Doing the Right Thing for Yourself and Others

What has unfolded as our American Presidency, in its absolute senile demented psychosis, is challenging our core.  Having irrationality shoved in our faces on a daily basis, as our news media struggles to stay abreast of legitimate news, is horrific.  Truly it is like arguing with a stupid brick wall.  Accordingly I have stopped looking at or listening to the President.  I read the news to stay informed, and it has gotten difficult and challenging.  It is key to realize and remember the hi jinks of the President could and should be construed as diversion from real issues, like the War in Ukraine and the Jeffrey Epstein debacle.  It was inevitable that the President would turn his back on the people and serve his patrons, the rich.  Big Oil.  Duke Energy.  Elon Musk.  Vladimir Putin.  It has become clear that these political decisions that involve military action, War, are simply a tool for the rich to get richer.  The greater American population, the middle and lower classes are the butt of his joke.  Continued inflation especially at the grocery store, of our energy costs to keep our homes running, and of fuel for our necessary vehicles to commute to work are a metaphor for the raping of America by her own President.  There are many examples of this behavior, but they are foreign to us.  With this smoke and mirrors emanating from our White House, it is important that Donald Trump's attacks on the Iranian people are the foreign metaphor.  The real violent attack is on the American people through clandestine, subtle, backdoor corporate behaviors that are harming our health and our ability to survive.  There is nowhere better to experience this behavior than near the world's largest military installation, Fort Liberty.  How is it that our Department of Defense and its secretary now have become a war department and an Army post named after a Confederate?  With all of the money spent and deliberation on finding a new name for Fort Bragg, finally Fort Liberty was born.  It was a good thing.  Now in a berserk circus Pete Hegseth has become the War Secretary and Fort Liberty evidently is back in the late 1800's.  Underneath this political theater manifesting itself as greed, narcissism, and passive violence, our lives are being attacked on the home front through a variety of inbred methods.  In Fayetteville these challenges alone have reduced a once middle class cultural town into a ghetto.  The homeless are the most common sight doing their best to survive with the closing of many of Fayetteville's soup kitchens and shelters.  It is the corporate assault on our daily sensibilities that is the most dire.  I have just experienced a handful of these assaults, and they come invisibly through the air unknown to most.  Much of it is aberrant electricity of all denominations.  Radio frequency (RF), Electromagnetic Frequency (EMF), and now Low Frequency Alternating Current (which should be added to the list) are wreaking havoc on daily activities and human health.  Case and point is what has happened to me in the last few months.  First the charging port on my Macbook Pro shorted, sparked blue twice, and burned preventing it from charging its internal battery.  Perhaps I am naive to believe such a repair should be common, but Apple makes it complicated.  They do this on purpose.  I have been an Apple user since 1991 when I moved to Columbus, Ohio to attend Ohio State University.  Specifically I wanted to learn basic computer music, and I did.  Dr. Thomas H. Wells headed the Sound Synthesis Studio which promulgated electronic music and audio recording.  I built my own personal Apple Macintosh system from surplus parts he harvested from university auctions.  Apple was the chosen system, because unlike Microsoft Windows, the Mac operating system was not an operating system on top of an operating system.  While Apple abstractly did steal the Zerox graphics interface for themselves, Steve Jobs produced a high end, long-lasting, quality computer that best serves the artistic community.  I did not reject the PC or Windows, but it did not make sense to use either.  Apple products were expensive, and as such it was not until my Prophet 600 synthesizer was struck by lightening that we were able to use the insurance reimbursement to purchase my first Apple Macintosh Color LC.  Over time I was able to upgrade to a PowerMac into which I installed a Newer Technology NuBus G3 accelerator card.  This allowed me to record four channels of digital audio being run by Mark of the Unicorn's Digital Performer.  It was a long and challenging build that took place over a few years.  Slowly building this system with bits and pieces was my sole focus at that time as a composer and jazz musician.  Therefore I have stuck with Apple, because it has served me well until Steve Jobs died of cancer and appointed Tim Cooke the Big Kahuna.  Instinctively I knew Apple never would be the same producing forward thinking, innovative, creative computing products.  It would just become Compaq with Tim Cooke's primary focus of filling stock holder's pockets with loot.  None of this concerned me, because second party sellers were still a viable option for finding Apple products.  The beauty of Apple's products was, because they were so well built, they could continue to serve their owners for several decades.  Tim Cooke attempted to change that philosophy to keep Apple lucrative for shareholders.  Not unlike the automotive industry manufacturers began to factor in a shelf life of their products necessitating eventually you would be forced to buy a newer product.  Easily this has been accomplished by slowly choosing not to support older products and phasing out their operating systems.  Newer software and peripherals were not backward compatible, and often it was as simple as a different connector.  The inbred cluster fock of PC computing connectors is real.  You, as the consumer, were forced to educate yourself not only with second party vendors, but Apple's conscious decision to make your machine obsolete.  Who would believe in 2026 they continue to do the same thing?  When my mother died, her iPhone 7 remained.  It worked perfectly, but having experienced the emotionally taxing bereavement of my mother's passing, I let it sit unused.  After a few months and spiraling cable TV and wireless prices, I cancelled her Verizon service.  The phone remained.  Surprisingly to me Boost Mobile had no problem ascribing it a new number.  It was reborn, and I chose to install a second new battery.  OEM batteries become scarce for an older phone, so you must rely upon your own instincts to find the appropriate replacement.  The phone has continued to work until a week ago, when I left it plugged into my iMac computer after uploading a single photograph I had taken.  The next morning the phone inexplicably was dead showing zero battery capacity.  Quickly I googled, and also had remembered that a "necessary and immediate emergency security update" had been suggested by the phone.  Not really thinking I agreed.  If Apple was choosing to update a ten year old phone, it must be for the good?  NOT!!!  The security update they installed in the phone via the internet through my iMac computer (capitalizing on the speed of my fiber optic internet service) is what caused this harm.  What harm?  The battery went from completely functional to DEAD in one night.  Apple's explanation was no different than it was in 2017 when they were sued for purposely "throttling" the processors of older iPhones to slow them down and make you buy a new device.  They were found guilty and were fined 500 million dollars (half a billion) in punitive damaged which was intended to go to individual users for their suffering and eventual loss of their phones.  Again their explanation was a Trumpian gaslight saying that the older aging batteries could not handle the demands of the phone's internal Power Management System.  They were doing the right thing slowing down the phones.  In actuality, truth, and fact Apple behaved criminally under the baton of CEO Tim Cooke.  My iPhone 7's demise was no accident.  They want me to buy a brand new phone.  Any sane man, after such an attack, never would allot one penny to the Apple company ever again.  That is not the way to do good business.  When you fuck your customers up the ass without them knowing it, you are abandoning your attorney client privilege and forsaking your bread and butter.  Apple got richer, shareholders got dividends, and the great divide between the ultra rich and the poor grew more.  For the likes of Musk and Bezos and Gates to hoard America's money and not invest it back into a dynamic economy where money flows is what has killed America and her free market system.  It is exactly the philosophy of our current President.  When God asks these men when they arrive at the Pearly Gates why He should let them into the kingdom of heaven, they will have no reply.  They will be diverted to Hades, where in agony hell fire they will be judged and sentenced to eternal life in through gates of hell.  All they have to do is do the right thing here on Earth.  

The Not Subtle Effect of Infrasound

 I am tired, because Military Ocean Terminal Sunny Point is taking its toll.  Most people don't know about America's largest deep water port.  It is located at the mouth of the Cape Fear River just below Wilmington, North Carolina.  "MOTSU" is the reason why there is no cruise terminal in North Carolina.  If you want to embark a cruise, you must travel to Charleston or further south on the Eastern Seaboard.  If you travel north you have Norfolk, where there is a terminal.  It is located in the midst of our nation's naval military industrial complex.  Why does North Carolina not want a cruise ship terminal in Wilmington?  The Department of Defense (now War Department) does not want it.  They do not relish passenger ships with 5000 cones cruising past America's largest military deep water port.  There are three piers which accommodate three cargo vessels and a vast array of railroad feeder tracks that supply this loading dock.  It has evolved into container shipping.  This is how military supplies are transported to Europe arriving at a military base in Germany.  Munitions and other kinds of equipment are loaded onto these large ships.  The ships sail across the Atlantic providing the proper gear for the United States military.  Because of America's new war with Iran, rail traffic from various military bases to Sunny Point has increased.  This is active revenue for rail companies.  It is easy to recognize.  Fayetteville has enough rail traffic of its own, and often it is overwhelming and destructive to the local civilian community.  There are three major railroads that intersect in downtown Fayetteville.  CSX, the Aberdeen and Rockfish, and RJ Corman.  How can rail traffic be harmful to those not traveling on Amtrack?  "I Could Write a Book."   It would seem those who supported Donald Trump also think it is not possible.  That warm fuzzy sentimental feeling about Thomas the Tank, Lionel, and the Polar Express will not allow them to fathom the dangers of EMF and low frequency alternating current.  Why would electromagnetic waves (radio waves) be emanating from diesel-electric locomotives?  It is an  operative question.  I have a rail study sitting on my desk that explains why.  Locotrol by Wabtec is one reason.  Precision Scheduled Railroading is another.  As railroads downsize their locomotive fleets and eliminate workers, they have begun to use satellite enhanced remote control.  Burlington Northern and Santa Fe  is experimenting with three mile long trains.  These monstrosities require consists in three different places in a train.  They are running three C40-9W's as the front consist, in the middle, and at the end.  That is nine locomotives for one train.  Locotrol is what that allows them to do this.  This system provides wireless control of 4400 horse power freight locomotives, so there are no operators in these additional consists.  In a nutshell every diesel/electric locomotive produces low frequency sound waves or infrasound because of the firing rate of the engine.  Common speeds of these locomotives is 650 rpm's at idle and 1050 for full power.  Each formula of cycles per second produces a corresponding low frequency sound wave which cannot be heard.  Every running locomotive produces its on wave that never stops propagating, even at idle.  In simple mathematical terms as in physics, if you group three locomotives together, their engine revolutions are not synced.  Each one is producing its own soundwave at a slightly different phase than the others.  If you place three more of these a mile away in the middle of a train, and three more at the end of the train, then you have an ambulatory circus of infrasonic pollution.  Google infrasound, and the results for this search will explain how destructive it is to the human body.  The Nazi's studied and used infrasound for various reasons in World War ll.  Never have I liked these waves, because after I discovered them in 1990, their effects never have ceased to make my life more difficult.  This is because of music.  Since Donald Trump has been President, and since Hunter Harrison sealed the deal with Precision Scheduled Railroading in America, the harmful effects of the rail industry have worsened.  When Sunny Point is loading equipment, infrasonic pollution is at its absolute worst on the East Coast.  In Fayetteville, the location of Fort Bragg, the sound waves are so strong they literally can push you over or hinder your gait.  That is now.  Logically I am not able to play music, because these immense, powerful, sound waves negate my efforts.  They have a negative effect of music.  As the music modulates these invisible and inaudible demons, it makes the music unpleasant.  Although I was an avid model railroader and appreciate and understand the importance of the "Iron Horse" in America's development, I despise the rail industry.  Their only goal today is producing revenue for shareholders.  The real world ramifications of a nine locomotive freight train ambulating the American landscape are dire and destructive for the surrounding population.  I have experienced the worsening of this sonic impact over the last decade.  In extreme cases people can die.  Donald Trump said he was getting ready to wipe out an entire civilization.  His administration sets no example for compassionate behavior toward their electing constituents.  It is the opposite.  They do not care if the common American taxpayer is being hammered by infrasound.  The effects of this plague are the same as they always have been, and it is well documented.  If you have questions about your own personal health, consider the effects of infrasonic pollution from America's rail industry, including the Strategic Rail Corridor Network.  (STRACNET)  We may be killing Iranians with bombs, but we are harming Americans in a much more subtle way. 

The Talons of Evil

First and foremost because I don't have an overt need to blog, shaving your head is liberating.  I didn't realize how much time hair takes.  With its absence comes freedom from worry, about hair anyway.  It changes the orientation of your body for the better.  The military figured this out decades ago.  Hair can be vanity, so thoroughly I have enjoyed my lack of hair.  It is more healthy, because as a living thing hair can harbor pathogens.  Still I don't feel an overt need or desire to blog, but I haven't made myself reflect on current issues in several weeks.  It is time.  I have been more bold in my offerings on FB.  My community of friends are conservative, thus the paradigm of "married with children" is prevalent.  There is not much "single" action or opinion.  Is it unusual to be single at the age of 63?  I think not, but there is no question gleaned from my new experiences being a homeowner, "married with children" is the norm for our neighborhood anyway.  From this example comes certain discriminations, and I candidly refer to the "trophy wife."  I have found that friendships within the marriage unit often radiate towards same sex, meaning wives have girl friends, and men have men friends.  Am I wrong?  Most of my life I have enjoyed and had more female friends, only because my choice of male friends was limited.  Interestingly when military couples deploy, the suddenly single wives now are open to fraternization.  When their husbands are deployed they are free to seek friendship outside of the marriage, because largely they are alone.  This interaction often is asexual, androgynous, and harmless.  It is communal support that is needed in the human race.  The maturity of the couple predicates the success or failure of this support.  I have been more bold in my offerings on FB now including hints of romantic or sexual interaction.  "Oh my God!"  Back in the day in the 1980's when I was an adolescent heterosexuality was prominent on television and in film.  It sold!  Sex sells, so they say.  For me it was nothing more than the prospect or possibility of romance.  I must be old fashioned, and at age 63 I must be a dinosaur to have romantic notions in my head at all.  I have not had sex in ten years, so that may explain it.  This is new terrain for me, getting old.  I am learning.  In other nations, as I learned traveling and working on cruise ship, sex readily is available.  Americans condemn this practice, because they equate exploitation of their children and trafficking with prostitution.  Look at the Epstein situation.  That is not prostitution.  It is something much more sordid and depraved, and as such it threatens to bring down the world order.  Enlightened nations just get on with it business as usual.  If you need sexual release or companionship you purchase it.  It only exists for on the short term, say an hour or more commonly a half hour, but it is legal, regulated, sanitary and helpful.  That the United States has such an immature and stunted opinion of the world's oldest profession is frustration, just as people supported Donald Trump.  You can't argue with a wall, and these people are just ?   We must move around them, because it is opinions like theirs that end the world.  We are in such a place politically.  I have washed my hands of it, because it is so depressing.  There are no words to describe the American political scenario.  It is beneath most people, and those who supported Donald Trump have realized the error of their ways.  Skin color and gender determine nothing.  Nada.  Zilch.  The choice of a black woman or a white man for the American President?  The inclinations of a white man are in full bloom and threaten to demolish the world order.  Perhaps having "Coffy" or Oprah as President would have been better.  Oprah built an empire as a black woman.  It is and was more successful than the Trump empire.  With this campaign of war in Iran, with it comes all of the unpleasant tendencies of white corporate America.  They are worse, more exaggerated, more egregious, and more dangerous to Americans.  It has reached a level of genocide, and that genocide peaked with the "outbreak" of Covid 19.  The Big Beautiful Lie of the Century is that Covid jumped from animals to humans, and that it occurred naturally.  The biggest lie of Rock 'n' Roll is the check is in the mail.  The biggest lie of our lifetimes is that Covid was NOT an engineered pathogen and that Anthony Fauci is NOT the devil.  He made HIV and he made Covid 19 and murdered hundreds of thousands of people.  The more quickly we understand the propensity to perpetrate such crimes the more quickly we can evolve and clean up the scraps of America.  Fauci is America's Hitler, and he was patroned by Dick Cheney.  RIP, Mr. Vice President.  How is the card game in hell?   

The FX of War

My fellow musician friend and I were hard at work creating music in his "Mancave" studio.  It had been a pool room and a small apartment with a kitchen and a bathroom.  They had an older man tenant for a while.  When Ed's wife died of cancer, we both needed an outlet for our emotion, opinion, and musical inclination.  Ed is a drummer, a guitarist, and a vocalist, but made his living repairing automobiles at his shop, "Import Auto Repair."  The city of Fayetteville enforced imminent domain, bought his shop, and built the transportation hub in downtown Fayetteville.  We made a good team, a musical duo with a plethora of ability.  Ed wrote songs in the "Old Timey" tradition, and I had a backlog of original music I had written over the years of studying jazz and contemporary classical music.  We had the most meager recording set up, a room, a computer, a stereo in/out audio interface, a PA system, and a handful of mikes.  I convinced him to mount an X/Y pair near the ceiling at the back of the rectangular room, and we recorded most things live.  He would play his vintage Premiere drum set, which sounded like Mitch Mitchells kit.  I played Fender Precision bass through an Ampeg B3 biamped bass amp and overdubbed keyboards from my live play rig which I had set up across and facing his drums.  I routed my small Peavey keyboard mixer into his PA head and into a pair of Ross Typhoon 18" three way speakers.  These older speakers were incredibly accurate, and it was through them we mixed.  Our process was a labor of love and enjoyment, and with Ed's life long experience in music and my professional experience in academia and on ships, we were the epitome of a "stream of consciousness" style of work flow.  I decided early on that I would not project my past gig formula or work load onto our creativity.  Thus we did not play "jazz standards."  We let the Spirit guide us, and it did.  We have produced a substantial musical output consisting of a handful of complete CD's of increasingly variable styles.  We experimented with Avant Garde jazz, swing, country, blues, and Latin.  He was able to express his bereavement for his wife Ingrid, and I was able to channel the challenges of caring for aging parents.  It was a rewarding collaboration in a short period of time.  I remember when Donald Trump was elected President in 2016.  I said, "Why not let him try his hand and see how our own quality of life would change."  I was trying to be optimistic, the same view I offered Pete Hegseth.  In hindsight 2016 began a spiral downward of average quality of life.  Everything became more difficult, like we were fighting some giant invisible antagonist.  Most of all the acoustics of the Mancave deteriorated.  Ed decided to renovate the moldy smelling damp space, so he pulled up the carpet and took down the acoustical or false ceiling.  Both things affected the sound, but it was not that that made the biggest difference in our attempted recordings.  It was the first time I recall recording a tune, and having the overall volume of our playing change drastically in the middle of the song.  Since then and culminating now in 2026, a decade later, the same phenomena exists on a daily basis.  It occurs in my home, and the volume of musical performance or playback changes radically over just seconds in real time.  Therefore my attempts to record videos of my own in different rooms with different set ups are plagued with the same demon.  I often play left hand bass as a keyboardist, and setting its level is the most important thing in a mix, especially in jazz.  Suddenly my bass sounds were not consistent, and their volumes were changing continuously in real time second to second.  The tinnitus in my left ear would ebb and flow, and the efficiency of the amplification would struggle.  Only in the last few months did GOOGLE tell me what the effects of "over voltage" were.  It explained the phenomenon exactly.  Because I have a vintage Hammond console organ with tubes, it is susceptible to such influence.  Others in the Hammond world have experienced similar effects.  What it boiled down to was that not only was there a standing wave in our space, there was a myriad of RF content coming from many disparate sources like the military at Fort Bragg.  This includes radar, widespread surveillance, and downright aerial antagonism.  It should be no surprise that aviation is viable tool for such activity, and a fleet of Russian backed shell company planes were found.  They are not the only culprit.  Like many modern American corporate processes including rail, it must have become clear that the artifacts or by products of these activities also could be  weaponized.  The Republican Party used this ploy touting the weaponization of various government agencies, including voting.  The reality is, now with very little governmental oversight or regulation, the ordinary landscape for working Americans has become a mine field.  Literally we are being attacked at all levels. With the Covid outbreak and the recent President's tirades against everyone including the Pope, the Catholic Church, and the evil Democrats, etc. it commonly should be understood Americans are not immune from persecution.  Upon study America has experienced five years of blunt and acute attack while Trump has been President.  Every aspect of our lives is beset with challenges rather than being supported.  For those who have committed no crimes, unlike Donald Trump, Americans do not deserve nor merit persecution from their own democratic leadership.  We have in fact witnessed and experienced an internal coup of leadership that has attempted to transform American democracy into Fascism.  Still to this day the leader of this evil is the American President.  It is not new.  Many other countries have succumbed to the same transformation, where the elected ruling body turns against the people.  It is fairly new to the United States, and I am not a historian enough to know if another American President behaved similarly.  The ploy is to feign honesty and integrity and skull fuck the population on the down low.  While we experienced remnants of this under George W. Bush Jr., (and it seemed extreme and painful at the time), it pales in comparison to the world corruption of Donald Trump.  He is a war criminal and a convicted felon and should be removed from office along with his Vice President and the Speaker of the House.  Unfortunately the Jeffry Epstein scheme blackmailing the most powerful and influential world leaders, including members of Congress, has proven effective  eliminating dissent in Washington.  They have become spineless cowards stemming from an immature lust for teenage booty.  No enlightened society would allow pussy to bring down world leaders.  You have to pay for it any way and where you look.  Power does not and should not predicate sex for free.  The idea that screwing under age girls on Epstein's private island could and would topple the world order including the most powerful and exemplary democracy, is ludicrous.  I would assume "Original Sin" is as powerful as God has said.  It only is truncated minds akin to Appalachian inbred hillbillies that would allow physical lust to undermine civilization.  It is a natural God-given urge and nothing of which to be ashamed.  Unfortunately "Fire and Brimstone" extreme Biblical prophesying by ignorant, manipulative, evil men has become the strongest political tool of all.  It's time to move on.  

The Devil - Phased Array Radar

The list is so long, the criminally illegal, unconstitutional, immoral acts of nepotism that our President has orchestrated and begun to actualize using the advantage of the most powerful man in the world.  Few American villains have had the audacity to flaunt their aberrations seeking some kind of sordid appreciation.  There once was a time when government and corporate corruption was high brow and sought to cover its tracks creating immunity from prosecution.  If you are so old with nothing to look forward to but criminal prosecution and public humiliation and the loss of your empire for a second time, then your delusions evolve into biblical proportions.  Of all of it, the planned and coveted war time economy as the result of a not Congressionally approved personal mandate to reward his backers, the most intrusive and heinous breech of American civil rights is surveillance.  It is rife.  It began with the NSA and the search for terrorists at the behest of a planned attack on the twin towers by the lower Saudi royals.  Strategy, policy, and philosophy have been elusive to Congress, and it is because we have elected ignorant, incompetent, Yes Men like Linsdey Graham.  Spineless sycophants incapable of planning a dinner party.  They rather would take a private jet to a private island populated with underage adolescents who have been manipulated to provide sex for repugnant old men.  It is no wonder Washington and Congress have failed.  A social club of wealthy losers who disdain God and worship themselves, America has not seen such a plight.  We have had periods of strife and corruption, but the long arms of democracy reached out and strangled the proprietors of these Trusts, regulated corporate monopolies, and reeled in ensuing American Marxism.  It took a century to manifest itself again.  The Republican Party was clever to begin with and manipulated state Electoral Colleges to elect Donald Trump in 2016.  They continued with the attack on the United States Capital when Congress was trying to validate President Joe Biden's win.  Since his reelection in 2024 there has been little finesse.  It has been a full fledged attack on the United States from within the White House, Project 2025.  Fascists all of them.  Shotspotter.  Backpack radar systems that easily were reprogrammed to become nonlethal weapons.  Did the Russians do this, take an American made military and civilian microwave product and turn it on us?  It cost the intelligence community 14 million dollars to find out.  If we wanted to set things straight and bring a rapid resolution to government tyranny against the people, we would ban the phased array radar.  The legalization of these frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum by Bill Clinton created a nemesis so great we cannot recognize it.  It is invisible, but you can hear and feel it.  Your body can falter from it like sufferers of the Havana Syndrome.  The phased array radar is the ultimate culprit, the invader of humanity with little pencil beams that can be steered by shifting the phase of thousands of individual microwave transmitters.  It can be pointed at you inside your house with pinpoint accuracy from a variety of host platforms.  Like they soon discovered what began as surveillance quickly escalated into corporate and government terrorism against the people.  The entire scope of the intelligence community in one fell swoop must have been rendered moot.  All of that leg work, that cunning strategy of the CIA, FBI, and KGB all reduced to a handful of oligarchs, the same thing that is happening to the American economy.  BAN PHASED ARRAY RADAR, and that horribly invasive broad band wireless signal now on most commercial aircraft ensuring connectivity for its customers never again will penetrate the walls of your home create harm for you and your children. 

The Removal of the Destroyer

Still I am pecking away at my cumulative history of American Popular Music.  It is too broad in scope, like the history of Western music, to reasonably absorb all of it.  I didn't know this before I embarked on this journey.  It did begin with just Jass, and my study of Jazz acutely exposed to me how broad this music is.  Here is an example, if you were trying to teach Jazz History to college freshman.  First, there are many styles or genres of what we call jazz.  Most are very different from one another, so trying to find a thread between them is difficult.  It is a life long task, but I am getting closer.  In talking about "styles" of Jazz, which of itself is taboo, the easiest way to present it is to just expose the students to examples of this music being played in their own context.  If we only have audio recordings, it is very difficult to put a timeline on Jazz music.  Visual performances, like American Popular Music, are much more telling and communicative.  It is and was the purpose of this music, for you to experience it first hand and not through an iPod.  While the miniaturization of music play back systems have created convenience for users and economical affordability, older methods of music listening are more efficient.  I'll say that again.  Youtube has revolutionized music history with its breadth of information, footage, and history.  College level music classes have been retooled, because most everything of importance is available at the touch of a mouse on the internet.  Experiencing the music in its historical context is more important, and that means full body contact.  Hearing little audio bytes through earbuds is a spayed and neutered process of experiencing music.  It is not unlike the modern day state of sexuality in the United States.  We have strayed so far from the Creator's purpose, we have lost the essence of much of humanity.  I refuse to accept a woman's berating of a man, because he shows romantic or sexual interest.  We are directly in that time, a unique and unusual time when male predators are the headlines.  It is gross, unconscionable, and embarrassing that some of our most beloved American figures are sexual offenders and pedophiles.  That Bill Cosby would drug mostly white women seeking career advancement and sexually abuse them in front of his wife is criminal.  The list is long, so it has been a common practice in American society that influential powerful men feel they deserve sexual favors for free.  That we continue to dethrone American Presidents because of sexual impropriety is archaic.  When compared to enlightened nations, American beliefs and subsequent behaviors are primitive, often brutal, and violent.  We like to fight, but it seems we don't really like to f--k.  We have spent the last decade (someone) trying to confuse our children into not knowing and understanding their own gender and sexual identity.  Inasmuch as I do not disdain homosexuality, upon consistent reflection and observation I have found nothing positive about it at all.  While I am sure there are well adjusted homosexual couples who are not depraved and promiscuous, many are.  They lifestyle of rebellion they live often is based on hatred, vindictiveness, and malice.  They do not seek solidarity but separation and recognition of their difference.  It should be no surprise the majority of the population today misunderstand basic human sexuality and its dependence on gender differences.  That I am sexually attracted to a woman is no bad reflection on me.  God gave me a penis and a man's hormones.  Being attracted to and wanting to couple with women is my mission statement as a man from God.  Period.  That women choose rather to hide behind shells of hatred and maladjustment rather than learning how to deal with the gender difference is their shortcoming.  It's a tough pill, but life is tough.  There once was no shortcut.  Today we choose to hide and cower and suffer from our own inabilities to solve our own problems.  We just spew hatred and vitriol like the modern Republican Party.  We dredge up reasons to hate one another, when it is easier and more rewarding to live in peace.  I guess we do need fresh lessons from God about this.  So much music is based on romance, and today it is anachronistic.  As a modern society we do not understand romance as it once existed.  The internet has seen to that.  When you do open yourself up to the Great American Songbook, you must have some understanding of heterosexual romance.  The Sexual Revolution in America did change this perspective as did drugs and Rock 'n' Roll.  Interestingly I never equated Jazz music with romantic love.  Many aspects of Jazz deal with deeper issues including racism, discrimination, and war.  John Coltrane had a world perspective in his music as did Miles Davis.  When you are playing about survival, it is a different story than simple romance.  There are genres under the blanket of the word Jazz that explore and actualize different goals.  These goals loosely can translate to "aesthetic" or feeling.  What are you trying to say, or create, or communicate to others?  One example is the genre of Keith Jarrett and Jan Gabarek with strings.  Jarrett has written many tuneful, almost gospel, singing melodies that have a feeling of church.  The industry chosen title for their style was championed by the record label ECM in Scandinavia.  It evolved into "New Age."  There was an undercurrent of worship in a large cathedral with those acoustics providing a depth of sacred feeling in the secular music.  This formula, or God versus the Devil, is common in quality American music such as the Blues.  The Pentecostal worship service, with its depth of feeling and exuberance to express such, found its way from the sanctuary to the jook joints.  Not all Jazz recognizes or acknowledges overt spirituality, and some Early Jazz was a vehicle for fornication.  I think it is most accurate to categorize a music by the feeling it creates.  Aaron Copland would disagree.  If you compared this ECM music and its feeling to a Thelonious Monk small group with his angular, pointed, modern compositions, the difference would be obvious.  Monk used Pointillism in his piano stylings, a much more modern approach to the piano than his immediate predecessors.  Similarly Gunther Schuller created "Third Stream" jazz that used elements of symphonic music.  Charles Mingus is a worthy example of this genre, and this combination changed the feeling of the music from possible romance, sexual activity, or relaxation to something deeper such as loss or the contemplation of morality.  None of this is about what I wanted to blog tonight.  What is on my mind is the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality.  I found this agency online, and for a while I was receiving email updates about their activity.  After trying to contact some of their agents, I quickly realized this organization has suffered the same fate as most other federal agencies under the Trump Administration.  No longer do they strive in their own mission statements.  Instead they have been taken over by stooges who advance the profits of their friends.  In the recent lawsuit by Cumberland Country against Chemours and DuPont, their rebuttal was, "No one but this department and the state can bring grievances against us."  This has shielded them from litigation until now, when a three judge panel ruled otherwise.  The Department of Environmental Quality is and was just a political tool to protect corporate America.  It is a farce, and it is the kind of farce Phil Berger embraced.  His main impetus as the Senate President Pro Tempore was to do for his friends, not the people of North Carolina.  There is no need to capsulize today's news.  It's absurdity is self explanatory.  The defense industry wants war as does other facets of corporate America.  Who benefited the most from the Covid outbreak, when we all were sheltered in place at home?  Jeff Bezos and his Amazon.  World politics is about the bottom line, not people.  We have more than one war criminal in Washington, and one of them blatantly attacked our own working government.  We reelected him President.  What does this say about our own people?  It says that most of us are not Americans at all.  We are war mongering extremists who have been indoctrinated by something else.  We want to devolve to the tribalism of Islamic Extremism, where we do not have minds enough to figure out what to do with our lives but fight one another.  It is a massive failure of the educational system, and it has been achieved by our own governments with leaders such as Phil Berger.  The immediate exploitation of American assets is their only goal.  Their ship is sinking, so why not take down the world with it?  Are we going to let a senile and deranged President achieve the same thing, invoke world war to destroy the world for kicks?  Any prudent nation would find a way to remove this man from office.  

The Barbs of Early Jass

My friend and mentor in jazz, George William (Bubba) Jay Knowles had very specific interests and opinions about this swing based improvisatory music.  If I quote him directly, "There are two things I don't.  They are singers and guitar players."  (You better not try to talk to the bass player while playing a tune on a set.  You might lose your job.)  Miles Davis often said his father was an oral surgeon and he never wanted for anything, but his overt voice in the jazz aesthetic could be a metaphor for melancholy.  Evidently Miles didn't equate this affliction with the Blues.  American racism saw him clubbed over the head with a knight stick while standing in front of the club he  was playing.  They took him to jail, much like ICE is "detaining" people of color.  The color of your skin was a barrier early Americans had trouble with.  White is right.  Not.  I tried to argue with Jay a few times about his opinionated views, but it was pointless.  It took me three more decades and watching Donald Trump be elected President twice to understand many people are irrational, and often they talk talk that doesn't coincide with their actions.  I have learned it is important to let people talk and express themselves, even if it is offensive to you.  I learned from my Uncle, Dr. Peter Reichle, that adults learn not by you telling them something, but from seeing something often enough they came to their own conclusion about it.  It takes time and reinforcement to make adult change their opinions.  That would explain the grandmaster blackmailer and now senile leader of the free world.  Perhaps $5.00 a gallon gas prices will lead them to vote another way come the November midterm elections.  I understood his point of view, my friend Bubba Knowles.  He was a jazz purist and had most issues of Downbeat magazine.  His CD collection was vast and covered several walls including music he had uploaded off the internet.  He didn't like "singers," and he didn't like guitar players.  I knew a little bit about jazz vocalists back in 1988 and not much about jazz guitarists.  I recognized the names Wes Montgomery, Charlie Christian, Jim Hall, Joe Pass, and George Benson.  That was about it.  Guitar and the playing of the guitar is an approach unto its own in the world of jazz.  Probably the most notable example of jazz guitar is with Oscar Peterson when he and Ray Brown didn't need a drummer.  Jim Hall fulfilled the responsibility of a drummer in this trio assuming the rhythm role.  It is similar to Freddie Green accompanying Count Basie all those years in his big band but never taking a solo.  Today if I had to have an opinion about jazz guitar, I would say George Benson and Kenny Burrell appeal to me most.  Although George is from a later era, he like Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin easily and aptly could synthesize past styles and appeal to modern sensibilities.  In a more pure jazz vein, Kenny Burrell easily could shed those feathers and embark on the journey of Soul Jazz and rock with organists like Jimmy Smith and Jack McDuff.  In 1988 Joe Pass was my favorite acoustic guitarist playing standards in a virtuosic style.  If I had to chose a guitarist in the fusion genre, it would be Larry Carlton.  Jay liked none of them, but he did like organists on the B-3.  Even as I have learned how important the early vocalists were for many reasons, Jay would never change his opinion.  Just as Dr. Ted McDaniel queried me on my General Exams in 1996, it has taken me this long to develop a comprehensive understanding of singing in the jazz vernacular.  The most important concept of jazz singing is, until it began to develop, the only singing the world heard was European-based art music.  John Phillip Sousa and Enrico Caruso were the best selling artists of the turn of the century.  The concept of the American Popular Song and its realization were new artistic developments.  That there could be information or expression "between the notes" was a new concept in the singing of art songs or in opera.  The "Blues" was influential as was slavery, because a new kind of expression was actualized to convey these deeper feelings.  The roots were in folk musics, and Scot Irish ballads were a large influence all ready expressing a blues of their own.  It may be that financially fortunate members of societies may not have been exposed to, forced to indulge in, or recognize and understand the depth of feeling of people truly struggling for existence.  Miles would say he never had the blues, but in reality he was a walking archetype of an individual consumed with heavy and often personally oppressive sentiments.  He was playing a club in Harlem and standing on the sidewalk smoking a cigarette on a break when a policeman told him to move along.  He explained he was headlining the club behind him, but the racist cop bludgeoned him on the head and took him to jail because he was black.  If you don't get the Blues from that experience, what would it take?  Being enslaved I would think.  Necessarily black slave culture was surprisingly different than white culture, and over time slave owners began to understand and sometimes appreciate this more African-influenced approach to living.  I would have to digress that George Williams Knowles' opinion about singers and guitar players defied logic, in that the human voice is the quintessential musical instrument.  Perhaps he was underwhelmed by the singing aesthetic of late 1980's in popular culture America.  Many trained and talented jazz musicians might be so judgemental as to deny Louis Armstrong the title "The Real King of Jazz."  After careful study I love the Paul Whiteman Orchestra.  I find nothing condescending or derogatory about this ensemble, its players or arrangements.  On the contrary I find this music, like Fletcher Henderson and Benny Moten, extremely forward thinking, artistic, clever, and entertaining.  That Early Jazz was arranged music, music written with a pen by an astute arranger, every note written out and intended for a particular intelligent audience, may be the irony or controversy.  Our modern interpretation of Jazz is that it mainly is improvisatory music.  Early Jazz was not, although Louis Armstrong created the mold that improvisation was cast from improvising choruses in Joe King Oliver's band as the patient and often bored second trumpeter.  They played written out tunes, often in a march form with different strains, and Satchmo would paraphrase the strict metronomic melody with a personal interpretation that mimicked a theme and variations.  He was interjecting his own soul into a somewhat institutional rendering of banjo music stemming from Vaudeville and the practice of minstrelsy.  Jazz on most occasions was performed for people with money, therefore society, so a certain code of conduct was in place.  It would be Jelly Roll Morton who developed Early Jazz in and for a more degenerate low income audience.  

Jazz Icons

In my study of jazz music, which began officially in 1988 after I graduated from the University of South Carolina with a Master of Music degree in Jazz and Commercial Music, it has taken over three decades to get near a historical lineage of the evolution of Jazz.  When I took my General Exams at Ohio State University, Dr. Ted McDaniel asked me a question so complex about the evolution of jazz it has taken me thirty years just to come to understand the question.  Needless to say the art form of Jazz is complex and far reaching.  One must live it to understand from the inside out.  I learned the bulk of jazz history from my friend and geru Jay Knowles.  To this day he is the most exceptional jazz scholar ever I have encountered, and that is because he loved the music.  Two years with him as a guide, and I waded through the theoretical aspect of jazz music, meaning it was a study of jazz theory.  I all ready new most of it, because I was a Graduate Teaching Associate.  With the exception of the Lydian Chromatic Concept, a theoretical framework of jazz harmony based upon the Lydian Augmented scale or ascending melodic minor scale, I understood most concepts of jazz melody and harmony.  Completing the coursework for a doctorate of musical arts in composition rounded out my knowledge of music composition.  There were two things Ted McDaniel asked me in the doctoral exam.  One, was the evolution of jazz just a journey culminating in the Avant Garde, and two, talk about the jazz vocalists.  I knew the major figures in jazz, which were Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughn, Joe Williams and a few more.  I never had done an exhaustive study of the vocalists like I had done for instrumental jazz with Jay Knowles.  As it turns out a thorough study of Miles Davis from his first recording with Rubberlegs Williams to the end was a solid base for understanding most jazz.  I did not pass these General Exams the first time I took them, and that was circa 1996.  After completing all of this coursework I had to stop at OSU to have cornea transplants in both eyes.  Only today do I feel I am getting close to the level of proficiency needed to be a jazz scholar.  It takes time, so it is a lifelong pursuit.  If I were teaching again, to make it interesting to students I would come up with unconventional references that would connect with a younger modern generation of students.  Once I was good at this, being "hip."  If we try to understand the music from within, it is rife with sorrow and disappointment.  We need a more light-hearted way to approach the music, understand it, and appreciate it for what it has to offer the human race.  It is substantial, but it is complicated.  I could start with a humorous aside that I got transferred off my first Carnival cruise ship orchestra position because I tried to talk to the bass player during a tune.  He was so surprised and offended, Kirwin Brown, that he stopped playing, put his bass down, yelled at me, and walked off the stage.  The band followed him and refused to finish the set saying I was an offensive homophobe.  I pleaded with them not do make this stand and finished the set solo piano playing bass with my left hand on a keyboard.  I got the written warning.  This is ship politics.  In my discussion with the Musical Director, I pointed out that everyone in the band that walked off the stage and refused to play also merited a written warning for refusing to perform their scheduled duties.  They were not happy about this, and for some reason it was a surprise.  All of this for trying to communicate verbally while playing a jazz set.  The drummer, Donald Brown, who often just stopped playing to let the piano player take the lead, said our jazz performance was sacred and no words should be required.  They highly were offended that I tried to talk to them as we played.  Can you imagine being on stage in the band, and not being able to talk to them?  Perhaps what is the next tune?  Shall we do a medley?  Let's cut this tune short.  Lets go to double time.  Tempers and egos were high on the Carnival Destiny, but with less than 24 hours notice I was told I was being transferred to the Carnival Paradise where I had to quit smoking cold turkey.  It wasn't much later that Mr. Brown blew his top again and was fired and put off the ship in Aruba to find his own way home.  Jazz is a lifelong study, and it is good that it is that way.  The Three B's, trumpeters that were put out of commission because of alcoholism.  Buddy Bolden, Bix Beiderbecke, and Bunny Berigan.  It is best not to be a BB in the Jazz Age.  You don't want your name beginning with B for your first and last name, and you don't talk to the bass player while playing during a set.  I made it a point in the last few years while looking after my mother to round out my incomplete knowledge of jazz vocalists, and I have with the help of Youtube.  In trying to answer the question put to Facebook users by my former student and doctor of music Robert Gardener, this is upon what I arrived.  1.  Louis Armstrong.  2.  Lester Young.  3.  Ella Fitzgerald.  4.  Miles Davis.  5.  Fats Waller.  Many would be alarmed and surprised I didn't include John Coltrane, Duke Ellington, or Count Basie, all of which who were extremely influential to the art of Jazz.  If you only could pick five artists who most shaped Jazz music over the course of a century, these are my picks.  The reason is, much like a college teacher, they do many things.  Louis Armstrong was the most substantial model of jazz being a virtuosic trumpet soloist and improviser, knowing and singing in his characteristic communicative tone almost the entirety of the Great American Songbook, and doing all of this without being able to read music.  He also transected Early Jazz and Swing smoothing out the earlier ricky tick style and codifying swing rhythm or feel.  The study of jazz saxophonists is almost as broad as the study of all jazz.  While Sydney Bechet is notable in the earlier years. the approach of Lester Young is phenomenally unique in its tender and expressive phrasing of melodies.  Many others used the same approach, but Lester was the original.  The Prez.  Ella Fitzgerald covered decades with her vocal prowess easily scat singing bebop, covering pop tunes with a girlish voice in her mid teens with Chick Webb, or belting Rock tunes with a dance band when necessary.  She did it all.  Miles can be credited with creating three distinct styles of jazz including Cool, Modal, and Fusion.  No other artist has this diversity as a band leader.  From the perspective of the keyboard, the study of jazz piano also is its own anthology.  While Art Tatum often is recognized as the progenitor of early jazz piano, Fats Waller was a prolific composer, vocalist, stride pianist, and entertainer.  He pioneered the vocal style of carrying on a conversation with multiple people while singing alone answering himself often in the opposite gender.  He covered all the bases alone.  While there are many more influential jazz artists who round out the aesthetic such as Eric Dolphy and Weather Report, if we are attempting to blanket the entirety of jazz and retain its most quintessential elements, these five artists are a good start.