Here is another review from NDPR on Shaun Gallagher’s immense collection that I mentioned a few months back. I have delved into this and have found some very good stuff that I’m currently reading.
“Von” Freeman
“Von” obituary
Louis Armstrong used to come by from the time I was about 3 years old, and he’d always say to me, ‘Hi Pops,’ recalled Freeman, pointing to the era when Satchmo was enjoying his first blush of success as a Chicago bandleader and emerging recording artist. “Earl Hines came over, and Fats Waller played this (Starck) piano of mine.”
Branford Marsalis Interview
As usual from any Marsalis, an articulate, provocative and amusing view.
It’s essentially inauthentic when I listen to it. It doesn’t sound like jazz, and I can find few situations with the exception of popular music where the music is so far removed from its roots that it’s so unrecognizable from the original form.
So I didn’t really grow up on the self-esteem campaign. When you were lousy at something, they told you you were lousy, and they told you how to fix it.
. . . because the two elements that you have to have to become successful are cognition and intuition. Intuition does not come without cognition, and my cognitive abilities were very, very low at the time.
I’d had enough of New York living — I had enough of 5-year-olds calling adults by their first name.
I could tell that he played gospel music or R&B or something like that because his feeling was really, really — it had a real strong feel to it. He was playing very simply; he wasn’t playing any overcomplicated thing.
You have a lot of people who want to play jazz but want to ignore the cultural imprint of the music.
But, if you play Eine Kleine Nachtmusik for your kid, the music is whatever your kid wants it to be about. It’s instrumental music. The kids’ imaginations can run wild.
Black Dog: Now and Zen
One has to hand it to Robert Plant for eventually finding his way through the dreadful ’80s and now re-establishing himself as an elder statesman without ever becoming a caricature of his former self, not trying to be perpetually hip (a la Bowie) and now no longer feeling he has to escape the burden of Led Zep. He is clearly so excited about surrounding himself with fantastic musicians from country, delta blues, folk, classic 50s rock and more besides. He doing far more successfully what Bowie could have done and what Rod Stewart tried to do (with modest success – I don’t mean commercially of course). Hats off to Plant for being a great supporter of New Orleans and especially to his (and Zep’s) appreciation of Fats. Here’s a perfect example of a blistering rock song given new life.
Now
Zen
Plant’s contribution to a Fats Tribute album
A bootleg of Zep doing Fats’ version of Blueberry Hill
The Conscious Brain
Coming soon (an unlikely cover for an OUP book).
Oakeshott on Law
STEVEN GERENCSER trailer from A Companion to Michael Oakeshott
To write about law in relationship to Michael Oakeshott’s ideas generally, or his thoughts on politics in particular, presents a complicated task, not because law is an obscure concept in Oakeshott, and not because it is a topic about which he has written little. In fact, Oakeshott wrote about law and jurisprudence at the beginning of his life as a publishing scholar and was still writing essays on law more than half a century later. Rather it is a challenge to write about Oakeshott and law because his ideas about law are so closely nested with related and interlocking concepts that it is very easy to start by thinking about law and find oneself considering authority or politics, or his distinction between civil association and enterprise association. These concepts are woven together so tightly for Oakeshott that to pull one out and consider it on its own without attention to the others would badly misconstrue the idea. To express this idea in the terms that Oakeshott employs regarding Hegel and Hobbes, these ideas are related as in a system, and to attempt to understand any element of the system in isolation can only generate a limited and incomplete view, that is, a misunderstanding.
Evelyn Waugh Revisited
Having just viewed Brideshead Revisited again after 30 some years here is the infamous and deliciously obstreperous John Freeman-Waugh interview.
Jazz in Japan
The Japanese people want to thank the United States, New Orleans and Satchmo for giving the world such wonderful music called jazz.
A lovely example of the power of this music to spread the joy, the conduit the very special Yoshio Toyama. In Treme (1:5) you may recall a Japanese jazz fan does a good turn for Antoine. Check out the photos as well.
Vettriano
Hated by the art establishment and other literati snobs, no doubt many of them would see virtue in Andrew Lloyd Vombo. JV’s film noir perspective is a lost idealized world of menace and sleaze with elegance, strong sexy women, sinister men, sexual “deviance”, drinking, smoking, politically “incorrect behavior” . . . some mid-Atlantic world, the LA of Marlow meets Bournemouth. NOLA would of course “get” Vettriano.
See this article The Singing Butler Did It – the writer Amy Fine Collins seems to be very versatile and writes competently on fashion to sex trafficking and much in-between.
Brain plasticity and the internet – a debate
Neil Levy takes on Susan Greenfield.
I started by mentioning Plato’s worry that literacy would weaken memory. As a matter of fact, Plato may not have been entirely wrong: there is evidence that people in preliterate cultures have better memories. It does not follow, however, that the invention of writing had costs as well as benefits, or rather it does not follow that any effect on short term memory is simply a cost. It may that (sic) writing did not merely provide us with an external memory store that was superior to brain-based memory (much more reliable, for one thing). By decreasing the burden on our memory, it may also have freed up brain-based processing resources for other tasks.
