Two saxes: a Stritch and a Manzello. Guess you mist the comment to Lloyd re setten in the 5spot NYC 1965 writing rhetoric for PLP convention @ 3/4AM listening to Rahsaan & Lil Jazz trade sets?

But I’m a fossil nowadays. Gotta chk out this Pink Martini band, goes from Gypsy to Jimmy Scott to Korean funk?

“leagues” — hey, I’m just a halfassed wyt jazzpicker, been around the periph long time, by accident acquired some v. good ancecdotes. I had some high spots though, in between disasters. Like coming back from Bremerhaven on the boat with Eddie Harris. the Green room, “passenger lounge” had a piano & an old alto saxophone, plus a jive set of German Band trapdrums, big ol’ bass drum w/ an elk on it:)

So we played ever afternoon, chess and bebop, trading sets. needless to say he won evertime, both pursuits:) He come out the projects Chi South Side, by twentyone owned hi rise real estate 63rd & Cottage Grove — from being House Piano on “bird” records — you know, like The Ravens, The Crows, The Orioles… doowop grps: 1 6 2 5, straight triplets all the way to the bank:)

Since we seem to be talking Jewish, ever chckd out Flip Phillips? Lew Tabackin is prty gd, technic-wise Brecker Bros is bad. Greatest Jewish saxoftenist, not a tenor player, IMHO was Serge Chaloff.

Bob Cedar/Seder was an alcoholic, never practiced, put the horn in the corner for months/yrs at a time, like when he was teaching Math at the High School & tryna be married. But I heard shit come out that bell I never heard before or since. He had Prez cold, ever solo note4note, knew all his tunes front/back/upside down — & if the mood struck him cd out-dolphy Dolphy. He’d say Well I may be fairskint but I aint no honky, I’m a Russian Gypsy Jew & I don’t give a fuck. & he didn’t.

Hehe- we usta play in Chinatown for the tourists, front the World Trade Center, no not that one, the SF one, just a fancy name on a Chinese business assoc, like the chamber a commerce, out on Grant St. Anyway he’d be playen some ballad, Tis Autumn, Ask Me Now, sthn like that, and he’d be worken my emotions, just gettin so tender, so nostalgic, so sedimental… I’d think I was about to cry or sthn. & he’d take the horn out his mouth & spit onto the concrete, fart, clear his throat-spit again, then go on playing like nothen happened, not miss a beat, right on the change, sweetern Tommy Dorsey.

We did prty gd on the Touriss, putten ones/fives/casional Andy in the case. But what pleased us was when one them Chinese FOB ladies worken one them sweatshops, din’t spk no Inglese much as Apaloosa knows about Xmas — wd put a quarter in the horncase. We knew somebody had understood, which is all that matters.

.

who is/was Edgar Winter?

mil grazie,

de:)

Well much as I admire Gilad’s dissection of “the Jewish Ideology”, insights into the psychological Holocaust Syndrome that preceded the historical event itself, etc etc, and much as I’m automatically in sympathy with anybody who plays something like Jazz on the tenor saxophone, I find GA’s take as unsatisfying as I find the limited portion of his saxophonical ouvre to which I’ve so far been exposed.
I have to admit to being a little spoiled when it comes to tenor players, having spent nine afternoons jamming with Eddie Harris, and several months as Bob Cedar’s designated stooge. I could drop some other names but Bob was the best I ever heard close up, so why go on. Did hear Pres at a cpl JATPs, but from way in the back.
Well, wait a minit, I forgot that night Hawk was on the bill at the Jazz Workshop, backing up Witherspoon with Freddie Redd’s trio. Oh this is a classic, cant help myself: the Workshop’s policy was no neon sign, just a wooden sign out front hung on a pole straight out above the door, one of those burnt-in-letters kind: Jazz Workshop. That board had little eyehooks on the bottom, to hang the name of the act featured that week. So it started out “Jazz Workshop”, “Jimmy Witherspoon”. Then Hawk was in town, so Art Auerbach the owner put him on the bill too: Jazz Workshop, Jimmy Witherspoon, Ben Webster with the Freddie Redd Trio. There was just room to walk under the F Redd Trio sign, but the drummer Freddie had for the week was Philly Joe Jones, who took exception to all these lightweights like Spoon and Freddie having their names up in burnt mahogany, while Philly Joe was sposta toil in anonymity:) So Philly Joe starts shucken/jiven, carryin on like he’s really upset. & Philly J Jones was nobody you wanted to have getten upset in yr immediate vicinity; he carried an aura of back alley crap games etc? So Art put on another shingle. Customers had to dodge it to get in, but the joint was packed so no biggie.
So they played, it was HOT. Then took a break; Philly continued to rant & rave down by the bandstand. Most present assumed he was jiven, just putten everbody on, haven some fun. But Spoon took no chances, he staid up by the bar & did his complaining about egotrippers etc from there, at about a mezzoforte. Meanwhile Philly Joe was around triple FFF with an occasional Sfortzando:)
Next set Armondo Peraza came in, just set his tumbas on the stand & commenced to drive it all to the next level, smiling his ass off:) Rafael Garret was the bassplayer. Nobody ever played better than Ben Webster, as good as maybe but not better. esp the low register.

Anyway: Self-Determination. Looks like Gilad ain’t never read Joe Stalin’s dissertation on the subject, which is where all intelligent discourse on the topic starts. Surprise, surprise: Unca Joe may have been mean, but he was not as dumb as Lev Bronstein wanted to believe. And wanted everybody else to believe, so help me Victor Navasky:)

I found Mr Atzmon’s essay tortured. Like he had an idea there but just couldn’t quite catch up to it.

Next?

What I said about him, you see, is true. And he is not Gore vidal, a socialist who probably likes mustard at his villa outside Rapallo. Dusseldorf mustard instead of dijon, indeed. You been sniffing it?

Lloyd Rowsey

It’s refreshing more than disturbing, however, that everyone including more and more lawyers are lately become experts in international law. And that this law has not changed much, or at all really, regarding pre-emptive aggressions.

After all, international law IS part of the United States Constitution.

And MANY of us have at least vague recollections of what that is.

It is now crystal clear to me that NO honourable solution to this Israeli-Palestinian conflict is possible. Anything that Israel puts on the table is just crumbs and stale leftovers for the Palestinians to take it and lump it! Therefore I see only two scenarios that can be played out which can give both the Israelis and Palestinians viable, honourable and independent States.

1: The Worst-Case Scenario

I would strongly recommend that the Palestinians give up their suicide bombing frenzy, which leads nowhere other than further punishment, misery and land grabbing by the State of Israel. This only provides the Israelis with the opportunity to cry out “foul” and play up the “victim syndrome” which for the last 60 years they have developed to a fine art.

Adopt the Mahatma Gandhi’s Satyagraha approach.

The Palestinians strength is not guns, bombs or missiles. It is its own people, and large numbers of them, reinforced by their determination. Now just imagine a well organised, drilled, multitude (half a million, 1 million, 2 million…10 million, even!) of men, women, children, young and old, armed only with their teeth, hands and fists, moving as a mighty wave, a human tsunami, into different and separate points of the Israeli’s occupied territories to reclaim their stolen land.
The very thought of it would scare the shits out of the Zionists. It could turn into a bloodbath, for the Israelis won’t hesitate to shoot and kill the defenceless. But by their sheer strength of numbers: the children scratching the Israeli’s faces and biting off their ears; the women spitting on their faces and with their nails gouge their eyes out, and the men with their bare fists ripping off their gut inside out; this, eventually but surely, would force the Israelis to eat humble pie, and bite the dust!
For the Israelis, this is the bad, bad, bad news.

NOW THE GOOD NEWS

2: The Best-Case Scenario

If I remember correctly, it was round about the time when the former League of Nations was created, or just prior to the Balfour Declaration, that the idea was bandied about to allocate to the Jews a National Home. Regions that were mentioned were Angola ( or part of it), Kenya and some others. Of course nothing came out of it. I use this as my starting point for what I suggest next. With this precedent in mind and now that the US and Israel are in such good and friendly terms (an historical peak!) it would not be outrageous for the US government to offer the Israelis a new Homeland in one of its vast deserts, compatible in size, climate and terrain to that of present Israel.
They would move en masse, lock, stock and barrel there. They wouldn’t even need a Moses to split asunder the waters of the Atlantic Ocean for them to make the long journey on foot to America. They would fly comfortably over, Jumbo jet, courtesy the American tax-payer.
Wasn’t the old London Bridge dismantled, shipped across and reassembled somewhere in America? So could also the Wailing Wall and all the sacred sites revered by the Jews, be carved out and shipped in containers and reassembled in their new home. There! A NEW ISRAEL, plonk in the middle of America, a fully independent nation, just like Switzerland is in the middle of Europe, too.
Now, securely surrounded by friendly states, the Israelis would then be able to devote all their energies praying at the Wailing Wall, until they’re blue in the faces, for the coming of their Messiah, who is not likely to come round in such a hurry, since they missed out badly on that other One, 2000 years ago.

Though, it may appear I’m writing this tongue-in-cheek, it is a scenario well worth considering, and sooner rather than later. Israel may be today America’s darling but there is no guarantee that it will be so 10/20 years down the road. This window of opportunity is wide open today, but just as quickly can be slammed shut tomorrow. By then, Americans may get so fed up with Israel’s antics in the Middle East, costing them lives and billions of dollars in Aid, and in the end reaping solely the opprobrium of the rest of the world. Then the Israelis will be left “frying” on their own where they are now, and for a long, long time.

Wouldn’t this be wonderful?
The Jews would be happy, the Americans would be happy, the Palestinians would be even happier, and the rest of the World would just sing, dance and rejoice!

Thanks for another excellent piece, Gilad.

I concur with the first part, but as to the second, so what? Israeli “tribal politics and praxis” have already been exposed, repeatedly. The fact is, that without massive US support Israel would be forced to negotiate immediately and sincerely, giving “the right to self-determination” a whole new meaning in that area of the world. On the other hand, the US and Zionist hierarchy would probably rather see the entire earth become a hollow smoking crater than give up their illicit strangle hold on the resources of the region. Hillary Clinton isn’t the only one with her hand in the monkey trap.

It’s funny how the transposition of a single word in literature of the ‘legendary’ ‘ultra-leftist’ Matzpen can turn it into a Neocon screed. Apropos how ‘both Neocons and Matzpen know what liberation may mean for Arabs’ (Shopping Malls for the former and Bolshevism for the latter) Amitava Kumar commented on this phenomenon in a book review:

For some members of the radical left, particularly in the West, people in developing countries are an ideological abstraction, on whom fantasies of liberation are projected from a comfortable distance. These fantasies are not infrequently laced with condescension.

Notions of left and right dissolve in the teleological determinism–or ‘motor of world history’ philosophy–whose mysteries these ‘cosmopolitan’ ‘atheist’ ‘intellectuals’ from their vantage position in the ‘vanguard’ have discerned.

To force oppressed peoples of the Third World into the Procrustean bed of their ideology (’smelly orthodoxy’ as Orwell called it), these ’secular humanists’ will prove themselves second to none in bloody-mindedness when they get half the chance. If they don’t get a chance, they’ll carry on their gatekeeper function in agitprop, keeping the possibility of meaningful dialog low and forcing their cant-ridden self-serving ideological worldview into any debate at the first opportunity.

For some members of the radical left, particularly in the West, people in developing countries are an ideological abstraction, on whom fantasies of liberation are projected from a comfortable distance. These fantasies are not infrequently laced with condescension.

Notions of left and right dissolve in the teleological determinism–or ‘motor of world history’ philosophy–whose mysteries these ‘cosmopolitan’ ‘atheist’ ‘intellectuals’ from their vantage position in the ‘vanguard’ have discerned.

To force oppressed peoples of the Third World into the Procrustean bed of their ideology (’smelly orthodoxy’ as Orwell called it), these ’secular humanists’ will prove themselves second to none in bloody-mindedness when they get half the chance. If they don’t get a chance, they’ll carry on their gatekeeper function in agitprop, keeping the possibility of meaningful dialog low and forcing their cant-ridden ideological worldview into any debate at the first opportunity.