Tony Smith, Tufts University political science professor and author of A Pact With the Devil: Washington’s Bid for World Supremacy and the Betrayal of the American Promise, has written a must-see editorial in the Washington Post. I’ve been saying the same things for a year. It’s great to see them spelled out in the Capitol’s newsrag.
Here’s some music for you to listen to while you read it.
Leonard Feather…a “jazz critic” who I actually saw fall asleep with one blond bimbo on each side of him in the Chicago jazz club the Scotch Mist and then publish a review of the group…I was in it…that cited pieces we didn’t even play that night…and Earl “That’s Earl, brother” Wilson, a minor league gossip columnist in the Ed Sullivan/Walter Winchell tradition, who actually calls these two giants “boys” on the video and then assholes himself even further by apologizing for calling Dizzy “Diz” because it’s too casual…like being named Dizzy isn’t about as casual as it gets.
“Sorta the Georgie Jessel of jazz.” Deep.
“You boys got anything more to say?”
Not that you would understand, motherfucker.
Bet on it.
Reminds me of the classic advice from the great Panamanian lead trumpet player Victor Paz, who played lead in Dizzy’s big band for many years.. “Don’ look at the white people dancing. It will fuck up your time.”
This is not classic Bird + Diz…Bird looks sick and sounds to me like he is just going through the motions. (He was a terrible junkie. Being called boy by fools like Feather and Wilson all of one’s life and having to take it can do things to a man. Especially a transcendantly gifted genius. Diz is another story. Equally brilliant, but absolutely indomitable. I knew him a little. ALWAYS up. And funny…!!!???) and the rhythm section isn’t really up to par either.
Search out the recordings.
Say 1945 on. Anything with Max Roach, Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, and/or Charles Mingus. Like listening to fire.
When I teach jazz history to serious students of the music, I tell them to understand the common relative reluctance to listen to this stuff as understandable. It’s like looking at the sun, sometimes. You have to look away before you hurt yourself.
AG
I’m not a jazz student or historian, just a jazz lover. And your comment really struck me. So many people I know who are musicians say they “just can’t listen to some of that jazz stuff. It’s too much for me to absorb at one time”.
What you say is so true. Not everyone “gets it”. Jazz, unlike most other forms of music, can have an almost narcotic affect on the brain when taken in the right dosages and combinations. Whatever it triggers in the brain is a bizarre experience. Trying to convey it to someone is like a marathoner trying to describe his runners high. Unless you’ve been there, you’ll never understand how it feels.
It is indeed like “looking at the sun”.
At the highest levels, Mike, ALL art is like looking at the sun.
Mark Twain famously wrote “Everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it.”
Well…everybody talks about “art” but not many people actually consume it.
Not really.
I mean…lots of people go to serious concerts or put on music in their house and (sorta kinda) “listen” to it…drift in and out of some sort of semi-sleeping reverie is a more accurate description, which is no bad thing in itself if the music has real art in it, but is NOT really “hearing” what is going on in its entiirety. (An act that is more akin to high level meditation that to anything else in which human beings normally indulge.)
And many people read “art” writing. Poetry and serious fiction. But how deeply do they experience it? This is a valid question. Ditto film. To consume art on or near the level that it was created? To be literally transported to other realms while standing in front of a van Gogh or Monet? Listening to great performances of Mozart, Bach, Ravel, Bartok or Gil Evans/Miles Davis collaborations?
It is EXACTLY like looking at the sun.
A llittle goes a long way for most of us.
A great jazz singer, Jane Blackstone, once described to me her musical epiphanies as a small child. Her father used to play orchestral music at home on a good sound system, and as a young girl she did not know that it was being played by many instruments. She just “heard” it. Accepted it totally as…as something. She did not know what it was, exactly, just…something beautiful and transporting.
We all of us (all who have any interest in “‘art”, anyway.) study art in some manner as we grow up. Study Shakespeare, study the history of music, study Whitman and Ravel and James Joyce and Kurosawa, etc.
But how many can resist the urge to go out and buy some popcorn in the middle of “Rashomon”? How many of us are so involved in the experience that we do not HAVE any extraneous thoughts for long periods of time while witnessing high art?
Not very damned many, I will guarantee. I speak from long experience here. The quest for the ability to achieve that sort of attention….as a creator AND as an observer/consumer…has dominated my entire life. Sent me to obscure teachers for guidance in arcane meditational techniques. Sat me down a thousand thousand times to try to not only “listen to” but HEAR great music as it really exists. ALL of it, just as Jane Blackstone first heard it at 3 or 4 years of age. Everything that is going on at any one moment or at least as close to that moment as I can humanly appproach.
You are familiar wiith the word “transported”?
Like that.
And Bird in full, (relatively) healthy flight??
John Coltrane?
Duke Elllington?
Bill Evans?
Dizzy Gillespie?
The Miles bands and the Miles/Gil Evans collaborations?
That music stands with the greatest that ANY civiilization has produced.
It challenges the hearing procedure in amazing ways. The attempt to get into the now…THEIR now” as it stood then/stands at this moment…???
Like looking at the sun.
A religious experience.
A dangerous religious experience in some ways. It can cause a certain kind of blindness. One in which you see other things, and in seeing those things take the risk of tripping over the everyday furniture of life in the process.
Everybody talks about art, but (almost) nobody does anything about it.
Yup.
Have fun trying…
I am.
Later…
AG
The main point of Tony Smith’s Washington Post op-ed is that DLC “neoliberals are nearly indistinguishable from the better-known neoconservatives”. That point had already been made by commentators at Counterpunch in 2004 against Kerry’s candidacy: Kerry was essentially presenting himself as someone who could run the American empire better (which is no doubt true).
That arguments are now being published in the Washington Post against the DLC line that “we can run the empire better”—which were previously heard only in the radical blogosphere—is a promising indication that the 2008 election will not be a replay of 2004.
I’m getting tired of Democrats, and I’m getting tired of liberals. I want FDR and a New Deal cause the one we currently have totally sucks. I now call myself an eclectic independent. Everything that Democrats use to stand for and for which I voted have been dead longer than all of the missing white chicks put together.
When many of the “old guard Republicans” express sentiments like those of Gerald Ford it gives some indication of how far off base a lot of the Democratic (read DLC) leadership is.
I, too, have been long troubled by the fact that a great many of our elected Democrats have tried to direct the discourse toward debating the execution of the war and not the validity of war itself. I know it’s easy to say “what’s done is done, we have to make the best of it” but that allows us to avoid entirely a most pertinent point. To avoid future situations like Iraq we must initiate a debate on just exactly what we want our country’s foundational goals to be going forward. The view put forth on the Iraq debate by DLC stalwarts such as Hillary Clinton would only result in a changing of the mannequins in the window of our government policy on our role in the world. Nothing she says from a policy standpoint would really result in a much different outcome should the same set of circumstances confront a President Hillary Clinton that confronted George Bush. Many Democrats, like Republicans, are still enamored with this “indispensable nation” paradigm. This will only continue to doom us to repeating the same mistakes again and again.
It is incumbent on all of us to do what we can to initiate some kind of conversation on what we want our country to represent to the world in the 21st century.
I find Tony Smith’s closing paragraph summarizes quite succinctly the complexity of the task at hand. And while it is complex, it is a conversation which must be placed at the top of our to-do list as a country.
And he closes with this very prescient warning shot across our bow.
I pray that we heed his advice.