Donald's Blog
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This old house was only a few blocks from the state Capitol in Madison,
Wisconsin. All the neighborhood cats lived in the basement during the
winter. The house has long since been torn down, but in 1972 there were
AR2ax speakers in the front room, and a lot of good music was heard there. |
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In the 21st century I am just as opinionated as ever,
and I now have an outlet. I shall pontificate here about anything
that catches my fancy; I hope I will not make too great a fool
of myself. You may comment yea or nay about anything on the
site; I may quote you here, or I may not. Send brickbats etc.
to: dmclarke78@icloud.com.
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June 29, 2012Congratulations to Nessa Records
When I was a little kid buying Little Golden Records, I was enchanted to be able to own a piece of music and hear it any time I wanted. (My favorite song was "Sweet Betsy From Pike".) And now that I am an old poop I am listening to Roscoe Mitchell's Before There Was Sound (1965) and Old/Quartet Sessions (1967, including a 31-minute meditation of "Oh Susanna"!) and thanking my lucky stars that Nessa was there to capture these sounds over 45 years ago. And to think that nobody else was recording Von Freeman in 1975!!
For unlike me, Chuck Nessa realized that somebody has to have the idea for a recording session, rent the studio, hire the musicians... And Chuck had the good taste and the big ears to do the job properly. He has made records that people will still be listening to as long as people listen to music.
In this year's Downbeat Critics Poll, Historical section, three Nessa CDs have placed in the top 15: Roscoe's Old/Quartet Sessions at no. 3, his Before There Was Sound at no. 10, and Vonski's Have No Fear at no. 15.
The title of Before There Was Sound refers to the fact that Sound, an album on Delmark the following year, was Roscoe's first commercially released recording, and Chuck's first production supervision before he started his own label. In the tracks from 1965 we get to hear young Chicago geniuses finding their way in the very year the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians was formed (still going today; meet the AACM here).
Where can I nominate Nessa for a MacArthur grant?
June 29, 2012Two cheers for half-fast health careNaturally, there is not much on the TV news or in the papers except the Supreme Court's decision on the health care mandate. In today's Wall Street Journal, Kimberley A. Strassel in her Potomac Watch column writes:
With this week's decision, the debate refocuses. This election is now about ObamaCare--not just in its own right, but as proxy for a generational debate over liberty.
Oh, I remember; that's the liberty to spend half your life worrying about health insurance. Will my employer continue to offer it? What if I lose my job? What if I turn out to have had a heart condition since birth: won't that be a "pre-existing condition"?...
Sorry, Kim, the industrialized capitalist democracies have been moving away from the freedom to sleep under bridges for 150 years or so. Maybe you should find yourself a little house on the prairie and get off the grid.
There are a lot of things wrong with ObamaCare, but now we can start to fix it. We Americans are famous for doing the right thing, after we've tried everything else. May it still be so.