entre ainda lembro, beija eu e nao va embora... o coracao fica meio apertado de vez em quando...
hearing the voices make me feel better...

WHAT A BEAUTIFUL CONCERT IT WAS!!!

Live review: Charlie Haden Family & Friends at Disney Hall

Jazz luminary Charlie Haden took no small amount of perverse joy Tuesday night in bringing the old-time country music with which he started his musical career in the Midwest seven decades ago into the tony surroundings of Walt Disney Concert Hall.

“Man, oh, man,” the 72-year-old bassist said upon taking the stage. “Who would have thought we’d have a country audience at Disney Hall?”

And that’s not the half of it. In less than three weeks, the hall has hosted Steve Martin’s mostly serious-minded venture into bluegrass music, Kris Kristofferson’s solo show and now Haden and a group of stellar Nashville singers and instrumentalists playing what once upon a time was referred to as “hillbilly music.” If this keeps up, people are going to start confusing Disney Hall with Disneyland’s Country Bear Jamboree.

But while this tour takes him back to the music he played with his parents and siblings through the Ozarks and elsewhere before he fell in love with jazz, flew the coop for Los Angeles, met Ornette Coleman and signed on with the saxophonists groundbreaking Liberation Music Orchestra, Haden’s hardly slumming.

The band members he brought with him to Disney Hall, most of whom also played on his inspired 2008 “Rambling Boy” album that spawned the tour, has as much in common with the stereotype of primitive hillbilly music as a $400,000 International Harvester Axial-Flow Combine has with a cast-iron plow.

Haden was flanked with several of the best musicians in the business: Union Station singer-guitarist Dan Tyminski, mandolinist Sam Bush, dobro master Jerry Douglas, fiddler Stuart Duncan, banjo player Jim Mills and guitarists Bryan Sutton and Mark Fain.

And living up to the “family” part of the “Charlie Haden Family & Friends” billing, he brought out his triplet daughters, Petra, Tanya and Rachel, son Josh, wife Ruth Cameron and son-in-law Jack Black to handle most of the vocals on songs that stretched back to the beginning of modern country music. The set list spanned old time country standards from the Carter Family (“Wildwood Flower,” “Single Girl, Married Girl”) to Josh Haden’s comparatively recent offerings of Donovan’s “Catch the Wind” and his own deeply yearning “Spiritual.”

Haden’s daughters often appeared uncomfortable at center stage without any instruments of their own, nervously bobbing and weaving in time with the band. Black, however, brought along enough stage presence and performance bravado to compensate for half a dozen wallflowers, doing somersaults from one instrumental soloist to another in the middle of his vocal spotlight on “Old Joe Clark.”

Cameron connected the dots between American folk tradition and the older music of Ireland, England and Scotland that immigrants brought here centuries ago with her touching rendition of “Down By the Salley Gardens” that she delivered with just a hint of a brogue.

Haden himself kept the rhythm anchored with unfussy bass lines, reveling in the fundamentalism of his instrument’s role in country and bluegrass music. They even made the war horse “Orange Blossom Special” sizzle with unpredictable chords interpolated into the song’s basic framework.

One quibble with the L.A. Philharmonic-presented evening: The music Haden offered up doesn't get much more quintessentially American than this -- unless it's the jazz with he's most closely identified. Yet it was billed as the first offering on the orchestra’s 2009-2010 "world music" series. Last we checked, as far removed as the Ozarks and Appalachia are from Walt Disney Concert Hall, they were still part of the United States. And in the wake of the Martin, Kristofferson and Haden shows, isn't it time for a full-fledged "Americana" or "roots music" series at the venue named for one of the great innovators of American pop culture?

--Randy Lewis

"he had no idea that grief was a reward. that it only came to those who were loyal, to those who loved more than they were capable of."

in between reading a sad but good book and watching the end of the world in the big screen, memories and stories float in my head and i'm transported to far away places. wasn't i supposed to procrastinate less and hit the pillows earlier???
just for the record, yes, i do miss all of you on a daily basis. i just know better and try not to dwell much on this otherwise i won't live. at all. life goes on, so do i.

ONE OF MY FAV SONGS!!!

"I HAD BECOME JADED WITH LIFE"

"what is there about fire that's so lovely? no matter what age we are, what draw us to it? it's perpetual motion; the thing man wanted to invent but never did. or almost perpetual motion. it you let it go on, it'd burn out lifetimes out. what is fire? it's a mystery. scientists give us gobbledegook about friction and molecules. but they don't really know. its real beauty is that it destroys responsibility and consequences.(...) antibiotic, aesthetic, practical."

bradbury

POLITE INCOMPREHENSION

What Ellen DeGeneres Knows for Sure

Photo: George Burns

1. My home address. But I'm not printing it here. Nice try, Oprah.

2. I know that "personality can open doors, but only character can keep them open." And I know that for sure because I read it on the sign at the dry cleaner's.

3. I forgot what number 3 is.

4. Sometimes I forget things.

5. I'm sure I'm good at making lists.

By the way, I should point out that there are things I know for sure and things I don't know for sure. Also, there are things I wish I never knew. Like did you ever see that Primetime report about hotel rooms and what's on the bedspreads? Exactly.

Actually, there's nothing I know for sure because I know for sure that things change.

For a long time I thought I knew for sure who I was. I grew up in New Orleans and became a comedian. And there was everything that came along with that. The nightclubs. The smoking. The drinking. Then I turned 13.

While I was doing stand-up, I thought I knew for sure that success meant getting everyone to like me. So I became whoever I thought people wanted me to be. I'd say yes when I wanted to say no, and I even wore a few dresses.* And it worked. I got my own sitcom.**

The show was very successful. I had everything I'd hoped for, but I wasn't being myself. So I decided to be honest about who I was. It was strange: The people who loved me for being funny suddenly didn't like me for being…me.

I had a really tough time for a few years. My show was gone. My phone wasn't ringing. There wasn't one job offer. And at that point, I thought I knew for sure that I wouldn't work in Hollywood again.

Eventually, I decided to go back to how I started my career, and I wrote an HBO special. Then I got my talk show. And look at me now…I'm on the cover of O. And that's the highest honor we give in this country.

I know for sure I would never change any of the hard times I went through in my life. Because it was in those times that I grew the most and gained the most perspective.

It's our challenges and obstacles that give us layers of depth and make us interesting. Are they fun when they happen? No. But they are what make us unique. And that's what I know for sure…I think.