G rateful Vineyarders will long remember the dazzling musical high wire act performed so superbly last weekend by Peter Boak and the inspired Island Community Chorus in their thrilling Spring 2009 concert.
That proud twinkle in John Alaimo’s eye on the cover of his latest solo album does not deceive.
Called Songs for Three Seasons, the disc delivers a rich and textured display of a master mood painter on an enchanting and enriching spree. Mr. Alaimo affably invites us to share his whimsy, his nostalgia, an occasional flirtation with regret, all on a splendidly harmonic solo pianistic tour of nature’s three warmer seasons.
During college in 1940, while working as a summer cowhand on the family’s Northern California cattle ranch, Dave Brubeck asked his father’s permission to take a job playing jazz at a San Francisco night club. Confounded by the idea, his father shook his head and replied, “I can’t understand why you would want to spend time in a dark and noisy and smoky place, when you could be out here with me in the fresh air with beautiful country all around you.”
The ancient signatures on the yellow horsehide were hard to read. But when I first held that old baseball in my hands in the early 1950s, I had barely learned to spell my own name, let alone decipher the signatures of old Pittsburgh Pirates players. My grandmother Mimmie never commented on the relic, which she kept, oddly, in the upper right corner of her sewing machine table.
