Tax Refund!

I have no idea what the Tea Baggers are belly-aching about. The federal income tax was lowered last year for 95 percent of Americans. I certainly got a larger refund than expected. That gave me the excuse to get this deluxe Bill Evans box set containing all ten of his Riverside albums plus a Cannonball Adderly album on which Evans played. These are 45 rpm audiophile pressings and among the best sounding records I have ever heard. Of course, the music is sublime. Evans is the most elegant of jazz pianists; he never seems to take a false step.

Here are a couple choice Evans quotes from the booklet included in the box set:

"Discipline and freedom have to mix in a very sensitive way. . . . I believe all music is romantic, but if it gets schmaltzy, romanticism is disturbing. On the other hand, romanticism handled with discipline is the most beautiful kind of beauty."

"My creed for art in general is that it should enrich the soul: it should teach spiritually by showing a person a portion of himself that he would not discover otherwise. It's easy to rediscover a part of yourself, but through art you can be shown a part of yourself you never knew existed. That's the real mission of art. The artist has to find something within himself that is universal, and which he can put into terms that are communicable to other people. The magic of it is that art can communicate this to a person without his realizing it. Enrichment, that's the function of music."

Everybody digs Bill Evans.