Once you slip into the
morning of calls, and email replies and new Skype pings to take ‘just a second’
to get back on, it is well after noon.
The delicate morning balance of what-happens-when, is thrown, the moment
you rise a half hour late. Add to this a
first-thing-in-the-morning, call with California, its all about catch up for
the next . . . well, till right about now.
Stunning outside.
Trying keep the buoyant spring élan bridled, so I don’t run off in my
enthusiasm like Julie Andrews. Spring, like
youth, is precious because it passes.
California sun every day of the year drains the bright, blooming
intensity of its temporal quality.
Missing winter after summer after fall in eternal spring it gets to feel
like there’s a Dorian Gray-like portrait of you in the closet somewhere ageing
as it goes through all those requisite transitions, while you on the outside
have the illusion of unending youth.
But me, right now, here, well seated above the tropics in
the northern hemisphere, I’ve earned this spring. It wasn’t a snowy winter. But it was cold, dry and murky and there are
hundred different trees all blooming outside and, they are, of necessity
drawing the bees, which draw the birds and the widespread, unstoppable
rejuvenation is afoot.
A call. And I’m back
sitting down. But wait. A Skype ping. It’s someone’s birthday. OK.
Nothing to act on. Wait. Another.
“can you talk now?” “um,
sure.” And eighteen minutes later we’re
back. That was a good one though. I wasn’t sure how something was going to get
done. Now I know. My erratic day of 飘忽不定[1], running, pausing, returning continues.
This angular, start/stop approach to the day fits with this
George Russell I have on. Born in
Cincinnati in 1923, Russell was raised in the world between the African
Methodist Episcopal choir and the trad jazz of the Ohio riverboats. Some people have a range of talents. Lying in an army bed recovering from Tuberculosis
in World War II, George Russell was taught the fundaments of music theory by
another patient. Later, working as a
sales clerk in Macy’s in 1953, he wrote “Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal
Organization” a seminal text on jazz theory that helped people like Miles and
Coltrane to make the leap into modal playing.
I say the word like I know what it means, “modal,” but it
was good to have a look see at the NY Times obituary of Mr. Russell to have a
bit of the theory explained. Rather than
build harmonic techniques off of chords, Russell illustrated how it would be
possible using scales to do so, instead.
The Lydian scale would be allow a performer to improvise off any note, in
a blues medium, so that there were no “bad” notes. He was part of an entire scene of music and
theory that launched the “birth of cool.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/30/arts/music/30russell.html
Originally Russell was a drummer in the Betty Carter band before he migrated over to piano and composition. Apparently Max Roach got the job and it was
his prowess “Max had it all” that lead Russell to focus on composition. I’ve
got his 1961 release “Ezz Thetics” on.
The tune “Night Sound” conjures up Duke Ellington’s “Echoes of Harlem”,
going from place to place under the streetlights, looking between shadows for
things lovely, things dangerous, till you reach some place you can rest
at.
During the ill-fated “Great Leap Forward” peasants migrated
to collective kitchens, melted down all their metal in backyard furnaces and,
in a year of excellent weather, initiated the worst famine in human
history. The problem was provincial
authorities lying to center about bumper harvests, and ever greater yields that
ultimately caused the center to demand more grain, which left the provinces with
full, tightly locked silos and nothing left to feed anyone with. Now we read about the provinces obfuscating
and outright lying to the center about precisely what the air quality is, such
that the National People’s Congress (NPC) reports cities showing marked improvement
where there is none, at all.
The pressure on provincial authorities to increase
production and keep people employed must be intense, as it was no doubt was
during the Great Leap, to tell Mao that his collectivization was a big
success. But it would appear we haven’t
come very far if the center still laps up rosy reports, when everyone, myself
included, who toured Shandong last month, can see, is nonsense. True, we can be glad that unlike the 1950s,
there is at least an independent group like the Shandong Environmental
Information and Monitoring Centre to illustrate that data is being faked. But unless their recommendations, that, for
example the offending firms not be fined but bankrupted, have teeth, it will
only be a matter of angular, disjointed time, until our dread friend the
particulate smog, returns.
For now though, it is still, stunning outside.
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