Speaking of hip-hop and DJ Premier, Gang Starr became a favorite along the way as well while I was at WRSU. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jseZP4K6rkg&w=560&h=315] It was an interesting time; there weren’t many DJs of color on air outside of weekend specialty programming, so most of the world music, hip-hop, jazz, and gospel went to those shows. I did a stint as music director and worked hard to change that. Since I got to open all the music when it came in, I put albums like Gang Starr’s in for regular rotation. It took time and conversation to convince the specialty show…

I mentioned discovering Wynton Marsalis’ other musically inclined relatives after digging into his discography. However, I came to know his brother Branford from a different path. The name Buckshot LeFonque goes back farther than the group B. Marsalis put together to Cannonball Adderly. However, as my love of hip-hop continued to fuel the vestiges of fire in my weary soul in 1994, this album was life. I cried (notice a theme over these days?) more than once as I sang along with songs like ‘Another Day’ and wanted to dash off and join the Panthers as I boiled over the…

Speaking of jazz, it has played a major role in my life since … likely since before birth. My dad was a big jazz fan and he and I spent a lot of time together, listening. Have you ever heard a piece of music and immediately understood the time and space it was meant to represent? My dad and I went to see Wynton Marsalis at the Trenton War Memorial. It’s now called the Patriot’s Memorial or something. I don’t recall when it was, and I can’t find information on that show, but I know it was there. Being a…

It’s interesting the things we do to ‘survive’. I might have told part of this story before, but when I was an undergrad, I found myself rather bereft of cash monies to put food in the fridge and eventually, when I got one, gas in the car. Someone hipped me to the idea of selling plasma. There was a little place not far from campus; the bus stopped in the strip mall across the street, so it was convenient. I recall hearing that some people received tidy sums for theirs, including a man and a woman who rode the train…

There’s a verse in the Bible that suggests ‘When I was a child, I thought as a child …’. It’s true. When I first heard Horace Silver (it was the Doin the Thing album though), laying in the middle of the living room floor of my parents’ house, reading the liner notes as hard bop flowed through the house (thanks to my dad’s ingenious wiring — yeah, we had surround sound before there was such a thing), I knew I would grow up to marry this man. Not as he would be by the time I was marrying age (he…

I remember hearing this song before seeing the video; it intrigued me. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9i0rSWRSREs&w=560&h=315] I was fortunate enough to participate in a student exchange program in high school. I spent about a month in England. I was a bit older in years than my exchange partner and as an only child who’d never spent time in such close quarters with other young people (other than my two stints at summer camp, which were abysmal failures at socializing me), we didn’t get on so well. Thinking back, I am sure she and her parents went to great effort to make me…

A friend and colleague posted a thing on social media called ‘20 Albums That Made an Impact on Me’ and I thought I’d use it as a topic for this space, which has been feeling rather neglected of late. As Elisa said, not every post will have a story with it, but knowing me, it will … First up is Mad Daddys Cat Scratch Fever. If you know my story, this album (EP, if you want to get all technical about it) wasn’t about the music. It was about my dear friend, known here as guitarist Screamin’ Johnson. Outside the…