Wednesday, December 11, 2013

Down by the Dusty Blue Creek




Is there really any end to discovering rarified jazz?  I hope not.  I consider myself someone reasonably familiar with the tradition.   I’ve just stumbled upon the trumpet player Howard McGee.  Damn.  Now as I dig in a realize I’ve heard him on other people’s sessions many times before, but I’ve never sat down and considered him or listened to him as a leader before.  Born in Tulsa Oklahoma in 1918, he got out of town and up to Detroit before the dust bowl hit.  He joined Lionel Hampton’s band in 1941, played with Billy Ekstien’s orchestra and then Count Basie.  He made the transition to bop early as part of Charlie Parker’s band when Bird played the West Coast in 1945.  I hadn’t realized that ‘Maggie’ as he was called also played on the classic Machito Afro-Cuban orchestra sessions with Charlie Parker.  The list of other touch points where Howard was on the set, is weighty.

Like so many great musicians in the following decade, he was out of commission contending with his heroine addiction.   But he resurfaced in the sixties.  At the outset in 1961 there is a beautiful date with Pepper Adams, Ron Carter, Tommy Flanagan, with the rather appropriate title for this crossroads: “Dusty Blue.”  I was then digging a disc from much later, in 1978 called “Jazz Brothers” that is stunning as well. At that time, I had no time for jazz, listening as I was to the Clash and Buzzcocks.  Would that I’d had the 12-year old wherewithal to have gone and heard the man, when I could have.  What a remarkable epoch of American creativity that fades further and further into memory with every passing year.  My kids don’t want to listen to jazz now, at twelve.  I hope they do one day.



I’ll share a funny news story with you all that isn’t the least bit funny.  I shouldn’t laugh.  But laughing is good for you even if smog isn’t.  And smug isn’t good for you, especially if you have all the power.  There was a very funny Southpark episode a while back that artfully juxtaposed “smug” and “smog”, suggesting that George Clooney’s acceptance speech at the Academy Awards had created a cloud of smug that was going to collide with San Francisco’s smug cloud and create a “perfect storm of self satisfaction.” 

Someone at the state news, CCTV thought, or was told to think, “don’t worry be happy.” Someone at the conservative tabloid The Global Times, came upon the same thought the same day, reinforcing the logic that both media organs were instructed to take lemons and turn them into lemonade. Smog is not simply negative, they insisted.   The Global Times opined that smog could be helpful in military situations, creating a literal “fog of war.”  CCTV took the more perky line suggesting that Chinese people were developing a more refined sense of humor, coping with the fetid atmosphere. I’ve said before that the CCP was not afraid of looking silly, as they find their way forward, and this is certainly some rather pungent evidence. 

The articles were quickly retracted.  Netizens and eventually other state media organs all lined up to pillory the notion that there was anything funny about persistent, life threatening air pollution.  It does make you wonder how stories are initiated and vetted behind the doors of the propaganda ministry.  Someone in a position to dictate, apparently became frustrated by steady drone of negative attention on the worsening air quality.  I presume that person barked an order to someone to “do something,” to change the minds of these ungrateful citizens.  Stop complaining.  Look on the bright side.  “Always” do as, Eric Idle reminds us. 

And the bright side is, of course, that this person or persons ended up looking foolish, was publically castigated and the foolishness self-corrected, at least at the rhetorical level.  Once upon a time insipid dictates would have gone unchallenged and there would have been a full campaign around pollution preparedness in combat. Now there is debate.  Lest you think I’m veering toward self-satisfied smug, 踌躇[1] with all the wonderful opportunities there now are for debate, allow me to share another physical pollution problem here in the neighborhood, that rhetoric isn’t doing much to remedy.

I was buying a Christmas tree the other day, by another villa compound where we used to live.  There is a stream that runs by it and the Christmas tree sales folk set up their trees on the bridge that crosses the creek.  It had been a turgid, polluted home to colonies of mosquitos and a range of unidentifiable odors.  A development company was hired, and boarded the place up, covered the work place with pretty posters of multi-use urban waterways.  They drained, they excavated, they built and then, they pulled back the makeshift walls and presented the water way anew.



The creek remains, a turgid, polluted home to colonies of mosquitos and a range of unidentifiable odors with nice walkways on the side.  Like so many people I felt completely cheated.  I thought, for a bit, that it would really be improved.  But it must have simply been a development boondoggle that allowed someone secure a large construction contract, but do nothing for the water.  This estuary flows through prime, high-end real estate in suburban Beijing with empowered, wealthy Chinese landowners living all along it.  If they can’t get this right, what can we expect for every other waterway in the country, for small waterways in the countryside?  

Perhaps the Shunyi District Government simply doesn’t have the authority to control what is tossed into, or leeches into this stream be it within its jurisdiction or further upstream, beyond their control.  Maybe the powers that be, also feel cheated.  Maybe they actually believed that the expensive, extreme makeover would solve the problem and result in a lovely, clear waterway that kids could splash in.

Why, if I was in power I would stand up and yell at my staff to “do something” about this nasty, ‘dusty blue’, cobalt effluence that everyone was still complaining about.  If you can’t make it clean, let’s try to change peoples’ minds to see the positive side.  The smells can be helpful as our young people study to learn various chemicals on the Periodic Table of Elements.  “No, no junior.  How could that be cadmium?  That’s the smell of boron.”




[1] chóuchúmǎnzhì:  enormously proud of one's success (idiom); smug / complacent

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