Waltz For Debby (Kronos)

When I was obsessively listening to Bill Evans a year ago, somehow I missed out on the collaboration of Kronos Quartet with Eddie Gomez and Jim Hall, two musical partners of Evans. They recorded some of my favorite songs by Evans, and although it's only Hall and Gomez who take solos, the results are spectacular. The style and compositions of Evans always lend themselves well to classical music, particularly French impressionists but even the quasi-baroque sounds of the Kronos Quartet here. With Gomez to establish a jazz foundation, Kronos Quartet's tribute to Evans is astonishingly quite successful. Although their Monk album was a tad underwhelming, I would love to hear them tackle compositions by various other jazz legends. Perhaps Ornette Coleman? Eric Dolphy?

Dancing Cheek to Cheek (in Trinidad)

One of the many pleasures of old calypso is catching references to other songs and melodies. Roaring Lion's "Cheek to Cheek" is clearly based on the US standard, but expertly adapted to calypso settings.

I Loves You, Porgy (Clarinet)

As someone who briefly played the clarinet and almost wishes to return to it, listening to Buddy DeFranco this evening has been pure delight. Further, as a fan of "I Loves You, Porgy," it has been nothing short of beautiful to come across a recording from Buddy DeFranco. He brings to mind a more modern Benny Goodman in his tone and style.

Greene's Orient Express

Although Graham Greene is one of my favorite novelists, Orient Express is so far my least favorite novel of is. As an "entertainment" with a similar title as one of Agatha Christie's classics, I expected something more exciting, granted there are some moments which are written as action film scenes. But I suppose my major problem with the novel is the caricatured main characters and the pervasive anti-Semitism where one is not sure if the author agrees.

The middle-aged lesbian who hates men, the virgin chorus girl, the self-conscious Jew, the thief on the run, and the novelist, Savory, are not as interesting as one would like, in spite of the "exotic" settings on a train bound for Istanbul. However, where the novel does approach the more typical 'Catholic' Greene territory, is in the lapsed Catholic Communist, Dr. Czinner (the name is a clue), who seeks redemption after the failure of an attempted Communist uprising. 

His character and his end, in his search for redemption, bring to mind a point made by a favorite intellectual historian of mine about the similarities between Marxism and Christianity. Furthermore, as Christiopher Hitchens's introduction to the edition I read indicates, Greene was likely drawing on his own sympathies for the Left and Catholicism in the character of Czinner, juxtaposing his fate with the ongoing social inequalities and exploitation of interwar Europe.

In that sense, the train, with its various classed cars and compartments, and the numerous references to the peasants, soldiers, clerks, and porters at the various sites along the way, is a portrait of the world in all its vicious social inequities, the passengers forced to engage with those in a setting in which the class, gender, sexual, and national borders are in flux. As one might expect, it doesn't end well for Czinner, Coral's fate is uncertain, but there are glimpses into which the characters' intersecting lives have unforgettably changed each other.