A party to celebrate 2 years of spreading Syracuse music

Mark Turley and Nicholas Oliver have a passion for the Syracuse music scene that comes from making art their own way. Do It Yourself, or DIY, as the acronymists of the world like to say. For almost 20 years, Turley has played in bands and Oliver has taken pictures, created art and collected vinyl albums.…

Slap a couple steaks on the grill

I hear the boasts here and there from the toughies who claim they’re always ready to burn up a couple of sirloins for dinner out there in their backyard no matter the season. Yeah, buddy, you master of your own universe, captain of the propane flame, king and queen of coal, grillmeister extraordinary. Not me.…

Connecting the dots between Yayoi Kusama, Eddie Murphy

There’s a movie being make about the life of Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, a woman whom I must report I’d never heard of until I saw that fact that “Life in Polka Dots” was being filmed while collecting items for my weekly Film News blog for the Syracuse New Times. She was a contemporary of…

A jazz singer who seeks discipline and adventure

You can’t always get what you want, right, Mick? But if you try some time, you just might find … Well, as much as he wanted to get me some phone time with rising star jazz vocalist Cecile McLorin Salvant for my weekly community blog column today for Syracuse Public Media site waer.com, her publicist…

From the slightly Wayback Machine, my video of the Heath Brothers

On Halloween, I was lucky enough to catch the Heath Brothers performing as part of the Legends of Jazz series at Onondaga Community College. Great show by 89-year-old saxophonist Jimmy Heath, his 80-year-old drummer brother Tootie and their younger mates Michael Karn on upright bass and Jeb Patton on piano. I wrote about it here.…

So about this Syracuse snow

I know the snow that’s fallen in the last three or four days cannot compare to the way in which my blogging friends Ann Koplow and Austin Hodgens in Boston and Bangor have been blasted this winter. And besides, our winter-of-2014-15 fate had been relatively tame except for some early December storms until now. But…

Eli Cook will drive from Virginia to spread his vision of the modern blues

Eli Cook will point his vehicle north come two weekends from now and be excited about meeting new people. The solo trip from Virginia to Syracuse won’t be so bad when there’s a guitar in the back, songs in your heart and the tradition of a style of music to modernize and keep alive. And…

I first interviewed SpongeBob in 2006, and I can prove it

As I sat watching the silliness of “The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water” Saturday at Destiny USA in Syracuse, I kept puffing up my chest like I took in too much water, thinking, I know SpongeBob. Well, sort of but not really. It is a cartoon character, you know, even when the animation stops…

Grammys leave me feeling half empty

Most every year I can’t get to sleep after the Grammys telecast has signed off because the annual celebration of what makes music move us has reminded me of great things past and present and stirred hopes for the future, too. Last night I watched the local news, thought about how I’d have to get…

Ellie B and I are the only ones who give a hoot

Walking with Ellie B aka Dogamous Pyle through a winter snow in our Syracuse city neighborhood of Eastwood’s nearby Norwood Park, we noticed something sitting on a backyard post just past a fence separating us and it. I pulled Ellie B through the snow to the fence to better see the bird. Ellie B pulled…