Vintage

It's not the swing band, but I thought I'd give you a taste of another band I've been playing in, Leonard and the Lab Rats. It's a blues band run by Andrew "Huggy Bear" Leonard on vocals, harmonica, and amplified ukulele (yes you read that correctly).

We played a gig at the Purple Crab the other night to a packed house. Here is a track I recorded that night:

Chicken Shack - Leonard and the Lab Rats
Live at the Purple Crab

Keep in mind this is a one-microphone recording to mini-disc so the mix is not exactly the best. But it's not bad considering.

Anita O'Day died in her sleep early Thursday morning at a hospital in West Hollywood where she was recovering from a bout with pneumonia. Her manager told media, "On Tuesday night, she said to me: 'Get out of here'... But it didn't happen then."

O'Day was once known as the "Jezebel of Jazz" for her drug use and reckless lifestyle. Born in Chicago, she began singing as a teenager. She left home at the tender age of 12, touring as a marathon dance contestant and singing for tips. She didn't win many dance contests and in 1936 she decided that singing was her true talent. "When I'm singing, I'm happy" she said later in life. "I'm doing what I can do and this is my contribution to life." It turned out to be the right choice. She never took a singing lesson and she enjoyed bragging about being "self made."

Like him or not, I admire Wynton Marsalis for speaking his mind. He doesn't seem to care whether or not people agree. He has opinions and when asked, he states his opinions firmly and eloquently. Since he was just playing here in Vancouver, The Georgia Straight printed an article about him, and his strong feelings on jazz and rap.

One thing that gets Marsalis talking is that rap, rather than jazz, has come to be known as the great African-American music.

"When people say that rap is black music, don't think that it is: it is not," he contends. "It's some black people doing it, but they're fulfilling national objectives."

Those national objectives, he adds, are to divide black from white, men from women, and young from old, while giving suburban dilettantes a titillating ethnic frisson.

And of course the "national objectives" of the record companies today are nothing like the meagre objectives of the tiny mom-and-pop record companies like Dial and Savoy (Charlie Parker) and Prestige and Riverside (Thelonius Monk) that recorded so many of the jazz greats in the old days.

A new study shows that young children who take music lessons show more advanced brain development and improved memory than those who do not. Apparently taking music lessons also helps kids pay attention. After a year, musically trained children performed better in memory tests which is linked to literacy, verbal memory, mathematics and IQ.