he strikes rarely, but with great force and precision

Jack Reilly strikes again. After boldly tackling Jason Moran under an assumed name, he takes on the whole of the European continent, and is naming names, in an open letter to DownBeat. It starts out great...

"you missed a great opportunity to educate those 'other' cats accross the pond on what real Jazz playing is and what styles/players should be mandatory to absorb and study."

...and only gets better. "Permit [him]."

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Rifftides on Kenny Dorham, reminding us that even the greats from the "golden days" sometimes held totally unrelated day jobs.

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It's only as I read this that I realised where the inspiration for the dénouement to Garth Ennis's intensely funny and decadent Preacher comic b... sorry, graphic novel, came from.

"'The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail,' a nonfiction work published in 1982 that spins an elaborate theory about how Jesus married Mary Magdalene and how their descendants still live in southern France."

Let me tell you, the result of 2000 years of inbree... sorry, preservation of the holy bloodline, ain't pretty.

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Eppy poses a common fan-boy quandary: what to do when you unexpectedly stumble across one of your idols? I'd suggest tentatively approaching them, asking "Excuse me, do I know you from somewhere?" and seeing how long it takes them to say "Well, I'm the Fiery Furnaces [for example]." In this particular case, Eppy also raises the negative-last-impression problem. Personally, I tend not to talk to musicians whose music I don't like. You could call it cowardice, I call it a pre-emptive non-strike.

I'll try it out and report findings in the next be.sightings (1, 2, 3, 4).

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Pretty gruesome jazz historian murder story.