Tag Archives: John Coltrane

My Favorite Pomplamoose

I was delighted by what Pomplamoose did with their cover of “Single Ladies” (mentioned in my previous post). But I am in utter, slack-jawed awe at their distinctively twisted cover of “My Favorite Things.”

This is a song I know well, having devoted my undergraduate thesis to the evolution of John Coltrane’s treatment of it over the years. Pomplamoose has taken the song in a completely different, but no less unexpected direction. It’s absolutely wonderful. And now I need to go cry in the shower, Tobias Fünke style, because I will never in my wildest dreams be able to produce something this amazing in my own home music studio.

New Coltrane site launched

John Coltrane, Avant Garde Jazz and the Evolution of "My Favorite Things"
I’m pleased to announce the launch of a brand new version of my John Coltrane website.

This is the first step in an ongoing process of splitting my currently mammoth website into distinct, separate websites tailored to specific content areas. Basically, each of the top-level navigation items you see at the top of this page will eventually become its own site.

For now there’s not a lot of new content on the Coltrane site — the big “draw” is the redesign itself. But I’ve added a blog to the site, and eventually I’ll also be adding a multimedia section where I’ll be featuring audio and video clips. Check it out!

This site design was also an opportunity for me to test the effectiveness of my new Room 34 Baseline WordPress theme. Believe it or not, that barebones theme really is the foundation upon which the new Coltrane site is built. So it works!

This site also takes advantage of some cutting-edge web design features: it’s built with HTML 5 and the Blueprint CSS framework, and it uses the emerging @font-face CSS method to render text in a custom font. I am using the free Museo font family throughout the site.

A Room 34 Christmas

No, I will not be donning my Santa hat whilst crooning over a cup of eggnog by the hearthside. For one thing, I hate eggnog. For another, anyone within earshot would hate my crooning even more than I hate eggnog.

That said, when Jw threw down the gauntlet for an RPM Holiday Challenge, I knew I was on board, and I knew almost as quickly which song I would butcher lovingly render in my own inimitable style. “Greensleeves” has been a standard of jazz musicians for decades (my favorite renditions being John Coltrane’s classic take along with Vince Guaraldi’s treatment for A Charlie Brown Christmas), and perfectly bridges the gap between a straight-ahead jazz treatment and holiday schmaltz. Since my solo music has been drifting in a jazz-ward direction lately anyway, it seemed a perfect fit.

It’s still in an extremely embryonic stage right now, but since I’ve made some progress despite the overwhelming odds of my “lifeload” (“workload” doesn’t cut it) in November in general and this November in particular, I just wanted there to be publicly documented evidence that I’ve made it this far, just in case I fail to stagger across the finish line.

So, here you go…

[audio:http://blog.room34.com/wp-content/uploads/underdog/greensleeves-02.mp3]

Vintage Google

I learned this morning from Daring Fireball that Google has temporarily restored their earliest available index from 2001, allowing you to see what was available back then for your searches.

Kind of cool. But a little depressing for me personally, to see that back then my site was the first result you’d get when searching for John Coltrane. Now it’s 7th, but I suppose I should be glad it’s still on the front page, given my lack of attention to SEO. (Of course, I think SEO is at least 75% snake oil anyway.)