Friday, January 20, 2012

The Dirty Lowdown for January 2012

Lowdown

This year has not started out very well for me. To start with, I got a phone call on December 30th informing me that a very good friend had past away. Needless to say, that news took some of the Happy out of Happy New Years. Farewell Matthew, you’ll be missed.

Then on January 2nd during a routine doctors visit, my doctor du jour decided to remove what was thought to be a ganglion cyst in my right wrist. It turned out not to be so simple and for some undisclosed reason, my whole right arm swelled up to huge proportions before I even got out of the doctors office. I ended up admitted for 3 days while the doctors all stood around and scratched their heads and I kept the various labs busy running every test conceivable.

Eventually, it was decided that they didn’t need me to continue scratching their heads, and we had run out of labs and technicians to poke me and they sent me home with half the pharmacy. After another week in bed with morphine, blood thinners, steroids and weird dreams, I decided to rejoin the world.

So, here it is three weeks into the new year and I am starting to feel somewhat normal, or what passes for it in my world. I am shaking off the effects of the drugs and the major case of the blues and looking at my calendar for scheduled book reviews, music reviews and other commitments and wanting a Mulligan. I want to start over on 2012! It’ll take me until June to catch up. And I had such awesome plans for hitting the bricks running this year….

3-6-11_1419B-Edit Billy HuntFor instance, I am starting a new feature here on The Dirty Lowdown. A sort of celebrity book review feature. We are going to have Authors write a book review on any book of their choosing and publish it here. It started out to be a monthly feature, but I received such enthusiastic acceptance that we are going to be doing this at least twice per month. I have lined up such authors as Mark Terry, Jan Burke, LJ SellersEric Jerome Dickey, Ward Larsen, and Tom MacDonald and many more. This should be a very fun an informative feature. Look for the first review this weekend.

I’ve always thought that you have to look for the silver lining when things go wrong and the silver lining in my odyssey was that I caught up on some reading, even though I wasn’t able to stay awake long enough to write, or for that matter think about writing reviews. So, the silver lining is that in what is left of the month I’ll be reviewing H. Terrell Griffin’s Collateral Damage. Collateral Damage I loved this book, so look for the review in the next few days.

Terry Griffin's latest entry in the Matt Royal set-in-Florida mysteries is a perfect blend of old south, beach bum, funky character driven stories, the kind that made John D. MacDonald famous, only Griffin's tale tops the best with its unexpected blend of international intrigue. My hat is definitely off!

David Hagberg - New York Times bestselling author

 

 

I’ll also be reviewing the latest Charlie Hood Novel from T. Jefferson Parker, The Jaguar.

T. Jefferson Parker delivers a crime thriller that redefines the landscape of the cartel wars as an epic clash of good and evil!

Here’s the trailer:

“The Jaguar”

Also this month, I’ll be reviewing Ed Gorman’s great Sam McBain novels, The Day the Music Died and Wake Up Little Susie. Now available in one Kindle edition.These are set in a small Iowa town in the 50’s and are just marvelous. Sam McBain

I also have a lot of music I have to listen to and write about before the 1st of February when I go in the hospital for the scheduled Nerve Transposition Surgery, which will leave me left handed for a number of months. I have been learning Dragon Naturally Speaking, so that I can dictate blog entries and keep the book and music reviews coming….with any luck. It’s a very different thought process between writing and talking though, but we’ll see how it works.

Some of the music I hope to get to this month Bay Area Jazz Vocalist, Ed Reed’s Born To Be Blue, also on the jazz scene is the great Jack DeJohnette’s Sound Travels. We’ve also got  Mike Wofford & Holly Hofmann - Turn Signal, and on the pop/rock scene we have The Hit Men which is a group of musicians that played with Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons, Tommy James and the Shondells, The Critters, Rod Stewart and others. It’s a fun nostalgic album, and you can read about it here.

We’ve also got new releases from Sax-y lady, CandyDulfer, of the long awaited MOLLO MARTIN new album entitled "The Third Cage" featuring Dario Mollo and Tony Martin who first got together when the Italian guitar player/producer and composer needed the right singer after he had put together a new set of songs in the late 90's. The former Black Sabbath singer came about on a suggestion from producer Kit Woolven. Also, we’ve got Elephant Micah, aka Joseph O’Connell, one of the most prolific and criminally overlooked songwriters of our generation. O’Connell is self-releasing the new Elephant Micah record, Louder Than Thou. I’ll be givin’ ya the Dirty Lowdown on these and much more so stay tuned.

That’s the lowdown for January.

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