Tuesday, January 07, 2003

Night Shift ...in man, unlike the apes, the impulse to use some sort of language is overwhelming.           --Norbert Weiner, The Human Use of Human Beings   ...the ailing civilization pays the penalty for its failure of vitality by becoming disintegrated into a dominant minority, which rules with increasing oppressiveness but no longer leads, and a proletariat (internal and external) which responds to this challenge by becoming conscious that it has a soul of its own and by making up its mind to save its soul alive.           --Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History   There once was a grouchy little dog who kept time like a Swiss watch and drove a hard bargain. Every afternoon he made the rounds in a canopied golf cart piloted by a stout German bachelor, collecting on his bets and mooching cheese. The people of the village hated to see the dog coming, but there was no escaping the fellow once a debt had been incurred. The dog had a powerful snout that aided him in his tenacious reprisals, and there was no richer resident in all the village. The residents of the community tried to find comfort in the fact that this particular dog had been sterilized in his youth and thus would sire no offspring. And then there was the matter of a dog's relatively brief lifespan. Certainly the dog tyrant had no more than five years remaining in his reign of terror. These were unfortunately small comforts to the beleagured villagers.   Two Instances of Prolonged Sleeplessness R.J., aged 40. She has been subject to hysteric fits from nine years of age. She was married at twenty-two, and was immediately exposed to great trouble; her husband was dissipated, and gambled away his property. Her sleep became disturbed, and she saw phantoms, and heard unreal sounds. She describes in a romantic manner some of her visions, in which the author of evil figures figures prominently.   E.W., aged 37, had gone through much trouble, in consequence of the ill conduct of her husband, who was very 'gay,' and twice infected her with venereal disease. Her complaints to me were all of an exaggerated nervous character --great lowness of spirits, constant fretting, tendency to faint, indefinite fears; her memory had gone; she had frontal headache, and vomited her food two or three times in the week.           --James Russell, M.D., 1861, in the British Medical Journal 11:03:18 AM

JAZZ IN 2002, A WRAP In this week's Village Voice Gary Giddins, for my money the best jazz writer in the country today, offers his list of the best jazz discs of 2002. I haven't heard much of the stuff on his list --still busy playing catch-up on all the old stuff in my own collection, not to mention the continuous stream of reissues that keeps rolling into the record stores. I will, though, concur with Giddins on the Arthur Blythe, Andrew Hill, Jason Moran, and William Parker discs, all of which I didn't get around to listening to until December --they're all terrific indications that, despite its dubious commercial prospects these days (at least so far as the major record labels are concerned), jazz is still a thriving and endlessly rewarding art form. I also was fortunate to receive Mosaic's splendid Mildred Bailey and Lou Donaldson sets for Christmas, and if you're not familiar with the work Mosaic does --beautifully packaged and annotated limited edition overviews of peak periods in the careers of jazz artists from the legendary to the overlooked-- you owe it to yourself (and to the folks at Mosaic) to check out their catalog. I've never been disappointed in anything they've done, and a handful of the Mosaic sets I own (The Complete Blue Note Recordings of Larry Young and The Complete Blue Note Recordings of Art Blakey's 1960 Jazz Messengers, for instance) are among my most treasured possessions  The Mildred Bailey set, in particular, is consistently thrilling. 10:11:15 AM

© Copyright 2003 Brad Zellar. Last update: 4/6/03; 9:57:31 PM.