Brownian Motion

I'm surprised that Alfred Lion didn't spring for a tuning. He must have known by the time he recorded Kenny Burrell both that the Five Spot piano was often out-of-tune and that the owner of the Five Spot didn't give a shit.

I just picked up a copy of Kenny Burrell Live at the Five Spot Cafe. The out-of-tune piano significantly reduces my pleasure in the music. I invite caveats for similarly afflicted recordings.

Of all the jazz trumpet players who died young, only Booker, IMO, was poised to change the course of jazz itself. We've missed out on much more than 45 years of great trumpet playing.

To leave in so ostentatious a manner is somewhat like asking for and receiving the chance to read one's own obituary.

I think so too, but I decided to post the obit outside of politics for maximum exposure.

I like your tabloid headline.

Fred Korematsu, 86, Dies; Lost Key Suit on Internment By RICHARD GOLDSTEIN Published: April 1, 2005 Fred T. Korematsu, who lost a Supreme Court challenge in 1944 to the wartime internment of Japanese-Americans but gained vindication decades later when he was given the Medal of Freedom, died on Wednesday in Larkspur, Calif. Mr. Korematsu, who lived in San Leandro, Calif., was 86. The cause was a respiratory ailment, said Don Tamaki, a lawyer for Mr. Korematsu. When he was arrested in 1942 for failing to report to an internment center, Mr. Korematsu was working as a welder and simply hoping to be left alone so he could pursue his marriage plans. He became a central figure in the controversy over the wartime removal of more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans and Japanese immigrants from the West Coast to inland detention centers. He emerged as a symbol of resistance to government authority. When President Bill Clinton presented Mr. Korematsu with the Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian award, in January 1998, the president likened him to Linda Brown and Rosa Parks in the civil rights struggles of the 1950's. In February 1942, two months after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order authorizing the designation of military areas from which anyone could be excluded "as protection against espionage and sabotage." In May 1942, the military command on the West Coast ordered that all people with Japanese ancestry be removed inland, considering them a security threat, and internment camps were built in harsh and isolated regions. Mr. Korematsu, a native of Oakland, Calif., and one of four sons of Japanese-born parents, was jailed on May 30, 1942, in San Leandro, having refused to join family members who had reported to a nearby racetrack that was being used as a temporary detention center. Mr. Korematsu had undergone plastic surgery in an effort to disguise his Asian features and had altered his draft registration card, listing his name as Clyde Sarah and his background as Spanish-Hawaiian. He hoped that with his altered appearance and identity he could avoid ostracism when he married his girlfriend, who had an Italian background. A few days after his arrest, Mr. Korematsu was visited in jail by a California official of the American Civil Liberties Union who was seeking a test case against internment. Mr. Korematsu agreed to sue. "I didn't feel guilty because I didn't do anything wrong," he told The New York Times four decades later. "Every day in school, we said the pledge to the flag, 'with liberty and justice for all,' and I believed all that. I was an American citizen, and I had as many rights as anyone else." Mr. Korematsu maintained that his constitutional rights were violated by internment and that he had suffered racial discrimination. In the summer of 1942, he was found guilty in federal court of ignoring the exclusion directive and was sentenced to five years' probation. He spent two years at an internment camp in Utah with his family. In 1944, the A.C.L.U. took his case before the Supreme Court. In December 1944 in Korematsu v. the United States, the Supreme Court upheld internment by a vote of 6 to 3. Justice Hugo L. Black, remembered today as a stout civil liberties advocate, wrote in the opinion that Mr. Korematsu was not excluded "because of hostility to him or his race" but because the United States was at war with Japan, and the military "feared an invasion of our West Coast." In dissenting, Justice Frank Murphy wrote that the exclusion order "goes over the very brink of constitutional power and falls into the ugly abyss of racism." The case was revisited long afterward when Peter Irons, a professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego, discovered documents that indicated that when it went to the Supreme Court, the government had suppressed its own findings that Japanese-Americans on the West Coast were not, in fact, security threats. In light of that information, Judge Marilyn H. Patel of Federal District Court in San Francisco overturned Mr. Korematsu's conviction in November 1983. In 1988, federal law provided for payments and apologies to Japanese-Americans relocated in World War II. Mr. Korematsu returned to California after the war, worked as a draftsman and raised a family. For many years, he withheld information about his case from his children, seeking to forget about his humiliation. In recent years, Mr. Korematsu expressed concern about civil liberties in the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Surviving are his wife, Kathryn; his son, Ken, of San Francisco; and his daughter, Karen Korematsu-Haigh, of Larkspur. In her decision overturning Mr. Korematsu's conviction, Judge Patel said, "Korematsu stands as a constant caution that in times of war or declared military necessity our institutions must be vigilant in protecting constitutional guarantees."

Harold Cruse, Social Critic and Fervent Black Nationalist, Dies at 89 By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT Published: March 30, 2005 Harold Cruse, an outspoken social and cultural critic who was best known for his angry collection of essays, "The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual," died Saturday in Ann Arbor, Mich. He was 89. The cause was congestive heart failure, his companion, Mara Julius, said. Largely self-educated and widely read, Mr. Cruse taught African-American studies at the University of Michigan and was one of the first blacks to get tenure at a major university without a college degree. He ranged over many subjects in his writing: politics, radicalism, music, culture and the situation of black people in America. In "Crisis" he summed up a set of positions that left him isolated from almost everyone else in the political spectrum of the mid-1960's. He was against integration. "Integrate with whom?" he asked. He deplored the black-power movement as being all slogans and no political program. He opposed the back-to-Africa campaign, although he had grudging admiration for Garveyism. Despite a brief association with the Communist Party, he abominated Communists and liberals - in particular, Jewish intellectuals, whom he blamed for black anti-Semitism. He was critical of almost everyone, from James Baldwin to Ossie Davis to Lorraine Hansberry, for accepting too readily the premises of white culture. He concluded that blacks must form their own political, economic, social and cultural base to work on all fronts toward an accommodation with capitalism as it was modified by the New Deal. Mr. Cruse's book stirred up strong reactions in many quarters. But Christopher Lasch wrote in The New York Review of Books that he agreed with book's thesis, as he put, "that intellectuals must play a central role in movements for radical change." A new edition of "Crisis" will be published next month. A year after its original publication, Mr. Cruse was asked to lecture at the University of Michigan, where he became involved in the African-American studies program until his retirement in the mid-1980's as professor emeritus. Harold Wright Cruse was born in Petersburg, Va., on March 8, 1916, and moved with his father, a railway porter, to New York City as a young child. After graduating from high school, he worked at several jobs but was ambitious to become a writer. He served in the Army in Europe during World War II. After the war, he attended the City College of New York briefly but never graduated. In 1947, he joined the Communist Party and wrote drama and literary criticism for The Daily Worker, although he was never doctrinaire. In the 1950's, he wrote several plays, and in the mid-1960's he was co-founder, with LeRoi Jones (now Amiri Baraka), of the Black Arts Theater and School in Harlem.The more he learned about the arts, the more he deplored what he saw as a white appropriation of black culture, particularly as exemplified by George Gershwin's folk opera "Porgy and Bess." He called for blacks to embrace their cultural uniqueness. His later books include "Rebellion or Revolution?", "Plural but Equal: A Critical Study of Blacks and Minorities and America's Plural Society" and "The Essential Harold Cruse: A Reader" edited by William Jelani Cobb with a foreword by Stanley Crouch. In addition to Ms. Julius, his survivors include two half sisters, Shirley Toke, of Richmond, Va., and Catherine Jones, of Petersburg.

Look for the Silver Lining was done in 1973 and is on a Concord 2fer, coupled with Jimmy Bruno and Howard Alden. Ray Brown and Jake Hanna round out the group. The Ellis/Pass quartet was Carl Jefferson's first recording; the Bruno/Alden date was his last.

This turtle needs an agent.

"That's a problem when you arrive later to the party - your name belongs to somebody else. " Unless you're deadcoldfish. Then you don't have to sweat it.

I can still count my reviews on one hand.

While I was out of town over Xmas someone ordered a CD from me that I had listed on Half.com. Since I wasn't around to confirm the order it was automatically cancelled by half.com. Half.com permits feedback on cancelled transactions, so I left the buyer feedback explaining that I was out-of-town and inviting him to re-order the CD. He didn't. Now, 3 months later, he leaves me negative feedback, saying he "never received order". What a vindictive little shit. And that will be the last time I squander my chance to leave reciprocal negativity!

Amen.

Dave Brubeck and his wife Iola wrote a musical in the early 1960s called "The Real Ambassadors". Although it never made it to Broadway it was performed at a jazz festival once or twice, and it was also recorded by Columbia with the original cast--Louis Armstrong and his band, Lambert, Hendricks and Ross, Carmen McCrae, and Dave. It's a wonderful recording. Also check out King Pleasure--Moody's Mood for Love being perhaps his best.

Very few professions have been more dramatically altered by the WWW than the used book trade. In the not-so-distant past it was slow, inefficient, and required dedication, a broad if not necessarily deep knowledge of history and culture, and a real love of books; dealer wannabes normally served apprenticeships at established bookstores, or were collectors who became dealers to feed an insatiable book habit. Today it is fast, efficient, and requires very little of its practitioners other than an urge to turn thrift store finds into cash. There are plenty of real book dealers on ABE and related sites, but there are plenty of imposters as well. They're the ones selling dollar books and gouging on shipping.

I list books on http://www.bookavenue.com/ , which is one of the smaller book databases, but Bookfinder searches Bookavenue, ABE, Alibris, and at least half a dozen others.

Eternity is a very very long time. Accept Jesus and pray to him daily. God bless you. At cosine we all can crucial as always tribute intern their flatworm and arachnid and swift..

Jesus, no kidding! Actually, if I was gonna zip someone from a board, I'd just zip 'em...no need to go public and set in motion a first class melee. Someone threatens people....ya just flip the switch and miraculously, they just never post again. These untidy cyber liquidations are so............soooooo Red Menace-like. B-) Where's the Maalox bottle? Weizen, the minute you leave the politics forum you start talking nothing but common sense. Who woulda thunk it?

Try Amazon.

It was the MJQ at Music Inn with Guest Jimmy Giuffre. I see from checking Amazon that there was a 2nd volume as well. I'm not sure whether either of these have been issued on CD.

I agree wholeheartedly with these picks; also check out The Sheriff, and the collaborations with Laurindo Almeida, Sonny Rollins, and Jimmy Giuffre. I believe part of the reason that the MJQ's reputation has suffered somewhat is that their Atlantic records were not well-engineered sonically: they have no presence--they needed RVG. The result is on their records they often sound like they're playing down the block.

That's Don Redman singing "Shakin' the Afri-can".

Sounds wonderful. Wish I still lived in Brooklyn.