Big ups to brother Jim Hoke for his traditional jazz arrangement of Janis Ian’s “Better Times Will Come.”

Traditional jazz* was the first music Jim and I fell in love with, growing up in Guilderland. I remember that Pee Wee Hunt album he holds up in the video as a real ear-opener – first 33-1/3 rpm album we ever saw. There’s SO much to love here, from the overall feeling of sheer exuberance, with bouncy street parade momentum, to such details as the jaunty uplift in all the horn parts and the off-beats on the snare near the end. He arranged and played everything.

The video knocks me out, too, filmed at Jim’s Nashville place where I visited in January, before The Plague. Check the zoom-in on the neck of the D-18 our nephew Jared decorated with Jim’s name, on his gig making guitars at Martin in Nazareth, PA; and a jazz portrait of Louis Armstrong – betcha he’s grinning at THIS one! – with Jim’s face cleverly inserted by his wonderfully talented wife Lisa Haddad and her friend Eva Sochorova.

Hit this, and be delighted:

• This music is ”Dixieland” everywhere but in New Orleans whose musical geniuses invented it; there, it’s “traditional jazz” – Hunt’s album title notwithstanding.