Brianland

On The Road to On The Road Sex, Drugs & Jazz A very abnormal thing happens — it’s post-movies Wednesday night (August 15th) when Carolyn & I normally part ways for our own offices and computers, but by fortune we met up in the kitchen and started talkin about the movie premiere tomorrow night, and […]

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Paul Simon certainly exceeded my expectations last night! He and his two bands only had a couple warm-up gigs in Dublin before bringing back “Graceland” in front of 50,000 people in the most famous park in the English capital of Europe. A 2 hour show became 3 hours, and he started at 7:20 to avoid […]

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A Shakespearean Cassady   . A month of rain in 12 hours can’t dampen the Spirit of a lifetime of experience or the experience of a lifetime. Two compatible souls a generation apart, Somehow related, somehow unjaded, somehow not faded, Still giggling unburdened, still freely unherded, Two jazz cats still flowing, still riffing, still reading […]

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. Whatever the particulars of any all-encompassing multi-day music festival you’ve been to — this one takes place in New Orleans.  When the festival music is over each night, instead of driving into a traffic jam or walking to a campground or checking into some generic hotel, you’re living in history and set loose in […]

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Here’s the artists / bands / ensembles I caught at New Orleans Jazz Fest over the last week . . . Thursday, April 26th, 2012 (1) — the Honey Island Swamp trio – at the Ogden Museum of Art Friday at Jazz Fest (11) — The Classic New Orleans Revue – with “Carnival Time” Johnson […]

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  It’s 4AM on Frenchmen Street in New Orleans — on a dosey-doe night of subterranean hideaways and pirate characters right outta “Treasure Island” and hanging in the Blue Nile next to Will Blades the young Hammond B3 master as he works the keys and valves and peddles to Karl Denson on sax and Stanton […]

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The Glorious Gumbo that is New Orleans .   Every big city in the world has a jazz festival — but when someone says “Jazz Fest,” unless otherwise qualified, they’re referring to The New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival that’s been running every year since 1970, including the year after k.  And btw, New Orleanians […]

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The  Maltese  Fall . It’s Friday, May 15th, 1998, our final port of call, Valletta, Malta, the ancient capital, site of The Great Siege, home of the thousand-year-old Knights of St. John, the nomadic Christian healers who were granted refuge on the island by the Emperor of Spain in 1530 for the rent of two […]

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The Grateful Dead Played My 30th  Or Everything I Ever Needed to Know I Learned At A Grateful Dead Concert             The weekend of my 30th birthday, four old friends drove from Winnipeg to New York to help celebrate it, and the Grateful Dead flew in from San Francisco to play. It’s a curious story […]

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Every Day Is A Gift   by Brian Hassett Every day you’re alive is a gawd-damned gift.  And that’s the whole shot, as Gregory Corso would say. Try adding up all the times your Indomitable Spirit was challenged but did not topple in a deathly firestorm of adversity.  There’s probably been a hundred of them, […]

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