Buddy Bolden's Blues

”What he did too little of was sleep and what he did too much of was drink and many interpreted his later crack-up as a morality tale of a talent that debauched itself. But his life at this time had a fine and precise balance to it, with a careful allotment of hours. A barber, a publisher of The Cri Leggi tutto

[3.5 Stars] The first time I put on Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew I was laying on my bed in the dilapidated housing the university passed off as residence. The walls were cold brick on three sides and thin plaster on the wall that separated me from my neighboring roommate. It was a perpetually cold room, Leggi tutto

I give a book five stars if I unreservedly recommend it, and I give it four stars if it's recommendable with a couple of caveats, and I don't do anything under four because I think star ratings / point ratings are generally unuseful outside of some personal criteria being established. This one gets

The one novel on the Isle of Arran for sale that was remotely acceptable. There are no longer any remotely acceptable novels for sale on the Isle of Arran.

Sometimes you read something by an author and it's very good, and you think back over their other stuff that you've read, and realise that it was all good, and some of it was even very good, or very, very good, and you see suddenly that this writer is actually one of your absolute favourites, you ju Leggi tutto

Thinking about this book, I remembered a line that's spoken near the end of the film, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend". Donald M. Marquis, in his book In Search of Buddy Bolden , https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3... , put together probably as many Leggi tutto