Kris King Photography

On singing the unsayable, the making of Rendezvous, and lessons learned from Wynton Marsalis and Jon Hendricks

August 1997

By Bill King

Cassandra Wilson stands as one of the premier torchbearers of contemporary jazz vocalization. Following in the tradition of the “Great Women of Jazz,” she continues to grow as a vocalist and composer with each new release. After two critically and commercially acclaimed Blue Note recordings — Blue Light ‘til Dawn and New Moon Daughter — Wilson has come back with an outing that teams her with pianist Jacky Terrasson, accompanied by bassist Lonnie Plaxico and percussionist Mino Cinelu. The pairing came at the suggestion of label president Bruce Lundvall, who thought the two would make a good combination. Studio veteran Bob Belden also produced the album, encouraging both musicians to experiment and develop their ideas.

I remember those interviews as though we were still seated across from one another, the room hushed between question and answer. Betty Carter. Shirley Horn. Dee Dee Bridgewater. Roberta Gambarini. Ernestine Anderson. Norah Jones. Each possessed a voice no other woman could borrow—a sound shaped by living, struggle, wit, and grace. Wilson was forty-one then, young enough to be astonished by the moment, old enough to understand that he was sitting in the presence of something time could never quite take away.

BILL KING: Do you feel a singer must believe a lyric to give it life?

CASSANDRA WILSON: Songs are everywhere. Instead of looking for them, I wait until they come to me. The lyric must say something.

BILL KING: Some say singing is a conversation put to music. Do you think that is an accurate description?

CASSANDRA WILSON: I think it’s more than a conversation. When you sing a lyric and music combined, you’re able to say things you can’t say in conversation. You sing unsayable things.

BILL KING: Are you moving closer to the sound and technique of horn players?

CASSANDRA WILSON: I don’t think about it. There’s so much to work with within the human voice. My approach is to sing and let it come out the way it’s supposed to. Worrying too much about what it will sound like when it does come out is misplaced.

I’m more concerned with delivering the emotions. After you sing for a while, many of those kinds of things take care of themselves. Once you’ve mastered your craft to a certain extent, you must let things work automatically.

BILL KING: Can a room affect how you sing?

CASSANDRA WILSON: Sure, everything affects how I sing. Each room and hall is different. Each audience is different. It’s one reason for having a soundcheck: to go in and get a feel for the room. It helps you gauge how much you need to project.

It usually takes me a while to connect with the audience and the event, but sometimes it happens almost immediately when I walk out. Those are the truly great times.

BILL KING: Do you think people tend to listen more with their eyes than their ears during a performance?

CASSANDRA WILSON: I don’t know. I think it’s probably a combination of both.

BILL KING: What about when looking at videos?

CASSANDRA WILSON: I don’t watch much video. I don’t relate to them that well. I like video when it’s video for video’s sake— when an artist works with a specific director who shares their vision.

I don’t care for those mass-produced in the marketplace with a certain tone, look, and motivation.

BILL KING: Have you ever seen the classic black-and-white footage of singers like Dinah Washington and Billie Holiday?

CASSANDRA WILSON: I’ve seen some video of Billie Holiday, but never any of Dinah Washington. I love to watch historical films and videos, though.

BILL KING: Can the outfit you wear on-stage affect your comfort zone, and do you dress differently for the street?

CASSANDRA WILSON: Oh, definitely, to both questions. It affects me on-stage in just the same way it affects me when I walk around the house.

I like loose clothing, so I work with designers who know my singing style and understand how I move on stage. It’s important to have a fitted look, but I also need space in the garment.

On the street, it’s a different look entirely.

BILL KING: After touring in support of two highly successful recordings, Blue Light ‘til Dawn and New Moon Daughter, you immersed yourself in Wynton Marsalis’ epic Blood on the Fields. Were there long hours of preparation for those performances?

CASSANDRA WILSON: The score was pretty difficult, so I did spend a lot of time with the music and text. It was very challenging.

BILL KING: Did you work from cassettes?

CASSANDRA WILSON: Yes. I worked from the cassette recording, and then when the CD came out, I worked from it.

BILL KING: Were the rehearsals a source of inspiration?

CASSANDRA WILSON: Actually, it’s difficult to summon the kind of energy you would draw from a performance in a rehearsal. But it does give you a chance to stretch out and do things you might not do live.

It’s good to see how far you can take the material and what kind of chances you can take with it.

BILL KING: Wynton’s brilliance can be felt on many levels. What did you get from the Marsalis experience that will last for you?

CASSANDRA WILSON: There are so many things. I learned a lot about orchestrating. When you’re inside of the music, and you hear it happening all around you, your head moves about, checking out all the changes coming at you.

On-stage, it’s how the people are separated and the different parts they play — having to cue in to certain individuals for notes you need. It was a great lesson on how to manage all of that.

Wynton’s very serious about what he does, and that message comes across. There’s room for play, but he’s a taskmaster. He wants to make sure every element of his music is being expressed exactly how he conceived it.

BILL KING: Jon Hendricks is recognized as the modern godfather of vocalize. Was it easy communicating with him?

CASSANDRA WILSON: We communicated with each other right from the beginning. That was another great learning experience; check out his approach to improvisation.

He has a whole physical thing that amazes me. It’s not just with the music. It’s the way he deals with himself daily.

Jon’s in his 70s and in great health. He’s got this aura about him, and when he gets on-stage, it’s magical. It’s an infrequent moment when he’s not right on his mark.

BILL KING: What brought you to record your new Blue Note CD, Rendezvous, with Jacky Terrasson?

CASSANDRA WILSON: Actually, it was Bruce Lundvall who suggested the concept. He said it was time for me to record standards, and he thought Jacky and I would make a good pairing. I’m very pleased with how it turned out.

BILL KING: Whose decision was it to streamline the session, keeping the instrumentation to a minimum?

CASSANDRA WILSON: Bruce didn’t make many suggestions in that regard. He just wanted us to get together.

Jacky and I started with the most logical instruments, our own—piano and voice. Then we tried to figure out what else we wanted to do.

We discussed various alternatives and agreed on the instrumentation that would be most appropriate in each situation and who we would use.

BILL KING: Are you comfortable in the studio?

CASSANDRA WILSON: Generally, I’m very relaxed in the studio. I love working there because of the discoveries you make. It’s great because you’re sequestered, and you get a chance to go inside.

I’ve been doing it so long I move behind a mic and open my mouth. I put the earphones on, listen to the other musicians and try to make a connection.

BILL KING: After finishing a recording, do you leave the music a few weeks before giving it a critical hearing?

CASSANDRA WILSON: I’m always anxious to hear it right there on the spot. I’m usually quite uninterested after a couple of weeks. By then, I’m moving on to the next thing.

With this record, I started listening again and thought, well, this is kind of nice. A lot of the technical details were left up to the producer, Bob Belden. That’s why you hire a producer like that to make the difficult technical decisions.

BILL KING: How do you know when a track is complete?

CASSANDRA WILSON: Generally, we all sit down in the control room together, listen to it, then look at each other. If we all get that certain feeling at the same time, we know it’s complete.

After the session, I let things go. If I didn’t, I’d never get any other work done.

Wilson died September 2, 2026

I was watching this interview again the other night and it pulled me straight back to 1968 — a bandstand in Los Angeles, ten thousand teenagers and twenty-somethings packed in front of us, and Chuck Berry out front doing what Chuck Berry did. He was a gentleman on that stage. Off it, he was a man who counted his money before he counted anything else. Both things were true. You learned to hold both at once if you were going to work with him at all.

Watching Robbie Robertson roll through Berry’s tattered scrapbooks, I understood something I hadn’t quite put words to before. Robbie knew when and where to go. He knew the sensitive areas, the soft regions — where a question could open a man up and where it would only shut him down harder. He plays Berry with the reverence of a kid who heard rock & roll for the first time and never got over it. And he prods like a genius interviewer who understands he’s walking on sacred ground, and how the whole thing can shake apart if he breaches it carelessly.

The setup. The conversation was filmed during production of Chuck Berry: Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll, Taylor Hackford’s documentary built around two concerts at St. Louis’s Fox Theatre on October 16, 1986, staged to celebrate Berry’s approaching 60th birthday. The film reached theatres in 1987. Robertson — guitarist and principal songwriter of The Band, a man who understood ceremony and grievance in equal measure — was brought on first as musical director and creative consultant. That didn’t last. Early meetings with Berry went hard, and Robertson stepped back from the concert-director role. Keith Richards took over, assembling and directing the stage band. But Robertson stayed on as a creative consultant, and it’s in that leftover space that this conversation happened — one of the more intimate things committed to film during that whole production.

The scrapbook itself had survived a fire. Scorched, tattered, held together by whatever holds a life together after it’s been through flame — photographs, advertisements, correspondence, the residue of a career nobody else could have assembled because nobody else lived it. Among the pages Robertson and Berry work through together is a telegram from Elvis Presley’s camp, asking Berry to write material for him. Sit with that one a minute. The King’s people, going to the man who built half the rooms Elvis would eventually walk into.

Where Part Two goes further. The talk moves off memorabilia and into method — how Berry actually built the thing. Asked more than once where those guitar figures came from, Berry gives the same answer he seemed to believe completely: he took them from boogie-woogie pianists and translated them for guitar. It tracks. Listen to the solo lines, and you can hear he leaned hard on Carl Hogan, guitarist for Louis Jordan’s Tympany Five through the 1940s. Hogan’s opening riff on “Ain’t That Just Like a Woman” sits right underneath “Johnny B. Goode” — not a coincidence, a lineage.

And the tone — that overdriven snarl, the mesh of clashing electric waves that became the sonic bed for everything after it — traces straight back to Sister Rosetta Tharpe. She was running distortion and conviction through a guitar before most of rock & roll’s official founders had picked one up. Berry translated the piano. Tharpe supplied the voltage.

There’s a moment in Part Two where Robertson picks up a guitar and accompanies Berry on “Pass Away” — also known as “Even This Shall Pass Away” or “The King’s Ring,” which Berry had adapted from Theodore Tilton’s nineteenth-century poem about a king searching for words fit for both prosperity and ruin. It’s an odd, quiet thing to find in the middle of a rock & roll documentary. A king’s parable, performed by two men who’d each had their own version of prosperity and ruin, filmed sometime during that October 10–14, 1986 production window.

I’ve also dropped in a couple of shorts of Keith Richards working with Berry — a completely different animal. Talking and playing bring out different men. Richards on stage with Berry is negotiation set to rhythm. Robertson across the scrapbook is something closer to confession, coaxed out one scorched page at a time.

Bill King Photography

We were forewarned.

By late afternoon, they said, Toronto could see tornadoes, large hail and fierce winds. The weather lords weren’t lying. They weren’t even guessing.

It was ferocious.

Twenty years ago, a canopy of trees stretched across our street. You could breeze down the middle beneath a roof of dense green foliage, sheltered from the sun and almost hidden from the sky. Those days are long gone.

Over the years, storms have cracked our streets, battered roofs and damaged cars. Tonight was no different—except the damage was ours for the second time.

Two enormous branches tore free and disappeared as if they had joined the wind road to Kansas.

I’ve included a video I shot from the back porch. Near the end of that first sequence, the tree snaps and takes flight just as I’m closing the door. The second half turns toward the street and what remains of the tree.

I don’t know where this storm will rank for intensity or destruction. I do know it will be a while before our street is cleared.

And ours is only one street.

The same scene appears to be repeating itself across Toronto—block after block, tree after tree—while the city waits beneath a bruised and restless sky.

As I post, the rain still slams my office window.

There’s no scrolling past it anymore. Open any feed, and the rage comes at you from every compass point — left, right, algorithmic, unaffiliated. I don’t remember it being this way under Obama or Biden. Those years, whatever else you want to say about them, were something close to an oasis. You could set the phone down, and the desert wasn’t waiting on the other side of it.

Trump renamed Lake Ontario “Lake America” this week, and I couldn’t even lose myself in the sheer lunacy of it, because I saw it coming a mile off. It’s the same trick every time — look over here, look at the shiny absurd thing — while the Epstein files close in behind the curtain. It’s down to how far Attorney General Blanche is willing to go now. Jail? I doubt it. My guess is he’s already been told a pardon is sitting on the shelf, waiting to be used. Max out. That’s the play.

The podcast wars. YouTube’s Legal AF has been showing up in my feed at the same manic clip as Ben Meiselas lately — practically hourly. I’ve always liked Michael Popok’s legal breakdowns, the way he lays out a case without theatrics. But something’s shifted. It’s as if he’s decided to go straight at Katie Phang’s territory. He used to surface every couple of weeks with something worth watching. Now his face is on a timer — daily, sometimes more. This is a turf war for podcast supremacy, and I can feel the machinery behind it. The minute a clip pivots to “subscribe, support us, hit the link” — I’m gone, waving from the top of the frame on my way out. That’s where Popok is heading. Phang, to her credit, isn’t travelling that road, at least not yet.

Meanwhile Ben screams like tomorrow doesn’t exist. Adam Mockler has built something genuinely useful, and still the money-grab undertow makes it hard to fully enjoy. I understand the economics — nobody’s getting paid by the clip — but the hustle is loud enough now that it’s become its own kind of content.

Why I don’t do the political speak twice a day. I could. I have the material, and I’d probably keep a decent following doing it — feed the machine, ride the outrage cycle, watch the numbers climb. But that isn’t why I started Sound & Reason. I started this to look at who we are and the shape of the world we’re standing in — the music, the culture, the undercurrents — because that’s infinitely more nourishing than swallowing political poison around the clock. Politics gets its moment here. It doesn’t get the whole house.

On CNN’s nightly wreckage — Abby Phillip looks like she’s about to bring a baby into the world any day now, and I hope the universe is gentle with her; she seems like a genuinely good soul caught inside a genuinely corrosive format. Because the show itself, night after night, is a pit — screaming, obfuscation, lies laid over lies, indecency wearing a suit, cross-talk as a substitute for thought. Put the whole rage-fest in ropes, tow it out, and let it drift.

Legacy media gave up somewhere along the way. Project 2025 was never subtle about its aim — an assault on institutions, paired with a flood of distraction loud enough to cover the sound of democracy being dismantled underneath it. And yet the wall is holding, mostly because the army arrayed against it is made up of grifters, thieves, liars, and cheats — and cowards, when finally cornered, eat their own. That’s not optimism. That’s just how these people are built.

A close friend wrote me at 8 a.m., worn down, his faith in people thinning out. I understand that completely. But I see something on the horizon too — the midterms, yes, but something larger underneath them. Something is moving across the whole planet, and I think it’s finally about to surface. I’ve said this for a while now: it’s about the changing planet itself. Migration. Neighbourhoods reshaping in real time. The workplace. The whole texture of community. It’s as if we woke up one morning and found ourselves standing in different clothes, in a room that had quietly rearranged itself while we slept — new people arriving, settling, staying. You cannot keep a secret from anyone anymore, not really. There’s a phone in the deepest, densest forest of the Congo and another one out past the last town in the Mongolian desert. We are, whether we like it or not, permanently wired to each other now.

One more piece of business, closer to home. Representative Thomas Massie stood on the floor of the House this week and read names — Epstein associates he says should be investigated and prosecuted, including people who’ve circled this scandal for years. It’s a genuinely striking moment, protected by the Constitution’s speech-or-debate clause, and it deserves more attention than it’s gotten. If you haven’t seen it, go find it.

And then there’s Doug Ford — our homegrown answer to Trump — and his campaign to rip bike lanes out of downtown Toronto. I’ve said the mayor should be our point of resistance here, and I got some pushback for it, as if naming her put a dagger in the political left. I don’t see it that way. Look at the number: the City of Toronto pulled in roughly $19.72 billion in total revenue in 2025, the latest audited year on record — something like $54 million a day moving through this city. That’s not a small municipality asking politely for consideration. That’s a powerhouse with real leverage sitting mostly unused.

We are somebody. The mayor is the face of six million of us pushing back against a province trying to dictate our own streets to us. That office has real power if anyone’s willing to use it. Use it. This is a call to resistance we all share — because in this particular corporate shakedown, we’re the ones actually losing.

— Bill King, Sound & Reason

Bill King Photography

High Park began as the private estate of architect and surveyor John George Howard and his wife, Jemima. They named the property “High Park” for its elevated setting overlooking Humber Bay. In 1873, the Howards donated much of the estate to the City of Toronto on the condition that it remain a free public park. The city later expanded it through additional land purchases, and in 1876, High Park officially opened to the public.

Over time, it became one of Toronto’s largest and most varied urban parks—a remarkable gathering of rare oak savannah, deep woodlands, Grenadier Pond, gardens, recreational grounds and familiar landmarks, including the Howards’ home, Colborne Lodge.

We have been visiting High Park since we first moved into the neighbourhood in 1971. It was our daily getaway. A pleasure on a bicycle. In winter, a sled ride through the thickets and down the slopes into darkness.

When Jesse was born, I began taking him into every region of the park, summer, winter, spring and fall. Our posse of dogs would leave early in the morning, spend the day roaming the park and return home at night in a glorious mess of mud, thistle, briars and pine needles.

The happiest brood on the planet.

Eventually, we began photographing the park. Over the years, its distinct ecological regions have been protected and restored, bringing enormous changes to the landscape. With that recovery has come an abundance of wildlife.

For the past few days, I have been locked onto YouTube, watching landscape photographers at work. Scotland, New Zealand—anywhere the terrain looked promising. I must say, the fellow in the hip waders, tripod in hand, hunting for mist, caught my imagination.

I paid close attention.

I love these interludes.

This harkens back to yesterday’s post about learning and its positive side effects. You never know when someone else’s process will shake something loose in you.

I remember touring with the great pianist Herbie Hancock and VSOP. We were the opening act. One day, I pulled him aside and asked how he could move so effortlessly from funk to free-flowing jazz.

His response stayed with me: “It took me four months to get my hands in order, and my mind liberated.”

Hands in order. Mind liberated.

As I mentioned, the man in the mist rises early, drives out to the water and studies the light, the fog and the possibility of a subject. I kept that in mind when I set out for High Park with my Fuji X-T30 and one lens.

Overnight, the rain had soaked the ground. The temperature had climbed to nearly thirty degrees. Humidity hung in the air, and the woods offered up all kinds of sensory delights—the scent of wet earth, damp bark and new growth underfoot.

The land is still recovering from a brutal winter. Broken limbs are everywhere. Trees stand bent over and submissive. Water levels have risen to the brim. There is damage, disorder and quiet calamity wherever you look.

For a photographer, it was a delight.

Toronto is fortunate to have a park of such enormous proportions in the heart of the city—a place large enough to disappear into, yet close enough to feel like part of home.

I’ll make a second run come late fall.

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I heard this recently on a podcast with famed producer Rick Rubin (Metallica, Dixie Chicks, Johnny Cash, the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Adele and co-founder of Def Jam Records).

I’ve been trying to say what Rubin said in so many ways through the years: We all have art in us. It’s about committing to learn and apply ourselves. It’s about taking control of our passions instead of waiting for somebody else to approve of them.

For much of my life, the thinking was always the same: Other people do that. I wouldn’t be much good at it, so why try?

I remember being a kid, reading a sheet of music and discovering what a chore it was to learn. Yet I would soon beg for a couple of sheets of broad-spaced manuscript paper so I could create something of my own.

It wasn’t anything anyone would choose to hear, but I got something down on paper. Then I kept playing that five- or six-note motif, hoping another passage would arrive unannounced.

It rarely did.

Creativity had tapped into an untouched area of my brain. What I didn’t understand was that creativity needed coaching. It needed research. It needed a deep dive into our town library, where I could bring home scores by Beethoven, Stravinsky and Shostakovich and see exactly where those exhilarating notes lay.

How did they do that? Where did the tension come from? Why did one passage lift you out of your chair while another left you suspended in silence?

The answers were there on the page.

I began taking composition seriously when I found myself the only male in a composition class at Ursuline College in Louisville, a Catholic women’s college. I think the priest teaching the class dug having another male around to talk Prokofiev and Ellington with. Maybe one other woman in the class knew who those composers were.

He encouraged me to write music to poems—Carl Sandburg, Walt Whitman and others. It was that focus on words rounding notes, and notes carrying words, that got me into songwriting.

I didn’t write songs to make hit records. I wrote because something inside insisted I follow my passion.

Rubin goes on to point out that art is not about making money. It’s about answering a call within. Rather than relying on elaborate studio techniques, Rubin often strips songs back to their essential elements. He encourages performers to focus on emotion, clarity, and creative instinct.

We hit the baseball diamond every day as boys. We hung around the basketball courts until Mom dragged us home by our ears. None of that was about making a dollar. Something inside drove us to follow our obsessions.

Shoot with consistency. Drive a ball over the fence. Make the impossible catch.

We did it because we had to see if we could.

I’ve long been a fan of craft shows—the One-of-a-Kind stuff. Ordinary people doing extraordinary things. The ten-year-old equestrian. The child who can read ten books in ten days and remember every line.

It’s pure magic.

Yet magic is rarely just magic. Behind it are hours of repetition, curiosity and failure. There are scraped knees, broken strings, ruined canvases, missed notes and ideas that never quite arrive. Then one day, something connects.

I’ve told this story before about an assistant principal speaking to us when we were thirteen years old. He broke down our future as if life came with an expiration date.

“By the time you’re thirty, the brain begins to reverse itself. Learning becomes difficult. The legs will no longer run fast or react as demanded. By fifty, you’re toast.”

I sat there counting the years until I turned fifty.

Then 1996 arrived, and I did a full medical review of myself and my mental awareness. There was nothing resembling those less-than-encouraging life lessons in the man’s bullshitting.

Not only that, but he also insisted that each of us could have only one skill in life that we could manage respectably. The parable of the one-talent man.

Horse shit.

The planet is made up of rare individuals who do remarkable things. They set the bar so high it’s beyond comprehension. Yet those people show us how far a human being can reach.

They’ve earned our respect for mastering a given endeavour. Still, if you asked them about their own lives, many would tell you about the times they failed. They would remember what they couldn’t do, the opportunities they missed and the work that fell short.

Even the masters know failure.

I always admired the Mr. Fix-Its. The sink is plugged. The lights have gone dark. The car is dead in the driveway. A shoe needs repairing. You need a deck built.

One guy can do it all.

Yet if you break down each of those skills, there’s a learning curve to every one of them. Nobody arrives knowing how to repair a pipe, wire a house, rebuild an engine or frame a deck. You learn by watching. You ask questions. You make mistakes. You try again.

That’s how ability is built.

I remember waiting for record labels to take an interest in me. I was in my home studio in Atlanta, pissing away another six months while waiting for an answer about a tape I’d submitted.

Then I got one of those return letters.

“Sorry, we lost your tape.”

At the time, I was rehearsing with some brothers from the south side of Atlanta. I grabbed the telephone and slammed it into my piano.

I looked around the room and said, “Fuck it. I’m doing everything myself.”

Tony, the percussionist, looked at me and said, “You’re fucking pissed, all right. We always do it on our own. No surprise here.”

I looked down at the ebony wood, saw my reflection and apologized to the piano.

I never struck it again.

Until that moment, it was always about what someone else said. I was always worried about how others would react. I think some of that came from my evangelical upbringing—the fear of doing something wrong, of upsetting someone, of stepping beyond whatever boundaries had been drawn around you.

From that day forward, I kept the door open.

I let the world in.

Then it became a matter of finding textbooks and teachers outside the mainstream—people who could help with problem-solving and guide you through the difficult struggles of learning something new.

Then along came YouTube.

Can’t tie a tie? Hang in there. Someone will walk you through the steps.

Want to learn how to fix a faucet, play a chord, mix a recording, paint a portrait or cook a meal? Someone has opened a door and invited you inside.

We depended on our computer-literate son to get us over the early hump. After that, it was on us.

If you want to learn something, the doors are wide open. The answers are often only a few keystrokes away.

That doesn’t mean everything comes easily. Information is not the same as mastery. You still have to sit there and wrestle with the thing. You still have to make the wrong turn, hit the wrong note and wonder why the picture in your head refuses to appear on the page.

You have to stay with it.

I truly believe the mind will replenish itself if we keep curiosity and creativity front and centre. The brain doesn’t have to become some dim storage room filled with old names, dates and disappointments. Open the windows. Move the furniture. Give it something unfamiliar to work on.

Don’t say no to something you’re madly in love with.

Enough of this “I can’t do it” bullshit.

It’s all part of who you are. You’re built to explore, discover and engage. You don’t need a record label, a publisher, a gallery owner, a teacher or some self-appointed authority to give you permission to make something.

Make it.

It doesn’t have to earn money. It doesn’t have to impress the neighbours. It doesn’t even have to be good—not at first.

Your first melody may be five or six notes waiting for a passage that never arrives. Write it down anyway. Play it again. Go to the library. Study the masters. Ask questions. Find the teacher who understands what you’re trying to do.

Keep the door open.

Trophies sitting on a bookcase collect dust. The mind is an action figure.

It was never meant for a shelf.

(BK and Charlie Craig drums at 15, and Joe Goff bass. Louisville, Kentucky, 1963)

The last two weeks have been interesting.

Sarah Alderson — Sound & Reason subscriber, author of The Weekend Away, the bestselling thriller that became the Netflix film with Leighton Meester in the lead — sent me a wonderful note. She suggested I introduce myself to her literary agent. That’s the whole story, and it’s not a small one. I’ve been a self-published guy since I wandered into the book world six years ago. Marketing has always felt like a foreign country to me, one where I never quite learned the language. Thanks to Sarah’s introduction, I now have a book trailer. I now have a way of getting Coming Through the 60s’ A Rock & Roll Story in front of eyes that might never have found it otherwise. Sometimes the door doesn’t open because you pushed harder. It opens because someone on the other side happened to like what you wrote and decided to say so.

I want to hold that gratitude for a moment before I go somewhere heavier, because that’s how these newsletters tend to work — the personal and the national end up sharing the same page whether I plan it or not.

Trailer by Maryam!

It has taken decades — decades — for military and intelligence professionals to say plainly, out loud, on camera, that they have a duty to refuse unlawful orders. That’s not a radical statement. It’s not new doctrine. It’s the Nuremberg principle, it’s the UCMJ, it’s the oath itself. And yet in November 2025, when Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona and Sen. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan joined House members Jason Crow, Chrissy Houlahan, Maggie Goodlander, and Chris Deluzio in a video simply reminding service members of that duty, the reaction from the White House was to call it “seditious behaviour” and demand prosecution. A federal grand jury looked at that demand in February 2026 and declined to indict. No charges. The system held this time.

I bring this up not as a partisan aside but because it’s the exact terrain I was standing on when I wrote Coming Through the 60s. That book was my attempt to put language to what it was like growing up inside a house carrying two wars. World War 11 and Vietnam. A father with what we’d now call PTSD, though back then it didn’t have a name; it just had weather: anger, fear, a kind of hostility that moved through rooms like a front coming in. That was the backdrop against which a music and cultural revolution was arriving on the radio and in the streets, and against which a teenage boy decided the only sane response was to go roam America — long stretches penniless, borderline, living on nerve and other people’s kindness. Music saved me. So did the love of a young woman. I don’t think I’ve ever fully separated those two things in my head, and I’m not sure I want to.

Which brings me to the photograph.

The Trio Side of an Eighteen-Piece

I’m deep in preparation now for the launch of A Life Between the Notes — a multimedia night at the Redwood Theatre on October 18 — and, while going through old boxes, I found the first band photo. Three of us, the cocktail trio carved out of an eighteen-piece dance orchestra. We’d play the quiet set, warm the room, then fold ourselves into the rest of the evening once the big guns — the full horn section, the whole machine — came in behind us.

Kristine asked me something I didn’t expect to answer cleanly: did I remember the moment that photo was taken, and if so, how did I feel?

I do, in fact. And here’s the strange part — the mind doing the remembering is the same mind that was sitting behind the crumbling baby grand piano. Sixty-five years older, still sharp, still filing away the same kinds of details it filed away then.

I loved playing music. I did not love playing fifty or sixty continuous songs in a night, and I really did not love the paperwork. The band director rode me constantly about putting the charts back in numerical order the second we finished a tune. Sounds simple until you remember these were piano parts — the chord charts ran eight, nine pages deep, a fat booklet you had to fold back down and hunt through a stand of numbered charts to re-file, mid-set, in the dark, while the next tune was already counting off. Most ended up on the floor or under my piano bench. Unsightly.

And the piano wasn’t there to be pretty. It was the rhythm machine — up-beats, down-beats, holding the floor together — until, without warning, you’d get an eight-note zinger dropped into the chart somewhere between bars 114 and 311, and if you weren’t counting measures like your life depended on it, you’d miss your one moment to actually say something. Counting measures wasn’t a skill. It was survival.

The core of that band sat in their mid-thirties. I was the kid. A year before Terry Adams arrived — along with his brother Don and Keith Springs, all future NRBQ — I took my share of bandstand abuse for being exactly that: the kid. I played my way out of it. I could read anything put in front of me, I could slap down some blues when called on, and I could laugh at whatever came my way, which in a band of grown men turns out to be its own survival skill. When Terry showed up, the attention in the room shifted, and I remember feeling something closer to relief than jealousy. This predates NRBQ by a stretch, but you can already see where the road was heading.

At fifteen I thought about music day and night — Stravinsky, the Stones, Bill Evans, Cannonball Adderley, all stacked in the same head with no sense that they belonged in different rooms. Total nerd, no apology. But it wasn’t only music. The boys around me carried a Beethoven sonata in their heads with the same weight they carried a batting average or a jump shot — the baseball diamond and the basketball court mattered every bit as much as the practice room. The overly devout evangelical strictness of the world we grew up in kept most everything else out of bounds. Sports, at least, were sanctioned as recreation.

The Wes Montgomery Poster

Yesterday, my old jazz teacher—the celebrated Jamey Aebersold—sent me a poster for the Wes Montgomery concert I write about in the book. I pulled the passage back out to read it again with that poster sitting in front of me.

I remember the room. I remember the piano. I remember the vibe and the sheer thrill of opening for Wes Montgomery, a thrill made sharper by the plain fact that we were kids and they were the adults. Whatever applause came our way that night, we locked it away in our chests and didn’t say much about it out loud — you didn’t, back then. What I remember just as clearly is how the Black community in that room treated us: with a generosity and warmth toward a handful of white boys that we hadn’t necessarily earned yet and were only beginning to understand.

When I came back through, only four or five years later, everything had changed. I was the one being pulled into every jam session there was — down in Jamey’s basement, and out at the Black clubs where a Hammond B-3 sat waiting like a held breath, and where drummer Boots Brown would wave me up onto the stage like it was simply assumed I belonged there now.

That’s the arc, I suppose. The kid filing charts in the dark becomes the one getting waved up onto the stage. It takes years to understand that the waving-up was never really about talent. It was about a community deciding, generously, that you were theirs too.

Life Between the Notes launches October 18 at the Redwood Theatre, Toronto — multimedia night, book in hand, whatever else the room decides to become that evening.

(from Coming Through the 60s’)

Pianist Don Murray moved his studio from the classical confines of the Ormsby Avenue mansion to a barn-like structure called The Arts in Louisville, a foremost jazz club with Playboy-style bunnies serving drinks. Murray’s downstairs space served not only for teaching but Monday-night jam sessions. My instruction time with Don had ended a year before, but we kept up the jam sessions. I also dropped by the waiting area at Don’s facility to check out the latest jazz records on display.

I have no recollection of how I landed my first jazz piano trio gig at The Arts, other than those six weeks studying with Oscar Peterson in Canada. Then the call came: opening act for the Wes Montgomery Trio. Damn! A sixty-minute set, and our trio had a good half-hour of material. There would be a lot of blues in play. Wayne King bass and John Cook drums.

We arrive early, set up, and I tap a few notes on the baby grand piano — not an instrument a pianist could take to heart, but passable. I then sit at the bar and look up to see the room’s upper perimeter lined with empty liquor bottles, a decorative touch. The Arts was massive, cut in rough timber, and covered in wall posters of nineteenth-century Parisian life, jazz clubs, jazz musicians, and other destinations.

Playing in the background: newcomer Nancy Wilson’s dynamic “Guess Who I Saw Today.” Those five words hit me like a keg of dynamite. I grabbed a cola and asked the bartender who was singing.

“That’s Nancy Wilson,” he says.

I had heard her sing “Happy Talk” and “Sleepin’ Bee” on WKLO Sunday nights — one of the rare times I didn’t switch the dial in favour of an instrumentalist. Wilson had debuted with the Cannonball Adderley Quintet in 1961 on Capitol Records: Nancy Wilson / Cannonball Adderley.

Then I hear: “I was born in a trunk, my momma died, and my daddy got drunk.” Lord help me.

“Who’s that?” I ask.

“That’s Lou Rawls and his trio — Lou Rawls Live!“ the bartender says.

It was like a bomb went off in my head, introducing me to the world of great jazz singers — vocalists I had mostly ignored. Content to drink cola after cola, I begged the bartender to play the recordings again.

Then the most stunning woman I had ever observed, barmaid Jackie Myles, took my order. Jackie “Myles” Brengle, as she was known then, was the daughter of my first paid employer, trumpeter Floyd Myles, and married to the local bassist Jack Brengle. Lovely from head to toe, and every boy’s dream pin-up girl. At this age, it was a challenge to even talk with a mature woman, especially one this attractive and seven or eight years older. For a shy Indiana boy, even a conversation took greater courage.

A few jazz heads sat down front for our opening set. We jammed away but didn’t perform anything advanced or challenging — just a righteous groove, kept modest. At set’s end, the three of us were awarded a polite, complimentary round of applause.

Enter Wes Montgomery! Big star time, and the room reacts. As quickly as we exit the stage, the barn fills up. Organist Melvin Rhyne extends a few drawbars on the Hammond organ; Montgomery taps the strings; the trio is now in motion.

As they play, I ask myself: when is the organist going to squeal like Jimmy Smith? It never happens. Someone next to me says, “He’s not very exciting, is he?” I had to listen and shed any preconceptions I’d had about the Hammond B-3. This came from the head and heart, without that gospel dynamic or the expected blues intent of purist jazz. The trio played the groove with precision, whatever the style — from Ellington’s “Satin Doll” to Ann Ronell’s “Willow Weep for Me.”

In passing, I said something to Montgomery — of which I will never recall — and he smiled back. I stood close to the man and thought to myself: this is the same guy I had read about, who at nineteen would fall asleep with the guitar in his hands, practicing sixteen hours a day.

It all happened that fast.

Theredwoodtheatre.com

We thought we should pay a second visit to the Ex last night, this time to experience the colours, the crowds, and the midway after dark. Kristine and I had planned a trip across the grounds on the Sky Tram—a final bit of summer carnival joy before the season begins slipping away.

Let’s just say those aspirations were quickly ditched upon our arrival. The lineups seemed a mile long, and the density of night-goers was unlike anything I had experienced at the Ex before. Perhaps it was because we usually choose a weeknight. I was told this was the exhibition’s busiest night of the year. Looking around, I could believe it. I get that.

My plan and Kristine’s plan both went off the rails. I was there to capture the colour and excitement of families enjoying the final stretch of late-summer amusement. Kristine was all in for a shiatsu massage and an ice cream waffle. A simple enough plan, one would think. Instead, we discovered that the wait for a massage was long—a very, very long wait—and everything else had become a matter of lineups, patience, and determination.

This was a hard slog. The many benches scattered around the grounds were jammed. The rides were nearly impossible to approach, let alone photograph. Even finding a place to stand and frame a picture was hit-and-miss. Everywhere we turned, another river of people flowed past us.

Still, I hung in. I watched the action unfold through that dense forest of humanity: children staring upward at the lights, families negotiating their next move, teenagers travelling in packs, and midway workers keeping the whole glowing machine in motion. There was colour everywhere, along with noise, motion, laughter, exhaustion, and that unmistakable late-summer energy that belongs to the Ex.

Enjoy the captures.

P.S. We did manage to cop the ice cream waffles. We guessed the kids dishing them out were exhausted and had reached the point of simply piling on whatever amount could be carved from the Chapman’s vanilla carton. Bravo. These were memory-sized portions—the kind we remember from Ex visits decades ago, before shrinkflation and serving-size reduction entered the midway vocabulary.

For a few glorious minutes, summer was generous again.

We were kids raised on baseball, basketball, and music heroes, and none of them asked our permission to become obsessions. Mickey Mantle stretched home runs past the limits of physics for the Yankees. Bob Cousy — still with us at 97, still a living thread back to the origin story of the Celtics — threaded passes no one else on the floor could see coming. Wes Montgomery worked a guitar with his thumb like he had nothing to prove and everything to say. Oscar Peterson’s hands moved faster than most people’s thoughts. These weren’t just skilled men. They were masters, and mastery, when it’s real, announces itself without asking.

What we were chasing, eyeball to screen, game to game, wasn’t the box score. It was the unrepeatable moment — a pass from the far side of the court that had no business arriving on time, a shot so absurd it got talked about for a week. We wanted to do the impossible. Failing that, we wanted to witness it and carry it around afterward like a secret.

I’ll say this plainly, because it needs saying plainly: there’s a long, hard-won history of celebrated women in the WNBA, and the record books and the championship rings settle the question of who the greatest ones are. That’s not what I’m writing about. When I watch Indiana’s Caitlin Clark, I don’t think about rings. I think about Michael Jordan hanging in the air a half-second longer than gravity allows. I think about Magic Johnson finding a passing lane that existed nowhere until he found it. I think about Tom Brady in the pocket, unbothered, like the whole defence was a minor inconvenience. Players who had that — the extra visual, the sense that something impossible was about to happen and you’d better not blink.

I watch as many Fever highlights as I can get my hands on, and I’ll admit it — I don’t much care who else is on the floor. I’m watching Clark. I’m not arguing she’s the best player in the league. I’m saying she’s the most watchable, and those are different currencies entirely. She throws passes the way Magic did — the ball finds a gap, bends through it, and lands with a spin that looks choreographed rather than thrown. In fact, her backcourt teammate Kelsey Mitchell deserves to be MVP of the league. That’s my eight cents. Kelsey Mitchell recently broke her own Indiana Fever single-season scoring record. She then reached 1,001 points in 2026, becoming only the second player in WNBA history to score 1,000 points in one season. She also set the WNBA record with 21 consecutive games scoring at least 20 points.

Then there’s the movement Clark itself, which at moments tips into caricature — in the best sense. She’s unconventional. Always drifting, sliding off a defender’s shoulder, then slipping back, spinning, banking one off the glass from an angle that shouldn’t work. That’s not athleticism alone. That’s finger control, touch, the kind of thing you can’t drill into a player who doesn’t already feel it.

And then the capper: those threes, consistent from 22 to 27 feet, and the deep pull-ups from 27 to 32 that shouldn’t be attempted, let alone made, let alone made with that particular net-snapping backspin — the prettiest shots the league produces from behind the arc.

I expect pushback for saying so, and that’s fine. Pushback means the conversations are alive. But the point isn’t ranking anybody. It’s naming a quality that cuts clean across sport and art and doesn’t care about your resume: the “it” thing. Dolly has it. Aretha had it in a way that made rooms go quiet before she’d sung a note. Beyoncé has it. The Williams sisters had it on every surface they ever played. It’s the thing that makes an eye refuse to leave the frame — the strike, the yell, the follow-through you can’t look away from.

Jordan’s dunks were never really about the two points. Kyle Schwarber at the plate carries a menace before the pitch even leaves the hand. Alcaraz and Sabalenka have turned tennis into theatre, full stop. Usyk and Crawford box like men who’ve read the script and decided to improvise anyway. Messi and Lamine Yamal move through soccer’s chaos like they already know where the ball is going to be, because in some sense, they do.

It was never only about the numbers. It’s the grace, the style, the how of the thing — how it looked when it was done, and whether you’re still thinking about it the next morning.

Here I am, 16 years and almost half a year later, still carrying the Saturday 10 a.m. torch at CIUT 89.5 FM, the University of Toronto. I never once considered that the show would continue to attract the best talent – that’s my crew, Gloria Martin, Rob Salem, Jessica Bellamy and, of course, my co-partner, Jesse King – Bass Culture on Substack.

From an interview show to a talk show. That’s a brave leap, yet I’ve got the voices. The Speak Up and Out team has a big media history.

Play here:

Theme Kobe: Bill King

Today’s show – Canada in our corner, a bit of Bajan food talk, the politics from the world’s supreme idiot – Farticus the Fake. Oh, how Lake of America landed in Canada. Even talk of leveraging tariffs on U.S. media. That’s Netflix, Disney, FOX, ABC, Amazon, CBS, NBC – the list runs deep. Now that would be painful.

The crew circles the stories and brings a different perspective to Dolly Parton’s grand life. That Canadian talk.

Just hit play and enjoy the day.

Bill King

I watched the news last night the way you watch a storm roll in over water — with that low hum of dread that tells you the barometric pressure has already changed before the wind does. Robotic dogs, hunting people. Not metaphorically. Actual machines, built for warfare, now walking American streets in pursuit of the undocumented, while an administration and its Project 2025 architects count down the days to midterms like men counting the minutes before a door gets kicked in. I’ve spent enough decades looking in on political courtrooms — contracts, custody, the ordinary American courthouse dramas — to know that freedom has never been a given. People litigate it daily by showing up. That’s the only reason it’s held this long. Whether it holds through November is not a musical question, but it’s the question underneath every note I write this month.

Then there’s Ukraine, which has become something closer to a proof of concept than a war — twenty-somethings piloting drones from folding tables hundreds of miles from the blast radius, killing with the same flat affect you’d bring to a first-person shooter, because in some real sense that’s exactly the muscle memory they were trained on. We used to say war changes those who fight it. What happens when the fighting no longer touches the body at all? I don’t have the answer. I’m not sure anyone training these operators does either.

Which brings me, not so obliquely, to Bill Gates and the Pope — an unlikely double bill, but here we are. Gates’ open letter lays out the case plainly: AI is outrunning our capacity to govern it, and the danger isn’t singular but threefold — the hollowing out of work and the inequality that follows, the weaponization of these same tools for cyberattack, bioengineering, surveillance, manipulation, and the deeper risk of losing the leash altogether, and finally what it does to a generation of kids handed a machine that will think for them before they’ve learned to think for themselves. Gates hasn’t gone full doomsayer — he still believes AI can lift healthcare, education, the baseline of human living standards — but he’s clear that lift doesn’t happen automatically. It has to be built toward, with real oversight, real international cooperation, jobs deliberately preserved for human hands, and yes, taxation of the machines that replace them. Pope Leo’s encyclical, in its section on truth and democracy, works the same terrain from the other direction—less policy, more soul—a reminder that a society that stops agreeing on what’s true has already lost the argument before it’s been had.

Robotic dogs. Drone pilots. AI outrunning its own guardrails. A pope writing about truth like it’s an endangered species. These aren’t four separate stories. They’re one story, told in four registers, about what happens when power moves faster than conscience. I don’t know what key that song is in yet. I just know we’re all playing it, whether we meant to or not.

https://www.gatesnotes.com/a-turbulent-ai-era-and-critical-choices-to-make?utm_source=chatgpt.com

ENCYCLICAL LETTER
MAGNIFICA HUMANITAS
OF HIS HOLINESS
POPE LEO XIV
ON SAFEGUARDING THE HUMAN PERSON
IN THE TIME OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Truth as a common good

Truth and democracy

132. The use of digital platforms and AI systems is driving profound changes in public and political communication. Tools that could foster dialogue and participation are often used to construct distorted narratives and blur the boundaries between truth and falsehood, mixing facts with opinions. Disinformation did not begin with AI, yet today it finds a powerful amplifier in AI. The ability to manipulate content, images and videos exposes people to biased or misleading perspectives. This problem has both cultural and moral dimensions, since the quality of public communication depends directly on social trust and, in turn, shapes it. At the same time, truthful information does not arise from centralized or automated control. In public discourse, the truth of facts has a rational dimension, as it requires verification, cross-checking of sources and responsible argumentation. Moreover, it is deeply relational, built through bonds of trust and shared practices, as well as an honest exchange with others and with the world. Only the shared pursuit of the veracity of facts, perceived as a common good, can provide a solid foundation for just communication.

133. Those who command powerful technological and economic resources, along with substantial human capital for intervention, possess significant capabilities for influencing cultural change. Ultimately, they can influence a significant number of people concerning the truth about humanity, the world, the meaning of existence, the family and even God. This is pure power detached from truth, which subtly or overtly imposes what it wishes others to accept as true. At its root lies a deeper and often unrecognized “sickness”: the fact that “modern man is wrongly convinced that he is the sole author of himself, his life and society. This is a presumption that follows from being selfishly closed in upon himself.” [140] Consequently, people believe that they can construct reality, and that whatever best suits their claims corresponds to what is true. Saint John Paul II reflected on the consequences of this “crisis of truth,” going so far as to state that “once the idea of a universal truth about the good, knowable by human reason, is lost, inevitably the notion of conscience also changes.” In such a context, universally valid truths, which precede us and which conscience must accept, are no longer recognized. This led Pope Francis to ask with realism: “What is law without the conviction, born of age-old reflection and great wisdom, that each human being is sacred and inviolable?” To which he concluded: “If society is to have a future, it must respect the truth of our human dignity and submit to that truth. Murder is not wrong simply because it is socially unacceptable and punished by law, but because of a deeper conviction. This is a non-negotiable truth attained by the use of reason and accepted in conscience. A society is noble and decent, not least for its support of the pursuit of truth and its adherence to the most basic of truths.”

134. The search for truth is an essential element of democracy, which is itself a means of contributing to the common good. When questions about what is true lose their appeal, and a pragmatism takes hold that is content with what appears useful or effective, then democratic life is weakened. After all, democracy does not consist of rules and procedures alone, but above all of a solid concordance with the facts and a genuine commitment to the good of individuals and society as a whole. Indifference to the truth leads, slowly but surely, to a descent into totalitarianism. As the philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote, the ideal subjects of such regimes are not so much those who are ideologically convinced, but rather “people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”

It’s been a hell of a run of remembrances. Clip after clip, story after story, and every one of them lands soft. Most times when somebody iconic goes down, you get a day of coverage, and then the culture moves on, indecent haste and all. When Michael Jackson died, I wanted it over — too much arrested-development weirdness clinging to the genius. Same with Prince — the chemical fog got in the way of the music. Amazing artists, both, but there was always something you had to look past to get to the gift. Dolly doesn’t ask you to look past anything. She’s a different animal.

So, I’ve been sitting with the question: where does that humour actually come from? Because I know where it doesn’t come from.

My father carried that Appalachian heritage in his hands and his silence. There were no jokes in that house. A slap on the knee, a spit of tobacco, the fear of God sitting at the table with you, and some genuinely fine picking — that was the whole vocabulary. When Dad played guitar, it was Depression songs, poorhouse songs, and there wasn’t a laugh anywhere in them. I never once saw Loretta Lynn truly funny. Never saw Cash crack wise, never caught Waylon or the Mandrell Sisters playing for an unscripted laugh. George Jones and Tammy Wynette — serious people living serious songs. That generation of country music was built to carry weight, not shed it. Hee Haw was as far as my parents’ generation let themselves go — safe, corny, nothing derogatory, nothing that could catch fire. Church people, in my experience, like to laugh at somebody else’s laugh. Not at the joke itself. At the sound of a person losing control in public.

Dolly’s wit came from around the family gatherings. Eleven siblings made for quite an audience and a way to cope with hardship.

Her dad and siblings were naturally funny. The family banter helped shape her comic timing and conversational style. Her mother, Avie Lee Parton, was known in the family for telling stories, singing, and expressing herself colourfully. Dolly learned to laugh at herself, yet grew into a public persona and urbane/country wit – that’s refined through the bandstand.

I got my ass whipped on the bandstand at fifteen, and I mean that as an honour. If a joke was coming down the pike, your name was in the punchline, guaranteed, and the only defence was speed. That’s the actual rite of passage in this business — not the first gig, not the first record, but the first time you get roasted in front of the band and have to fire something back before the silence turns on you. You learn quick, or you learn quiet. I think Dolly came up in exactly that kind of room — gig to gig, van to van, holding your own among players who’d take a piece out of you if you flinched — and she figured out early that the persona itself could be the weapon and the shield at the same time. Wit gets you through locked doors. Wit gets you out of rooms that were about to turn ugly. She understood that before she understood almost anything else about fame.

I’ve been particularly taken with the stories from session players — Lee Sklar’s recollections of his time with her especially. That’s road-warrior testimony, not publicist copy, and it tracks with everyone I’ve known who actually made people laugh out of the box: Ronnie Hawkins, Craig Russell, Ruth Pointer, Carol Burnett, Kent Sprague, James Jamerson. None of that humour was written down anywhere. It lived in vans and dressing rooms and got sharpened on other musicians.

Hawk is probably the closest thing I knew personally to Dolly’s frequency — the man carried a whole skull-file of stories, could pull one out for any occasion, any room, any crowd. My old bandmate Kent Sprague, who played drums behind “Just Gimme a Little Sign,” had a whole other register — he’d run Eldridge Cleaver, Black Panther cadence back at us, straight-faced, needling the white boys in the band. We’d sit up all night with no drugs, no drink, just lobbing one-liners across the room until somebody surrendered.

That’s the world I think Dolly came out of. Not a comedy tradition — a survival tradition. And I’d argue the wigs, the five-foot frame, the figure that got exaggerated into caricature before she ever opened her mouth — those weren’t just costumes; they were tools. She let the world hand her the joke first. The trick, the whole trick, was never taking the incoming barb seriously. Catch it, redirect it, send it back with a little more heat than it arrived with. A stinger missile disguised as a punchline.

That’s not Nashville-honed humour. That’s big-family, bandstand humour. That little paw reaching across the breakfast table for the last biscuit and getting away with it. Big personality. She just took it all the way to the top.

I just caught the buffoon doing what he does so well: buffoonery. At this stage of his residency, there’s not much else to do than await impeachment hearings. Court dates, investigations and either death or jail.

Entertain thyself, resident jester!

It’s a beautiful day in the neighbourhood.

Each time the illustrious fool stabs Canada, it leaves wounds so deep we folks stop buying American products.

BK

I wrote about Strings only weeks after launching Sound & Reason. Last night I came across this most revealing and personal interview and thought – it’s Thursday – let’s hang with greatness and a survival story that merits our attention and compassion.

The first time I saw Billy Strings perform, it was alongside Willie Nelson in a documentary celebrating the Great One. It was clear from the jump—here was a talent that didn’t just rise above the rest; it burned like wildfire. The moment Strings opened his mouth and struck that first chord, you could feel it in your gut: this was the next generation of bluegrass greatness, a torchbearer with both hands on the flame.

Last week, I caught Strings in a raw, informal setting, interviewed by the ever-insightful Rick Beato. A perfect match. Beato, a man of deep musical intellect, met Strings exactly where he needed to be met—before the art of deflection had set in, before the media training smoothed the edges. Everything about it felt real. No pretense, no polish, just an open channel from the soul of a musician still fueled by the purest kind of love for the music.

Strings’ stepfather, Terry Barber, first set him on this path. A picker himself, Barber handed down the mountain music tradition like an heirloom, and young Billy absorbed it all, note for note, moment by moment, at the knee of a man who understood its weight. These are the stories that shape musicians. An instrument, plenty of time, and a deep respect for what came before. You listen, you learn, and then, if you’re lucky, you find your own voice in the echoes of the past.

Ralph Stanley understood that better than anyone. He didn’t just play bluegrass—he embodied it. That high, lonesome voice carried across time like wind through the hollers of Appalachia, a sound soaked in the history of the Clinch Mountains. Alongside his brother Carter, he helped set the blueprint for bluegrass in the postwar years, blending gospel harmonies with the relentless pulse of the banjo. But after Carter’s passing in 1966, Ralph truly stepped into his own. He stripped the music down to its rawest essence—his clawhammer banjo ringing like a warning, his voice an instrument of pure, unvarnished truth.

When he sang “O Death” on the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack, it wasn’t a performance. It was a reckoning. A reminder that the old ways weren’t gone, just waiting in the dark to be heard again. Stanley’s influence ran deeper than bluegrass alone. His music found its way into country, folk, even rock & roll. Dylan, Springsteen, Emmylou—they all felt it, that unshakable honesty, and folded it into their own work. He taught Ricky Skaggs and Keith Whitley what it meant to carry tradition forward, not as a relic but as something still alive, something with blood in its veins.

Billy Strings carries that same fire. Born William Apostol in Michigan, raised on Doc Watson’s surgical flatpicking and the deep, unfiltered soul of Appalachian music, he took what was old and made it feel like a lit match in a dry field. His fingers move with the speed of a train about to jump the tracks, blending bluegrass, rock, and psychedelia into something that bends tradition without ever breaking it. His voice, rough and unpolished, is the sound of backroads ballads and outlaw stories passed down through generations. But it’s not just his playing—it’s the energy. Strings plays like he’s channeling ghosts but moves like a man just stepping into his own legend.

And Willie Nelson saw it. The outlaw king himself, a living bridge between country’s past and present, recognized in Billy a kindred spirit—an artist who respects tradition but refuses to be caged by it. They’ve shared stages, swapping licks and harmonies, erasing the decades between them. Billy’s reverence for the past aligns perfectly with Willie’s outlaw ethos, but it’s his refusal to be boxed in that makes the connection inevitable. Like Willie before him, Billy chases the music wherever it leads, refusing to let genre dictate artistry. His collaborations stretch from bluegrass purists to jam-band adventurers, and his shows crackle with the kind of wild, unfiltered energy that makes a theatre feel like a backwoods picking circle turned full-blown revival.

In an era where music is too often polished to perfection, Billy Strings keeps it dangerous. He stands on the edge of something massive—something that still smells like sawdust and whiskey, something that moves like fire in the hands of a man who plays like he was born to set the whole thing ablaze.

Most of us have an uneasy relationship with Facebook—and with its billionaire godfather, Mark Zuckerberg.

This is what my dashboard says:

Profile has some issues.

We restricted your profile as a safety measure because your activity may not follow our rules.

Meanwhile, that same dashboard tells me I stand at 1,117,100 reads in the past 28 days.

This shit pisses me off.

When the dude in full buffalo head and horns stormed the Capitol building, I posted a photo and took Trump to task. I was banned a solid month from posting.

There is something especially galling about being scolded by a faceless system, some digital hall monitor wagging its finger and telling me I may have broken the rules. The whole performance feels patronizing: Zuckerberg and his machinery lording over the rest of us, determining what gets seen, what gets buried, who gets rewarded, and who gets sent to detention.

All while Meta has been ordered to pay millions upon millions of dollars.

As of August 25, 2026, Meta/Facebook has been ordered to pay $942 million in the New Mexico child-safety case: a $375 million civil penalty, plus another $567 million designated for a youth mental-health fund. Meta says it will appeal, so we should be precise here. This money cannot yet be described as definitively paid.

Meta paid $9 million to settle a Kentucky school district’s lawsuit accusing social-media companies of contributing to addiction and other harms among young people.

Then there is the approximately $4.2 million assigned to Meta from a $6 million verdict in an individual social-media-addiction case. Again, that is a verdict, which does not necessarily mean the money has already changed hands.

So the clearest accounting is this: Meta faces about $955.2 million in judgments and disclosed settlements connected to alleged childhood addiction and related harms. Of that total, only $9 million is clearly documented as having already been paid.

Precision matters. So does perspective.

I post a meme clowning on Trump and get slapped with a detention badge. The badge drives down the number of people who see the piece when it is posted on Facebook. My reach shrinks. The door closes a little. The algorithm turns down the lights.

But the company policing my behaviour has faced nearly a billion dollars in judgments and settlements tied to allegations involving children, addiction, safety, and mental health.

Apparently, I am the one who needs watching.

Which brings me to Aaron Sorkin.

Sorkin is not on social media, yet he understood Zuckerberg—and the craven ambition behind the race to join that exclusive, all-boys pact for world domination. He understood that this was never merely a story about a website. It was a story about power, loneliness, status, resentment, and the desperate human urge to get inside the room where everyone else appears to be having the time of their lives.

That is what good writers do. They look past the machinery and find the appetite operating it.

I was a huge fan of playwright Neil Simon. I admired the discipline behind the laughter: the patience required to sit down and write, to pull stories from the ether, and to keep returning to the page. Writing asks for more than inspiration. It demands the willingness to revise, reconsider, tear something apart, and build it again when the work calls for it.

That discipline has always fascinated me.

The words may arrive like magic, but the work itself is rarely magical. It is repetition. Attention. Stubbornness. It is listening for a sentence’s rhythm and knowing when the music is off. It is accepting that the first version may carry the spark but not yet the flame.

There is a great deal of ground covered in this Esquire interview with Sorkin. It is the kind of conversation that makes for a perfect Wednesday-morning motivational—a reminder that craft matters, that survival changes the stories we tell, and that the work still begins with someone sitting alone, staring at an empty page.

Aaron Sorkin has spent decades writing some of the most influential stories in film and television, but the most valuable lessons he has learned extend far beyond the page.

In this episode of Esquire’s What I’ve Learned podcast, the Academy Award-winning writer and director sits down with Editor-in-Chief Michael Sebastian to reflect on the craft of writing, the power of dialogue, and why storytelling still matters—especially in the age of artificial intelligence.

Sorkin speaks openly about addiction and recovery. He discusses what he learned from Rob Reiner, why he wants to revisit The Newsroom, and how becoming a father changed how he saw his life and his work. He also reflects on surviving a minor stroke, an experience that forced him to reconsider time, health, and the illusion that there will always be another day to get things right.

And, of course, he talks about The Social Reckoning, Facebook’s influence on modern life, and the strange, sprawling consequences of allowing a handful of powerful men to reshape how billions of people communicate, argue, perform, remember, and understand one another.

Still, Sorkin has not surrendered to despair. He believes America can turn things around.

I want to believe that, too.

Maybe reckoning begins with refusing to accept the language the people in charge hand us. Maybe it begins when we stop confusing immense wealth with wisdom, technological reach with moral authority, and a platform’s rules with some sacred definition of right and wrong.

Maybe it begins by continuing to write, even when the dashboard says your profile has issues.

Especially then.

Dolly Parton’s passing reminds us of what we are missing in our daily lives—the goodness one person can spread through humility and deeds. I’m speaking of those in our faces every day — somewhere being corporate, media, politicians, and hucksters.

There will be much said tonight and in the coming days about Dolly Parton, and I will bet that, other than FOX News, not a derogatory word. How could there be? Parton did all of the motivational and humane things one with a platform and immense reach can do. She shone light on all of us.

No get-rich schemes or taking advantage of the observant.

I wrote about this a few years back. Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library is a free book-gifting program founded in 1995 and inspired by her father’s inability to read and write. It mails one age-appropriate book each month to enrolled children from birth to age five, regardless of family income, in participating communities. The Dollywood Foundation coordinates book selection, purchasing, and infrastructure, while local organizations enroll families and help fund delivery.

The program has grown from an initial order of about 1,700 books to more than three million books mailed worldwide each month. Research suggests participating children are read to more often, show greater interest in books, and develop stronger early-literacy skills. Its clearest success has been expanding access to books and helping families establish regular reading habits before children begin school.

I think it was during DeSantis’s assault on literacy in Florida when I first sat with this program in earnest, tried to measure what it meant against what was being taken away in the same breath. One woman building a library out of nothing but a mailbox and a memory of her father’s illiteracy. One governor’s office stripping shelves bare. You don’t need me to draw the line between them. It draws itself.

This alone is a massive achievement. Many tributes, rightly so, come from those who can speak firsthand to the most intimate details of her life. That night’s young and Parton’s reach was into every living room — the trailer parks and the penthouses both, the truck stops and the tour buses, wherever a radio dial found her.

I think back to the roots of the legends — Cash, Lynn, Parton, Haggard — that mournful cry and tear in the voice. Ralph Stanley calling from the hills and the ground that awaits. These were people who came up through dirt floors and revival tents and never once pretended otherwise, even after the money came. Parton never scrubbed the mountain out of her voice, never let the rhinestones fool anyone about where she started. That’s the trick almost nobody pulls off — get famous enough to buy anything and still sound like you’re singing from the porch.

It’s the land, the tone of the wind as it breaks through the limbs of bending willows and the church people all dressed in Sunday whites. That’s where the songs came from, and that’s where she kept sending the royalties, one way or another, back down into the hollows — a library card program with her father’s face behind it, a theme park that kept a whole region employed, money moving the direction gravity doesn’t usually allow.

We don’t get many like her. We get plenty who perform the goodness for a news cycle and vanish once the cameras find someone else. Parton built something that outlives the tribute segments — millions of books still going out in the mail tomorrow morning, whether or not anyone’s watching.

That’s the good life. Not the mansion. The mailbox.

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(Bill King Photography)

IN CONVERSATION

From childhood pilgrimages to MoMA to four decades in the concert pit, painter and photographer Kristine King reflects on colour, discipline, and the strange freedom of painting for only herself.

Interview by Bill King

THE FIRST MUSEUM

BILL KING: What was the first museum you ever visited?

KRISTINE KING: MoMA, of course — the Museum of Modern Art in New York. I went as a kid, all the time. It started with school trips, with my art teacher, and then I got bold enough to take the train in with my friends and go by myself.

She grew up on Long Island, in Center Moriches, seventy-five miles east of the city — commercial fishing country, boats and beaches, with no galleries of its own. MoMA became something closer to a second home.

“I was fascinated by everything I saw there. I would sit across from the giant paintings and just stare at them forever — to see how they were made, and exactly everything about them.”

Her taste declared itself early. “I’ve always been attracted to abstract art — colour and design have always been my main interest. But I also really liked the Impressionists, and pretty much everything. I’m open when it comes to art. Even people who say ‘I can’t draw, I’m not an artist’ — I still like to see what they come up with. You’ve got something in there that can come out on canvas or paper, whatever your medium of choice is.”

As a child, that meant colouring books and fairy tales — the two things she returned to obsessively. “I loved colouring books, and probably even then I was attracted to colour. When I wasn’t drawing in one, I was reading fairy tales. That was kind of my childhood, besides being a tomboy and climbing trees.”

By ninth grade, the pull toward art had become something closer to defiance. “I had one period of art scheduled, then I dropped a class and had two. Then I’d skip two other classes and go to art, so I had four periods of art in high school. I was an impossible person to deal with, so they just let me do it. I was headstrong, and I was going to do it.”

A STUDIO ON LONG ISLAND

Long Island’s art world reached beyond the boardwalk galleries of the Hamptons — including, once a year, a school bus trip to the East Hampton studio of Jackson Pollock, where his widow, the painter Lee Krasner, still lived.

“It was fascinating to go to his studio. It was just paint everywhere. It was inspirational to see him as a very famous artist — and his wife was a very famous artist too. In fact, he copied her.”

King had read Krasner’s biography and points to a familiar injustice: “It was just because women couldn’t get a leg up in the art world — they didn’t even want to show their work in a gallery. But Jackson Pollock was all the rage, and he basically copied from the woman who became his wife.” Center Moriches offered little formal art beyond the classroom, but the moneyed summer towns nearby — Westhampton, the Hamptons — kept small galleries stocked with local subject matter: ocean scenes, boats, the coastline rendered back to the people who could afford to look at it.

TURPENTINE AND PAINT

King’s move to Canada in the 1970s led her to Three Schools of Art, tucked into Toronto’s Annex.

“It had old, creaky wooden floors and smelled of paint — turpentine and paint, which I really liked. It was like my dream come true.”

She studied there for less than a year before life intervened — she became a young mother, and formal instruction gave way to the ordinary discipline of grabbing time where it existed. “Even when we were living in the room on Madison Avenue, I would sit at the desk and make art, draw and paint, whatever. But it’s not been constant, because you have to stop and go to work, and then you’re too exhausted to think or be creative.”

In the 1980s, back in Toronto, she enrolled in the Central Tech adult art program — three years, free, with a single condition. “Your only commitment was to show up. You had everything: illustration, design, still life, sculpture, printmaking, photography. You couldn’t really specialize in anything at that point.” Work pulled her out after two years, but two things from that program stayed with her permanently: a love of sculpture, for which she has never since had space (”my little studio upstairs is seven by nine”), and printmaking, which she still practices in a scaled-down form — paper and a roller, no press.

THE TWO HANDS RULE

If painting was King’s first language, photography arrived sideways — through the Jazz Report, the magazine she and Bill King founded, and through the two men who mentored her behind the lens: Paul Hoffert and John Reeves.

“I was intimidated by photography. But what inspired me was having the magazine. I’d see their photography in the Jazz Report — and I was really inspired.”

Reeves shot extreme close-ups; King absorbed the style and made it her own, most memorably in a cramped hotel room with Herbie Hancock, three photographers and their lenses crowded around him. “You can see every pore on his face. But they’re still good photos.”

Her longer, defining mentorship was with Hoeffler, whose specialty was jazz portraiture and live concert work—a discipline King practiced for roughly four decades —and who eventually published a 240-page monograph, Portraits in Music, spanning legendary and emerging jazz artists alongside figures like Beyoncé and Macy Gray.

“I don’t post an ugly picture of somebody. I don’t think that’s fair. Every single one of them has joy on their face — they were just joyfully making music. That’s what I always tried to capture with my lens.”

k.d.laing Kris King Photography

From Hoeffler, King inherited a technical commandment she’s passed on in every workshop she’s taught: include the hands.

“Two hands. To this very day, I joke that even after he died, Paul Hoeffler sat on my shoulder screaming, ‘Two hands, two hands!’ It’s like cutting off the legs of a dancer — you’re focusing on her face, but whoa, what happened to her feet?”

The two also shared a private joke about their own limitations in another setting entirely: unposed shots grabbed on the fly in Barbados, which they called “drive-by shootings” — and, less charitably, “amputations,” for the body parts that routinely vanished out of frame.

RIDING BACK INTO THE ROOM

For more than thirty years, King had the kind of access most photographers only imagine — accredited at the Montreal International Jazz Festival, working the pit, rarely sitting for a show. The one exception she remembers clearly involved pianist Hank Jones.

“I finished my three songs photographing him, then went to my seat. It was too crowded to put my camera away, so I left it on my lap. I saw him lift his hands and blow off three shots real fast.”

The image won King the International Jazz Journalists Association’s photo of the year — shot in 2008, awarded in 2009. But the era it belonged to was closing. “All the legends have passed. We’ve photographed almost all of them.” The performers who followed, she says, carried a different energy entirely — less flamboyant, less theatrical, closer in bearing to students than headliners.

Hank Jones

Then the pandemic emptied the concert calendar altogether, and King — who had already been drifting back toward the studio — simply stopped leaving it. “I said, ‘Okay,’ and I just spent the entire time painting. It was always my first love. Music, art, dance — that’s pretty much how I’ve spent my life. What inspires me is basically the arts.”

IMPROVISING LIKE A MUSICIAN

Ask King to describe her style and the answer arrives without hesitation: abstract, and saturated with colour, always. The pandemic didn’t cause that — it just gave it room.

“Everything is abstract but always involving a lot of colour. I improvise like a musician. I might have a bit of an idea of what I’m going to do, or I might not — I just start painting and see where it’s going.”

Her process resists deadline entirely. A single canvas can sit unfinished for months while she looks at it, waiting to know what it needs next. “I sit and look at it a lot. I have a painting I’m working on right now — it’s been there for months. I come to a point where I go, ‘Where do I want to go with this next?’ So I’ll sit and look at it for months before I decide.” Several works are typically in progress at once — a large canvas, a smaller one on board, something in a sketchbook — with watercolours waiting in the wings.

“Once you start painting, hours pass. You don’t even know. Next thing you know it’s six o’clock and where’s dinner?”

The freedom she describes, though, comes with an asterisk she’s candid about. She set out to return to painting, to loosen up — “I wanted to just paint with freedom and abandon, let that brush hit the canvas” — and instead found herself doing what an old art teacher once complained about: tight, detailed, painstaking work. “I need to have some structure and organization. They need to make sense to me. I don’t work hard enough to just slap some paint on a canvas and say, ‘There’s my painting.’ I can’t do that.”

It’s a self-assessment offered without bitterness, even as she watches looser, more gestural work sell for six figures elsewhere. “I wish I could do that.

A LIFE WITHOUT TELEVISION

The other constant, alongside painting, is reading — several books a week, sustained by a small but deliberate rule: no television at night.

“Reading is like watching TV, only it’s on paper. It feeds your soul in a way that almost nothing else does.”

The habit runs back to childhood and the fairy tales she read “hundreds of times,” broadening in the 1970s into fiction through Agatha Christie — “so then I read all of Agatha Christie’s” — though nonfiction and historical fiction remain her deeper attachments.

Dance was once part of the same appetite for the physical arts — twenty years of classes, from age thirty-one to fifty-one, ended by osteoporosis and a doctor’s order to stop. “My body misses dance like you wouldn’t believe.”

WHAT A PHOTOGRAPH CAN’T DO

King draws a sharp line between the two visual disciplines she’s spent a lifetime inside.

“A photograph is a moment. A painting is an impression of the moment.”

It’s a distinction she’s built her practice around: unlike many painters, she refuses to work from her own photographs, however tempting the material. “My theory is that I don’t paint what I can photograph. I know a lot of people do — they stand outside and paint the scene or take a photograph and paint it. That doesn’t interest me so much, and God knows I’ve tried. I just get bored of it. I prefer to let the painting unfold.”

Nothing on her walls, she notes, is rooted in observed reality — including a pattern she didn’t notice until the paintings were hung and grouped together: an unplanned, recurring motif of abstracted flowers. “That was kind of a surprise to me, too.”

PAINTING FOR NO ONE

King describes herself, characteristically, as a behind-the-scenes person — someone who paints without any interest in exhibition.

“I paint for myself. I’m not looking to be in a gallery. That’s too much pressure.”

She was, by her own account, horrified when her paintings were first hung in the living room for guests to see. Time has softened that. “Now I have a chair that sits right across from all my paintings, and I go, ‘Oh yeah, I really like that one.’” Not every piece earns that reaction — she’s candid that she doesn’t love everything she’s made — but distance has given her something like curatorial perspective on her own work, including the occasional urge to add to a finished piece rather than start over.

The response from beyond the living room caught her off guard entirely. Early on, she was too intimidated to post a painting online. When she finally did, canvas prints began selling — to friends across Oregon, British Columbia, and Nova Scotia, among others. “I never expected that people would buy my paintings.”

What she wants understood, though, is the labour underneath any single finished canvas — the tiny, deliberate detail work that stretches a piece across weeks or months. “I’ve always painted little niggly stuff that’s tiny and takes forever. Even a sixteen-by-twenty would take months and months.”

THE CORRELATION

Toward the end of the conversation, King turns to her own handwriting — small, tight, near-illegible to anyone but her — and finds in it an unexpected echo of the work itself.

“I use a very fine point — .05. I used to try to read it with a magnifying glass.”

Bill King suggests the correlation isn’t incidental: that an artist’s hand on the page and an artist’s hand on the canvas tend to move the same way. Neither of them disagrees.

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Blurb.ca

I just caught that podcast with Chuck Todd, someone I had largely lost faith in as he stumbled deeper into the political megaphone universe. Yet here he is, seeing Canada—and Prime Minister Mark Carney—with unusual clarity. He gets what is happening. He understands that this is the long game, played patiently and deliberately. Eleven yards at a time.

Todd returns to Davos and to Carney’s speech there, not simply as another piece of political theatre but as a marker of where the world may be heading. He sees in Carney’s words the outline of a future that others are only beginning to recognize: a West learning, reluctantly, that the old arrangements can no longer be taken for granted, and that trust, once broken, cannot be restored by another hastily negotiated communiqué.

He opens with the collapse of the latest U.S.–Canada trade talks. Carney walked away after the Americans introduced last-minute demands, chiefly involving tariffs on medium- and heavy-duty trucks. He did not pretend that this was a routine disagreement between dependable partners. He said plainly that the United States could no longer be trusted as a partner.

When asked about the stark tone of his remarks, Carney’s answer was blunter still: when you are attacked, you are at war. There was no diplomatic lace around it, no softening language designed to make the obvious sound more comfortable. It was the kind of sentence that changes the temperature of a room because it names what everyone else has been trying not to say.

Todd argues that much of the Western world is quietly cheering Carney on, even as individual European leaders push back and the European Union accepts its own deal. Beneath the formal statements and careful distancing, there is recognition. Someone has finally drawn a line and described the moment for what it is.

The deeper problem, Todd observes, is that this American administration does not negotiate with one voice. Agreements remain vulnerable to sudden reversals, competing factions and demands introduced at the final hour. Under those conditions, negotiation becomes less a search for common ground than an exercise in managing uncertainty. A partner cannot build a long-term strategy around a country whose position may change between the handshake and the signing.

And now the political fallout is landing directly in America’s Senate battlegrounds. Republican senators are being forced to answer for a trade war that is hurting their own states and constituencies. Susan Collins, in particular, has had to speak out against the trade policies of her own party.

That may be where the long game begins to tell. Not in one grand confrontation, and not in a single dramatic victory, but through steady pressure, shifting alliances and political consequences that become harder to ignore. Eleven yards at a time.

There’s a Sunday morning ritual I can’t quite quit — the dance between Kristen Welker and Jonathan Karl, NBC and ABC each taking their turn poking at the usual Trump-orbit suspects like they’re checking a wound to see if it’s healed. It never is. This week it was the balloon-headed senior senator from South Carolina, Tim Scott, paired against Texas governor Greg Abbott, a man who gets stranger the longer you watch him.

Scott has a rare gift — the ability to irritate people on the far side of the planet who only stumbled across him by YouTube algorithm and bad luck. He is one of the most grovelling Trump bootlickers currently on display in the MAGA trinket shop, and there’s a lot of competition for that title. Chain the man in a bat cave, starve him for eight months, and when they finally cut him loose, he’d find a way to blame Joe Biden on his way out. Utterly appalling. Welker, for her part, ran her usual mix — ninety percent capitulation, ten percent almost-got-you, which is about as much spine as the format allows her these days.

The second guest was Chris Van Hollen, Democratic senator from Maryland, who sat down in front of what looked like a democratic-socialist scare banner, and Welker went at him like he was standing in for Fidel Castro’s field general. Hollen, a class act, waded through the stench without getting any on him and glided into a clean segment ending. Meanwhile Scott got handed open field — room enough to lay down lies and fantasy thick as sod, and you start to wonder whether that imbalance was the assignment.

Which brings me to Karl.

The Abbott segment was a nothing steamer — no smoke, no heat, nothing to hold onto. But the morning saved itself in the next block: a solid, tasteful conversation with Pulitzer Prize–winning photojournalist David Hume Kennerly, a class act in a morning that otherwise had none to spare. Kennerly has a new book landing, In the Room: 60 Years on the Front Lines of History, and it’s the kind of thing that makes you forgive the hour you spent getting there.

Covering political dignitaries at close range is a serious ground game, and Kristine and I took a run at it once, years back. I still don’t fully know how we scored accreditation to photograph the Prime Minister of Japan and his wife — a friend on the press line got us in, and he was not amused to have us tagging along. I did the only sensible thing: watched his movements and mimicked them. You angle, you position, you stay ahead of the moment. You don’t chase it and fire from behind — that’s amateur hour, and everyone in the room can tell. We came away with a few decent frames and the clear-eyed knowledge that this particular chase wasn’t ours to run.

Which is exactly what makes Kennerly worth the half hour. This is a man for whom the chase was his life’s work, and he ran it better than almost anyone alive. He won the 1972 Pulitzer for Feature Photography at twenty-five — Vietnam, Cambodia, refugees streaming out of East Pakistan, Ali–Frazier — the kind of portfolio that would end most careers by setting the bar impossibly high on the first try. Instead, it opened the door. In 1974 Gerald Ford made him chief White House photographer, and Kennerly got the access photographers dream about and rarely receive: the president off-guard, the First Family unposed, the machinery of the administration caught mid-turn rather than staged for the record.

He’s photographed every president since Lyndon Johnson. Fifty-some Time and Newsweek covers. A hundred countries. He was in the room the night Robert Kennedy was shot at the Ambassador Hotel. In the room for Watergate’s slow bleed into Nixon’s resignation. In the room in Geneva for Reagan and Gorbachev’s Fireside Summit. Standing next to George W. Bush the night of an election that refused to end. He photographed the Pentagon burning on 9/11, then went to Afghanistan and Iraq to keep photographing what came after. Obama’s first night. The Trump-Clinton night. The Harris-Trump night. Sixty years of being exactly where history was deciding what it would become, camera up, patient, in position — never chasing, always ahead of it.

The book drops as the country turns 250, timed alongside an exhibition at the new Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library this fall. Jon Meacham wrote the foreword, which tells you what register this thing is aiming for. For anyone who cares about photojournalism at the height of its powers or just wants a reminder of what serious access looks like when it’s earned rather than performed — this is the one to own.

It’s Monday morning, and somewhere between Tim Scott’s grievances and David Hume Kennerly’s fifty years of proximity to the actual hinge-points of American life, I remembered why I still bother with the Sunday shows at all. Most of it’s noise. But every so often, someone walks through who was actually there — and for eight minutes, the whole enterprise justifies itself.

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Big love to all who hit me up about Wayne Ferguson’s skill and patience in restoring the Henry L. Miller grand piano and placing it in the Redwood Theatre. A story such as this brings out the piano in us—and the memories of our own musical past.

I’ve been dancing through old hard drives this morning, trying to locate footage and photographs from the day Kristine, Sybil Walker, and I took a ride to catch the unpacking of the Red Point Steinway—the piano that has resided in the Jazz Bistro for the past thirteen years.

Early on, I was terrible at cataloguing video and images properly. I might leave a date or some vague abbreviation, hoping I’d remember what it meant later. Never worked.

As other videos began popping up, I thought of those impromptu moments. A piano sitting on the street. Someone from the crowd taking a seat and blowing the roof off. Or a solitary moment at home with a glass of wine, a keyboard, and nothing particular in mind. Just the urge to play.

It’s in those moments that I press record.

The first video is of my buddy Stephen Smith and me in 2012, hitting those forty-one pianos placed around Toronto as a three-year promotion leading up to the Pan Am Games. Ingenious.

Stevie and I went on a mission to capture me playing as many of them as we could find and count. Not all were as capable as the one Stephen filmed in this video, but that was part of the adventure. You never quite knew what you were going to get until you sat down and touched the keys.

The second video is from the release of my jazz-and-blues piano trio album at the Orbit Room, 2010. Gary Slaight and his crew sponsored the night. Marke Kelso was on drums, with Collin Barrett on bass.

I had just introduced Gary to my latest discovery, Stacey (Bulmer) Kay, whom I’d invited to the club. Somewhere in the middle of the set, Gary yelled, “Get Stacey up there!”

The young woman didn’t hesitate for a second. She was ready to sing some Etta James.

Then word came: “And John Finley.”

That one was a no-brainer.

The jam is electric. John is John—pure soul—and Stacey is off-the-map sensational. It is one of those moments you could never fully plan. The right people were in the room, the music opened the door, and everybody walked through it.

The last video is that walk down to the basement.

The house has toned down. Quiet settles in, and you can hear your own breath. The mind is empty of pressing matters. No destination. No arrangement waiting on the stand. Nothing but a keyboard and the feeling that something may be there if you sit still long enough to find it.

I call this one “Shadowland.”

Listen here:

It was a one-take performance on the Roland FP-7. As I’m playing, I punch in the strings and let them settle over the piano. One time through, and I knew I had something complete.

I pulled out the USB key and carried it upstairs to my mixing software. “Shadowland” went on to become a prominent instrumental piece on new-age radio formats.

Sometimes the music arrives that way. No grand announcement. No plan. You walk down to the basement, sit at the piano, press record, and see where your hands take you.

Now it’s Blue Jays and Yankees.