Sunday in the park with Houston

This was a wonderful Sunday for music. I went to Jazz at the Albright-Knox and heard Houston Person. A saxophonist I love!

That is the great man in the picture up above. As I wrote in my review in The Buffalo News, he kind of whispers into that saxophone.



Another highlight for music was that at church today we got to sing a great old chestnut nobody ever gets to sing. It is "Daily, Daily Sing to Mary."

This hymn is so old and out of fashion that I never sang it growing up and I do not know the words. I have to follow along. It was always looked on as being out of date. My dad told me that when he was a boy they used to abbreviate it laughingly as "Da, Da, Sing to Ma."

But it is a beautiful melody.



 It is hard to find a recording because if you look for it on YouTube most people use the old German hymn tune "Maria zu lieben," which is equally beautiful ....

  .

... but is not the hymn I am looking for.

Another problem is it is hard to find any Catholic hymn recording that does not sound kitschy or weird. A lot of the time you start to listen and you hear some guitar chords and go ... uh uh. We have that big problem in the Catholic Church with bad music directors. I was one of them for a long time, so I am not throwing stones, but it is a problem, is all I am saying.

Ha, ha! I remember someone asking me once if I had heard, I don't know, "Table of Plenty," something like that.

I said: "Heard it? I've played it!"

Not only that, but even worse, I've played it on a piano!

And sung it into a microphone!

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, as Pennario used to say.

Back to my Sunday. I ended it at my friend Gary's house because it is his birthday, not that we need any excuse to go over to Gary's. The great cabaret artist Guy Boleri played the piano and because it was Gary's birthday we were able to use that as leverage to get Guy to do "Mad Dogs and Englishmen Go Out in the Noonday Sun." And Gary had garlic wine. But that is another story for another day.

How is Monday going to top all this?

I will have to figure out something!