AL BASILE’S TRIBUTE TO JAZZ Written by Keith "MuzikMan" Hannaleck
Contact: Al Basile Sweet Spot Records PO Box 4723 Rumford, RI 02916 Phone & Fax: 401-438-7431 E Mail: basile@albasile.com Website: http://www.albasile.comRumford, RI--March 24, 2005--Al Basile has a range of influences including Frank Sinatra, Sam Cooke, Marvin Gaye, Nat Cole, Solomon Burke, Muddy Waters, and Lonnie Johnson. However, it all started for him when he heard "All or Nothing at All" by Sinatra with Harry James orchestra on a 78 that his mother had around house. Several decades later, a culmination of events coupled with experiences and influences evolved and Basile recorded jazz album Red Breath. He was not interested in doing typical covers or a bland contemporary recording. Something different and memorable was in order. Tireless research of favorite Vernon Duke and Rodgers and Hart compositions that were virtually unknown but just right, yielded songs selected for album. Although it is a departure from his blues work released in past with Duke Robillard and Roomful of Blues and several solo albums, you will recognize Basile’s unique stamp on music.
| | I Come From the Movie Planet, How About You?Written by Jesse S. Somer
When people ask me where I am from I often reply jokingly, “I’m from Movie Planet.’ That’s what I reckon people from other planets would call us here on Earth. How many movies have I watched in my life? How many hours have I sat in front of a small or big screen watching a story unfold, acted out by my fellow species? The answer is almost inconceivable. We worship film as an arena to learn, dream, escape, and even vicariously live our lives from. We pay actors millions of dollars, more than doctors as well as nearly all rest of us, and a lot of us see them as superhuman beings that are a step above rest in our perceived realm of mundane normality that we have constructed our lives in. A lot of time result of this belief structure causes a lot of pain for these ‘famous’ souls who would rather just live a normal life outside their work. The hounding paparazzi definitely don’t make actors feel superhuman!Look, I like watching movies a lot, maybe even more than ‘average person’, I just wonder about relationship we have with this imagined reality we so often connect with. We choose to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on some movies like ‘Independence Day’ that end up being bombs in box office, while there are billions of people in true reality on Earth who have nothing to eat. It seems like madness if you look at it from that angle. Do we watch these visions of ‘ourselves’ doing things so that we don’t have to think about what hard work we have to do in our real lives? Even as I sit here on a Friday afternoon I am wondering if I should grab a DVD tonight to watch as an attempt to relax at home after a pretty hard working week. The funny thing is if I grab ‘wrong’ type of movie, I may end up more stressed out than I am right now! So, am I addicted to these things? Are we all? I’ll let you think about it. To focus on positive side of things, we must realize that we can learn so much from our experiences with movies. We wouldn’t have become obsessed over nothing, now would we? I myself learn a lot and get to experience many emotions during engrossing visual experience. I mean, I do have a big enough range of feelings in my real life, but it’s kind of cool being able to be in ‘The Matrix’ (maybe we already are?), or to be ‘Spiderman’ for a day, or maybe live in a weird world like “Charlie and Chocolate Factory’ for a few hours.
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