SOUNDTRACK: IMMANUEL WILKINS-Tiny Desk (Home) Concert #164 (February 3, 2021).
Immanuel Wilkins is a saxophone player who creates mellow but poignant jazz.
Candles and books rest on a trunk at the bottom right corner of the wide shot. There, too, are special photographs of alto saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins with family in his childhood home in Philadelphia.
Wilkins plays three songs from Omega in this twenty minute
Omega was released last year to high acclaim. The project is all about Blackness, Black theory, the Black experience and the struggle and triumph that go with it all.
They open with “Grace and Mercy,” which is “a lyrical story about peace, forgiveness and humility with carefully crafted form and melody.”
He met up with his long time bandmates — Micah Thomas on piano, Daryl Johns on bass, Kweku Sumbry on drums —in Manhattan’s Sear Sound studio to record this set. The quartet has been playing together for years, which is remarkable considering Wilkins is only 23 years old.
There’s a really nice piano solo in the middle of the track from Thomas
“Warriors” opens with a saxophone intro before the band joins in for this
driving, dynamic tune that conveys the shield of protection provided by our inner circles.
Wilkins gets up to some wild soloing in the middle of the song. As the song comes to an end and Wilkin repeats the same melody, Sumbry gets to show off his chops on the drums.
“The Dreamer” is a tender piece that honors the Black writer and activist James Weldon Johnson and is based on his poem “A Midday Dreamer.” The opening lines are played effortlessly on bass by Johns and when Wilkins joins in, his melodic saxophone exudes the rhythm of the poem’s first stanza: “I love to sit alone, and dream, and dream, and dream…”
This is some wonderfully thought provoking instrumental music.
[READ: March 3, 2021] Super Puzzletastic Mysteries
I was in Barnes & Noble at the end of last year and I was feeling splurgy so I picked up this book, thinking that everyone in the family might like it. We all love Chris Grabenstein after all. So this is basically a series of pretty short mysteries. The end of the story is pushed to the back of the book so you can figure out if you solved the mystery before it is revealed to you.
CHRIS GRABENSTEIN-Introduction
Grabenstein sets up what the book is about. it was inspired by Donald Sobol (the guy who created Encyclopedia Brown) and his Two Minute Mysteries. There would be some kind of crime, clues would be presented and the story would end without a solution. The end of the story (and the solution) came at the end of the book so you could try to figure it out for yourself. Amusingly, he also tells us that his story is “based on something I actually saw out the library window when I did a school visit the day after a snow day.”
I’m giving a brief summary of each mystery and then whether my adult brain could solve it.
CHRIS GRABENSTEIN-Snow Devils: A Riley Mack Story
In this story, someone has written the word FART in very large letters in the snow. The principal is going to find out who did it. I did not figure out the answer entirely, but I was on the right track. I think there was a little too much information withheld to get the answer fully correct.
STEVE HOCKENSMITH-Possum-Man and Janet
This story is more comical than mysterious. Indeed, the mystery, if you can call it that, is not very hard to figure out at all. But the whole thing with Janet’s uncle being Possum-Man, a decent but hardly secret superhero is pretty delightful.
STUART GIBBS-Monkey Business: A Funjungle Mystery
In this story someone tries to steal a squirrel monkey. There’s some good humor in this one too. I did not figure this out, but if I were a little more knowledgeable about animals I might have.
SHEELA CHARI-The Fifty-Seventh Cat
Set in Ernest Hemingway’s house (!), two young girls are given the task of finding the fifty-seventh cat on the premises (apparently there are 56 cats in Hemingway’s house?) But that’s not the real mystery. The real mystery is who stole the special cat statue? There was so much misdirection in this story that I never would have gotten it.
FLEUR BRADLEY-The Perfect Alibi
I enjoyed the framing device of this. A young girl gets in trouble for being late, so her mom makes her help to clean out the neighbor’s garage. He’s a grumpy ex-policeman. but he is nice to her and talks about a cold case that he never solved. The girl and her friend think they can solve it. There were a lot of clues on this one and I had an idea where it was going but I was wrong on the details
LAUREN MAGAZINER-Three Brothers, Two Sisters, and One Cup of Poison
This story was cuckoo. A grandma (Bubbie) had brought her two grandkids on a lengthy trip to visit their Great Aunt Bea. The two older women haven’t spoken in years–they had a huge fight. But Bubbie has an important thing to tell Aunt Bea that can’t be sent in writing–that she is in danger. When they arrive there are three grown men there–they are triplets. The danger comes down to one of the boys trying to kill off his mother for the inheritance. But how can you tell with triplets? There was a lot going on in this story and I didn’t even try to figure it it out.
GIGI PANDIAN-The Haunted Typewriter
This story was fun because there was a magician and a ghost and a cypher in it. A woman’s expensive jewelry is stolen. The ransom note comes as a cipher on the family’s old derelict typewriter. The solution is a good one with some nice slight of hand. I figured out the Who of this story, but not the How.
LAMAR GILES-Surprise. Party.
I really enjoyed this story a lot. A spoiled girl has a party but all she cares about is the super mega awesome present that her mother is going to give her. It is huge and she can’t wait to open it. When she does, the box is empty. Turns out there’s a boy a the party who was forced to go there. He couldn’t be more dorky–sweater vest, big words, mushroom sausage pizza, and he is able to deduce what happened to the present. He clears the names of two kids who the girl accuses and teaches everyone a lesson. I didn’t really deduce the answer, although I was on the right track. I enjoyed the detective too much to care, though and I want to read more from Giles.
KATE MILFORD-The Dapperlings
This story is set at camp. There’s a lot of strange details that I think flesh out the story but which I had a hard to keeping track of. Also strange was that three pages in the main character’s best friend is revealed as a ghost. The story turns into a bottle episode mystery or a locked room mystery and the result is kind of obvious but not for any reason I would have guessed.
LAURA BRENNAN-Codename: Mom
A girl is convinced her mom is a spy, but her mom denies it–she’s just a math teacher. Her mom has plenty of excuses for why she does all the seemingly spy-related stuff she does, but the girl does not believe her. One day her mom puts her phone in the girl’s lunch. Then the girl notices a suspicious person following them. Can she unlock the passcode of her mom’s phone (that’s the real mystery). The story was really pushing us in the right direction with this one and I should have guessed it but I was focusing on words not numbers (even if she is a math person)
LARA CASSIDY-The Red Envelope
This story is about a classroom challenge to join the honors class. Anyone who answers one question gets in. But it’s a very hard question. Everyone who is correct is admitted into honors, but the person who answers it first wins the Golden Answer Award. Nine kids try out. The clues range all over the room. There’s math, there’s music, geometry. The kids have to work together but one of them has to win. Who will it be. I was pretty sure I had the answer, and I did, but I didn’t think it would be the answer. It was strangely too easy and at the same time too complicated.
FRED REXROAD-Whiz Tanner and the Pilfered Cashbox
It interested me that several stories used the same basic mystery just wrapped in a different puzzle. There’s also lots of cash boxes in these stories. This one involves a cafeteria, a girl with a fishing rod, a know it all and an injured girl. I had the right idea, but I imagined it happening in a different way (I assumed a wad of bandages was concealing the cashbox). So I’d give myself partial credit.
BRYAN PATRICK AVERY-The Magic Day Mystery
I loved this story. I loved that the main sleuth in this one is a young Black kid with an Afro (named Marlon Jackson) who performs magic: “the crowd was stunned to see a black seventh grader dressed in magician robes and sporting an afro performing magic.” There’s some wonderful sleights of hand in this story. An escaped rabbit, a boy who wants to pull a prank, a girl who wants to use the gym where the magic is taking place and a boy who films everything. I was able to solve this mystery pretty easily–close reading helps.
MO WALSH-Puzzling It Out
I enjoyed this for two reasons. One was that the teacher in this story was actually a secret identity–she wasn’t spy, she was whistleblower! And she relies on two kids to help get the answer with a series of puzzles. I also learned about the Magic Square where each row and column adds up to the same number and the trick for solving them easily Looking forward to trying one some day. The solution to this puzzle involved doing a math puzzle so I didn’t bother.
ALANE FERGUSON-The Scary Place
The Geeks 4 Science club was often pranked by Crazy Brian who wanted to be in the club but was a little too crazy. Instead, he founded his own club Ghosts Were People 2 and then told the geeks that there was a ghost in the haunted house in town. I was really fascinated by the subplot that Brian’s parents purchased the Scary house! But anyway, Brian’s team found a ghost and wants to show it off to the Geeks. I figured out the answer pretty quickly, although not specifically what would have happened. I wondered, though, if Brain’s group knew the answer already and was messing with the geeks or if they thought it was a real ghost
PETER LERANGIS-Ottonetics
Lerangis is one of the few authors I’ve read in this book (from The 39 Clues). I loved how complicated his story was. He created a “famous” character whose life was based around puzzles. Then he had a boy, Jack, who was not allowed to go into Central Park at night meet a homeless man who knew about these puzzles. And then it all tied together to get Jack to find a missing artifact that was stolen by the Nazis. There’s even a guy who tries to double cross them. Wow. I don’t know if this puzzle was solvable exactly. It depended a bit on knowing what was there–which we couldn’t see. But it was certainly a good story.
BRUCE HALE-Gridlock Jones Cracks the Case
I don’t know if Gridlock Jones is a series or if this was a one-off but this story was great, too. Gridlock Jones is a pun on Sherlock Holmes, because the boy, Gabe, is in a wheelchair. It was originally a mean comment but he has embraced it. Anyhow, there was a stolen cash box and a number of (adult) suspects. Was it the principal, was it the person with the grudge, was it the janitor who hated gambling (the money was earned on a school casino night)? I did not figure this one out at all.
TYLER WHITESIDES-The Case of the Mysterious Writer
This was a fun story with two sleuths–a brother and sister team. Someone won a story writing contest at the local library but three kids claimed to have written the story (it was submitted under a pseudonym). But all three had submitted a story of their own. So who could have written the story (which was really good?) The sleuths interview each suspect, but the reveal is a surprise. I feel like I almost got it, but the detail that revealed the real person was not really revealed to us ahead of time, exactly.
JAMES PONTI-TRICKED!-A Framed Story
I’m gathering from the introduction that Framed is a series. There’s two sleuths–Florian Bates and her best friend Margaret–who are seventh graders who also for the FBI. They have solved some pretty major cases. This one is not huge but it is important. The Washington Capitals have just won the Stanley Cup (there’s some Stanley Cup history as well). When superstar Darius King brought the cup to their school (he does a lot of community outreach), it was stolen while they were not looking. There are a lot of suspects and some great misdirection. There’s also a snotty reporter and the Cup’s handler (who is afraid of losing her job). I did not get the answer although I was most suspicious of the person who did it.
I enjoyed this collection, even if I realize my mind isn’t suited to this kind of puzzle-solving. One thing I noticed was that most of the female authors described the looks, especially the hair of the characters in much greater detail then the male authors did.
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