I
don’t know if I’ve yet to profile a Green Mountain Boy, a Vermonter jazz
musician on the site. Today we'll do two. Claude
Williamson was a pianist known for his contributions to the west coast jazz
scene. But he was born in
Brattleboro VT, in 1926. I came to
him through Hampton Hawes and am enjoying a 1955 album of his credited under
The Claude Williamson Trio. The
tune, “My Heart Stood Still” sounds confident, and clean. Claude had a younger brother named Stu
who was a trumpet player and this provides me with material. I think I may even like his eponymous
album “Stu Williams” released the following year, more than his older brother’s
trio effort. This song “Hongry Child” flows on like Vermont maple sap. I've got to explain this fraternity to my gals. http://www.allmusic.com/artist/claude-williamson-mn0000121047/biography
My older daughter is searching or at least supposed to be
searching for a “cool” piano teacher.
Her younger sister brought home her band trumpet yesterday. I’ll see if I can impress upon them the
connection to the Williamson boys.
I was so happy to be outside the band practice yesterday, where all the first time
brass blowers were exhaling. One
of the moms and I got talking and she asked me what instrument my son played? Ahh, yes, my daughter is
blowing the trumpet.
The hearing of young ears is far better than one might
assume. I just told my younger
daughter about Stu and Claude in close range. “Oh. Thanks dad.”
When I tried to impress upon my older daughter a while later that the
older brother played piano she started to finish the sentence. “ The younger
sister played trumpet.” “No.” “I
was obligated to interrupt. He
actually taught his gerbil to play trumpet and they had an act together, which
was odd. Do you want to see the
video?” Parents, it seems, must
necessarily be corny.
Back on Y Combinator’s Hacker News today. Two interesting articles at the top of
their list. One that mapped out a
few different means by which humans might ultimately travel to, say, the
nearest neighboring solar system, Alpha Centauri. Solar Sails that fly in towards the sun, charge up
intense solar power before sailing out beyond the sun’s reach. A faster, but more apocalyptic means
might be to use fusion power. “Load
your starship with 300,000 nuclear bombs, detonate one every three seconds, and
ride the blast waves.” And then,
there is the Star Trek favorite of warp speed, which would alter space and
gravity so severely to allow for the transcendence of time as we know it. Beyond my lifetime, I can only
imagine, but as the article notably points out in the last sentence “Today, a
starship seems like the height of futuristic thinking. Future generations might
find it quaint.”
The other article examines a rigorous study in of 50,000
Italians illustrating that social networking seems to have a negative effect on
individual welfare. : ( A broad survey
that correlated to people’s use of Facebook and Twitter asked: ““How satisfied
are you with your life as a whole nowadays?” Interestingly it seems that actually engaging with real
humans, face to face, not unlike the woman I referenced on the subway yesterday,
actually heightens your sense of well being:
They found for example that
face-to-face interactions and the trust people place in one another are
strongly correlated with well-being in a positive way. In other words, if you
tend to trust people and have lots of face-to-face interactions, you will
probably assess your well-being more highly.
I consider it a badge of something that I have managed to
avoid having a Facebook presence all these years. To me it always just seems such an enormous time sink to
deal with so many people’s likes and dislikes. Who cares? Now
I come to realize it is reinforcing my self-esteem, as well to engage, as I do,
with real faces, 喜形于色[1] or whatever flavor, rather than
emoticons. :)
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