Tuesday, June 24, 2014

Rationalize Anything




I’d have been left scratching my head were I to have been asked to name an Austro-Hungarian jazz luminary.  But fortunately my time spent with Nat Adderley yesterday led me on to the keyboard player and arranger on Adderley’s 1964 session “Autobiography.”  Joe Zawihul was born in Vienna, Austria in 1932 of Hungarian Gypsy and Moravian ancestry.   He passed in the same city in 2007.  The title track of the album “Money in the Pocket” is playing in my ears now, and it swings but it's the song that follows, “If” that really floored me.  I was just walking down Beijing Road keeping time on a “air” cymbal, happy but ridiculous en route for a morning espresso. 



This set has a myriad of guys I’ve enjoyed featuring here on DB before, like Blue Mitchell on trumpet and Louis Hayes on drums and Sam Jones on bass.  The latter is driving particularly hard in ears right now.  Something about this mix, which is Atlantic and not Blue Note, has the bass recorded more prominently.  He and Louis Hayes dive in from the fat, curvaceous head to cast out a broad freeway for Zawihul to skate over with such muscular confidence before welcoming Blue Mitchell in, utterly reliable. But Joe Henderson on tenor and Pepper Adams on baritone sax later set a ferocious pace. Joe Henderson’s contemplative opening solo is challenged by Adams aggressive first run and then Henderson accepts the dare and rises to Adams’ velocity, the two of them driving hard back and forth making you wish you could have seen the looks on their face as they engaged.  

One can get the look on Joe’s face and the position of his hands on this 1968 clip of his tune that Cannonball Adderley made famous, “Mercy Mercy, Mercy.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycNv57aZF

I’ve been down here in Shanghai for a while now and my book in the bathroom, as it were, is something my brother in law leant me “Under the Banner of Heaven” by Jon Krakauer. http://www.amazon.com/Under-Banner-Heaven-Story-Violent/dp/1400032806  I wasn’t sure if I was going to continue with it as the opening sections read like an extremist rap sheet.  He traces a half a dozen cases of fringe movements to the Mormon Church of the Latter Day Saints (LDS) who live apart from the world and practice polygamy, statutory rape, and in the opening case, murder.  I had expected to learn about how the LDS folks themselves think and this all seemed rather peripheral and polemical. 

Once we got into the history of the faith and Joseph Smith himself and his revelations from the angel Moroni, I was at least properly captivated.  It reminded me of the story of Hong Xiu Quan, the Chinese intellectual of only twenty years later who failed the Confucian exam three times, met a preacher and became convinced he was the brother of Christ.  Twenty Million deaths later the Taiping Rebellion was crushed. Once you are convinced and have the charismatic power to convince others that the Lord is speaking to you directly, anything is possible. 

Smith’s progression from no-account utilizer of “seeing stones” in upstate New York chased to Missouri and on to the swamps of Illinois is surreal.  As Krakauer and we all, must acknowledge, the myriad fantastic and irreconcilably inaccurate aspects of the story are no harder to swallow the vast collection of impossibilities catalogued in the holy books of the Abrahamic tradition.  They are simply more recent and for Americans more physically immediate and demand the glaring light of logic, more loudly than stories from the mists of recorded history. 



Joseph, it seems was unfaithful to his wife Emma, again and again and again.  Emma, no pushover herself, was not content to be one of Joseph’s many 宠擅专房[1].  But this was not enough to stop the chosen one.  Eventually, Joseph who was in touch with the almighty, reckoned that if polygamy felt so good and seemed so good, God must have intended for it for it to be so.  Unflagging pursuit of this tenant eventually lead to Joseph Smith’s death at the hands of an angry lynch mob.  Regardless of whether your Hong Xiu Quan or Joseph Smith, once you’ve got a direct line upstairs, it is possible to rationalize anything, perhaps including yesterday’s sins as well as one’s own martyrdom.

Almost anything can be reconsidered, perhaps, but not women ordained as women priests.  This not something the Angel Moroni is going to allow anytime soon.  I noticed this morning that Kate Kelly an activist who organized an ‘Ordain Women’ web site to promote reform for women to be admitted as LDS female priests, was formally excommunicated from the faith by the powers that be in Salt Lake City yesterday.  Maybe you can start a support group with similarly excommunicated Catholic ladies Kate.  Perhaps I’ll have a better idea of Mormon reform when I learn more about how the church made peace with the U.S. authorities after Joseph’s death . . .







[1] chǒngshànzhuānfángan especially favored concubine (idiom)

2 comments:

  1. zawinul did the best stuff in weather report. most of that stuff was ok at best, but he had some beautiful compositions that rose above the fusion element. he played a music fest at my college, moravian one summer. then ray charles played so it was a fun night, just steps from my practice room that i pretty much lived in.

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  2. Thanks Blair. Great to imagine you there, takin it in.

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