The Colin Vallon Trio with Patrice Moret and Julian Sartorius at the Tinguely Museum and the Bird’s Eye in Basel on 28 February and 1 March 2025

Pianist Colin Vallon's trio with bassist Patrice Moret and drummer Julian Sartorius played at the Tinguely Museum in Basel on Friday afternoon, 28 February, and then again at the Bird's Eye in Basel that evening and last night (Saturday, 1 March). On Friday afternoon, I dreamed to their music like the soundtrack of a road movie. On Friday evening, I focused on Sartorius's drumming, especially on the snare. And yesterday, I got a sense of the trio as a whole. Besides some solo introductions by Vallon, they play no solos. But they aren't all soloing all the time; rather, they're accompanying each other as the compositions and improvisations build toward their climaxes. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 2 March 2025)

Colin Vallon, Tinguely Museum, Basel, 28 February 2025

Patrice Moret, Tinguely Museum, Basel, 28 February 2025

Julian Sartorius, Tinguely Museum, Basel, 28 February 2025

Don Q shouts at clouds again, but it’s Sky Man

When Don Q looked at the window that Vanza kept having repainted on the wall, he shouted at the clouds, and they never shouted back. Often, tears would fill their eyes, and they would say, "Thank you, sir." But one day, when Don Q was shouting and putting his cards on the table, it wasn't the clouds; it was Sky Man. Tears did not fill his eyes, and he said, "I'm not playing cards." Vanza looked at the window and said, as he'd said before, "I really don't care." Later, Don Q laughed. "This is going to be great television." But Elephant, Macaroni, and Schmerz had already taken Sky Man's side. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 1 March 2025) 

Two duos playing the full range of jazz at the Bird’s Eye in Basel, 27 February 2025

Last night, the Bird’s Eye in Basel featured two quite distinct duos: Tim Garland (saxophone) and Jason Robello (piano), and then Izumi Kimura (piano) and Gerry Hemingway (drums, vibes, bowed cymbal, harmonica, vocals). Garland and Robello’s songs were all in standard jazz format with head, solos, and head, all originals except one standard, Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer’s “Moon River” (1961). Kimura and Hemingway’s compositions were much less conventional, sometimes with rubato fragments of sound, sometimes with aggressive thunder, and with much in between. And when they turned to free improvisation, Hemingway introduced a superb piece of spontaneous composition on vibes and piano with the memorable phrase “something for right now.” (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 28 February 2025) 

Forty years of playing Lou Reed’s “I’m Waiting for the Man"

Back in 1985, my frenemy Kurt Johnson taught me Lou Reed's song "I'm Waiting for the Man", from The Velvet Underground's 1967 debut album "The Velvet Underground & Nico". Kurt played it in D major with his band The Vegetables, so I played it that way, too. He got mad at me when my band Petting Zoo also started performing the song. Sometime later, I moved it up to E major instead and started playing it with a shuffle rhythm. Now I've been playing it the song for around forty years; I've always loved singing its vivid evocation of two things I've never done: buying heroin in Harlem, then shooting up. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 27 February 2025) 

A note to my students about writing their daily 111-word texts

Some evening this term, you might notice that you haven't written your text for today (as I haven't written mine for today as I type this up). It might cross your mind that you could quickly generate a 111-word text using a text-generation program. But if you're really out of ideas, or if you're really too tired, just skip a day instead. After all, this course is not about effective uses of so-called AI; it's about developing your own writing skills. And such programs are also notoriously bad at counting (as in the question of how many Rs are in "strawberry"), so they might not get the word count right anyway. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 26 February 2025, a text addressed to the students in my class "111 Words a Day: A Writing Project") 

Proofreading a book with Professor Albert Gelpi in Summer 1986

In summer 1986, I spent many warm afternoons on the deck of the house of Stanford English Professor Albert Gelpi, where we were proofreading the galleys of his book "A Coherent Splendor: The American Poetic Renaissance 1910-1950". That spring, I had met him in his course on Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson. We would take turns reading the manuscript out loud and reading along in the galleys, and we even mentioned every punctuation mark. I had not thought of that project in a long time, until yesterday, when I read the chapter on Adrienne Rich in Al's 2015 book "American Poetry after Modernism: The Power of the Word". (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 25 February 2025)

The Salamander daydreams about Don Q, Lone Odor, and the Turtle

While the Salamander sat in his fiery nest, waiting for calls from the Six Flacks to rant and ramble on their television shows, he smiled at the thought of Don Q's head iconoclast Lone Odor. That nasty fulfillment of the Salamander's loveliest nightmares had gone beyond planning a pirate base on the moon and was imagining settling Mars even as he flew the skull-and-crossbones to root out vermin in Plunderland. For so long, the Salamander had admired the Turtle's slow hokum, which made him such a fine and nasty pirate, but now he could only laugh at the Turtle's meek gestures towards taking down that flag he lad always sailed under. Andrew Shields, #111Words, 24 February 2025)