Blog - Jazz Spectrum

This Week on Jazz Spectrum - 6/28-6/30

June 25, 2024

Each week, Fritz exchanges thoughts with Aly Krajewski about the Song of the Week featured on Jazz Spectrum Saturday.Song of the Week – “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most” – Music by Tommy Wolf, Lyrics by Fran Landesman Dear Aly, Last week at dinner, a friend and I were talking about Salman Rushdie’s new book, Knife, an extended and moving reflection on an extremist’s demented attempt to stab him to death, thirty years after the fatwa that was decreed against him for the act of publishing a work of imaginative fiction. Read More

This Week on Jazz Spectrum - 6/21-6/23

June 17, 2024

Jazz Spectrum

Each week, Fritz exchanges thoughts with Aly Krajewski about the Song of the Week featured on Jazz Spectrum Saturday.Dear Aly,

As we age, and our gears begin slightly to slip, it can lead to some wonderful suspended-in-mid-air exchanges. I was recently on the periphery of one.

We were showing off the downtown riverfront park development. Admittedly, it IS disorienting. But:

“You pretty much cover the waterfront.”

“I love that movie.”

“Which movie” Read More

This Week on Jazz Spectrum 6/14-6/16

June 13, 2024

Jazz Spectrum

Each week, Fritz exchanges thoughts with Aly Krajewski about the Song of the Week featured on Jazz Spectrum Saturday.By Fritz ByersDear Aly,
Read More

This week on Jazz Spectrum – 6/7-6/9

June 6, 2024

Jazz Spectrum

Each week, Fritz exchanges thoughts with Aly Krajewski about the Song of the Week featured on Jazz Spectrum Saturday.By Fritz ByersDear Aly, Anyone who’s been through law school, or at least the caricature of law school that fetishizes the Socratic method, knows that enormous power derives from being the person who asks the questions. Ms. Read More

This Week on Jazz Spectrum - 5/17-5/19

May 15, 2024

Jazz Spectrum

Each week, Fritz exchanges thoughts with Aly Krajewski about the Song of the Week featured on Jazz Spectrum Saturday.By Fritz ByersHi Aly, I didn’t mention to you when we were talking last night that any impairment you detected in my capacity for linear thought was likely due to my having spent excessive time recently with the movies of the French New Wave. I think mostly the movies go way over my head, but I find them funny; often, I think, unintentionally so. Read More

This week on Jazz Spectrum – 5/10-5/12

May 9, 2024

Jazz Spectrum

Each week, Fritz exchanges thoughts with Aly Krajewski about the Song of the week featured on Jazz Spectrum Saturday.By Fritz ByersHi Aly, Yesterday the sky’s vast cloudless expanse was so striking that it set me to wondering what it was reminding me of. Do you remember the Peanuts strip when Linus asks Lucy, “Why is the sky blue?” And she answers, “Because it isn’t green.” Yesterday, it was a blue on blue, like an English weave It was very nearly one of those impossible Renoir blues we talked about a couple of weeks ago. It was a sweeping heartache blu Read More

This week on Jazz Spectrum – 5/3/24-5/5/24

April 30, 2024

Jazz Spectrum

Each week, Fritz exchanges thoughts with Aly Krajewski about the Song of the Week featured on Jazz Spectrum Saturday.By Fritz ByersHi Aly, I checked the rules, but I don’t see one that prohibits beginning consecutive Song of the Week emails with a reference to a poem. So, last week, e.e. cummings, this week, Frank O’Hara. Frank’s affecting poem, “St. Paul and All That,” has this perfectly cadenced stanza: I walk in
sit down and
face the frigidaire
it’s April
no May
it’s May Read More

This week on Jazz Spectrum – April 26-28

April 23, 2024

Jazz Spectrum

Each week, Fritz exchanges thoughts with Aly Krajewski about the Song of the Week featured on Jazz Spectrum Saturday.By Fritz ByersHi Aly, e.e. cummings was right to say that “Spring is like a perhaps hand
(which comes carefully out of Nowhere)arranging Read More

This week on Jazz Spectrum – April 19-21, 2024

April 19, 2024

Jazz Spectrum

By Fritz ByersThe tenor saxophonist Lester Young is widely – and I think plausibly – credited with inventing the use of the word “cool” to describe something hip or fashionable or, well, you know. That alone should land him in one or more Halls of Fame – who in American history has more enduringly shaped the national vocabulary with a single word? This cracks me up: the original OED isn’t having any of this use of cool. BUT, in a supplement, the editors added several usages. Read More

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