New Year’s Day: Reflection, Not Resolution

Reflection without discipline can be self-indulgent, especially as the year draws to a close and a new one opens before us. So, let us impose discipline; avoid white-collar crime (there will be plenty in 2018); and focus on music, booze and books.

First, music is especially appropriate at this season, whether for reflection or not.  Here is the Miles Black Quintet, Jazz For The New Year:

As jazz critic for the Wall Street Journal (and JazzWax blogger) Marc Myers notes:

Sixty-three years ago, on New Year’s Day in 1955, pianist Teddy Wilson, bassist Milt Hinton and drummer Jo Jones went into a studio for Norgran Records and recorded The Creative Teddy Wilson, a 12-inch album.

When Norman Granz founded Verve a year later for Ella Fitzgerald, the Wilson tracks were soon reissued on the label with a new title—Teddy Wilson: For Quiet Lovers.

Read the entire post here, and listen below:

Then move to Benjamin Britten’s “A New Year Carol,” here performed by Anonymous 4:

If the end of the year looms like the end of time, try 1000: A Mass For The End of Time, also by Anonymous 4:

Next, unless you have impulsively sworn off the hooch, what to drink?

Hot cocktails are always fraught; many of us do not do them well.  With arctic temperatures across the country, however, this piece on Cold Weather, Hot Cocktails from the New York Times is especially welcome.  The Rock and Rye Toddy and the Port Toddy  seem especially promising.

Generally, I am not a fan of tequila, but this Winter Citrus Tequila Highball  (from Emily Arden Wells at  Gastronomista) is worth a try.

Third, what to read?

Our last post had some suggested 2017 crime fiction.  Here, from The Rap Sheet, are some more lists collected and discussed by J. Kingston Pierce.

And, from The Rap Sheet’s channel on YouTube, the original trailer from “The Wild, Wild West,” which debuted on television in 1965, about a couple of Secret Service agents in the mid-1860s.  They had a train.  I loved it, especially all the technology: