TOO BUSY BURPING, YAWNING, FLATULATING, MOANING, AND EATING LEFTOVERS TO POST ANYTHING…AND THEN OLD PAL JEREMY PROVIDES THE MUSE…

Jeremy (JLG)…my oldest friend (as in our friendship goes back further than any other in my life) sent me a few notes and among them, a note that Jeff Healey, who was featured playing guitar in previous post was also deserving of an RIP after his name. Healey was a remarkable musician who in addition to his unique guitar skills (he played with the instrument on his lap) took up the trumpet late in life and channeled his idol (Louis Armstrong) playing Classic American Jazz on records and in the club he founded in Toronto that bore his name.

JLG also suggested over the phone that I might look for some James Jamerson video to post. For those not familiar with the name, suffice to say that he was the bass player on just about all the tracks that came out of Motown in the 60’s and early 70’s and to say that his contribution was an important factor in the sound and success of that music would qualify as music history understatement of the decade. All you have to do is listen to those tunes and imagine that the bass line was replaced by something standard and generic and you’ll hear for yourself how his playing didn’t only make that music cook, it transported it into the highest realm of creative art. A few years back there was a documentary called “ Standing in the Shadows of Motown” that told the story of the house band “The Funk Brothers” who backed up all the singers and groups who recorded in that cramped Detroit basement studio and became the Stars of Motown. That movie had its genesis in a book called: Standing in the Shadows of Motown: The Life and Music of Legendary Bassist James Jamerson. The book was all about Jamerson and doubled as a study guide with a CD that included tracks played by a host of bassists influenced by Jamerson (the publication was made possible in part by Paul McCartney) and the book title was then attached to the film to tell the story of the entire band for the movie.

Anyway, it was Jeremy who first called Jamerson to my attention, and I’ve been paying attention ever since every time I listen to those Motown tunes.

There’s not much to choose from online by way of live performances where you can see Jamerson (partly because it was always about the singers and not the band—which is par for the course and always annoying) but there are probably hundreds of videos of bass players laying down their own versions of Jamerson’s bass lines. It’s like some rite of passage--which is probably as it should be. But I found this, which is a great (and to me, moving) live performance of a Marvin Gaye classic (with Marvin stretching out on piano for a long spell) intercut with some inner city street footage intended to illustrate “What’s Goin On” and some nice shots of Jamerson sitting by his side (at 1:23 and at 2:23) and providing what only he could bring to the party.



Notable Quotables

"Where there is no hope, it is incumbent on us to invent it." This, I think, is a great argument for the power of
secular humanism and proof that one needs no imaginary sky daddy to have a strong sense of morality and duty.
Albert Camus

God. He loves you. And he needs your money.
He's all-powerful, all-perfect, all-knowing, and all-wise, somehow just can't handle money!
George Carlin

“Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest”
Diderot


"Experience witnesseth that ecclesiastical establishments, instead of maintaining the purity and efficacy of religion, have had a contrary operation. During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What has been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution." --- James Madison,


I’m still thinking about the Life is a Comedy v. Life is a Tragedy dichotomy and thought I’d start a list.


On the Life is a Comedy side I would put…

Shakespeare
Bach
Hayden
Socrates
Moliere
Swift
Mozart
Balzac
Wilde
Twain
Whitman
Mencken
Einstein
Randy Newman (if he got his due, he’d be known on a one name basis too)

And on the Life is a Tragedy side…

Aristotle
Hobbes
Dickens
Nietzsche
Melville
Yeats
Eliot
Hugo
Tolstoy
Hemingway
Marx
Mahler
O’Neill
Fitzgerald
Dylan
Sartre

Heard much about new novel “The Art of Fielding” and Ellen got it for me for my birthday. I’m about 150 pages in and if I were to heed the advice “If you have nothing good to say, then say nothing.”…then I would say this: