The Music of the Night

 There was a reason why Muscle Shoals was fruitful for American popular music.  Florence Alabama Music Enterprises was founded by Rick Hall in 1960.  Under his tutelage the Swampers formed, a capable rhythm section, and recorded and created the Muscle Shoals sound.  Diverse musical artists were drawn to FAME, as it built a reputation for musical creativity and production.  Not unlike Stax Records in Memphis both studios were known for racial diversity.  Muscle Shoals was a remote location on the banks of the Tennessee River in northern Alabama, and was the butt of many jokes.  Music in a broad sense encompasses many human sensibilities, not just aural sound.  With the advancement of wireless technology, our understanding and thus production of music has waned.  Music is more than a short wave radio signal, a dot or dash of Morse code, or a simple sound byte.  Why is it that burgeoning wireless technology has hurt the field of music?  Watershed cultural events in America's history like radio and television easily are not usurped by a PC.  All of the 1's and 0's cannot create art, a deep contemplative study, understanding, and creative interpretating of life.  Convenience in a frenetically paced world does not suffice.  Immediate gratification is a shallow and unsatisfying anodyne.  We have come to live in a disposable society, and we are suffering the consequences, a lack of soul.  What is missing from digital music?  There is no question the storing and sharing of digital music via Napster changed the music industry.  It could be said this network gratuitously offering contraband music to the masses annihilated America's traditional music industry.  Who could resist the immediate gratification of downloading music immediately for free?  In a business sense like loosing weight from a smart phone, sending your gold jewelry to a company in the mail and expecting a check, or collecting millions from the lottery, continuing to steal commercially recorded music from the Black Web is not beneficial for the American economy.  We have lost sight that if money is to circulate representing goods and services, than all goods and services must be included, not just energy, housing, and food.  The basis of a Democratic Republic choosing Capitalism and a free market, is based upon everyone being included, not just the wealthy and empowered.  This is how America has changed in the last several decades.  We have become a nation of success or failure on a grand scale and of great spectacle, and the model of this irresponsible behavior is foreign television programming that that has convoluted America's premiere maiden communication offerings.  With the sheer amount of time, devotion, impetus, and money spent building America's first wireless radio networks, and the positive affect they had creating solidarity in America, especially in rural areas, cheap, trite, superficial talent shows exploiting average Americans has been extremely detrimental to our economy.  In essence the opportunity, fluidity, and power of average people has been hijacked by the elite wealthy.  This hijacking was the Big Short in 2008, when banks foreclosed on un-vetted pooled mortgages that continue to make hedge fund managers filthy rich.  Unknowing buyers at the urging of President Bill Clinton bought outside of their means with easily obtainable free flowing credit, later to be foreclosed upon when raises in premiums doubled and tripled with the written terms of the contract.  They were fleeced, and it was this practice that has stolen America's money.  A small group of Wall Street investors saw this coming and created custom financial instruments that were forced to pay them off moving the bulk of America's capital to their own offshore bank accounts.  We have not recovered, and to this day that money is just sitting stagnant.  For Capitalism to work and America to become healthy again in a free market system, this money has to flow.  Instead a plutocracy has been created with a committee of oligarchs.  We have become a nation of rich and poor with very little middle class, the class that has been the cornerstone of American achievement since her inception.  What is the best example of the middle class?  It is the group of professionals responsible for educating your children and creating the future leaders of our nation.  The Troubled Assets Relief Program, at the urging of Secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulson, used federally funded taxpayer dollars to bail out corporate America, and the Tea Party began.  Before our economy will be refurbished,  American priorities must change.  Donald Trump's grand push to autocracy should stay a dream in his head.  No one would argue that the personal computer has changed the world, business, and economies, but we are human.  Money is not the only thing we need, and our planet Earth is the best example of this.  Billions of dollars in paper money cannot affect the change needed to heal her.  Mother Nature is a fickle beast, and unless we curb the sheer amount of microwave radiation and carbon emissions currently in play, we will perish as a race.  The predictions in the Book of Revelations will come true, and fire will rain down from the heavens and bubble up from the oceans.  God will come again and judgement will happen.  Those who have accepted Christ will be transported to a new planet, and the traitors, sinners, and Agnostics will be left on earth like a smoldering Hades.  The goodness of America has been lost.  It is disconcerting that America reelected Donald Trump, and the rest of us are living with self-proclaimed self-serving fascists.  This is not what I want to think about when I get up in the morning, but after watching several quality Hollywood films such as "A Most Violent Year,"  it become evident that in a free society your neighbors also are your competitors.  When their level of intelligence and civility dips below an acceptable level, we are forced to reckon with their irresponsibility.  The cusp of civil war in this case is ill timed.  America needs regeneration, and like Trump wanting a Nobel Peace Prize for sanctioning a violent siege of our nation's Capital, his Make America Great Again should be interpreted as make it great for the white and wealthy.  He coerced minority voters and immediately forsake them.  Even as grocery prices continue to rise and the earth gets hotter, and full fledged attacks on average working Americans, especially in the Civil Service, are carried out, America continues to choose a Hitleresque dictator over a black woman.  Our recent Presidential campaign was not elegant, effective, or streamline.  Like Joe Biden has become, it was a stumbling attempt to keep the democratic party in power.  Only conceding his candidacy for President months before the election, no democrat had the time to mount a potentially successful and winning campaign.  Knowing that the electing of a woman for the first time in American history, and an African-American woman at that, nearly was impossible, Kamala Harris had no real chance.  Like everything in America, the election process has become broken.  How does American popular music have anything to do with politics?  I don't know the quick answer to that, but I do know that commercially recorded music once was a profitable, satisfying, and sometimes artistic machine.  Music, television, and film have contributed to a social and moral consciousness in America, and it is needed.  What is not needed is foreign entities hijacking American businesses such as Chemours and DAK Americas.  Mexicans and the Chinese are not citizens of the United States of America, so why do they own and have control of American businesses in our backyards?  I have developed judicious animosity towards North Carolina since moving back.  While Phil Berger has replenished the state coffers to some extent, priorities here have moved in the wrong direction.  I agree with legal prostitution, but prostituting your state purely for money is a mistake.  North Carolina has failed in the most massive way, failing to provide clean water and clean air.  With the amount of aeronautical industry slated to build in North Carolina, a PFAS-laden Cape Fear River basin is no longer is our first priority.  With Ground Forces Command moving to Fort Bragg, with them they brought increased and plentiful air pollution.  American, Delta, PSA, and Piedmont airlines are not helping spewing downtown Fayetteville with black microdust every time they take off and land.  If we did desire a resurgence of American popular music, and its long term affects on the human soul, no longer is it easy to achieve what once was in the mid years of the twentieth century.  While shared recorded music now may exist in earbuds in private, the process of creating music always has and should be conducted in a plural human realm.  Music production can have its solitary aspects, but as communication of ideas, thoughts, and feelings it cannot exist in a vacuum.  The music will be richer, more plentiful, and more satisfying if it is allowed to gestate in real time, such as how a composer pens a major work.  The best metaphor for this process is imagining Frank Sinatra singing a sonorous vocal in an isolated, insulated, vocal booth with headphones.  His intonation will suffer, because of the inability of headphones to represent live bass frequencies, and there is no acoustic reinforcement of his voice.  What does this mean?  It means like a community, your end product will be better if it has support rather than opposition.  Imagine Frank trying to sing this vocal rendition in a trench on the battlefield with guns a blazing.  Then imagine him at his prime early in his career singing in front of a live orchestra for thousands of military spouses missing their deployed husbands.  The symbiosis of all of this support via emotional energy conveyed in person in real time is insurmountable.  It takes a village. 

Playing in a Cover Band

 ...is not anything ever to which I have aspired.  While I heard a few bar bands while I was in college, including "Hootie and the Blowfish" in Columbia, and a few good bands in the Research Triangle Park, or Triad, or Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, never was I motivated to want to play in such a group.  The music was interesting to me, but I grew up listening to jazz.  My father was a jazz pianist, and some would call him a stylist.  His approach to the piano was Milt Bruckner's "Locked Hands," of which George Shearing adopted and brought to a wider public.  It is a particular harmonic approach to realizing tunes from "lead sheets" or "chord charts" that states the melody in an octave spacing, usually between the little finger in the right hand and the thumb of either the right or left hand.  Barry Harris is the more modern purveyor of this style based on the ascending melodic minor scale.  It uses a diminished chord as a V, so as you harmonize a diatonic scale ascending I,V, I, V, I with diminished chords substituting for the V7.  It sounds very lush and sophisticated.  These little diminished chords were notated in my father's hand-written fake book, and never did I understand what they were.  If you play a tune with this stylistic approach, you must really know the melody of the tune, meaning you have harmonically analyzed the intervals of the melody and are capable of inserting passing chords in between the notes in the melody.  It is the common practice of most jazz pianists.  In essence when "faking" a tune, the pianist realizes a more complicated and sophisticated sounding accompaniment becoming an impromptu arranger on the spot.  You are doing something different than playing "licks" or fills behind the melody, which becomes distracting quickly if you are not tasteful.  I will admit that although I am a solid jazz pianist, I never spent the time on each and every jazz tune I play.  I always have played the melody mostly by ear, hunting and pecking away in a rather ignorant approach.  My pianistic touch is subtle and dynamically expressive, and my ear is keen, so never has it been a problem.  But (and I don't usually begin a sentence with a contraction) I can't tell you the notes of particular melodies.  When I compose music, and with two composition degrees, I do use harmonic analysis along with my heart and ear.  I write this analysis on top of the staff like a lead sheet.  When you play, you do not think this way.  You sing the song, and that singing is in your head.  I have only recently realized that this singing makes the realizing of a tune much much easier.  Your ear remembers or knows the tune, so aural tradition plays a large role in your performance of the song.  So was the case for much American popular music.  It was not written down in musical notation.  The melodies were passed down through the generations from person to person.  There were a handful of "Tune Catchers" who traveled to Appalachia to find and transcribe this mountain music, as did Alan Lomax traveling to the American South to record blues, work songs, Negro spirituals, and other indigenous music.  In the last five years I made it a goal to study the lineage of American Popular Music, and I never realized what a huge undertaking this was.  It is a massive undertaking, and still yet has it not has been done.  Ken Burns as made a sizeable dent in this archiving with his series on Jazz and Country music.  I have accomplished some of my goals as a musician, composer, and performer, but it was not until I became a caregiver for my mother that my life's musical perspective changed.  Never did I realize how much I don't know about American music, and that is because I never studied it.  Classes about American Popular Music were scant during my college years.  It is important, critically really to understanding who America is a nation.  More importantly this musical heritage is diverse and includes both Native and African American roots.  This is not a rich political era for recognizing these roots.  In fact it may be the worst in our lifetimes.  Only this week news commentators  were vocal in saying, "Dixie has returned to Washington, DC."  What does this mean?  In a slight pause I will mention that life has not been easy recently for anyone, and the entire nation is hesitant to push back on the policies of our President.  My vote for Fayetteville mayor was changed in one split second, when the candidate for which I had chosen to vote decreed his agenda for mayor would mimic Trump.  A Nobel Peace Prize?  Let's reflect shall we at the absurdity of that notion?  A Nobel Peace Prize for a sitting President who sanctions a violent extremist entity indoctrinated with his cult-like desires?  They attack the United States Capital and try to stop validation of Joe Biden's win for President.  He fails to respond to this violent incursion deploying no one, and several people lose their lives.  This mob violently breaches the Capital Building as working lawmakers scurry to safety hiding in various places.  This action in the pinnacle of the opposite of a peaceful transfer of power in Washington.  There is no more absurd suggestion that Donald Trump could or would earn this prize, because his policies and the ramifications of his ideologies have caused much more violence, separation, and unrest in America since his election as President.  It has been a rally of the Ku Klux Klan.  Life in America since 2016 markedly has been worse than before, and violence has escalated.  It has been the worst decade of my life, and this is one week out of having had Covid for at least the 8th time.  The corruption of America has become so deep, we are beginning to lose the border of reality.  The news media, not unlike the rest of Corporate America, has fallen prey to the intimidation and legal coercion of the Trump Organization through mob-like action.  Trying to keep the torch of America's true history alive has become daunting, because Cancel Culture has infiltrated the mainstream.  Education has become so compromised and Americans so put upon and sheltered, as a populace we are not capable of seeing or understanding the truth.  Everyday is just another reinforcement of Donald Trumps autocratic tendencies, and many local leaders have joined his party.  As a musician and now self-proclaimed music historian, finally I have realized why this journey is difficult.  As I have been looking backward to the roots of American popular music, the Trump Organization (now the Trump Administration) is looking to sanitize, homogenize, and marginalize American achievement.  It has been American democracy, that out-of-bounds, dirty, disruptive, and aggressive force which has made leaps and bounds in civil rights.  It means that in freedom, not everything is going to be in your liking.  Most things may stray from your own personal perception of American live.  That is the definition of diversity, and the question looms as to whether America is and has been diverse since its inception.  The unequivocal answer is, "Yes," and there is n denying it.  To put the pedal to the metal, early Americans bought slaves, African-American slaves.  These slaves were captured, shackled, and shipped to southern American ports, where they were sold to affluent white people.  If you mean to say America is not diverse, than you would not have brought indigenous Africans to America in bondage.  One only has to look at the history of the Minstrel practice of Blackface to understand.  The images derived from slavery and used as entertainment often were accurate.  The basis of the images, while sometimes exaggerated, were true.  There were Aunt Jemimas and Uncle Toms.  The basic hierarchy of a plantation was the "Mammy" ran it.  A large, powerful, masculine, and often rude woman was the authority figure of the inner workings of a plantation.  One could suggest she was a lesbian, because she was not to be the object of the affection of the master.  That would infringe upon the romantic sovereignty of the wife, thus her responsibility was to be feminine.  The images used as entertainment during the period of Blackface, while seemingly startling and possibly unsettling were accurate.  African culture at the onset of slavery, because of its pure roots, markedly was different than European,  now new American sensibility.  This disparity in culture truly is the soul of America, and over several hundred years evolved into the true roots of American culture.  To deny African or Native American influence is erroneous and in insult to Jazz, Pentecostal, R&B, Blues, and Soul music.  Without the Black Church, upon which freed slaves came to rely, American Popular Music would be a shell of itself.  Try to tell our modern generation of Americans this tale.  Black music?  Blues artists?  Gospel Music?  Soul?  Jazz?  Jazz is the least popular music in America.  To understand the soul of America is to understand the oppression and despair of freed slaves being lynched in the American South.  What was it about African-Americans that merited such murderous behavior, being whipped and hung from trees to die?  What was so antagonistic about Joe Biden's win of the Presidency, that merited a violent mob attacking our elected leaders while they tried to confirm the vote?  Simply it is racial discrimination or White Supremacy, or "Dixie comes to D.C."  I have been writing about Jim Crow Jr. throughout the Trump Presidency, and I never knew I was living in a chosen red state.  Red states lack soul, understanding, empathy, and compassion.  Their social and political sentiments could be attributed to the same Red Skins erroneously earmarked as as savage and self-serving.  By what is the Republican Party under siege?  Much of their fodder is being created for the purposes of their own rebellion, otherwise America may have continued as a peaceful and prosperous entity with democratic rule. 

The War in Viet Nam May Be Over, but Fayettenam is Alive and Limping

The strains of, "If you lived near Camp Lejeune, you may be entitled to a settlement," have waned on television.  Unfortunately this phrase is a metaphor for a common remedy in The Swamp.  I don't believe Washington, DC always was evil.  It was not until the career lobbyists took up shop with their professional coercion of elected officials, that American democracy began to crumble.  It didn't help  the Russians bought Donald Trump and secured his freedom from a slew of grievous felonies including theft of confidential material, election rigging, treason, conspiracy, and fraud.  Oh, he got nabbed for that one, falsifying insurance property values for his gain.  He was in deep water, but investors bought him out.  Russian mafia.  Is there a difference between Putin and the mafia?  Probably not.  When you bring this stench to Washington, it has an effect; it is not the effect of people smelling your soiled Depends and knowing that you are incontinent.  Why should we know these things?  Is it because our President is too old to handle the job of president?  If the supporting Deep State of the Marines at Camp Lejeune didn't care about contaminated ground water at the base, then they don't care now.  Fayettenam is the litmus test.  Fayetteville, North Carolina is the modern Camp Lejeune, but its exploitation, wounds, and casualties may be worse than people suffering from disease and dying of cancer.  We are experiencing it in real time, and nobody knows.  If they do know, they are too afraid to resist the military industrial complex.  Rest assured it is industrial, and it is complex, and like Koch Industries, everyone is all in.  The military is the second largest economy in North Carolina.  Let me say that again.  No textiles.  No Big Tobacco.  No hogs and chickens.  No produce.  No tourism of the beautiful Atlantic beaches or the Great Smokey Mountains.  The military has overtaken the Eastern Seaboard.  If you go to the shore, you will hear the military in the sky and in the water.  Did anyone ever stop to ask the constituency of North Carolina, if we wanted this?  Roy Cooper is mum, and the future of aviation has burgeoned from his governorship.  Why is Fayettenam the new Camp Lejeune?  The Deep State was overjoyed when BRAC (Base Realignment and Closure) decided to move Ground Forces Command to Fort Bragg.  The decision began in 2005, but in June of 2011 FORSCOM moved to Fort Bragg.  The gentle strains in the community then were not, "You deserve financial compensation for your suffering."  Instead it was, "Those army generals are coming, moving from Atlanta to Cumberland County."  The word on the street was someone wanted to see troops out their window.  Fourteen years have passed and one Trump Presidency beginning in 2016.  We didn't notice much amiss in the Fayetteville community until later.  There was a time when Trump told some truth.  It was true when he said "we" rebuilt the American military.  Two installments of 800 billion dollars.  Military life has not changed much, so what of that money?  Take a look at Youtube.  The number of shiny, spit and polish, seducing websites chronicling the exploits of the modern military technology are rife.  It is like a propaganda campaign.  Like?  Websites that prop up policy.  The internet.  Video.  "Content."  You can't buy any product without the internet somehow being involved or an iPad.  Is it a promotional video?  A copy of the contract?  When you watch these videos, it is another Cold War.  "I'll show you mine, if you show me yours!"  It is complex, industrial, and high technology.  Long gone are the days of lying in a trench computing trajectories with math by hand.  Today they use the AN/MPQ-64 radar.  While there are many contributing players to the game of military gentrification, and some of them are civil or private, this single Raytheon-built device is a major player transforming Fayetteville, North Carolina into Fayettenam.  The 30+ million dollar Apache helicopter firing range is a close second, but only because each aircraft has two gas turbine engines that operate at temperatures of 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit.  Fayettenam must be the only city in America that gets hotter after the sun goes down.  I'll never forget the first time I saw a rail car filled with molten sulfur on a CSX track.  The entire metal car was molten red, not just the sulfur.  There is a rubber vulcanization plant in downtown Fayetteville.  We quietly can rejoice at the closing of DAK Americas, but I have figured out when the Q-64 is watching.  It is like the TET, an autonomous, all seeing, all knowing, electromagnetic maelstrom of targeting information.  How can and does the Army differentiate between their hypothetical enemy and the citizens of Fayetteville that live around the base?  Because housing is so direly needed, people literally live on the edges of the drop zones.  Fayetteville always has been integrated with war games at Fort Bragg, but evolving and available technology subsidized by 1.6 trillion dollars of Trump appropriated dollars has created an elite, mostly covert, almost private sub military having nothing to do with grunts in a trench.  It is reliant upon the electromagnetic spectrum solely for its information.  Fort Bragg, now the home of Ground Forces Command and Special Operations, has been playing high tech War Games since this infusion of revenue.  In contrast to Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld's ruthless approach to annihilating Iraq, wiping out their infrastructure from above and disabling human life, is "Unconventional Warfare" any more humane?  I say not.  It is happening now, and no one knows it, because it cannot be seen.  What is the difference between a biological and chemical weapon?  A chemical weapon has a physical footprint.  It is a liquid or a gas, and it has to be applied.  It is dangerous to handle, and its refuse is difficult of which to dispose.  A biological weapon, something former George W. Bush Vice President Dick Cheney sanctioned Dr. Anthony Fauci to create is much more sinister.  While the visual images of the Black Plague are gruesome and painful, slowly dying from the inside out with no concrete diagnosis of multiple causes is pure evil.  Like the effects of the Q-64 radar on the human body, you can't see the pathogen.  Let's combine the virility of a lab-created virus with radiation.  In any given scenario whether the radiation activates the pathogen, or the pathogen is exacerbated by skin penetrating millimeter waves, the outcome is morbid.  It is difficult to qualify if and how the disparate players in the game of democratic deconstruction are cooperating.  Certainly CSX has been a major player in transporting the goods of the treasonous.  The smell of Vodka wafting down from the skies, as Russian pilots assault the American people in ways not definable is unmistakable.  The trifecta of military, air, and rail on a domestic community has ability to impart change.  In a democracy that change may be for the people.  In the case of Donald Trump, a traitor, that change is akin to any other fascist dictator attempting to oppress, silence, and eventually kill his own people.  With the citizens of Fayetteville dead, Fort Biberty will be free to spread out like the communist enclave it is meant to become.  The sight of Stepford Soldiers earning their daily keep will usurp any semblance of cultural life and art, and the disparate strains of diverse lineage through sound, race, and presence will melt into one great chorus of, "Hile Trump."