07.30.07
A little barrelhouse piano is what’s called for here
Roosevelt Sykes shouts and bangs. Not sure of the year for this gem.
07.29.07
The can-do spirit in the Tigris-Euprhrates crescent
Congrats to the national soccer team of Iraq for its Asia Cup championship
07.28.07
Some “security subcommittee” partner
Iran’s real head honcho spells it out for any remaining clueless types or Reasonable-Gentleman types.
07.27.07
The House of Mickey caves to the finger-waggers
BTW, the blogger from whom I gleaned this tidbit has a book out that I’m putting on my to-read-this-year list.
07.26.07
Ehud drinks the Kool-Aid – today’s edition
1,000 M16s for Fatah. Then again, is that really any wackier than the US and Iraq forming a “security subcommittee” with Iran?
This is what I’m talking about – today’s edition
Today’s recommendation of a blog that no doubt flies under the radar screen of your presumptions: Hip Hop Republican.
And one of the contributors is also involved with this interesting MySpace page.
This stuff was coming out at the same time as The Beatles and The Supremes
One of the great delights of the Aebersold workshop is the bookstore. Tables groaning with fake books and instruction books, but mostly those seemingly endless bins of classic Blue Note, Prestige and Riverside albums from the 50s and 60s on CD, all for a steal compared to what you’d part with at Borders. I always blow a small fortune. This year I came home with such gems as Toccata Trompeta by Kenny Dorham, Empyrean Isles by Herbie Hancock, Relaxin’ with the Miles Davis Quintet, A Night at Birdland Volume 2 by Art Blakey (with Horace Silver, Clifford Brown and Lou Donaldson), The Eminent J.J. Johnson Volume 1, among others.
Discovering this storehouse of treasures at my age, in the early twenty-first century, is a little weird for me, especially since I am, in my academic life, a cultural historian, and since I have had my ear glued to the radio since age four. I was paying rapt attention to popular culture when these records came out. Why were they not in the bins at my local LP outlets? (To be fair, maybe I wasn’t looking, fixated as I was on rock at the time. That said, part of the reason for that is surely that the rock was what was prominently displayed.)
I think about the music that did come across my radar screen at the time these great records were coming out. Certainly there was the rock and R&B that was front and center for my generation, but one also had to note the prominence of the Broadway scores of the day (Hello, Dolly, Bye Bye Birdie, Oliver), the country (Buck Owens, Jim Reeves, Eddie Arnold, Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn), and the symphonic offerings. There was even some jazz that got peoples’ attention, but the names associated with that were the likes of Ramsey Lewis, Dave Brubeck, Herbie Mann and Stan Getz. Good players all, but now I can see that they represented an attempt by the music industry to grapple with some kind of accessibility issue.
So now, along with just straightforward current enjoyment of the bounty I bring home each summer, I have to run my head back through my experience of the past five decades, and assimilate this music into the context of the world of my youth.
Who did listen to Lee Morgan, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Kenny Dorham and McCoy Tyner in 1965?
Some time back I had a conversation with Pat Harbison (a professor of trumpet at the IU School of Music) and he posited that the reason jazz moved from the club to the classroom was that soul music, and particularly Motown, encroached upon that region of black America’s imagination that had been occupied by jazz.
It seems to have started earlier. Speaking of Motown, in Berry Gordy, Jr.’s autobiography, he speaks of the period in his life when he first came home to Detroit from his Army service in Korea (1953) and started a record store in his old neighborhood. He predominantly stocked the kinds of jazz records mentioned here and quickly went belly-up. His customers were clamoring for The Drifters and John Lee Hooker and Big Maybelle.
Did the marginalization of jazz begin at the dusk of the swing era, when jazz ceased to be primarily a dance music? That seems to be a pretty plausible view.
Still, as one listens to the astounding musicianship and the unbridled zest for life, and the same soul that comes through the music given that name, one wonders how American culture might have developed differently if there had been some way to reach young music-hungry citizens like myself when this stuff was current.
07.25.07
Recommended reading
Cinnamon Stillwell has two great blog posts this week – one on the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love and one on a Washington Post / Newsweek – moderated panel discussion on getting along with Islam.
About what you could have predicted
I’ve come to an interesting assessment of the state of the world in the past few days. There’s a lot going on, some of it encouraging, a lot of it alarming, some of it silly and sad (see post below), but none of it really surprising. Everything that’s unfolding is the playing-out of trends that have been in place for some time.
Take this delegation representing the Arab League that visited Israel. Actually, only two countries – Jordan and Egypt – sent officials. Headlines are hailing this as some kind of historic event. But get to about the third paragraph under any of the headlines and you see what they’re offering Israel: a comprehensive Arab peace (as if they can deliver that) in exchange for Israel giving up all territory outside its original 1948 borders. Talk about non-news. This has been the position of every Arab entity that didn’t explicitly have Israel’s obliteration as its agenda since 1973.
Pakistan has the jitters about its prospects for stability since its Supreme Court ruled for the reinstating of its chief justice, a poke in the eye to Musharraf. Appeals for calm have been issued. Yet another Pakistani leader does what he can to cling to power in Islamabad while in the remote areas of the Hindu Kush, tribal leaders provide all the accomodations al-Qaeda needs to perfect its designs. Since the late 90s, a nuclear arsenal has been at stake, which is, shall we say, noteworthy.
This Gordon Brown character in the UK is casting his nation’s lot with the rest of a fatally cluesless Europe, forbidding government officials from identifying bombing plotters as Muslim, and saying that the UK – US partnership is going to take on a different tone now.
One of our two major political parties here in the US – the one with a majority on Capitol Hill – says that the only thing left to debate is just how to get our troops out of Iraq. This is their stance at the very time when all reports indicate that the surge is working. This is the same party that took the same stance regarding Vietnam beginning in 1968, when the yippies, after the Grant Park riots, opted to “work within the system” – in other words, begin the McGovernization process which has continued apace ever since.
The North Korean situation – well, see my most recent post on that. No sooner had it shut down the Yongbyon reactor than Norkor said that the US had to remove it from the State Department list of terror-sponsoring nations, and dole out a bunch of goodies. The basic NorKor bargaining position for fifty-some years.
So there’s not a lot occurring on the world stage, or in our own halls of government, that would cause one to start a blog post with, “Hey, look at this unexpected development!” I don’t suppose that will happen until those in a position to influence the twists and turns of history are guided by common sense rather than wishful thinking.
Moonbats gone wild
The main thing that bugs me about a bunch like this is that they give the unsuspecting public the illusion that the H-word creature is moderate and statesmanlike.
This is what I’m talking about
Appropos the post below, here is the always spot-on Walter Williams on government-run health care.
07.24.07
They do an impeccable job of representing where I’m coming from
I met a lot of great people this past weekend. A lot of you bought my book. Thanks so much. If you do some poking around on the Net and my site specifically, you may find yourself wondering, “Just where is this guy coming from?”
With that in mind, permit me to turn you on to some of what I consider to be the liveliest minds addressing soiciocultural issues today. Towering intellects, every one. Check them out and see if you don’t find them thought-provoking.
Walter Williams
Thomas Sowell
Stanley Crouch
Every American of any age, gender or ethnicity would benefit from acquainting himself with the thoughts and works of these razor-sharp minds.
07.23.07
Two olives and a ringside seat
Vodkapundit will be, in his own words, “drunkblogging” the Democrat debate tonight. If watching the actual telecast is too much to bear, checking in with Steven every so often should keep you up to speed.
It didn’t have to be this way
There are plenty of lucid and thorough histories of Israel that refute the moral-equivalency claims such as “occupation” and “refugees’ right of return,” but none so comprehensive as this.
Elitist condesension does no one any favors
It was most interesting to come upon this Myron Magnet piece in City Journal after my four days at Indiana Black Expo. Magnet is one of the most rigourous and clear-eyed observers of the upheavals in American society in the last fifty years, and here he applies that scrutiny to the question of why we have the simultaneous phenomena of an expanding black middle class and a huge black prison population. It’s long, but I invite anyone who starts into it to read the whole thing before drawing any conclusions. And if anyone feels the need to get the same message from someone of another pigmentation, may I suggest the works of John McWhorter or Shelby Steele.
07.22.07
Separating fact from fiction
Somewhere around here I have a chart I made showing which people and places in my novel are of my own devising, and which ones are historical. Discerning between the two should be fairly easy for those (ever-fewer) readers who actually lived in Indy’s Indiana Avenue area or their descendants, but general readers from elsewhere might want clarification.
This has come to mind in the last few days as I’ve had conversations with – and sales to – people from out of town at my booth at Black Expo. If my story is their first acquaintance with the entire subject, they ought to have a way to get that straight.
From time to time I go looking for that chart, but it’s obviously in the middle of some densely packed stack of research materials.
Herewith is a partial list to get the general reader started.
ACTUAL PLACES MENTIONED IN HIGH C AT THE SUNSET TERRACE
The Sunset Terrace Ballroom
The Sky Club
Perkins Grill
The Senate Avenue YMCA
Henri’s
The Walker Theater
The Coffee Pot
Crispus Attucks High School
FICTIONAL PLACES
The Rhythm Room
Reggie Williams’s shoe store (and his opther businesses)
The barber shop where Marvin gets his hair cut
The various houses where the characters live
This is a start, but I really would like to find that chart.
Well, now, this is just dandy
History takes another turn based on a bribe between devils. That whole Iran – Syria connection has never smelled like anything life-affirming.
07.19.07
I still have a pulse
Blogging’s been light lately. It’s been a wacky week. With this upcoming booksigning booth at Indiana Black Expo, I’ve had to knock out three magazine articles this week, rearrange guitar lesson times, get ready to tape my radio show (still would like to come up with more content before the Friday morning taping), construct a display for the booth, record some music to play (dedided to keep it fairly low-tech), and take care of the ongoing stuff like woodshedding, household chores, bill-paying.
I have kept my eye on the passing parade. Interesting stuff. Lots of speculation re: North Korea, for instance. Is the Hermit Kingdom motivated by economic desperation, which would lead us to expect further moves toward denuclearization in short order, or, with the shutting down of the Yongbyon reactor, will NK now stall and bluster and confuse the issue and make demands? Then there’s Iraq. General Pace says there’s been a major shift on the ground there. Just today I saw a headline about the arrest of the highest-ranking Iraqi in al-Qaeda. That’s pretty cool. Makes you wonder if Harry Reid et al wish they’d just gone on home to sleep last night. Speaking of al-Qaeda, it’s clear they’re breathing down our neck as much as ever. If you’re a grown-up in Western civilization, you just take into account that that’s the backdrop to what you’re doing with your life. And it will be interesting to see how Olmert’s release of 250 Palestinian prisoners pans out. I mean, are these guys gonna go back to their families, get jobs, and join the local chess club? If I’m not mistaken, they were heaved into the hoosegow because they acted on their hatred for Israel. Then there’s the Falcons quarterback and his dogfighting charge. Jeez, is there anything further removed from what God was intending when he created human beings than dogfighting?
Well, it’s 10:15, and I gotta pop the orange roughy in the oven. That’s what kind of week it’s been.
