Blippin' Jazz

20090823

Listening to Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew. Miles was working on it exactly 40 years ago. Some may disagree, but it’s my favorite Miles album, and that certainly is saying something.



Great Mati Klarwein jacket, too. I put it up on my new jazztrain profile on blip.fm



http://blip.fm/~c7fgk

But here ya go, should you be interested:



A funky, spacey sound.

I think this jazz profile pretty much completes things for me on blip.fm. Maybe someday I might get back in a country / folk sort of mood, but it’s been many years now since I really have been into that. Every now and then I’ll listen to a song or even a CD, but I can’t say I’ve gotten into a particular phase in a long time.

While you can search within blip.fm for music--and sometimes it’s necessary, because YouTube doesn’t have everything--yet--YouTube really is, as you probably already know, just an amazing treasury of clips. Mostly I’ve been exploring classical, rock/pop, blues, and now jazz, in that order.

I’ve probably mentioned it before, but one of the nice features of blip.fm is you can link each profile to a Twitter account, which I have, and that enables you to meet some interesting folks. For instance, my first follower on my jazztrain Twitter was TheDaveHolland.



http://blip.fm/~c74to

It seems that sometimes that’s updated by his people and sometimes by him.

I was followed by Paul Winter after I mentioned on my classical Twitter

http://twitter.com/musicaclassica

(linked to my blip.fm that I wasn’t in the mood for classical, but was instead listening to world music, like Kitaro and Paul Winter. This piece, Anabela, is beautiful with Brazilian guitarist/vocallist Renato Braz
and Winter sweetly playing sax. I used to apply the now rather musty label, “New Age,” to him, but “World Music” fits well now, because Winter has often incorporated Third World and Native American music, not to mention many nature sounds at times.

24 Hours of Air Traffic (Animated Map)

Fascinating 24-hour view of global air traffic. At first glimpse, I thought, wow, Europe is the center of the traffic. But I quickly realized that, of course, the concentration of flights follows the sunlight. People would rather avoid landing somewhere at 3 a.m., if they can help it.

Alan Moore on faces of different eras

In the first text part of Watchmen, "Under the Hood," Alan Moore writes:

"Moe Vernon was a man around fifty-five or so, and he had one of those old New York faces you don’t see anymore.



"It’s funny, but certain faces seem to go in and out of style. You look at old photographs and everybody has a certain look to them, almost as if they’re related.



"Look at pictures from ten years later and you can see there’s a new kind of face starting to predominate, and that the old faces are fading away and vanishing, never to be seen again."



It's something that probably we all think at some point. I'm not sure. Is it the hair? The clothes? Or even the cameras, etc? Actually, one of the guys in the first photo (from the 1950s) looks something like one of the guys in the second photo, which is from the 1980s.


1950s photo licensed through Creative Commons from freeparking’s photostream at http://www.flickr.com/photos/freeparking/468956377/

1980s photo licensed through Creative Commons from
foundphotoslj’s photostream at http://www.flickr.com/photos/foundphotoslj/334767030/

athletic photo licensed through Creative Commons from lululemon athletica's photostream at http://www.flickr.com/photos/lululemonathletica/3491309891/

Keith Olbermann attacks Congressmen owned by the healthcare industry

I didn't know anyone actually said things like this on TV. An extraordinary attack on GOP and Dem Congressmen who have been bought and sold by the healthcare industry. Please watch this video venom from MSNBC's Keith Olbermann

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677/vp/32277034#32277034

John Sinclair

Back in 1972, John Lennon & Yoko came out with a politically radical album, Sometime in New York City, that Rolling Stone called “artistic suicide.”

I was pretty much at my radical peak at that time, so I had no problem with it at all. Just about all the songs espoused radical causes, from Angela Davis to Belfast, feminism to legalizing drugs. On that subject, there was “John Sinclair”:



Manager of Detroit’s punkish MC5 band, Sinclair was also heavily involved with the White Panthers, a radical group that backed the Black Panthers. Wikipedia does a good job of filling in the rest:

After a series of convictions for possession of marijuana, Sinclair was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 1969 after giving two joints of marijuana to an undercover narcotics officer.[2] This sentence sparked the landmark "Free John Now Rally" at Ann Arbor's Crisler Arena in December 1971. The event brought together a who's-who of left-wing luminaries, including pop musicians John Lennon (who recorded the song, "John Sinclair" on his Some Time in New York City album), Yoko Ono, David Peel, Stevie Wonder, Phil Ochs and Bob Seger, jazz artists Archie Shepp and Roswell Rudd, and speakers Allen Ginsberg, Abbie Hoffman, Rennie Davis, David Dellinger, Jerry Rubin, and Bobby Seale.[3] Three days after the rally, Sinclair was released from prison when the Michigan Supreme Court ruled that the state's marijuana statutes were unconstitutional. These events inspired the creation of Ann Arbor’s annual pro-legalization Hash Bash rally, which continues to be held as of 2009, and contributed to the drive for decriminalization of marijuana under the Ann Arbor city charter (see Marijuana laws in Ann Arbor, Michigan).

Well, here’s Sinclair, doing some poetry with jazz accompaniment:



Oh, and, as you can see, MC5 was a pretty exciting act: