It’s the 20’s, young people are leaving the farm and going to the city to work in the factories. That New Orleans music had moved north to Chicago and then to New York. The radio was new, so was sound in the movies. We started to have shared experiences as a nation. Jazz, speak easies, women in short skirts……….. Grandma, who was busy raising her family, must have been shaking her head.
What I love about YouTube is access to original recordings. The quality isn’t great but you are there in the room for the first time.
The Charleston represented a decade and here it is played by its creator. James P Johnson.
ser·en·dip·i·ty /ˌserənˈdipədē/ noun: serendipity; plural noun: serendipities the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way. “a fortunate stroke of serendipity” synonyms: chance, happy chance, accident, happy accident,
I was tempted to use Jace’s title for this Sunday’s selection for serendipity played a big part in todays selections. I was reading a story on my local NPR station web site. The next story offered was about a local musician and his strange string instrument playing Celtic music. And here is the serendipity, the YouTube algo offered up a video by one of the musicians in the group. A young man, Amando Espinoza, from Bolivia, composing wonderful music. He is using music he had heard as a child in Bolivia and fusing it with world rhythms, all played by a collection of local musicians. Not in New York or LA but in this conservative cautious cow town called Kansas City
We truly live in a golden age and as evidenced by our President, are too stupid to realize it.
I could go on but lets just relax and listen to what the world offers on our door step, enjoy.
From a comment in my Twitter feed: “You may not know the composer but you know the song” The Composer was João Gilberto and the song “Girl From Ipanema” But Gilberto was more than that one song, He created a new genre of music, Bossa Nova, and brought the dance beat back to Jazz
Gilberto passed away last week at age of 88, in his life he left his mark on the music of Brazil and the world
The following are from the 1965 Grammy Jazz record of the year, Getz/Gilberto a collaboration between Gilberto and Jazz saxophonist Stan Getz
For a smooth mellow Monnday morning, enjoy.
From NPR João Gilberto is credited by some with writing the first bossa nova, or new beat. This mid-20th century musical gift to the world drew on Brazil’s African-influenced samba tradition, but was performed without the usual battery of drums and rhythm instruments, and at much lower volumes. Gilberto’s intimate and nuanced style of guitar playing and singing, eventually central to the bossa nova sound, were reportedly developed in 1955 when he sequestered himself inside of a bathroom at his sister’s house so as not to disturb her family and to take advantage of the acoustics provided by the bathroom tiles. In the mid-1950s, Brazil was in the midst of a post-WWII modernization inspired by a new president who wished to move the country out of third world economic status. Gilberto’s “Bim-Bom,” often named as the first bossa nova song, came from that period, and soon thereafter, the style began to sweep Rio’s cafe’s and bars. Bossa nova’s sophisticated sound became popular with a new moneyed class eager to move away from the more traditional samba sound of explosive drums and group singing. Rio de Janeiro was ground zero of the country’s cultural explosion; Gilberto, composer Antonio Carlos Jobim and poet Vinicius de Moraes were the key architects of a culture shift that forever changed their country’s musical point of reference.
Gillespie was a trumpet virtuoso and improviser, building on the virtuoso style of Roy Eldridge but adding layers of harmonic and rhythmic complexity previously unheard in jazz. His combination of musicianship, showmanship, and wit made him a leading popularizer of the new music called bebop. His beret and horn-rimmed spectacles, his scat singing, his bent horn, pouched cheeks, and his light-hearted personality provided some of bebop’s most prominent symbols. In the 1940s Gillespie, with Charlie Parker, became a major figure in the development of bebop and modern jazz. He taught and influenced many other musicians, including trumpeters Miles Davis, Jon Faddis, Fats Navarro, Clifford Brown, Arturo Sandoval, Lee Morgan, Chuck Mangione, and balladeer Johnny Hartman. Scott Yanow wrote, “Dizzy Gillespie’s contributions to jazz were huge. One of the greatest jazz trumpeters of all time, Gillespie was such a complex player that his contemporaries ended up being similar to those of Miles Davis and Fats Navarro instead, and it was not until Jon Faddis’s emergence in the 1970s that Dizzy’s style was successfully recreated [….] Arguably Gillespie is remembered, by both critics and fans alike, as one of the greatest jazz trumpeters of all time”.
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.
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.
