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, 踌躇满志[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.”
No comments:
Post a Comment