Closing Out 2011

| December 31, 2011

It feels good to be working on Invisible Soul, my Cleveland soul music book, on the last day of a busy, fast year. I’m writing several chapters to send to a publishing house at a university in the south in hopes that citadel of higher learning picks up on the proposal and helps me with [...]

Goodbye to summer

| August 27, 2011

Last time I posted I was into writing for Lodging Hospitality again, in addition to writing occasionally for Hotelnewsnow. Since then, I’ve been to Dallas and reported my LH stories; vacationed on Cape Cod, where I spent some summer time with my parents when I was a little boy; continued to work on Invisible Soul, [...]

Music 2010 and before

| December 30, 2010

I didn’t want the year to end without mentioning the Horse Flies, an upstate New York band I’ve been following for 20 years. The band played at Beachland Ballroom Dec. 17 and generated a gang of encores. They worked through material from “Until the Ocean,” their latest album, and they’re beginning to focus on a [...]

Random thoughts

| November 7, 2010

Musings of a peripatetic thinker. Ponderings without a point. Catching up. Intellectual laziness. Call it what you will, I figure I should capture some mind wanderings, given the week past, last night’s entertaining Cleveland Jazz Orchestra concert “The Cleveland Scene,” and upcoming travels. I’ve never been great at headlines. I’m depressed about the elections, though [...]

For the record

| 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). [...]

Transitions

| 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 [...]

Over too soon

| 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 [...]

Lylah goes worldwide

| 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 [...]

Stimulated

| 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 [...]

The torchy Sophie Milman

| November 6, 2009

Sophie Milman is a 26-year-old Toronto chanteuse who may be the hottest Canadian export since Diana Krall. Not only is Milman, a Russian native and a kind of wandering Jew, fluent in English, she sings jazz with an authority common to far more seasoned performers. Backed by Paul Shrofel on piano and Mark McLean on [...]

About the author

I'm a veteran critic and business writer who reads and listens and writes about music, books, hotels and travel. I've been in the business for many years and still enjoy it. My pride and joy is my book, Cleveland Rock & Roll Memories. Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/CarloWolff