“By the same token, jazz musicians who want to keep their own equally beautiful music alive and well have got to start thinking hard about how to pitch it to young listeners—not next month, not next week, but right now.”

- Terry Teachout | Wall Street Journal

Related posts:

1. "One of the big things that caught my attention was after he moved to Nashville in the '60s, he and another Texan, Waylon Jennings, eventually told the Nashville people to go to hell, and they left," says Sample, who will join Nelson in performances of the "American Classic" material in Chicago on Sept. 27 and 28 for a PBS special to air in the fall. (Willie Nelson in Jazz Country, L.A. Times)
2. Readymade jazz mix in my Muxtape:
   • Induce
   • Miles
   • Ananda Shankar
   • Angelo Badalamenti
   • The Budos Band
   • Mulatu Astatqé
   • Nils Petter Molvær
   • Marcus Belgrave
   • Nostalgia 77 Octet
   • Craig Taborn
   • Masabumi Kikuchi Sextet w/ Sadao Watanabe Quartet
   • Teruo Nakamura
3. Consequently, we've not had universal health care for the common good. We have never enjoyed the benefit of universal higher education, because collectively we cannot agree that it is in the common good for all citizens to be equally free from ignorance. We pay the price of that at every turn … in the lack of nuance in the national character, in the childlike and clichéd thinking of our electorate, in our satisfaction with a deluge of technological toys instead of meaningful work and leisure, or intellectual and spiritual substance. (via Joe Bageant)
4. I've uploaded another Muxtape (finally). Mid-tempo jazz, funk, and soul. Listen here. Muxtape No.2: 1. Art Farmer - Moanin' - The Brass Sessions: Brass Shout! / The Aztec Suite 2. The Aquarians - Jungle Grass - Jungle Grass 3. Lonnie Liston Smith - Journey into Love - Loveland 4. Ju-Par Universal Orchestra - Flute Salad - Moods and Grooves 5. The Budos Band - Aynotchesh Yererfu - The Budos Band 6. Yamasuki - Aieaoa - Captain's Crate 7. Lalo Schifrin - King Kong - Towering Toccata 8. Gene Ammons - Jaggin' - Free Again 9. Lemmy "Special" Mabase - Kwela Blues - African Jazz n' Jive 10. Roy Ayers - It Ain't Your Sign It's Your Mind - Everybody Loves the Sunshine 11. The Ensemble Al-Salaam - Circles - The Sojourner 12. Nostalgia 77 Octet - Stars - Weapons of Jazz Destruction

5. Not So Fast

   Sending and receiving at breakneck speed can make life queasy; a manifesto for slow communication

   By John Freeman

   The boundlessness of the Internet always runs into the hard fact of our animal nature, our physical limits, the dimensions of our cognitive present, the overheated capac­ity of our minds. "My friend has just had his PC wired for broadband," writes the poet Don Paterson. "I meet him in the café; he looks terrible—his face puffy and pale, his eyes bloodshot. . . . He tells me he is now detained, night and day, in downloading every album he ever owned, lost, desired, or was casually intrigued by; he has now stopped even listen­ing to them, and spends his time sleeplessly monitoring a progress bar. . . . He says it's like all my birthdays have come at once, by which I can see he means, precisely, that he feels he is going to die." We will die, that much is certain; and everyone we have ever loved and cared about will die, too, sometimes—heartbreakingly—before us. Being someone else, traveling the world, making new friends gives us a temporary reprieve from this knowledge, which is spared most of the animal kingdom. Busyness—or the simulated busyness of email addiction—numbs the pain of this awareness, but it can never totally submerge it. Given that our days are limited, our hours precious, we have to decide what we want to do, what we want to say, what and who we care about, and how we want to allocate our time to these things within the limits that do not and cannot change. In short, we need to slow down. Our society does not often tell us this. Progress, since the dawn of the Industrial Age, is supposed to be a linear upward progression; graphs with upward slopes are a good sign. Process­ing speeds are always getting faster; broadband now makes dial-­up seem like traveling by horse and buggy. Growth is eternal. But only two things grow indefinitely or have indefinite growth firmly ensconced at the heart of their being: cancer and the cor­poration. For everything else, especially in nature, the consum­ing fires eventually come and force a starting over. The ultimate form of progress, however, is learning to decide what is working and what is not; and working at this pace, emailing at this frantic rate, is pleasing very few of us. It is encroaching on parts of our lives that should be separate or sacred, altering our minds and our ability to know our world, encouraging a further distancing from our bodies and our natures and our communities. We can change this; we have to change it. Of course email is good for many things; that has never been in dispute. But we need to learn to use it far more sparingly, with far less dependency, if we are to gain control of our lives. [Article continues here via Wall Street Journal] Photo Credit:  Mark Crossfield

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.