Is Jazz Dead?

sociology

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

music

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?”

Noel Malcolm on Hobbes

Noël Malcolm

Noel Malcolm’s monumental 2,355 page edition of Leviathan is rightly attracting attention well beyond philosophical circles. And you can read Malcolm’s chapter on Oakeshott’s Hobbes in the forthcoming A Companion to Michael Oakeshott.

But things are looking up for the Monster, thanks to the labours of Noel Malcolm, a polymath at All Souls College, Oxford, and a former journalist and commentator. In the 1990s Dr Malcolm transformed the study of Hobbes by assembling and annotating his surviving correspondence. Dr Malcolm seems to have read, and judiciously assessed, everything that may be relevant to everything that may be relevant (this includes graveyard inscriptions, so it can fairly be said that he leaves no stone unturned). He has now published the first fully critical edition of “Leviathan”, including the different, and shorter, Latin version, which Hobbes published some 17 years after the English text that anglophone students of politics study to this day. Anyone who wonders why Hobbes used the name of a biblical sea-beast that was traditionally identified with the devil to refer to the state, or commonwealth, “to which…we owe our peace and defence”, will find the obscure but likeliest solution to this puzzle, and others, uncovered here.

Radical Temporality and the Modern Moral Imagination: Two Themes in the Thought of Michael Oakeshott

timothy fuller

Here is the “dean” of Oakeshott exposition, Tim Fuller, and a taster from his essay for the Companion.

My intention is to reflect on two themes that run through the whole of Oakeshott’s thought: first, the radical temporality of the human condition and, second, the character of modernity’s response to radical temporality. The first is, for Oakeshott, universal in experience to all times and places; the second is peculiar to a development in the modern West which, Oakeshott suggests, began to come into sight about five centuries ago, which persists into the present, and which manifests our particular experience of, and response as he understands it to, the universal condition of radical temporality. The second theme emerges as Oakeshott’s exploration of the distinctively modern response to the universal condition. My approach here prepares the way to expound a “philosophy of politics,” which Oakeshott has described as “an explanation or view of political life and activity from the standpoint of the totality of experience” (RPML 126).

Episteme 9.3

epistemology

New issue now available featuring symposium on Christian List and Phillip Pettit.

HIGHER-ORDER EPISTEMIC ATTITUDES AND INTELLECTUAL HUMILITY

Allan Hazlett

RELIABILISM: HOLISTIC OR SIMPLE?

Jeffrey Dunn

GROUP AGENCY AND EPISTEMIC DEPENDENCY Aaron Dewitt

CONSTRUCTIVIST AND ECOLOGICAL MODELING OF GROUP RATIONALITY

Gerald Gaus

EPISTEMOLOGY IN GROUP AGENCY: SIX OBJECTIONS IN SEARCH OF THE TRUTH

Fabrizio Carrion

HOW TO BE A REDUNDANT REALIST

Kurt L. Sylvan

THE NORMATIVE STANDING OF GROUP AGENTS

Rachael Briggs

SYMPOSIUM ON GROUP AGENCY: REPLIES TO GAUS, CARIANI, SYLVAN, AND BRIGGS

Christian List and Philip Pettit

Steve Jobs on life and death

philosophy of life

Update – see the official Apple tribute to Jobs. Notable is Jobs’ valuing the liberal arts.

This on the first anniversary of Job’s passing. Death, as I analogize it, is a truck with its headlights on, bearing down upon one standing in the middle of the road. So carpe diem!

Nagel and Tye on phenomenal consciousness

consciousness

Nagel in The Nation

Tye in 3:AM

The Religious Sensibility of Michael Oakeshott

elizabeth corey

Here is the opening to Elizabeth Corey’s essay for the Companion.

I have often thought that one of the best introductions to the philosophy of Michael Oakeshott is a children’s book by Arnold Lobel. Grasshopper on the Road describes the journey of a remarkably even-tempered grasshopper who meets various other insects on his way down a pleasant country lane. Each of these insects displays some modern pathology. Grasshopper first encounters the members of the “I Love Morning” club, who raise placards extolling the virtues of morning while shouting such slogans as “Morning is Best” and “Hooray for Morning.” Grasshopper is welcomed into the club when he reveals that he, too, loves morning. But when he remarks that he also loves afternoon and evening, the other insects turn on him in disgust and order him out of their ranks. A bit later, he meets “The Sweeper,” a housefly who has noticed a speck of dust on her rug. Her effort to sweep it away has made her aware of the dust that has collected on the floor next to the rug, and also on her front stoop and sidewalk. She realizes, in despair, that there is also a great deal of dust on the road in front of her house. It is here, as she attempts to sweep clean a gravel road, that she meets Grasshopper. The book is full of subtle political commentary of this sort. It playfully lampoons the vanity of attempts to control the world, the desire of people to find purpose in life by joining a movement, and the general human inability to enjoy life as it happens. It is a wonderfully Oakeshottian book.