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 Wandering In 

A JAZZ STATE OF MIND - Page 4

  

 

 

 

The Minds Eye: Warm Canto 

 

 

Warm Canto from The Quest, 1961: Mal Waldron (p); Eric Dolphy (as,c); Booker Ervin (ts); Ron Carter (c); Joe Benjamin (b); Charlie Persip (d)  

The Minds Eye theme: Truth by Miles Moore;  Painting by Hughie Lee Smith

 

Of Mal Waldron's piano solo on Warm Canto, someone wrote:

 

"Mal's solo on this song is one of my favorite piano solos of all time! Mal was capable of much more impressive and technical solos, but for this piece he wanted each note to count. I'm not against "sheets of sound" but sometimes a really minimalist solo can be something to savor. It's like a beautiful haiku versus a great novel."

 

 

 

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Beyond the Ephemeral

 

 

Asked if there’s a point where Jazz is too intellectual for the culture or the ritual, writer and music critic, Albert Murray, answered in part by explaining that Jazz is on the most ephemeral level of appreciation. He's right. Many of us evaluate music and other art forms, as a measurement of its popularity in the commercial marketplace, rather than as a matter of our own taste.

Maestro, Duke Ellington spoke on the subject of taste and popularity while in Sweden.

 

 

Taste in art is a matter of having sufficient confidence and ability to ascertain value. Evaluations of art by people who are mainly interested in selling things should be discounted because art is beyond the ephemeral. 

    

  

 

 

 

 Appreciating Losses

 

Basketball Hall of Famer, Kareem Abdul Jabbar said, “You can’t win unless you learn how to lose.” Tai Chi students are taught a similar lesson: “You must be prepared to accept defeat repeatedly and for a long period," the masters say. "You must ‘invest in loss’ otherwise you will never succeed.”

 

 

  

Losing is not always something negative or unfortunate or accidental. Losing is sometimes beneficial; an intentional positive act. Investing in loss and learning its lessons, however, are not easy.

 

 

 

The Ultimate Question

 

First responders perform many vital services, but some of them may be a little too tightly intertwined with one another. Indeed, it’s not very unusual for a preacher and a morticians to be one and the same person.

When Mother Nature or Father Time or an infirmity of another name takes the inevitable toll on us, the preacher and/or mortician is usually among the first responders to offer condolences to the bereaved family and usually first to ask the ultimate question:

“Who’s got the body?”

 

 

St. James Infirmary - January 28, 1930

Joe “King” Oliver, Jimmy Allen, Bubber Miley (t), Jimmy Archey (tb), Bobby Holmes (cl, as), Glyn Paque, unk. (as, ts), Don Frye (p), Arthur Taylor (bjo), Jean Stultz (g), Clinton Walker (tuba), prob. Edmund Jones (d), Carroll Dickerson (vln, dir), Frankie Marvin (vcl) 

   

Of these two vital first responders, the preacher and the undertaker, which was established first as a profession?  

 

 

 

Creeping Up on Himself

A Mulla Nasrudin Teaching Story from The Exploits of the Incomparable Mulla Naasrudin by Idries Shah

 

 

Bedar, the Watchman, caught the Mulla prying open the window of his own bedroom from the outside, in the depths of night.

 

‘What are you doing, Nasudin? Locked out?”

‘Hush! They say I walk in my sleep. I am trying to surprise myself and find out.’

 

 

 

 

Domestic Tranquility

 

Sane people are mentally sound. They have good judgement. They have the ability to anticipate and appraise the effect of things that happen. And when things go wrong, they try to make them right. 

A few months have passed since an apparently insane man walked into the Sandy Hook Elementary School in New Town Connecticut and gunned down 26 innocent people. Twenty little children lost their lives in the nightmare. On December, 14, 2012 something went very wrong in America. Most Americans say background checks are needed to help keep criminals and mentally challenged people away from firearms, but some of our elected "leaders" don't agree. They say they're protecting our Second Amendment rights. They're backed up by the "Guns don't kill people, people kill people" crowd, by gun merchants and their lobbyists. So they filibuster. 

   

 

 

Sane people have good sense. And they prove it by making sense. Sane people don't let people kill their children. Our "leaders" are supposed to make sense. Yes. We have rights under the Second Amendment probably do need protecting. But domestic tranquility needs protection too.

 

 

 

 

 Coming to Mind

 

The word “spirit” refers to the mysterious invisible something within human perception that relates to the supernatural or to the soul or to God. People are often said to be spiritual when they express “a mind or emotions of a high and delicately refined quality.”   

 

In his book, THE AFRICAN ORIGIN OF BIOLOGICAL PSYCHIATRY, Dr. Richard King describes "the collective conscious" as the "darkness, the shadow, the primeval ocean…the accumulated experience and wisdom of the ancestors” and suggests these treasures can come to mind today from as far back as 300,000 years! Believing we can forgive someone for something they’ve done to us even though we know we can’t forget what they did must come to mind from some ancient accrual of wisdom.

  

 

 

Who really knows where ideas like forgiving or turning the other cheek, etc. come from or how they enter the mind, but they always get there with a delicately refined quality that must be reckoned with. 

 

 

 

 Maafa 

 

Maafa is the Kiswahili word some people use to describe a long history of atrocities inflicted on people of African descent around the world. The Maafa as it relates to the "New World" began early in the 16th century with the captivity, forced transplantation, and eventual enslavement of African people.

 

The human toll of the “New World” slave trade can't be verified, but historian C.L.R. James said: "A conservative estimate is that 15 million Africans landed after crossing the Atlantic; but some estimates give 50 million and some go even higher. Further, the mortality rate on the voyage to the Americas was often high, and in addition some were killed in Africa in the raids and wars conducted to get slaves, and some died while waiting to be sold or shipped."

"The African Holocaust" website reports that "the African Holocaust or Maafa, is a crime against humanity and is recognized as such by scholars…Slavery, corrupted and stripped both the enslaved and the slave master of their humanity and dignity. The African Holocaust represents an existential threat to the peoplehood…It is estimated that 40 – 100 million people were directly affected by slavery via the Atlantic, Arabian and Trans Sahara routes…Some historians conclude that the total loss in persons removed, those who died on the arduous march to coastal slave marts and those killed in slave raids, exceeded the 65–75 million inhabitants remaining Africa at the trade's end…Over 10 million died as direct consequences of the Atlantic slave trade alone. But no one knows the exact number: Many died in transport, others died from diseases or indirectly from the social trauma left behind in Africa.“

The institution of slavery in the “New World” spanned 18 generations. 

 

 

 To Be or Not

 

 

How do religions come to be?

 

 

 

This video was found at a website called Religious Center for Muslim-Jewish Engagement. Their mission is to “promote dialogue, understanding and grassroots, congregational and academic partnerships among the oldest and the newest of the Abrahamic faiths while generating a contemporary understanding in this understudied area and creating new tools for interfaith communities locally, nationally and beyond.” Best wishes for success!

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