Fornits
Treatment Abuse, Behavior Modification, Thought Reform => Hyde Schools => Topic started by: Ursus on April 12, 2007, 08:22:15 AM
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http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld ... -headlines (http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-me-vonnegut12apr12,0,500494.story?coll=la-home-headlines)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2055623,00.html (http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2055623,00.html)
http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/break ... 442159.ece (http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/breaking-news/world/north-america/article2442159.ece)
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/books ... ref=slogin (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/books/12vonnegut.html?_r=2&hp&oref=slogin&oref=slogin)
http://1010wins.com/pages/350744.php?co ... tId=408657 (http://1010wins.com/pages/350744.php?contentType=4&contentId=408657)
http://www.pacificfreepress.com/content/view/1147/81/ (http://www.pacificfreepress.com/content/view/1147/81/)
http://www.salon.com/tech/htww/2007/04/12/vonnegut/ (http://www.salon.com/tech/htww/2007/04/12/vonnegut/)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Vonnegut (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Vonnegut)
http://www.vonnegutweb.com/ (http://www.vonnegutweb.com/)
http://www.vonnegut.com/ (http://www.vonnegut.com/)
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I need someone to show me the things in life that I cant find
I cant see the things that make true happiness, I must be blind
Make a joke and I will sigh and you will laugh and I will cry
Happiness I cannot feel and love to me is so unreal
And so as you hear these words telling you now of my state
I tell you to enjoy life I wish I could but its too late
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You can hang me in a bottle like a cat
Let the crows pick me clean but for my hat
Where the wailing of a baby
Meets the footsteps of the dead
We're all mad here
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One year I had an english class with Mrs Brown, Julie?..Im not sure..Stans wife....anyway, on the first class of the fall she asked us what book we read over the summer. I said I read a Vonnegut book, and thought it was pretty cool. She told me that he wasn't a real writer...and likened his work to a comic book. Ridiculed me infront of the others who said they read other books..
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One year I had an english class with Mrs Brown, Julie?..Im not sure..Stans wife....anyway, on the first class of the fall she asked us what book we read over the summer. I said I read a Vonnegut book, and thought it was pretty cool. She told me that he wasn't a real writer...and likened his work to a comic book. Ridiculed me infront of the others who said they read other books..
Her name was Laylee or Layla. They lived in a house on Richardson. I stopped by looking for Stan one warm May or June day. She came out of the house in an india print dress, barefoot. She put one foot up on the top two by four that held the pickets of the picket fence that defined the small front yard. She had a beer in her hand. I told her I was looking for Stan. She said Stan would not be back for three or four hours but I was welcome to come in. I would be surprised if they are still married.
Kurt is easy to read. So is Hemmingway. Short clear cleanly constructed sentences define the style. I hear papa stole it from Gertrude Stein. I like to imitate it sometimes. Sometimes when I think about drinking in cuba, I like short sentences.
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Her name is Lili (Lee-Lee) and they're still married.
So much for your fantasy!
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Her name is Lili (Lee-Lee) and they're still married.
So much for your fantasy!
I am surprised.
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Her name is Lili (Lee-Lee) and they're still married.
So much for your fantasy!
I heard that LD and DD got divorced but then remarried at the Mansion. Is this true? He was a strange bird way back in the day so am not surprised about the allegations. Am surprised that Hyde tolerated it for years!
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One year I had an english class with Mrs Brown, Julie?..Im not sure..Stans wife....anyway, on the first class of the fall she asked us what book we read over the summer. I said I read a Vonnegut book, and thought it was pretty cool. She told me that he wasn't a real writer...and likened his work to a comic book. Ridiculed me infront of the others who said they read other books..
I got some of that during my first seminar at Hyde. There were about fifty of us in the lounge of the union and Anne Legg was the facilitator. The whole business of sharing my private life before a group of total strangers was unappealing in the extreme but everyone was doing it and majority rules. I don't remember what I said but as soon as it was over Anne started trembling violently and repeating my words in a cracking falsetto. Then she sat back and actually laughed at her performance, her bosom rocking up and down, and that was the signal for the rest of the room to join in the merriment.
Mike
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...and that was the signal for the rest of the room to join in the merriment.
Scary how the crowd only felt comfortable following the designated signals, eh?
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...and that was the signal for the rest of the room to join in the merriment.
Scary how the crowd only felt comfortable following the designated signals, eh?
It would be interesting to enumerate and analyze the ways in which Hyde turns a fresh crop of decent folk into a lynch mob.
Mike
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Ugh. Being lynched is an experience I'm altogether too familiar with.
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Ugh. Being lynched is an experience I'm altogether too familiar with.
Share it.
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:oops: HA!! :lol:
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Ugh. Being lynched is an experience I'm altogether too familiar with.
Share it.
Of course, you're under no obligation here. But it could be healing, and altruistic into the bargain...
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Her name is Lili (Lee-Lee) and they're still married.
So much for your fantasy!
The reason that I said that I was surprised was when I came back later that day, early evening, Stan said that they were having trouble.
Stan said the school that year was a disaster. The behaviour problems were as bad or worse then the typical summer school; Lots of kids on 2/4 nee work crew; Lots of drugs on campus. Everyone that was into the school was involved in the Legg - Gauld power struggle and attention to the kids that needed attention was neglected. Gauld's National Commitment program fizzled and he had nothing to do. So he started to mettle in the day to day operation of the school which was Ed's bailiwick as headmaster. The faculty was forced to be one one side or the other. So you may ask who was on the students side. Good question. Stan said he was feed up and was looking for another job partly because that question was not being raised.
When you are saving the world what difference do the lives of a forty or fifty kids that you have made a commitment to matter? I am sure that Ed and Joe saw the struggle in that light.
That is what I like about the new Hyde. It is a completely post-modern cynical money making operation. No grand sense of mission just as I heard Joe say a, "get the money" business. Greed is good. And oddly they are now closer to spreading the gospel of character education then they were in the halcyon days when the tongues of fire kissed the brows of the committed.
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THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC
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http://www.rense.com/general69/vonnegutsblues.htm (http://www.rense.com/general69/vonnegutsblues.htm)
Vonnegut's Blues For America
By Kurt Vonnegut; 2-6-6
No matter how corrupt, greedy, and heartless our government, our corporations, our media, and our religious and charitable institutions may become, the music will still be wonderful.
If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:
THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC
Now, during our catastrophically idiotic war in Vietnam, the music kept getting better and better and better. We lost that war, by the way. Order couldn't be restored in Indochina until the people kicked us out.
That war only made billionaires out of millionaires. Today's war is making trillionaires out of billionaires. Now I call that progress.
And how come the people in countries we invade can't fight like ladies and gentlemen, in uniform and with tanks and helicopter gunships?
Back to music. It makes practically everybody fonder of life than he or she would be without it. Even military bands, although I am a pacifist, always cheer me up. And I really like Strauss and Mozart and all that, but the priceless gift that African Americans gave the whole world when they were still in slavery was a gift so great that it is now almost the only reason many foreigners still like us at least a little bit. That specific remedy for the worldwide epidemic of depression is a gift called the blues. All pop music today jazz, swing, be-bop, Elvis Presley, the Beatles, the Stones, rock-and-roll, hip-hop, and on and on is derived from the blues.
A gift to the world? One of the best rhythm-and-blues combos I ever heard was three guys and a girl from Finland playing in a club in Krakow, Poland.
The wonderful writer Albert Murray, who is a jazz historian and a friend of mine among other things, told me that during the era of slavery in this country an atrocity from which we can never fully recover the suicide rate per capita among slave owners was much higher than the suicide rate among slaves.
Murray says he thinks this was because slaves had a way of dealing with depression, which their white owners did not: They could shoo away Old Man Suicide by playing and singing the Blues. He says something else which also sounds right to me. He says the blues can't drive depression clear out of a house, but can drive it into the corners of any room where it's being played. So please remember that.
Foreigners love us for our jazz. And they don't hate us for our purported liberty and justice for all. They hate us now for our arrogance.
When I went to grade school in Indianapolis, the James Whitcomb Riley School #43, we used to draw pictures of houses of tomorrow, boats of tomorrow, airplanes of tomorrow, and there were all these dreams for the future. Of course at that time everything had come to a stop. The factories had stopped, the Great Depression was on, and the magic word was Prosperity. Sometime Prosperity will come. We were preparing for it. We were dreaming of the sorts of houses human beings should inhabit ideal dwellings, ideal forms of transportation.
What is radically new today is that my daughter, Lily, who has just turned 21, finds herself, as do your children, as does George W Bush, himself a kid, and Saddam Hussein and on and on, heir to a shockingly recent history of human slavery, to an Aids epidemic, and to nuclear submarines slumbering on the floors of fjords in Iceland and elsewhere, crews prepared at a moment's notice to turn industrial quantities of men, women, and children into radioactive soot and bone meal by means of rockets and H-bomb warheads. Our children have inherited technologies whose by-products, whether in war or peace, are rapidly destroying the whole planet as a breathable, drinkable system for supporting life of any kind.
Anyone who has studied science and talks to scientists notices that we are in terrible danger now. Human beings, past and present, have trashed the joint.
The biggest truth to face now what is probably making me unfunny now for the remainder of my life is that I don't think people give a damn whether the planet goes on or not. It seems to me as if everyone is living as members of Alcoholics Anonymous do, day by day. And a few more days will be enough. I know of very few people who are dreaming of a world for their grandchildren.
Many years ago I was so innocent I still considered it possible that we could become the humane and reasonable America so many members of my generation used to dream of. We dreamed of such an America during the Great Depression, when there were no jobs. And then we fought and often died for that dream during the second world war, when there was no peace.
But I know now that there is not a chance in hell of America becoming humane and reasonable. Because power corrupts us, and absolute power corrupts us absolutely. Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many lifeless bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas.
Human beings have had to guess about almost everything for the past million years or so. The leading characters in our history books have been our most enthralling, and sometimes our most terrifying, guessers.
May I name two of them? Aristotle and Hitler.
One good guesser and one bad one.
And the masses of humanity through the ages, feeling inadequately educated just like we do now, and rightly so, have had little choice but to believe this guesser or that one.
Russians who didn't think much of the guesses of Ivan the Terrible, for example, were likely to have their hats nailed to their heads.
We must acknowledge that persuasive guessers, even Ivan the Terrible, now a hero in the Soviet Union, have sometimes given us the courage to endure extraordinary ordeals which we had no way of understanding. Crop failures, plagues, eruptions of volcanoes, babies being born dead the guessers often gave us the illusion that bad luck and good luck were understandable and could somehow be dealt with intelligently and effectively. Without that illusion, we all might have surrendered long ago.
But the guessers, in fact, knew no more than the common people and sometimes less, even when, or especially when, they gave us the illusion that we were in control of our destinies.
Persuasive guessing has been at the core of leadership far so long, for all of human experience so far, that it is wholly unsurprising that most of the leaders of this planet, in spite of all the information that is suddenly ours, want the guessing to go on. It is now their turn to guess and guess and be listened to. Some of the loudest, most proudly ignorant guessing in the world is going on in Washington today. Our leaders are sick of all the solid information that has been dumped on humanity by research and scholarship and investigative reporting. They think that the whole country is sick of it, and they could be right. It isn't the gold standard that they want to put us back on. They want something even more basic. They want to put us back on the snake-oil standard.
Loaded pistols are good for everyone except inmates in prisons or lunatic asylums.
That's correct.
Millions spent on public health are inflationary.
That's correct.
Billions spent on weapons will bring inflation down.
That's correct.
Dictatorships to the right are much closer to American ideals than dictatorships to the left.
That's correct.
The more hydrogen bomb warheads we have, all set to go off at a moment's notice, the safer humanity is and the better off the world will be that our grandchildren will inherit.
That's correct.
Industrial wastes, and especially those that are radioactive, hardly ever hurt anybody, so everybody should shut up about them.
That's correct.
Industries should be allowed to do whatever they want to do: bribe, wreck the environment just a little, fix prices, screw dumb customers, put a stop to competition, and raid the Treasury when they go broke.
That's correct.
That's free enterprise.
And that's correct.
The poor have done something very wrong or they wouldn't be poor, so their children should pay the consequences.
That's correct.
The United States of America cannot be expected to look after its own people.
That's correct.
The free market will do that.
That's correct.
The free market is an automatic system of justice.
That's correct.
I'm kidding.
And if you actually are an educated, thinking person, you will not be welcome in Washington, DC. I know a couple of bright seventh graders who would not be welcome in Washington, DC. Do you remember those doctors a few months back who got together and announced that it was a simple, clear medical fact that we could not survive even a moderate attack by hydrogen bombs? They were not welcome in Washington, DC.
Even if we fired the first salvo of hydrogen weapons and the enemy never fired back, the poisons released would probably kill the whole planet by and by.
What is the response in Washington? They guess otherwise. What good is an education? The boisterous guessers are still in charge the haters of information. And the guessers are almost all highly educated people. Think of that. They have had to throw away their educations, even Harvard or Yale educations.
If they didn't do that, there is no way their uninhibited guessing could go on and on and on. Please, don't you do that. But if you make use of the vast fund of knowledge now available to educated persons, you are going to be lonesome as hell. The guessers outnumber you and now I have to guess about 10 to one.
I'm going to tell you some news.
No, I am not running for President, although I do know that a sentence, if it is to be complete, must have both a subject and a verb.
Nor will I confess that I sleep with children. I will say this, though: My wife is by far the oldest person I ever slept with.
Here's the news: I am going to sue the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Company, manufacturers of Pall Mall cigarettes, for a billion bucks! Starting when I was only 12 years old, I have never chain-smoked anything but unfiltered Pall Malls. And for many years now, right on the package, Brown and Williamson have promised to kill me.
But I am now 82. Thanks a lot, you dirty rats. The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick and Colon.
Our government's got a war on drugs. That's certainly a lot better than no drugs at all. That's what was said about prohibition. Do you realise that from 1919 to 1933 it was absolutely against the law to manufacture, transport, or sell alcoholic beverages, and the Indiana newspaper humourist Ken Hubbard said: "Prohibition is better than no liquor at all."
But get this: The two most widely abused and addictive and destructive of all substances are both perfectly legal.
One, of course, is ethyl alcohol. And President George W Bush, no less, and by his own admission, was smashed, or tiddley-poo, or four sheets to the wind a good deal of the time from when he was 16 until he was 40. When he was 41, he says, Jesus appeared to him and made him knock off the sauce, stop gargling nose paint.
Other drunks have seen pink elephants.
About my own history of foreign substance abuse, I've been a coward about heroin and cocaine, LSD and so on, afraid they might put me over the edge. I did smoke a joint of marijuana one time with Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead, just to be sociable. It didn't seem to do anything to me one way or the other, so I never did it again. And by the grace of God, or whatever, I am not an alcoholic, largely a matter of genes. I take a couple of drinks now and then and will do it again tonight. But two is my limit. No problem.
I am, of course, notoriously hooked on cigarettes. I keep hoping the things will kill me. A fire at one end and a fool at the other.
But I'll tell you one thing: I once had a high that not even crack cocaine could match. That was when I got my first driver's licence look out, world, here comes Kurt Vonnegut!
And my car back then, a Studebaker as I recall, was powered, as are almost all means of transportation and other machinery today, and electric power plants and furnaces, by the most abused, addictive, and destructive drugs of all: fossil fuels.
When you got here, even when I got here, the industrialised world was already hopelessly hooked on fossil fuels, and very soon now there won't be any left. Cold turkey.
Can I tell you the truth? I mean this isn't the TV news is it? Here's what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial. And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we're hooked on.
I turned 82 on November 11, 2004. What's it like to be this old? I can't parallel park worth a damn any more, so please don't watch while I try to do it. And gravity has become a lot less friendly and manageable than it used to be.
When you get to my age, if you get to my age, and if you have reproduced, you will find yourself asking your own children, who are themselves middle-aged: "What is life all about?'" I have seven kids, three of them orphaned nephews.
I put my big question about life to my son the pediatrician. Dr Vonnegut said this to his doddering old dad: "Father, we are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is."
Extracted from A Man Without A Country: A Memoir Of Life In George W Bush's America, (Bloomsbury).
Published on Sunday, February 5, 2006 by the Sunday Herald (Scotland)
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whoa, that description ( of lee lee) ruined my lunch. I can't remember a single time being attracted to or interested in a single teacher at Hyde, for the most part those ladies had trouble remembering to comb their hair and put on clean clothes, a 60's thing I guess.
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whoa, that description ( of lee lee) ruined my lunch. I can't remember a single time being attracted to or interested in a single teacher at Hyde, for the most part those ladies had trouble remembering to comb their hair and put on clean clothes, a 60's thing I guess.
Nahhhhh, not a 60's thing. They still all look the same, overweight, dirty hair, manly, and in need of a complete makeover. Could this be why so many of the men diddled around with the students?
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another one bites the dust:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/stor ... odule-jazz (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9720393&surl=http%3A//www.vpr.net/music/george.shtml&f=module-jazz)
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In case any of you New Yorkers wish to make it, his funeral is today:
In Memory
Andrew Hill
June 30, 1931--April 20, 2007
Funeral Services will be held at Trinity Church, Wall Street on Broadway, New York City, Friday, April 27, 2007 at 2:00 PM.
http://www.andrewhilljazz.com/home.html (http://www.andrewhilljazz.com/home.html)
I think I might have him contributing on an early Rahsaan Roland Kirk. Of course I have a small number of Marion McPartland's CDs (some small label that begins with a "C", I believe they are the same sessions from NPR), her pieces are priceless, nothing else quite like them for a slice of insight on conversation with your musical heroes! The NPR site (link from previous poster) has a link to the whole hour or so session. I'm playing it right now.... Thanks!
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In case any of you New Yorkers wish to make it, his funeral is today:
In Memory
Andrew Hill
June 30, 1931--April 20, 2007
Funeral Services will be held at Trinity Church, Wall Street on Broadway, New York City, Friday, April 27, 2007 at 2:00 PM.
http://www.andrewhilljazz.com/home.html (http://www.andrewhilljazz.com/home.html)
I think I might have him contributing on an early Rahsaan Roland Kirk. Of course I have a small number of Marion McPartland's CDs (some small label that begins with a "C", I believe they are the same sessions from NPR), her pieces are priceless, nothing else quite like them for a slice of insight on conversation with your musical heroes! The NPR site (link from previous poster) has a link to the whole hour or so session. I'm playing it right now.... Thanks!
concord:
http://concordmusicgroup.com/labels/?label=Concord+Jazz (http://concordmusicgroup.com/labels/?label=Concord+Jazz)
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Yup! :D I thought "Concord," but then thought that sounded too mainstream... These CDs are currently packed away due to some other life arrangements, hence I wasn't able to physically check...
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I have this one:
http://concordmusicgroup.com/labels/alb ... AZZ&id=440 (http://concordmusicgroup.com/labels/album/index.php?label=CONCORD_JAZZ&id=440)
I was very happy to hear Walter say Grant Green was his favorite guitarist.
Concord is pretty eclectic: Rosemary Clooney to Peter Brotzman
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I knew Walter long ago, decades... His girlfriend at the time, her name was Karen, her last name escapes me.... Stanley, perhaps? Brilliant woman, viciously smart... committed suicide not long after. Very sad...
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I knew Walter long ago, decades... His girlfriend at the time, her name was Karen, her last name escapes me.... Stanley, perhaps? Brilliant woman, viciously smart... committed suicide not long after. Very sad...
I have always liked their music IF you listen to the Don Byron Romance with the Unseen CD you can hear Aja quoted in Perdido, which is really interesting seeing how they borrowed some the Duke. I love the East St Louis Toodle -oo cover, almost note for note from an Ellington recording, pedal steel subed for the trombone and lead guitar for trumpet.
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I have always liked their music IF you listen to the Don Byron Romance with the Unseen CD you can hear Aja quoted in Perdido, which is really interesting seeing how they borrowed some the Duke. I love the East St Louis Toodle -oo cover, almost note for note from an Ellington recording, pedal steel subed for the trombone and lead guitar for trumpet.
I love "referential art" -- but you'd have to specialize so extraordinarily to keep up with it! :D And I used to listen to a lot of Steely Dan, even before I could appreciate the nuances.
However, some of the earlier material brings back some terrible memories, that was a difficult time in my youth. I can only listen to them when I feel strong enough. And then Karen Stanley's suicide pretty much closed that chapter for me.
It is also possible that I may be overly morose today so pay no heed to my ramblings.... :roll:
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BTW, Concord has really changed! My Marian McPartland CDs don't look anything like the one's on that website, HA! Mine are pretty basic white, with some red highlighting, just basic black text and a few photos...
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Andrew Hill's 'Nefertisis' (this mp3 link may only be active for a few weeks)
link to 'Nefertisis' (http://http://destination-out.com/media/tracks/Hill_Nefertisis.mp3)
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From Jazz Blog Destination:OUT (click on title for link):
POINTS OF DEPARTURE: Andrew Hill, 1931-2007 (http://http://destination-out.com/?p=102)
We're deeply saddened by the passing of the great pianist, composer, and bandleader Andrew Hill. He was an important artist who held fast to his idiosyncratic vision -- even when that meant long stretches in the commercial wilderness. In recent years, Hill's music experienced a resurgence through reissues and remarkable new projects. Where he once may have seemed a fascinating but marginal figure, his influence is now indelibly stamped on many of today's most creative players.
* * *
We're honored to include this touching remembrance and tribute to Hill from one of those musicians -- pianist and composer VIJAY IYER:
"Andrew Hill was a hero, mentor, and supportive friend to me and to a number of other young musicians. His music changed my life, repeatedly, starting in the early 1990s. Every time I heard him live, I would find my usual sense of time and space overridden or intensely altered.
"I introduced myself to him several times throughout the 90s, and eventually Hill came to recognize me as one of his crazed Bay Area fans (along with pianist Graham Connah, whom I first met with a copy of the LP Smokestack under his arm, as we both stood in line at Yoshi's to see Hill in action). One particular revelatory evening was Hill's performance with Trio 3 (Workman, Lake, Cyrille) in '94 or so. I also saw him at Maybeck Recital Hall, Mills College, the Oakland Museum, Golden Gate Park, and several times at Yoshi's -- unfailingly magical and beguiling.
"My move to New York coincided with his full-fledged return to the scene from Portland, so I started seeing him even more frequently. In 1999 when I was on a Steve Coleman tour, he played solo before us in Verona. I seized the moment and talked to him for a while, and perhaps he started taking me more seriously after that. We became friendly enough that he started coming to my gigs. He would call me early the next day to tell me what he thought, often to devastating effect; his gentle but frank words would echo in my head for weeks afterward, leaving me to rethink everything. Once when the collective trio Fieldwork played at the KF's AlterKnit, Andrew was in the front row at a table with Henry Threadgill and Muhal Richard Abrams, making it one of the scariest evenings of my life.
"I was glad to be around to observe his post-millennial renaissance. He made such interesting and careful choices in his music and career, and he provided a model for how to achieve longevity in a challenging area of the music world.
"And then one summer Andrew told me he was dying. We were standing outside the hotel at the North Sea Jazz Festival. My heart dropped, but he was oddly upbeat. He had known for some time, and I was left thinking that maybe he found solace in the certainty of it, knowing that the coming years would be framed by this circumstance.
"The last time I saw him was at Merkin Hall last fall, for the recreation of Passing Ships. His advanced frailty was heartbreaking to see, and I was mortified by the presenters' thoughtlessness: a man dying of lung cancer was made to carry his own chair, and then interviewed on stage without a microphone. But Andrew's good humor and his top-form playing dispelled all the pity in the room; we were in the presence of sheer mastery.
"Afterwards I was headed for the subway, but as I reached the corner something told me to turn around. The building had closed but I talked my way back inside, found him backstage, and sat with him and his wife Joanne for an inspiring half hour. He was remarkably warm, light-hearted, lucid, even affectionate. This was our last earthly interaction, and it will always be a cherished memory for me.
"Andrew Hill's recordings, performances, compositions, and personality influenced me to such a degree over such a long period that he feels like family, like a part of me. I am humbled and blessed to have received his generosity, wisdom, and friendship. His spirit lives on through his musical legacy, his vast influence on modern music, and all the lives he touched."
* * *
"The Man Who Knew More Than He Was Asked"
Jason Moran once said Andrew Hill knew more about different styles of music than people suspected. Hill famously carved out his own unique style of halting phrasings, odd chords and meters, and compositional left turns. His former student emphasized how Hill was also capable of pulling from a vast and surprising storehouse of styles at a moment's notice. Moran noted how Hill was deeply informed by classical, funk, boogie woogie, cartoon music, and numerous other genres not normally associated with the maestro.
"Still Waters"
These tracks pay tribute to Hill's range, casting light on some overlooked corners of his discography. "Hey Hey" is an atypical slice of free-funk, an insidiously catchy groove number complete with a large chorus. There's a wonderful sense of play here, melding funk and an odd vocal counterpoint that seems to stem as much from the classical tradition as the gospel.
"Nefertisis" is the flipside to the jubliant band effort of "Hey Hey." This solo piano effort is solemn and dirge-like, but completely riveting. When Hill filtered his ideas through ensembles, it was sometimes easy to miss the power of his own playing. What Ethan Iverson perfectly described as "the Mad Scientist approach." In this piece you can't miss his wonderfully eliptical phrasings as he teases, coaxes, and conjures one surprising idea after another from the material. You can also hear his absolute authority on the instrument -- a quality that was never showy but never more immediately palpable than on this track.
"The Classic Years"
For those who want to hear tracks more representative of Hill's work, check out any of his stunning Blue Note albums from the early 1960s, all of which are back in print. Or see our previous post dedicated to Compulsion, one of Hill's more untethered masterpieces.
Be sure to check back in the coming days for more updates and thoughts about one of jazz’s true masters.
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Another Andrew Hill mp3 link, this one to Compulsion:
link to 'Compulsion' (http://http://destination-out.com/media/tracks/Hill_Compulsion.mp3)
Andrew Hill Compulsion! Blue Note : 1965
AH, piano; Freddie Hubbard, trumpet; John Gilmore, tenor sax, bass clarinet; Cecil McBee, bass; Joe Chambers, drums; Nadi Qamar, percussion; Renaud Simmons, conga.
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Here's what Destination: OUT has to say about it:
http://destination-out.com/?cat=17 (http://destination-out.com/?cat=17)
"Compulsion" is a longer track than we usually like to post -- 14 minutes. And while the entire piece is stellar, there's a particular four minute section I'd like to highlight. It's simply the most thrilling four minutes of Andrew Hill's entire illustrious career.
It starts at the 3:00 mark, when Hill's piano reenters the tune and the dark rhumba groove begins. That stuttering Latin feel subtly underpins this entire section, allowing Hill and trumpeter Freddie Hubbard to become increasingly unhinged. Hubbard soars against the beat with an impassioned solo that's full of rhythmic stabs and melodic shrapnel. Hill slowly turns up the heat on everyone, almost subliminally at first until he begins to unleash a tidal swell of notes. This oceanic rumble is so physical and menacing at first it's hard to believe it's coming from him. It's as if a whirlpool has suddenly emerged at the middle of the tune, threatening to capsize the other players and suck them into its vortex. Hill plays as if he's limning the void, gleefully. Amazingly, the song doesn't get blown apart, but manages to stay afloat and even on course -- but just barely. It's a remarkable passage -- the musical equivalent of watching an ocean linear tossed aloft by 100-foot waves.
There's plenty more excitement to come in the tune, including Hill's double-fisted and crabwise duet with John Gilmore and the song's frenzied full-band coda. But we'll leave those for you to figure out for yourself. (CJC)
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Hi,
Welcome to the culture corner. Today a tall man from Minnesota reads a poem about bill Evans:
http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/p ... 30/#friday (http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/programs/2007/04/30/#friday)
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Here is the text from the poem in question (link from the previous post):
Live at the Village Vanguard
Near the end of Bill Evans' "Porgy (I Loves You, Porgy)"
played live at the Village Vanguard and added as an extra track
on Waltz for Debby (a session made famous by the death
of the trio's young bassist in a car crash) a woman laughs.
There's been background babble bubbling up the whole set.
You get used to the voices percolating at the songs' fringes,
the clink of glasses and tips of silver on hard plates. Listen
to the recording enough and you almost accept the aural clutter
as another percussive trick the drummer pulls out, like brushes
on a snare. But this woman's voice stands out for its carefree
audacity, how it broadcasts the lovely ascending stair of her happiness.
Evans has just made one of his elegant, casual flights up an octave
and rests on its landing, notes spilling from his left hand
like sunlight, before coming back down into the tune's lush
living-room of a conclusion. The laugh begins softly, subsides,
then lifts up to step over the bass line: five short bursts of pleasure
pushed out of what can only be a long lovely tan throat. Maybe
Evans smiles to himself when he hears it, leaving a little space
between the notes he's cobbled to close the song; maybe
the man she's with leans in, first to still her from the laugh
he's just coaxed from her, then to caress the cascade of her hair
that hangs, lace curtain, in the last vestiges of spotlight stippling the table.
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The recording in question, done of Bill Evans Trio's infamous Sunday in 1961 at New York City's Village Vanguard, is discussed at length, along with assorted other Bill Evan's trivia and insight, in a New Yorker article from about six years ago entitled 'It was just one afternoon in a jazz club forty years ago,' by Adam Gopnik.
http://www.billevanswebpages.com/gopnik.html (http://www.billevanswebpages.com/gopnik.html)
Excerpt (re. the recording session in question):
On that Sunday afternoon in New York in 1961, the trio played five sets, about two and a half hours' worth of music. The numbers ran between five and ten minutes a turn. In the first three sets, knowing that the machines were running, they didn't repeat numbers, playing a lilting "Waltz for Debby," a hushed "My Foolish Heart," a floating "Alice in Wonderland," and an up-tempo "My Romance." Then, for the first time that day, Evans played "I Loves You, Porgy." In the last set, they ran back over numbers from the first few sets. By then, it was late, a long day's hard work, and they finished with a number by LaFaro, a strange 9/8 Zen thing called "Jade Visions." Throughout the recordings, you hear the crowd noise: glasses tinkle and conversation goes on, a counterpoint of forty-year-old flirtation and talk. Orrin Keepnews said, "I remember listening to the tapes and saying, 'There's nothing bad here!' Normally, you can cut one or two things right away, and there was nothing bad."
Two weeks later, on July 6, 1961, Scott LaFaro was driving up Route 20, a back road in those days, to his parents' place in Geneva, upstate. The car skidded and hit a tree, and he was killed instantly. "I was sleeping and the phone rang, and it was Bill," Paul Motian recalled. "He said, 'Scott's dead.' And I said, 'Yeah,' and I went back to sleep. And the next morning I said to my wife, 'Man, I had the weirdest dream last night. I dreamed that Bill called me and said that Scott had been killed!' So I called Bill right away at that apartment over on West Eighty-something to tell him about the dream."
After Scott LaFaro's death, Bill Evans became numb with grief; it took him months to recover, and there are people who think that he never did recover. Paul Motian: "Bill was in a state of shock. Look at my gig book: nothing, nothing, nothing with Bill, until December. Bill was like a ghost."
"All jazz records," Orrin Keepnews said, "have two lives, one in their time and another twenty-two years later. What no one could have imagined was that the second life would be so large."
Why has that afternoon lasted so long?
"You know what I like best on that record?" Paul Motian asked. "The sounds of all those people, glasses and chatter - I mean, I know you're supposed to be very offended and all, but I like it. They're just there and all." Perhaps that's it, or part of it. Though we're instructed to search for "timelessness" in art, it is life that is truly timeless, the same staggeringly similar run of needs and demands and addictions, again and again, which blend one year into the next and one day into another and February's gig in Detroit into March's in Toronto. It is art that puts a time in place. Art is the part of culture that depends most entirely on time, on knowing exactly when. The emotions it summons belong to the room they were made in, and the city outside the room when they were made. Not a timeless experience of a general emotion but a permanent experience of a particular moment - that is what we want from jazz records and Italian landscapes alike. The gift the record gives us is a reminder that the big sludgy river of time exists first as moments. It gives us back our afternoons.
One of the mysteries of Evans's career is that, after that Sunday, he continued to play "Porgy" over and over again, almost obsessively - but almost always as a solo number. Paul Motian gave this some thought. "I don't think there was any reason - no, wait, I remember something now. While we were listening to that number on the tape, Bill was a wreck, and he kept saying something like 'Listen to Scott's bass, it's like an organ! It sounds so big, it's not real, it's like an organ, I'll never hear that again.' Could that, his always playing it without a bass afterwards have been a sort of tribute to Scott? I kind of doubt it, but then again maybe so." When we hear Evans play "Porgy," we are hearing what a good Zen man like Evans would have wanted us to hear, and that is the sound of one hand clapping after the other hand is gone.
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paul motian is still playing the vanguard. I want to catch lovano and frissell and motian some time.
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paul motian is still playing the vanguard. I want to catch lovano and frissell and motian some time.
You'd best make haste! He is, sadly, getting quite old... :(