Music, art, biographies, history, vintage cars, vintage comic art, rowing, sailing, going to museums, going to dive bars, good restaurants, and cafes that serve good coffee. I love peaty single malt scotches and good red wines. I love to laugh and to make others laugh - some folks have said I'd make a good comic or comedy writer.
Johnny Cash if he wasn't dead. Ditto Charles Mingus and Graham Hill. I'd like to meet the writer Henry Manney again and my great-great-uncle Simon Rodia, who built the Watts Towers in Watts, South Central LA. As far as living people go, folks who share some of my interests.
Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, The Meters, Duke Ellington, and Billy Strayhorn are among my favorite musicians. For bass I dig Mingus, Paul Chambers, Dave Holland, George Porter Jr., Ray Brown, and Christian McBride.I listen to a lot of other stuff besides jazz, including X, Dave Alvin, The Knitters, Red Meat, Johnny Cash, Tom Waits, Renaissance vocal music, occasionally opera, early ska and reggae, and a lot of other stuff. I love a lot of the classical Cuban music too, and tangos have influnced me some too. I guess I'm just a music slut, or a "bass ho," as an old girlfriend used to call me.These days I mostly play upright bass but my first instrument was cello. I'll be dusting that off for the first time in many years for some classical stuff and maybe some Astor Piazzolla tangos. I also play electric bass - mostly in church gigs and worship music.I like writing tunes and lead my own jazz group featuring my own tunes. We mostly play in the San Francisco Bay Area. My website, http://www.ribak.com, tells more about what I'm doing.
Buster Keaton movies, Tender Mercies, Wallace and Gromit flicks, Spinal Tap, A Mighty Wind, Sideways, Louise Brooks movies, The Thin Man, Rear Window, Vertigo, The Trouble with Harry.
Simpsons, The Shield.
Mysteries, Biographies, History books - haven't read any real winners lately. "God is Not Great " by Christopher Hitchens was very intersting reading.
Charles Mingus (as a musician, not for how he treated people), Duke Ellington, J.S. Bach, Count Basie, Thelonious Monk, Jaco Pastorius, Ray Brown, Milt Hinton, Johnny Cash, Arthur Ashe, race driver Phil Hill, ditto Graham Hill.