Living with Music is a collection of insightful, masterful jazz writings from the musician-turned-writer Ralph Ellison. To him jazz was like poetry, as he pointed out in “On Bird, Bird-Watching, and Jazz,” a piece on Charlie Parker: “Consider that at least as early as T.S. Eliot’s creation of a new aesthetic for poetry through the artful juxtapositioning of earlier styles, Louis Armstrong, way down the river in New Orleans, was working out a similar technique for jazz.”

In “Homage to Duke Ellington on His Birthday,” Ellison skillfully captured the essence of Ellington’s nickname in one sentence: “Somewhere during his childhood a friend had nicknamed Edward Kennedy Ellington ‘Duke,’ and he had proceeded to create for himself a kingdom of sound and rhythm that has remained impregnable to the fluctuations of fad and novelty, even the passing on of key members of his band.” Isn’t that just beautiful?

Ellison also had no problem speaking with eloquentness when disagreeing with another critic. In “Blue People,” Ellison corrected Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones) for making an erroneous differentiation of the blues: “Jones makes a distinction between classic and country blues, the one being entertainment and the other folklore. But the distinction is false. Classic blues were both entertainment and a form of folklore. When they were sung professionally in theaters, they were entertainment; when danced to in the form of recordings or used as a means of transmitting the traditional verses and their wisdom, they were folklore. There are levels of time and function involved here, and the blues which might be used in one place as entertainment (as gospel music is now being used in night clubs and on theater stages) might be put to a ritual use in another. Bessie Smith might have been a ‘blue queens’ to society at large, but within the tighter Negro community where the blues where part of a total way of life, and a major expression of an attitude toward life, she was a priestess, a celebrant who affirmed the values of the group and man’s ability to deal with chaos.”

If that kind of thorough comprehension doesn’t prove Ellison was living with the music, I don’t know what is. He truly meant every word when he said, “In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.”

From National Geographic‘s “The Third Sex“:

In Thailand the concept of three sexes is ancient. Creation tales from northern Thailand say that in the beginning, a man and woman had three children: a male, a female, and a third sex. Many Thai believe that to be born a ladyboy or ‘phuying praphet song’—literally translated, ‘second kind of woman’—is a result of one’s karma. Many believe that in their past lives, ladyboys were men who had many affairs with different women. It was their karmic destiny to be reincarnated as a woman trapped in a man’s body. Ladyboys believe that if they behave well they will be reborn as either a man or woman.

Thailand’s estimated 180,000 ladyboys might live as women, but legally they are considered men.

Check out Thailand’s Third Sex gallery by Kevin Tat.

A discussion on old-school hip-hop albums on Soundcheck with Brian Coleman (author of Check the Technique) and Mark Anthony Neal (associate professor of Black Popular Culture at Duke University).

With Ratatouille Pixar studios and director Brad Bird churned out yet another original, witty and delicious animated picture. The motif, “everyone can cook,” inspired Remy, a little rat who has a good taste, to make his own dishes instead of eating garbage food like the rest of his family. Since rats are forbidden from the kitchen, he teams up with Linguini, the garbage boy, to execute his recipe in an ingenious, amusing technique: hiding inside the boy’s white hat and pulling his hair like a puppeteer. The most dazzling moment is when dozens of rats in the kitchen not eating but preparing the food. So the next time you see roaches and rats near the pots and pans, kill the roaches not the rats, especially if they look as cute and clean as what Pixar has rendered them.

I am not even sure what to say about an article in Vietnamese about Nguyen Quang Huy, a three-year-old boy who was born with such an abnormal structure in his private part.

You have heard enough about the hype already, but this post is not about the iPhone, rather it is relating to it. If you drop by the Apple web site today, you’ll see nothing but the humongous visual treatment under the global navigation. The boxes below the fold even dropped out to focus mainly on the iPhone. How many corporate homepage do you see with this bold and simple approach? Take a look at the Mac Pro image on its secondary page. Ain’t that big enough for ya?

Jazz pianist Chick Corea teamed up with bluegrass banjoist Bela Fleck on the new album titled The Enchantment. Both musicians perform and share their collaborative process on NPR.

About Fleck: “Renowned as one of the world’s foremost banjo players, Fleck blends bluegrass, jazz, folk and even classical music into a sublimely realized whole.”

About Corea: “One of the most influential jazz and jazz fusion keyboardists of the modern era, Chick Corea has — over the course of a nearly 50-year career — developed a distinctive and original style that pushes the melodic and percussive capabilities of his instrument to the limit.”

If you’ve wanted the piece of the new hype but can’t get one, don’t feel so bad. Not everybody’s going to get one!

A chart from Econimist.com shows the street price of coca from Columbia ($2 a gram) to New Zealand ($714.30 a gram).

These disturbing and torturing images of Barbie are freaking me out. Not that I ever liked what the dolls were suppose to represent.