Sunday Overnight

Welcome to the dark side with Miles, featuring Dave Liebman, Reggie Lucas, Pete Cosey, Michael Henderson, Al Foster, and Mtume - Montreux Jazz Festival, 1973.

Part 2, and part 3.



...and with Keith Jarrett, Chick Corea, Dave Holland, Jack DeJohnette, Airto Moreira, and Gary Bartz - Tanglewood, 1970.

A fuller version of this set may be found (for a time) here: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7521423388637542657

Don't Forget To Pick Up Some Lobbyist While You're Out

CanCon Friday - Lighthouse

Lighthouse, with the mighty Bob McBride on vocals, circa 1971.

Big Time

'...stretching your mouth to let those big words come right out'

Kid, This Ain't Your Night

Sunday Overnight

Lester Young, Bill Harris, Ray Brown, Buddy Rich, & Hank Jones laying it down like it's meant to be on a jam, joined by Harry 'Sweets' Edison, Flip Phillips, and the great Ella Fitzgerald...Who gets a tune of her own below, Sunshine Of Your Love, with the Tommy Flanagan trio, 1969.

CanCon Friday - Ashley MacIsaac

Don't be fooled by the fiddle...This high-kicking boy has more Rock & Roll in his dark heart than most metalheads, is a distant cousin of the White Stripes' Jack White, and can set a reel afire so that your toes cannot help but tap, unless you've turned up dead.

'Sociable!'

So?

So?

So what if I selected myself with a knowing wink when asked to recommend someone in the number 2 slot who could keep an oedipally conflicted figurehead from looking unpresidential?

So what if I secretly met with Oil and Energy executives, generous donors to my campaign all, to formulate a plan that would fleece the consumers more effectively without bothering the public about the details?

So what if I have mobile industrial paper shredders visit my residence at taxpayer expense to deal with masses of inconvenient documents related to my activities which, even though I ostensibly work for the people, I deem that they have no right to know about?

So what if I shot some lawyer in the face when I'd been drinking, got caught trying to hush it up, then pulled some strings and had him apologise to me?

So what if I told my trusted dogsbody to release classified information against U.S. law to the press in order to smear someone who was tasked with providing reliable information to the CIA on verifiable threats, just to get back at her husband who had revealed an element of our chicanery?

So what if I lied...again...and again...and again, right to all of your faces?

So what if when I was defense secretary, I helped downsize the American military so that it couldn't cope effectively with a multiple conflict scenario, just in time to involve it with one?

So what if the company that I used to C.E.O. for gets all the no-bid military outsourcing contracts it can handle while I get richer by the second from it?

So what if people think that whether through omission or commission I left the door open for our enemies to attack us one Fall day?

So what if I don't think I'm part of the Executive branch, but a law unto myself, and subject to no external review or control?

So what if I knew that the various premises for going to war with a foreign country was bogus, but I fast-tracked the rush to conflict anyway?

Do you really think I care that a majority of Americans wanted out of Iraq in 2006, and even more now...and don't want a conflict with Iran?

So goddamn what?

Why don't you ask Pat Leahy how I feel about you all?

Love & kisses,

Dick

Many Happy Returns...

To Jerry Reed, Lee 'Scratch' Perry, Jimmie Vaughan, Carl Reiner, Spike Lee, 'No. 4!' Bobby Orr...And your humble host, among many other worthies and less-thans.

Happy first day of Spring, y'all.

And fuck George Bush's war of choice.

Honest And Upright and Clean

Take Me To Your Rainbow

Sunday Overnight

Pat Metheny and Michael Brecker (with Antonio Sanchez and Christian McBride), asking the eternal question What Do You Want?, 2003.

Salutations From Chairman Bho

CanCon Friday - The Downchild Blues Band

Some of you youngsters might be familiar with the Blues Brothers, who did memorable versions of such tunes as Big Joe Turner's Flip, Flop, And Fly and Shotgun Blues.

But there wouldn't have been a Blues Brothers revue...without the Downchild Blues Band.

Formed in the Big Smoke (Toronto) in 1969, led by brothers Donnie (on guitar and harp) and Richard 'Hock' Walsh (on vocals), this powerhouse act made Flip, Flop, And Fly their own hit in 1973, and wrote the original (and, IMO, played the superior versions of) Shotgun Blues and I Got Everything I Need (Almost).

Top comedian and noted blues aficionado Dan Ackroyd used to spend a mighty amount of time digging them in his Second City days, and even though weathering storms such as the passing of Hock Walsh, Tony Flaim, and dynamite pianist Jane Vasey, the turnover of over 120 musicians on the roster over the years, and all the other usual tribulations that can befall a touring band on the endless highway, they still play the circuits today as Downchild...An act well worth the cash on the counter when they come to your town, should you feel like feelin' the Blues.

Down in the park with friends of mine

My apologies for the sparse posting of late. I have recently acquired a job with a day and a night shift, and have had to claw sleep and a zombie's shambling life out of what free time I once had.
I'm sure that many of you are in similar situations, so the details would be superfluous.

One thing that is not superfluous, however, is support and friendship.

Many of you may be familiar with Blue Gal, a staunch supporter of independent bloggers and a person with a good heart who could use a shower of blessings herself.

A great deal of my minor 'popularity' (if such a word could be used to describe the state in which some regard me) stems from her championing of my works on broader scales at significant junctures in time.

She has done so selflessly, for myself and many others in spite of the difficulties strewn upon her own brilliant path.

Thus, I would earnestly entreat my viewers that if you have any spare love and alms to give to place it within her tender reach, that she may continue to provide a higher example for us all.

Pax

Sunday Overnight

Monk, Bolivar Blues, 1963.

'In order to dream you gotta still be asleep'

As public outrage and contempt over the ham-handed malfeasance of the last 8 years of American Empire Lite commingles with the tentative hope that after January 2009 the nightmares will fade away like hazy black mist, and we will all awaken to a new 'new morning in America', there are more than a few signs that this too is but a fleeting gossamer dream, irrespective of how the worm turns or not this November.

From Watergate, where America blinked and allowed an insider successor of a failed president to give pardons and control of incriminating documents and recordings back to a malefactor ripe with incipient dreams of unquestioned power...

To Iran-Contra, where a president in the early stages of mental breakdown relinquished control of his office to a shadow government filled to bursting with 'neat ideas', that not only committed treason against the United States (by selling arms to a rogue nation and using the profits to finance an outlawed foreign conflict, with the added 'value' of putting more illicit drugs on American streets than ever before), but also stalled criminal proceedings against itself long enough to...wait for it...grant pardons to all the major players under indictment as a firewall against the taint reaching to the highest places...

To the shabby little dogwagging skirmishes, incipient police state development and winking 'business as usual' of the Clinton 90's, in tandem with self-righteous elected hypocrites whipping themselves and the credulously suggestive members of the populace into a petulant media tantrum over marital infidelities and parsed words while the real bad news passed stealthily under the populace's radar, this era then being brought to a weak denoument by yet more pardons of questionable dealings and associates.

And so here we are. 2008. The final year of George W. Bush's and Richard V. Cheney's co-presidential epoch on behalf of corporate enrichment and population enslavement through greed, gross exploitation of the appalling national ignorance of and bias against a nation's own laws, and fear of the unfamiliar world beyond their quivering noses.

Perhaps it is the final year, or perhaps not...Perhaps, with the Democratic-controlled legislative branch preparing to imminently capitulate to an Executive branch demand for telecom immunity (a patent farce if ever there was one, considering that all existing laws allowed this administration to pursue threats to the state handily and with retroactively issued permission, provided that they could show grounds to a friendly court for that pursuit), we see the final step of insulation against prosecution, along with the corruption of the Justice Department (through seeding it with zealots and complicit types), wanton destruction of evidence even after being legally ordered to desist, and the appointment of approving minds to the highest courts of the land - and now perhaps yet another terror event for purposes of outcome control, midwifed through self-interested officials looking conveniently the other way, need not come to pass. Perhaps.

We see before us a population only now struggling to come awake from their fatuous slumber because their subjective interests are being threatened by someone and something even more rapaciously ignorant and greedy than themselves.

And so they seek a champion, someone who will give them hope, someone who will help them to forget the monster they brought into being, whether actively or passively, and bring back the lazy warm feelings inside such as a kitten might get from rolling in a sunbeam.

Horseshit. Pure fucking horseshit.

Just like a child cannot have ice cream at dinner until the peas and carrots are finished, a nation can't have the good times back until the hard work of rebuilding is accomplished.

And I would say this to you, each and every one of you Americans:

Unless you can develop and foster the collective majority will to root out all of these malfeasants, from the Executive office on down, and clean house using the laws of the land that have been so recklessly flouted in the last decade...Then you are a failed nation.
And you will be eventually assimilated by more resolute nations who do not share your weaknesses and lack of purpose, if they have not already made substantial inroads in doing so.

That is your fate, but it is your fate to change.

I am pro-American, and I have always been. America is a splendid concept, and a nation that other nations could aspire to. But America has shown incredibly bad judgement, and has established a rather odious track record in letting bandits and crypto-fascists run its affairs (and subsequently forgiving themselves for their own crimes) while ogling the jiggling distractions for far too long to maintain any sort of credibility without now showing the necessary resolve to affect lasting permanent remedies.

Don't just hope.

Dare. And act.

Or shut up and suffer the long delayed consequences.


crossposted @ SteveAudio.

Brothers and Sisters

...A testimonial.



;>)

CanCon Friday - Memorial Edition

The late, great, Jeff Healey...Yer Blues.

O'Renault

"I'm shocked...shocked! - to find rude commentary on websites...other than my own."

;>)

The Audience Is Listening

Pleasure Island Dead Ahead

Sunday Overnight

Rahsaan Roland Kirk and his quartet, Ode To Billie Joe, Prague, 1967.

...And via con Dios, Jeff Healey. Condolences to his loved ones.