I
have a meeting in Hackensack today.
It’s not my first time. But
this time, I’ll have a car, and I’m wondering if I should go over to Englewood
Cliffs and do a drive by on the Rudy van Gelder studio there. It would appear that he still lives
there, remastering the archive though the last recorded date would appear to
have been a McCoy Tyner session in 1995.
Scrolling back up, however, looking over the years, he was certainly a remarkably
busy man beginning with a session in 1953 at his parents home in Hackensack,
with tenor and baritone player, Gil Mellé. And if my math is correct he’s now about 89 years old, so if
I do make it over there I won’t presume to bother him with a knock.
The first session he ever recorded, this Gil Mellé date
simply entitled “The Gil Mellé Quintet” is on now. Rdio doesn’t have it but I found it on Youtube. The tune, “Temepiece”, sounds a bit to
my ears like Miles’ “Birth of Cool” sessions that don’t happen for another four
years. Born in New York in 1931 he
was apparently abandoned by his parents and raised by a family friend. Unfazed he was winning painting
contests as a preteen, playing Greenwich Village jazz clubs at 16 and was the
first non black artist signed to Blue Note at the age of 19. He moved to LA in the sixties and
scored countless films, built his own electronic instruments and wrote a number
of symphonies as well. He died in
Malibu ten years ago, October. If Rudy's home I'll thank him for the introduction.
Foreign journalists are band from the cities of Hotan and
Yarkand in Xinjiang and a week after the fact China announces that nine and
fifty-nine terrorists were shot dead in both cities. Invoking Maosit rhetoric the Xinjiang Party Secretary Zhang
Chunxian was quoted as saying:
“We have to hit hard, hit
accurately and hit with awe-inspiring force,” . . . “To fight such evils we
must aim at extermination. To cut weeds we must dig out the roots.”
Citing foreign influences, the report suggests that a local
separatist group went on a rampage and attacked local police barracks. Who can really say what is going on
with so much obscured from view?
Is there a coordinated command control within, say, Al Qaeda that is interested
in focusing their efforts on Xinjiang?
Certainly it is a horrible to imagine such a strategy’s effects on the
local people and invoking an overreaction from Beijing. The only silver lining may be that,
like 9-11 it tended to draw the U.S. and China closer, commiserating around a
common enemy, 同仇敌忾[1] Let’s hope things quiet down,
instead.
I better head out if I’m gonna have time for Englewood
Cliffs.
No comments:
Post a Comment