Quoting Herbie Hancock
I was always frightened playing with Miles. Herbie Hancock, winner of the 2025 Polar Music Prize
Archive of posts filed under the music category.
Sergio Mendes and the Consumer Surplus of Music Streaming
Last’s night’s DJ John Show in the HF living room traced the history of Mas Que Nada, the ‘60s pop hit by Sergio Mendes and Brasil 66. Its roots in my pantheon of beloved music stem from its moment – KFI, the mid-1960s pop radio that ran as the background soundtrack of my childhood home. …
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From the Sands to Thriller
I don’t remember how I stumbled onto Ernie Smith’s Tedium. All you need to know is that he wrote the definitive guide to why Butterfinger candy bars break so easily: I’m always drawn to the structural integrity of candy bars. On the surface, they are often stacked, solid, as thick as a smartphone. (It must …
Rubber Soul, the path to elevation 1,040, and the game of chicken on the Colorado River
Two years ago, when the level of Lake Mead was hovering near elevation 1,040, my artist wife Lissa Heineman and I drove out over UNM’s fall break to see it for ourselves. Out beyond the old Boulder Harbor, we walked a half mile across mud flats to get to the water. I could look out …
The poets down here don’t write nothin’ at all, they just stand back and let it all be.
Colorado has no plans to make additional cuts to water use next year to meet the Bureau of Reclamation’s demand to conserve millions of acre-feet of water, a step needed to preserve power production in Lake Powell and Lake Mead. Instead, Colorado officials insist that other states should do the cutting. “I think that at …
“I say, roadrunner once, roadrunner twice….
Walking in our neighborhood these covid summer nights, a friend and I have been counting roadrunners. They are incongruous, relic dinosaurs as apex predators (but what of the hawks, and cats?) in our suburban neighborhood. Early in the pandemic, we’d see one or two. Rarely zero, but rarely more than one or two. We’d see …
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The Birth of the Cool
Carlos Santana was born in Jalisco, the son of a mariachi, and grew up in that stateless borderland between Tijuana and San Francisco playing first the violin, then the guitar. There was a breadth to his musical education: If I would go to some cat’s room, he’d be listening to Sly and Jimi Hendrix; another …
The West has always been, in part, a thing of our imagination
That corner in Winslow Arizona, the one with the pretty girl and the flatbed Ford? Actually happened in Flagstaff, the truck was a Toyota.: Browne was traveling through Arizona when he began working on the song. But the scene about the corner and a girl in the Ford was written by Frey after Browne related …
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Horse roundup at Canyon de Chelly
Striking video by my colleague Pat Vasquez-Cunningham of a horse roundup at Canyon de Chelly
Change takes place in the margins
This dude used to work with me at the newspaper. He was in a back corner, both literally and metaphorically, and was kinda quiet, and it took me a while to figure out that he was the smartest and most interesting person in the room.