Her Thing Just Now

At the top of the Spotify app there used to be something called related artists.  This was apparently insufficiently social.  Or perhaps they changed the algorithm but now we have “friends also like.”  Usually if you are listening to hard bop, for example what they offer up is all pretty predictable.  Today though, I’d found my way back to George Russell and enjoyed his album “Blues in Orbit” on the way over to the gym this Saturday afternoon.

He had another album which I remember from the cover where he oddly looks more like George Clooney than he does George Russel, but it was no longer there among the choices. And when you look at what “friends” like the name Roscoe Mitchell came up.  Couldn’t place him.  Now I know he was a cofounder of the Art Ensemble of Chicago and has a had a long, prolific if angular career since then.  I’m digging “Roscoe Mitchell and the Sound and Space Ensembles” from 1983, while I type.

My little one called today while I was tapping out an order for contact lenses on my phone in Chinese.  She was with a friend who would soon be returning home to South Korea. “I just gotta say I really love Korean food.  It’s so good.  I wish I could go there to eat some.  The next time we have to travel somewhere can we go to Korea?”  The Hermit Kingdom is her thing just now.  She studies Korean in her spare time.  I tried to remind her of when I’d brought here there when she was younger and how she and her sister thought it was boring.

Roscoe is getting so thin, sparse and out there, just now, that my wife’s Chinese soap opera has come blasting in to my ear space from the kitchen.  A national phenomenon, it's her thing just now.  Someone is yelling at some else.  Someone sounds furious.  My music is too spatial and gentle.  I must close my door and find something more dense to listen to. 

Saturday 12/15/18