The Fifteenth Annual Jaybee-bies: Well, THAT Sure Sucked

Executive Summary:

2025 was everything we feared it would be, and more.

• Personal: I'm getting over (I hope) an illness.
• Music/Personal: Due to the above, I did the world a huge favor and stopped "playing" guitar for a while. The world took no notice. So I had no choice but to start again. This time with a focus on having fun. You've been warned.
• Music: Per my last post, I'm feeling more alienated than ever from the current music, probably due to thoughts on mortality. Jazz, Blues, and Oldies were great, as usual. Otherwise, I kept looking for the weirdos. Thank god I found some.
• Politics: After a long year, I'm seeing a little bit of daylight. How about you?

Humans:

Best:

• Some judges
• A very few congresspersons
• Janet Mills
• Many, many others who, in my current state, I just can't bring to mind. Feel free to write in your favorites.

Worst:

Some old winners (Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Jesse Waters) are working extra hard at being awful just to keep up with the new kids:

• All the tech bros with no balls
• All the media outlet owners who really don't give a shit about media
• Elon Musk
• Laura Loomer 
• Nick Fuentes (do I really have to point this out?)
• Neil Gorsuch, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas 
• ICE
• Mike Johnson
• Pam Bondi
• Stephen Miller

Best Books:

I managed to read some books this year, none of which changed my life, but many that taught me things, some of which I might have been better off not knowing. I hope it's all made me a better person.

• Peter the Great by Robert Massie - Great Russian history. I see Adam Driver in the title role. 
• The Age of Revolution 1789-1849 by EJ Hobshawm - A tad (or two or three) drier than Massie's book, but it's got such a grasp of the entire era, it's worth it.
• The Killing Fields of East New York by Stacy Horn - History on a much smaller scale. Not to worry, there's still plenty of evil here to go around.
• The Family by Ed Sanders - Just some light reading before tackling Infinite Jest.
• Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion - Even less sixties nostalgia than The Family.
• Small Town Talk by Barney Hoskyns - Even less sixties nostalgia than Bethlehem.
• Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace - I read it on my tiny iPhone SE, which took nearly all summer. And as I did with Gravity's Rainbow, I ended up frustrated, annoyed, and wanting to read it again, maybe this time with a highlighter.
• The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin - Chuck D patiently explains it all to us. Great first line: "Listen up, motherf*ckers."

Best Movies:

• Wake Up, Dead Man
• Okay, Superman

I don't even remember if I saw anything else. I simply have to get out more!

Best TV:

I was stingy with my time this year, so I was reluctant to commit to an entire series. Mike Schur is a safe bet, though:

• A Man on the Inside

I simply must stay in more!

Best Concerts:

Do the 40th anniversary screenings of Stop Making Sense and Clue count? (Answers: Yes and No)

Music Awards:

Most Work (But Worth it): 

   Can

Most Work (And Possibly Not Worth It): 

   Luckily, nothing this year.

Most Surprising (and Not Necessarily in a Good Way): 

   Heartworms

Best Nostalgia:

   Louis in London

Best Artist:

   Cindy Lee

Best Albums of My Year:

1. Cindy Lee: Diamond Jubilee (2024) - A dark time, indelibly stamped by this odd, lonely, beautiful record.
2. Handsome Family: In the Air (2000) - Cindy Lee swapped for Johnny Cash, the cold tundra swapped for the country, where everything is Very Normal. Right.
3. Duke Ellington/Charles Mingus/Max Roach: Money Jungle (1962) - Seemingly effortless group creation on the fly.
4. CMAT: EURO-COUNTRY (2025) - Containing great tunes, great singing, and sheer gusto.
5. Lester Young with the Oscar Peterson Trio (1952) - Improvisational genius improvising away, accompanied by a crack trio, none of whom are exactly slouches either.
6. Hurray for the Riff Raff: The Past is Still Alive (2024) - This simple, straightforward country rock album patiently waited for me to catch up to it. I feel so dumb!
7. John Coltrane: Crescent (2024) My Coltrane sweetspot appears to be just before he takes off for the stratosphere. An excellent intro to his work.
8. Geese: Getting Killed (2025) This one gets extra credit for conceptual integrity.
9. Adrienne Lenker: Bright Future (2024) - Oh so fragile and yet it outlasted other, more "muscular" records.
10. Otis Redding: Dictionary of Soul (1966) - Of all his not-quite-great albums, this one is probably the best.

Honorable Mention: The Pretty Things, Oklou, The Housmartins, Waxahatchee, Iggy, Dijon, and Louis Armstrong

Best Compilations:

1. Slim Harpo: The Best of...

2. Big Joe Turner: The Very Best of... 

3. Little Richard: The Georgia Peach

The Album I Listened To Most but Had the Least to Say About It Due to Density (Mine, not the music's.):

 Boards of Canada: Music Has the Right to Children

Songs:

• Some of the best songs I heard this year can be found here. It's a weirdly folk/country/hard rock hybrid. Good luck!
• And since Cindy Lee is not on Spotify, here's a link to hear the entire album. I recommend you play it really early, or really late:

Conclusions:

I've been listening differently this year. Circumstances persuaded me to look to the past in hopes of finding something timeless. So I took my eye off the new and the shiny. A well rounded person would do both.

So then, how could you, dear reader, gain any useful knowledge about this year? You're busy, you want to have fun. Why am I dragging you to the old abandoned mine shafts? It's always been the conundrum of my approach. 

The other issue is ranking some new records against many that have stood the test of time. It's almost as though the new music doesn't belong on the list at all. But I'd rather think of it as how I feel about these records right now as opposed to for all eternity.

And yet, on Bluesky, I'm seeing more and more folks mixing the old and the new on their lists of books and records in the name of describing the year they had. As the inventor of this approach, I approve.

The circumstances I mentioned above pulled me away from playing guitar for a while. Time was looking more and more limited, and I decided listening to actual pros was a better use of it than playing mediocrely (yes, I just made that word up). I fight the same war on the reading/writing front. Why write a word when there are so many great books to read? I don't know, but I will anyway.

I eventually drifted back to theh guitar, ignoring the voice asking me what the point was to trying to get better at this point. Then Son Michael bought me a new guitar - a nice electric one I really have no business playing. But Mike said I had a rough year and should "have some fun", whatever that is.

On the real-life front, I've gotten past my horror, or at least compartmentalized it. Elvis C was wrong, you know. One can be disgusted by events, but given how many people get hurt, there's never a justification for feeling merely amused.

Have a great new year anyway.

Summer of Jazz (for Grumpy Seniors)

Lester, in the pocket.

John, searching for more.

Too Darn Hot?

I'm not a fan of summer. My comfort zone has shrunk considerably since I was a kid who loved being off from school for two months. Once school was no longer an issue, I quickly noticed that summer was HOT. And HUMID. Who knew? Air conditioning helped, except when it was too high and you'd get pneumonia. All this makes me grumpy, and that's not conducive to expanding one's horizons. Too many CDs get thrown out of windows, perhaps prematurely. 

It's just safer for me to stick to simple, energetic, and melodic music. So classical, jazz, country, and blues were all out. They were relegated to winter, when all hope is lost anyway, so you may as well learn something. Plus, it takes effort, which generates heat, which saves on the gas bill.

But my approach was no longer working. Pop music was becoming foreign to me. (The age gap alone is getting embarrassing.) My old reliable -  guitar-based pop - was sounding stale and repetitive, and I'm just tired of waiting for joy to show up. "Everything at/in its proper time and place" is wisdom I may not have time for anymore. 

I tried something differenct last time and lucked out with the blues. The key was to keep things simple. No big box sets. Just single-CD best-ofs. Big Joe Turner and Skip James did the rest. 

With that in mind, I asked myself Why not jazz? Perhaps a sax or piano could provide a respite. The guitars will just have to show up when they show up. One can't force these things.

And lo! (Always wanted to say that.) I managed to find some great jazz records I happily listen to in summer. Early summer mornings, but still summer.

Feeling Young:

Once while in college, I sat with a semi-stoner buddy. Since music was always the lingua franca of those years, we almost immediately got on the topic, and to my surprise, he told me he was into jazz.

I wasn't yet, but the explorer in me took over, and I asked him to name his favorite artist. His eyes went wide.

"Lester Young," he said. 

I made a mental note that stood dormant for oh, fifty years, because there was always someone else who would edge him out. Sure, I'd get Billie Holiday records, where LY was the main side man, but never one of his own records. But there was one I had my eye on.

And wouldn't you know it? The All Knowing Jeff F*cking Bezos (his actual name) dangled that very album in my "music library". When I tried to play it, though, I got a saying it'd play if I joined Apple Music. I have yet to take that approach to my listening habits and declined. I like to own my music. And if anything, JFB has been misbehaving lately, which led me to my current "any store but Amazon" period, so I could safely say that was never going to happen. 

But finally, one day the price was right (Yes, I checked iTunes, but it cost more. Any other suggestions would be welcome.) and I gave JFB my $7, which I believe went to his engagement ring fund.

Lester Young with the Oscar Peterson Trio (1952)

By 1952, the quality of recorded sound was improving, but it still had a way to go. This might explain my preference for late-50s jazz. By then, the clarity had improved to the point that you could hear everything - including the silence - quite clearly. So the sound on this record is less than stellar.

Once you get past that minor limitation, it's a delight from beginning to end. Right off the friggin' bat, LY bursts out of the gate with a bouquet of notes to kick off "Ad Lib Blues". Oscar Peterson and his trio are not far behind. OP is smooth, smooth, smooth, like Art Tatum. But unlike him, he's willing to take the occasional Bud Powell-like imaginative leaps instead of giving empty flourishes. Barney Kessel's guitar - despite the limited sound - is very on point, so it's not all on Lester. 

But they don't call him "Pres" (short for President) for nothing. His solos seem effortless and yet fill every available moment with a melodic ebb and flow. Unlike Coltrane, say, Young is not a searcher. He always sounds perfectly comfortable in whatever setting he's in. So he's not always riveting, but it is always rewarding and, well, reassuring.

LY was supposedly past his prime at this point. If that's the case, I'll have to dig deeper, because this is  record is simply wonderful.

A

Trying to Catch the 'Trane:

And since I have no imagination whatsoever, I then default to John Coltrane.

I recently checked my database* to see how many JC albums I have. It lists nine under his name and eight collaborations. So, work with me as I do the math, and say the total is .... seventeen. And that doesn't count the dozen or so I've got with him as part of the Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk units.

That would tie him for SECOND on my all-time list, behind the Beatles, who have 22, and that's only because that includes both American and British versions of several of their albums. He shares this honor with the elusive and frustrating Miles Davis and the frustrating and elusive Neil Young. JC can be pretty f*cking elusive, too, but he's just so much more likable as a human, it makes me willing to hear him out when he jumps off the occasional musical cliff.

And he does that a lot. Whenever I get a JC album, I brace myself because I rarely get it the first time I hear it. My first Coltrane CD was Giant Steps in 1990. It took years for me to get a hold of the title number. It was like a roller coaster I was afraid to get on. Once I did, though, oh boy! 

My favorite JC album may be Afro Blue/Impressions, which is a posthumous compilation of live dates from 1963, providing wonderful solos but also the occasional foray into space.

JC put out - and appeared as a guest or band member on - a dizzying number of albums, so I need Allmusic's help to zero in on the best ones. I noted that The Cats, Ole', and Crescent are the most highly regarded ones I didn't already have. So they would be my next stops on the Trane.

He mostly stays moored to Earth on these albums. You never know when I'll pull the trigger on one of his free jazz albums like Ascension or Interstellar Space, which carry what amounts to warning labels. Having just gotten an Ornette Coleman box set of eight early LPs, including Free Jazz, I am no longer afraid. I'm prepared to be embarrassed, though.

Tommy Flanagan, John Coltrane, Kenny Burrell, Idrees Sulieman: The Cats (1959)

Although released at the end of 1959, this was actually recorded in April 1957, right around when Miles Davis fired Coltrane because of his heroin addiction. (Coltrane's, not Davis', who'd already been there and done that.) Luckily, Coltrane had signed with Prestige, where he did a lot of work as a sideman. And that's what he is here, even if his name is on the cover.     

But right out of the gate, you know it's him. Standard Coltrane here. At first, a bit tentative, finding his way. So nothing stupendous, but nothing bad. Later, with a little more room, JC branches out and uses space and silence as much as notes. A nice trick.  The rest is mostly an inventory of his bag of tricks at this point. Perhaps he was just being polite. But not bad for a heroin addict.

And, of course, I may be judging this record on JC's performances alone, which would be unfair. The other sidemen really shine. Idrees Sulieman on trumpet, in particular. I suspect this one will be a slow burner.

B+    

John Coltrane: Ole' (1961)    

At this point JC has kicked his heroin habit, re-joined the Miles Davis group for Milestones (1958), Kind of Blue (1959), among many other records, and put out a number of collaborations and solo albums of his own, the great ones being Blue Train (1957), Giant Steps (1960), and My Favorite Things (1961), which immediately preceded this album.

The title track shares some similarities with "My Favorite Things", mainly in how JC uses it to take his clarinet out for a spin. He uses the opportunity, on MFT, he replaced the Western major and minor chords with Middle Eastern modes to make something new. On this original, he uses some (what else?) Spanish elements to build up a rather ominous tone over its eighteen epic minutes. He may have been inspired by Miles Davis' Sketches of Spain, released the prior year, although Miles goes all in with an orchestra for a full album. Here, JC just adds a second bass, and then is one and done. 

On "Dahomey Dance", he sounds a lot like Kind of Blue, but more muscular. He's given himself room to stretch out, and he's one of the few musicians who benefits from it.

McCoy Tyner's "Aisha" reminds me of "Naima" from Giant Steps. And as before, it's amazing how far he can fly on a mellow tune.

"To Her Ladyship" (on the expanded version of the album) closes things out in a very mellow mood. 

Kudos to Freddie Hubbard, who more than holds down his end on trumpet. Ditto for McCoy Tyner on piano, and Eric Dolphy for adding sweetness with the flute.

An excellent record that finds JC in a more relaxed mood.

A-

John Coltrane: Crescent (1964)

By now, JC has released Africa Brass, Live at the Village Vanguard, Live at Birdland, among many other records, and collaborated with, among many others, Duke Ellington.

Now he's approaching A Love Supreme, which would come out the following year and two years before Ascension, when he does that swan dive, or rocket launch, depending on where you're sitting.

The first two compositions here are as mellow as anything J.C. has recorded, except for the fact that he finds a way to gracefully veer from smooth sailing to heavy turbulence and back in a matter of seconds. 

The relatively short "Bessie's Blues" is more uptempo, and JC swings with it for all its worth.

Then it's back to the mellow "Lonnie's Lament", one of my very favorite JC tracks. Solemn, mournful, and yet hypnotizing. 

This is another relatively subdued Coltrane record, and a fine introduction to his work. Which is why I give it a slight edge over Ole.

A-

If things go as expected, about a year from now, I'll get the JC itch again. I always seem to be looking for more John Coltrane. 

I think I'm trying to understand him. That's a fool's errand, especially for me, the pop music fan. But it's provided me with a lot of joy as I try.

_________________________________________________________

*Not be confused with my spreadsheet. (Helpful Hint: The database is for records I own, the spreadsheet for the ones I'm considering getting.)

The collection

"My Music":

So what do I mean by this? I don't create music, I only consume it, so when I say "my music" I'm referring to any album, EP, or single I've purchased or received as a gift (or borrowed and never gave back. Sorry, about Pearl and After the Goldrush late Friend Billy Mac!). 

But, as I get older, it’s getting harder and harder to determine what "my music" is. 

In case you didn't know, when you buy an album you don't own the music. The record company or whoever still owns the publishing rights does. (In a perfect world that would be the artist but here we are.) Without getting into the legal terms, the record you bought is just the means by which you can hear the music when you please. So at the risk of nitpicking, you own a single copy of the record, but not the music itself.

But it was still something. 

Books/Records/Space/Time, or The Sanctity of the Collection:

When reading books, I tell people that the ones I buy are too hard to get to because I'm busy reading the ones I got from the library - the ones I have to give back.

With music, it's kind of the opposite - mainly because you only need to read a book once. With music, you should be able to listen to it over and over. In order to do that you probably shouldn't have too much (a relative term, I admit) of it. Just enough to listen to enough.

And I like it that way. That's the type of relationship I want to have with music. I don't want to date it, I want to marry it. I want to take it home and get to know it. So the act of buying it implies a level of commitment - of money and time - you can't have when there's a whole world of music right at your fingertips. 

Some people own a few records. Others have complete, encyclopedic Collections. I occupy the middle ground of having more records than the average person but less than the fanatics. My collection has a small c. I don't just Hoover up anything I see. It's not about size. It's about quality. Or that's at least what men keep telling themselves.

But in this case, it's true. I'd rather have one excellent record than five pretty good ones. I don't need every Neil Young album. Just the great ones. That's plenty.

 
I first realized the importance of this when I sent in for an offer of 25 albums for $15 (plus shipping!). And it was almost exclusively garbage. I threw away all but three. But why throw away anything, you might ask? Isn't it better to have them than not? Won't I get to know and like these records more? I, who previously would have answered Yes, now realized it wasn't true. Bad music takes up too much time, and bad music on vinyl or CD takes up too much space.

Thus you might think I'd welcome downloads. Well...

The Thing:

For the longest time, in order to deliberately play specific music - ie. avoiding the happenstance of the radio - you would use a physical object to do so. And whatever you may hear these days, those things were cool. A vinyl album has liner notes and cover art. The former for us nerds who love the music enough to want to know who contributed to it in some way. The latter for everyone, which itself could be a work of art. (And yes, CDs have them as well, but have you ever tried to read those 6-pt font liner notes? Or hung a CD cover on your wall? Not bloody likely.)

And you had to take care of the physical object. Protect it from harm. But as long as you did you could play it whenever you wanted.

The thing itself has changed over the years. Wax cylinder, Vinyl, reel-to-reel, cassette, 8 track tape, DAT, CD. 

And each medium pulled us further and further away from the physical action of music creation and re-creation. There was a time when artists would record a performance directly onto vinyl. And when you played it, if you listen without the speaker on, you could hear the needle extracting the music from the grooves. 

I remember once hearing a song from a record that was rotating on a portable turntable but without the needle on it. And the song I was hearing wasn't even on the side that was facing up! Turns out a piece of plastic with a sharp (enough) point was rubbing it from below. It wasn't playing through the speaker but I could hear it very well.

With cassettes, the action took place between the tape and the tape head. You could see the tape move over the head but there was nothing you could hear without a speaker. Same with 8 Tracks, although if it was poorly made, much like my record above, you could hear phantom music from a track that wasn't supposed to be playing.

And forget about CDs. You popped those in a magic box and out came the music. And when they skipped good luck finding the smudge that caused it.

Not THE Thing, Exactly:

Even home taping or CD burning still involved having a copy of the thing. I won't go into the differences between the original vs. the copy because you still had a thing, if not the thing. Not great but it would do in a pinch. And you could dry out your ink cartridges for the privilege of printing out a crappy version of the cover art. 

But these copies never make it to my record shelves - because I never really believed I had them - and end up gathering dust in my basement.

Not A Thing, Exactly:

Then came downloading and just playing it from your hard drive.

Then take the next step of buying an album and not bothering to download it at all. It's just up there in the cloud, at the mercy of an old iTunes account whose ID you forgot. Do you own it or don't you? Sorry Mr. Jaybee but that account is no longer active. 

Thanks, Amazon?

On the other hand, I am finding albums by Lightning Hopkins, Nina Simone, Lester Young, and many others that I don't remember ever buying. 

One might this that was cool, too. Just ending up with a bunch of records without even asking for them.

And even though my "research" indicates that the Lester Young record I didn't buy is probably the best one to get by, I'm not playing it, because I haven't (yet) embraced it as "mine"! After all, what if it's a mistake? Will Amazon - which gives itself the power to control and define what is"my music" now - delete all these records when they realize they made an error?

Then where will I be? Yes, I know I could just buy the ones I liked but the whole thing makes me feel less in control, which is important when you're blogging about the sanctity of your collection.

Not A Thing, a Service:

With services such as Amazon Music and Apple Music, for a low monthly fee, you can listen to just about anything you want. And Youtube where you can just look an album up and play it. Sounds great, doesn't it? 

I want no part of it. 

I like knowing what's in the collection and what's not, and having an opinion on it. And I don't want to merge it into a larger Matrix-like musical universe where everything is kind of okay and I don't really know any of it.

If you can hear almost everything, are you really listening to anything? You would hear something once and decide it's boring, never knowing that another listen was all it would take for it to click with you.
When you get to that point you become that despised (by me) person who gets to say such edgy things like "I like all kinds of music", when I know what you really mean is that you don't love any of it.

In the seventies, Philip Roth compared Checkoslovakia to America, saying that in the former nothing is allowed and everything matters, and in the latter, everything is allowed and nothing matters.

I want my music to matter. To me, at least.

The End of the Collection:

And yet it will go away. It will survive me by a little bit but then it'll be gone, too. Yes, a record collection was not only finite but temporary. 

When I'm gone this large and varied set of music that reflects the Uniqueness of Jaybee - is just another person's pile of crap. I mean, Mrs. Jaybee does her best to put up with a lot of it, but when I'm gone, we (well, you) will know what she really thinks of Pere Ubu and Captain Beefheart!

I used to think about this when it wasn’t a real thing. I fantasized about who would get dibs on these amazing records. It went something like this:
Mrs. Jaybee
Brother Pat
Friend Mike

But now that I'm 63, and it is a real thing, I'd have to add a few more names, like my kids.

And each person would take what they wanted and then pass on the rest. I'm SURE there'd be none left after all that, right?

But let's say, no one goes for that Joanna Newsom record (or two or three hundred others). I guess it becomes the stuff of garage sales and used record stores, where a record hopefully becomes part of someone else’s collection.

I've heard it said that everyone dies three times: First, when you physically die, second when your name is uttered for the last time, and then third when someone has the very last memory of you.

For the record collection, it's pretty similar, One is still when you die, but two is when your family, friends, and record collectors take what they want. Three is when the record dealer tosses what he can't sell.

So after I - and my collection - die, do we disperse into the universe like Caesar's last breath? Maybe it doesn't matter. Thanks to mass production, it's not like I have the single, existing copy of anything. Those same records are out there somewhere, part of other people's collections, and live on.

Unlike me.