etnobofin

Freddie Hubbard, 1938 – 2008

Rochester, NY – 1976 (Image: Tom Marcello)

Freddie Hubbard – Keep Your Soul Together (Excerpt)
From Keep Your Soul Together: CTI [Buy]

There was a time when I didn’t know who Freddie Hubbard was.

I was just starting to learn about jazz. A friend’s father (himself a well-known pianist and jazz broadcaster around town) thrust two dusty cassettes into my hand, which I duly took home and thrashed to death in my bedroom.

One tape was a copy of Miles’ Someday My Prince Will Come. The other was Herbie Hancock’s Empyrean Isles. The Herbie tape had a hastily scribbled playlist and personnel listing: Herbie… Ron … Tony… Freddie. Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, Tony Williams, I’d heard of. But this Freddie guy… playing the … cornet?

Pretty soon Freddie Hubbard was a familiar sound in my house. His solos from that album – on One Finger Snap, Oliliquy Valley – were melodies I could sing in the shower. At that time, all trumpet players sounded fresh and exciting to me. Lee Morgan, Wynton Marsalis, Clifford Brown were all early additions to a small trove of cassettes that filled the family home with sound on evenings and weekends and annoyed my sister in her room down the hallway.  Freddie, with his loud-high hard bop style, probably annoyed her more than most.

At university we formed little jazz bands that played cafés around town. Somehow we managed to persuade the owners that we were actually good, and sometimes the owners even paid us.  By that time, we had discovered Freddie’s early 1970s recordings for CTI, and Red Clay inevitably ended up on our setlist.   We played it EVERY gig. Along with Chameleon, Wayne Shorter’s Footprints and a couple of Cole Porter ballads.

And then one January day, one of the band was killed in an accident. He was the youngest of us. Hell, the oldest of us was only 23.  We put together a band that played at his funeral.  Stevie arrived there before us, and we did our soundcheck next to his coffin. We played four songs before the start of the service. One of them was Red Clay.

Now Freddie Hubbard’s gone too, to join the ever-expanding jam session in the sky.  Through his most powerful recorded work (from, say, 1961 to 1975) many of his phrases have spun themselves into the DNA of all young jazz trumpet players today.  I never got to see him play live, but more than most trumpeters, it felt like I knew him a little bit through his records and the way they influenced me and my bandmates.   So, thanks, Freddie.  We’ll remember you.

Image by Passetti

2009 already looks like it’s going to hell in a handcart.   The credit crisis rolls on and with it the possibility of the worst economic conditions for 60 years. Israel and Hamas continue their mutual idiocy. (Can someone please put the leaders of both sides in a sealed room for a month and tell them to  tell ‘em to f*cken sort their sh*t out? I apologise for the expletives, but they aptly convey my frustration and sadness at what’s happening in Gaza).

Oh, and we still seem unable to help Zimbabwe, and the slaughter continues in the Congo.  And there’s that climate change thing, and Australia’s running out of  useable water.  So, everything’s alright then.

Last night I found Jared Diamond‘s talk on Why Societies Collapse at TED.com.  It’s worth spending 18 minutes watching it, even if just for his awesome Boston accent. Recorded in 2003, Diamond’s talk seems remarkably prescient, looking back on it with 5 years’ further wisdom.  Environmental change, inability to adapt, incapacity to think beyond the short-term self-interest … although his studies of environmental history concentrate on individual societies, Diamond could be describing the entire human race right now.

For me, Jared Diamond’s key insight is that human societies have a general inability to plan for the long term.  We have evolved to instinctively choose short-term benefit, even if this means long-term catastrophe.  We’re also not helped by our political processes. Although democratic government is probably the best way we have of organising ourselves, a major weakness of democracy is that it encourages policy-making based around electoral cycles.

Politicians aim for targets that ensure they get re-elected the next time around – giving most policies a maximum time for payoff of between four and seven years.  No leader seems willing to make a good long-term decision if it might lead to a lower standard of life for their voters in the short-term.

Diamond suggests there’s probably not one single thing we can do to avert global disaster.  There’s probably a dozen things that need to happen, and we need to get them all right.  Off the top of my head – dramatic and immediate CO2 reductions, giving women an equal role in all decision-making, media and politics, reducing energy consumption, a re-thinking of the benefits and side-effects of economic growth… and that’s just a short brainstorm. Add your priorities in comments below…

Image: uncultured

So yeah, I’m a bit down on the whole humanity-planetary-viability-survival thing at the moment. I blame the cold weather in Birmingham.  But there are reasons for hope.  For example:

• ColaLife.org – a project to use Coca-Cola’s global distribution system to get medicines to patients in remote villages (possibly the smartest idea I’ve heard all year – for once, I really want to buy the world a Coke).
• ICRD – an NGO involved in peacemaking that recognises the necessarily important role that faith still plays in solving conflicts.
• Room to Read – supplying books, libraries and educational acitivties to children living in poverty. Founded by former Microsoft executive John Wood.

And these programmes aren’t necessarily the best, or the most worthy of our support – they’re just three I’ve learned about just in the past 24 hours.

We have brilliant brains, we have brilliant people, we have brilliant ideas. But we don’t have much time.  As with all strategy, the problem isn’t coming up with a plan. The problem is implementation – we need brilliant leaders.   Will we make it?

Sorry for the kinda heavy post. More of a mood-piece than a think-piece. Hopefully some music soon!

Eartha Kitt (1927 – 2008)

Take 2 teaspoons of Billie Holiday, a pinch of Edith Piaf, half a cat, a small dose of Judy Garland (or Liza Monelli to taste), and mix together with the essence of Marlena Dietrich, Josephine Baker and some dynamite.

Smoulder on stage for 81 years, serve in a slinky cocktail dress, sharpen her claws, light the fuse and stand well clear… you have created…. Eartha Kitt.

Photo: MikeBaird

Happy Christmas to all the readers and subscribers to this blog. I hope you have a restful holiday, whether you are travelling, spending time with family or friends, or staying home.

For anyone interested in a Christmas-time story for the kids, I suggest David Haywood‘s short story, The Secret Talent of Albert Otter:

Read on…

Choristers at Canterbury Cathedral, December 2008 (Photo: chrisjohnbeckett)

I’ve finally managed to finish Alan Mould’s The English Chorister. Mould’s book is likely the definitive history of boy choristers in England – a history that stretches to the first child oblates who sang the daily office alongside Benedictine monks in the monastery founded by Saint Augustine in Canterbury in the year 597.

Coursework reading meant that this book sat next to my bed all term, half-finished, until this week. But it was well worth perservering with, providing some insight into a musical tradition that formed a very important part of my early musical education.

The continuation of choristership over 14 centuries is unique to England – nowhere else in Europe today can claim a similar long-standing tradition.  But what becomes apparent in Mould’s history is the precarity of the choristers position for many centuries. Despite the demands of singing two services every day, choristers were often badly housed and fed, and until the 20th Century, little provision was made for their education.

Choristers also suffered through political and religious turmoil, including Viking raids on monasteries in the 7th century, or the open hostility of Tudor religious reformers. During the English Reformation, all trappings of Roman Catholic practice  were under threat in the newly protestant Church of England.  Choral worship probably only survived because Elizabeth I (a music fan) personally demanded that choirs not be disestablished – and today choristers still sing  the daily Canticles laid down in Thomas Cranmer’s 1552 Book of Common Prayer.

Today, it is estimated that at any given time, there are around 900 boys and girls in the UK involved in formal choristership – in cathedrals, Oxbridge colleges or the Royal Chapels.  Beyond the UK, a number of “English-style” choral foundations exist, notably at Saint Thomas Church in New York, Saint Andrews in Sydney and Christchurch Cathedral in New Zealand.

The one Anglican choir that undoubtedly receives more “airtime” each year than any other is the choir of King’s College, Cambridge.  On Christmas Eve, millions of people in the UK and around the world tune in for the live broadcast of the service of lessons and carols held in the college’s magnificent chapel.  A televised version is also recorded.  Here’s the choir a few years ago, singing Kenneth Leighton‘s arrangement of the Coventry Carol.

2008 has been a year of rediscovering pop music.  It’s been about dancing around the kitchen to Dizzee Rascal’s Dance Wiv Me and The Ting Tings Great DJ (both perfectly respectable pieces of radio-friendly pop).  But beyond those well-crafted but disposable gems, some new music has grabbed me by the scruff of the neck.  Here are five albums from 2008 that I really, really like.

The Sea and Cake – Car Alarm I fell in love with this album on my first listen, and it’s become the soundtrack to my time in Birmingham.  I wrote my early impressions on the blog a couple of months ago, and it’s still a joy to hear such intricate musicianship in a “rock” context.  Car Alarm is best heard on an iPod walking down Bristol Road on a bright frosty morning – it’ll help you forget you’re going to a 9am Finance lecture.

Vampire Weekend – Vampire Weekend Another band of precocious middle-class white dudes making unusual music.   With improbably-titled songs like Oxford Comma and Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa, this material really should fall flat on its pretentious postmodern face. Instead, you find yourself singing along to lyrics like “I see a mansard roof through the trees” and sighing wistfully for that mysterious  chick  with the Benetton sweater in your Philosophy tutorial.  Hopefully Vampire Weekend never make another album, because this disc approaches an unlikely perfection.

Nicholas Ludford – Missa Benedicta & Antiennes Votives (Choir of New College, Oxford/Edward Higginbottom) Luminous and meticulous music from 500 years ago. Tudor composer Nicholas Ludford was almost forgotten until recent scholarly work revived his reputation, including some of the last sacred music to be composed before the English Reformation. This disc won the 2008 Gramaphone Award for Early Music.

Fleet Foxes - Fleet Foxes This is a late entry into the Top Five.   Their début album sounds like Pet Sounds peformed in Appalachia by a troupe of medieaval troubadours for a 1930s Smithsonian folkways archive projet. But actually they’re from Seattle and signed to Sub-Pop. You have to hear this band. Are Fleet Foxes the new Flaming Lips?

Kenny Wheeler - Other People Kenny Wheeler was born in the same year as Clint Eastwood (1930), and like Eastwood he is enjoying a hugely creative and powerful “late period”.  Every Kenny Wheeler album seems to visit the same idiosyncratic Wheelerian Universe, but each time he takes a different bunch of musical collaborators.  This time it’s the Hugo Wolf Quartett, offering textures that recall Ravel and Schumann, delivered at moments with urgency and passion.  If I’m half as inspired at the age of 78 as Kenny Wheeler is , I’ll consider myself very lucky, punk.

It’s been an interesting few months to be a student at business school.  Our lecturers have been describing the recent series of bank collapses, credit tightening and government-funded bailouts as “unprecedented”.  Certainly none of them have seen anything like it in their lifetime.

Next year, half of the textbooks will  have to be rewritten. A lot of the companies used in their case studies have, quite literally, disappeared.

There’s been a lot of talk about whether business schools are to blame for the current crisis. At Kellogg, Wharton and INSEAD, future business leaders are taught powerful strategic and financial tools that may drive progress and prosperity for large numbers of people. But there is little instruction in the ethical or spiritual roots needed to wield these knowledge and skill with prudence and humanity.

The school I’m attending isn’t quite as high-powered as Harvard or HEC. But it still receives 1200 applications a year for 90 places on its MBA programe.  People are willing to pay large amounts of money for the skills and reputation an MBA can bring – whether their goal is personal enrichment, professional fulfilment or a desire to help society function better. I think for most of my classmates, our motivations are a  genuine mixture of all these factors.

Sao Paulo Stock Market. Image by rednuht

There is a danger however that business schools, (by their very nature of being “schools”), can turn management into a hard science – providing templates, techniques and tactics that forget that business is a very human enterprise. The apparently  immutable rules of Capitalism seem not to recognise that at the centre of the whole abstract system is the weakest link – Us. Humble humans with limited intellects driven by Greed and Fear, and perhaps occasionally by Compassion.

NPR’s Speaking of Faith is running a series of programmes called Repossessing Virtue, examining spiritual and ethical questions raised by the current economic downturn.  In this week’s show, an interview with Quaker educator and  writer Parker Palmer, the interviewer Krista Tippett puts her finger on what is so easily forgotten in the rush for self-enrichment.

- Krista Tippett

I finished with business school late next year. I hope that I and my classmates will remember that while business, industry and commerce can (and must) be a powerful force for good in the world, we must be careful not forget our own humility and frailty.

Kea Photo by leiwandnz, Creative Commons

Today Etnobofin has migrated to some brand new webspace. If you subscribe to the blog by RSS, please make sure you’ve updated your feeds:
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Thanks to Rushan for hosting the blog for two and a half years – now it’s time to strike out on my own! There are a few plans for the root domain name, and hopefully there will be at least a placeholder site there in the next few days.

I’ve been living in Birmingham for just over three months, so any sweeping generalisations I make about Birmingham and its region can be ignored or ridiculed. But sweeping generalisations are fun (if dangerous), and they assist in cultivating a superficial veneer of knowledge…

The first rule of Birmingham: nobody lives in Birmingham. There’s a mistake that all newcomers to Birmingham make at least twice: ask a local “So, how long have you lived in Birmingham?” The answer tends to be: “I’ve never lived in Birmingham. I work in Birmingham. I’ve lived in Dudley/Sutton Coldfield/Halesowen all my life.”

This reaction seem particularly virulent among people from Solihull, who appear most unwilling to acknowledge that England’s second largest city lies just 9 miles north of them.  Solihull gives the impression it would much rather return to the bosom of mother Warwickshire.

Most English people who aren’t from Birmingham know very little about the city, except for three things:

• New Street Station is the 2nd worst place to change trains in the country (the worst place being Crewe, a subject for another post).
• They don’t like the Birmingham accent (which is a purely English irrational prejudice – foreigners love the Brummie accent)
• They don’t personally know anyone from the city (which makes sense, because nobody lives in Birmingham). Although they’ve probably seen Ozzy Osbourne or Jasper Carrott on TV.

Birmingham (and the wider West Midlands) form a far more interesting conurbation than its external image gives it credit for.  Fierce local pride seems to define the various towns in the region – Dudley and Wolverhampton are right next to each other, but you’d do best never to confuse the two. And of course there are the usual football rivalries, with Aston Villa, Birmingham City, Wolves, West Brom and Coventry City all fighting it out in the top two divisions.

It’s difficult for outsiders to tell, but there are several distinct accents across the region, too: Black Country people (whose dialect preserves otherwise extinct features of Middle English) don’t sound like Brummies, who  definitely don’t sound like people from Walsall.   (Second rule of Birmingham: Walsall English is just about the most impenetrable form of English you’ll ever encounter).

It’s said that Birmingham has more miles of canal than Venice, and the canal paths form a good network of cycle routes to explore the city.  If you like old industrial architecture, it’s well worth a couple of days pedalling (take a good map). Cycle far enough and apparently you’ll reach Warwick or Stratford-upon-Avon.

If you get bored with canals, Birmingham has a vibrant creative/new media community, and they all Twitter. There’s at least a few good pubs (the Fighting Cocks in Moseley seems like a friendly place from my one visit so far) and some good music to be had (try the Hare and Hounds in Kings Heath).

Third rule of Birmingham? Don’t rubbish the place until you’ve spent some time here.

Rahsaan Roland Kirk… the blind man who conquered the world through sheer force of will, talent and not a little mild insanity.  His performance at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1972 was captured for TV, and yes, he IS playing flute and recorder at the same time…

I have the audio album version copy of this performance, first released in 1996, it’s well worth checking out.

Some regular visitors may notice I’ve played around with blog’s look and feel, and the sidebar. There are also a few changes under the hood, hopefully making the site easier to maintain.  If you like/hate it, or have any suggestions for improvement, let me know!

Oh and Sport Direct in the UK are evil. Don’t shop there.