Today was another lovely day in Madrid. The sun was shining and there was a very light breeze. When the weather is nice in Madrid, the ideal Sunday is spent in the La Latina section of town where everyone meets to eat, drink, and loiter in the sun. I was supposed to meet up with Neska for lunch, but she spent Saturday night on the town with John Travolta, and I think that she was left only with a headache and no longer a fever.
So I decided to take the day into my own hands. I grabbed by iPod Shuffle — courtesy of FON — and ventured out to take a nice stroll through my neighborhood to the sounds of The Chico Hamilton Quintet with Eric Dolphy from the album The Original Ellington Suite. What a perfect paseo with Chico Hamilton’s chamber jazz accompanied by Eric Dolphy’s flute and bass clarinet — really wonderful.
I recently purchased this album right after writing a post about a sudden Eric Dolphy CD buying spree. I had continued to research more Dolphy performances and found this CD along with The Illinois Concert with a 23 year old Herbie Hancock on piano. Both CDs had been lost in storage somewhere and were recently found and published.
While I was taking my stroll I was also thinking about the lines from the book that I am now reading, Ports of Call (or Les Echelles du Levante in French) by Amin Maalouf:
Love can remain in tact, and so can passion. Month after month, year after year. Life is not so long that one can get tired of it.
I really liked that second sentence, “Life is not so long that one can get tired of it.” Anyways, I still have fifty pages left to see what happens now that my stroll is over.
Since I couldn’t find any songs from The Original Ellington Suite, I have embedded the next best combination, a song from Duke Ellington and John Coltrane.
Grave Error 