About Me
I suppose I should first state my name: Chris Calabrese.
I was born and raised in the Santa Monica, California area. During adulthood I’ve lived in Los Angeles, Monterey, San Francisco, Tokyo and Las Vegas, my current place of residence. Interests of mine include music, computers, Japanese history and culture, general aviation, and of course: NASCAR. Job-wise I’ve split my time between computers and music.
On the music side my primary instrument is piano, although I enjoy playing a variety of instruments for fun and occasional profit (the latest being soprano saxophone). I enjoy a variety of musical styles, but jazz is what I love the most. There are many flavors of jazz, but the kind I prefer is the kind—as the late, great Steve Allen put it—”that sings and swings.” My favorite pianists include Fats Waller, Nat Cole, Count Basie, Art Tatum, Oscar Peterson, Duke Ellington, Bill Evans, Dick Hyman, Dave Frishberg, and my all time favorite if forced to choose, Dave McKenna. Other musician favorites include Al Cohn, Lester Young, Stan Getz, Jackie Coon, Chet Baker, June Christy, Blossom Dearie… the list goes on and on.
I’ve been fascinated with computers since the mid 1970s. My first computer was a Radio Shack TRS-80 model 1, with a whopping 4k of RAM and a cassette tape recorder acting as removable storage. I owned one of the original Apple II computers, one of the original 128K Macintosh computers and several other incarnations of the Mac. I switched from Macintosh to IBM PC compatibles around 1990, primarily because PC software was flourishing while Macintosh software was floundering. I currently own a variety of PCs, my primary being a Dell. Its hardware configuration changes on a seemingly weekly basis.
Regarding this blog, it’s just a bunch of randomness. Mostly information I thought others would find interesting or helpful because it either doesn’t already exist on the Web or is difficult to find.
Feel free to comment or contact me at chris@jazzpiano.com.