Fun-looking peach and plum salad from Saveur.

Vibey:

Picture by Bags

David Lebovitz gives pickled strawberry preserves. I’d try it, sure.

Photograph by Brittany Carmichael via MPD.

Smitten Kitchen delivers green beans with almond pesto. 

Jorge Delgado…Mr. Swing.

[Photo Via: Itcuddles]

Diebs. 

Smoke ’em if you got ’em. 

Evening Sky by Robert Henri. 

Knock her out the water.

[Photo Credit: Jerry Schatzberg]

Happy Days are here again. 

Always love the beat boxing on this track:

Picture by Bags

What the hell? Let’s make it a week of beat boxing gems.

Picture by Richard Phillips via This Isn’t Happiness

Food 52 gives Spicy, Savory & Sweet Watermelon Rind Pickles.

Just writing my name and graffiti on the wall.

[Photo Credit: Jack Stewart]

Drypoint by Diebs. 

My latest reprint for The Daily Beast gives Nat Hentoff on Louis Armstrong:

Louis Armstrong, summoned by King Oliver, came up to Chicago in the summer of 1922, Buster Bailey reports that “Louis upset Chicago. All the musicians came to hear Louis. What made Louis upset Chicago so? His execution, for one thing, and his ideas, his drive. Well, they didn’t call it drive, they called it ‘attack’ at the time. Yes, that’s what it was, man. They got crazy for his feeling.”

His feeling. Even toward the end of his life, when many of the same tunes would be played night after night, month after month, Louis could still, as trombonist Trummy Young remembers, make a sideman cry.

His feeling. Billie Holiday, a young girl in Baltimore, listening to Louis’s recordings: “He didn’t say any words, but somehow it just moved me so. It sounded so sad and sweet, all at the same time. It sounded like he was making love to me. That’s how I wanted to sing.”

There has been no jazz musician so widely, deeply, durably influential as Louis. And no trumpet player who could do all he could do on the horn. Once, Louis told journalist Gilbert Millstein, “I’m playin’ a date in Florida, livin’ in the colored section and I’m playin’ my horn for myself one afternoon. A knock come on the door and there’s an old, gray-haired flute player from the Philadelphia Orchestra, down there for his health. Walking through that neighborhood, he heard this horn, playing Cavalleria Rusticana, which he said he never heard phrased like that before. To him it was as if an orchestra was behind it.” 

Collage by Louis Armstrong. 

Alexandra gives Whole Peach Bellini. Bottom’s up.

This here’s gone viral and that’s a good thing. It’s damn impressive plus a ton of fun. Love the look on the dad’s face as he gets schooled by his daughter.

“Cover Girl” by Helena Hauss (via This Isn’t Happiness)