Discovering ECM Records as a young musician and writer was such an awakening. In order to hear some of the people I was reading about in Bass Player Magazine I had to check out these kinds of records. It was not until I was living in Calgary and becoming a loyal customer of Recordland that […]
It belongs in the English curriculum of every senior high school in Canada. Leonard Cohen’s work appeared in my high school 9th grade English class. I was already studying his work and using his influence in the creative aspects of my attempts to write at that young age. One of the other poetry books in […]
Many readers will look at this photo and try to figure out what the words are. This very page sits to my right as I type this. The contents look like a Doctor’s prescription bill pad. They actually represent an outline for this very post. A few short days ago when I was working on […]
My first publishing credits were as a poet, where I appeared in three anthologies over the course of the same number of years with the Calgary Stroll of Poets. It was a nice trip down memory lane to pull these off the shelf and review the work that they published. They were interesting pieces of […]
Most writers and indeed many people would flip out just to possess even an ounce of Leonard Cohen’s confidence. Some would take having his confidence over having all of his writing talent. There are many nights that I would lie awake and read “Stranger Music” as it was my introduction to Cohen’s words […]
A few days ago I spun a great track from one of my bass heroes who happens to also be a terrific songwriter and guitar player. The song is a great piece of Canadiana called “That Kind of Blue”. The voice is Jay “Jimbo” Semko. Jay is the legendary bassist and songwriter of The Northern […]
Dann Alexander 