Everyone fend for
themselves tonight. No sit down
dinner. Consume some of the leftovers
and get back to work.
Yesterday I mentioned the organization of music in my
mind. Until recently this was
exclusively done in terms albums. I
suppose if I was ten years older I might organize by “singles.” The first music I’d ever bought was
45’s. Paper Lace “The Night Chicago
Died” was ingloriously that first purchase.
And if I was older I’d have gotten 78s and probably been wedded to them
as an organizing musical principal.
Prior to this you only “bought” music to read the sheet music. Albums I think of like novels. They are produced with a similar
cadence. A work, created by a person or
group of people, at a particular time that reflects what they wanted to create
at that moment with those people, etc.
There is a consistency to that expression.
At some point when we all started downloading things
randomly there was a great hauling of the nets.
What was pulled into the craft from the “gentle green ocean” with these
trawls had, as Charles De Gaulle said of the Germans “a tangle of monsters and
treasures.” And songs were attributed to
artists and lumped into a folder a-contextually. From what period of the artists work is this
song? What else was recorded at this
time? With whom was he or she
playing? What year was this damn thing
recorded? You could do the work and
discern these things, times hundreds or thousands of songs and, of course, that
didn’t happen. They remained, instead, in
a lump, in a folder.
I had the good fortune to see Randy Weston ten years back at
an Other Minds concert in San Francisco.
It was a mighty, thundering savannah charge of a show that left me a
convert. And I think it was a post-Napster,
pre-bit torrent time back then, when I opted to just download a ton of his
stuff line. I got some great music that
was categorized under his name. But I
never fully engaged with him as an artist.
I never got the proper cadence of what songs were created when and what
else was created along with it.
So it is with great pressure I am now engaging with the
albums, not just the recorded songs, of Randy Weston, over on Rdio. “Blue Moses”,
“African Cookbook”, “Sprits of Our Ancestors,” with the remarkable opening song and title “African Village Bedford
Stuyvesant.” It’s lovely to imagine his
progression as an artist over the arc of his life.
Born in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn in in 1926 Randy Weston
served in the army in World War II and later opened a restaurant that hosted
the great musicians of the post-war era.
By the end of the decade he was playing as a pianist in bands
himself. Later, on touring in Africa in
the late sixties the last stop was Morocco and he decided to stay, opening the
African Rhythms Club in Tangiers. From
there he toured the region and played in fourteen different African countries. It
was from there in 1972 that he produced “Blue Moses” on which he plays electric
keys and which I am enjoying now.
I want to try to write a bit this week about gluttony. The trawling of free music off the Internet
is perhaps a form of gluttony. Taking in
more music than you ever reasonably consume and understand, squirreling it away
in some pouch for future listening. All
the music becomes subliminally tainted because you came about it in a land
grab. Gluttony is one of the Seven Deadly’s and it is the third that I look at
in the Seven Deadly Starbuck’s (7DS) manuscript, “Gula” set there in the Beijing Capital Airport, where I catch a few
bites to eat before only just boarding the plane.
Gluttony comes from the Latin gluttire. It means to gulp down or swallow. Eating, drinking, consuming more than you
need. Imbibing more than is required to
the point of extravagance or waste. St.
Gregory the Great, Pope during the late 6th century, thought long and hard
about ingesting things. He identified
five ways that one might succumb to the sin of gluttony: “1. Time; 2. Quality;
3. Stimulants; 4. Quantity; 5. Eagerness.”
Meaning you had to be very careful to tiptoe around the
question of consumption, as the devil had you covered from every angle. One could sin by eating at the wrong time, by
overemphasizing the quality of what you ate, by putting things like herbs and
spices on to your food to dress it, by eating too much of whatever it was that
couldn’t have tasted very good in the first place, were you to 大快朵颐 [1] and, finally, for stroking and scheming at the notion of how
good it was going to be when you finally sank your teeth into that next meal. For the faithful, all of these were portals to the feeding
trough of sin.
Wrought as a metaphor for consumption in general, the United
States traditionally set the standard for national gluttonous behavior. We taught the world a thing or two about what
a prosperous, freedom-loving country could achieve in terms of ravenous
consumption. Now, China is in headlong
competition with the “beautiful country” across the Pacific for the title of
world’s largest national glutton.
America won’t cede the title lightly, but the smart money is on the People’s
Republic, long famished, now raising the bar on state-consumption to a
patriotic corpulence heretofore unknown.
Traditionally the U.S. consumer has been an engine of world
growth. Now the Chinese government is
committed to stimulate domestic consumption, by any means necessary. A force-feeding. A fattening.
We’ll take a few entries now to consider this unhealthy competition to see whose consumption will be most aggressively, most convincingly boosted and
what will become of the patients, as a result.
Right this way, down the hall, to a lovely banquet in our our honor set in our own little baojian suite.
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