Spring semester of my freshman year at college – this would have been 1973 – I took a jazz history class taught by a youngish (28 year-old) jazz scholar and graduate student named Jim Patrick. (In preparation for writing this blog, I Googled Jim to see what he was up to, expecting – foolishly – to see pictures of the bearded, somewhat rotund, dryly funny guy I knew in the early ‘70’s. Instead, I found his obituary from just a few days ago – July 25, 2013 –which mentions that he died at 68, was predeceased by his wife, was a loving grandfather and yadda yadda. Holy crap. Sometimes I hate the internet; we can no longer pretend “not to know”. Meanwhile, the question, no matter how cliché, must be asked: where does the time go?) I became friends with Jim, because he was the one-and-only jazz guy on the Princeton music faculty. (An interesting factoid: as a graduate student in jazz, he wasn’t being advised and overseen by a music department faculty member but rather, by a sociology professor named Morroe Berger. In those days at ivy-strangled Princeton, jazz was not considered a genuine musical genre but rather, a […]