Gene Seymour, a Connecticut native, spent years working for big-city newspapers as a reporter and movie and jazz critic—including at the Philadelphia Daily News, where we first crossed paths. He's the author of a young adult history, Jazz, the Great American Art. These days, he lives in Philadelphia and contributes mightily on a remarkable range of subjects from baseball to crime novels and many steps in between to The Nation, Bookforum, CNN. com, The New Republic, the Washington Post, and others. His excellent Substack is That Gene Seymour.

Ron Carter, the great bassist, was born in 1937, and you would be hard-pressed to find a notable jazz artist from the 1960s to the present he did not play with. These days he leads several groups and has an active touring schedule, which you can learn about at his website. I recommend following him on Facebook, YouTube, and virtually every other platform you happen to find yourself on.

Photo: Ron Carter in 2009. Credit: Marek Lazarski

Brian Cullman is a writer and musician based in New York and in France. He has written extensively for The Paris Review, Antaeus, Rolling Stone, and the Village Voice and has won the ASCAP/Deems Taylor award for excellence in music journalism three times. He has three solo albums on Sunnyside and is currently a member of Lisbon-based group Rua Das Pretas. His new book is called How to Prepare for the Past: Travels In Music and Time.

The book is a memoir composed of vignettes, many about Brian’s encounters and relationships with fascinating people, from the 1960s on, most of them musicians and most of them no longer with us. The book kicks off with a story about Ed Sullivan, and a few of the other people we meet are Dr. John, Jimi Hendrix, Nick Drake, Paul Bowles, Big Joe Turner, and Sandy Denny.

Brian's website

Peter Stampfel's website

Peter playing "Bird Song" to a clip of Easy Rider, Radio City Music Hall, 2019

"Moment of Peter Stampfel" is from a 2010 interview he did called "Advice to Musicians"

Jonathan Coleman's books include AT MOTHER'S REQUEST: A True Story of Money, Murder, and Betrayal (which won an Edgar Allan Poe Award, and was made into a CBS miniseries); EXIT THE RAINMAKER; LONG WAY TO GO: Black and White in America; and a collaboration with basketball icon and NBA logo Jerry West, WEST BY WEST: My Charmed, Tormented Life.

He began his career in London on Ian Hamilton's legendary journal The New Review, became a book editor at Knopf and Simon & Schuster, then worked as a journalist for CBS News. He has written for the New York Times, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Sports Illustrated, and many other publications, and is a contributing editor of The Sunday Long Read. He is also an award-winning voiceover talent and recently narrated the audiobook of Ken Auletta's HOLLYWOOD ENDING: Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Silence. For many years, he taught narrative nonfiction writing at the University of Virginia.

Jonathan's essay on Jerry West, from The Hedgehog Review.

Aaron Latham's 1973 New York Magazine piece on Gay.

"Frank Sinatra Has a Cold," by Gay Talese, originally published in 1966 in Esquire.

"Your moment of Nan Talese" source is a Library of America conversation with her author Margaret Atwood.

Photo is of the Taleses' wedding day in Rome, 1959. Credit: Elio Cardone.