TRANSFORMATIONS
The Power of Black Music

Samuel A. Floyd Jr.

 

The Negro Renaissance: Harlem and Chicago (Part 2)

 

 

Art by Aaron Douglas-Aspiration(1936)

 

 

 

                                      As James Weldon Johnson (1922) wrote at the time:

         A people may be great through many menas, but there is only one measure by which  its

         greatness is recognized and acknowledged. The final measure of the greatness of all      

         peoples is the amount and standard of the literature and art that they have produced. The

         world does not know that a people is great until that people produces great literature and

         art. No people that has produced great literature and art has ever been looked upon by

         the world as distinctly inferior.

                                       The status of the Negro in the United States is more a question of

          national mental attitude toward the race than of actual conditions. And nothing will do

          more to change that mental attitude and raise his status than a demonstration of

          intellectual parity by the Negro through the production of literature and art.

         

                                         The guiding assumption was that "excellence in art would alter the nation's perceptions of blacks, [leading] eventually to freedom and justice." Patrons supporting or promoting this belief were wealthy black and white philanthropists, publishers, entrepreneurs, and socialites who wanted to promote the aesthetic advancement of the race; assist in blacks' social, artistic, and intellectual progress; or reap financial or gain. Among the real patrons of the movement were A'Lelia Walker, the black beauty-culture heir, who provided a gathering place for musicians and writers alike on the third floor of her Harlem residence, known as the Dark Tower; Casper Holstein, the black "numbers" Kingpin, whose Holstein Prizes for musical compositon were offered through Opportunity magazine; J.E. Springarn, who offered a gold medal for "musical achievement in any field"; David Bispham, sponsor of a prize medal of the American Opera Society, one of which was won by Clarence Cameron White for his Opers "Ouanga (1931).

                                         

                                            Also, there were the Wanamaker family whose Wanamaker Music Contests were held under the partial auspices of the National Association of Negro Musicians (NANM). The intellectual and artistic activity of writers, painters, sculptors, photographers, playwrights, and actors was feverish, and progressive organizations published magazines for the intellectual and political edification of black thinkers and strivers.

 

  

Jean Toomer Wrote the novel Cane          Walter White wrote Flight (1926)

(1923)

 

         

Langston Hughes wrote Not Without Laughter   Zora Neal hurston wrote "Sweat" (1926)

(1930)

 

  

Alain Locke edited the New Negro    Aaron Douglas painted allegorical

(1925)                                               scenes

 

      

Archibald Motley painted Syncopation(1925)         Palmer Hayden painted Schooner(1926)

Stomp(1926) & Spell of Voodoo(1928)     & Quai at Concarneu (1929)

 

Eubie Blake                                          Noble Sissle

Both wrote the musical Shuffle Along (1921)

 

 

James P. Johnson wrote Runnin' Wild     he and Fats Waller wrote Keep Shufflin (1928)

(1924)                                                          

 

                  

Donald Haywook wrote the operetta Africana        Paul Robeson acted in Simon the Cyrenian

(1933)                                                                   (1920), All Gods's Chillum Got Wings                                                                               (1923). The Emperor Jones(1925) and

                                                                               Showboat (1928)

 

 

                                     Musically, the idea was to produce extended forms such as symphonies

and operas from the raw material of spirituals, ragtime, blues, and other folk genres.  The movement's first successful effort in the transformation of folk music into "high art" was Dett's Oratorio The Chariot Jubilee (1921). Still's Afro-American symphony (1930) was the movement's crowning achievement. There were frequent concerts by the Harlem symphony Orchestra and the Negro string Quartet, which played works by black and white composers. But the pride of the Renaissance leaders were the recital singers: Roland Hayes, Paul Robeson, and Marian Anderson had magnificent voices, and they served as exemplars for the New Negro movement. Burleigh's Album of Negro Spirituals, which he had begun to write as early as 1916, probably served as the initial impetus for the black-music repertoires of these and other concert singers.

                                        Also in 1925, Paul robeson became the first black solo artist to sing entire recitals of these songs, taking them to parts of the world that the Fisk Jubilee Singers had not reached in their tours during the 1870s to 1890s. Robeson was the son of a preacher and was steeped in black culture, he was nourshed on the spiritual and on the sustenance of the ring. His biggest contribution to African-American musical nationalism was probaly the influence he had on the recital artists of the period: after his 1925 concert of spirituals, nearly all black concert singers included them on their recital programs.

                                        And for entertainment, all danced the Susie Q, the lindy, the black bottom, and the Charleston at clubs such as Barron's Rockland Palace, and the Bucket of Blood. Initially, entertainment music, including jazz, was ignored or dismissed by Renaissance leaders in favor of concert music; the blues and other folk forms (except for the Negro spiritual, which was held in high esteem) were rejected as decadent and reminiscent of the "old Negro." But many of the movement's entertainers were both amused and offended by the superior attitudes and posturings of some of the black intellectuals. So the entertainers subjected them to "Signifyin(g) revision" or "troping," commenting on them occasionally in speech, posture, gesture, and even song--for example, in Fletcher Henderson's "Dicty Blues; (1923) and in Duke Ellington's Dicty Glide" (1929).

                                        

 

TO BE CONTINUED!!

  

      Nancy Wilson - Guess Who I Saw Today

                                NASTY NANCY DOING WHAT ONLY SHE CAN IN 1994.

 

        

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   

MUSIC: Tribute to Benny Goodman takes place Jan. 21 in Bridgewater

 

 

The world of jazz has had plenty of royalty, from a Duke (Ellington) to a Count (Basie) to at least one Lady (Billie Holiday, known as Lady Day). But there was only one king: Benny Goodman, the King of Swing.

More than 25 years after his death, Goodman’s legacy lives on, according to clarinetist Dan Levinson, a featured player in James Langston’s New York All-Star Big Band. The group will perform a tribute to Goodman on Jan. 21 at the Theater at Somerset County Vocational and Technical School in Bridgewater.

The timing of the tribute is deliberate. On Jan. 16, 1938, Goodman’s band played a concert at Carnegie Hall that is considered a milestone in jazz’s acceptance as a legitimate musical form.

The program in Bridgewater will not be a re-creation of that concert, Levinson said. But he added that it will replicate the feel of the big-band swing that is one of Goodman’s trademarks.

“Benny, to my ears, believed that what mattered more than technique was swing, and he demonstrated that principle in every note he played,” Levinson said. “There’s something about Goodman’s sound that always stops me in my tracks.”

A true genius

Saxophonist James Langston, who has assembled the group of musicians for the Bridgewater concert, agreed.

“Genius is a word often thrown around without thought,” he said. “I heard a good definition: A genius is a person whose work, within his field of endeavor, fundamentally changes that field, influencing everyone who comes after him.

“Goodman was a genius,” Langston added, “as was Fletcher Henderson, whose arranging created the Goodman band sound.”

Levinson and Langston are matched in their enthusiasm by Jim Bourke, who is promoting the Bridgewater concert, with the sponsorship of the New Jersey Jazz Society.

“This is music that gives you excitement and joy,” Bourke said. “This is wonderful music that lifts the spirits in a way that the music of today does not. We’re incredibly fortunate to have musicians of this caliber coming to the area.”

Bourke has been promoting an annual jazz concert in Bridgewater for the past three years, but he is carrying on the tradition of the Jazz in Bridgewater concert series that ran for several years.

Obituaries

Milwaukee barber Frank Gay doubled as jazz musician

Journal Sentinel files

Hubert Humphrey visited with Frank Gay in 1972 as Gay worked on a customer’s hair at his Grand Barbershop on Milwaukee’s north side.

Jan. 20, 2012

Frank Gay was a north side barber who played jazz trumpet as a young man and whose King Drive shop was known for its camaraderie and a great jukebox.

He grew up in a generation of Milwaukee musicians who went on to jazz careers, some of them gaining regional and national reputations. And as a trumpeter and member of the musicians union, he played with some of the greats who visited town - including Lena Horne, Dizzy Gillespie and Billie Holiday, his daughter said.

Gay died Jan. 13 of bone cancer. He was 83.

Gay's kids described his King Drive barbershop, which he opened in 1965 and operated 30 years, as a Milwaukee institution, full of talk, laughter and music from a jukebox loaded with jazz music.

"It was like going to a club, being at that barbershop," said his daughter, Christina Gay.

Gay grew up in Milwaukee and graduated in 1948 from Lincoln High School, where he played in the marching and concert bands.

Many others came out of Lincoln playing jazz and made names for themselves in Milwaukee or even nationally - including Willie Pickens, Frank Morgan and Bunky Green. Singer Al Jarreau graduated from Lincoln about 10 years later, but his brother Alphaeus was a year behind Gay and remembers the future barber as an excellent musical interpreter.

Gay was also a good reader of music, and he joined the musicians union in his teens because of that ability - a connection that got him gigs with the stars then and later.

Pickens, a jazz pianist who moved to Chicago in 1958 and made a national name for himself, said there were two musicians unions in those days - one for black performers and one for whites.

John Schneider, who wrote a fact-based play in 1999 for the old Theater X company called "Jazz: A Milwaukee History," relied for a large part of the play on an interview with Gay.

In the interview, Gay listed some of the north side clubs where jazz could be heard when he was playing in the 1940s, '50s and '60s - the Pelican, the Celebrity Club, Thelma's Back Door, the Jam Room. He bemoaned the loss of those clubs, and the old Bronzeville neighborhood around W. Walnut St., to urban renewal and freeway construction.

After high school, Gay served in the Army, where he played in an Army band at Fort Benjamin Harrison in Indiana, his daughter said. When he came back to Milwaukee he worked at construction jobs but continued to play music.

He got a master barber's license and a certificate in business administration in 1960 from what's now the Milwaukee Area Technical College. He opened a barbershop at 2543 N. 3rd St. in 1965 and named it Grand Barbershop, after a Detroit jazz venue, Club 20 Grand.

Like many barbershops in the black community, his became a major social gathering place. One of his former customers, Journal Sentinel columnist Eugene Kane, remembers him saying slugger Hank Aaron was once a regular patron - though Kane quoted Gay as saying he didn't like baseball because of how black pioneer Jackie Robinson was treated.

His longtime companion, Mary Jo Avery, said Milwaukee Bucks and Green Bay Packers players were also among his customers, and politicians often stopped in, including Hubert Humphrey, the Minnesota senator and vice president who ran for president as a Democrat in 1968 and competed for the nomination in 1972.

After his retirement in the mid-1990s, his daughter said, he was an avid golfer. "I bet he played four days a week," Christina said.

Gay's three-decade marriage to the former Mary Jane Wiley ended in divorce in the mid-1990s. Beside his ex-wife and his daughter, he is survived by sons Monty Shadd and Glenn Gay, five grandchildren and Avery.

A service is set for 11 a.m. Saturday at the Northwest Funeral Chapel, 6630 W. Hampton Ave.

   

                                                 TRANSITIONS MADE:

 

The 2011 Musical Obituaries
Compiled by George Graham

Jan. 1 Charles Fambrough, jazz bassist, composer, 60
Jan. 4 Gerry Rafferty, singer-songwriter, Stealer's Wheel, 63
Jan. 10 Margaret Whiting, pop singer, 86
Jan. 17 Don Kirshner, rock producer, 76
Jan. 26 Gladys Horton, member of Marvelettes, 65
Jan. 26 Charlie Louvin, country artist, Louvin Brothers, 83
Jan. 31 Mark Ryan, member of Adam and the Ants, 51
Feb. 6 Gary Moore, rock guitarist, singer, Thin Lizzy, 58
Feb. 14 George Shearing, jazz pianist, composer, 91
Mar. 11 Jack Hardy, folk singer-songwriter, Homegrown Music artist, 63
Mar. 12 Joe Morello, jazz drummer w/Dave Brubeck, 82
Mar. 14 Big Jack Johnson, blues guitarist, singer, 70
Mar. 16 Melvin Sparks, jazz and soul guitarist, 64
Mar. 17 Ferlin Husky, country singer, 85
Mar. 21 Pinetop Perkins, blues pianist, 97
Mar. 22 Zoogz Rift, iconoclastic musician, wrestler, 57
Apr. 5 Gil Robbins, folksinger, The Highwaymen, 80
Apr. 9 Roger Nichols, recording engineer, Steely Dan, 66
Apr. 11 Billy Bang, jazz violinist, 63
Apr. 22 Hazel Dickens, folk singer, 75
Apr. 26 Phobe Snow, popular singer, 60
May 8 Cornell Dupree, jazz and blues guitarist, 68
May 11 Snooky Young, jazz trumpeter, 92
May 15 Bob Flanigan, jazz singer, Four Freshmen, 84
May 27 Gil Scott-Heron, musician, poet, composer 62
June 2 Ray Bryant, jazz pianist, 79
June 3 Andrew Gold, singer-songwriter, 59
June 8 Alan Rubin, trumpeter, Blues Brothers, 68
June 12 Carl Gardner, singer with the Coasters, 83
June 18 Clarence Clemons, saxophonist E-Street Band, 69
July 8 Kenny Baker, country and bluegrass fiddler, 85
July 9 Michael Burston, a/k/a Wurzel, guitarist with Motorhead, 61
July 11 Rob Grill, singer-songwriter, founder of The Grass Roots, 67
July 23 Fran Landesman, composer, lyricist, wrote with Bob Dorough, 83
July 23 Bill Morrissey, singer-songwriter, 59
July 23 Amy Winehouse, singer-songwriter, 27
July 24 Dan Peek, singer-songwriter, member of America, 60
July 26 Frank Foster, jazz saxophonist, 82
July 29 Gene McDaniels, singer-songwriter "Compared to What", 76
Aug. 11 Jani Lane, vocalist with band Warrant, 47
Aug. 20 Ross Barbour, jazz singer, Four Freshmen, 82
Aug. 22 Nickolas Ashford, R&B singer, composer, Ashford & Simpson, 70
Aug. 29 David "Honeyboy" Edwards, blues pioneer, 96
Sep. 7 Eddie Marshall, jazz drummer 73
Sep. 13 Wilma Lee Cooper, country singer, 90
Sep. 16 Willie "Big Eyes" Smith, blues drummer and harmonica player, 75
Sep. 22 Vesta Williams, R&B singer, 53
Sep. 26 Jesse Dixon, Gospel musician, 73
Oct. 1 Butch Ballard, jazz drummer, 92
Oct. 1 David Bedford, British composer and musician, 74
Oct. 5 Bert Jansch, guitarist, vocalist, founder of Pentangle, 67
Oct. 16 Pete Rugolo, jazz and film composer, 95
Oct. 18 Bob Bruning, original bassist in Fleetwood Mac, 68
Oct. 28 Walter Norris, jazz pianist, 79
Oct. 31 Liz Anderson, country singer-songwriter, 81
Nov. 12 Doyle Bramhall, blues and rock singer-songwriter, 62
Nov. 22 Paul Motian, jazz drummer, 80
Nov. 22 Kristian Schultze, German keyboard man, Passport, 66
Nov. 27 Keef Hartley, drummer, band played at Woodstock, 67
Dec. 2 Howard Tate, soul singer, 72
Dec. 2 Al Vega, jazz pianist, 90
Dec. 4 Hubert Sumlin, blues guitarist, 80
Dec. 6 Dobie Gray, soul singer, "The In Crowd", 71
Dec. 14 Billie Jo Spears, country singer, "Blanket on the Ground", 74
Dec. 16 Bob Brookmeyer, jazz trombonist, composer/arranger, 81
Dec. 17 Cesaria Evora, Cape Verdean singer, 70
Dec. 26 Sam Rivers, jazz composer and multinstru

 

 

 

 

  Re/Birth of a Nation

    

    Black Like Me

 

   Rest at pale evening,

   A tall, slim tree,

   Night coming tenderly                 

   Black like me.                              Langston Hughes 1925

                                                   by artist Winold Reiss

 

   Langson Hughes

 

          Although first conceived cira 1920, Ethiopia Awakening (cat.24) by the New England-based, rodin-trained sculptor Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller was art for the future. In spite of the sculpture's roots in early-twentieth-century Pan-Africanist thought, and in the part classical, part allegorical forms of Antoine-Louis Bayre and Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Fuller's vision of an ancient Egyptian noblewoman, aroused and emerging from the cloth and papyrus wrappings of the dead, was a spirited message of rebirth and self-realization: an artistic statement articulated by many african-Americans in the aftermath of slavery and the post-Reconstruction period, and one that clearly resounded with black modernists in the 1920s and 1930s.

 

           This figure, looming from a cocoon-like sculptural base, gave concrete form and signification to the uprooting and resettlement process experienced by blacks in the early twentieth century, whether African-Americans migrating in droves from the rutral South to the urban North or blacks from the Caribbean and Africa moving in ever increasing numbers to Paris, London and other European cities. This diaspora-wide arousal, akin to a reawakening, was the rediscovery of an African identity that had been submerged under decades of peonage, servitude and stultifying tradition, but was now freed from a chrysalis-like state in order to explore and interact with an inductrialized world and to see the self and other peoples of African ancestry in a new light.

 

            In a 1925 essay entitled 'The New Negro', Howard University Professor of Philosophy Alain Locke described this transformation as not relying on older, time-worn models but, rather, embracing a 'new psychology' and 'new spirit'. Central to Locke's preescription was the mandate that the 'New Negro' had to 'smash' all of the racial, social and psychological impediments that had long obstructed black achievement. six years prior to Locke's essay, the pioneering black film-maker Oscar Micheaux called for similar changes. In his 1919 film Within our Gates, Micheaux presented a virtual cornucopia of 'New Negro' types:from the educated and entrepreneurial 'race' man and woman to the incorrigible Negro hustler, from the liberal white philanthropist to the hard-core white racist. Micheaux created a complex, melodramatic narrative, around these types in order to develop a morality tale of pride, prejudice, misanthropy and progressivism that would be revisited by Locke and others.

 

TO BE CONTINUED:

 

 

   AFRICAN AMERICANS

                VOICES OF TRIUMPH

  

EARLY BLACK MOVIEMAKING

 

                Los Angeles's black community was thriving in the summer of 1915. The city's Central Avenue section boasted a Booker Y. Washington Building, a pair of hotels, two newspapers, and so many other enterprises that the black weekly California Eagle headlined: "Central Avenue Assumes Gigantic Proportion as Business Section for Colored Men." The community also had its share of movie houses, but the films were largely made by whites for whites; blacks, when they appeared, were mostly portrayed as menials or dimwitted comedy characters.

                     That would start to change the very same year, when African American actor Noble Johnson and several partners founded the Lincoln Motion Picture Company to make films about blacks, directed and acted by blacks, for blacks. Lincoln was one of many small companies throughout the country to make films with black casts in the years that followed. Tall, good-looking Noble Johnson was already a bit player in the movies. Brought up around horses in Colorado, the young man was working on a ranch in 1914 when a Philadelphia moviemaker on location needed someone to substitute for an injuired performer. Johnson did so well--in one scene driving a runaway four-horse stagecoach--that the company signed him up for further films, usually portraying Indian or Mexican characters. As the film industry moved west, he soon was in Hollywood playing minor roles for Universal Studios.

                     But Johnson had stronger ambitions. With a few backers, including black actor Clarence Brooks, and a white camerman named Harry Gant, Johnson started Lincoln Motion Pictures to create pioneering films in which blacks came across as real people. The company's first film was ready in 1916. A  short two-reeler entitled The Realization of a Negro's Ambition, it cast Noble Johnson in the role of a Tuskegee graduate, a civil engineer, who overcomes prejudice by saving the life of a wealthy white oilman's daughter. Rewarded with a job, he strikes oil in California, then, realizing that the same oil-rich conditions exist on his father's Alabama farm, brings in a gusher there, marries his childhood sweetheart, and lives happly ever after.

                       Trite and simplistic by modern standards. Ambition nonetheless spoke strongly to black yearnings for acceptance and offered an new type of protagonist, a middle-class hero who believed as strongly as anybody else in the American work ethic. Produced on a shoestring budget and distributed to black theaters via friendly black newspaper editors who served as booking agents, Ambition struck a responsive chord with audiences. "Our patrons were surprised and delighted, " declared a Chicago theater owner.

 

TO BE CONTINUED:

  

  

                                    From the autobiography of- RUTH BROWN - Miss Rhythm

  

        

 

  Chapter 9 "Oh, What a Dream"

Chuck Willis and I were discussing material at Atlantic one day in the spring of '54. "When are you going to write a song for me?" I asked him, half-joking. "Are you kidding?" he replied. "Do you really want a song from me?"

    "Of course I do. I've never been more serious about anything. " I was simply staggered at his modesty. "Well," he said, "I may have something that could be perfect for you. It's not finished yet, but i'll show it to you when it is.

    A few weeks later he produced a set of lyrics written out on yellow legal pad paper, and proceeded to hum the tune for me. In view of what I was going through with Willis, "Oh, What a Dream" was a killer title, but I fell in love right away with the wonderful slow, bluesy mood he'd created in his combination of words and music. All we needed was for Jesse Stone to come up with an arrangement to match, and we were home free--well, almost. The record was barely on the streets when the inevitable happened. You guessed it, a Patti Page duplicate on Mercury.    Patti page make Billboard's mainstream Top Forty; I settled as usual for the upper reaches of the R-and-B chart. It would be nice to report that my original had crossed over to the white chart. Instead, the reverse happened. "The Singing Rage" crossed over to the black R-and-B list! Later that same year I hit again with the topical "Mambo Baby." Mercury, not to be outdone, hit back with a Georgia Gibbs duplicate. Same result, the bulk of the sales creamed off. Never mind, the tunes kept the name of Ruth Brown hot, hot, hot in the same year that Atlantic, with its black orginals, was declared the "most-covered label" in the U.S. Personally i think "most-covered" was a misnomer; I would have termed it "most-duplicated." (to be continued

Bessie Smith 1936 by photographer Carl Van Vechten

 

Reading Music

Though a musician needs a good ear to play jazz well, it is possible to be musically illiterate and still excel in jazz. Erroll Garner was the most shining example. Erroll had such a quick ear as a child that he never bothered to learn to read. One hearing was usually enough for him to learn any piece of music. When someone mentioned his not being able to read music. Garner said, "Hell, man, nobody can hear you read."In the early days, a jazz musician who could read music was usually called "Professor." Written notes were viewed with suspicion by the unschooled and were considered to be devoid of soul. But men like Eubie Blake could read and write music very well. He said:

     In those days Negro musicians weren't even supposed to read music. We had to pretend we coouldn't read; then they'd marvel at the way we could play shows, thinking we'd learned the parts by ear.

Nowadays most jazz players can read, but they still may run into situations they aren't prepared for. Saxophonist Jack Nimitz, a Stan Kenton alumnus, had no problem with reading or improvising, but when he took a job with a club date band that faked harmony to standard tunes, he had trouble.  Club date fake bands play long medleys, one chorus of each song.  The trumpet or the lead alto will play the melody, and the rest of the horns find harmony parts by ear.

   Jack was doing all right with the harmony lines until the band began to play a tune he didn't know.  He tried to catch it by ear, but in the process he played a few wrong notes. The leader shouted over the music, "if you don't know the tune, just play the melody! 

 

Saturday Night Street Scene by artist, Archibald J. Motley Jr.

 

 

BEGINNINGS

Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis took a pragmatic approach to becoming a jazz player:

   I didn't buy an instrument for the sake of the music. It's different if someone says he likes music and wants to get an instrument to try to be a musician. In my case I wanted the instrument for what it represented.

   By watching musicians I saw that they drank, they smoked, they got all the broads and they didn't get up early in the morning. That attracted me. My next move was to see who got the most attention, so it was between the tenor saxophonist and the drummer. The drums looked like too much work, so I said I'll get one of those tenor saxophones. That's the truth.

 

Nat Cole's wife Maria discussed the legend that Nat's singing career had begun when a drunk had insisted he sing "Sweet Lorraine" until he finally gave in and sang it:

   The incident of the insistent barroom customer, a guy who often spent as much as "three bucks a night" in the Swanee Inn, did happen. As Nat explained it, "This particular customer kept insisting on a certain song, and I told him I didn't know that one but I would sing something different, and that was "Sweet Lorraine."

   The trio was tipped fifteen cents-a nickel apiece-for that performance, and the customer requested a second tune. Again, Nat didn't know it but asked, "Is there something else you would like?"

   "Yeah," the customer said, " I'd lkie my fifteen cents back."

 

Wynton Marsalis had a trumpet long before he developed an interest in being a trumpet player. He said:

   I was about five or six, and Miles (Davis), Clark Terry, Al Hirt, and my father were all sitting around a table in Al's club in New Orleans-this was when my father was still working in Al's band. My father, just joking around because there were so many trumpet players sitting there, said,

   "I better buy Wynton a Trumpet," And Al said,

   "Ellis, let me give your boy one of mine." It's ironic looking back on it, because Miles said, "Don't give it to him. Trumpet's too difficult an instrument for him to learn." Ha!

 

 

Jockey Club, 1929 by artist, Archibald J. Motley Jr.

 

 

 

HAPPINESS

Happiness is the greatest paradox in Nature. It can grow in any soil, live under any conditions. It defies environment. It comes from within; it is the revelation of the depths of the inner life as light and heat proclaim the sun from which they radiate. Happiness consists not of having, but of being; not possessing, but of enjoying. It is the warm glow of a heart at peace with itself. A martyr at the stake may have happiness that a king on his throne might envy. Man is the creator of his own happiness; it is the aroma of a life lived in harmony with high ideals.

For what a man has, he may be dependent on others; what he is, rests with him alone. What he obtains in life is but acquistion; what he attains, is growth. Happiness is the soul's joy in the possession of the intangible. Absolute, perfect, continuous happiness in life, is impossible for the human. It would mean the consummation of attainments, the individual consciousness of a perfectly fufilled destiny. Happiness is paradoxic because it may coexist with trial, sorrow and poverty. It is the gladness of the heart, --rising superior to all conditions.

THE JAZZI

It is necessary to understand this: Jazz has to do with quality. For musicians the music has to be first and foremost "good" to be perceived as jazz. All other criteria play a secondary role, however important that may be.

...James "the jazzi" Harber

 

"This we know, all things are connected, like the blood which unites one family. All things are connected.

Teach your children that the earth is our mother. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons and daughters of the earth.

Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web he does to himself."

Chief Seattle
Native American
1854