Jazz & Me - Part 3 - McCoy Tyner

Isa and I got married on a beach in a small town in eastern Venezuela in 2005. We did the whole thing on the cheap largely because we did almost everything ourselves – from sewing the tablecloths and writing the ceremony to figuring out the menu and choosing the music. I spent a day with my brothers burning CDs (that’s right), including one with a selection of jazz. This was long before I began this informal study of jazz, but two of those songs were by my now-modal-hero McCoy Tyner. The first was this one, called Contemplation:

Jazz & Me - Part 2 - What do you mean “modal?”

Jazz can be trying on the ear because it has a harmonic complexity that is foreign to most musical ears. To put it another way, jazz arranges chords in ways that go against the grain of the unwritten rules that govern most rock, pop, country or classical music. Listening to jazz often left me feeling lost for precisely this reason.

Jazz & Me - Part 1

It came across the radio as I was flipping through stations on a bright yellow Sports Walkman. A walking bass rumbling from below, a piano tinkling from above, a snare and high-hat holding them together.  I don’t know what songs I heard, who performed them or what era or style of jazz they came from. I was sitting on a bus in Bogota in September 1996, heading toward the university on a college semester abroad. I was expecting those months would leave me well-versed in Latin culture and music. That day, instead, I felt like I had discovered jazz – even though I’d been listening to it for years. 

Garcia Marquez, Macondo and McOndo

The death of Gabriel Garcia Marquez prompted a euphoric celebration of the man who made magic realism a reality. His magnum opus 100 Years of Solitude shattered the decades-old tradition that kept Latin American novelists confined to hyper-local expressions of their country’s cultural identity written for the psyche of their own compatriots. The saga of the fictional town of Macondo used universal themes of love, isolation and despair to give the rest of the world a window into a region whose literature had until then been intensely navel-gazing.

Yes, that’s beer

It’s taken a lot to convince people that the contents of the container below does in fact contain beer. 

Folks are less tripped up by the appearance than the description. A Belgian saison spiked with 46 ounces of sauvignon blanc grape juice concentrate, yielding a beer-wine crossover known as Antithesis Saison du Vin. 

Hey Google: Quit stalking me

Google is stalking me. It’s pissing me off.

Of course I’ve only got myself to blame. Sick of Firefox crashing and for some reason unable to download a post-WWII version of Explorer, I’m now using Google Chrome both at home and at work. The world’s premier search engine is not only privy to my every search (it always ways), it can now serve me ads based on information collated from every click in my browser, my Gmail account and my Blogger account that hosts this blog.

As a result, I click through the Venezuelan newspapers online and I’m assaulted by ads for products that, for example, I recently looked at on Amazon. This strikes me as an odd way to seduce a person’s consumer loyalty, more akin to creepy stalking than the casual flirtation that might lead me toward new consumer habits.

Tomás Argüelles, a Dad for all time

“Papá Tomás is not my Dad,” Isa told me a few months after we started dating. Despite the obvious potential for confusion created by that moniker, Tomás, she explained, was in fact her uncle. It turned out he wasn’t really her uncle either, he was one of the many relatives that had over the years been brought into the fold of her family in a uniquely charming Venezuelan fashion.