Born Under the Stax Sound

Booker T. Jones at the Natick Center for the Performing Arts, 6/19/26

Last night, Booker T. Jones was a soulful, consummate professional, still at the top of his game musically. As well as performing his well-known Booker T. and the M.G.’s hits, he had tributes to Albert King, Otis Redding, Marvin Gaye, B.B. King, Jimi Hendrix, and Bob Dylan.

The show opened with the M.G.’s #9 1968 hit, a cover of the theme to Hang ‘Em High*. With those first four notes on the organ I smiled and thought, “Yep, that’s the sound.”

Left to right in the photo were Al Jackson (drums), Steve Cropper (guitar), Booker T. Jones (keyboards), Donald “Duck” Dunn (bass).

A highlight of the show for me was ‘Born Under a Bad Sign’, a song Jones wrote for Albert King.

This is King’s original version.

The best known version of ‘Born Under a Bad Sign’ is by Eric Clapton and Cream.

* The leading lady in Hang ‘Em High is Inger Stevens. I’ll take advantage of any excuse to look at Inger Stevens, who died tragically young.

Inger Stevens in Hang ‘Em High

LLM Explains It All?

A company that interests me is Open Evidence. They use AI to collect authoritative medical research and process the information for presentation to physicians.

There’s a study that claims Large Language Models that aren’t medically specific generate results that are superior to Open Evidence. As you would expect, Open Evidence isn’t letting that claim go unchallenged.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/rigorous-evaluation-of-medical-ai-is-good-ugcPost-7471713096210751489-x_VW/

In other medical information technology news, there’s a good, old-fashioned ransomware hack over at Amazon’s company, One Medical.

https://cybernews.com/security/amazon-one-medical-data-breach/