Friday Varia and Quick Hits

Not only is the snow melting, but it’s beginning to dry out. This offers hope for a smooth transition from “mud” to “dust” season here in North Dakotaland. With temperatures scheduled for the 50s tomorrow afternoon (I’ll believe it when I see it) there is even a slim chance that I can run a bit outside.

This is a good sports weekend with the Japanese GP at Suzuka, which is one of my favorite tracks. The Phillies season started yesterday with a bang and continues over the weekend. The Sixers continue their improbably run at the 6th seed in the East, the NCAA tournament continues and the NASCAR circus is at Martinsville. Finally, I’m more than intrigued by the Moses Itauma v. Jermaine Franklin heavyweight fight this Saturday. 

This weekend is about reading and some class prep (and some grading!).

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Decentralizing Data (and Publishing)

This past week I’ve been thinking more and more about issues of centralization and decentralization in terms of digital infrastructure. My thinking about these things are inchoate. Obviously, some of it stems from conversations about physical nodes in networks such as data centers, anxieties about the corporate organization of our online and interconnected digital world, and the role of institutions in mediating the dissemination of knowledge and information.

Eric and Sarah Kansa’s recent article, “Open Context in a Changing Context: Data Publishing, Interoperability and Governance” in Internet Archaeology, prompted me to think about the relationship between institutions and knowledge making in archaeology. The article is good and worth reading for all sorts of insights into how Open Context works. One point that stood out to me, however, was that unlike many other data archiving and publishing services (and I deliberately conflate the two even as I understand the former requires more substantial infrastructure than the latter), Open Context does not have an affiliation with a pre-existing institution such as a federal agency or a university. The Kansas argue that this reflects the capital intensive requirements of long term data preservation (which, incidentally, parallels the development of libraries), but also represents a vulnerability especially for those repositories the require federal or state funds for maintenance. Open Context, in contrast, relies on a range of different repositories as backstops for its data publishing with an eye toward ensuring that even amid the increasing vagaries of institutional commitments and priorities, the publish data remains persistent. 

(By the way, you should go and read this article on its own merits which go far beyond my slightly incomprehensible rambling here. I’ve had the pleasure of working with Eric and Sarah Kansa on and off for most of the 20-odd years that Open Context has been thing. I’ve also published data with them from the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey and our two projects at Pyla–Koutsopetria on Cyprus). 

This flexible and recentered approach to data publishing (rather than the tendency toward centralized data archiving) parallels their broader approach to data. Rather than imposing a standardize template on data that Open Context publishes, they publish archaeological data according the schemes that the project itself defines and presents. This means that comparisons across datasets published by different projects is more complicated and requires us to manage fuzzy alignments to produce meaning. This is a slow process in that it mitigates against the efficiencies promoted by standardized schemas. It also divests itself of any authority inherent a centralized schema. 

I’ve been thinking about this stuff against some recent works on digital infrastructure. Britt Paris’s recent book, Radical Infrastructure, which I’ve only read part of, considers the limits and challenges of our digital infrastructure and its shadowy collusion with the interests of the state and capital. Of course, these interests may not align with the interests of the users and, in fact, may run strongly counter to users political, economic, or social commitments.

Paris sites work like David Nemer’s Technology of the Oppressed (2022), which considers the ways that people living in Brazil’s favela communities created networks using improvised methods. I’ve only skimmed this book so far, but it clearly is something that I need to read more carefully.

The point of my post today is to start to think a bit about how institutions mediate the interface between physical infrastructure (such as servers, cables, switches and so on) and intellectual infrastructure (ontologies, data structures, and other tools). Outfits like Open Context are interesting because they demonstrate how standing even slightly outside of these institutions gives them a position where they can offer a distinct perspective (and an implicit critique) on their operations. 

This is meaningful to me, in part, because I’ve been thinking about how publishing can work in this way as well. Presses (cough… like The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota) that operate on the margins of institutions (as I’ve argued before, I like to think of my press as cultivating the undercommons) or completely free from connections may occupy positions of critical importance. In particular, I wonder whether scholarly and learned societies could similarly work to support practices and structures that offer critical resistance to standardization imposed by capital, efficiency, and, state authority. Of course, I understand that we live in a deeply interconnected world and learned societies are not more free from the entanglements of capital, the state, and the demands for efficiency and standards. That said, Open Context offers us a glimpse of how even within systems that are inhospitable to the kind of engaged, critical, and even inefficient way of presenting data and building knowledge, distinct and creative ways forward are possible.

Writing Wednesday: Revising with Purpose

I submitted my latest book manuscript on oil, photography, archaeology, and The Bakken when I wasn’t entirely sure what I was doing. In part, I was hoping some reviews would help me focus a bit (or cut away the cruft from my key points making the book more on point) and tighten up my work. 

As so often happens, the break from the manuscript, the reviewers notes, and some additional reading has led me to make some key revisions. I wrote a bit about what I was planning to do last week. Some of them are subtle, but there are a few that stand out. 

Here are three new paragraphs that I think made my book stronger.

The first paragraph is the first one in the book: 

This book presents photographs from a workforce housing site in the North Dakota’s Bakken oil patch as an archaeology of the contemporary world. These photographs embody a contemporary encounter with an oil boom and the workers who came to this isolated region to drill, frack, move, and consume oil. Despite my efforts, the photographs resisted subordination to a narrative structure and refused to be reduced to evidence. Instead, these images taught me to see the contemporary world as irreducible fragments that endure without resolving into narrative. The rest of this book explains why this matters.

The next two paragraphs come from deep in the manuscript and do some work to integrate Byung-Chul Han into my argument. These are pretty important paragraphs that too a long time to write:

Less influential on archaeology, but perhaps as important, is the work of Byung-Chul Han who argues that the modern world saw the collapse of narrative. Teleology, rhythms, stories of progress, have collapsed under the endless demands of capital. Hillary Orange’s work on “daycentrism” and artificial lighting in the post-medieval Europe demonstrates that even the diurnal rhythm of light and darkness succumbed to the relentless pressures of capital and, in the 20th century, petromodernity (Orange 2018). In the Bakken, boom time both anticipated the bust, but also denied it. Among residents of the oil patch, my colleagues and I recognized this denial and termed it “Bakktimism” (Caraher et al. 2020: 300). Bakktimism represented the optimism that the boom time would continue indefinitely into the future avoiding the cyclical encounter with the bust. At the same time, Bakktimism also allowed for the frenetic pace of boom time to continue unabated into the future. It denied the illusory relief of the bust, which simply marked the relocation of capital to the next boom, and anticipated the future where the boom continues indefinitely. For Han, this hope for an unending boom reveals our incapacity to even imagine narratives any longer much less personalize them. We cannot see a future where labor creates a different world. Instead, the world is just more of the same (even a bust anticipates the next boom). Han, perhaps drawing on Benjamin’s essay “The Storyteller” (1936), sees modern time without direction or pattern as dyschronic, fragmented, isolated, and isolating. This leads to our expansive concept of the contemporary because past and the present intermingle indiscriminately as in the Parisian Arcades or on the surface of the ground. There is no direction, rhythm, structure, or plot to give it order.

Here’s the other:

Rather late in my work on this manuscript, I encountered the work of Byung-Chul Han (Ribeiro 2025). Han’s book The Scent of Time (2009/2017) argued that with the demise of narrative we need to find new ways of engaging with fragments. Han, loosely, although not explicitly, following Benjamin, by arguing that the modern world no longer has narratives that create temporal direction. With modernity, the pilgrim whose goal was the transformational impact of the journey gave way to the tourist for whom the journey itself is an inconvenience that delayed the consumption of the destination. As a result, contemporary individuals find themselves working with no goal and time to “whizz” about untethered from any sense of teleology, rhythm, or structure. The greatest risk, for Han, is that our quest to bring order to this senseless whizzing of time and experiences pushes us into the waiting arms of machines. The time of machines divides experience between work and recovery and the absence of any narrative to produce goals reduced humans to ”animal laborians.” The blurring of the division between vehicles designed for “recreation” and those occupied by laborers in man camps is symptomatic of the mechanization of experience. Even time spent not laboring serves merely to provide us more productivity. This productivity does not move forward toward any kind of goal. This evokes Michael Roller’s description of “machanic consumerism” among Pennsylvania coal miners living in 20th century company towns. Both production and consumption served to integrate workers into a system of alienated labor.

The stochastic character of resource booms amplifies Han’s concept of ”dyschronicty” which he uses to describe the whizzing, fragmented, and atomized time. After all, the Bakken boom is merely one of a number of booms that happen episodically around the world and relentless draw on capital and labor until the next boom occurs. Acquiescing to these work rhythms offers no escape because there is no goal and no end. Moreover, any effort to restore narrative in the present is doomed to collapse under the contradictory forces of contemporary existence. This is why the narratives produced from archaeological work, with its industrial organization, fragmentation, and photography, are safely circumscribed in the past. It is just as well. The contemporary — and the archaeology of the contemporary — is incapable of producing narratives because the contemporary resists diachronicity whether in Benjamin’s Parisian Arcades, Roller’s company towns, or Dawdy’s New Orleans.

Two for Tuesday: Ginsberg and Cavafy

This week is the annual UND Writers Conference. It should be a good show and is headlined by George Saunders. I hope to be able to make it to a few sessions.

The writers conference week always nudges me to read more fiction, more literature, and more criticism. It is all too easy for me to race around reading stuff that doesn’t matter: academic ephemera, low-stakes assignments, routine emails, box scores. I spend too little time reading writing of thought and of substance.

It’s not that I don’t try.

This week, I’ve been enjoying Allen Ginsberg in two registers. First, I’ve been reading a newly published collection of Ginsberg’s lectures at the Naropa Institute’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics titled AH!MERICA. The lectures were edited Sebastian Clark and published by Isolarii in their remarkable little book series. The lectures center loosely on Ginsberg’s reading of Blake. As someone who is less familiar with Blake than the average Naropa student, much of what he says, I have to take at face value.

More important (and familiar to me) is Ginsberg’s comments on reading poetry. “This is why when I read a page of someone’s poems, I look for minutiae… So I find myself reading vast reams of poetry with my eye running down the page” (36-37). He then goes on to discuss William Carlos Williams’s poetry of the ordinary. Williams’s effort to understand his entire house a poetics of domesticity. Ginsberg notes details in “The Young Housewife” and exclaims “And the imaginary…is all contained in the fish-man!” (46-47).

I’m reading Ginsberg’s The Fall of America (1973). And letting “my eye run down the page.” The poems, among other things, offers vivid and detailed travelogue as Ginsberg drives across the US reading roadside signs, hitch hikers, fragments of the radio, truck stops, warehouses, the Vietnam War, and details…

Monosnap The Fall of America_ Poems of These States, 1965–1971 -- Allen Ginsberg -- The Pocket poets series,, San Francisco, USA, Califo… 2026-03-23 14-19-04.

I’ve been taking my cameras with me on walks. Most of the time I feel silly. I’m looking at the same stuff over and over again thinking that maybe the light will change or I’ll notice a new angle. I take the same photos over and over. Maybe I need to go back to Williams and spend more time with Ginsberg when I worry that I’m seeing the same things and convince myself that beauty is in the minutiae.

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Yesterday morning, very early, I read Langdon Hammer’s reflection on biographies of Cavafy in the Yale Review. He seems to be thinking about Gregory Jusdanis and Peter Jeffreys recent work, Constantine Cavafy: A New Biography. The essay took me back to my first Greek class which was taught by Avi Sharon’s who published an award winning translation of Cavafy. I had Modern Greek with Gregory Jusdanis at Ohio State. Reading Sharon’s translation of Cavafy’s “Caesarion” I recognized something:

When I managed to find the date in question,
I’d have put the book aside had a brief mention
of King Caesarion, an insignificant note really,
not suddenly caught my eye…

The insignificant notes, the minutiae, or, in an anecdote from Hammer’s review:

Once, when a protégé grew impatient with his discussion of the fine points of metrical analysis and said, “Certainly, maître, all of these are details,” Cavafy snapped: “What else is art but details?”

Maybe that’s what I’m after somehow with my work in the Bakken, with my preoccupation with fragments, and with my endless photographing of the same things. It’s not art, I concede that very quickly, and it certainly isn’t poetry, but the minutiae matter on their own. 

Postscript: As usual Noah Kaye seems to be ahead of me, sometime yesterday he posted on Takis Kayalis’s recent book Cavafy’s Hellenistic Antiquities: History, Archaeology, Empire (2024) which includes a chapter on Cavafy’s “Caesarion.” I’m reading that chapter this morning with my coffee. 

Music Monday: Miles, Wilkins and Knuffke

I spent big chunks of time typesetting on the weekend, which meant that I had time to enjoy some music (as well as various policy mandated training videos).

Last weekend, I listened to Miles Davis’s classic, Kind of Blue (1959). Like most people, I love the album (and I’m quite partial to the mono mix; I had long assumed that this was made from the mono microphones, but the 21st century mono releases were apparently mixed from the stereo mics). Listening to Miles’s discography more or less in order also helped me appreciate how Columbia Record ensured that it would stand apart by bracketing it between the Gil Evans produced Porgy and Bess (1958) and Sketches of Spain (1960). I don’t love Progy and Bess but I adore Sketches of Spain. The appearance of these two albums rather than another album based on small ensemble studio work undoubtedly gave Kind of Blue space to breathe.

1961 saw the release of Someday My Prince Will Come (1961) which was a sextet recording and some of the last to feature John Coltrane and Philly Joe Jones on drums. Instead, Hank Mobley makes a cameo on tenor sax. In 1963, the transition from the 1950s group to his second great group was complete. Seven Steps to Heaven is another document of that transition and combines studio guys — Victor Feldman on piano and Frank Butler on drums on some tracks — with the first appearance of Tony Williams and Herbie Hancock. Ron Carter and George Coleman play throughout.

Two other new albums came out this weekend that brought me joy and will find their way into my rotation. First, Immanuel Wilkins Quartet Live at the Village Vanguard (Vol. 1). I don’t love the entire album, but I feel like it is authentic even the droning and looping eternal where Wilkins’s tone comes to the fore:

A more surprising discovery is Kurt Knuffke’s album Brother (2026) with violinist Charlie Burnham and bassist Thommy Andersson. I’ve not listened to much of Knuffke’s trio work with Thommy Andersson, but I liked this album. Knuffke’s cornet is a lovely balance to Burnham’s violin.  

Friday Varia and Quick Hits

Late winter days in Grand Forks hint at hope, but are filled with false promises. Today we’ll see the upper 40s and there’s promise of a whole week with highs above freezing. While our entire world feels like its wet, muddy, and icy, there is hope.

The weekend is all about NCAA basketball. I don’t really have a rooting interest in this year’s tournament; I suppose I’ll pull for the two A10 teams: VCU and St. Louis. The Cup guys are at Darlington which is always fun. The Ammo Williams – Carlos Adames fight on Saturday night is just short of must-see TV, but will be interesting.

We’re entering the home stretch of the semester and while my summer travel plans remain unclear, I’m starting to think about long bike rides and warm summer days. And, I’m always thinking of quick hits and varia:

Typesetting

Over the last week or so, I’ve been playing around with some page designs for a book project set to come out later this spring. The book is a multi-genre memoir that includes essays, poetry, and writing with a distinctly spiritual cast. The manuscript was brought to me by Paul Worley. Paul noted that its blend of Americana, spirituality, and plainspokenness evoked the Beat generation, and I tend to agree with him. That said, the book isn’t derivative. It has a kind of genuine character that is untamed, pure, and true.

Finding a mise-en-page that will reflect the character of the book has proven a bit challenging. I wanted to make the pages unique and distinctive, but also familiar. I’m going with a 5 x 8 book size so the text block will narrow and well suited for poetry. At the same time, I want the font generous and plenty of room for white space. 

I got to thinking about Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Pocket Poet volumes. The austerity of the covers, the abundant use of white space, and the generous leading (the space between the lines). 

Here’s a page of Ginsberg’s The Fall of America: Poems of These States, 1965–1971 (1972). 

Monosnap The Fall of America_ Poems of These States, 1965–1971 -- Allen Ginsberg -- The Pocket poets series,, San Francisco, USA, Califo… 2026-03-18 05-39-55.

I took that as inspiration and adapted it to the particular book and contemporary sensibilities. I went with larger margins and a narrower text block. 11 point Miller Text for the main body with 16 point leading. The title is Acumin semibold in 16 point. The date is simply Miller Text italics.

Monosnap Acumin_Miller_11-16_Justified.pdf 2026-03-18 05-58-39.

I shared some variations of this page with different fonts and leading with my students in our Practicum in Writing, Editing, and Publishing and they helped guide this mise-en-page into being. This weekend, I’ll be making a book!

Writing Wednesday: Revisions to my Book

The last couple of weeks have been focused on revising my archaeology, oil, and photography book. At some point, I’ll need to settle on a proper title, but for now the need for a complete and revised manuscript seems to trump other issues.

Revising doesn’t do much for the old “Writing Wednesday” blog post, but it is vital aspect of my writing process and it seems worth sharing. I’ve tentatively told my press that I will have a complete manuscript ready for copyediting done by May 1. This seems optimistic, but not impossible.

To get this done, I’ve identified three writing tasks.

Prelude

One of the challenges of this book is that it was meant to be an introduction to the photographs. Over time, however, it has become something else. That means, ironically, what was designed to be an introduction now needs an introduction. The manuscript has crept closer to a “minigraph” than anything else, I realize that I need an introduction that both establishes the key theoretical and historical touchstones for my book and also makes clear my work’s contribution.

This means foregrounding the key works that informed my perspective in archaeological photography (Leslie McFadyen and Dan Hicks, Yannis Hamilakis and Fotis Ifantidis, and Michael Shanks), in the study of oil (Stephanie LeMenager, Timothy Mitchell, and Imre Szeman), in archaeology of the contemporary world (Chris Witmore, Alfredo González-Ruibal, and Shannon Dawdy) as well as broader theorists (Timothy Morton, Benjamin, Han, Nora Goldschmidt). All I need to do here is point forward to the book itself. 

The larger task and one that I’ve shied away from is explaining how my work contributes to (gestures wildly) some field (mainly, probably, archaeology of the contemporary world). I can actually hear my old buddy Dimitri Nakassis asking me: “what question is your work answering?” And, of course, imaginary Dimitri is right, and I probably can’t quite answer that. This is mostly because my work is “discursive” to a fault, but I do think I can suggest that my work presents not just a distinct perspective on archaeological photography (on that might be useful) but also gives the reader the photos themselves. 

Revisions

So far, I’ve revised the first three parts of the book (and I’ve not re-written the prelude that I described above), and I’ve saved the most complicated section for last. Section 4 is titled “Photography and Archaeology of the Contemporary World,” and it traces the relationship between photography, archaeology, fragmentation, and narrative. This is where I need to fold Byung-Chul Han into my work more fully. His work will help me not only explain why the contemporary lacks a narrative (and can’t be made to produce or conform to a narrative), but also how the reader should engage with these fragments. One of my reviewers argued that fragments have no meaning. I think Han would disagree (or at least say that if photographs constitute fragments, they are far from meaningless). In fact, I think Han would argue that our inability to make sense of fragments is a product of both the collapse of narrative and our reluctance to dwell in a fragment, to linger, and to find meaning from the fragment itself.

It also directs the reader to the photographs in the book and the archive that they represent. 

Appendix

The biggest lift of my current revisions is writing the appendix that I casually outlined in my post last Wednesday. The appendix will basically outline the basic conclusions from our work in the Bakken. It’ll be around 5000 words, summative and organized across three scales: the landscape, the camp, and the unit. Each section will include select case studies.  

Two Thing Tuesday: The Archive and Watts’ Blindsight

I’ve continued to think about AI over the last few months and especially the role of generative AI and large language models. Here are two slightly unhinged thoughts about it as a “Two Thing Tuesday”:

Thing the First

Historians are fascinated by archives and they often observe that historical discoveries (e.g. opportunities for knowledge making) occur not because the well-organized structure of the archive, but despite it. Accidental discoveries — like those described by Arlette Farge, Robert Darnton, and Carlo Ginzburg — shape our encounters with archival collections. These discoveries come about not because the careful organization of the archivists anticipate the questions of historians, but because historians can make distinct connections on their own that often belie the structure of the archive itself. 

As we become more and more familiar with the generative AI, we can’t help but notice the sometimes random associations of texts and ideas. At their worst, they manifest as hallucinations where names, ideas, places, and arguments belch forth as hopelessly garbled references or descriptions. Recently certain kinds of scholars have reveled in showing off historically and geographically inaccurate maps on social media demonstrating that they are smarter than generative AI because they know where Bremen is. What’s more interesting, of course, is that these maps represent wildly speculative geographies not generated from whole cloth, but algorithmically assembled from the massive archive underpinning the large language model. In other words, these maps — like hallucinated citations — are wrong because the algorithm has engaged incorrectly with the archive. 

This misengagement with the archive is familiar to most of us as historians (or archaeologists). It’s not uncommon for us to encounter texts or artifacts that lead us to tell a story, but as our assemblage of texts or material expands, we understand that story to be incomplete or even inaccurate. Archaeological notebooks are fully of what we might call hallucinations that dissipate as we read. Our alarm at the propensity of generative AIs to hallucinate is not so much because these are wrong, but because they are uncanny: they look right. Of course, this is always the risk of any engagement with any archive. 

What is more remarkable to me is not that generative AIs can produce bizarre hallucinations (I’ve worked too much with archaeological notebooks to be surprised when something looks right but, in fact, isn’t), but that it can genuinely find connections across the archive that we might not expect. This is largely because the generative AI can constantly adapts the structure of its archive. On the one hand, this is frustrating because it seems to undermine the very idea of an archive as stable and committed to preservation or at least consistency. On the other hand, this is brilliant because we can compel the archival organization to adapt to our inquiries, at least to a certain extent.

Noah Kaye, a friend and frequent commentator on my blog, noted that AIs are at their most spectacular when they find connections that surprise us even in the speculative geography or the hallucinated citations. These products reveal the contingency of the archive itself and the allusive and elusive nature of its shifting organization. 

Thing the Second

I read Peter Watts’ novel Blindsight (2006) this weekend on the recommendation of a colleague. Without spoiling it, it is a first-contact novel where a ship full of modified humans encounter an alien form that calls into question their notions of sentience and even life itself. The crew includes an individual with a partitioned mind that allows for multiple individuals, an individual whose capacities for vision, hearing, and dexterity have been massively expanded through prosthetic forms, a military officer, an observer whose job is to synthesize the experiences and report them back to Earth, and … a vampire. The ship, the Theseus, itself is controlled by an AI who communicates almost exclusively with the reclusive vampire who is the nominal (?) commander of the mission.

Without getting too far into the weeds (and most of the book has a distinctly weedy quality to it), the encounter with alien forms on their ship, the Rorschach, leads the crew of the Theseus to explore how their own forms of sentience shape their ability to apprehend and ultimately engage with the world. Whether the aliens ever qualify as sentient by human standard remains unclear. They certain learn from their environment and by the end of the novel our perform humans at certain things. The critique offered here is not subtle and remains timely. 

Blindsight anticipated the contemporary discussion of sentience and consciousness in relation to various forms of generative and agential AI. More than that, it reminds us that as we try to define what AI is, we invariably also define ourselves. Part of the genius of Blindsight is that the crew all negotiates various situations that in our contemporary we might consider “disabilities” (and here I’m drawing on my conversations with my colleague). Historically these disabilities — from multiple personalities to the reliance on prosthetics to the vampire’s vulnerability to right angles — have defined individuals as “less than” fully human. Peter Watts’s Blindsight suggests alternately that consciousness is what makes us human (and it was not compromised by disabilities) but also that our reliance on consciousness is a rather less efficient way to live. By the end of the novel, it’s become pure metaphor: in the final scenes, the ships AI devises a plan to dispatch the lobotomized narrator to Earth to tell the tragic story. It reduces the intriguing ambiguity of the narrative to a biological metaphor. Our “blindsight” (that is the ability of the unconscious brainstem to process even complex inputs like vision) protects our consciousness. The ship’s AI protects its more fragile, sentimental, and self-destructive occupants. There are shades of Iain Banks here. 

Music Monday: Shabaka, Walter Smith, and Woody Shaw

This weekend, I enjoyed some new and not so new music. Readers of this blog know that I very much enjoy the exciting music produced by the London jazz scene. I’m particularly fond of the Shabaka Hutchings work — from his more raucous performances with Sons of Kemet to his quieter more introspective flute work. Like many people, I was intrigued by his decision to put down the saxophone and focus on flute and even more curious when he released a solo album featuring programing, saxophone, flute, and clarinet titled Of the Earth (2026).

It’s good. Check it out here:

I also really enjoyed Walter Smith III’s Twio Vol. 2 (2026) with Joe Sander on bass and Kendrick Scott on drums. There’s something old school about Smith’s saxophone and the slight airiness in his tone that I find deeply endearing. There’s nothing out there or particularly adventurous about this album, but I have enjoyed it.

Finally, I was blown away by Canadian bassist Neil Swainson’s album 49th Parallel. Recorded in 1987, Swainson plays with Woody Shaw on trumpet, Joe Henderson on sax, Gary Williamson on piano, and Jerry Fuller on drums. It’s Shaw’s last studio recording and he is in great form (despite his declining health). Henderson sounds incredible as well and when they play against each other, it is genuinely special. It’s well worth hearing.