Author: DJB

A Night of Baseball Geekdom

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Tonight I put everything on the back burner and wallowed in a night of baseball geekdom.  Yes, it was the annual pre-season visit to Politics & Prose bookstore by the editors of Baseball Prospectus.  And it was a night of VORP (Value Over Replacement Player), BQS (Blown Quality Starts), BABIP (Batting Average on Balls in Play) and other incomprehensible acronyms and statistics.  It was also a night for a long soliloquy by co-editor Steven Goldman on why the Yankees will be facing a huge decision in 2010 on Derek Jeter, when they predict his bad glove, age, slumping hitting, and a chase for 3,000 hits will all come together the year his contract expires.  As they note, …famous-player milestones sell tickets and merchandise, but as veterans of the Astros’ “Biggioquest ’07” can tell you, subjugating team goals to the greater glory of a fading star isn’t conducive to winning.  By 2010, Jeter’s glove won’t play in the infield and his bat won’t play anywhere else.  His 3,000th hit will have zero benefit to the winning effort. As …

Searching the Internet and Finding…The Music’s Over

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This is another of those “look what I found on the Internet” postings. The other day I was searching for information on Clarence White and found this cool blog called The Music’s Over…but the Songs Live On.  What a labor of love.  The blogger writes about musical artists who passed away on that day in history, and he’s putting together a great archive of American music in the process.  He’s also covering just about every musical genre imaginable.  So you’ll find your bluegrass guys right up there with the punk rockers. On this date – March 16th – in 1975 the great blues guitarist T-Bone Walker passed away.  As noted in The Music’s Over: Electric Blues starts with T-Bone Walker. No T-Bone Walker? Then possibly no B.B. King, Pee Wee Crayton, Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown or Stevie Ray Vaughan. From his recording debut in 1929, to his passing from an earlier stroke in 1979, T-Bone Walker dazzled his audiences with a guitar style that was, well electrifying. And when he decided to actually “plug in” in the …

Sweet Love

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Candice and I were out at a party on Capitol Hill last evening and had a nice time with friends old and new.  However, when I climbed into bed last evening I knew I’d best set our alarm or we’d miss our obligations at church this morning. My iPod has a playlist I entitled “Quiet Time” which we listen to as we fall asleep and then which is what we hear as our morning alarm.  We may wake to a Gregorian Chant or Anonymous 4, some Miles Davis or Bill Evans jazz, or perhaps a quiet New Age guitar piece from Will Akerman or Al Petteway. This Sunday morning we slept a little later, due to the party.  But the wake-up music set the tone for an introspective day that worked well with the gray and rainy weather. The first thing out of my iPod this morning was John Gorka singing this wonderful Kate Wolf tune entitled Sweet Love. John Gorka has one of the most distinctive voices in folk music.  I can listen to him sing anything.  But several …

Clarence and Roland White featured in spring Fretboard Journal

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My favorite magazine showed up in the mail earlier this week, and I was delighted to see a cover story on flatpicking pioneer – and former Byrd – Clarence White.  The Fretboard Journal is coffee table quality but with writers who have musical smarts.  The Spring 2009 cover article on Clarence White and his mandolin-playing brother Roland is a terrific example.  There are great pictures of White’s Telecaster and superb writing about the unique syncopation that Clarence employed.  (You can hear it in the video below.)  White was one of the most influential guitarists of all time (#41 on the Rolling Stone list of 100 Greatest Guitarists) and The Fretboard Journal connects all the dots of his impact. Clarence White is that unique musician who had influence in multiple musical genres.  As a teenager he introduced the guitar as a lead instrument in bluegrass.  Then he moved to the Byrds where he played a key role in defining the sound of country-rock.  And much too soon – at age 29 – he was hit by a drunk …

New National Dunn Looking Good at the World Baseball Classic

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It is exciting to hear that new Washington National Adam Dunn has had a great start at the World Baseball Classic.  Dunn had a home run in each of the first two victories, but it was his enthusiasm that led Ted Lilly, the starting pitcher for Team USA, to say, “Adam Dunn is a lot of fun,” Lilly said…. “He’s got a lot of energy and he keeps things light. It hasn’t taken him long to kind of warm everybody up.” Dunn has homered in both United States victories here. One home run was a line drive to left-center field, and one was a towering blast pulled to right. The United States manager, Davey Johnson, compared his power to that of Willie McCovey, a Hall of Famer. “I’ve seen a lot of big guys that swing the bat hard,” Johnson said. “But he has a really good eye for a big, strong guy.” A new National compared to Stretch McCovey, one of my heroes as a young boy.  Come on opening day! Read the entire story at the …

Missy Raines Brings New Hip to IMT

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My colleague John and I were among a small but appreciative audience to hear Missy Raines and The New Hip at the weekly Monday night concert of the Institute of Musical Traditions.   The band features Raines’ energetic bass lines as the foundation for jazzgrass and acoustic music, capped with some terrific solo work by a group of young Nashville-based musicians. Instrumentals are the core of this band’s work, and they played most of the selections from Inside Out, their new CD on Alison Brown’s Compass Records.  The title track, Duke of Paducah, and a reworked Angeline the Baker entitled simply Angeline are among the highlights.   All the musicians were top notch, but Michael Witcher on dobro stood out throughout the evening.  Multi-instrumentalist Ethan Ballinger looks to be all of 16, but played beyond his years.  The band also broke in a new guitarist (on his second gig and so new he’s not listed on the web site) who carefully studied the chord charts but didn’t miss a beat.  At the end of a satisfying night …

46 Days Until…

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Just ordered my tickets to Merlefest 2009 – Happy Birthday indeed! I love this music festival because it is four days in the North Carolina mountains surrounded by the best Americana and roots music in the land.  The shot at the top of the blog is Dobro god Jerry Douglas playing at the 2006 festival.  The 2009 festival has another strong lineup.  Doc Watson is, of course, the host at this festival named after his late son Merle, who died more than 20 years ago in a tragic late-night tractor accident.  And Doc – the 86-year old blind singer and guitarist extraordinaire – is also the magnet that draws all these wonderful musicians. As I type this I’m listening to Darrell Scott’s River Take Me, also from the 2006 festival.  Scott is one of those relatively unknown musicians that I regularly discover at Merlefest.  He’s a terrific songwriter (perhaps you’ve heard of Long Time Gone by some band called the Dixie Chicks) but is also an incredible musician. Regulars such as Sam Bush, Jerry Douglas, and …

Your Abbreviated Pundit Round-Up

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Every morning on The Daily Kos (warning:  this is a progressive blog post about politics), Barbara Morrill (aka BarbinMD) posts Your Abbreviated Pundit Round-Up.   I look at it almost every morning, because it is funny, short, and almost always includes at least one comment about a previously unknown writer that I want to read. In today’s post, Morrill includes a link to New York Times’ pundit Gail Collins’ column of March 5th entitled The Rant List, with the comment that “Gail Collins is fast becoming one of my favorite columnists.”  Amen to that.  Collins makes me laugh out loud almost once a column, and she’s not as snarky or personality focused as Maureen Dowd.  In today’s column (and I recommend the entire read), she’s writing how we have to prioritize the things list of  “life is unfair” items hitting the news reports on an hourly basis. The paragraph that hits home for me is: Given the competition, I can’t get all that worked up about defaulting homeowners who are looking to the government for a rescue. True, a …

Chicago: Great Main Streets, Great Architecture, and Great Food

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I’ve been in Chicago since Sunday for the National Main Streets Conference, and it has been a great couple of days.  I love Chicago and I love Main Street.  The conference is sponsored by the National Trust Main Street Center and brings together 1,600 people from around the country who are rehabilitating their downtown commercial districts.  Having lived in three great Main Street communities – Murfreesboro, Tennessee; Americus, Georgia; and Staunton, Virginia – I have a real affinity for these towns. Getting to Chicago was interesting.  The first of two snowstorms blew into Washington on Sunday morning.  I got a call from the airlines at 4:40 a.m. telling me my morning flight was delayed by an hour.  When I arrived at the airport it turns out that every other passenger on the flight had been moved to a different flight in order to make connections and I had a regional jet all to myself!  I joked that I flew up on the corporate jet…but it was a surreal experience. The opening session at Main Street is …