Here is a play based upon Terry Teachout’s excellent biography. Also check out this time period in Ricky Riccardi’s equally excellent and touching description in his biography. Update: another review from Slant.
Duke Ellington on jazz and freedom
Michael S. Rozeff over at Lew Rockwell has, as usual, a nice squib on jazz and freedom.
po’boy
My po’boy is a hot mess. The spicy smoked sausage, slicked by its own fireball-orange grease, is determined to slide out the sides of the Leidenheimer loaf. The links are further lubricated by two types of mustard (yellow and Creole) and a slather of chili that ramps up the ooze factor. By the time I’m done with my sandwich at Domilise’s Po-Boy & Bar, I’ve gone through at least a dozen napkins.
But I savor my “dressed” flavor bomb because I know that with each indelicate chomp I’m biting into history – not just the history of this beloved po’boy shop in Uptown, but the very culinary history of New Orleans.
Eric Hobsbawm
The name Hobsbawm was virtually institutionalized at Birkbeck. While there I felt obliged to read a bit of Hobsbawm at a time when I was also reading G. E. M. de Ste. Croix – the latter so much deeper and more compelling than the former. I took inspiration from De Ste. Croix’s paper “Why were the Early Christians Persecuted” published in Past and Present, a paper that after all these years still stands as one of my favourite pieces of critical scholarship, “Croicks” later taking on the task of assimilating Jerry Cohen’s very difficult Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence. So why did Hobsbawm make little or no impression on me? Struck by the rather bland but certainly prominent obituary of Hobsbawm in The Economist I give this brief assessment.
I had three problems with Hobsbawm’s Marxism. The first is the he never was able, or saw the need, to explain why he became a Marxist in the first place. He came from a Marxist background and assimilated the creed. There was nothing else to think, given his German background: that’s what comes across from his autobiographies. When you think of the reflectiveness of English communists, the contrast is poignant. He wasn’t a Marxist because of the crisis of capitalism, which was the (reasonable) ground of much English Marxism. He was just a Marxist and could give no more account of it than a child brought up by Jesuits can explain why he’s a Catholic.
The second is that he doesn’t do micro-history. If you read EP Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, here you see a historian working from a messy mass of primary material and illuminating it with a marxist analysis. He’s not putting up a prefabricated house; he’s, in Oakeshott’s metaphor, building a dry wall brick by brick. Hobsbawm by contrast takes big events & trends and sets them out in a stereotyped Marxist narrative. If you read Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916/17) you already know what Hobsbawm is going to say, what line he is going to take, about Western imperialism.
Thirdly, as for the claim that he separated his ideological commitments from his historical scholarship, which he kept scrupulously pure and objective, this is just a lie. Read all you want by Hobsbawm on postwar East European and Russian history, and where are the gulags? Where is the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe? The man closed his eyes to every inconvenient truth and finished up – oh exquisite irony – lauded for his scholarship. Which, by the way, is wholly secondary. I don’t think he knew what an archive was.
A final consideration is that he showed no interest in the more sophisticated brands of Marxism that were produced by a string of writers from Gramsci to Althusser. He never moved on from Ernst Thälmann! . . .
What I didn’t know about EH was his interest in jazz:
Alongside history and politics, Hobsbawm was an important figure in the New Orleans Revival (the introduction of jazz to Britain in the Forties and Fifties). He started writing jazz criticism in 1947 and had a weekly column as jazz critic of The New Statesman from 1955 to 1965 under the name Francis Newton.
Even here his purpose was often polemical: Jazz he believed to be “a musical manifestation of populism — where jazz plays its most important part and has its real life in the common tradition of culture.” He wrote a number of books on the subject including The Jazz Scene (1959) and Uncommon People, Resistance, Rebellion and Jazz (1998).
Perhaps EH on jazz will be more interesting and palatable. I’ll give it a go sometime.
New Orleans’ Top 10 restaurants for 2012
As with all lists, this is bound to be contentious – and of course this being NOLA you can have wildly delicious food without going to a fancy eatery. Of the top-10 I have only been to one – the perennial Commander’s Palace. And yes, it did live up to being one of my most memorable meals, competing with Le Bernardin for one, which is high praise indeed.
Extended Mind meets Hegel
Philosophy will be the key that unlocks artificial intelligence
In my view it is because, as an unknown sage once remarked, “it ain’t what we don’t know that causes trouble, it’s what we know that just ain’t so.” I cannot think of any other significant field of knowledge where the prevailing wisdom, not only in society at large but among experts, is so beset with entrenched, overlapping, fundamental errors.
Michael Oakeshott’s Philosophy of History
In the countdown to October 19th here is the intro to Geoff Thomas’ chapter:
Omnis determinatio est negatio, says Spinoza: to specify the nature of anything is also illuminatingly to say what it is not. This remark, whatever its general force, applies exactly to Michael Oakeshott’s philosophy of history. Oakeshott is a polemicist, a prince of skeptics, throughout his writings on the nature of history. To be sure his position can be characterized positively: he is a constructionist. He holds that the historical past is an inferential construction from present experience. So, clearly enough, here’s the first negative: Oakeshott rejects any idea of the reality of the past. The past does not exist; if it did, the historian would not need to construct it inferentially or in any other way. It would just be there, open to investigation.
The non-reality of the past is a major negative theme. Another of Oakeshott’s principal themes, that of the autonomy of history, also carries heavy negative implications. Oakeshott has a strong sense of the autonomy of history. Historical inquiry has its own internal impetus. It defines its own problems, poses its own questions, and has sole authority in regard to its methods. Its practitioners also decide who is a good or competent historian. Oakeshott’s insistence on autonomy is not accompanied by very much if anything of a methodology of history as a specific craft of inquiry. But it does carry some punchy negatives. One of these is a rejection of scientific categories from historical explanation. More precisely, Oakeshott will have nothing to do with causal explanation in history. The notion of cause is a mistaken intrusion — an outside interference — from the scientific realm. Nor is science the only source of irrelevant categories. The realm of practice sends its saboteurs into historical inquiry, and the price of history is eternal vigilance against them. Practice obtrudes its unwelcome attentions in three ways: one, by seeking to use history as a repository of practical wisdom, as a guide through analogies and parallels to the current world; two, by moral judgment on historical phenomena; and three, by false teleology, projecting ends, goals, processes as inherent in the course of historical events. It is hardly too much to say that Oakeshott’s positive theory of history is a coda to the rehearsal of these errors: the errors of assuming the reality of the past, of applying the category of causation to historical inquiry, and of allowing the intrusion of practical considerations into the work of the historian. In his own terms Oakeshott is concerned with “the philosophy of history” in the sense of an inquiry “about the nature of historical truth and the validity of historical knowledge” (WIH 203). He is not occupied with the methodology of historical research (e.g., how to decide whether there are too many or two few word-dividers on a putative Ugarit tablet) or with speculative delineations of great historical patterns such as we find in St. Augustine’s de Civitate Dei, in Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History or in Spengler’s The Decline of the West.
Is Jazz Dead?
Here is a critical review of a book that I haven’t yet read. The review rightly touches on several meta-issues in Jazz but whatever insights Duncan Heining’s review offers and whatever perhaps legitimate criticisms he levels against the target author, Heining’s political sociology itself comes over as a sophomorish off-the-peg conceptual apparatus so characteristic of circles where there is no genuine philosophical culture.
While Nicholson does attempt to link what he sees as the cultural conservatism of Marsalis et al with the political conservatism of Reagan and Bush, he fails to analyze the processes involved or their political implications and consequences. On the one hand, he appears to suggest that the repositioning of jazz within American culture is a radically inspired move, setting this against an America where the right was in the ascendancy. On the other, he sees the way in which this has been achieved as having consequences for the music, which have stifled innovation and restricted opportunity for many US musicians. Yet, Marsalis-Murray-Crouch achieved their goal of moving jazz to the centre of American mainstream culture not merely by linking it with the high culture of classical music and dance. They did so by turning it into a commodity, both in its traditional economic and Marxian senses.
Kid Ory
Write-up from NOLA.com: ‘Kid’ Ory bio research took author 15 years; ‘the music is why we care,’ he says.
John McCusker’s website
Kid Ory was a trombonist, composer, recording artist, and early New Orleans jazz band leader. Creole Trombone tells his story from birth on a rural sugar cane plantation in a French-speaking, ethnically mixed family, to his emergence in New Orleans as the city’s hottest band leader.
A Kid Ory jazz band in California, 1922. The Ory band featured such future jazz stars as Louis Armstrong and King Oliver and was widely considered New Orleans’s top “hot” band. Ory’s career took him from New Orleans to California, where he and his band created the first African American New Orleans jazz recordings ever made.
In 1925 Edward “Kid” Ory moved to Chicago, where he made records with King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, and Jelly Roll Morton that captured the spirit of the jazz age. His most famous composition from that period, “Muskrat Ramble,” is a jazz standard. Retired from music during the Depression, he returned in the 1940s and enjoyed a reignited career.With Creole Trombone, author John McCusker tells the story of a jazz musician arriving on the scene in New Orleans at the same time as the music itself. The man and the music came up together, reached maturity together and, ultimately, faded from the scene together.
The tale covers the years between 1900 and 1933 and that period is the book’s main focus. Kid Ory’s remembrances carry the story only to this point, and it would have been difficult to fill the remaining years without his voice. While the tale of his career revival in the forties is interesting, it is far less so than the earlier period and less relevant to the historical question:
“Who was Kid Ory?”
manwithoutqualities 