renaissance man
I put my beloved Impulse Tee back on today. And what should pop up in my Amazon feed, but this:
Available in two physical formats: vinyl (£160!), or CD (£12-20).
This compilation – on four records or two CDs – appears to be not just a celebration of Impulse! as a Jazz label, but Afro-American ‘consciousness’, as well.
I’m seriously tempted get the CD version. But I have to reign in my music buying. As poverty is a very real issue, alas.
A while back I had a pretty heavy Alice Coltrane phase. Still love her music. Just not listened to much recently. Instead, I’m getting my jazz harp fix from Dorothy Ashby.
The above linked YouTube video, the complete Fantastic Jazz Harp of Dorothy Ashby, is great. And I have a double CD on its way to me that collects four of her early albums (and the best part, but alas not all, of a fifth).
Fantastic is playing as I type this. And it’s aptly named. Of course Dot’s harp is the star attraction. But I was also blown away by the bass player and drummer on these recordings.
Bassist Richard Davis is a monster! I didn’t know this until listening to this album prompted me to dig around a bit, but… he’s the bassist on Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks!
And the drummer is Grady Tate… nuff said!
Percussionist Willie Bobo adds to the engine room grooviness. And numerous cuts feature a four-piece horn section, comprising only trombones!
Five of the ten cuts on this disc are Ashby originals. The five covers range from pop to ‘trad arr’. All the material is wonderful.
Maybe one day, when I’m a bit more flush, I can get this:
The above New Land deluxe 6-LP boxed set With Strings Attached is about £200! But it looks well worth it, to my mind (and ears). I’d best get saving.
YouTube, meantime, has moved on, and is now playing this:
… which appears to be Dot in solo mode. And it’s utterly sublime! I initially felt a bit dismissive of this album, purely on the basis of it being a later recording (1984). And maybe the cover art? Well, I was mightily mistaken.
Django… Misty, and Concierto de Aranjuez were Ashby’s last releases. Both coming out on the Philips label in 1984. She died in 1986, aged just 63!
It’s funny how stuff can sometimes take a while to connect. I got an mp3 only version of Dorothy’s Afro-Harping many moons back (over a decade ago). And I loved it. But I didn’t dig any deeper at the time.
And then came my fairly intense period of listening to and loving Alice Coltrane. And still I didn’t check Dorothy out any further.
It was really down to her stuff – specifically 1969’s Dorothy’s Harp – popping up in my YouTube feed recently, seemingly at random, that I finally made a deeper connection.
And then I find out that only last year, UK label New Land put out their deluxe reissue set… synchronicity, eh? But only on vinyl. And super expensive.
I utterly adore Uncle Walt’s Band. Their eponymous 1974 debut (originally released as Blame It On The Bossa Nova, but retitled for the extended 2019 Omnivore label reissue) is just terrific.
I just ordered a cheap used copy of their next album, An American In Texas, via Amazon. It’s another expanded Omnivore re-release, which adds the music from their formerly cassette only 6-26-79, and a number of live tracks.
I found a great article on the group, and the careers of the individuals involved, that you can read here.
I’m just starting a new book – Trafalgar, The Men, The Battle, The Storm – and in it I have learned of a small Royal Navy boat, called HMS Pickle.
This has a certain resonance for us, as my niece Sofi is nicknamed Pickle!
I thought I’d look into this funny little coincidental connection. And quickly discovered that HMS Pickle is, or was, evidently a famous and well loved little ship.
There’s a book about her. You can buy models of her – some very expensive! – a seaworthy replica has been constructed, and there are these two videos:
There’s even a Pickle Night! Which I hope might tickle our little Pickle?
Click here to visit the Admiralty Ship Models website’s page on their HMS Pickle (pictured above). Just shy of £700!
Why so celebrated? Well, because she was the swiftest ship in the fleet, present at Trafalgar. And as such was charged with taking home the news. News of triumph and tragedy:
‘Sir, we have won a great victory, but we have lost Lord Nelson!’
… so spake Lieutenant John Lapenotiere, commander of the Pickle, on his return to Blighty.
I’m watching a snooker match from the recent (or current?) Riyadh tourney. I think the introduction of the golden ball is, at least as it’s currently being done, really stupid.
I googled the subject and found this:
If a 147 is possible in the frame, the Golden Ball will remain on the table. If a player completes a 147 maximum, he will then have the chance to pot the Golden Ball to complete the 167. Once a 147 is no longer possible, the Golden Ball will be removed from the table, until the start of the next frame.
In my view – not that there’s any need to add a golden ball at all (I wouldn’t bother, personally) – if you are going to have it as a way to extend the 147, don’t have it cluttering up the table and wrecking game play by being there from the beginning of each frame. Only put it on the table once a 147 has been achieved.
But as I say, I think it’s a crap idea anyway. Saudi Arabia’s isn’t a very morally sound culture. At least as far as I’m aware. And this idea is rather a crass thing, I think, in a country of that sort.
But I’m going to watch this match – O’Sullivan vs Higgins – anyway. See how it pans out. So far Ronnie is thrashing Higgins!
Some time later…
Po’ John! Ronnie utterly thrashed him. I think the only points he scored were from a four point foul!? Higgins didn’t pot a single ball. That must’ve been awful for him? Ronnie, on the other hand, was sublime. Getting a century in every frame.
I don’t mean to boast, but I have an 18”er! Actually that’s small. We’re talking bass drums.
I also have a pretty fab’ Jojo Mayer bass drum pedal. And I have a Mapex brand bass drum riser. To help lift the dinky little kick drum up a wee bit, so that the beater hits closer to the middle of the drum head.
Alas, this riser design doesn’t mate or marry that well with many (any?) of my bass drum pedals. As can be seen in the pic at the top of this post, the clamps on my Jojo pedal can’t get much purchase on the riser plate. They’re obstructed by flanges that are part of the riser’s design.
My solution? File these flanges back a bit. See if that helps. Well, it does. To a degree. But I’m not all the way there yet, to a satisfactory solution.
Why not? ‘Cause the black rubber cushion (on the pedal), which usually protects the drum hoop, now clamps onto the riser, and the equivalent rubbery parts of the riser don’t fully overlap.
I’ve also realised that there are, for me, some issues, even with this ‘super-pedal’, designed by the awesome ‘super-drummer’ that is Jojo Meyer.
Let’s look at what they are:
First – and for me this might also be the most annoying – the single square-headed drum key adjusted attaching mechanism.
For one thing, it’s positioned on the collapsible pillar. When the pedal is collapsed, you can’t fix it to the hoop or riser. Once erected – well, at all times (but only once up will it secure the pedal to the bass drum hoop) – the pillar gets in the way of tightening the square headed bolt!
[Having said this, I can see the point – and a very good point at that – in locating it where it is. In theory, if/when it mounts satisfactorily to your bass drum, you can, thereafter, take it on and off without the need to adjust the bolt. Simply by collapsing the pillar.]
Second, it tightens on just one side, as opposed to both sides or centrally. So inevitably there’s ‘racking’, meaning the side with the screw is tighter than the opposite side.
I’d also have preferred the footboard to have been a single piece longboard, rather than the sort it is, with a hinged heel plate. Longboards allow for both playing the pedal with the foot lower down the footplate (more travel for less work), and an increased efficiency if/when using heel-toe techniques.
But, strangely enough, they sell it on exactly this issue, as being better than your everyday kick pedals (see screenshot).
I wonder if they’ll address these things in future models? Maybe they already have?
Today is only our second day of ownership – or should I say Flo’nership? – of our new Nissan Qashqai. We’re calling her Flo’ (go with the Flo’!?), at Claire’s suggestion, in preference to Bertha, which was my idea (she’s a big gal!).
I’m driving like a super polite and fairly timid little ol’ lady. And I’m actually enjoying doing so. It’s a lot more relaxed and relaxing than zooming around. Not that I was always zooming previously.
I’ve had a few phone mounting devices over the years. And I’ve never really liked any of them. I’m hoping this mirror mounted thing might prove different? I only ordered it yesterday. Great that it arrived so quickly!
It’s so good to be back at the wheel, and working/earning. I was extremely worried! My aerial acrobat tightrope walking – in outer space, with no safety net – was taking its toll.
Some time, (I think?) after midnight, last night, I finally finished volume three of Shelby Foote’s whopping great three volume The Civil War.
Wow! What an epic read. But, as he says at the end. All things must and indeed do pass. Rather like reading Delderfield, I feel almost obliged to note that Foote is – or was, before this twenty year work – primarily an author of fiction.
He’s also been criticised for romanticising the South. Personally I don’t have a beef with him on that. He is, after all, a Southerner himself. Considering that is so, he’s remarkably balanced about things.
But it does mean you have to bear that in mind a bit. In terms of a bias, or a tendency to romanticise things – he has a definite thing for the ‘ghostly halloo’ of the legendary ‘Rebel Yell’ – you can definitely feel it.
For example, he ends the book with what amounts to – or can easily be construed as – a slightly hagiographic defence of Jeff Davis.
But I don’t mind that. History will always have multitudes of voices, saying slightly (sometimes wildly) differing things. I’m not a big fan of Napoleon’s alleged remark that history is merely lies agreed upon. One hopes there are truths of sorts that can and should be ‘dug up’.
But the main thing is, this is dramatic, exciting and compelling. The kind of history that might inspire a lifetime’s dedication to the subject. And as long as one has the critical faculties to detect and discern bias, and treat it appropriately, then in itself it’s not a deal-breaker.
I have really enjoyed reading this monumental work. And I’m almost sad it’s finally ended. It’s like travelling to another time and place. A holiday for the mind/soul. Beneficial even to the body: reading this has been both calming, generally, and has helped me sleep without the chemical crutch of zopiclone.*
But I’m also happy. I’ve travelled far and wide, from knee deeps muds, sloggng along ‘bottomless’ rain-drenched roses, across rivers with magical American names – from the Appomattox to the Yazoo – with shot and shell whistling around my ears. From the reduction to rubble of Fort Sumter, and elsewhere, to re transutions into defensive trench warfare on land, and the birth of the ironclads on river and at sea, it’s been truly epochal.
Utterly absorbing. I honestly can’t recommend this enough.
* And not by boring me to sleep. Far from it.
My mum’s currently recovering from a second hip replacement surgery, in a local hospital. She just messaged to say that after a very rough first night, she’s had a better second night, ‘in spite of [the] noisy ward.’
I replied that I was glad of the former (the better nights sleep, of course!). I didn’t respond to the latter, as she’d most probably be ‘brought down’ by my ‘negativity’!
So I’ll share my thoughts on that second part of her message here.
I think there’s a pretty major problem in our modern hospitals, re noise vs calm. And I say this based entirely on personal experience. Not just of my own time in hospitals, but when visiting others (family).
My own last/most recent visit to a hospital A&E – excluding the numerous routine blood tests I’m obliged to undergo – was, frankly, appalling, from the point of view of ‘healing’.
The levels of noise – bleeping electronics in partic’ (never mind groaning or screaming fellow patients*) – meant it was more torture chamber than place of healing. The irony!
* On several occasions my father’s been admitted to hospital in recent years. And it’s often been the case that the proximity to other patients, expressing their suffering in distressingly unchecked manners, has likewise been more conducive to furthering ill health, as opposed to recovery.
Perhaps this especially true of mental health? As factories for the return to purely physical or mechanical health? Well, modern hospitals are more about that, it seems to me. Keep the drones sufficiently functional for society at large to tick over.
And to my mind that’s a very fundamental flaw in the system, proceeding from political and moral sources. I attribute it to Toryism, or under-investment in public health and wellbeing.
Hospitals should be like the best private sanatoriums. The sort you glimpse a little of in classic old black movies. In which wealthy patients have access to private rooms, and plenty of attentive staff!
But I fear that with the relentless pursuit of private profit for the few, over the common good, let alone any visions of well-being for the many, things are destined just to get worse.
As author Kurt Vonnegut (I think?) laments, with his usual world-weary and acerbic insight, modern humanity might well self-annihilate on the basis that to take a more long term or morally sound view simply isn’t ‘cost effective’.*
NB – The non-movie screenshots that ‘illustrate’ this post were culled from the top few google results returned by the search terms ‘noisy hospitals’. Unsurprisingly a large topic. But one which, like the godawful beeping devices’ is being steadfastly ignored by those in a position to address it. To the detriment of the majority.
* I’ve seen this quote being attributed to Kurt online:
‘We’ll go down in history as the first society that wouldn’t save itself because it wasn’t cost-effective’
I’m re-writing this review from memory, for the present. Hopefully I’ll find the review I wrote at the time of reading?
But for now, a very simple and slight synopsis: I concur completely, with the author, inasmuch as he contends that whilst a rational contemporary mind may rightly baulk at full on religious belief, or ‘faith’, we have much to learn from the worlds religions. To simply abandon them wholesale is to throw the baby out with the bath water.
But what ought we learn from religion, and how might we keep what’s best whilst discarding what’s worst? Like Marx on Capitalism, non-religious folk like de Botton are often surgically exact in dissecting the ills of religion. But when it comes to what to put in its place?
Like almost all failed Utopian forms of Socialism, which all too often follow the road to Hell, whether paved with good intent or not, that’s also where I feel this book fails.
I have memories that are simultaneously clear and yet woefully dull, of attending Humanist meetings (amongst many other types, from Buddhist to Green, to… whatever), hoping to find a vibrant compelling alternative to the religion(s) I was brought up in.
That’s not to say that the latter are necessarily vibrant or compelling. But, despite (or is that because of?) the vacuum where rational thought might’ve been, these varied forms of Christian faith cohered. Not by dint of truth. More by sleight of mind.
And de Botton is quite good here, on that aspect of how religion has proven useful to humanity. The real rub is how to transfer that irrational utility into rational living. And in that area I’m less than convinced.
The other thing about all of de Botton’s books that I’ve read, is that whilst they’re well enough written, obviously well informed, and bespeak a clear thinking mind – what one hopes for in a professed/professional philosopher – for me they lack a certain zest. Ultimately that means I find them worthy but a trifle dull.
I’m prob’ being too harsh here. But having just finished the humungous and epic three volume Shelby Foote series, The Civil War, the compelling romantic excitement that reading that was, is a marked contrast to de Botton’s cool, calm, possibly slightly neutered style.
Just like the subject he’s addressing, there’s something slightly awry at the heart of this dilemma. Anyway, I’m going to leave it there for now. Until I either unearth my original more detailed review, or (this is less likely!) return to re-read the book.
To summarise: a good and worthy book, about a subject that needs addressing. But, just like most attempts to do what the title suggests – reap the benefits of faith without actually abandoning reason – it kind of doesn’t quite work. So both book and subject remain an unresolved and slightly dis-satisfying conundrum.
It’s maddening that faith in flawed fairy tales should prove more robust and utilitarian as an ‘answer’ to life’s riddles than evidence based reasoning. But that’s the rub. The latter, rather than providing pat answers, or even much solace (de Botton attempts to address this in another work The Consolations of Philosophy), simply leads to more questions.