Author: whskyjack

I just ran across this excellent article about Elizabeth Warren. The writer does a good job of making the case of why she is the most important person running for president. It is long form writing so it will take a while to read , but well worth it whether you are a supporter, detractor or ambivalent. While it starts with Joe Biden in reality it is a case for why the American left should embrace her brand of Teddy Roosevelt style liberalism than Bernie Sanders’ path which has it’s roots in Henry Wallace socialism.

Go here to read it all

The contrast between Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden is stark: Biden is comfort food; Warren is food for thought with, to some tastes, a dollop of spinach.

Warren stands virtually alone in the field by offering comprehensive, and specific, proposals for reanimating American democracy by reforming capitalism to reconcile its long-term interests with the needs of Americans writ large. She is, in substantive terms, by far the most important Democrat seeking the presidency.

Whether one tends right or left, Warren’s importance to the political dialogue transcends the eventual fate of her campaign. That’s because she is asking an essential question: Can we repair our deepening economic and social fissures by making large corporations more responsive participants in a revitalized democracy which expands economic opportunity, reinvigorates competition, and redefines corporate citizenship. Her candidacy is an attempt to rescue contemporary capitalism from its potentially fatal excesses.

 Richard North Patterson

Jazz and patriotic music don’t often go hand in hand but thanks to the folks at NPR I was able to find an interesting selection to start the week of the 4th. It is a medley of “America the Beautiful”, “Lift every voice and sing“, “Skies of America” by

Charlie Haden and The Liberation Orchestra

A chaotic scene of sickness and filth is unfolding in an overcrowded border station in Clint, Tex., where hundreds of young people who have recently crossed the border are being held, according to lawyers who visited the facility this week. Some of the children have been there for nearly a month.
Children as young as 7 and 8, many of them wearing clothes caked with snot and tears, are caring for infants they’ve just met, the lawyers said. Toddlers without diapers are relieving themselves in their pants. Teenage mothers are wearing clothes stained with breast milk.
Most of the young detainees have not been able to shower or wash their clothes since they arrived at the facility, those who visited said. They have no access to toothbrushes, toothpaste or soap.

New York Times

How does a person get up every morning and go to work in this facility? It is beyond my ability to even understand. How do they justify this to themselves? How do they explain their participation in this atrocity. Just to their wife, their children?

Enough sympathy.

What I want to know. Who are these criminals, we need names, we need perp walks, right down to those who went to work everyday with total indifference. This is not a time for political posturing from presidential wannabes. This a time when all Americans should stand up and say put these bastards in jail.

It is time for the press to start naming names from the top to the ones who went in everyday and silently tolerated this abuse. Stand in front of their doors with cameras running, microphones in their faces. Shine the light on them. From the big boss right down the lowliest cockroach. Treat them like the perverts they are.

In less than 10 days it will the 4th of July the anniversary of the founding of this country. A time where a group of men pledged their lives and sacred honor to create some thing better than what they knew back in Europe.

This is the God! Damn! United States of America!

How dare you assholes do this in our names!

Jack

Horace Silver ( September 2, 1928 – June 18, 2014 )

From Wikipedia

Horace Silver was an American jazz pianist, composer, and arranger, particularly in the hard bop style that he helped pioneer in the 1950s. As a player, Silver transitioned from bebop to hard bop by stressing melody rather than complex harmony, and combined clean and often humorous right-hand lines with darker notes and chords in a near-perpetual left-hand rumble. His compositions similarly emphasized catchy melodies, but often also contained dissonant harmonies. Many of his varied repertoire of songs, including “Doodlin'”, “Peace”, and “Sister Sadie”, became jazz standards that are still widely played. His considerable legacy encompasses his influence on other pianists and composers, and the development of young jazz talents who appeared in his bands over the course of four decades.

Some very relaxing enjoyable music for your Sunday pleasure

Jack

There are experts on Jazz out there who can describe with great eloquence what you are about to listen to and why it is important. I’m not one of them. It is just good music from great performers. I’ll let the music speak for itself.

Jack

From Wikipedia

Bebop is a style of jazz developed in the early to mid-1940s in the United States, which features songs characterized by a fast tempo, complex chord progressions with rapid chord changes and numerous changes of key, instrumental virtuosity, and improvisation based on a combination of harmonic structure, the use of scales and occasional references to the melody.
Bebop developed as the younger generation of jazz musicians expanded the creative possibilities of jazz beyond the popular, dance-oriented swing style with a new “musician’s music” that was not as danceable and demanded close listening.[1] As bebop was not intended for dancing, it enabled the musicians to play at faster tempos. Bebop musicians explored advanced harmonies, complex syncopation, altered chords, extended chords, chord substitutions, asymmetrical phrasing, and intricate melodies. Bebop groups used rhythm sections in a way that expanded their role. Whereas the key ensemble of the swing era was the big band of up to fourteen pieces playing in an ensemble-based style, the classic bebop group was a small combo that consisted of saxophone (alto or tenor), trumpet, piano, guitar, double bass, and drums playing music in which the ensemble played a supportive role for soloists. Rather than play heavily arranged music, bebop musicians typically played the melody of a song (called the “head”) with the accompaniment of the rhythm section, followed by a section in which each of the performers improvised a solo, then returned to the melody at the end of the song.