As the crowd grew, ...the management made that unheard of request: ‘Could you play louder?’ They could, and did, and nobody went home until the place closed down.
Jim Leigh, The Mississippi Rag
Wow! I don’t know how I missed this, I guess it’s a problem of living out here in the boonies, but I just stumbled onto Judy Carmichael’s most excellent radio show. One of my favorite episode thus far is her interview with pianist Mark Shane. I’ve gotten to hear Mark play a couple times at various west coast festivals, and always really loved his playing. Listen online to this and other past episodes, or download the podcasts.
I was reading a forum recently were someone was requesting suggestions for of a Dixieland song that would good for a wedding recessional. And wasn’t “The Saints”. We get questions like this a fair amount, so it was fun to see what people came up with:
Of course there are so many, and this list doesn’t even hit on the more common love song jazz standards, such as “It Had To Be You”, “Best Is Yet To Come”, etc.. What other songs would you have suggested?
Oh yeah - it’s about time this site was up! I’m still tweaking stuff here and there, but please let me know if you see anything amiss, or broken, or, misspelled.
Thanks to Jeremy and the gang at 805 Collective who came up with the original design for the site, well over a year ago, and to Luke at Stateseven Design who did some image wrangling for me.
For the curious and nerdy in the group, this site is driven by Expression Engine.. I did a website a few years ago in EE and thought it was pretty cool, and more recently worked on a site that was using Kohana, a framework that came out of CodeIgniter which itself came out of the EE world. I could have used either of those, and in fact, started the site in each of them, only to have my enthusiasm waver when I realized I didn’t really want to write my own CMS. And while I was awfully tempted to use this as a chance to learn Ruby, in the interest of time decided to stick to what I knew a little bit about and build from there. Plus some cool kids I knew were raving about EE, and got me started on the right path (Thanks, Ben!). There’s a wonderful development community that has gathered around Expression Engine with active forums, free or inexpensive plugins, and lots of blogs with helpful suggestions, tutorials. Kudos especially to EE Insider and Train EE, whose tutorials got me up and running pretty quickly. I’m using the jPlayer music player.