When it rains, it pours, as the fella says.
I bet a lot of backyard ’Burque barbecues wound up in the kitchen yesterday. The rain started in midafternoon, laid about a half inch on us in four hours, then took five for the holiday.
When I stumbled out of bed this morning at stupid-thirty our weather gizmo reported (drum roll, please) another half inch overnight. No wonder I slept so well. Rain is a fine thing for sleeping. Also for farms, forests, and other living things, as long as they’re not sleeping rough in an arroyo.
Any morning you wake up on the right side of a damp lawn is a good one.
Sonny Rollins didn’t make it to Tuesday. But he left his mark in a big way before heading west yesterday at the age of 95. The giant of the tenor sax had such a commitment to the music that he put his career on hold before it really took hold, because he wasn’t satisfied with his sound.
In 1959 he stepped away from the clubs and the studio and just played, often come nightfall at the Williamsburg Bridge near his place on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. And he stayed gone for two years.
“A lot of people couldn’t comprehend why I would stop playing,” he told DownBeat magazine in 2001. “But I learned something. It was necessary for me to do to have the kind of confidence I need to play music like this.”
His comeback album was called “The Bridge.”
Sonny would slip away once more, that time for a spiritual pilgrimage, but he came back and kept reaching, hoping to grasp. A Saxophone Colossus indeed.
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We got 0.2 inches from that storm before we sent it up your way. I am glad you got a good rain, because out here, even when riding, there is no bad rain. If you mix lightning and strong wind gusts with it, then seeking shelter is the ticket. The middle pumps in a Circle K gas station worked for us most of the time. I’m sure we all have good stories about getting caught on the bike in a thunderstorm.
It was something. We’ve gotten next to no precip’ lately — my training log shows one light rain in early April, and another sprinkle in the first week of May. So to get an inch is something, and most welcome.
Glad I beat it home before the afternoon matinee. I got a late start, and then just kind of ambled around to no particular purpose until I saw the clouds ganging up. Home, James! And then fwwwwooooooshhh!
We got a good deluge yesterday and more overnight. Thank the heavens.
My own Uncle Mouse was also a musician and a sax player. Sadly, he burned through a lot of his life on the needle, and in a bit of irony, died of thyroid cancer. He was living in Las Vegas during the above ground nuclear tests.
https://jazzjournal.co.uk/2023/03/05/mouse-bonati-portrait-of-a-jazz-hero/
Mouse woulda been 96 this June. A contemporary of Sonny Rollins.
Damn, Mr. Bonati could play!
Yeah, the Bonati kids were musicians. No idea what happened to me.
Ralph, Roy, my mom Anne, Al, and Joe (in order of birth) were either professional or great amateurs. Uncle Joe, aka “Mouse” was in a class by himself. I recall that one way the family survived the Great Depression after Grandpa augered his motorcycle into a streetcar was Ralph and Roy busking. Then Ralph joined the Army Corps of Engineers in the late thirties and landed a war gig with Gen. Raymond Wheeler, an engineer, in India. Roy got the call during the war and was off to the Third Army. Al also served in the army, but between wars. My mom worked in a war factory in Buffalo.
My mom was singing by night and working in a law office by day for a number of years when I was a rug rat. Have no idea what happened to me. I can barely play the stereo. Musta inherited my tin ear from the other side.
Just south of Rio Rancho. we had a Haboob blow through and two hours latermin dumped about a1/2 inch of rain to settle the dust and make the patio a mud slick piece of concrete. Late last night it poured again. The dogs enjoyed the walk with the clean smells and bunnies in the bushes. Love the moisture, been dry since I got here in November.