Jody Stecher & Kate Brislin

I first became consciously aware of neutral pitches in 1965 when I was playing guitar with Fred McDowell. (See my blog entry of June 6, 2026 ,“Where’s Your Gui-Tar, Man?” for details).  Fred lived in Northwest Mississippi in a spot…

The previous blog was a slog. A slog blog.  Maybe I should  delete it. I don’t want to post boring words.

I hope today’s blog post will be more engaging.

I remember looking through the LPs in a huge Paris…

When, in my first blog post,  I announced the topics I intended to write about, I received the most positive response about the topic of modal music and microtonal intonation. People want to read what I have to say about…

Spaghetti and meatballs, peaches and cream
Jody on a soapbox letting off steam

-from “Talking Cell Phone Blues” 

I’ve been thinking about how things change. Red and blue did not used to indicate the political right and left. Not so…

I have been mistakenly identified as the person who affixed the term “potatoes” to a rhythmic figure that is sometimes played at the start of fiddle tunes.  I did no such thing. No-siree-Bob.  Some years ago I wrote an article…

My third recording session at the start of 1970s was as part of an ensemble accompanying David Bromberg in successive concert situations at a venue in Philadelphia that modestly called itself “World Control Center” or maybe “World Control Studios”.   I…

After a summer in San Francisco, and an autumn on the Albion Ridge in Mendocino County, I found myself in Berkeley, California as the new year 1969 approached. In the year or two that followed I was involved in 3…

Some months after the Bobby Darin fiasco the 5-string banjo player Roger Sprung asked me to play mandolin on his second “Progressive Bluegrass” album.  Roger, aka “Old Sausage Fingers” was the first resident of New York City to work out…

Around the time of the Vanguard fiasco the pop star Bobby Darin heard my bluegrass band somewhere and got the idea that he could make a lot of money from owning the rights to an LP record of our music…

This is a long blog post.  Let me know if it is too long please.

I’ve been writing about my recordings with Kate as a stimulus to memory. Now I’m remembering my earliest recording experiences.  

There were two kinds: in…