Two quick confessions. First, I can’t play a lick of jazz. Second, my idea of great jazz is clicking on the Oscar Peterson playlist and sitting in amazement as I take it all in. The bassists highlighted in this Soundtrack primarily come out of that tradition, swinging with style, verve, and technique.
Ray Brown (1926-2002) is the bass player I most associate with Oscar Peterson and the swing rhythm section. Brown played 15 years with Peterson who once said, “I don’t think another group has achieved that closeness, that ‘breathe together’ bond that we had.” But Brown and his warm mellow tone supported countless incredible musicians throughout his stellar career. Since we ended last week’s post with Christian McBrideplaying a bass duet with Edgar Meyer, we’ll start this one with McBride and Brown kicking off Now’s The Time. Oh, and did I mention that Herbie Hancock and Hank Jones are playing piano, Kenny Burrell is on the guitar, the rest of the band is equally accomplished…and then Betty Carter joins in on vocals!
At the 1977 Montreux festival, Peterson and Brown played a concert together with another giant on the acoustic bass, Niels Henning Ørsted Pedersen (1946-2005). NHOP as he was known is my favorite acoustic bassist in jazz and many consider him among the best on the instrument. His technique was incredible and those in the know point to the ways he elevated others around him. Just listen to these three masters play off each other, first in You Look Good to Me and then in No Greater Love.
Rick Beato has an informative video on the “insane playing of NHOP.” Go to the 4:10 mark and watch the Joe Pass/NHOP duet. Caution: when they take off on the melody your head might explode! As Oscar Peterson says, “Niels didn’t play the bass, he was the bass.”
I listen to Christian McBride more than any current jazz bassist through his Conversations with Christian show each Saturday morning on the SiriusXM Real Jazz channel. Take in his opening solo on Steps with the late Chick Corea on piano, Kenny Garrett on saxophone and the ageless Roy Haynes — at 85 years old, mind you — on drums. Music is the fountain of youth!
Charles Mingus (1922-1979), another of my favorites, is among the most influential bassists in jazz history. I love this version of Take The A Train. As one commentator noted, only Mingus can have a band with a stride piano break followed by the most progressive Free Jazz bass clarinet solo you’ll ever want to hear. It is like a history of jazz in one performance.
Ron Carter is the most recorded jazz bassist in history. “After playing with Chico Hamilton, Jaki Byard and Milt Jackson in the early 60s, Carter joined Miles Davis’ quintet in 1963, and stayed for five years, playing on classic albums such as ESP and Miles Smiles.” For some great Ron Carter, give a listen to Third Plane.
Another jazz bassist who has grabbed my attention through the years is Dave Holland. He replaced Carter in Miles Davis’ band and has had a remarkable and lengthy career. Enjoy the warm tone he gets out of this solo blues piece.
I know I’ve left out so many talented jazz bass players. (Where’s Jimmy Blanton you might ask). But perhaps this sampling will whet your appetite to jump in and hear some yourself. And because I simply cannot get enough of Peterson, Brown, and NHOP, let’s have them take us out with a spirited Reunion Blues.
We are approaching the 100th anniversary of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, among the worst single instances of racial terrorism in American history. While many recognize this event and its aftermath as the horrific tragedy it is, there are others who are using the weapons of choice for those who want to push back against history and shift responsibility for racism to others. If we are to live so that we will be a people worth remembering, we must learn to follow and understand the truth of our memories. Of our history.
As always, this Weekly Reader features links to recent articles that grabbed my interest or tickled my fancy. I hope you find something that makes you laugh, think, or cry.
“In the span of about 24 hours between May 31 and June 1, 1921, a white mob descended on Greenwood, a successful black economic hub in Tulsa, Oklahoma then-known as ‘Black Wall Street,’ and burned it to the ground. Some members of the mob had been deputized and armed by city officials.
In what is now known as the ‘Tulsa Race Massacre,’ the mob destroyed 35 square blocks of Greenwood, burning down more than 1,200 black-owned houses, scores of businesses, a school, a hospital, a public library, and a dozen black churches. The American Red Cross…said the death toll was around 300, but the exact number remains unknown….Those who survived lost their homes, businesses, and livelihoods. Property damage claims from the massacre alone amount to tens of millions in today’s dollars. The massacre’s devastating toll, in terms of lives lost and harms in various ways, can never be fully repaired.“
What the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Destroyed is a 3D model in the New York Times of what was lost in terms of property and intergenerational Black wealth. It is worth your consideration.
Blowback against the impacts of racism can be seen in conservative attempts to take one of the aspirations for the civil rights movement — King’s famous line that individuals would one day “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” — and strip it away from considerations of power, hierarchy, or structure. Sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, author of Racism Without Racists, notes that color-blind racism is an ideology that “explains contemporary racial inequality as the outcome of non-racial dynamics…(W)hites rationalize minorities’ contemporary status as the product of market dynamics, naturally occurring phenomena, and blacks’ imputed cultural limitations.” Such explanations “exculpate [white people] from any responsibility for the status of people of color.”
“(T)his new (Oklahoma) law undermines efforts to reckon with our collective past, and it will chill classroom discussions of this history. H.B. 1775 instructs educators to emphasize that although the perpetrators of the Tulsa Race Massacre did bad things, their actions do not shape the world we live in — even though White rioters murdered scores of Black Tulsans and destroyed more than 1,200 buildings in the Black Greenwood neighborhood, annihilating decades of accumulated Black wealth.” (emphasis added)
As the reality of our nation’s deep racial divide highlights white privilege and white terrorism, many who have benefitted from those systems and actions feel uncomfortable. Generations are affected by actions such as occurred in Tulsa in 1921. Yet too many would rather our history be taught in the old “patriotic” way. The attempt to shift blame onto anyone but those who have controlled power since our nation’s founding shows the desperation felt by the country’s shrinking but well funded and highly vocal group of white supremacists.
We should understand our history and live out those consequences so that we will be a people worth remembering.
More to come…
DJB
(Image: During the Tulsa race riots in 1921, more than 1,200 black businesses and homes in the Greenwood District in Tulsa, Oklahoma, were destroyed at the hands of white residents. Bettmann Archive/Getty Images)
The first time I met my new boss was at a one-on-one getting to know you session over lunch. At some point over the salads and iced tea I heard, “I don’t understand your job.”
Gulp #1. And it wasn’t the tea.
I no doubt stumbled a bit in describing my work and finally turned to the truth. “As the job is currently configured,” I responded, “it lacks clear-cut responsibility and authority.”
Gulp #2. What had I done?
This individual went on to become one of my most influential mentors and a good friend, but at that first meeting I certainly could not predict what lay ahead.
Without knowing it at the time, what was taking place was the first of many lessons on maintaining focus in the face of an unpredictable world. In trying to handle all my responsibilities and whatever else the job threw at me each day, I found myself struggling to set priorities.
So much of how we focus is making intentional choices about what to do and what not to do. I had practiced making focused, intentional choices during different parts of my life. In leading a start-up organization early in my career, we engaged with more than 150 groups and many wanted very different things. Over time we honed in on two key elements of our mission.
It turns out I was very good at one of our priorities and not as skilled at the other. After losing a bruising legislative battle and learning that lesson the hard way, I hired someone who could provide the leadership we needed in that part of our work while also pushing myself to learn more about the ins-and-outs of this critical piece of our mission. We allocated our resources, made clear-cut choices about how to compete, and came back with a legislative victory that proved transformative. In other words, we focused.
I knew the importance of focus, but needed to grow in turning that knowledge into lifelong practice. My mentor helped me see how one inculcates these short-term bursts of sharpness into a way of life.
The work of staying focused never ends
Peter Drucker said that “People in any organization are always attached to the obsolete — the things that should have worked but did not, the things that once were productive and no longer are.”
Staying focused is hard work. People and organizations go through periods of focus and then quickly forget what it was that brought success. Too soon they have faced a crisis; taken on more work that they have the capacity to complete; seen leadership changes; grappled with personal challenges; or — no surprise here — get caught in trends and cross-winds that are difficult for even the best to navigate. The long-term performance of the businesses Tom Peters and Jim Collins highlighted in their management bibles is a cautionary tale.
Saying no is just as important — perhaps more important — than saying yes
“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on,” said Apple founder Steve Jobs. “But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the 100 other good ideas that there are.” Organizations and people fail far more often from trying to do too much, than trying to do too little. One has to choose carefully. Ryan Holiday, in distilling the wisdom of the Stoics, suggests we “say no (a lot).”
The unpredictable nature of life must include clarity about the right resources needed to focus
Focus in an unpredictable world requires working with real people, not burying your head in technology and data. Technologies try to “force fit a predictable model onto a world that is infinitely surprising.” Instead of relying solely on technology, try to associate with the smart, strategic, and nimble people who make you better. Being focused on what matters isn’t always the most efficient way forward, but it does require relentless preparation, the ability to attempt new things, and the ability to discard those things that don’t work.
“Preparedness, coalition building, imagination, experiments, bravery. In an unpredictable age, these are tremendous sources of resilience and strength. They aren’t efficient. But they give us limitless capacity for adaptation, variation, and invention.”
Finally, it takes bravery to be focused
My mentor showed me time and again how hard it is to stay focused, and the bravery that is required to succeed. It is actually much easier to be unfocused. If you can stand the clutter, you can give the appearance of being busy. But clutter is costly.
Sometimes I think we chose not to focus because we fear making choices. Rich Harwood makes this point in his upcoming bookUnleashed: A Proven Way Communities Can Spread Change and Make Hope Real for All. As human beings, he notes, we fear the ambiguity and uncertainty.
“There is concern about being blamed for something going wrong or awry…But here’s what I know, more than anything: change only happens when we make intentional choices.”
Focus is all about intentionality. Building a daily practice of intentionality that leads to a focus in your life is satisfying. You can still be imaginative and creative as you live a life of focus. But without committing to focus on what really matters, the work you imagine and create will fall short of its true potential.
As Saturday afternoon’s bright sunlight faded and darkness descended on the eve of Pentecost, I found myself in the nave of the Washington National Cathedral, fully enthralled with Les Colombes, the multimedia art installation of German artist Michael Pendry.
Andrew, Candice, and I had come to an evening exhibit walk, which is part of the public showing that began this month as the city opens up. Les Colombes means “white dove” in French, and the installation has three components: a flock of 2,000 origami paper doves hung in a winding column down the nave, a lighting display, and a mystical soundscape.
Just before Christmas, Pendry installed the Les Colombes exhibit in the grand nave of Washington National Cathedral. Across cultures and religious traditions, doves represent hope, peace and rebirth. Many of the over 2,000 paper doves that make up Les Colombes are inscribed with hopeful and prayerful messages. The doves were installed to encourage a feeling of optimism as we ended a challenging 2020 and began a new year. The Cathedral notes that “This sculpture is arranged to give new life to the Cathedral, embody our resolve to be kind to our fellow human, and to do our part in making a better tomorrow.”
Les Colombes has previously appeared in Salisbury Cathedral in Salisbury, England; St. Martin-in-the-Fields in London; Mount Zion in Jerusalem; Heilig-Geist Viktualienmarkt in Munich; and Grace Cathedral in San Francisco.
“What does the symbol of the spirit, the white dove, look like in our present days? Does this symbol still exist and is it still appropriate? Does it function properly when transformed into the 3rd dimension and what does that possibly mean for a modern art installation today ?
The spirit – a very abstract term in our modern hightech and consumer orientated society – apparently of little importance and difficult to understand. The installation is seeking an approach to the idea of the spirit, the “Holy Spirit” on various levels and angles with a full range of stylistic devices – a physical and emotional experience in unique spaces.”
MichaelPendry.de
Andrew, Candice, and I all felt a real sense of optimism as we entered the Cathedral for the first time in more than a year — a space where we’ve worshipped, made music, learned, and been inspired hundreds if not thousands of times since we moved to the city in 1998. We were not disappointed.
If you are in Washington and have the chance to see Les Colombes, I encourage you to do so. Hopefully the doves — simple yet powerful — can point us towards a more peaceful world.
As any thinking person would realize, this is not a Saturday Soundtrack about Meghan Trainor.* In fact, just to be safe I thought about naming this version Catching some bass, which is the title of a wonderful article I discovered early in my blogging career written by Miss Music Nerd. Her piece is about the difference between the instrument or voice with the lowest register in a musical ensemble and a fish with a name that is spelled the same but pronounced differently. But even that sentence is confusing, so I went with my original instincts.
DJB on the bass, with my brother Joe and a very young nephew Joseph!
For as long as memory serves, I have been captivated by the beautiful, deep, resonate sounds of the acoustic bass. When first listening to bluegrass, roots, and acoustic music in the late 1960s, I loved hearing those mandolins, fiddles, and guitars grounded in the wooden music that can only come from the acoustic double bass. And as my tastes broadened into a greater appreciation of jazz, the cool cats on the bass again mesmerized me with their clear groves. Mind you, I don’t really play the bass (the picture above notwithstanding), but simply love what a good musician can do with this instrument.
So this will be a two-part Soundtrack. Today we’ll focus on roots music bass players from the bluegrass, folk, new acoustic, and Americana genres. Next week, we’ll explore some jazz cats. Oh, and while a good Paul McCartney bass lick pleases me as well as the next baby boomer, no electric basses need apply for this review.**
Most of the musicians in the roots field point to the importance of Tom Gray, the bassist with two of the more influential bands in bluegrass music: The Country Gentlemen and The Seldom Scene. Tom was influenced by the music of George and John Shuffler, flashy bass players with The Stanley Brothers, as well as the jazz bass of Keeter Betts, who played with guitarist Charlie Byrd. But in the 1960s and 70s, he built a sound that worked to support the strong vocals and instrumental skills of the Gentlemen and the Scene, and in the process became the best-known bluegrass bass player of his generation.
Tom can play flashy instrumentals, and one of his showpiece tunes with the Seldom Scene was Grandfathers Clock, heard here on 1975’s Live at the Cellar Door album.
Bassist extraordinaire Tom Gray and Dobro master Mike Auldridge with the Legends of the Potomac (photo by DJB taken at Evensong Farm on 10.10.10)
I got to know Tom when he began helping his daughter Julie at the Silver Spring Farmers Market. If he wasn’t too busy, we would chat a bit and discuss who he was playing with that weekend. You can see Tom from this era, with the late Dr. John Starling and another former member of the Seldom Scene, Ben Eldridge, in this 2014 Smithsonian Folkways video of With Body and Soul (featuring wonderful background vocals by Emmylou Harris).
One of the musicians who can play outstanding bluegrass but, just as importantly, helped showcase the possibilities of the acoustic bass in the new acoustic music of the 1970s is Todd Phillips. An original member of the David Grisman Quintet, playing both mandolin and bass, Phillips went on to play bass for many years with Tony Rice, helping Tony create both his jazz-influenced work as on the tune Mar West and making bluegrass history with the Bluegrass Album Band.
Fat Kid, the opening cut from Phillip’s 1983 album Released, features Tony Rice on guitar, DGQ bandmate Darol Anger on violin, and Phillips on both bass and mandolin. The bass and mandolin interplay to kick off the tune is worth the price of admission.
Phillips has also explored his jazz and bluegrass roots as a part of the Phillips, Grier, and Flinnertrio, heard here in 2019 on Tennessee Blues.
Phillips’ turn playing Thibodaux with the Claire Lynch Band gives me the perfect segue to my next bass hero. Phillips was in Claire’s band at that time because her regular bassist, Mark Schatz, was playing the 25th anniversary reunion tour with Nickel Creek.
Claire Lynch and Mark Schatz hot foot it at Merlefest
Mark Schatz is an amazing bassist (and a great banjoist, dancer, and hambone player to boot) who has played with damn near everyone in the roots music field — Claire Lynch, Tony Rice, Bela Fleck, Nickel Creek, Tim O’Brien…the list goes on and on. I have always loved the set at Merlefest where Rice fronts a super group of Sam Bush, Fleck, Mark O’Connor, Jerry Douglas, and Schatz. Here they play Bela’s tune Whitewater. Bring out the fire extinguishers!
In looking around the internet, I came across this really delicious banjo/bass duet, Banjo Meltdown, from 1992 with Schatz and Bela Fleck. At about the 3:20 mark, Bela backs off to give Schatz some room to stretch out.
And in another segue, this bass duet on one bass takes this post from Schatz toEdgar Meyer.
“Throughout a lifetime of performing and composing, Edgar Meyer has turned the double bass into a modern virtuoso instrument that is equally at home in classical music and in the American vernacular. In 1994, Meyer became the first bassist to win the Avery Fisher Prize. He is also a recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Award and three Grammy Awards. Meyer has found devoted audiences through a vast range of projects, from his own double bass concertos that he continues to perform regularly to recital collaborations with Emanuel Ax and Amy Dorfman and performance and recording projects with artists including Joshua Bell, Yo-Yo Ma, Bela Fleck, Zakir Hussain, Mark O’Connor, Sam Bush, Jerry Douglas, Mike Marshall, and many others. The New Yorker calls him ‘the most remarkable virtuoso in the relatively unchronicled history of his instrument.’”
Many of us came to know Meyers’ music through the acoustic supergroup Strength in Numbers with Bush, Fleck, Douglas, and O’Connor. Meyer has a tasty bass solo in Duke and Cookie beginning at the 1:50 mark.
We’ll continue our tour of Meyer’s work with two of his duets with Chris Thile. Those are followed by an incredible Tiny Desk Concert from 2010 with Meyer, Fleck, and Zakir Hussain. This amazing music is well worth the listen.
As a foretaste for next week’s Soundtrack, here’s Meyer with jazz bassist Christian McBride in a wonderful bass duet entitled Solar.
There are many other roots and bluegrass bass players I could feature, including Byron House, Bryn Davies (check out the solo at 5:50), and the wonderful Missy Raines.
I love Missy’s version of the old Flatt & Scruggs tune Darlin’ Pal of Mine with Alison Brown because Todd Phillips and Mike Bub (another terrific bluegrass bassist who has played with everyone from Del McCoury to Sturgill Simpson) show up to join in the fun and add the only triple bass playing on the double bass I’ve ever seen!
That’s enough for now. Just remember, its all about that bass!
Enjoy.
More to come…
DJB
*To my ears, the best version of Meghan Trainor’s pop hit All about that bass (no treble) is from the folks at Postmodern Jukebox, where vocalists Haley Reinhart, Morgan James, and Ariana Savalas rock some great Andrews Sisters- style harmonies. Most importantly for these purposes, it also features a “sweet four hand bass solo by Casey Abrams and Adam Kubota.”
**But careful readers will know that by clicking on the two links in the Paul McCartney sentence, you’ll get Come Together and Day Tripper…two wonderful bass lines from the many in the Beatles catalog.
A former colleague posted an article from Medium on her LinkedIn page this morning that immediately drew my interest. It was entitled 50 Very Short Rules for a Good Life From the Stoics by the author Ryan Holiday, and it turned out to be a great list.* Holiday, author of the book Lives of the Stoics: The Art of Living from Zeno to Marcus Aurelius, based it the premise that the work of philosophy is to define your rules. Then live by them.
This is a short but thoughtful read as you head into the weekend. It is hard to pull out the “best” of these rules, because virtually every one resonated with me. But to whet your appetite (and to encourage you to click on through to see the full list), here are a baker’s dozen to ponder:
Over the last two weeks, the backlog of articles I’d like to share has reached the point where I’m using the old baker’s dozen approach to point you toward works you may find of interest. With 13 articles in the mix, I hope you can work your way through the full list. To help, I’ve placed them in groups with similar themes or issues.
As always, this Weekly Reader features links to recent articles that grabbed my interest or tickled my fancy. I hope you find something that makes you laugh, think, or cry.
Why we get history so wrong
One of the best reads of the week came from Michael Harriot at The Root. He went looking for the history textbooks used by the (virtually all white) Senators opposing the teaching of Black history in the 1619 Project when they were in school and suddenly everything makes sense.
The Textbooks Used By Senators Who Oppose ‘The 1619 Project’ outlines some points of view of the textbooks that these senators pine for. This will be the one article where I spend some time with the quotes, as I want us to look at one of those involved: Senator Marsha Blackburn from my home state of Tennessee (who is NO Albert Gore…Senior or Junior!)
“What she read: Although she represents Tennessee, Marsha Blackburn attended elementary and high school in Laurel, Miss. In 1959, the year Sen. Marsha Blackburn would have entered kindergarten in Mississippi, the state legislature handed control of choosing textbooks to Gov. Ross Barnett. At the request of the Mississippi State Society of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), the state had already mandated a ninth-grade course in Mississippi history, which means Blackburn learned the history of her state from John K. Bettersworth’s textbook Mississippi: a History.
The New York Times wrote in 1975 that Bettersworth’s catalogs “treat blacks of old as complacent darkies or as a problem to whites.” When The Root reviewed the text, we noticed that the entire history of the 250-year institution of slavery was reduced to five pages. Bettersworth’s book was based on UDC propaganda that taught children that the slave master treated his slaves ‘as his own,’ but noted that most of the human chattel were so lazy that ‘it took two to help; one to do nothing.’ However, Bettersworth was sure to point out the kindness of the masters who educated the enslaved ‘as they taught their own children.‘
Mississippi: A History also treats the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education case as a travesty, insisting that Mississippians were largely satisfied with segregated schools. ‘Incidents had been extremely rare,’ it explained. ‘[F]or by and large, each race—its parents, its pupils and their teachers, had found it advantageous to remain in an ‘equal but separate’ status.‘
The United Daughters of the Confederacy play an outsized role in the way we learn history. Formed in the late 19th century, the group is not only responsible for most of the Confederate monuments in America but perhaps their biggest memorial to the white supremacist utopia known as the Confederacy is how they instilled their beliefs in schools across America. By turning Southern housewives into lobbyists for the Lost Cause ideology, they transformed history into a fictional version of the past, complete with happy slaves and brave, honorable white men who just wanted low taxes. By the early 1920s, they had become so powerful that a history book didn’t stand a chance of being approved if it contained a negative portrayal of the Antebellum South or the Civil War.“
How the media portrays civic life and the fight for democracy
Why were progressives were so fooled by President Joe Biden’s agenda? Anand Giridharadas in The Atlantic says progressives thought they knew what a Biden presidency would look like, but they were wrong, in his article Joe Biden and the New Progressive Era.
“But for now, a capital that has been defined in recent years by the absence of useful action bubbles with generative possibility. And many of us who thought we knew what a Biden presidency would look like, and didn’t expect much from it, are suddenly asking ourselves: How did we get him so wrong?“
And while the media may still be focused on the old emphasis on bipartisanship and outreach, that has been “displaced in Joe Biden’s Washington with an emphasis on coalition — attending first and foremost to your own side, everyone balancing the holding of their own with the holding of their nose, so as to get the good-enough thing done now instead of waiting for what might never come. ‘
When I first saw the piece in the New York Times that looked down upon President Biden for being deliberative and pushing his staff to bring their “A” game, I was upset. But clearly not as upset as long-time blogger Oliver Willis who wrote NY Times Very Mad Joe Biden Is Not A F*%$#&^g Idiot Like Trump.
“’Aides say he demands hours of debate from scores of policy experts,’ the Times notes, as if that wasn’t what over 81 million people voted for in November 2020.
Discussing Biden‘s attitude when aides don’t bring him clear and precise answers, the Times drops this shocker: ‘Let’s talk plain English here, he will often snap.‘
Reporter Michael Shear put an exclamation point on the Times’ framing by tweeting out the story with ‘SHORT FUSE’ in caps to make it clear what the paper is trying to do here.…
Because Trump’s most trusted policy advisors were Fox & Friends (notorious for roasting marshmallows with plastic spoons) and Tucker Carlson (who keeps his Klan robes just slightly to the left of the camera angle), America suffered. Hundreds of thousands of people who did not have to die, died. Because of Trump, children were stolen from their families and multibillionaires got tax cuts while judges who don’t want to see Blacks and Latinos vote were enshrined on the bench.
But the New York Times got lots of access.“
This story is ridiculous, and the Times should be ashamed of itself.
As Max Boot writes inThere are no Marjorie Taylor Greenes in the Democratic Party for The Washington Post, “let’s avoid any false moral equivalency between the two parties. There is no comparison between the likes of AOC and MTG. One is a progressive who engages in civil, rational discourse. The other is a fanatic who has left civility and reason far behind.”
While Boot wasn’t singling out anyone in particular, the Times, the Post, the WSJ, and CNN — among many others — need to learn basic journalism. It took forever for those outlets to call Donald Trump’s lies a lie. Faux News, of course, is in a whole different category filed under propaganda.
Janisse Ray has an article in The Bitter Southerner about a project that I worked on when I was with the National Trust: A New National Park in Central Georgia.
“Macon is a power spot. Not only is it located on the banks of Ocmulgee’s boiling waters, it’s also where the Muscogee (Creek) people built a civilization with a history that reaches back at least 17,000 years. They established towns, including one of the largest Mississippian mound complexes in North America, which is estimated to have had a population of at least 1,000 in its heyday. By the 1730s, the town at Ocmulgee was abandoned, although it continued to be a sacred site for the Muscogee (Creek), who returned for ceremony and trade.
Beyond that, you know what happened to the Native people of North America. Crushed, almost destroyed, by European viruses and bacteria, they were pressured off their lands. In 1830, when President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, most of the Creeks and Cherokees who remained in Georgia were marched to Oklahoma on a weeping walk, leaving behind life as they had known it for tens, hundreds, thousands of years.“
Let’s end with a look at the 100-day marker that pundits like to use to quickly handicap the success (or lack thereof) in a presidency. Writing in The Washington Post, Robin Givhan looks at President Joe Biden’s late April speech to Congress on the eve of his 100th day in History writ large and small.
“The night was full of history. There was that singular, dramatic moment that announced the future. The presence of two women in these dazzlingly high positions of power — one of them Black and Asian American — is a reminder to keep pressing forward. The sight of Harris and Pelosi together is an image of inspiration for generations of strivers whose hopes are rooted in what they can see rather than what they can imagine.“
And Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky, writing in The Hill, says “enough already” in 100 days is a ridiculous way to judge a presidency. Based on the first 100 days of FDR’s first term, in 1933, she notes the marker is a historical aberration. For example, on March 4, the Senate unanimously confirmed FDR’s entire Cabinet without hearings on the day of his inauguration.
“While pundits might focus on the first 100 days, voters should not apply this historic, but unrealistic standard to the 21st century. Instead, they should evaluate the accomplishments of the first 18 months of the Biden administration when they go to the polls in November 2022.“
Rounding the corner on my morning walk, I spotted the first one. The next house had one as well. Before reaching the end of that short block, I’d stopped to admire two more.
It was at the fourth sighting of a patch of iris in full bloom that I lifted up my eyes and said a silent, “Hello, Mom.”
My mother loved the old fashioned iris. We had our own garden patch on East Main Street when I was young. When I see them today my thoughts inevitably turn to her and the lessons she taught me about beauty, respect, life-long learning, and empathy.
Mom’s been on my mind at this moment in time as I have been reading about the hollowing out of public goods and public education by those who would have everyone suffer before they would consider sharing resources with those of other races. I think of her because I am old enough to have attended segregated public schools in my youth. Mom’s actions in that moment are part of my story.
Capshaw Elementary School, Cookeville, TN (credit: The Living New Deal)
In the fall of 1963, I was a rising third-grader at Capshaw Elementary School in Cookeville, Tennessee. A WPA building constructed in 1939 as part of the New Deal, the Capshaw in my memory is a one-story, low slung brick building, with wide halls, wooden floors, rooms full of light, steps at the entrance near the administration offices and the school cafeteria, and interior stairs to navigate through a schoolhouse built into a hill. It certainly wasn’t a new building when I arrived, but it was top-of-the-line compared to the six-room, frame with brick veneer Darwin School, which housed all the community’s Black students.
Although the historic Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision ordering school desegregation was handed down in 1954, the public schools in Cookeville, Putnam County, and throughout the Upper Cumberland region in Tennessee were still segregated at the beginning of 1963. The federal government had not pushed for compliance, and state and local governments were not in a rush to end the Jim Crow practice of “separate but equal.”
That all began to crumble in Cookeville when the Darwin School burned to the ground in January. Arson was suspected but never proven. For a time, the students were taught in make-shift classrooms at local Black churches. But in April, a group of Black parents came before the county board to state that they wanted their children to begin attending white schools. In Cookeville, the debate over whether to rebuild Darwin began to shift as the more progressive voices in the community argued for desegregation and compliance with the Supreme Court order.
Mother took on the position as head of Capshaw’s Parent-Teachers Association, or PTA, in the fall of 1963. She certainly understood the issue of integration and was supportive of the change. But as she endured pushback and anger, it would be a year she never forgot.
The decision was made to integrate the schools, and I recall the addition of Black children to our classrooms, already crowded to near capacity thanks to the baby boom. We generally accepted the change and I do not have any strong memories of conflict. But anytime I was called to the principal’s office, I knew that Mr. Oliver Bohannon — someone I generally tried to avoid — wanted me to take PTA materials home to mother. Often they related to the integration of the public schools.
Even with a relatively small number of Blacks and the leavening influence of Tennessee Tech University, which accepted its first Black student around the same time, Cookeville still saw pushback against the change. Giving up a privilege that is seen as a birthright — no matter how randomly and cruelly the advantage was gained — is a bridge too far for many. Years later Mother would reflect that it was one of the most difficult years of her life. “We never had a problem with the children,” she noted. It was always the parents — the alleged adults in the situation — who made her job miserable.
My parents came from families that were steeped in the Jim Crow traditions of the South, so Mother knew the mindset of other adults in the community. Both sets of grandparents lived in and generally supported a separate-but-equal world. Mother and Daddy recognized the injustice of the inequality and supported slow yet progressive change. It was in showing respect through interpersonal relationships where they first made their mark on me. Our mouths would face a date with a bar of soap if the n-word was used. We were all taught to call the Black cooks at church Mr. and Mrs. Smith, instead of using the first names in an informal and disrespectful way that we would never think to use with our friend’s parents.
As they grew older, Mother and Daddy came to turn from the way they were raised as they began life with their own family. Both saw the Black citizens in Cookeville, and later in Murfreesboro, as people to know and love; as fellow Children of God, in their religious worldview. Years later I had conversations with my father where he suggested that the turning away from their cultural upbringing included a forgiveness of their parents as well as the asking of forgiveness for their own culpability in supporting injustice.
Which brings me to 2021.
There was a time, a moment as integration began to take hold in the 1950s and 60s, to change the course of our nation’s history and the narrative about our past. Some, like my mother, tried. But soon the divide-and-conquer tactic of those in power began draining public pools, building segregation academies, and pushing racial fear to keep the middle and lower classes from realizing that their prosperity came from working together. These were tactics similar to those used after the Civil War when the opportunity of Reconstruction was pushed aside for the harshness of Jim Crow.
Because of all that we’ve witnessed over the past year, we are at another moment in time when we can change the course of our nation’s history and the narrative about who we are through our actions. Once again, Mom’s example is shaping my response.
My mother, the librarian, was a life-long reader who instilled that discipline in her son. She read to learn, and I have turned to books as one way of learning about our racial divides. In this year of pandemic, I have leaned on the many good books available to help in understanding our past, the potential of this moment, and the chance to change the future. This was my time to pick up writings by authors I may not know to gain a broader, deeper, and more nuanced perspective of what racism has done, and continues to do, to America.
Books like Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt’s Biased, and Ibram X. Kendi’s How To Be An Antiracist, the latter usually found right at the top of the list of recommended works to read in order to understand the systemic racism in our country and how best to respond.
Two highly influential works that have shaped my thinking are Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me and Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy. The same is true of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness as well as Democracy in Chains by Duke historian Nancy MacLean, which helps the reader understand how unfettered capitalism became more sacrosanct than democracy in America, thanks to a stealth plan based on divide-and-conquer racism by the radical right.
We are at a moment where we can change as a country. We can learn if we will just be open to narratives from other perspectives that differ from the exceptional nationalistic one we were taught in grade school. We can learn from the ordinary people in ordinary places who do extraordinary things. We can respond with the tools of grace and love instead of hatred and violence. We can follow the example of those who have walked this path before us and help bend the arc of history a little further toward justice.
When I see the patch of iris, I am reminded that Mom is still here, helping me see that we are facing another moment in America where we can change our narrative and our future. It will not be easy, but we have to continue to try, for ourselves, and for our children and grandchildren.
She knows that I’ve been a huge fan of the 76-year-old mandolin player, composer, musical producer, and lover of all things acoustic ever since the needle went down on the first track on side one of the 1977 album The David Grisman Quintet and the pulsating rhythms of E.M.D. exploded through my speakers.
I still love to listen to that album and the amazing musicianship of Grisman, the late Tony Rice, Darol Anger, Todd Phillips, and Bill Amatneek. The cover of the album told you this record was all about the instruments and their players. It looked like a bluegrass-influenced album, but from the opening notes of E.M.D. (Eat My Dust) the listener was quickly dispelled of that notion. Grisman, Rice, and Anger — taking the leads — were playing a type of string jazz influenced by gypsy, blues, and bluegrass music that had a beauty and clarity I certainly hadn’t heard before. At the time it was so unique that it was jaw dropping in its inspiration. Now, 40+ years later every acoustic musician worth his or her salt can work their way through similar tunes, but the originality of Grisman’s vision in the 1970s reminds me of the breakthrough of bluegrass when Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs joined Bill Monroe’s Bluegrass Boys in the 1940s and a whole new American music was created.
In a similar fashion to Monroe’s Bluegrass Boys, many of the famous acoustic musicians of the late 20th century cycled through Grisman’s band with members including Rice, Anger, Phillips, mandolinist extraordinaire Mike Marshall, Joe Craven, Enrique Coria, Matt Eakle, Jim Kerwin, John Carlini, George Marsh, and Frank Vignola. One of the most famous and prolific was Mark O’Connor, who had stints as both the guitarist (following Rice) and the violinist in the DGQ.
O’Connor’s incredible musicianship as seen in the video of Dawg’s Rag from an Austin City Limits performance may require some explanation:
Notice at 6:37, as O’Connor begins his guitar solo, his string snaps and one can hear this audibly. The high E string of the guitar came lose from the end pin and dropped all the way down to where it was flopping. You can see O’Connor attempting to figure out what to do as he continued his solo on national television. Beginning on the lower strings, he mutes some with his right hand, then gestured towards David Grisman as if he was going to give his solo back to him. Grisman does not respond and continues to play rhythm not really knowing what happened. Then O’Connor turns away from the mic and within a period of three seconds (from 7:01 to 7:04) the high E string is perfectly back in tune for the remainder of the solo. This very moment back in 1980 helped solidify O’Connor’s reputation as a young star whose ability as a great young musician was growing. These few seconds were the talk of the show to many guitar players watching at the time.“
By the time the DGQ band was formed and the album released, Grisman had been around for some time in acoustic music circles. He emerged…
…as a mandolin visionary from New York City’s Greenwich Village folk scene in the early 1960s. He first played with local bluegrass bands and then professionally with the Even Dozen Jug Band, Red Allen and the Kentuckians and Earth Opera. He became a record producer and session player on recordings with Tom Paxton, Judy Collins, James Taylor, Linda Ronstadt and many others. In 1969, Jerry Garcia invited David to play on the Grateful Dead’s classic American Beauty. Garcia famously dubbed him “Dawg” and their musical friendship led to the legendary bluegrass band, Old & In The Way.
Over time, as Grisman and JerryGarciaboth gravitated to the Bay Area, they maintained their musical friendship. Both my children can attest to the fact that we listened to There Ain’t No Bugs on Me from the Grisman/Garcia album Not for Kids Only many a day in our car when they were very little. We all still laugh as we remember the first time Claire sang out the line “How in the hell can the old folks tell / If it ain’t gonna rain no more” from her car seat, with gusto! The old B.B. King tune The Thrill is Gone is from another of their Acoustic Disc collaborations.
David Grisman has always shared the stage with some of the world’s great musicians, people like guitarists Les Paul, Enrique Coria, Martin Taylor, and Doc Watson. In the early 1980s Grisman recorded and performed with legendary jazz violinist Stephane Grappelli. There’s a wonderful video from the old Tonight Show vaults where they play two tunes, in a seven-minute- plus set, that clearly brings joy to Johnny Carson and the Tonight Show Band. I also love the version of Grappelli and DGQ playing the standard Sweet Georgia Brown from the great interplay first between Grappelli and Grisman, and then Anger and Mike Marshall. Grappelli is a legend, and the playfulness on the faces of all the musicians joining in his slipstream is wonderful to watch.
Others who came into his orbit can be seen in the following three videos. A Frets magazine Music Awards all-star jam session includes O’Connor and a very young Alison Krauss; New Grass Revival band mates Sam Bush, Bela Fleck, and Pat Flynn; dobroist Jerry Douglas, and bassists Edgar Meyer and Mark Schatz playing the Grisman tune Dawgs Bull. Check out Fleck’s banjo break as well as Meyer’s bowed bass turn in the spotlight.
Grisman’s Acoustic Disc record label (tagline: 100% Handmade Music) has produced several albums highlighting the sound of vintage acoustic instruments played by the masters. This audio track features Seldom Scene founder and Dobro master Mike Auldridge on the Saint Louis Blues — one of my father’s favorite songs.
And Grisman remains active into his 70s, playing here with guitar master Tommy Emmanuel on Tipsy Gypsy.
Throughout his career, Grisman has stayed in touch with his bluegrass roots. One of the most satisfying collaborations in this vein has been with Del McCoury and the Del McCoury Band.
The Birchmere performance of David Grisman’s Dawg Trio will feature Grisman, his son Samson Grisman on bass, and banjoist/guitarist Danny Barnes. But I want to end by featuring the trio with the always tasteful Jim Hurst, playing his lovely Gallagher guitar, on Swang Thang from a 2016 Bluegrass Underground show on PBS.
Thank you, David Grisman, for bringing so much joy into my life over the past four decades. I hope you, dear reader, will find something to enjoy here as well.
More to come…
DJB
Image: Publicity shot of the 1977 David Grisman Quintet with Darol Anger, Tony Rice, Grisman, Bill Amatneek, and Todd Phillips from AcousticDisc.dom
Lovers of sports, writing, and especially sportswriting were saddened to hear the not unexpected news last week that columnist Thomas (Boz) Boswell, was retiring at the age of 73, after 52 years at the Washington Post. As one appreciative writer put it, “If your favorite team won or you have a cherished World Series memory, Boswell was probably there and wrote about it better than anybody.”
As always, this Weekly Reader features links to recent articles that grabbed my interest or tickled my fancy. This one is my all-in appreciation for the work of Thomas Boswell. I hope you find something that makes you laugh, think, or cry.
“I always assumed that good sportswriting was just good writing, and I still do,” Boswell said in his induction speech into the National Sports Media Hall of Fame. He was sometimes criticized by those who see sports — and especially baseball — as all numbers. But Boswell had the last laugh in one of his all-time great columns: Nationals’ spirit triumphed over Astros’ numbers in the World Series.
“Because if instead Anthony Rendon, Howie Kendrick, Juan Soto, Max Scherzer, Stephen Strasburg and 20 others appear to be elderly men, we will know they truly sold their souls to pull off this once-in-a-century triumph.
Yes, they did it again. The unbelievable, late-game-dancing, break-their-foes-hearts Nationals did it again.
Washington has a World Series champion for the first time in 95 years after a 6-2 Game 7 win over the utterly stunned, disbelieving 107-win Houston Astros here Wednesday night, and the only explanations seem to be baseball miracles or deals with the devil.“
Then Boswell goes in for the kill.
This time, as if to show that the deeds of these Nats truly are once-per-century stuff, the game-transforming blow was a two-run home run sliced off the right field foul pole by Kendrick, the same 36-year-old gentleman whose grand slam extinguished the season of the 106-win Los Angeles Dodgers in the division series two weeks ago.
Two teams whose brilliant thinkers believe players of his age are dinosaurs on the edge of extinction have been pushed into a tar pit by Howie.“
What baseball writer thinks of dinosaurs and tar pits when his home town team just won the World Series? One that is prepared. One who gives uncommon care and thought to his work.
Barry Svrluga is part of the smart group of sports columnists that the Post has attracted through the years. On Sunday, he wrote an appreciation of Boswell, his hero, that included the following story.
“His columns, even those that delved deep into numbers, weren’t mechanical. They were lyrical. Again, that’s ability — but only partly. At the 2013 World Series, I came back up from the field to our seats in the Fenway Park press box before Game 6. Boz wasn’t there, but his tools remained — his laptop, notebooks, game notes and a ragtag paperback. I’m still not sure I should admit this, but I will: I peeked. It was a dog-eared copy of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s journals, with various passages underlined — some in red, some in blue, some in both.
When Boz returned to his seat, I asked him, essentially, “What gives?”
“Oh,” he said. “Emerson’s poetry isn’t worth much, but his prose is great.”
He wanted, he said, to be in the right frame of mind to write that night’s column. There is uncommon care and thought in that process.
The Red Sox could win the series that night; indeed, they would. Boz knew that a series-clinching column could be the one to remember — not for him but for the reader. The column that might be framed as a keepsake. The column that might be read and read again to relive the moment. He had to be at his best so his words could be the best they could be.
I had read Thomas Boswell off-and-on for years, but the column that was my keepsake, the one that grabbed me and wouldn’t let go, was a piece he did for the Washington Post Magazine in January of 1987. I still have the original packed away in a memory box. The column was WHY IS BASEBALL SO MUCH BETTER THAN FOOTBALL? It begins with “Here are the first 99 reasons why baseball is better than football. (More after lunch.)”
I’ve quoted and linked to this story so many times, such as when I wrote about 10 reasons Super Bowl 48 will be my last… Let’s look at a few of the reasons baseball is the superior game:
“1. Bands.
2. Half time with bands.
3. Cheerleaders at half time with bands.…
12. Vince Lombardi was never ashamed that he said, ‘Winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing.’
13. Football coaches talk about character, gut checks, intensity and reckless abandon. Tommy Lasorda said, ‘Managing is like holding a dove in your hand. Squeeze too hard and you kill it; not hard enough and it flies away.’…
23. Everything George Carlin said in his famous monologue is right on. In football you blitz, bomb, spear, shiver, march and score. In baseball, you wait for a walk, take your stretch, toe the rubber, tap your spikes, play ball and run home.”
I could go on and on.
Boswell wrote about teams other than the Washington Nationals, of course. For many years he was the Baltimore Orioles beat writer for the Post, when the nation’s capital was going through its three-decade drought of major league baseball. There are some delicious columns out there featuring Cal Ripken, Jim Palmer, and — most of all — Earl Weaver. Some of the best of that early writing can be found in his books, including 1982’s How Life Imitates the World Series. The first chapter’s title — This Ain’t a Football Game. We Do This Every Day. — is a quote from Weaver.
He also covered every World Series game from the famous 1975 Carlton Fisk “stay fair” home run until last year, when he missed his first Series due to the coronavirus. None of those columns were any better than the one he wrote after the Red Sox won a “doubleheader” in the League Championship Series against the hated Yankees in 2004 entitled October’s Great Boston Marathon.
“Twice on the same day, with the pennant sitting squarely on their plate, the Yankees handed the ball to their central heroic protagonist of the past nine seasons, reliever Mariano Rivera. Of all Manager Joe Torre’s worthies, none — not Derek Jeter or Bernie Williams — has matched Rivera’s October value. And twice, the mighty and usually perfect Panamanian blew those saves. Both times his flaws were almost minuscule. The second squandered lead was barely his fault. But the Red Sox had just enough.”
“Please, can we have a deserved resolution to an old ache? Can we, at last, expunge the Caps’ ugly, only partially deserved reputation as gifted, inexplicable chokers? And can we replace it with an image of undiluted joy?
Or, if you prefer, a memory of a gray-haired, gloriously relieved Ovechkin, beaming at thousands of Caps fans who roared throughout this game, who will now always be remembered as a champion.“
“But there were almost as many Big Johns as there were days. Once, my mom said she had enjoyed her late-night talks with that deep-voiced coach who had returned my calls. They had talked about child rearing and any old thing. Which coach? ‘John Thompson,’ she said.
What?!
‘Those farm girls are wise,’ Thompson informed me, referring to my mother.“
Boswell has been recognized for years as one of the deans of American sportswriting. His induction speech into the Hall of Fame contains so many classic Boz lines that I encourage you to watch the entire video. Early on, he recognizes where he comes from…
“I graduated from Amherst College with a degree in English Literature, the great refuge of the undecided.”
And then, at the end of the speech, he knows what good writing — on sports or any other subject — actually uncovers:
“Athletes cross the same range of human virtue and vice as the rest of us, the whole range. So over the years, the way you view athletes, the way you see all of sports, will come across in your stories and columns. And it will unintentionally reveal how you feel…about…everything. The reader knows that intuitively and knows it immediately. If you think you are judging others when you write, you’re wrong. You’re uncovering yourself.”
Boz, you’ve more than earned this retirement. Thankfully, those of us who will miss you have your books plus a digital archive full of columns to call upon when we want to read timeless stories about what the uninitiated may see only as fun and games but which are, in reality, about life itself.
MORE TO COME... 