Punchy Block-Chord Style

Red Garland was born in Dallas in 1923.  I’ve got a date on from thirty-four years later: “John Coltrane with the Red Garland.”  Trane is astounding, commanding, as always, but I’ve been trying to appreciate Garland’s playing in particular, trying to understand its’ distinction.  He has this punchy, block-chord style that I’m learning deeply influenced many other players, including Bill Evans.  Twelve years his junior, I assume Bobby Timmons was also impacted by Garland’s confrontational key style, thinking of his ivory-assault on “Moanin’”, for example.

Appropriately enough for one with such a pugilistic style, it turns out that Garland also had a career as a welter-weight boxer.  The helpful Wiki page tells me he had thirty-four fights including an exhibition round with Sugar Ray Robinson himself.  These are two skill sets one doesn’t easily consider conjoined.  And whereas Miles notoriously stood accused of having punched and slapped John Coltrane, in the same year as this recording, one can only imagine the trumpeter would have approached Red Garland with a bit more caution. 

This is the season to update syllabi. I’ve got one I’m trying to bang out today.  I’ve taught this course five times before and love the theme and really enjoy the material.  And every year you have a chance to toss out what didn’t work so well and update things with new and interesting material.  The theme for this first syllabus is Emerging Markets and I’ve been building up to this all year intellectually, as the concept of what and where is “emerging” is changing before our eyes.  Certain advancements in the Chinese market have all but rendered the United States as a market full of “institutional voids” for swift moving Chinese companies to exploit.  The book on this, the cases on this, have yet to be written.

And where as foreign companies who artfully exploited voids in the China market in years gone by were generally regarded as astute, and visionary, one can only assume Chinese companies who bring disruptive new opportunities to the U.S. market, things that U.S. entrepreneurs don’t or can’t already do themselves, (and they do exist) the adjectives chosen to describe them, in this Trump era of trade-war, will no doubt be less salutary.  The next few decades are really going to test American humility.  We'll see what a new group of students has to say about the matter later this spring.

Monday, 03/12/18