An introduction

I want to thank Robert for inviting me to join him on this blog. As he already noted, I am not a musician or a music expert in any form or fashion. However, I am a journalist which means that I write about things that I know little about for a living.

Seriously though, I am a music enthusiast and I love to discover new music (even if it is old music I had not heard before).
I credit Robert with first introducing me to jazz. Back when I was in college in the late '80s, he bought me the Bob James and David Sanborn collaboration "Double Vision" which is still one of my favorites. For the next several years I collected a lot of contemporary jazz. But it was not until the Ken Burns Jazz special came out on PBS a few years ago that I began to delve into classic jazz.

I imagine that Robert will focus initially on classical music while I will focus on jazz, but there is nothing that says we can't cross over. I like classical music too. My first classical album, and still my favorite, was Beethoven's Sixth Symphony - The Pastoral - which was part of the Funk and Wagnalls classic music series that my Mom bought for me when I was in junior high school.

To better understand how my musical tastes have developed over time, I traced my own musical odyssey a while back and posted the first part at my other blog. You can read it here.

It will be interesting to see where things go from here.