Oh such a great weekend for live music it was! I'm completely recharged, regrooved, refined and required. I hope you'll like what I've got mixed into the musical gumbo of Just Plain Jazz this week - blasts from the past like Fletcher Henderson, Jimmie Lunceford and Louis Armstrong, solid straight ahead swingers like Kenny Dorham, Lee Morgan and Johnny Griffin, great vocalists like Kurt Elling & Cassandra Wilson, some hard to find tracks from Jim Hall with Italian pianist Enrico Pieranunzi, as well as the Cats & the Fiddle (!).

Just buying a new hat (thanks Mississippi Valley Blues Society!) would have made this Independence Day stand out, but add in a chance to hear the A.A.C.M.'s Great Black Music Ensemble in full flower in Davenport, hearing Sterling Plumpp read a "fresh" poem for Billy Boy Arnold ("I Wish You Would", "I Ain't Got You", harmonica on Bo Diddley's first recordings...), New Orleans band Bonerama covering Led Zeppelin's "The Ocean", John Scofield blazing into the night sky - well, it made me ever so grateful to these and so many other sung and unsung musicians who enrich our lives. If I can give back even a small fraction by sharing some of the music I love, I'm a lucky guy.