1. I was looking forward to the Gonzaga/Baylor tilt today, but two Covid tests in Zag World, a player and a person traveling with the team, forced the game's postponement. With some extra time on my hands, I strained and stored the chicken stock I had going. Later, I used some slightly older chicken stock and made a chicken, rice, and vegetable soup that worked out pretty well. I continued my familiar kitchen dance, loading the dishwasher, unloading it, loading again, and trying to keep things half way spiffed up.
2. I accidentally, and fortuitously, happened upon the recording of the Facebook Live concert that Jim Page and Jessica Lurie gave today, outdoors, in a driveway -- Jim's driveway? I didn't catch that detail. I'm a bit hazy on the details, but if I don't have it quite right, and if you know better, please let me know -- but it looks to me like Jim performs a regular series called Essential Music from the Porch (or Driveway?). Whether it's regular or whether it's at Jim's house, I'm not sure, but what I am sure of is that this hour of live music was sensational. I'd heard of Jessica Lurie's band, originally called the Billy Tipton Memorial Saxophone Quartet, but now known as the Tiptons Sax Quartet, but Jessica's name was not familiar to me and I figured out who she is by clicking around online.
Her accompaniment on saxophone, flute, and accordion to Jim's sons was sublime. It was subdued, perfectly pitched to Jim's style, and added emotional depth to Jim's lyrics and singing. I not only deeply enjoyed Jim Page and Jessica Lurie playing together, I enjoyed the memories that surfaced of other duets I've heard over the years, like, say, Alasdair Fraser and Paul Machlis. Fraser is a lyrical and sometime forceful Scottish fiddler, but the two or three times I heard him play at the University of Oregon with Paul Machlis, I was struck by how Machlis, a gifted pianist, played so beautifully and subtly underneath Fraser's fiddling, never calling attention to himself, but enhancing Fraser's performance. Dave Swarbrick had a similar talent as a fiddling accompanist, particularly when he played in support of Martin Carthy.
I loved how Jessica Lurie and Jim Page played together today. I had never imagined hearing Jim Page being accompanied by flute, saxophone, and accordion and the concert left me yearning for more.
By the way, familiarizing myself with Jessica Lurie led me to explore the story of Billy Tipton, a jazz pianist and saxophonist, who died in Spokane in 1989. Then it came back to me -- the story of how Billy Tipton was a woman, born Dorothy Lucille Tipton, but passed herself off as a man during her long career as a jazz musician. I have quite a list of books developing that I'd like to read. Today I learned that Diane Middlebrook, also a biographer of Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, wrote a biography of Billy Tipton, Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton. I will add it to my list.
3. Speaking of Diane Middlebrook, it's uncanny how things sometimes connect. Thanks to that episode of Gravy I listened to on Friday, I've been reading poems by Aimee Nezhukumatathil and I learned today that she was a Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin. If it weren't for Jessica Lurie accompanying Jim Page leading to me reading about Billy Tipton and discovering that Diane Middlebrook wrote a biography of Billy Tipton, the name Diane Middlebrook wouldn't have meant anything to me when I read that Aimee Nezhukumatathil had won a fellowship bearing Diane Middlebrook's name. Oh! Right! This string of connections only happened because Bill Davie shared Jim Page and Jessica Lurie's concert yesterday on his Facebook page and I stumbled upon his share.
I've read four or five of Aimee Nezhukumatathil's poems today. I don't quite have the right words yet for my enjoyment of them and want to read more. I also found an audio recording of an interview with her and the interviewer very politely asks Nezhukumatathil to help her with the pronunciation of her last name. I learned that the h's are silent and listened four or five times to Nezhukumatathil say her name and I'm starting to be able to pronounce it correctly myself, to my delight.
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