Dec 03 2006

Years and years ago I joined a Jazz CD of the month club. Why? I don't know, it seemed like a cool thing to do...not many twenty year olds were in the Jazz CD of the month club during the 90's. Every month or so I would get 3 jazz CD's in the mail. The first set included "Kind of Blue" from Miles Davis, Duke Ellington's "Live at Newport '58" and Louis Armstrong's "Louis Armstrong and the Hot 7's". To this day "Kind of Blue" is probably my single favorite album, bar none...well, the Chipmunks Christmas album is a close second. A few albums I absolutely adored, but for the most part a lot of albums got played once and then put on the shelf...and a few CD's were never opened. After a year or so I gave up on the CD club, played a few of the albums, and forgot about the rest as they collected dust with CD's from my college industrial phase (was it really necessarily to buy 6 Skinny Puppy albums?).

Well, fast forward 10 years or so to the Ken Burns Jazz documentary. Overall I thought the documentary was great...sure, he gave credit to Louis Armstrong for everything short of ending World War II and Viagra...but it's one man's point of view. And hey, how can one not listen to Louis Armstrong's voice and not lose oneself? I dare you...quite impossible. Unless you are one of those tone deaf people and then it really doesn't matter because you probably are listening to that Chipmunks album and thinking...hey...not bad. But I digress, as part of the DVD they had a special feature where they listed information on which song was the backtrack. I'd watch a segment and hear the backtrack and think...wow, what a cool song. I'd hit the information button and think to myself, hmmm, that sounds familiar. I'd go over the the Jazz section of the CD collection and discover that I've owned that albm for 10 some odd years. Over and over...probably 15 or so instances where that happened. And as I get to the end of this story I realize there really is no point, other than it was something I was thinking about as I was determining what photo I wanted to blog tonight.

As for the photo, there is a nifty little utata project, 'Utata Imitates Life'. I finally found a use for those Jazz figurines I bought in New Orleans! That and I got to test out shooting tethered to the Mac Laptop (tethered meaning that when I take a shot it shows up on the laptop computer screen!). Lighting was done via a small handheld flashlight bounced off some gold foil. The digital capture was then converted to black and white in photoshop.

December 2006