I have a very musical sense about things. I know this: One day, many decades hence, before they put me in the cold ground, there’s going to be a ragtime band playing a few tunes. Some of it might sound like this:
The Preservation Hall Jazz Band and the great Allen Toussaint are touring together — they’ve never done that before, somehow — and they played Samford tonight. It was a terrific show. Toussaint has 20 records, two Grammy nominations and the National Medal of Arts award. The band goes back 50 years with a rotating cast of members. Some of the current iteration have been onboard for decades. Seeing them all on one stage feels like you’re reaching elbow deep into the hopes, history, irreverence and dreams of Americana. To see great talent like those men playing together is to, perhaps, get a small inkling of jazz as the American art form. Within it all there are discordant notes and spaces and wandering musicians and multiple instruments and it all comes back together again. Americana. They all count their time in music and New Orleans in generations.
Charlie Gabriel, for example, is 81 and has been playing music for at least 67 years. He has four generations of New Orleans musicians behind him and three generations playing below him.
Also, if someone can book a singer that sounds like Charlie Gabriel for that day many decades hence, that’d be splendid.
They did play St. James Infirmary, two versions in fact. One of them was perhaps the happiest tune about death you could imagine. The other was very angry, as it should be. Part of that is in the clip above.
Things to read … because there are clips below, too.
Supremely well said, Open Letter to the Auburn Family.
Also, if you were there, you got to see a Medal of Honor winner:
Student assaulted, accused of recording Ferguson protest meeting:
A University of Missouri-St. Louis student who uses an online platform to live-stream protests in Ferguson was hospitalized last week after five or six people threw him out of a church, where protesters had gathered to strategize, and beat him.
The student, Chris Schaefer, began live streaming Ferguson protests and interviews on Oct. 23. But during the protest strategy meeting at St. Mark’s Family Church on Nov. 6, he was not recording, he said in a video from a hospital bed.
[…]
Schaefer told police five or six people assaulted him at the meeting because they believed he was recording the meeting, said Sgt. Brian Schellman, a St. Louis County Police Department spokesman. Schaefer ran out of the church to a Walgreens about a half mile from the church, where police responded to a 911 call, Schellman said. Police are looking for the suspects.
Russia is changing their media laws, and so … CNN To End Russian Broadcast By Year’s End
Here’s another demonstration of the need for multiple platform idea Millennials Spend 18 Hours a Day Consuming Media — And It’s Mostly Content Created By Peers:
New research by social-influence marketing platform Crowdtap indicates that individuals ages 18 to 36 spend an average of 17.8 hours a day with different types of media.
Those hours represent a total across multiple media sources, some of which are consumed simultaneously.
We all need to develop effective (meaning, sometimes, different) messages across platforms within our unifying themes. It is starting to sound like jazz, no?
