Wednesday, December 13, 2006

JAZZ MYSTERIES and THE HOLIDAYS

The newspaper interview I mentioned earlier appeared in The Press Enterprise on 7/28/2006. It was in "Spotlight: Discovering the Writer Within" and was titled "Professional Pursuit." It's a nice article. I emailed my thanks to the writer.

One of our sons is a professional jazz trumpeter, and while at Left Coast Crime Convention in 2004, I purchased some jazz mysteries by Bill Moody for him as gifts. Moody's jazz group played for one of the receptions. Each of his books is connected in some way to a famous jazz musician.

I bought Bird Lives! for both of us. The back blurb reads - "A string of murders hits the jazz community like a sour note. Its victims are those musicians who've traded the traditional sounds of the greats like Charlie "Bird" Parker for the newer, more marketable 'smooth' jazz. But 'Bird' lives on - at the expense, it seems, of a few unlucky transgressors."

Some of the books were out of print, and I couldn't locate The Sound of a Horn. Obviously, that horn is Chet Baker's...the perfect book for a trumpet playing son. Thinking of it again this year, I searched independent mystery bookstores when it wasn't on Amazon. I found it online at The Mystery Bookstore in Los Angeles (Westwood), where we held our launch for LAndmarked for Murder! Isn't that terrific? I sent them an email telling them how pleased I was to give them a little business when they'd been so cooperative with that project plus highlighting Sue Ann in January. Had a nice reply from them. I ordered three books from them.

We celebrate Christmas in our home. In contrast to G.B. Pool (LAndmarked for Murder: Just Like Old Times), who has several trees and uses 3,000 Santas, we only have one tree. We live in an area of So Cal that still has open space, so mid November we went to a nearby tree farm and tagged one. Today we brought it home wrapped in netting.

Before we went to the farm, we put out two sawhorses and filled a bucket with water. After we'd wrestled the tree out of the car, we laid it it on the ground while I used a high pressure nozzle to wash it off. It's important to keep the trunk dry as wet wood is almost impossible to cut. I always wear a raincoat for this process, and my husband wears gloves and old Dockers. (Well, actually, he wears more than gloves and pants.) With much grumbling, and a protest from my healed broken elbow, we lifted the dripping tree onto the sawhorses. I anchored while my husband sawed off three inches off the trunk. The idea behind this is that the sap seals the trunk if you wait too long with it out of water. So we make a fresh cut.

For the next step, we maneuvered it into the waiting bucket. There it will wait, leaning against a wall, until tomorrow when it'll be dry enough to bring into our living room.

It's time to go to physical therapy on my elbow. I can't straighten my arm all the way. How I decorate our tree will have to wait for the next blog.

Take care,

Dee Ann
www.deeannpalmer.com
Posted by Dee Ann Palmer 11:16 AM 0 Comments:

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