Carlo | September 5, 2010
I’m on my way to the Detroit Jazz Festival yesterday to cover it for Jazz Times and the tire pressure warning light on my Scion xB is on. Car’s riding OK, but still. I try to inflate the tires myself, but I’ve never been good at that (I’m even less mechanical than my father was). [...]
Carlo | August 29, 2010
August has been an important month. The key events: I severed my ties with the Cleveland Jazz Orchestra following a process that resulted in my feeling I no longer could contribute to the board, and we delivered Katy to the University of Colorado at Boulder. The CJO decision continues to weigh on me, and I’m [...]
Carlo | July 31, 2010
Haven’t written anything for my blog it seems like forever, and it’s the end of the month, a change. July was hot, indeed. It was also great: I can’t remember a nicer summer in Cleveland, which is indeed getting warmer. But this evening there’s a coolness, a dryness absent all July, suggesting fall is in [...]
Carlo | July 9, 2010
My daughter, Lylah Rose Sandstrom Wolff, has her first global photo credit. It’s a picture of me that she took in New Orleans in January, in color. Slacker genius that she is, Lylah decolorized it, giving it a gritty, black-and-white treatment. It’s not permanent—I believe in updating, at least seasonally—but it’s cool. It’s on page [...]
Carlo | June 11, 2010
Yes, that’s a cliché, but Justin Carr has given it new life with a 17-minute DVD about Cleveland’s role in rock. In it, I talk about the city and its rock tradition, along with Rock Hall head Terry Stewart, legendary promoter Mike Belkin, and Billy Bass, a remarkable DJ known for his farsightedness at WMMS [...]
Carlo | April 22, 2010
I’m off to Europe on a hotel trip today, back May 1. Didn’t think I’d go because of the Iceland volcano, but the Continent seems to have quieted down, and the trip is on. I’ll be in Brussels, Barcelona, Toulon, Marseille, Chantilly and Munich. More train than plane is in the plans; it’ll be interesting [...]
Carlo | March 29, 2010
I just started Week Two of mental stimulation marked by seeing six movies at the dazzling Cleveland International Film Festival, a great, too-short concert by John Zorn’s Masada Sextet (here’s my preview) and, this morning, reading “Atomic Age,” Martin Benjamin’s first, long-overdue book of photography. Karen and I went to the film festival for the [...]
Carlo | March 7, 2010
In rock ‘n’ roll, comebacks are by no means a sure bet. Some bands never go away, even when they should, like the Stones and the Who. Some go acoustic and minimal, like Ray Davies of the Kinks. Others devolve into their leader, like Roky Erickson, whose 13th Floor Elevators yielded the barbed-wire breakup song, [...]
Carlo | March 6, 2010
The headline is a pun I use as an excuse to catch up with my blog, woefully unattended to for nearly a month. Seriously, it’s a pleasure to write this at my living room window as I watch snow mounds on the deck finally melt. It’s still cold but it’s bright, the snow crunching less [...]
Carlo | January 21, 2010
I went to traffic court today for a hearing about the $25 ticket I got Dec. 22, when I was accused of parking too far from the curb. I parked in the Justice Center garage across the street from the plug-ugly Justice Center and got to the second floor in plenty of time for my [...]
