Southern Bells and Pop Music

I have been wanting to blog for a week or so, but like other tasks I have been avoiding blogging at times heightens awareness a bit too much.  I will call it an invasion of privacy.  Abstractly refusing one's mind it's need to function, to operate, to think and solve problems, to fight for one's survival is a bit Southern.  The South after all is genteel.  It is a land dotted with plantation front porches, glasses of freshly squeezed lemonade, and bells.  I don't mean the kind that are found in church towers.  I am talking about Southern women or matriarchs as Chef Vivian Howard calls them.  Disparaging Southern Bells is and was not the intent of this blog entry, although I have a few things to say about the subject.  They do enjoy a passive man, a man who smiles, shag dances, and otherwise blows sunshine up their asses.  If you are connected, grew up with money and influence, you may not need the skills about which I am going to write.  The skills I have learned throughout my life with an undergraduate degree from Chapel Hill (in 1985, which means far more than it does today), a graduate degree from the Gamecocks at USC, and all DMA coursework at Ohio State has both taught and inspired me to excel in the field of music.  I would have done it anyway had I not attended any of these places.  My father was an exceptional musician, and somewhere along the line I decided being the best musician I could was the right thing to do.  It has gotten me very little.  In fact nothing.  Unless you are part of the in crowd as Ramsey Lewis would say, finding a job in academia is political.  UNC didn't teach me this.  Politics is taught within the family unit as children observe their affluent and influential parents' wheel and deal through their lives.  Many of the people I went to school with were stupid.  They did not do well in high school, but amazingly they all seemed to have grown up to be their parents.  They have yuppie jobs, children, and still enjoying shagging, pink and green, and the company of other Southern socialites.  If that is what floats your boat, playing dress up, smiling, pretending to be something, because you don't have the gumption to actually do something with this time, okay.  We differ.  Socializing in Fayetteville, North Carolina purely is politics.  It is a small town with very little room for new blood or money.  I overlook this fact, and it continues to cause me grief because I don't like to soak cork. I mean be Southern.  Be passive.  Smile.  Act the fool to blend in and not challenge the set way of thinking.  If you have that good job, then it would be easy to do that.  That is what the South has been doing for over a century.  If you are looking for work, looking to enjoy your on life without the influence of power and money, it is a different story.  The way I became good at music, although I have reaped almost nothing from my exertions, was to be excited about it.  I was a mover and shaker and took no prisoners.  This worked well until I met a girl name Geraldine.  It continued to work well for three years, until she grew up.  I don't know whether she became unattracted to me or the the opposite, but we separated on a sour note.  The three years of musical excellence we experienced together at my behest came to an abrupt end, when she decided to end my life.  I never really knew it at the time, that one person's opinion can destroy another person's life.  That is politics, and I have experienced it a few times in my life.  Once I had words with Cruise Director Sammy Baker, and she picked up the phone and blacklisted me with the Carnival Corporation.  She told their musical hiring professional not to hire me again.  I quit her gig two weeks shy of my contract completion date, because she did not see, understand, or acknowledge how I had contributed to the Regal Princess.  When life becomes a time when you are working far above and beyond what is reasonable, and someone begins to criticize you for it, it is time to go.  I had to end a seven year relationship with my first love for the same reason.  I learned that such behavior is an inability to make a decision that is difficult.  They could not sever the bond that needed to be severed, so they mistreat you enough until you do it for them.  Criticism in the midst of great effort and love.  It is a conundrum.  Geraldine was a prickly pear, and decided in her adolescent glory to take my success for herself.  Until that point I was allowed to be a successful musician. The parties at large around us were summoned by the wives, and their influence was great.  It is one reason why my band Quintessence won the semi-finals of the Hennessy Cognac Jazz Search.  She and John Glancy's girlfriend accompanied us to New Orleans to compete at Storyville.  When we played these two blond beauties whooped up the place like groupies we never had had, and it worked.  Doc Severinson and the judges liked their tight white pants, and the band, and our music.  We would not have won without the Southern Bells at work.  Needless to say I was not given two extra plane tickets to Los Angeles, and no one paid us any mind at the finals even though a young Chris Potter was fronting the band.  It was politics.  Music is politics.  I listen to WCPE pretty often, and there are times when thoroughly I enjoy the music.  The rest of the time they play music from the Classic Period, and if anyone is interested the Classical Period was during a time of court.  Papa Haydn worked for the Esterhazys.  When you hear this music by nature of its emerged definition, it is polite, symmetrical, and a bit stiff and square.  It sounds like court.  Certainly it doesn't sound like individual freedom.  When they play classical symphonies I feel the same way as I do when confronted with the American South.  Someone else is controlling the party, and it is their party.  Music for my is MY party.  It is one of the things I can do that allows me the freedom and expression to be an individual, rejects society's  norms and stereotypes, and tell the story that I am thinking and feeling.  It is not unlike writing a blog entry, yet it is more visceral. Music if given the opportunity can be pure feeling. Schoenberg and other great composers disagree including Mr. Stravinsky.  They say music has no inherent emotion, and Mr. Babbit would agree wholeheartedly.  If it is embraced and appreciated for its ability to do this, music can be pure feeling.  For me it is.  It always has been, and that is why I excelled at it.  If you tap into expression, emotion, and if it means something, then you are making an artistic statement.  I listened to myself playing lead trumpet in my Governor's School wind ensemble in 1980, and it was transcendent.  The entire group new what we were accomplishing, and we have Terry Mizesko, the bass trombonist with the North Carolina Symphony, to thank for this. He didn't look like Leonard Bernstein in his white tennis shorts, but he understood what we were trying to accomplish.  It was an exemplar education experience, as it should have been being The Governor's School of North Carolina.  I am grateful to have been allowed to have participated.  I almost didn't make the cut.  The original GSNC in Winston Salem was an orchestra.  When they expanded to St. Andrew's College there weren't enough string players to go around, so they made a wind ensemble.  Because wind ensembles have no strings, they use trumpets and cornets.  This is a lost art, and I am not sure any traditional musical concepts are being taught today in education.  Our musical educational system has sold out just like Apple.  They teach pop to kids and parents who demand the shag.  One interesting thing is the South helped create great music in America. The "Jazz Highway" is an interesting map that shows the history of jazz just in the Carolinas.  It includes Cheraw, SC, Hamlet, NC, and Rocky Mount.  A diagonal line connects the birthplaces of Dizzy Gillespie, John Coltrane, and Thelonious Monk.  (There is one other person on the journey, but I can't remember them.  Oh, it's me!)  At least my birthplace of Mocksville, NC is in proximity.  I quit aspiring to be a great jazz pianist years ago.  Interestingly when you quit trying to be great at something, it gets easier.  Truly if you have an interest, you will continue to pursue your interest out of desperation.  We must do something.  I am not sure if picking what you love so you will never work a day in your life applies, but music feels a bit like that to me, until now.  I am not liking music at the moment, because of what has happened to music in America.  Surely it is because of Simon Cowell and the Norwegian television producer who came to America and destroyed professional music.  As television continues to do they would rather exploit  the common man, pay them nothing, build them up, and then revel in their subsequent failure.  This is the definition of pop.  Pop does not even seek to find the suitable expression.  If it did, it would require talent, musical knowledge, skill, and technique.  Most of all it would require an intellectual and spiritual understanding for which no one has the time.  Pop in a nutshell took the easiest rhythmic concept, the one that is the most simplistic and requires the least amount of feeling or time, and exploited it.  I used to really dislike Motown.  I disliked them, because Barry Gordy exploited soul music.  Soul music has the feeling and spirituality of which I am talking, and it was embodied at STAX records.  Motown instead used the pop groove as the vehicle for their music, because like shag music seemed to communicate with the masses.  It is simplistic.  It is what we have today, silhouettes of guitar players strumming those infernal machines with no understanding that other rhythms are possible.  That visual representation of pop, that up and down strumming of the guitar, is so limiting.  It is limiting, because by definition it cannot create an emotion.  If you strummed a string of eight notes in perfect time and generated an emotion within your body, it would be possible to convey feeling.  That string of notes, that strum on the guitar that has become the metaphor for pop music, does not possess the ability to move listeners.  It is a beginner's roller skate, which functions at an elementary level and allows aspiring pop musicians to create a facade of greatness.  At least when you listen to classical music, reggae, or jazz in the pure forms they use instrumental music to convey feeling.  It is accomplished with the things you learn in a good music education.  Phrasing, dynamics, taste, rhythm, and the rest.  You cannot substitute desire for the elements that create great music.  Hence we have mediocre pop music, and if it continues surely it will disappear.  Unlike Wynton Marsalis I will not buy a ticket on the pop train.  I will not buy a ticket, because after almost two years of study and exploration of the pop idiom, I have no desire to change my learned piano technique.  I now know how Stevie plays, how Elton plays, and how Leon Russell plays.  Even one musician I admire, David Foster, is exploiting the pop rhythm.  America seems to know nothing else these days.  It was extremely fitting that Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize in Literature.  At least he was doing the right thing. 

A Short History of GSE's

The Federal National Mortgage Association or Fannie Mae was a Government Sponsored Enterprise or GSE formed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal in l938 in response to the Great Depression. It attempted to facilitate liquidity in the market by making mortgages available to lower income families. It bought mortgages from Savings and Loans, which encouraged more lending and insured the value of the mortgages by the United States government. In l968 Fannie Mae was converted into a privately owned corporation with shareholders. A newly formed publicly funded partition institution, The Government National Mortgage Association or Ginnie Mae, took over the role of Fannie Mae. In l970 The Emergency Home Finance Act created a new private corporation GSE to further stimulate the secondary housing market. The Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation or Freddie Mac buys mortgages on the secondary market, pools them, and sells them as mortgage-backed securities to investors on the open market.

Zen and the Art of Midnight Motorcycling

Tonight I tarried on both of my blogposts.  I made valid points, but I didn't get to the heart of the matter intended.  At Christmastime (in Caroline, and in other places) society is in full combat dress, or at least that is what it feels like to me.  This evening consisted of eating pinto beans, raw tomato and onion, and cornbread which browned and set with the help of Alton Brown.  Heating your cast iron skillet in a 425 degree oven ensures your batter will crust on the bottom when cooking for twenty minutes.  A little sugar helped.  I was glad to help my mother, although she was in a rotten mood.  After watching a little tube I did a thing that could be a metaphor for my holidays.  I have experienced these holidays before in Cowtown.  It took a while for it to become apparent to me that I was experiencing a true Paul moment.  It was not my mother.  It was not the neighborhood, although they were involved.  What I did completely and one hundred percent was me, and the response I had also was one hundred percent me.  I was riding a Honda CRF50 minibike in the darkened rain at ten o'clock at night in an upstanding middle-class neighborhood.  I had no helmet.  I had no protective gear.  Only I had a hoodie that won't stay up, because of the force of the driving wind.  It was surreal.  The hum of the CRF motor was a calming force for me, but also I get a visceral jolt from being rebellious in what is not a rebellious place.  For a brief moment three curious vehicles stalked me, and after I stopped and sat on the side of the road quietly recalcitrantly they drove past.  Residents of this neighborhood I am finding have rampant imaginations, and a fifty year old man in a hoody riding a minibike in the rain is like the Ringling Brother Circus.  It is surprising to me that adolescents today must live lives of such doldrums.  Do they really not know how to have fun anymore?  We used to have sex.  Such an action in the old days would qualify as such.  I enjoyed my ride, but what was challenging was the disparity between a rebellious motorcycle ride and expensive homes draped in decorative Christmas lights.  I have not taken the opportunity to tour the neighborhood in the evening, so who knew families were so into decorating their homes for the holiday season?  I do not feel festive in the least, so for me it's business as usual.  I, as a single adult, will have to jump start my holiday gift-buying, or I will be delinquent.  The metaphor which emerged under a crisp, clear, Carolina moon was that the majority of these people were in their warm homes adorned by Christmas lights with their families doing what I assume are festive things.  (or maybe because school is not quite out, preparing for the next day)  I didn't want to think about it for too long, because it was creepy.  To the sensibility in this neighborhood I could have been the Creeper smelling and stalking adolescents for the feeding.  As a matter of consequence I do not take a minibike rides in the darkened rain every seventeen years.  (or is it more or less?  I can't remember)  What I was doing in reality was not recreating, but trying to get an automatic three speed clutch to behave.  Like all motorcycles usage is the best maintenance.  If a vehicle sits it dies, or it ages drastically.  I am not sure about the clutch on this CRF50, but riding it certainly helps.  It is a gift for neighborhood children, and I wanted to help by working on the machine.  I was successful with the motor.  Once it finds a gear it pops along merrily and content the engine humming like a finely lathed top.  I know the secret rules for carburetor jetting for a few bikes anyway.  The motor ran well enough that it gave me the same satisfaction as my CB-250 and my XR-200.  The vibration of a Honda four stroke is a prized well earned and earnestly should be appreciated as the best caviar.  I was disappointed that further clutch repairs would be necessary, but a strong-running motor is a great foundation for many years of future riding pleasure.  I did my job.  

Shackademia

In my previous blog post I wandered.  I wandered like an aberrant shepherd looking for the newly born baby Jesus.  I was hoping to find enlightenment in my rambling, and yet I found only a condemnation of digital piracy.  The millennial culture was built with shortcuts.  Modern films employing millennial directors suffer from lack of camera vision.  They are limited by shortcuts, camera angles that never have been studied or developed into a concept to provide a vehicle for the film.  What?  You mean the camera cannot just aimlessly roam around looking up people's noses?  Not in traditional cinema.  Traditional American cinema has a lineage and a history rich with intelligence, artistry, and expression.  It meant to convey something, not just earn money.  To convey something, an idea say, one needs more that what the pop arts are offering today.  There is a bit of stripping down of technique today, and possibly at one time that may have worked.  The entire discipline of the Avant Garde in essence is a dramatization and simplification of its predecessor.  It worked and still today stands as the most recent chapter of art history.  The Avant Garde is effective.  Ask Jackson Pollack.  Ask Ornette Coleman.  I love the Avant Garde, but I always didn't because I didn't understand it.  I didn't understand that if you, the artist, had the message, the intent, the understanding, and the technique it doesn't take a lot to get your point across.  Mark Rothco and other modern artists did it with Abstract Expressionism.  Composers set the same goals during the 1920's.  I love Modernism.  I wish I had lived during the 1920's in America.  One only has to watch the movie Rhapsody in Blue to feel the visceral energy in the air musically during this decade.  There are such things as concepts.  Concepts are effective, because they ensure you will achieve your goal as an artist.  You must know what you are doing.  Millennial film and television directors have taken the shortcut.  They have not lived long enough to have studied film history.  They feel as if the hand held camera is free to roam whimsically, like an epileptic filming hat could be beautiful moments.  Why must the camera shake?  It makes me feel like I have Parkinson's.  Rather I would like to view the scene from the stability of a sane person with no angst.  Let the camera sit.  I have wandered again, and although I am suggesting that a thorough study of the Humanities is necessary for integrity, my premise of this blog entry was to criticize academia.  (and not with sour grapes)  Premise:  Ash Carter is a noted academic and scholar.  Ash Carter was the most recent Secretary of Defense.  Who is the better choice for America's Secretary of Defense, Ash Carter, a noted academic and scholar, or a tough-as-nails military officer?  I say the latter.  After reviewing the Obama years it occurred to me that academic has become a problem in America.  Not only is it now a dinosaur, it has it fingers in the pie, America's pie.  Academia has become so powerful through tenure, and so weak because there are no jobs, it is gobbling up huge amounts of America's pie.  Obama went to some Ivy League schools.  This ensured him enough clout to enter the American political system, like most systems in America, is controlled by influence.  Influence cannot and has not run a country.  That is why Donald Trump is president.  

Clinton Folly and Humanism

It would be nice if the Clinton Camp would take a lengthy vacation.  They could go to Acapulco.  If they traveled incognito maybe even George Soros could not find them.  They could drink Margaritas on the beach.  (not Acapulco Bay like the song says.  It is pretty polluted.)  Are their any white sandy beaches left on the Pacific?  If the Clintons took a nice long vacation, then maybe the remains of the Democratic Party could concede defeat in the presidential election.  As it is now we must listen to them whine nightly.  This is what politics has become in America.  Mudslinging.  It was inevitable I guess.  Jerry Springer, a former mayor, sets the example each day on network television.  How can American ideals remain pure, as the country changes so much?  This is the fundamental question that has been posed.  What has changed?  The answer is simple.  Them Internets.  When personal computers existed in labs at universities, they were regarded as a tool of academia.  Them Internets began as a connecting of data bases facilitating the development of the nuclear bomb.  It was academic.  Connecting scholarly data bases is a good idea for research.  Connecting personal home computers for the pirating of music is not.  Napster did it anyway, and shortly thereafter a thriving music industry in America died.  It was not a lengthy death.  As soon as adolescents realized you could pirate MP3's for free, it was over.  When an audio track, now an audio computer file, became available for download for free, America decided buying CD's no longer was a reasonable idea.  Paying a premium price for a studio recorded musical project became the butt of the joke.  Juggling digital music became a jubilant and rebellious practice for the youth of America. I was included to a degree.  I purchased a few recordings from iTunes, but after I realized the price was the same as buying a higher audio quality CD, I stopped.  If you buy the CD, not only do you have the CD to which to listen, you can import it onto your personal computer and then upload it to your iPod.  The consumer wins with multiple copies of his purchased music.  I don't know what the rules are today.  Apple at one point securitized their offerings, so you could not share them.  As a consumer and as an American the idea of owning my purchase seems reasonable.  We are a Capitalist community.  If I buy your album, it is mine.  The music is of course by the band, from the songwriters, and produced by the record company.  They all should get their cut from my purchase.  These terms have been thought out and well implemented for decades when the American music scene flourished.  Radio, both AM and FM, was a part of it.  Many people benefited from this system.  The system we have today only a few people benefit.  The system in America today benefits only a few, and these few are the influential cyber captains who have forged Internet commerce.  Them Internets.  This is what has changed in America, and while buying gifts from Amazon and eBay is enjoyable, undercutting large portions of the business community with piracy is criminal.  ASCAP is at war with Congress over digital copyrights.  Our federal government, incumbent, senile, narcissistic walking anachronisms continue to castrate American culture.  Pulling the strings of course are puppet masters which continue to escape public scrutiny, Rupert Murdoch being one.  Our media has become one large spin machine, literally a Big Brother, and these beings laugh and take our money.  If society as a whole decides to exploit our youth rather than educate it, there will come a time (now) when the mieda hits the fan.  Every major television network exploits the new arena of social media.  Should television news journalism have demeaned their craft for popularity?  Here is another fundamental question in America.  If talent and integrity openly and knowingly are sacrificed for popularity and this money, what remains?  With no one to monitor society, without religion or honest government, who will assure that American Capitalism will not destroy itself or be destroyed like Sodom and Gomorrah?  God is not happy.  American popular culture, mainly Facebook and iTunes, by sheer force have thrust their eager penises into our lives.  Their presence has unseated traditional norms like broadcast news journalism and the music industry.  Youtube, Google, and Amazon have thrust their eager penises into the art world disguised.  No matter how shiny, no matter how sparkly, and no matter how appealing immediate gratification is created by online media, it cannot replace the traditional arts.  The shortcuts that iMovie, Garage Band, and Photoshop offer us cannot and will not substitute for a thorough study of any discipline including broadcast news journalism.  The Voice, America's Got Talent, and Dancing with the Stars are entertainments.  They are entertainment offerings in the reality TV arena.  They exploit, embrace, and champion amateurism.  Tabloid news then capitalizes on their failures in the public eye.  It is very Greek, and yet the Greeks invented the humanities.  The Greek culture created and recognized areas of study which would ensure the human race an existence of integrity. No matter how hard they try, Internet commerce never will replace the traditional humanities.  Only unless we as a race decide we no longer want to be human.  

Fake News

It is interesting that "fake" news has been in the news.  After America's presidential election all I seem to see is fake news.  Rather it is not fake.  It severely is politically biased.  Sometimes it is erroneous stemming from the partisan desire to slander the political enemy.  While national news coverage of the Trump transition has been unbiased, Internet news and social media have shown their true colors.  I do not take the newly elected president too seriously.  If one did, it could be a descent into severe depression.  Today society, with its state-level legislative shenanigans, makes it difficult enough to find hope in America.  Instead I choose to see Donald Trump as a catalyst for real change in American government.  His triumph over the Democratic party has pointed out to me that the democrats and what they now represent are a large part of the problem.  I find his associations through the Trump businesses and brand to be refreshing.  I know that Vladimir Putin highly is not popular with the outgoing Obama Administration.  Clearly I remember Ronald Reagan's success at ending the Cold War and bringing down the Berlin Wall.  These were major achievements in civility, and having Russia as an ally, not an enemy, allowed the decade of the l980's to flourish with creativity, artistry, and peace.  I prefer to remember this relationship with Russia with Mikhail Gorvachev at the helm.  Although Vladimir Putin was the head of the KGB, I will not incriminate him without evidence more than hearsay spread by malcontent and petulant Internet news agencies.  I do not see the preexisting relationships an oil tycoon has with Russia as counterproductive to State Department policy.  It points out to me that government in the last eight years has failed to function even with Barack Obama at the helm.  While I do believe the execution of Osama Bin Laden and the passing of the Affordable Care Act were notable accomplishments, our federal government did very little to help Americans during his tenure as president.  This is one reason why Donald Trump was elected.  Frankly I find his views to be refreshingly anti-establishment, and our American federal government replete with narcissism, senility, and dysfunction needs to be shaken up.  It is happening, and it is good.  When I hear incumbent lawmakers complain that Donald Trump brings a savvy business perspective to Washington, what is wrong with that?  What is wrong is that Washington has been fleecing the America people for way too long.  It is brilliant that Trump thumbed his nose as Boeing and their padded federal contract.  It is brilliant that Trump thumbed his nose at Lockheed Martin with their inflated prices for the F-15 fighter.  Could five hundred billion dollars even be possible?  The best metaphor for Washington's ability to govern effectively is suggesting we spend tax payer's dollars investigating Russia's influence in the election.  The best metaphor for local government is spending seventy-five thousand dollars to pay for a study to see if an arts center is a good idea.  Government has been operating this way squandering real money for too long.  If a small percentage of tax payer dollars actually were spent for the appropriate things, America could be positive again.  Instead we must rise each day and observe our crumbling infrastructure, incapable Congress, and mongering corporations take money from those less fortunate.  Truly America has become a Third World Country. 

The America America has Become. Entertain Mindlessly. Do Not Educate.

When music no longer communicates an opinion, a feeling, or an idea and resolves itself only to entertain for money, then we have failed our children.  

The Orchestra That No Longer are There

Yesterday I ventured into the woods for the first time in many weeks.  (I don't like being heckled by the neighborhood children.)  There only is one really, but the experience was enough to cut short their enjoyment.  If a child is stupid enough to yell taunts at a stranger in the woods carrying a chainsaw.  Well you get the picture.  That is not a very smart drink of water.  I realized this later, but then working in the woods is my therapy.  I used to enjoy working in the woods, cutting trees, pulling vines, and trimming brush.  It was more visceral than working in your yard.  It is a bit Boy Scout.  It is a bit military.  It is a bit "man."  Working in the woods many men do in the American South.  I'll bet they do it everywhere in America.  I'll also bet many men who do this may be considered "Radical Militants" by their communities.  They are not, and neither am I.  I just am not a pussy.  I like wielding an ax.  I also like swinging it into an aberrant rotten tree blocking my trails. An ax is and always has been a useful tool, but useful tools today in America are smart phones, Bluetooth speakers, and ?  An ax is "Old School."  Geez, we are getting so ignorant, naive, and pubescent in America it will not be long until our entire historical culture may be lost.  I'll call it Generation Pussy.  Kids todays are pussies.  It seems the people in my neighborhood are afraid of "the guy in the woods with the chainsaw."  Is it that uncommon to see a man cutting fallen trees in a patch of woods in a neighborhood?  These kids have overactive imaginations, because they life they live is pathetic.  It is pathetic, because systematically we as a nation have purposely neglected the upbringing of our youth.  Instead we have capitalized upon them.  We have exploited them.  We have indoctrinated them with wuss.  It is the America America has become, and it sucks.  Each day I read the news in the Fayetteville Observer or online the same unconscionable theme appears.  How is the state government in North Carolina taking advantage of her citizens?  First what must be jar-headed Republican politicians re-draw the boundaries of voting districts to favor themselves thinking no one will notice.  A federal court noticed and not only demanded a fair and unbiased redrawing of the boundaries again, but rescheduled the election for this November.  All politicians elected with the new boundaries must be voted for again.  I could go on.  Those property owners whose real estate was taken with imminent domain for the building of I-295 have not been paid.  The DOT under McCrory's watch built an impressive entrance to Fort Bragg, the home of Ground Forces Command, and took the property of incumbent residents without paying them!  It took Yarborough a class action lawsuit to make the state fess up their money.  Meanwhile if you see fit to carry your refuse to the city dump, you will pay $20.00 for the privilege of dropping it off there.  You are not rewarded for cleaning your property.  You are penalized with a fee, while you drive your vehicle up a dirt mound and unload your garbage yourself.  I would say the state of North Carolina is in dire financial straights.  What's new?  These practices have crept into government and corporate government since George W.  We are a scourge of a nation.  While I can laugh off these scenarios like I laugh off the condemnations of our newly-elected Commander and Chief, I can't laugh off the recent performance in Chapel Hill of Wynton's Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra.  How can I say what I am going to say without getting sued for defamation?  Tell the truth, brother, and only two percent of the American population even know what jazz is.  Swing Wynton called it at their Saturday evening performance at Memorial Hall.  I first heard the band Spyro Gyra at Memorial Hall in l981.  It was the most enjoyable concert I have ever seen next to the Turtle Island String Quartet.  I had an instinct, that I would not enjoy this ensemble, because anything that has risen to the ranks of "Lincoln Center" must be contemptuous.  How could jazz, a music that rose from the brothels of New Orleans, be heralded by Lincoln Center?  There is a chasm between orchestral music and jazz, while there should not be.  It is an accurate metaphor for the chasm between the Left and Right in America today.   I will elaborate.  Jazz never has been mainstream music in America.  It is considered to have been popular during World War ll.  With the doldrums of war upon us, regular American folk liked to escape reality by dancing to the Glenn Miller orchestra.  The Jitterbug and the Lindy Hop were appropriate vehicles for adolescent sexual tension.  Them internets are fucking up.  While teeny-boppers did dance to swing music back in the day, Jimmy Buffet and James Taylor always have prevailed as chosen artists for lackluster conformist Americans.  Jazz after all was considered "devil music" by the Nazi's.  Anything that represented freedom of expression and individualism during the Nazi occupation of Germany was outlawed.  It is called Communism.  Unbelievable we are experiencing a similar oppression in what now has become America.  I bristle at the notion of calling America American anymore, because we are not the same country we have been.  We are not the same country we have been, because how can the eldest statesman of jazz champion an ensemble that consciously does not at least try to swing?   Wynton Marsalis, the most known and respected jazz artist of our century sat at the helm of an orchestra that knowingly played the "pop" rhythmic style rather than traditional swing.  (and he called it swing)  This is a prickly pear, and one about which I have blogged for years.  Ninety-nine percent of American won't be able to tell the different.  To boot those ninety-nine percent are to whom the Marsalis band is kowtowing.  Jazz is dead in America, and Wynton voiced that publicly.  He said if you wanted to continue to work in the field of jazz, you better do what the people want.  Hence "Pop."  What's the difference?  How actually can you play swing in pop style?  It is not that easy by the looks of the players in the Lincoln Center Ensemble.  None of them moved.  None of them grooved.  None of them show an ounce of rhythm in their bodies as they played this so-called jazz music.  I never have seen anything like it.  It felt like I was sitting at the most square, white boy, classical recital in history.  They were afraid, uptight, and not having fun.  In addition when it became apparent that it was obvious the band was not swinging, they attempted to Uncle Tom an impression that they were.  Can anyone believe I am saying the name Wynton Marsalis and Uncle Tom in the same sentence?  Miles wouldn't have it.  He refused to "Uncle Tom."  His turning his back to the audience when leading the band lead to heartfelt outcries that he was insensitive the needs and desires of the audience.  This band abandoned the key concept of swing music, and watered down their music for the ignorant populace that has become America.  I won't explain it again.  Pop is not swing, although cruise ship and Broadway bands including the SNL band continue to mock the religion of music with a practice that is sacrilege.  I may be no Adjunct Faculty at North Carolina Central University, but I can look at a rhythm section and tell how they are playing.  They are not playing.