Thursday, September 24, 2015

Jimmy McGriff - The worm


jimmy mcgriff - the bird 7''


1964 - Brother Jack McDuff Quartet



Brother Jack McDuff - organ; Red Holloway - tenor sax; George Benson - guitar; Joe Dukes - drums

Thursday, September 17, 2015

Charlie Parker & Dizzy Gillespie - Oop-Pop-A-Da


Charlie Parker - Dizzy Gillespie - My Melancholy Baby


Charlie Parker - Modern Jazz Quartet Live 1952 ~ How High The Moon



Charlie Parker - Alto Sax
Milt Jackson - Vibes
John Lewis - Piano
Percy Heath - Bass
Kenny Clarke - Drums

Charlie Parker - Begin the Beguine



This track was recorded in NY on 23 Jan 1952. Bird backed by Benny Harris on trumpet, Walter Bishop Jr. on piano, Teddy Kotick on bass, Max Roach on drum kit and Jose Mangual on congas

John Coltrane, Stan Getz, Oscar Peterson, - Hackensack



John Coltrane and Stan Getz together is rare. Recorded in Germany 1960. Oscar Peterson pno. Paul Chambers bass, Jimmy Cobb drs

Friday, September 11, 2015

9/11

Today is 9/11.  Fourteen years ago - 9/11/01 - our world changed.  The almost 1400 year war between Islam and the "West" became front page news again, leading to fruitless wars, massive changes in both the perception and reality of civil rights in the USA.

I knew people who died in both the towers and Flight 93.  The people I knew had no connection to foreign policy, or any anti-Islam organization.  In fact, they would most likely have been more understanding of the plight of the Palestinians.  But, no matter  --  after all, radicals usually do not consider individuals, they are driven by "big ideas", and the actual lives of real people are only "distractions".

At the time of the attacks, I would have been happy to see Afghanistan (where, we were told, the attacks had originated) "turned to glass".

That was not to be  --  instead we began TWO, yes TWO, unwinnable wars, while our leaders told us to "go shopping".

At that point, any sane person had to know this was not going to end well.

It has not  --  and the dead of 9/11 have not been avenged in any way.

We are a lesser nation.  Prejudice and bigotry have, again, reared their ugly heads.  Both the left and right have spun off into la-la land, and we have used a huge amount of our resources on seemingly useless military action while people starve, our middle class disappears, and our education system flounders.

Now, it appears, there are folks who say our response to 9/11 was "an overreaction".  It was not an overreaction, it was just that we did not use our resources wisely, and used 9/11 to attack targets that had no connection to the attacks on the USA.

There's so much more to write   ----   but, since I'm now 76 years old, I'm going to let these matters go.  I'm afraid those who are now "coming up" really do not know history, nor do they actually understand the historical background that informs the current wars.

I suspect all you young folks will live in "interesting times".  

Wednesday, September 9, 2015

A Crisis of Public Morality, Not Private Morality

This from Robert Reich.
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http://robertreich.org/


At a time many Republican presidential candidates and state legislators are furiously focusing on private morality – what people do in their bedrooms, contraception, abortion, gay marriage – America is experiencing a far more significant crisis in public morality.
CEOs of large corporations now earn 300 times the wages of average workers. Insider trading is endemic on Wall Street, where hedge-fund and private-equity moguls are taking home hundreds of millions.
A handful of extraordinarily wealthy people are investing unprecedented sums in the upcoming election, seeking to rig the economy for their benefit even more than it’s already rigged.
Yet the wages of average working people continue to languish as jobs are off-shored or off-loaded onto “independent contractors.”
All this is in sharp contrast to the first three decades after World War II.
Then, the typical CEO earned no more than 40 times what the typical worker earned, and Wall Street was boring.
Then, the wealthy didn’t try to control elections.
And in that era, the wages of most Americans rose.
Profitable firms didn’t lay off their workers. They didn’t replace full-time employees with independent contractors, or bust unions. They gave their workers a significant share of the gains.
Consumers, workers, and the community were considered stakeholders of almost equal entitlement.
We invested in education and highways and social services. We financed all of this with our taxes.
The marginal income tax on the highest income earners never fell below 70 percent. Even the effective rate, after all deductions and tax credits, was still well above 50%.
We had a shared sense of public morality because we knew we were all in it together. We had been through a Great Depression and a terrible war, and we understood our interdependence.
But over time, we forgot.
The change began when Wall Street convinced the Reagan Administration and subsequent administrations to repeal regulations put in place after the crash of 1929 to prevent a repeat of the excesses that had led to the Great Depression.
This, in turn, moved the American economy from stakeholder capitalism to shareholder capitalism, whose sole objective is to maximize shareholder returns.
Shareholder capitalism ushered in an era of excess. In the 1980s it brought junk bond scandals and insider trading.
In the 1990s it brought a speculative binge culminating in the bursting of the dotcom bubble. At the urging of Wall Street, Bill Clinton repealed the Glass-Steagall Act, which had separated investment from commercial banking.
In 2001 and 2002 it produced Enron and the corporate looting scandals, revealing not only the dark side of some of the most admired companies in America but also the complicity of Wall Street, many of whose traders were actively involved.
The Street’s subsequent gambling in derivatives and risky mortgages resulted in the crash of 2008, and a massive taxpayer-financed bailout.
The Dodd-Frank Act attempted to rein in the Street but Wall Street lobbyists have done everything possible to eviscerate it. Republicans haven’t even appropriated sufficient money to enforce it.
The final blow to public morality came when a majority of the Supreme Court decided corporations and wealthy individuals have a right under the First Amendment to spend whatever they wish on elections.
Public morality can’t be legislated but it can be encouraged.
Glass-Steagall must be resurrected. Big banks have to be broken up.
CEO pay must be bridled. Pay in excess of $1 million shouldn’t be deductible from corporate income taxes. Corporations with high ratios of executive pay to typical workers should face higher tax rates than those with lower ratios.
People earning tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars a year should pay the same 70 percent tax rate top earners paid before 1981.
And we must get big money out of politics – reversing those Supreme Court rulings, providing public financing of elections, and getting full disclosure of the sources of all campaign contributions.  
None of this is possible without a broadly based citizen movement to rescue our democracy, take back our economy, and restore a minimal standard of public morality.
America’s problems have nothing to do with what happens bedrooms, or whether women are allowed to end their pregnancies.
Our problems have everything to do with what occurs in boardrooms, and whether corporations and wealthy individuals are allowed to undermine our democracy

Thursday, September 3, 2015

Pointer Sisters - Yes we can can 1974

We really were a better world - "once upon a time".