24 hours till takeoff

Tomorrow, I leave for Detroit, to check out the city's 32nd Annual Jazz Festival. (I'll be getting on an airplane for about the sixth or seventh time in my life.) It's going to be a great event. Among the people I'm going to see are Vijay Iyer, the Sun Ra Arkestra and Dave Holland. Not to mention Sean Jones and Artist-in-Residence and Pittsburgh native Jeff "Tain" Watts. I'll be there straight through until till the end, Monday night. Flying back the next morning.

This time, I'll have a laptop with me, so I'm hoping.....really hoping that I'll have some discipline and get some writing done in the mornings when I wake up. I have two assignments due for City Paper on the day I get back. One is a review that I might write tomorrow when I wake up before I leave. But of course there are more albums I'd like to review here. Plus there's the whole concept of gin-infused blog entries the night after each set of shows.

I've been off work all week to spend more time with the kid (who's between the end of summer camp and the start of school) and actually did a preliminary packing job last night! That's a first. Now I just have to figure out what CDs I'm taking with me and when I'll listen to them. (This sounds anal, but it's true because if I don't have it mapped out, I'll just end up listening to Charlie Parker the whole time.)

Speaking of the kid, yesterday I gave him a crash course in open chords on the guitar. He wanted to bang away on my old Kay acoustic so first I tuned it to an open D chord. He put me on the organ while he went crazy on the strings, so we had a raga going on. After a quick change to an open G (his favorite chord) I went back to an open E and showed him how to play bottleneck slide with an empty Bombay gin bottle. Don't tell CYS.