Some funky moments on this live album recorded January 1973, especially on the last track Manuel Deeghit. The performances were at Concerts by the Sea, a jazz club on the Redondo Beach pier that lasted until at least the mid 80's. The club was run by Howard Rumsey, the bassist and founding member of the legendary West Coast jazz band the Lighthouse All-Stars, which featured some of LA's best jazz musicians of the 1950's. Through playing and hosting concerts, Rumsey has contributed to the Southern California jazz scene for most of his life. He is 94 years old and continues to play sporadically, most recently (to my knowledge) in a tribute to Stan Kenton last October.
Puttin' It Together shares most of its cast with the more popular Live at the Funky Quarters (San Diego) record that came out in 1972. On this album, Mike Wolff replaced Al Zulaica on piano and Tjader added Bob Redfield on the guitar. Ed Bogas, who produced Live, also co-produced this album and Jim Stern stayed on as the engineer. Like many prolific jazz musicians, Tjader's sound changed a lot over the years and although the Latin influence was a thread throughout his career, he was really versatile. For me, the funky semi-electric music that he got into in this era is some of his heaviest.
Cal Tjader: vibes, timbales, percussion Mike Wolff: piano Bob Redfield: guitar John Heard: bass Dick Berk: drums Michael Smithe: congas
This post marks the 50th upload on this blog, so I made a little mix to celebrate. I'm a fan of long mixes, so this one is over an hour long (but short enough to fit on a CDr) and on top of that it's full of long selections. Most mixtapes only use short cuts, either songs that are short to begin with or excerpts of longer songs. My main beef with even the best of mixtapes is that they are only conducive to radio style listening, they don't let you get too deep into the long jams. If you feel the same way and like jazz, you will probably like this.
Thanks to all the listeners. I have no plans to slow down any time soon, so stay tuned and enjoy.
It's been a couple of months since I posted a good old-fashioned straight ahead jazz album, so here's a lovely effort by a quartet featuring three Dutchmen and a German, recorded live in 1980. The grooves on the A side are especially slick. All the musicians play beautifully on this one and Noordijk (who passed away in October) in particular kills it on a couple of solos. However, it was the great Cees Slinger who stood out to me as the anchor of this album. Slinger, who died a few years back, not only played piano on this album but arranged all the songs. Slinger's work is known and appreciated in some jazz circles, but in my mind, the recognition that he received stateside never matched his creativity in playing and in arranging, (his album Live at the North Sea Jazz Festival is a noteworthy example of the latter.)
I'd be curious to hear how well known Slinger is in Europe, but in any case he is a member of the generation of European jazz musicians whose contributions to the genre have been severely underappreciated in the U.S. Unlike so many American listeners, a lot of the American jazz greats viewed a number of Western and Northern European countries as significant sites on the jazz map. American jazz musicians toured Europe routinely and some even relocated to Europe permanently to live there as ex-pats and make their mark on the European jazz aesthetic by playing with local musicians. Slinger was apparently well acquainted with the American circuit; All About Jazz credits him with playing alongside Dizzy Gillespie, Jimmy Knepper, Sonny Stitt, Jimmy Heath, and Archie Shepp, among others.
It's impossible to say exactly which musical trends the Americans brought across the pond and which ones they brought back to the States as a result of their international collaborations, but there is no question that trans-Atlantic listening was a major part of jazz even from the decades immediately following the genre's inception. Early on, a lot Black musicians liked playing in Paris because they were treated less like second class citizens there. And from some time in the 20th century through to the present day, European governments have been very supportive of creative music compared to the U.S. government, giving out grants for compositions, performances, and travel much more readily. These factors and the general enthusiasm that so many Europeans have historically felt for jazz made the continent a much more comfortable environment for the music, and even today they say that it is much easier to live as a jazz musician in Europe than in the U.S.
The thing that I wonder about is why European jazz fans seem to know so much more about American jazz than Americans know about European jazz. Obviously, the music was born in the States and many of its major innovations occurred on American soil as well, but I get the sense that European collectors are generally more dedicated to seeking out the deeper, rarer jazz recordings from all around the world. Is it a different attitude towards the arts in general? A different culture of music listening? Either way, I'm always grateful to hear new material from the European masters, especially because in the absence of a lot of information about their careers, every recording feels like a window into a different world.
Piet Noordijk: alto and soprano saxes, percussion Cees Slinger: piano and arrangements Rob Langereis: bass Evert Overweg: drums
Today I bring you the next installment in my quest to discover classical music: Debussy's String Quartet in G Minor played by the highly respected Paganini String Quartet. This was the only string quartet that Debussy ever wrote, although the liner notes mention that he intended to compose another. The music on this record is incredibly beautiful; it is full of passages featuring Debussy's characteristic whole tone scale, but it also shows a mastery of harmony, rhythm, and dynamics. The rich timbres are as much a credit to the musicians (and apparently the instruments as well) as to Debussy, but the richness and beauty of the composition itself could have only come from the mind of a great master. To date, I would rank this as my favorite of the classical records in my collection.
The quartet does not actually feature the great virtuoso Paganini, but all four musicians, Henri Temianka, Gustave Rosseels, Charles Foidart, and Lucien Laporte play on Stradivari instruments previously owned by Paganini. The sound quality of the disc is high and the instruments sound very pure, but the fact that the quartet chose to base their image and name on their Stradivari instruments got me thinking. Is the Stradivarius sound really so unapproachably unique, and if so, are his pieces truly superior to those of all the other artisans who have ever produced instruments in the violin family? I understand that there is little consensus on this issue in the classical world, and I therefore wonder if it would be appropriate to draw a parallel between the Stradivari issue and the audiophile movement. There are some music listeners who insist that they can tell the difference between audiophile recordings and their less extravagant counterparts, but I for one have always been a little skeptical of just how superior audiophile recordings really are to the human ear. First of all, most audiophiles have had years of listening practice to make their ears more discriminating. Second of all, most of them tend to have unreasonably expensive sound systems, so it seems to me that to the degree that audiophile records do sound better, the difference is only perceptible on prohibitively expensive equipment. For all practical purposes, then, the difference is negligible. Finally, although this suspicion doesn't prove anything, I would be curious to hear how these listening experts would fare in a pepsi challenge type exercise. I once heard that if you play the exact same recording on the exact same gear for the same person at two slightly different volumes, most respondents will confidently answer that the louder of the two clips had a higher quality sound. In any case, whether or not the uniqueness and perfection of the Stradivari sound are overstated, this record should be a treat for all lovers of deep music.
This collection of huaynos features twelve songs by five groups, probably recorded some time in the 1970's. The huayno is a type of Peruvian music strongly associated with the indigenous people of the Andes and especially with the countryside. Today, a more electronic genre based on huayno structures called the technocumbia has emerged, but conventional huaynos use acoustic instruments, most notably the charango, a plucked string instrument similar to a mandolin and typically include a spoken introduction. This album's focus is love songs, many of which contain strong expressions of Peruvian identity in their lyrics. Some of the artists on this album, like El Jilguero del Huascaran, received wide critical acclaim while Los Hualaychos del Altiplano de Puno yielded no results in a google search.
My first exposure to huayno was through a song on a UNESCO CD called Peru: Music of the Indigenous Communities of Cuzco, which I've posted below. While all the songs on the Folklore record are sung in Spanish, Languilayo Qochachapi is sung in Quechua, the most widely spoken native language of Peru and one of the original languages of the huayno. The singer is eight years old and the instrumentals are a little bit less polished, but the song is incredible. As professional recording artists, the bands on Folklore followed the example of Latin American musicians from all over by turning their regional folk music into something more widely palatable and salable but (many would argue) no less true to its roots. On the back cover, the Odeon label brags that "with this disc, we bring you these artists' best recordings, giving you the exact flavors of the different regions of the Peruvian mountains."
It seems like because the bands on this album don't sound like amateur village bands, the record could sell better, but for the same reason the label had to emphasize the record's authentic qualities. This is a trend that I have noticed in the marketing of so-called folkloric music. People tend to believe that in order to find the ultimate expression of a region's music, the music must be realized in a more formal setting by musicians whose high levels of technique allow them to treat the music with a certain kind of respect. The struggle over the right to claim authenticity is an aspect of many kinds of music, especially those treated as expressions of ethnic or national identity .
I had a hard time figuring out more about this album though. Do the artists and the label identify the music more as a national music than a local music? The song Serrana y Bien Peruana posits a correlation between Andean and Peruvian identity, but is this a different kind of Peruvian identity than say that of a Limeño urbanite? Could the label be at odds with some of the artists on this point? By compiling songs in Spanish rather than Quechua and pointing out that the disc contains exemplary performances of all the regional styles, (which is of course impossible in such a small collection,) Odeon claims the music as the property of broader Peru by treating the regional styles as puzzle pieces that fit into a national genre, varied but strongly related. Are these songs huaynos reinvented for an urban setting, even if that setting is Cuzco rather than Lima?
This disc features a couple of interesting tracks and some unusual production techniques like boosting the shakers higher in the mix than the drums and other instruments, but the truth is that what interests me most about this album is its geography. M. Al Azeem, the singer, songwriter, and recording engineer, recorded and mixed all these songs at his studio in Oakland and sent the tracks down to LA to be mastered. Sly Dunbar was the only musician I recognized in the credits, and while I'm not sure where any of the others lived at the time of the recording, it is clear that Azeem had established himself in Northern California. If you recall the Super Jerry album that I posted a couple months ago, you'll remember that that one was recorded in California as well.
I wonder if there is a lot more to this California reggae connection than a few apparently unrelated recordings. A great many reggae giants such as Ras Michael and Scientist call Los Angeles home today, but I'm curious when and how the West Coast became established as a center of reggae production and culture. Whether or not California was a distant corner of the reggae world in 1980, Sly Dunbar's presence on this album indicates that if nothing else, California was on the reggae map.
A separable but related topic that this record brings up is the idea of the circuits in which records circulate. Basically, depending on what part of the world you live in, you have a higher level of access to certain kinds of records while others are harder to find. People living in Paris will have any easier time picking up original pressings of Congolese soukous because of the French-Congolese connection but will have less luck hunting down most norteño recordings than someone living in LA. (Incidentally, I recently discovered that LA is a more significant site in the norteño record circuit than certain areas of Mexico, namely Cancún.) I wonder how widely some of the more underground California reggae records spread: how available they are in Jamaica, on the East Coast, in the UK, and in other more marginal zones of the reggae world? The more we know about this, the more we can deduce about how integrated the California reggae scene was into the international reggae phenomenon.
This point brings me back to the idea of artistic "threads" that I discussed in the Descargas post in November. The more I can chase down threads of California's early reggae scene, the better I will understand the connections between California reggae and reggae from other parts of the world. Of course, this is more a wish than a promise; I have little to no control over the records that I come across, but I'd love to hear more about this from any informed readers in the comments section. Although I haven't heard as much ex-pat reggae that satisfies my listening desires like the homeland stuff does, I'm always interested to learn more about the under-reported activities taking place in the (transnational) margins of this (or any) genre.
M. Al Azeem: lead vocals, rhythm guitar, keyboards, bass, drums, and percussion Sly Dunbar: drums on tracks 1, 2, 5, 6 Maxwell Beaumont: keyboards, background vocals, and percussion Mike Gambs: lead guitar on tracks 3, 4 Natty Jahzuff: drums track on 4 Steve Greshin: bass on track 4 Willie T. Killer: drums on track 8 Rashaan: congas and percussion Raslam Atiba: congas and percussion Dennis Jackson: alto sax and trumpet Umlah Sadau: tenor sax, soprano sax background vocals: Frances Johnson, Belita Ragsdale, Diane Strong, Earlene Rabiu, J.T. Hamond, Maxwell Beaumont and John Smith
On this disc, the Wrigglers offer up calypso standards and songs I hadn't heard before. It was released as a souvenir/ advertisement for the Arawak hotel in Jamaica, so the liner notes are dedicated to talking up the resort and give almost no information about the band other than the name of the singer, Denzil Laing. Some of these songs appear on the Jamaica Mento 1951-1958 compilation where they are credited to the Wrigglers featuring Ernest Ranglin, and Ranglin's guitar graces all the songs on this album.
Many Jamaican musicians followed changing musical trends as the nation's music industry exploded beginning in the fifties, moving from mento to ska or ska to reggae, but Ranglin contributed more significantly to a greater number of these genres than almost any musician I can name. On this recording, he sounds at home in a mento setting, and he had already begun shaping the ska sound by the late fifties. He is also featured on a lot of jazz recordings, notably many of Monty Alexander's classic albums including "Rass!" He also earned recognition from the jazz world in his own right and toured to England with a trio as early as the mid sixties, recording at least one live album there. According to wikipedia, he also worked as an arranger, studio musician, and live guitarist for reggae greats like Lee Perry, Jimmy Cliff, and the Melodians. In short, Ranglin has had one of the most versatile careers that a musician could hope to have, and he stands out as a national musical treasure in a country where revolutionary musicians abound. Ranglin's playing on the Arawak makes the depth of his musical vision apparent, even at that early stage of his formidable career. This album does not even begin to tell the story of Ranglin's musical diversity nor the immensity of his contributions to Jamaican music and music in general, but as is the case with so many of his recordings, his playing here is both fun and thoughtful.
I've been trying to explore classical music lately, mostly small combo pieces and music for strings. I've been having trouble consistently finding things that I like because the genre is deep in a way that's so foreign to me. I haven't figured out how to spot the albums I like because so many of the great composers and performers were so prolific. Until you listen to a record, you have no idea how it will sound unless you know the composition ahead of time. If anyone has any recommendations based on the clip below, please let me know.
This week's album contains pieces by three composers: Sonata in E Minor by Johann Sebastian Bach, Passacaglia by H.I.F. von Biber, and Concerto in G Minor by Giuseppe Tartini. Listening to Bach's sonata was something of a breakthrough for me because it was the first time I ever enjoyed the harpsichord. I usually think its sound is less refined and expressive than other instruments', and it doesn't help that the volume and timbre of each note are fixed regardless of how hard you hit the keys. When a harpsichord is high in the mix it's in your face for the whole song. In the sonata, the harpsichord and the cello lay down a foundation for the violin and the rich tones of the harpsichord blend into the background smoothly. The violin part is very striking and the harpsichord and cello create a lush texture throughout the song.
Max Rostal, violin on Passacaglia Max Rostal , violin; Frank Pelleg, Harpsichord; Antonio Tusa, Cello on Sonata Max Rostal, violin; Winterthur Symphony Orchestra, Walter Goehr, conductor on Concerto
This might be the first compilation on the blog. It's a collection of Brazilian music that's not 100% essential listening, but it includes some really nice tracks, especially on the second side. My favorite is Ela Desatinou, written by Chico Buarque and performed by Nara Leão. The song was originally released in 1980 on Leão's album Com Açúcar, Com Afeto. In the middle of the 70's, she had left the music world altogether to focus on her family and study psychology. She had already started recording again when she learned that she had inoperable brain cancer in 1979, and in the subsequent 10 years before her death she was incredibly prolific.
The beauty of this song caught my attention right away, and when I learned that she recorded it a year after receiving her diagnosis, I was inspired. It was not the strength of her spirit in the face of death so much as the way that she was able to take control of her creative impulse and produce not only an incredible quantity of music, but a song this beautiful to top it off. I don't have much more to say than that Leão is a beautiful example of the endless creative potential that people possess. It's amazing to witness the incredible feats, artistic and otherwise, that great people manage.
My introduction to the jazz aesthetic was Misterioso, one of Monk's live albums recorded during sessions at New York's Five Spot in the 50's. Very few albums have had as great an effect on my music appreciation as that one, and it continues to touch me in a way that few albums can. Misterioso will always be my favorite, but I love how Monk's other recordings document the way that he continued to modify his compositions and sound over the course of his career. In addition to his contribution to the jazz sound itself, Monk also became a masterful exponent of the jazz practice of producing infinite variations on musical themes.
This recording captures a Paris appearance by Monk's quartet in 1970. Monk gives every note a lot of weight by playing with a rare sparseness, especially on Sweet and Lovely, which takes up the entire A side. Every member of the band leaves plenty of room for the others, giving the performance a more delicate quality than other Monk recordings. I know nothing about Affinity, the Spanish label that released this album first, but the recording was made by BYG people and the sound quality is very clear. Personally, I would go so far as to rank this album among Monk's classic recordings, but that distinction is usually reserved for major label releases.
This one comes from the Gramophone Company of India Limited, an EMI subsidiary, and although there is violin and tanpura accompaniment, the focus in unquestionably Prasad's tabla playing. He has a very intricate style, establishing patterns and then quickly moving on to other ones. Prasad comes out of the Benares gharana, achieved significant recognition for his skills in his lifetime and had a relatively prolific recording career. On this album he played the first side in tritaal, or tintal, the 16 beat cycle, and the second in roopaktal, the 7 beat cycle.
Since Prasad plays in the Benares style, I became curious about how he compared to the other great Benares tabla player I've heard, Lachchu Maharaj. As soon as I saw Maharaj playing tabla on this video, I was struck by the way that his rhythmic genius appealed to a jazz standard of beauty. http://youtu.be/C_70fUJJXfY?t=1m28s Prasad's music has a different kind of rough elegance. Unlike some performers who only hit the drum heads with sharp, definitive strikes, Prasad is not afraid to use the sound of his palm brushing against the skin of the tabla.
While both of these men were educated in versions of the Benares gharana (apparently the gharana's true style is disputed) Maharaj also studied under a variety of masters from all different parts of India and created a unique style by combining techniques. There are considerable differences between the playing on the Maharaj video and the Prasad album, but the performance contexts were also very different. Prasad's was a formal studio recording session and Maharaj's an intimate concert in which he could let his personality shine through a little bit more. I have no idea about the relationship between these two men if there ever was one, but both of them play remarkably different music with similar levels of creativity. Plus both recordings feature the tabla as the solo instrument. I'd be interested to hear more Benares tabla if anyone has any recommendations.
This is the third and last Descargas album, part of a live recording of a concert organized by New York salsa DJ Symphony Sid that featured many of the great Tico Records musicians. The concert went on for hours, and this volume captures songs from late in the night, when the band was deep into the jams. The sound quality is less than perfect, probably because there were so many musicians and not a lot of time to set up the mics, but the music has an energy that cuts through the roughness of the recording.
On the back cover, Tico president Morris Levy included a note of thanks to the DJ. Levy would go on to lead a much-criticized career in the music industry. He ventured into jazz and rock, famously engaged in a series of lawsuits with John Lennon and a few major labels, and died after being convicted of extortion. It was not Levy's career specifically that interested me so much as the breadth of the music that he managed to involve himself in. It got me thinking about the way that music fans go about finding music.
People interested in exploring the world of recorded music learn to dig for new recordings by chasing what I call threads. These threads can be almost anything: they are typically musicians, but they can include producers, arrangers, recording engineers, labels, genres, countries of origin, record cover aesthetics, and so on. Morris Levy's career is a perfect example of how erratically these threads can zigzag and connect in unexpected ways, visibly intersecting on records.
Sometimes these threads lead us astray and frustrate us; just today, I picked out what I thought was a samba record to find that it was closer to disco. Just as often, it is also the unpredictable pathways of these threads that make the hunt for new music magical, because they lead us through oblique channels to amazing recordings that we could have otherwise missed. The more threads we follow, the more we realize the vastness of the entire body of recorded music and how impossible it is to listen to more than an insignificant fraction of it. At the same time, though, we also get a sense of the interconnection between artists and genres that we would consider unrelated if we didn't know better.
Saxes: Alfred Abreu and Robert Porcelli Trumpets: Pedro Boulong, Vincent Frisaura, Victor Paz, Alfredo Armenteros Trombones: Jose Rodrigues, Barry Rogers Flute: Johnny Pacheco Piano: Eddie Palmieri, Richard Maldonado, Charlie Palmieri Bass: Bobby Rodriguez, Israel Lopez Congas: Joe Cuba, Candido Camero, Ray Barretto Timbales: Tito Puente, Jimmy Sabater Vibes: Tito Puente Cow bell: Chino Pozo, John Rodriguez Bongo: John Rodriguez Vocals: Santos Colon, Rafael Davila, Jose Feliciano, Ramon Sardiñas
This album is available elsewhere but I'm posting it because I have a pretty clean copy and because I wanted to use it as a jumping off point for a follow up article to the occupy piece I wrote last week. This album features a number of famous and lesser known dancehall singers freestyling over drum and bass beats supplied by producer George Pang, who sampled them from Sly and Robbie. The lyrics cover everything from social issues to love to the dangers of smoking. As is the case with a lot of dancehall, some of the lyrics of homophobic and mysogynist, but Lady Ann also sings a song about how hard it is for female DJs to make it in the face of the prejudice that characterizes the male-dominated music industry. On the opening track, Buro Banton sings about all the politicians and foreigners who smuggle guns to poor Jamaicans. He says that although the politicians consider the Soviets enemies, these politicians have done more harm to the community than the Soviets, who never sent a single gun to the Jamaican ghetto. By inciting violence through the sale of guns, powerful outsiders continue to influence Jamaican society even as Jamaicans try to take back their identities and their lives by embracing rastafarianism and its doctrine of non-violence and detachment from Western materialism. Internal fighting holds everyone back and makes life in black Jamaica more difficult.
On the surface, this topic seems to have little to do with the occupy movement. Where Buro laments that powerful outsiders are turning poor Jamaicans against each other and therefore themselves, the occupants fear that they are being completely excluded from important decisions that affect all members of society equally. One group wants less contact with power altogether while the other desires a greater role in it. But one thing that sets the occupy protests apart from countless other American protests is the fraught role of police in the movement. As usual, the police are vilified for excessive and unnecessary use of force, (the response to the incidents in Oakland is a prime example of this,) but many protesters have also been reaching out to cops, or at least expressing solidarity with them, on the grounds that they too belong to the 99%. These protesters believe that the cops who use violence to suppress the occupants have been trained by the 1% to act contrary to their self-interest and the interests of their peers. This critique is very similar Buro's.
The trend of considering cops allies rather than foes, if it becomes a major feature of the occupy ideology, will distinguish these protests dramatically from most radical protests of the last half century. In the protests of the 60's, clashes with the police were more than a part of the movement; eruptions of violence became the symbolic staging ground for the two Americas to prove their allegiance to their ideologies. The police at that time did more than enforce order, they represented the order that the protesters sought to overthrow, and their violence against the protesters demonstrated how very entrenched that order was. In more recent protest movements, clashes with the police have tended to eclipse the issues that inspired the protests in the first place. I believe that the protesters will significantly empower themselves if they reappropriate the meaning of police, characterizing employment by the police department as a marker of working class identity rather than alliance with the state project. I'm sure such a semantic shift will be hard to orchestrate, not least because many cops will probably not go along with it, but if it can be done, I think it will help the movement achieve a new level of credibility in the eyes of many critics.
First of all, I rarely put up posts with no album, but I just checked amazon and this one seems pretty easy to find on CD. (NB: if you want to buy it from amazon, please support a private vendor. Although amazon struck a deal with California to avoid a proposition battle over the California sales tax issue, they are still not bound by the law that they agreed to until September.) This might be the wrong time to start observing intellectual property laws given this post's sympathetic stance towards protesters who have been labelled anti-capitalist, but whatever. The album is Duets, recorded in 1976. Each of the four tracks features a different guest: Keith Jarrett, Alice Coltrane, Ornette Coleman and Paul Motian. I found Alice Coltrane's track the most musically inspiring along with Ornette's, but the album is definitely for committed jazz fans only. The song I want to talk about today is "For a Free Portugal," which features Haden on bass and Motian on percussion accompanied by two prerecorded tapes. The first captures Charlie dedicating a song to the Africans struggling for liberation from Portugal during a concert in Lisbon. The crowd roars in response. The second is a tape made in Angola by the Liberation Support Movement, included on the album with the group's permission. The tape features the group's anthem and field recorded war sounds. Hearing Haden incorporate this raw media into his album reminded me of the way that today's protesters share and borrow media like protest videos and add their own voices through commentary, editing choices, and other techniques.
The internet has unquestionably become a major tool for social and political change. It has featured prominently in the many Arab Spring movements and is playing a similar role in the occupy movement in the United States. Today more than any day so far I've noticed the viral spread of youtube videos featuring raw footage less than 24 hours old from occupy sites across the country. There is something very democratizing about high levels of access to technology, especially when this technology enables us to share media expressing and concerning the public's grievances. The images and recordings now circulating depict specific people and events, and yet like the public spaces that American protesters are occupying, they are both ownerless and at the service of the people. I think that this kind of media sharing demonstrates solidarity and support because it allows people to identify with the exact same sounds and images and to make these media their own. These sounds and images become points where people's aspirations and frustrations intersect and grow. The translocal connection that they engender can transform the act of occupying one city block into the act of occupying a bureaucracy or an ideology. The world is going to keep getting smaller, and as it does, I think that expressions of solidarity through media sharing will become more widespread, meaningful, and effective.
Some general thoughts on occupy: Fortunately, it seems like modern protesters recognize the limits of the purely internet-based activism that overloaded our inboxes throughout the late 90's and most of the 2000's before Facebook became the main venue for that sort of thing. People today understand that the internet can enhance real world movements but that the act of being there is still important. In fact, being there can be even more effective when "there" is a translocal, even transnational space.
Of course, no movement has the support of all the people. Occupy has taken a lot of heat for its lack of clarity on a concrete agenda and for the presence of participants who many Americans do not consider serious political actors. To me, the movement looks more like a group of people who have indisputably liberal tendencies but who became fed up for their own reasons. These protesters essentially share one thing: the suspicion that if the people with the most power are becoming richer than ever and most others are becoming poorer than they have been in a long time, there are probably better solutions to the problems facing our nation than the ones we are using at the moment. Unlike the Tea Party, which has sought change by entrenching itself in the bureaucracy, the occupy protesters seem to believe that a more immediate strategy is both necessary and more likely to work.
As a final note on the power of grassroots-mediated images, I want to acknowledge the sympathetic skeptics of the internet who try to prevent us from getting carried away with our own rhetoric, like the people who brought us this picture:
I struggle with the Western tendency to flatten representations of Africa into representations of poverty and "underdevelopment", but images like this also help keep things in perspective.
Another gospel album here, this time from singer Ruth Busbee. As you've probably noticed, I tend to focus on instrumental music, and even when I include music with a vocal component, the singing isn't always the highlight. The opposite is the case with this album. Although Busbee has a tight band and a strong choir backing her up, there is no question that she steals the show. She has a rare combination of range, technique and passion that are obvious right off the bat with the opening of section of Blessed Assurance, where she solos over the harmony before the groove drops.
I don't think it's a coincidence that I overlook a lot of gospel music on this blog; my focus on instrumental music has everything to do with it because gospel music is centered around the voice. As Reverend Jim Holley of the Rock Baptist Church, where the album was recorded, says on the back cover, "once in a lifetime, a voice comes full of life, pulsating, vibrant, and soulfully picturesque through the universe, expressing the universal... With every note expressed, you can feel the love of God [Ruth] has, and the love God has for Ruth." Part of what I think the reverend is getting at here is that any instrument in a gospel band can express the feeling of God, but only a singer can express the feeling and the message at the same time. Not to mention that we can pick up on emotional inflections more easily from a voice; with instrumental music, we have to use more subjective criteria to pick out emotional coloring.
Another thing about the back cover caught my attention is an uncredited quote that a google search suggests was paraphrased from the Bhagavad Gita. "Nothing in life is ours alone. What is yours today was someone else's yesterday, and it will belong to someone else when you are gone." There is an interesting contrast between this quote and one above it by Pastor Leonard A. Lyons, who says it sounds like "God has given [Busbee] the voice of an angel." Are these quotes supposed to be read together? If so, what are we supposed to make of the idea that God gave Busbee an incredible gift with which to praise him, but he will take it away to bestow on someone else someday? Who knows. But as far as my idea about the voice is concerned, the proverb emphasizes that Ruth's voice is God-given and that God gives people everything, apparently including the ability to feel a connection with him through prayer. In this sense, the voice seems like a major symbol in gospel because God gave it to man (in part) to bring man closer to him.
