My deep admiration for the works of Kathleen Ann Goonan is no secret around here. If you can put up with dealing with what I can't at the moment - the homeport's search engine over there on the siderail - you'll find many more entries about her as person and her as work sprinkled throughout the life of this blog. But you won't find all of them because the search engine kinda sucks.
Anywho.
Yesterday the RSS reader thingy, where Goonan's blog is among my subscriptions, brought delightful news that she was interviewed on Jazz Connections, a radio show on NPR affiliate Interlochen Public Radio hosted by Jeff Haas, and it sounds like it went *great*! Snip:
Jeff interviewed me about the jazz aspects of my novels. It was a marvelous interview–great questions. A jazz musician of some renown, he asked me which musician I would most like to be. This is such a good question that I couldn’t decide, as if I actually had to make that decision instantly before being transmuted into someone, a la QUEEN CITY JAZZ, in which the inhabitants of Cincinnati become American musicians, artists, or writers. I said Billy Strayhorn, for his depth and mastery. I might just as well have said Ella Fitzgerald, for her astounding control of her instrument, John Coltrane for the spirituality permeating his work, Bill Evens for his erudition, Miles Davis for his cool, Charles Parker for his heat, his shattering creative intensity.
But throughout most of the interview, Jeff, he asked me about jazz and my books–just how and why my books are jazz-based, and why my brain is wired the way it is.
Also interviewed for this show is Charles Limb, an otolaryngologist at Johns Hopkins. He uses fMRI to image the brains of jazz musicians while they play. Terrifically exciting!
In the full post excerpted above, Goonan mentiones that Haas is also a jazz musician. (And also a techer.) This immediately made me think of the fantabulous Campbell/Moore interview of Epic that was so incredible in no small part because the interviewer (Campbell) had WWI Trench Level Experience of his own going into it. The conversation flows differently because of that.
You can listen live and online to the interview by going to the listen link on his siderail. The show airs locally and (simultaneously online ... I think) Saturday at 7 pm (on IPR News Radio), Sunday at 6 pm (on Classical IPR), and Thursday at 10:06 pm (on Classical IPR).
#yay