Apologies for being somewhat slack on the blogging front these last few weeks. Exciting activities among the family of musicians I've been working with the past few years have kept me away from computers more than usual. I spent much of the last week hanging out in the American South -- a part of the country I rarely get to see -- on the occasion of Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Tennessee.

If you know nothing about Black Mountain College, where the photo below was taken, start here. Its teaching ranks were populated not by academics but practitioners. Among those who taught there during its brief, 24-year lifespan were Josef and Anni Albers, Alfred Kazin, John Cage, Harry Callahan, Robert Creeley, Merce Cunningham, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Walter Gropius, Franz Kline, Charles Olson, Aaron Siskind, and Robert Motherwell. (I'll let you Google the unfamiliar names.)