REG'S CORNER

Photos provided by Upsplash About the time you finish reading  this article you could be serving this delicious dish to your dinner guest. The spinach salad has long been a favorite side dish in many New Orleans restaurants. Packed with nutritious greens, red onions, and fresh mushrooms this side salad is the desired starter intro to a great meal.   As a young college student living in New Orleans I found myself short on funds. What college student is not? Although today's  college life is probably not the same as say thirty-five years ago. The internet and online courses seem to have made getting a degree a matter if one has the time to complete a course of study. Did I miss out on something? I needed a job to pay for extras. You know, the things that care packages and work-study did not provide. A life! I applied for a job as a dishwasher at a local family restaurant in walking distance from the university.  I was hired immediately, more like on the spot. After reviewing my appli

Photos provided by Upsplash After recently seeing a young Alaskan girl, Lydia Jacoby win the 100m breaststroke gold medal at the Tokyo Olympics I was instantly reminded of the time I spend in Anchorage.  I was stationed at Fort Richardson back in 1984 and how I was surprised to see that the land I had imaged was nowhere near what came to my mind before I’d arrived there. All set to live in an Igloo this was not to be the case at all.  Of course it was very cold and the sky seem to be in a constant state of overcast.  No surprises there being that Alaska is mostly nine months of winter and three months of summer.  One man I meet in Fairbanks said he’d been there most of his adult life and that the climate was something you never get use to.   That appeared to be true for me as well.  I seemed to never know when day began and when nighttime started. All this is relative to this story which will emphasis my first encounters to this land they called The Last Frontier. First, the  Great Al

Photos provided by Upsplash Photos provided by Upsplash   Most of us in the jazz world know the name,Batiste.We listen to the cool sounds of the entertainer Jon Batiste who is associated with the young music lions coming out of New Orleans today.You know  the ones,Trombone Shorty,Kermit Ruffin,Ivan Neville,Kent Jordan,the Dirty Dozen Brass Band,Christian Scott,and the famed Marsalis Brothers. What do these family of players have in common you ask? Well,other than their approximation to a close knit and very closed unit of musicians from Nawlins' as we say down South ,the proverbial answer is one man they call "Bat". Alvin Batiste,jazz clarinet player virtuoso and the inventor of the "Cosmic Hipness".  Alvin "Bat" Batiste was an educator, bandleader, composer and a mentor to hundreds of maybe thousands young musicians around the world. “Bat" won the Downbeat Jazz Poll Clarinetist of the Year so many times. And rightfully so I might add that most w