[Hi and Lois , November 7, 2016.]
This mom really does have eyes in the back of her head. Also a face. Yikes. Regan MacNeil has nothing on Lois Flagston.
The swivel in this panel makes the flipped head in a recent strip seem like a party trick. And the swivel makes the vanishing doorknob plate in today’s second panel seem just routine. Things go missing all the time.
Slavic Soul Party! Plays Duke Ellington’s “Far East Suite.” Ropeadope Records. 2016.
Early or late, elements of the “exotic” often surfaced in Duke Ellington’s music: the growling trumpet and trombone of his 1920s “jungle band,” the misterioso swirl of “Caravan” and “Conga Brava,” the “nouvelle vague exotique“ of Afro-Bossa , the “down under and/or out back” of The Afro-Eurasian Eclipse . The Far East Suite (1966), the last great Ellington-Strayhorn collaboration, is a sustained adventure in the exotic. The work is awkwardly named, having been inspired by the Ellington band’s 1963 travels in Syria, Jordan, Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Ceylon, Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and a 1964 visit to Japan. The 1963 tour, sponsored by the U. S. State Department, was cut short by the Kennedy assassination, before the band could go on to Cyprus, Egypt, and Greece. How wonderfully strange then that in 2016 a group of New York musicians should continue the journey by Balkanizing this music.
It’s no gimmick: Slavic Soul Party! has reimagined The Far East Suite with deep respect and understanding. The arrangements (by Matt Moran, Jonas Müller, and Peter Hess) evoke their Ellington-Strayhorn sources without falling into mere imitation. The challenge of adapting the material for the band’s instrumentation finds ingenious solutions: the wide intervals of “Ad Lib on Nippon,” for instance, an easy matter for a pianist, are distributed among trombone, clarinet, and accordion, making for unusual tonalities. “Isfahan,” a Johnny Hodges specialty, becomes a slow drag that suggests Kurt Weill, mariachis, and a New Orleans funeral band. “Bluebird of Delhi” and “Amad” detour into intensely rhythmic episodes for clarinet, trombones, and percussion. The musicianship at all times is superb. I especially like hearing Peter Hess, whose baritone saxophone suggests the massive sound of Harry Carney, and whose clarinet evokes both klezmer wails and the urbane Jimmy Hamilton (a major voice in the original Far East Suite ). Among Hess’s responsibilities here: suggesting the majesty of the Taj Mahal in “Agra,” as Carney did before him.
The best non-Ellington recordings of Ellington-Strayhorn music are those that transform their source material into something new: I think immediately of Steve Lacy and Mal Waldron’s Sempre Amore , the Modern Jazz Quartet’s For Ellington , and World Saxophone Quartet Plays Duke Ellington . I place this recording in that company.
One more thing: The exclamation point in the group’s name is warranted. It is impossible to sit still when this record is on.
The program:
Tourist Point of View : Bluebird of Dehli : Isfahan : Depk : Mount Harissa : Blue Pepper : Agra : Amad : Ad Lib on Nippon
The musicians:
John Carlson, Kenny Warren, trumpets : Peter Hess, saxophones and clarinet : Peter Stan, accordion : Matt Musselman, Tim Vaughn, trombones : Ron Caswell, tuba : Chris Stromquist, snare and percussion : Matt Moran, tapan/goč/bunanj
Related reading and listening
All OCA Ellington posts (Pinboard)
Slavic Soul Party! (Listen here)
Live performances of “Amad” from 2013 and 2015 (YouTube)
[Four asides: 1. “Caravan” and “Conga Brava” are largely the work of Ellington’s valve-trombonist Juan Tizol. 2. The phrases “nouvelle vague exotique” and “down under and/or out back” are Ellington’s. 3. Matt Moran’s credit may be a bit of a joke: as far as I can tell, tapan, goč, and bunanj (the first two Serbian, the last Bosnian) all mean the same thing: drum. 4. Something I don’t get: the album cover. Elephant? Ellington? Upside-down?]
From Leddy’s Imaginary Dictionary of Usage (2016).
Harumph!
Also from this non-existent volume: entries for get , killing it , and nice .
Thanks to J. D. Lowe for asking about own it .
[Henry , November 5, 2016.]
Wait — is she a? Yes, she’s an elevator operator. The mysterious circle under her hand is no futuristic handbag: it’s the lever that makes the elevator stop where it needs to, more or less aligned with a floor. Not all operators get it right. (See Davey McQuinn.)
Wikipedia has an article with some details of where elevator operators are still at work. I last rode with an elevator operator in the Fine Arts Building in Chicago. It was modern times, this past spring: no hat, no gloves, no uniform.
Related reading
All OCA Henry posts (Pinboard)
“Oh — Groundhog Day is on again.”
Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)
The Dr. Bronner soap label received an “Old & Improved” redesign in 2015. If you buy your Bronner several bottles at a time, you may not have yet noticed.
Here’s a PDF showing the evolution of the Dr. Bronner label from 1973 to 2015. The 1984–2015 labels are also available as individual PDFs. (The pamphlet The Moral ABC is also available as a PDF .) A recent development: as of September 2016, the label carries a call for a higher minimum wage.
Something I noticed and wondered about: the 1984–2015 label appears to have room for everything but “32 FL. OZ.”
||: 32 FL. OZ.! :||
A related post
Dr. Bronner, productivity guru
[The ||: and :||? Repeat, &c.]
“We are just as interested in knowledge and reading as anybody else. We just don’t have the access to the things that the rest of New Yorkers do”: The New York Times reports that the Bronx is about to lose a Barnes & Noble, the borough’s lone general-interest bookstore. The reason: impossibly high rent. Saks Off 5th will replace the bookstore.
This browsable map, from the organization Unite for Literacy, shows where books are and aren’t across the United States. The Bronx already appears to qualify as a book desert.
At what point do those in positions of power recognize that bookstores (like record stores before them) are cultural resources worth protecting?
I know what prompted me to choose the word sympathist to describe my regard for the Chicago Cubs: the ways in which the word sympathizer has long been associated with hateful and fanatic causes.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines sympathist thusly: “One who sympathizes, a sympathizer.” And sympathizer : “One who or that which sympathizes; esp. one disposed to agree with or approve a party, cause, etc.; a backer-up.” So one can sympathize without being a sympathizer.
What makes me happy about having chosen sympathist : as I now know, the OED traces the word to Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The full Coleridge sentence that the OED abbreviates:
The knowledge, — the unthought of consciousness, — the sensation of human auditors — of flesh and blood sympathists — acts as a support and a stimulation a tergo, while the front of the mind, the whole consciousness of the speaker, is filled, yea, absorbed by the apparition.What makes me happier still — take note, Stefan Hagemann — is that Coleridge is writing about Hamlet .
[Hamlet , from a 1611 text in the Bodleian Library.]
As I just told a friend in a letter, I have watched more baseball in the past few weeks than in the past many years. I was hugely happy to see the Cubs win a pennant and a World Series. I am sympathist rather than diehard fan, loyal to those close to me who are loyal to the Cubs.
Whichever way a game went, I found the announcers’ incessant chatter incessantly annoying, particularly when they were swapping statistics that only algorithms could have produced. “Only two catchers have ever,” “The last time a team,” “In 1911 and 1953,” that kind of thing. I know very little about baseball, but it seems to me that the game invites contemplation — watching and waiting and thinking. Joe Buck and company, but especially Buck, sucked all the silence out of the game.
“I gotta use words when I talk to you,” says T. S. Eliot’s Sweeney, but you don’t have to talk all the time . At times I hit Mute.
[The Chicago Cubs over the Cleveland Indians, 8–7, in ten innings. The Cubs have won the World Series.]
