Roses bloom, algae may bloom, and musicians bloom sometimes, too. Yazz Ahmed, trumpeter and flügelhorn player, has been blooming since 2011, when she released her debut album, Finding My Way Home. This Track of the Week is from her second album release, La Saboteuse (2017). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHDayLZdPIY The general style of Yazz Ahmed's work is ambient…Read more Bloom
Track
Bite the Bullet
To adjust to unpleasant circumstances. e.g. "The severe drought is forcing everybody to bite the bullet and use less water." dictionary.com A few days ago, a drought was declared in half of England. Crotchety County falls within the drought area and this part of the English midlands has sizzled to 30+ degrees C. Our once…Read more Bite the Bullet
Light is Dim
Hommage aux Frères Pigeon Spöket i KöketÅkervinda Today I'm offering a collaboration between a folk big band and a choral quartet. The instrumentalists call themselves Spöket i Köket, which is Swedish for Ghost in the Kitchen. (Literally, the spook in the cookhouse.) If you think of a 50s dance band playing traditional folk tunes, you'll…Read more Light is Dim
Tünel
Tünel is the Turkish word for "tunnel". The one pictured here carries water 120 kilometres across Finland from Lake Päijänne to a reservoir at Vantaa on the outskirts of Helsinki. (The photo was taken when it was undergoing refurbishment.) It seems unlikely, though, that Naci Oğuz had this particular rock channel in mind when he…Read more Tünel
Hear You Can See
Today's track-of-the-week has a puzzling title. It might be the end of one sentence and the beginning of the next: "... hear. You can see ...". It could be a spelling mistake: "Here, you can see ...". Or it might be another example of the curse of autocorrect. And that gives me a problem. What…Read more Hear You Can See
Nothing But a Fool
The members of Joy Division had agreed that the band would not perform under that name should any one of them leave. So, when their singer Ian Curtis took his own life in 1980, the dark post-punk group morphed into New Order. The band soon evolved more of a dance-rock sound, closer to new wave…Read more Nothing But a Fool
Eleuthera
The fingers of fate are long and bony. They reach into the mind to turn up thoughts that you never imagined could be there. And so it was the other day when I revisited a post that appeared in my Hubzilla feed a few months ago. The post was headed "Eleuthera", Stockholm - Monty Alexander,…Read more Eleuthera
Avalanche
It doesn't take much to trigger an avalanche. Sometimes a fresh fall of snow or the warmth of the rising sun on a mountain slope is enough. In this case, though, it was just a brief entry on a social media feed - barely more than a link to this YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASjn1Z83g9c Aimee Mann…Read more Avalanche
Smoke Gets In Your Eyes
When the Crotchety Kid picked up a bass guitar at the beginning of the seventies, he was completely ignorant of harmonic structure. As a first step to composing bass lines, he bought and read a book in the Teach Yourself series. Those books had distinctive yellow and blue covers, which served as a stamp of…Read more Smoke Gets In Your Eyes
Nothing Left to Say
I'm a firm believer in the adage, "If you have nothing to say, say nothing". And, when I started this blog post, I had nothing to say about Imagine Dragons. So it came as a bit of a shock to discover that they were phenomenally successful in the 2010s, especially in the U.S. They had…Read more Nothing Left to Say
Crotchety Man 