The
day after rain. Quite in the
morning and you can’t hear birds, and you can’t sense the moisture or smell the
saturated earth, nine floors up with aircon humming all day and all night and the
traffic of twenty million people throbbing quietly everywhere.
Breathe in and breathe out. 吐故纳新[1]. If you control your breath you can slow the mind down. When you hold on the release that must come, the same: exhale. When you pause and feel before that next breath in again the mind settles peacefully for a second or two before the next ignition of thought runs off somewhere with you in tow. And if you deny the exhale or the inhale a bit longer the settling void expands a bit, pleasantly. And you know that this might, be expanded a bit further. And perhaps a bit more. And then the mind, denied of oxygen, or unable to release carbon dioxide would rapidly shift from peaceful to urgent to desperate.
I wrote yesterday of someone who died years ago. And yesterday I learned that someone
died a few days ago. Horace Silver
was a phenomenal beacon of modern jazz, whom I’ve loved for well over half my
life. So many times on this blog
I’ve come across musical figures and learned, like I did yesterday, that they
had passed when I was here or there in my life and I’d been completely unaware. So today we shall pause to consider a man who has only just left the earth.
I think I was twenty-two or so, living in the Lower East
Side when a friend picked up a copy of his album “Six Pieces of Silver”, with
him sitting there on a New York park bench somewhere. And all six songs became
urgent and immediate and quickly, before we acted on so many other figures in
the tradition, we’d gotten half dozen more of Horace Silver sessions. Born in Norwalk Connecticut, of Cape
Verdian parentage he passed in New Rochelle, not far from where I grew up.
I looked and confirmed that I’d written about Horace Silver
before, as I thought I had. And
I’ve thrown on “Six Pieces of Silver” this morning in the man’s honor. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6_Pieces_of_Silver Looking I find that I’ve already
written about just about everyone on the set from those two days in 1956 when
it was recorded as well. (Somehow I would
have guessed it was recorded a few years later.)
But Louis Hayes, who was the drummer throughout the set is someone I
have never considered.
Looking, he has about six albums or so on Rdio that I’ll have to dig
into. I’ve got a 1960 set of him
with Yusef Lateef and Nat Adderly that sounds like Horace Silver could have
been in the next room. I’ll credit the man from Norwalk with the kind
introduction to Mr. Hayes and this tune of his “Hazin.”
It’s getting hot down in Hong Kong. And three hundred and fifty thousand citizens
of all stripes including Anson Chan, the former legislator have come together
under the tough-to-crush banner of “Occupation with Love and Peace” to organize
their own unofficial ballot on how to decide candidates. Beijing isn’t happy and has declared
all illegal. For seventeen years
now and three administrations they have had time to consider this and make
commitments around political reform on their own terms. Hong Kong should be the nation’s “Special
Political Zone.” Unfiltered
universal suffrage in 2017 would have been Beijing’s public relations coup,
almost regardless of the results.
It was their terrarium to arrange.
Obfuscating, delaying, insisting, miscommunicating; now they must
react.
Hong Kongers are not by nature the most politicized people
in world. The city, the Cantonese
underlay, is disproportionately composed of traders who like to be left
alone. But the demands are out
there and some four percent of the population is weighing in at this
juncture. Beijing needs a
face-saving way to alter the aperture and suggest that this is their agency,
their beneficence. Otherwise they
crush it. And the
low-road of repression here will cost Beijing more than the SAR. If they really
have to resort to violence the proximity of Taiwan they’ve worked so hard to
secure and around which they have made so much progress since the days of missiles
and aircraft carriers in the Taiwan Straits fifteen years ago, will
vanish. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/21/world/asia/in-hong-kong-an-unofficial-election-draws-beijings-ire.html?ref=asia
Let these
people breathe out before they move on from urgent.
[1] tǔgùnàxīn: lit. to breathe out stale air and
breathe in fresh (idiom, from Zhuangzi 庄子); fig. to get rid of the old and
bring in the new
No comments:
Post a Comment