Enthusiasms (32) ~ Farmers By Nature

I have let this theme go for too long and will try to post periodically about music that has caught my fancy. I was in Washington DC last week and made a stop at the Melody Record Shop. Among the cds (how retro!) I found is this wonderful trio collaboration by Gerald Cleaver, William Parker & Craig Taborn. This apparently is the second release on AUM Fidelity by the trio, which calls itself Farmers by Nature. I've been playing it more or less constantly since we returned home. The title of the cd "out of this world's distortions" continues on the title cut as ... "grow aspens and other beautiful things." Just so. The phrase not only is true of the broader world, it succinctly captures the beautiful music made by this trio too.
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P.S.: I will note too that the cover photograph to this release is pretty amazing.

So, Which Waxed Male Chest is Offensive and Which Is Not?

The big box retailers Barnes & Noble and Borders reportedly have asked the purveyors of this magazine to wrap the cover before it can go on their shelves. The model, by the way, is male. I wonder if they demanded the same thing when this cover came out:

I recently cited the Rob Lowe cover here. Of course, Barnes & Noble and Borders are not serious booksellers, so the hypocrisy here is somewhat less than it might be. (Mostly, these outfits sell least common denominator crap.) But the local B&N store (in what I suspect is a corporate level campaign) has an annual "Banned Books" window display as though they are defenders of freedom of expression. Beefcakes? Yes. Androgynous types? Not so much.

Coming Soon to a Local Independent Music Store Near You

A new record by Buddy Miller and a bunch of his friends. You can find a little taste here - a cover of a George Jones tune. I posted about Buddy here a while back and things have not changed since then.

Passings ~ Fred Anderson (1929-2010)

Fred Anderson sits on the edge of the stage at the Velvet Lounge
before opening for the evening (February 2006)
~ Photograph © Jeff Robertson/AP.

Fred Anderson has died. You can read obituaries here and here and here and here. Anderson was a musician, entrepreneur, mentor and, by all accounts, a genuinely decent man. His passing is an immense loss to the jazz scene in Chicago especially, but very far beyond as well. I commented on a recent Anderson recording here just about this time last year.
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Thanks for the heads up!

Music Rochester

Every so often The Guardian runs a story about the disappearance - or at least precarious existence - of local record shops. There is another in the paper today. I often complain about Rochester as a cultural backwater, but there are at least three terrific independent record stores in town (compare that to supposedly hip places like, say, Ann Arbor, which seems unable to sustain any) - The Bop Shop, Record Archive, and Lakeshore Record Exchange. Each of the stores occupies a distinct niche - for instance, I try not to go the Lakeshore for fear that I will single-handedly dilute the hipness of the staff and clientele simply by virtue of my age. In any case, on this dimension at least our cultural ecology seems relatively robust.