This eagerly anticipated installment of the one-and-only Matador Playlist blogg represents an excursion into unexplored and potentially exciting terrain, Gentle Reader(s): Live (sort of) blogiating from the 58th Annual Grammy Awards, presented on the Tiffany Network, CBS, this very evening. The Grammys are usually held on a Sunday but considering that yesterday was both Valentine's Day and the night that new episodes of Downton Abbey air, the brain trust behind the primo music awards ceremony decided not to compete with the distractions of unbridled shagging that Downton Abbey inevitably inspires and put the Grammys off to the following night. The Dowager Countess of Grantham would doubtlessly approve.   Okay, here we go.

Ah, dear and Gentle Reader(s), I am returned from an extended hiatus from the posting of ruminations and lists of play upon these pages. The reasons for this extended silencio are various and sundry, but included amongst them are a) travel, b) more travel, c) distraction, d) physical malady, and e) (most dreadfully) f) deficit of inspiration. The travel is not a problem but whenever I think I'm going to get some writing done on the road I typically find that I am sorely mistooked. That's where the distraction comes into it—too much other stuffe to do and think about. The holidays snuck into the mix somewhere around the 25th of December as they are wont to do, and upon that very selfsame evening, right smack in the middle of Birthday o' Jebus observations, a rather dreadful throbbing began to manifest itself in the region of an upper right pre-molar, the lower portion of which had decided to bust a move for the Great Outdoors back in September (quite possibly inspired by a fairly dull Keith Richards documentary I had been watching on Netflix). The throb evolved into a mindbendingly dreadful pain that had Your Humble Narrator stumbling and mumbling about in a humble little mumble circle in his living room, groaning in agony—a state of affairs that continued intermittently throughout Jebus Birthday weekend. Timing, as is oft noted, is everything, and in this case the timing could scarcely have been worse. I survived till Monday when good Doctor Doug Reid was able to extract the offending article with dispatch, ending my holiday weekendus horribilis. It is said that if it don't kill you it makes you stronger and I am feeling quite strong at the moment.

Gentle Reader(s), since the last installment of this weekly-ish report from the trenches of Santa Fe musical subterranea I have once again ventured to and from the land of my birth, the city that puts the 'Id' into 'Humid,' New Orleans. The day before my impending departure I woke to the sad news that a true titan of the city's music scene—the great Allen Toussaint—had passed away suddenly following a gig in Madrid. There are few passings that could shake New Orleans to the core quite like the passing of this extraordinary man. He was an integral part of the city's rich cultural life for 60 years, starting off as a fill-in sideman in Earl King's band in 1955. Toussaint was a pianist, vocalist, composer, producer, arranger, and musical ambassador for his native city, but above and beyond all that, to all reports (and I have heard a few) he was a lovely, humble, soft spoken person and a true gentleman. Toussaint didn't shy away from stepping out in a bit of boldly colorful couture once in a while and his trademark about town was his succession of Rolls Royces, but he was a down-home guy and absolutely not a single person that I have ever spoken to has ever had a bad word to say about him.

Texas, baby. It's there, it's big, it's not going anywhere, and, if you're driving to New Orleans from New Mexico, there ain't no way around it. Of course, you actually could go around it but that would require either a sea worthy sailing vessel or a profound preference for the scenic pleasures of Oklahoma (I've long thought that the highway sign marking the Oklahoma state line should read 'Welcome to Oklahoma—It's Not Texas!!'). Being possessed of neither a sailing vessel of any degree of worthiness nor the patience for an Oklahoma detour, I decided to address the situation full on for my first ever driving trip from Santa Fe to my hometown. The Inky Prius was washed, recharged with fresh oil, pumped full of high octane Chevron petrol, and on a bright Saturday morning of mid-September in the Year of Our Lord 2015, off I went into the great semi-unknown.

Ah, Gentle Reader(s), I am returned from an enjoyable and productive visitation to my benighted home town—the Snafu by the Bayou, the Migraine by Lake Ponchartrain, the Muddle on the Big Muddy—New Orleans of Louisiana. The forecast temperatures for this excursion were intimidating—in the mid-90s for the most part—but the humidity was relatively moderate so that life outside of the air conditioned unreality was rather less unbearable than might otherwise have been the case. A bicycle has been recently added to the inventory of the New Orleans digs and it got well used each and every day. I have not had a bicycle at my disposal  in New Orleans since I departed the city with extreme prejudice back in 1979 so it has somewhat revelatory to return to the two wheels. It remains my considered opinion that a) the bicycle is the finest mode of transport ever to be invented (the train being in second place), and b) there is no better way in which to get to know a place than from aboard a bicycle.

Signs and Wonders, Gentle Reader(s), Signs and Wonders. We live in extraordinary times. Things are happening. Lots of things. The measure of these many things will require significant passage of time in order for the fullness of their significance to become apparent, but some of these things have an immediate effect. Two such things came in the form of rulings handed down by the Supreme Court of this land a couple of weeks ago: A stunning rebuff to the challenges to our president’s health care initiative and an epochal endorsement of the legality of same sex marriage. The former ends a challenge that has been brewing for only a few years but the latter is a landmark decision that has been generations in the making. Despite these setbacks to the regressive/repressive/conservative agenda no one should delude themselves by thinking that the forces of darkness will quietly fold their tents, take down their evil banners and fade back into the gloom from whence they arose. Quite the contrary. Many amongst the defeated will take these reversals of fortune as incentive to redouble their efforts to impose their fearful morality upon the lives of others (and no, I’m not talking about ISIS). Some may decide that the time to resort to more extreme measures is nigh. Celebrate, indeed, but the old adage remains as true as ever: One of the costs of liberty is eternal vigilance.

That guy in the photograph above—his name is Dave—is someone who I have never met but I spent a portion of my day with him, five nights a week, for about thirty years. He's older than me me by a good bit but in a way we sorta growed up together. It's interesting how much you can come to feel that you know someone that you've never actually met. It seems likely that this notion—a popular one—is a complete fantasy, for how often does one find out that one doesn't even really know the people that one has met, like the people one is related to or romantically involved with? On the other hand, I have long been intrigued with the notion that perhaps one can, in fact, get a more accurate impression of a person through their work than you might be able to obtain through direct contact. Perhaps the public expression of the private person can offer the more precise insight into the nature of the individual than we might expect. Is it possible that listening to the music of John Lennon or studying the paintings of Mark Rothko or reading the works of Thomas Bernhard might give us a more accurate portrait of who they really were than one would be able to get if one actually met the person and their personality got in the way? Or is the opposite more likely to be true? I mean, in the end, who the hell really knows anybody?? Tis an conundrum, Gentle Reader(s), an conundrum indeed.