Sunday Serendipity

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Today’s selection couldn’t be more different from last week’s selection yet both composers were very influential in the twentieth century American music scene.

Today’s selection we have three songs by William Grant Still, originally, I believe, written for piano and voice. They have been arranged for flute and piano by Alexa Still (no relation) A well know flutist from New Zealand. It is a beautiful arrangement to calm the nerves on this post-Thanksgiving Sunday.

Performed by Demarre McGill – Flute, Orion Weiss – Piano

Enjoy, Jack

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/-tWlfN0V40I
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23 thoughts on “Sunday Serendipity”

  1. thanks, jack, i needed that. it certainly was a stressful few days for awhile there. one of those  “they said they were leaving hours ago yet are still here” times.

    surely doth music soothe the savage(d) beast

     

  2. David Horsey The real perversion, from Colorado Springs to Qatar | The Seattle Times oped and cartoon today:

    Wear a rainbow patch on your uniform and you will get a yellow card in a World Cup match. Wear a rainbow hat and security personnel will not allow you to enter a stadium. Wear rainbow paraphernalia of any kind on the street or in the Doha subway and you risk being accosted by an outraged local.
    Such is the situation in Qatar where the World Cup is currently underway.
    Bringing the planet’s biggest sporting event to the small Muslim monarchy has been controversial from the beginning. Qataris allegedly bribed members of the site selection committee to win their bid to host the event. After that, according to human rights groups, the Qataris ruthlessly exploited the army of foreign workers brought in to build six new soccer stadiums. Then, reneging on a prior agreement, Qatari officials outraged fans by banning beer sales.
    The beer ban is of far less import than the apparent failure to follow through on a promise to relax the country’s strict laws against homosexuality. In a country that rarely sees a rainbow in the endlessly rainless skies, many Qataris are freaking out at any display of the rainbow symbol of LGBTQ rights.
    Meanwhile, in an arguably less civilized country — the United States of America — a young man armed with an assault rifle and a pistol walked into a drag show in Colorado Springs’ only gay nightclub on Saturday night and started shooting. Five people were killed and many more wounded before a couple of brave patrons took the shooter down.
    From Qatar to Colorado Springs and so many places in between, there are fundamentalist zealots who believe anyone whose sexual orientation varies from a heterosexual norm is perverse. The real perversion, though, is the belief that the ancient, ignorant biases of some holy book should be imposed on everyone. And the real deviants are those who imprison or, worse, gun down people who are merely seeking to live and love according to their own inclinations.

  3. 11/27/2020

    The song is a showtune from the 1949 musical South Pacific. At the time, South Pacific received scrutiny for its commentary regarding relationships between different races and ethnic groups. In particular, “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught” was subject to criticism, judged by some to be too controversial or downright inappropriate for the musical stage. Sung by the character Lieutenant Cable, the song is preceded by a line saying racism is “not born in you! It happens after you’re born…” Written by Richard Rodgers / Oscar Hammerstein II

  4. good news though in the guardian today about where the buffalo roam — again

    Bison proliferate as Native American tribes reclaim stewardship | US news | The Guardian

    Perched atop a fence at Badlands national park, Troy Heinert peered from beneath his wide-brimmed hat into a corral where 100 wild bison awaited transfer to the Rosebud Indian Reservation.
    Descendants of bison that once roamed North America’s Great Plains by the tens of millions, the animals would soon thunder up a chute, take a truck ride across South Dakota and join one of many burgeoning herds Heinert has helped re-establish on Native American lands.
    Heinert nodded in satisfaction to a park service employee as the animals stomped their hooves and kicked up dust in the cold wind. He took a brief call from Iowa about another herd being transferred to tribes in Minnesota and Oklahoma, then spoke with a fellow trucker about yet more bison destined for Wisconsin.
    By nightfall, the last of the American buffalo shipped from Badlands were being unloaded at the Rosebud reservation, where Heinert lives. The next day, he was on the road back to Badlands to load 200 bison for another tribe, the Cheyenne River Sioux.
    Most bison in North America are in commercial herds, treated no differently than cattle.
    “Buffalo, they walk in two worlds,” Heinert said. “Are they commercial or are they wildlife? From the tribal perspective, we’ve always deemed them as wildlife, or to take it a step further, as a relative.”
    […]
    Heinert, 50, a South Dakota state senator and director of the InterTribal Buffalo Council, views his job in practical terms: get bison to tribes that want them, whether two animals or 200. He helps them rekindle long-neglected cultural connections, increase food security, reclaim sovereignty and improve land management. This fall, Heinert’s group has moved 2,041 bison to 22 tribes in 10 states.
    “All of these tribes relied on them at some point, whether that was for food or shelter or ceremonies. The stories that come from those tribes are unique to those tribes,” he said. “Those tribes are trying to go back to that, re-establishing that connection that was once there and was once very strong.”
    […]
    The US interior secretary, Deb Haaland, the first Native American cabinet secretary, said in an interview that settlers “wanted to populate the western half of the United States because there were so many people in the east”.
    “They wanted all of the Indians dead so they could take their land away,” she said.
    The thinking at the time, she added, was “‘if we kill off the buffalo, the Indians will die. They won’t have anything to eat.”’
    […]
    With so many people, houses and fences now, Haaland said there was no going back completely. But her agency has emerged as a primary bison source, transferring more than 20,000 to tribes and tribal organizations over 20 years, typically to thin government-controlled herds so they do not outgrow their land.
    “It’s wonderful tribes are working together on something as important as bison, that were almost lost,” Haaland said.
    Bison demand from tribes is growing, and Haaland said transfers will continue. That includes up to 1,000 being trucked this year from Badlands, Grand Canyon national park and several national wildlife refuges. Others come from conservation groups and tribes that share surplus bison.
    [continues]

  5. Buffalo Dusk 
    By CARL SANDBURG

    The buffaloes are gone.
    And those who saw the buffaloes are gone.
    Those who saw the buffaloes by thousands and how they pawed the prairie sod into dust with their hoofs, their great heads down pawing on in a great pageant of dusk,
    Those who saw the buffaloes are gone.
    And the buffaloes are gone.

    [Not so fast, Carlo….]

  6. 1/7/2012

    Roger Miller singing You Can’t Roller Skate in A Buffalo Herd and following up into Chug-a-Lug Chug-a-lug live at Austin City Limits

  9. Now if we could only get human beings to decrease the herds of people.  When I was born California had 9.6 million people. It now has 40 million. How do you ruin paradise? Add people. It is not a good thing to drive more and more species to extinction mainly due to habitat loss to provide places for people to live.

    There was a warning yesterday that Dallas was endanger of flooding due to expected rain.  The area has grown so rapidly that being paved over means the water no longer has any place to go.

     

     

  10. In 1790, President George Washington wrote to Jewish congregations of Newport, Rhode Island, that the United States Government “gives to bigotry no sanction,” adding his hope for Jewish Americans that “every one shall sit in safety” with “none to make him afraid.”

  11. Jamie – I look at Colorado for my horrible reference.  1970 about two million people, and a lot more cattle.  2010 when I left there were over five million people.  There was barely enough water when I first arrived and recycling pee water when I left.  Now there is no water and people are still pouring in.

  15. Yep, I had good intentions of  sanding it thoroughly, and then refinishing it but somebody called about playing a job out on the Road to Hell so I had to put it back together and one thing led to s’mothers and  semi-back-together it stayed.  Axe of the Century, 2001. 

    No matter how many times I tell it it still makes me laugh, putting that thing back together half finished like that.

  16. By the fall of 1876 , the hide hunters were finishing up their bloody work wiping out the “Great Southern Herd”.  This happened right afterwards –

    In February 1877, a rancher named John Lovelady, riding on horseback below the caprock south of the mouth of Yellow House Canyon, witnessed thousands of wolves loping over the plains and up the Yellow House.
     
    The wolves, he said, were maybe “twenty abreast, and the pack must have been two or three miles in length.” He saw them “heading in a northwestern course across the plains.”
     
    https://www.lubbockonline.com/story/lifestyle/columns/2017/07/08/chronicles-why-did-thousands-wolves-lope-yellow-house/14825402007/
     
     
     
     
     

  18. Something I am getting irritated about is the media yacking away, apparently austonded by people under sixty voting.  My kids are in their forties, their children are in their late teens.  I do not remember being in my thirties and the reporters being shocked that we voted.  Many of us were veterans of WWI, WWII, Korea and Vietnam, todays “kids” are also veterans, but not quite the percentage.
     
    In my twenties, in the military, we voted, we really voted as Nixon was president.  I don’t remember anything about youth voting.

  19. That wolf pack  Mr. Lovelady saw was less than 10 miles from this keyboard. It is widely  known that killing off the buffalo was seen as a way of depriving the first nations of food and shelter. 
    But not until  a tanner in England solved a very big problem he had, did the real  killing get under way.
    The industrial  revolution is thought of as coal, iron , and steam. But all those factories had a voracious demand for  heavy leather belting,  Only about 3 strips down the spine of a large cow would do.  
    Around the end of the 1860’s  demand was soaring  in Britain  , and here as well . They all knew about those millions of hides grazing on the plains , but  industrial tanners could not process the bison raw hide into leather. 
    Then that fellow in England found a way around 1870 .
    And Boom !
    We shot 70 Million animals in  less than 10 years , one bullet at a time. All to feed  the “live derive”  system of manufacturing . 
    A steam engine  powering a long overhead drive shaft with pulleys  along it .  A set machines under each pulley.
    All of it connected by thick wide leather belts, with clutches  to engage the belt or make it slack .
    That was the driving  force  of why we shot all those animals. 

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