The Audience Hooting and Yelling

Was just driving past yet another high-speed rail line that is going up.  This one, not too far from my neighborhood.  I noticed it first the other day and now it’s all rather obvious if you drive along the Jing_Cheng Highway.  This will connect Beijing with Chengde rapid-fire, as I understand it.  Perhaps it will continue on.  At some point China will have to take a pause on constructing new infrastructure at the pace it has been doing.  But that time has yet to arrive.  If this trade war kicks off anew, they will like double down on the build-out, if anything to drive more short term stimulus. 

One can’t look at new concrete supports for massive elevated rail line go up and wonder why this seems impossible to construct in say, Queens.  It seems something will need to be destroyed before something disruptively new is allowed to be built.  Perhaps it will be our turn to leap frog, over the ‘old-fashioned, can-only-go-300-mph trains of that seem so wonderful, today.

How did I wind up with Mingus?  I’m not sure.  Wait, I think it is because I was listening to a lot of Eric Dolphy and they often played together.  Yes.  An album or two they are on together lead to an album or three that is just Mingus.  This morning I found myself propelled from one Youtube album to another named “East Coasting” from 1957.   Presumably a pun on his Angeleno origins and other than Bill Evens on piano and the perennial Mingus rhythm section complement, Dannie Richmond on drums I didn’t recognize a number of the band members.  The song “Celia” has a remarkably catchy break and it sounded so good I played it a second time on my bike ride over to the gym. 

Now I’ve got to make dinner.  I’m not going to write about what I made.  I ain’t made it yet.  I’m laboring to find something that will make my little girl happy.  (I’ve cooked a lot this week and I’m not feeling very inspired.) The older one is heading out with her beaux so I’m free from having to consider vegan sensibilities.   Mac & Cheese?  She’d like that.  Would I like that?  I’ll decide when I get to the market, just like you.

Mingus, again, is thumping away on a live selection, this time from Detroit, sixteen years later in 1973.  It’s not the perennial Dannie Richmond but the muscular Roy Brooks on drums and man does he have the audience hooting and yelling.  Check out “Pithecanthropus Erectus” around the twentieth minute and see what you think.  I’d a been hooting at Roy Brooks too.  Shit.

Friday 05/10/19