>>Yes, he's a superb trumpet player. His newest album A Tale of God's Will:Requiem for Katrina is positively brilliant. You may not like it as much as Wandering Moon or some of his other really harder bop stuff, but the emotions that come out of this album are intense.
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>>Only it's Terence. ;)
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>>Funny you mention that album...it was the track "In Time of Need" from the Katrina album that got me hooked on Terence. Generally I don't care slow ballads, but that track was brilliantly done.
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>>So I now have Katrina, Wandering Moon, and Bounce....three great albums.
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>>About a month ago I had a dream that I was in a Mexican restaurant in Atlanta, eating tacos, and waiting for Charlie Parker and Dizzie to come on stage and play. If I could live in one period of time other than this one, it'd be back in the day...
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>And hopefully catch the Bird on a night when he wasn't nodding out....
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>I recently read Eric Clapton's autobiography. He writes with striking candor about his addictions to drugs and alcohol. He says there was a period of his career -- the 1980s, basically -- when he was so impaired that his playing was not what it should have been. He felt like he was letting the audience and more so his fellow musicians down by not being able to give his best effort. In an interview elsewhere he was said that quitting drinking is his proudest accomplishment. As you might imagine, I found that inspiring.
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>Yes, I know lots of great music has been created under one influence or another. Clapton's own Layla album, Sgt. Pepper, and any number of jazz masterpieces come to mind. But I don't know that any of them could keep that up over the long term. At some point you suffer an impairment of your ability, if it doesn't kill you outright.

And the worst of it is that we'll never know how many promising musicians never reached their potential because they thought it was the snow that made Bird great. It was something that Bird always regretted, but he still couldn't stop himself.