I’ve
a remarkable piece of music on that I’ve been playing over and over since I
first came across it last week.
The drummer Roy Brooks and the Artistic Truth have an album from 1973
called “Ethnic Expressions” that is phenomenal. I’ve got M’jumbe on and it's a gorgeous broad plane of
activity with Reggie Workman and Roy Brooks both anchoring the vessel and
providing it velocity. The head is
fat and memorable. Beautiful. The next song I like even more. And the culminating “Eboness” is as confrontational as it is
inspirational. And I liked it a
lot but was floored to learn later that the lady behind the voice was none
other than Ms. Dee Dee Bridgwater, who’m I’ve long known, but not in this
Angela Davis meets Jello Biafra incarnation.
Born in Detroit in 1938, Mr. Brooks came up in the 60s,
playing with a constellation of bop luminaries and remarkable sets, including
Horace Silver’s “Songs for My Father.” After time with Mingus’ Big Band he launched the
“Artistic Truth.” The song I
referred to up above, “The Last Prophet” is one of the most buoyant expressions
I can remember hearing in a long time.
What a lovely sound.
Apparently Roy Brooks was challenged with depression and fought it
through his later years. He died
in a nursing home in Detroit in 2005 at the age of 67.
Argument last night.
My older daughter has an iPhone.
Her main communication platform like four hundred other million people
in China is through “we chat.” Her
messages with her friends are in Chinese.
I could technically work through and read any such message with a bit of
a slog. But, and bad on me, I rely
on my wife. Last night at
dinner my wife was insisting that she needed password access to my daughter’s
phone. I’d assumed she had
it. My daughter suggested that if
she must provide it, it meant that we didn’t trust her. Surprised that this was even up for
debate I said, “done. Provide the
password or the phone. If you want
a private space, I will not read your journal. But you can’t have private access to the internet.”
And upon considering 18 hours later, I am still rather clear
in my mind that this is a no-brainer default, for basic safety. It is clear we have to have a talk
about what “trust” is and dive into the perennial chasm of “you don’t
understand how my generation communicates.” True. Nor will
you fare any better with your offspring.
I spoke about it with my wife this morning and she said she saw our
daughter, who for now surrendered the phone, rather than the password,
squirreling away in a journal.
Hard not to feel that this was not an undeniably positive thing.
Huge rain last night.
We’d been waiting for it all day.
I went out in the morning with an umbrella in anticipation of being
dumped on. I scheduled all my
meetings one place so I wouldn’t be caught running around in the downpour. I decided not to stay to meet some
people because it would have been a nightmare getting a cab in the pouring
rain. But the clouds just gathered
and the humidity built until around midnight with no rain and then it broke. The crackle of thunder. In the distance lightning cuts
horizontal. My wife and I went out
and stood beneath the leaves and felt all the drops become 滂沱大雨[1].
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