Time's short this week, too. Paying the price for all that procrastination in past weeks. Anyway here's a few further thoughts on various subjects already discussed, and then a picture, and then off to work. Grind to the nosestone.

Jay likes swing. A lot. And big band, and jazz, and of course the blues. His collection includes two gems of Muddy Waters, plus a few Ruth Brown CDs that stayed in the player for months after he got them. Indeed, the Muddy Waters CDs were replacements for treasured old vinyl that got lost among Jay's many vicissitudes and resulting moves from one tenement to another. He also loves boogie woogie, which he recently re-discovered after years of deprivation, having forgot that he liked it so much. Oh, and ragtime, definitely ragtime. If you're not familiar with it, re-acquaint yourself with its wonders with a search on YouTube. Their boogie woogie selection is particularly rich, with many clips from the Old Days When Television was Good. And monochrome.

Check this out, too:

But time is way short, so here's a freshly minted picture to tide over. It links to a larger version on RedBubble.com. Jay's been going for walks at the river in the evenings lately, and spotted this scene a few evenings ago. He tried to getit with his pocketable pointy-shooty thingus, but ended up returning the next evening with tripod and wideangle.

We used to all make jokes about elevator music. You know you're old when "your song" is relegated to Muzak. How true, but these days, elevator music is the good stuff. Jay's noticed an unpleasant trend among the cheap restaurants he frequents - radio stations instead of even the lowly Muzak. Bad, bad, bad radio stations. Bad music, worse audio. Maybe if the audio were decent the music wouldn't be so nerve wracking.

In some places, they're playing solid Oldies, which in today's parlance means bad, bad music that grates on the ears. Real Oldies, maybe deserving of being called "classical" by now, would be no problem, but even the few places that play it are using horrid Corporate Radio to pipe the world's worst audio signal to bad store speakers. Pity poor ears. Pity the poor audiophile!

Actually, Jay's not one. An audiophile, that is. Mainly, Jay's wallet doesn't permit such indulgence, although his ears would surely relish a treat. There's a limit to how much lack of quality he can stand, however, and low-quality MP3s broadcast over FM radio stations littered with noisy DJs and stupid contests push Jay's limits to the max.

His long treasured FM receiver having bit the dust a couple of months ago, Jay's suffering along with computer driven audio till the microeconomy in Jay's immediate vicinity permits shopping for a replacement system - might be a while. He's converted a few dozen of his favorite CDs to computer audio (at maximum quality, uncompressed thank you very much), and sends the audio out through dinky but decent speakers at a few meager watts. Doesn't quite drown the drone of the computer and its external harddrives, but Jay has to make do till the "big" receiver can be replaced.

Don't even suggest repair. The thing is almost 20 years old. The company that made it has been bought out and re-bought out, and the likelihood of finding parts is low, much less someone capable of performing the repair at less than astronomical cost. It was good in its day. Not by any means an audipphile's dream, of course, but way decent, with all kinds of (revolutionary back then) video inputs and an on-board 10-band graphic equalizer. Now it's past its prime, clicking and popping, with dusty pots and sliders that squawk when operated. Its LCD display is long kaput, so there's no telling what the receiver's doing unless you've lived with it for over a decade, which Jay has, and can discern its "modes" from listening to its results.

Really, though, it's only Jay's fourth or fifth system for all his merry days. He tends to hang onto stuff that works until it doesn't. (It's beyond hot here, so that's why the refreshing pool picture, which has zip to do with audio.)

The many better-traveled people out there are by now cringing that they can't pack off hate email for Jay's meager travels being touted in the previous post. Fact is, Jay's been around mostly locally, and had a great time doing so. He'd rather explore the streets of Pageland, South Carolina, for the season's best watermelon or ride the Ridge west toward Leesville and Gilbert for July's best peaches than put up with leg-cramping, knee-aching, interminably boring flights to parts of the planet beyond the ponds.

Pageland, as it turns out, is on Jay's list of favorite places for the good times he had there. It's a cute, quaint, friendly, definitively small town. Jay's in no danger of moving there, the locals will be delighted to learn, but he's visited many times and enjoyed every trip. He's been to Boston many times, too, and big city that it is he enjoyed those visits. That was before Yoyo Ma, one of Jay's current heroes, played Bach on the cello for Beantown's benighted city council. Now, Jay'd have to think carefully before visiting Boston again. Well, okay, visit might be okay but calling on the city council is out of the question. Not that they care.

Jay had a great time in San Francisco, including a culinary adventure already detailed, and would like to visit again, stay longer, and maybe leave wiser but leave just the same. Chicago, too. Jay got snowed on there once in April. April! What a ridiculous time of year to have cold weather, much less snow. But Jay likes huge, hulking Chicago, having visited there many times and never once going shopping in the touristy designer shops area. Put Charlottesville, Virginia, on the like-em-a-lot list, too. Great small town that thinks it's a big city. Or maybe wishes it was.

Curiously, both times Jay's been to Virginia Beach, Virginia, it snowed. Well, it was January. Nice place, and Jay enjoyed going there but found it difficult to get comfy with snow and ice in the way.

Time's short this week, so this discussion has to hold for another installment.

We haven't yet explored Jay's passion for the Keys, his unenthusiasm for Jackson, Mississippi, or his fondness for Charlotte, North Carolina. Here's a picture from Newport, Rhode Island, another of Jay's favorites, to tide you over till next week.

Jay's fond of some modern composers' stuff, including Eric Satie, the dreamy Claude Debussy, especially the latter when expertly played on the piano by Marina Lomazov. Though it is "modern" music, he finds the piano pieces of Konstantinovich Shchedrin irresistible, in the hands of Miss Lomazov. She masterfully brings out their playfulness in a cat-dancing-on-the-keys kind of way. Then there's Ravel, and all the fabulous works of Rachmaninoff, not to mention some Stravinsky and some other composers whose work tickles Jay's ear, but isn't four hundred years old.

Summarize to say, Jay's taste in music is fairly ecclectic, with exceptions here and there to prove the rule. He doesn't like much of disco, for example, can't stand rap, and tires of current Top Forty after a few microseconds. Jay digs some jazz, most swing, the blues of course, many movie soundtracks, some country, lots of old gospel, the mellower New Age, some alternative, and a little, albeit very little, bluegrass. Zero "adult contemporary." The radio in his car stays tuned to the local NPR station, but mostly it stays turned off since it barely works anyway and has to be switched off and back on sometimes to squelch the noise that creeps in. Jay's smartphones offer excellent sound quality, but most of the time Jay drives in quiet, since he rarely goes very far. Quiet is good. Not as entertaining as Mussorgsky, but nice.

This quietude was not always the case. Several years ago Jay equipped his next-previous Hondacar with a high-quality sound system. It bellowed out the classics beautifully. He equipped the door compartments with a dozen of his favorite CD's, rotating them occasionally. In short, he rode around town in a rolling concert hall with 230,000 miles on the odometer. Loving it. In those days, he traveled frequently and always drove, since he doesn't like flying. On one of his many trips to parts north, he put a Lara St. John CD - J.S. Bach, the best - into the contraption and grooved, as Boomers used to say, on the drive through the North Carolina mountains and into Tennessee, just at sunrise. He'd worked out the timing for the trip so he could enjoy the view.

After stopping for breakfast and fuel at a McDo - it was convenient, ok? - he happily got back on the Interstate to resume the trek. A little more than an hour later, he noticed a mile marker - 6, instead of the hundred-and-umpty he expected. In another mile, a sign read "Welcome to North Carolina." He had obliviously retraced over an hour of the trip. U-turning at the next exit, he kicked the sound system up some more decibels and joyfully went back northward. Alas, the car's stereo system was stolen while Jay lived downtown, but the thieves left all the nice CDs. Not to their musical taste, presumably. Now he's stuck with a cassette tape deck that doesn't work at all, and a radio that has its moments.

One thing Jay does not do while driving is sing. If you heard any of his attempts, you'd know why. Mainly, it always comes out nearly off-key enough to anger plate techtonics. Something about no vocal training, none ever attempted, even. And definitely none justified.

In addition to Miss Bobo, Jay's teacher Hall of Fame (He also has a Teachers' Hall of Infamy, but is sparing you that for now) includes the late William T. Slaughter. An accomplished organist respected for his technically superb and musically inspired renditions of Bach fugues, Mr. Slaughter taught band instruments in all six (!) grades at Aiken Junior and High schools. He was a one-person staff - no assistant teachers back then - ably assisted at the High School by a student staff that included (ta-da!) Jay.

Mr. Slaughter taught all the instruments. Reeds, flutes, percussion and brass. Glockenspiel and timpani, oboe, clarinet and saxophone. French horn and trombone. Maybe he knew and played stringed instruments, too, but he didn't teach them, referring interested students to teachers in nearby Augusta, Georgia.

He gave private lessons in a back room of his house in downtown Aiken, and Jay, who stuck with band from Seventh to Twelfth grades, was one of his students, a half-decent one in his later years. Jay played cornet, the "symphonic" version of the trumpet. At the outset of band class in the Seventh Grade, Mr. Slaughter examined the facial structure of each new student in turn and recommended an instrument that suited them. He probably skewed the choices to what instrumentation the high school band would need three years into the future, but he never let on. Jay's choices were cornet or French horn, the latter of which, Mr. Slaughter warned, was quite difficult to play.

Easy choice, really. Jay took the path of least resistance, with blessings from his father, who disliked music in general except for the military bugle call "Taps." After an impressively inauspicious start, Jay caught on to getting a sound out of the instrument, moved up to shaky scales and the occasional arpeggio, and kept at it, even practicing occasionally as whim and necessity dictated. When Mr. Slaughter recommended private lessons, Jay's parents footed the bill, and Jay's father even sprung for a silver Conn Connstellation cornet, the stuff of dreams for a cornetist then and now. He'd already bought a baby grand piano that took up much of the livingroom.

Jay's hero list took on new musical entries. Harry James, of course, because he was still the rage in the early Sixties. And Bourbon Streeter Al Hirt, who had popular tunes in the Top Forty of the day. Good ones.

Jay's love affair with music started even earlier, as his Sainted Mother insisted he have piano lessons. She so wanted to be able to play the piano herself, but didn't take lessons. Instead, she dutifully pursued a mailorder self-study course in which the middle piano keys were numbered on a cardboard overlay. The course ignored basics and moved right into songs. Eventually, she learned to play her favorite piece, "The Merry Widow Waltz," quite well, but after that she stopped studying.

On the other hand, Jay flopped at piano. He learned to read music and count rhythms, but never got the knack of reading both treble and bass clef lines at the same time. When he figured out that he could improvise the music by reading only the treble clef, that was the end of piano studies. After exhausting only two piano teachers, the first being one of his cousins, he got stuck on "Flow Gently Sweet Afton," and gave up, turning his attention to the cornet, which only entailed one clef at a time. He took up piano many years later and learned to play a few of his favorite classical pieces - long after giving up all hopes of professional musicianship.

Jay played first chair cornet in the Aiken High School Bands and helped organize the Pep Band at the University of South Carolinia (slash) Aiken. That was pretty much the end of his career, however - although at the urging of a colleague, an accordion player at the newspaper where he worked, he played hymns and carols with the Salvation Army Band on Main Street a few times. Decades later (see the picture and don't laugh at the hot pink hat), Jay again had delusions of musical adequacy and relearned the cornet, but that episode was cut woefully short by health and other troubles.