Leonard Feather...a "jazz critic" who I actually saw fall asleep with one blond bimbo on each side of him in the Chicago jazz club the Scotch Mist and then publish a review of the group...I was in it...that cited pieces we didn't even play that night...and Earl "That's Earl, brother" Wilson, a minor league gossip columnist in the Ed Sullivan/Walter Winchell tradition, who actually calls these two giants "boys" on the video and then assholes himself even further by apologizing for calling Dizzy "Diz" because it's too casual...like  being named Dizzy isn't about as casual as it gets.

"Sorta the Georgie Jessel of jazz." Deep.

"You boys got anything more to say?"

Not that you would understand, motherfucker.

Bet on it.

Reminds me of the classic advice from the great Panamanian lead trumpet player Victor Paz, who played lead in Dizzy's big band for many years.. "Don' look at the white people dancing. It will fuck up your time."

This is not classic Bird + Diz...Bird looks sick and sounds to me like he is just going through the motions. (He was a terrible junkie. Being called boy by fools like Feather and Wilson all of one's life and having to take it can do things to a man. Especially a transcendantly gifted genius. Diz is another story. Equally brilliant, but absolutely indomitable. I knew him a little. ALWAYS up. And funny...!!!???) and the rhythm section isn't really up to par either.

Search out the recordings.

Say 1945 on. Anything with Max Roach, Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, and/or Charles Mingus. Like listening to fire.

When I teach jazz history to serious students of the music, I tell them to understand the common relative reluctance to listen to this stuff as understandable. It's like looking at the sun, sometimes. You have to look away before you hurt yourself.

AG

Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie.-Mae West

The main point of Tony Smith's Washington Post op-ed is that DLC "neoliberals are nearly indistinguishable from the better-known neoconservatives". That point had already been made by commentators at Counterpunch in 2004 against Kerry's candidacy: Kerry was essentially presenting himself as someone who could run the American empire better (which is no doubt true).

In the battle to control the American empire, the neocons have in their corner the Project for a New American Century while the New Democrats have the Progressive Policy Institute. Come November, who will get your vote? Coke or Pepsi?...

Kerry and his comrades in the progressive internationalist movement are as gung-ho about U.S. military action as their counterparts in the White House. The only noteworthy difference between the two groups battling for power in Washington is that the neocons are willing to pursue their imperial ambitions in full view of the international community, while the progressive internationalists prefer to keep their imperial agenda hidden behind the cloak of multilateralism. (Kerry Tells Anti-War Movement to Move On)

That arguments are now being published in the Washington Post against the DLC line that "we can run the empire better"—which were previously heard only in the radical blogosphere—is a promising indication that the 2008 election will not be a replay of 2004.

I'm getting tired of Democrats, and I'm getting tired of liberals.  I want FDR and a New Deal cause the one we currently have totally sucks. I now call myself an eclectic independent.  Everything that Democrats use to stand for and for which I voted have been dead longer than all of the missing white chicks put together.  

Republicans such as Brent Scowcroft, James A. Baker III and the late Gerald R. Ford seem more skeptical about an American bid for world supremacy than do comparable senior Democrats. "I can understand the theory of wanting to free people," Ford told Bob Woodward in 2004. But the former president doubted "whether you can detach that from the obligation number one of what's in our national interest. And I just don't think we should go hellfire damnation around the globe freeing people, unless it is directly related to our national security."

When many of the "old guard Republicans" express sentiments like those of Gerald Ford it gives some indication of how far off base a lot of the Democratic (read DLC) leadership is.

I, too, have been long troubled by the fact that a great many of our elected Democrats have tried to direct the discourse toward debating the execution of the war and not the validity of war itself.  I know it's easy to say "what's done is done, we have to make the best of it" but that allows us to avoid entirely a most pertinent point.  To avoid future situations like Iraq we must initiate a debate on just exactly what we want our country's foundational goals to be going forward.  The view put forth on the Iraq debate by DLC stalwarts such as Hillary Clinton would only result in a changing of the mannequins in the window of our government policy on our role in the world.  Nothing she says from a policy standpoint would really result in a much different outcome should the same set of circumstances confront a President Hillary Clinton that confronted George Bush.  Many Democrats, like Republicans, are still enamored with this "indispensable nation" paradigm.  This will only continue to doom us to repeating the same mistakes again and again.

It is incumbent on all of us to do what we can to initiate some kind of conversation on what we want our country to represent to the world in the 21st century.
I find Tony Smith's closing paragraph summarizes quite succinctly the complexity of the task at hand.  And while it is complex, it is a conversation which must be placed at the top of our to-do list as a country.

It isn't easy to offer a true alternative. The challenges to world order are many, as are the influential special interests in this country that want an aggressive policy: globalizing corporations, the military-industrial complex, the pro-Israel lobbies, those who covet Middle Eastern oil. The nationalist conviction that we are indeed "the indispensable nation" will continue to tempt our leaders to overplay their hand.

And he closes with this very prescient warning shot across our bow.

The danger lies in believing that our power is beyond challenge, that the righteousness of our goals is beyond question and that the real task is not to reformulate our role in the world so much as to assert more effectively a global American peace.

I pray that we heed his advice.

"Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity"