A week ago Saturday while driving and listening to my excellent local jazz station KCCK 88.3 the jock played this great Latin Jazz tune, “A Night Like This” …
Their debut album Deleted Scenes from the Cutting Room Floor, featuring this as one of the singles, went to #1 for 30 consecutive weeks on the Dutch charts in 2010, the longest run ever.
Here’s a full performance by them from 2010 at the North Sea Jazz Festival.
They released another album or two but sadly are no more.
This one song from 1960 launched him to legendary status over the next several years among white blues players like Eric Clapton, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Johnny Winter, and countless others.
I nearly always prefer these gritty, raw performances by the original artists, especially with this style of blues made famous by Freddie plus several others like Magic Sam (one of my favorites) and B.B. King.
They invented and perfected a variation on 1940s and 50s R&B dubbed West Side Blues, or Uptown Blues, with an uptempo, energetic, danceable groove, often featuring horns — and they are the best at it.
More about him, and the TV show he appeared on here, coming up over the next few weeks.
He’s friendly and chill. He likes people and will let anyone pet him. Like a dog, in many ways.
Of course he likes sitting in boxes, and bags. Every cat seems to like this, and for us it’s endlessly entertaining. Put a box on the floor, wait a couple minutes, and he’s sitting in it. Just looking at you like “ha, look what I did!”
Anyone who has ever had to write anything for anyone can gain something from these videos and the books they are drawn from.
Personally I have been through both of these journeys — to write well, and writing to learn — separately from these books.
Writing to learn, I discovered quite by accident, is the best reason to write, at least for me. Now I write to amuse and inform myself, I write to learn by researching and tying threads together, and I write to organize thoughts and test my own assumptions about a topic. It’s quite energizing and I feel like I understand a little bit more around the world around me every day.
You have to understand a topic to write clearly about it. If you find you have trouble writing about it, you probably don’t understand it well enough quite yet. That means go back and learn more, and then come back to the writing.
Of course a secondary goal is to entertain readers enough that they want to come back next time. But I find that, for me, if I flip the goals around and make that the primary goal, the magic goes out of it.
Writing to Learn
Top notch advice, all of that.
Then there’s the one thing every single human wishes they could do better: write well.
Believe it or not, everyone can become a much better writer by following some rules and being disciplined about cutting out unnecessary words. Use active voice and present tense. Eliminate long words when short ones will do. Etc.
Clarity is king.
It’s more of a craft than an art, and that means everyone can learn enough to be better.
Only prodigies can sit down and just write once and be done with it. Jack Kerouac famously did that with “On the Road”, writing the whole thing on a single sheet of rolled up paper. Put that out of your mind; it does not work like that.
Here’s how it does work. On Writing Well.
I have not read either of these books, but know the concepts within them very well.
It’s easy to take an amazing artist like Elton John for granted, but he’s been a legend for 50+ years now and his music was a big part of my musical education as a teenager.
To pick just one year from his peak in the 1970s, these three songs are all from 1973, when he released two albums, “Don’t Shoot Me, I’m Only the Piano Player” and “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road”. Both reached #1 in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia. Three singles reached either #1 or #2 in the US, and a fourth reached #12.
It was a pretty solid year for him.
Always one of my favorite Elton John songs, “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road”, live at Dodger Stadium, 1975.
Just Elton and piano, bringing the beauty of the melody of “Daniel” to the forefront.
I love the way he says “sure” without hesitation and just sits down to play this masterpiece that means so much to the guy in the audience as a tribute to his long gone dear friend.
For me the real difference maker was the quality of the album cuts, like “Blues for Baby and Me”. All of his albums in the early- and mid-70s had several such quality songs.
I could go on and on and on — we’ve only covered songs from 1973 here!
John has more than fifty top-40 hits on the UK Singles Chart and US Billboard Hot 100, including nine number ones in both countries, as well as seven consecutive number-one albums in the US. He has sold over 300 million records worldwide, making him one of the best-selling music artists of all time. He is the most successful solo artist in the history of the US Billboard charts. His tribute single to Princess Diana, "Candle in the Wind 1997", a rewritten version of his 1974 single, sold over 33 million copies worldwide and is the best-selling chart single of all time. In 2021, he became the first solo artist with UK Top 10 singles across six decades. Among John's numerous awards, he is one of 19 entertainers to win the EGOT, which includes an Emmy Award, five Grammy Awards, two Academy Awards, and a Tony Award. He also won two Golden Globes, a Laurence Olivier Award, and the Kennedy Center Honor. He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1992 and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994, and is a fellow of The Ivors Academy. He was knighted by Elizabeth II for services to music and charity in 1998 and was appointed a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour in 2020, being invested at Windsor Castle in 2021 by the Prince of Wales.
Seven consecutive number one albums.
His YouTube channel is chock full of great videos, and well worth digging into.
In 130 BC the Han Dynasty opened trade with the West, so this is considered the start date for the Silk Road and for truly global trade, but it had ancient origins even before that.
The Silk Road (a.k.a “Silk Routes” because it was actually many trails, not just one road) was a major trade route for over 1500 years until it was blocked by the Ottoman Empire in 1453 due to a blockade against China.
When I was in school they talked about Marco Polo and the Silk Road together, quickly and superficially, but the Silk Road was open for 1400 years before Marco Polo, a mercantilist from Venice, explored the entire Asian world visiting many countries as the foreign emissary of Kublai Khan for over 20 years, from 1269-1291, and wrote a book about it, “The Travels of Marco Polo”.
That book opened European eyes and culture to China and the “Far East”.
During that same time frame, the 13th Century, the Mongol Empire expanded dramatically, extending from the Sea of Japan to the Mediterranean Sea, the largest contiguous land empire in history. The Silk Road, therefore, was completely controlled by one empire during the travels of Marco Polo.
The key driver of this explansion was Genghis Khan, grandfather of Kublai Khan.
