Roger Ingram and High Notes

I had the distinct pleasure of spending parts of the last two days with Roger Ingram, who was the guest artist at the Schoolcraft Jazz Studies Program’s Up Jumped Spring concert yesterday.  Roger is a high register trumpeter who played on the road for 35 years with Tom Jones, Connie Stevens, Ray Charles, Frank Sinatra, Maynard Ferguson, and was the lead trumpeter for the Woody Herman and Harry Connick big bands.

Roger is a great player, and a really nice, very encouraging person.

Here's one of the songs Roger played with us, as recorded with a different band.

Roger Ingram Live at the College Hideaway with the Jim Stewart Orchestra

At his clinic yesterday, he discussed playing in the high register, and quite a few times mentioned counter-intuitive thinking.  The first requirement for having a high register is having a strong, secure low register.  As Bud Brisbois, Stan Kenton’s lead trumpet player in the late 50’s, told him, you can’t build a skyscraper on a weak foundation.  

So what I take from this is that unless you really own the bottom of your horn - from low concert E to high C, you need to devote your efforts there before embarking on the high road.

Once you have that foundation, you can, as Roger’s friend and past guest artist Wayne Bergeron put it, “discover,” not “develop” the high register.  Wayne’s idea is that when you have this firm foundation, you then have the playing strength to be able to explore and map the new region above.  Counter-intuitive thinking.

Something that was a real eye-opener for me is that playing high requires less air, not more.  Bud Brisbois told Roger that if you use a tablespoon full of air to play high C, use a half tablespoon to play the F above, and a teaspoon full for double high C.  If you fill your lungs to capacity and shove a lot of air through the horn attempting to play high, you’re dooming yourself to failure.  Counter-intuitive thinking.

An exercise he recommended for discovering the upper region is to gliss from C to high C and back [Bb on trombone].  In demonstrating, he took a moderate tempo - about 1 second for each leg of the excursion.  Repeat the glissing exercise each half step higher, as far as you can go.  Recognize and accept that this will sound terrible.  Allow that to happen.  You aren’t going for sound, you’re going for a result.  Tone will come later.  If you have a good foundation, and do this for 15 minutes every day for one month, you should be able to play up to double high C at the end of that time.  This approach builds in muscle memory for the location of the partials, and helps to internalize the control needed to play reliably in the high region.   In his demonstration, he did not work hard, and it actually looked pretty effortless.

I’ve had some success building my upper register over the last year, but still would like to expand the next half octave to double high C [concert Bb,] and certainly need to discover control in my existing high range.  I’m excited to embark on this new adventure.

One last parting counter-intuitive thought.  Roger said he really enjoys playing in the middle register!

One Nation, Divisible

We are a country not just divided, but fragmented along axes of race, age, religion, economic status and geography.  There are now 15 States where citizens have filed petitions to secede from the Union.  "These include Louisiana (which led the charge), the Republic of Texas, Kentucky, Colorado, New Jersey, Montana, North Dakota, Indiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Alabama, Florida, Georgia and Oregon."  I don't know which is number 15, but I'm gong to guess Oklahoma. 

I'm not going to get flip about it.  While these petitions have virtually no chance of achieving anything, it's important to remember two things:

1)  You never hear anything like this when Republicans win.
2)  All but 4 of these states represent the (since 1965) solid Republican South.

Another geographic dimension is urban vs rural.  When I do get flip, I say Obama won everywhere that people outnumber cattle, deer, goats or alligators.  This comes distressingly close to being the truth.  Look at the electoral map of just about any State.  I like to consider Ohio, since it is my home State and in many ways represents the U.S. in miniature.  But pick a State at random [or Texas in particular] and you'll probably see the same scenario.   The Ohio electoral map shows that Obama carried 16 of Ohio's 88 counties.  Half of these are strung along the Lake Erie shore, four more are contiguous in the densely populated north-east corner, and the other four contain Columbus, Dayton, Cincinnati and Athens.

I'm not ambitious enough to undertake the study, but I'll hypothesize that Obama's vote percentage in each county is directly proportional to the total population - and this in a State where the counties don't vary much in physical size.  Consider that Lucas Co. [essentially my home town, Toledo] with 198,000 votes cast went for Obama by 64 to 34%, while Mercer Co. along the IN border with 21,000 votes cast went for Romney by 77 to 22%.  You can find these kinds of results all over the country.

Another divide is along education level.  Among the 15 States with the best public school systems, Obama carried 13, while among the 15 States with the worst public school systems, Romney carried 12.  I see this as a big component in the recent Republican war on education.  One thing you develop as a result of good education is a set of critical thinking skills, which then give you the ability to see through nonsense peddlers like Rush, Trump, and the whole Fox roster.

All of this tends to make me pessimistic about our nations future.  But I see rays of hope amidst the great divide.  Even in Georgia, which went 53 to 45% for Romney, you find Obama winning by huge margins in Atlanta, Macon, Augusta, Columbus, Savannah, and Albany.

Plus, another thing is happening that you have to see a country-wide county level electoral map to notice.

There is a blue streak that starts along the Mississippi river valley where Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi converge and runs almost continuously through Alabama, Georgia and the Carolinas to join with the blue States along the coast.

I call it the band of sanity running through the South, and it might just represent an opportunity for progressives to build on going forward.

Cross-posted at AB

Bumper sticker of the Day

Seen in the Trader Joe's parking lot

The rich get richer.
The rest get less.
Vote Democratic


Fifty years ago (or near enough as no matter) my dad told me this:

Every once in a while, when a crumb falls off the plate, the Democrats will let you keep it.

The Republicans won't even do that.

In my callow ignorance, I had no idea what the hell he was talking about.  Seriously.  My own personal brand of selfishness was far too venial to help me get it.  I really had no idea about the all-too-common human capacity for avarice and cruelty.

As recently as 1990, I really still wasn't getting it.

Thank you Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Junior partner to your own presidency "W", John McCain, Paul Ryan and Willard Romney for bringing my late father's wisdom home to me in such graphic terms.

I really get it now.

Also, too - a H/T to my lovely wife who continuously teaches me the virtue of selflessness.

The Real World of Real Work

I was reminded again of this, while reading this comment from Steve, at his own blog (following Art's link.) 

My sister, after abandoning the Berkeley Phd astrophysics program, ended up [with no programming experience] programming those Visa mainframes that process billions of transactions a night — in assembler! I asked her once if she used any of her higher math from college, calculus and such. “No,” she said, “we pretty much just add and subtract. On rare occasions we’ll get really abstruse and multiply or divide.

Which is tangential to the topic Steve, et. al. were discussing, but keys right into something that I was thinking about.  I have two degrees in Chemistry, B. S. and M.S.  I worked in industry from early June of 1968 until the end of November in 2008 - a tad over 40 years.  If you aggregated all the time I spent doing actual chemistry, it might total a few months; certainly it was far less than two years.  If you aggregated all the time I spent doing things where my knowledge of chemistry directly informed my ability to function, it would total somewhere in the range of 15 to 20 years.  Dealing with Mechanical Engineers threw this into stark relief.  A typical Mechanical Engineer simply would have been incapable of doing my job.  Just as I would have been incapable of doing her's - for that 30 to 50% of the time, unless I received some amount of specific training.*  Also, I'll posit that specific engineering knowledge was a relevant enabler to the M.E. no more than 50% of the time.

Here is a related anecdote.  Some of my musician friends are employed as computer programmers.  Their education is in music.  Their employer specifically seeks musicians because training them is especially easy.  There is some sort of fit between the musician's mind and the tasks to be performed.

My point is that doing something other than what you were educated to do is not a misuse of talent, except in the most egregious examples - frex PhD' physicists driving cabs, Engineers delivering pizzas, Accountants digging ditches, Economists doing economics.  (Sorry, couldn't resist the dig.)

Realistically, your education does not prepare you for the world of work, and most specifically, the chance of it preparing you for the job you actually get is almost vanishingly small.

__________________________________________

* Some of this is skill and training related, and some has to do with individual brain idiosyncrasies, interest level and willingness to learn.  I'll bet I could learn the M.E.'s job with very little additional training.  Engineering is applied math, and I'm reasonably good at that.   Not so the other way around.  At the briefest mention of anything remotely chemical, the M.E.'s eyes glaze over.  Persist, and they will run, screaming, from the room.

A look at Tennessee

The situation in Wisconsin is not a single unconnected event.  It is part of a concerted effort by Repugnicants nationwide to bust unions.

An editorial in the Memphis, Tennessee Commercial Appeal this morning talks about HB 103, which would strip teachers of the right to organize. 

Gov. Bill Haslam seems to have a genuine interest in improving public education in Tennessee. 

At least his ideas, which emerged this week with the release of his legislative package, are related to the task. 

The same can't be said for proposals put forward by the General Assembly's Republican majority, which can fairly be compared to corporal punishment -- except teachers are getting the swats. 

.   .   .


Haslam has a strong hand to play in the legislature with both chambers in the hands of his party. His proposals stand in contrast to ideas that were floated earlier in the week by members of the GOP legislative majority.

Taking away teachers' right to collective bargaining, kicking them off the state employees pension board and the like have the distinct aroma of vengeance against a teachers' union that refused last fall to contribute as much money to Republican campaign coffers as it was giving to Democrats.

Lawmakers in search of credibility would do well to follow the governor's lead.

 I'm trying to find out if anything is happening with this bill.  No luck so far.
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The Big Lie in Wisconsin

 Update: This afternoon the Wisconsin employees unions agreed to accept Gov Wanker's demands on pay and benefits, but not give in on the right to organize.   He turned them down flat, refused to consider their offer, and was both heavy-handed and dictatorial.  What this did, though, was unmask his lies.  Clearly, as I state below, this is not about the money.  It has never been about the money.  It is about destroying first, the unions in Wisconsin, then the unions nation-wide, and - ultimately - the entire middle class. Be afraid.  Be VERY afraid.  Sooner or later, they are coming for you!

You probably know by now that the Democratic members of the Wisconsin State Senate have fled the state so that there will not be a quorum present to vote on legislation backed by newly-elected Rethug governor Scott Walker.  This legislation pretends to address a budget disaster that Walker manufactured - but is really designed to deprive the State's workers of collective bargaining rights. As noted in the link above, similar action is on the docket in Ohio, another working class state that made the huge mistake of electing a Repugnicant governor in the most recent election.

Here are the facts about Wisconsin.

1) There was no budget shortfall until Walker took office.  The State Fiscal Bureau project a surplus of $121 million in a report dated January 30, 2011.

2) Walker wiped out this surplus with the following actions -
- $25 million for an "economic development fund" that has a $75 balance due to lack of job creation.  Essentially this is money down a black hole.
- $48 million for private health care savings accounts -as implemented in Wisconsin, this favorite Rethug love-child is simply a tax-dodge for the well-off.
- $67 million for a tax-shift plan to benefit "job creators," but at levels too low to spur hiring.

The bottom line is evident to anyone who cares to pay attention not to the spin but to the budget figures: Walker is manufacturing a fiscal “crisis” in order to achieve political goals.

Walker is not addressing a fiscal crisis.

He is not serving Wisconsin.

He is serving his own interest and those of the lobbyists who represent his campaign contributors.

3) Walker's plan to strip state workers of their collective bargaining rights specifically excluded the police and fire fighters unions, which had supported his candidacy.  This is a blatant ploy to pay back those unions for their support, and to play divide-and-conquer among the state's employees.  To their credit, the police and firemen have joined the teachers and other state workers in their protest against the governor's union busting tatics.

4) One lie you might hear is that state workers are overpaid, or have overly generous benefit packages.  Menzie Chinn presents the facts.  Any way you slice it, public sector employees (except for those with less than a high school education, who make slightly more) in Wisconsin make less than their private sector counterparts.

5) Wisconsin state employees, as retirees, receive very modest pensions, and their pension plan is getting badly screwed by the fund mangers.   David Cay Johnston of Tax.com explains it to Dylan Ratigan:

You know, the pensions they want to go after, they’re not very big in Wisconsin. I just calculated the numbers. The average Wisconsin state employee gets $24,500 a year. That’s not a very big pension. The state pension plan, 15% of the money going into it each year is being paid out to Wall Street to manage the money. That’s a really huge high percentage to pay out to Wall Street to manage the money. And what I think is going on here is this is the state as we began where public employee unions were first by law allowed, and if this governor can break these unions then you’re going to see this happen all across the country and further drive down wages. And if you can drive down wages in the public sector, it means private employers can drive down wages in the private sector.

Jack Norman, research director at the Institute for Wisconsin Future -- a public interest think tank -- sums it up this way.

Walker was not forced into a budget repair bill by circumstances beyond his control.   He wanted a budget repair bill and forced it by pushing through tax cuts... so he could rush through these other changes.   . . . The state of Wisconsin has not reached the point at which austerity measures are needed.

The Cap Times editorial linked and quoted above put it this way.

To the extent that there is an imbalance -- Walker claims there is a $137 million deficit -- it is not because of a drop in revenues or increases in the cost of state employee contracts, benefits or pensions. It is because Walker and his allies pushed through $140 million in new spending for special-interest groups in January. If the Legislature were simply to rescind Walker’s new spending schemes -- or delay their implementation until they are offset by fresh revenues -- the “crisis” would not exist.

In summary, Governor Wanker's plan achieves or attempts the following:

1) A budget crisis manufactured by more than $100 million in give-aways to corporations, lobbyists and special interest groups.
2) Shifting the tax burden from the haves to the have-nots - a consistent Rethug theme since Reagan.
3) The destruction of collective bargaining - a consistent Rethug theme since Reagan.

My hat is off to the Democratic senators who fled the state, the demonstrators who refuse to take this lying down, and Ed Shultz who started reporting about this on Monday, when nobody else was paying attention.

Ed has been calling Rethug policies an assault on the middle class for years - and he's right.  It has been clear for decades that Rethugs want to roll back the New Deal.  State Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Madison, as quoted in the Cap Times editorial takes it farther:

In one fell swoop, Gov. Walker is trying to institute a sweeping radical and dangerous notion that will return Wisconsin to the days when land barons and railroad tycoons controlled the political elites in Madison.

Polan sees the Rethug plan as going back 100 years or more to the gilded age of robber barons.  But even that is not taking it far enough.  Rethugs have been at war with education for over 50 years.  They do not want a population educated beyond the ability to do simple repetitive labor tasks.  They certainly do not want a population who understands civics and democracy, and is able to rise up the way the union workers of Wisconsin have risen up.

The Rethug plan is to roll back not only the New Deal, but the U.S. Constitution, and The Enlightenment, on which it is based.  The key phrase, from the Preamble to The Declaration of Independence, is  "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal . . ."  Everybody knows these words - an astoundingly radical statement at the time - but how often do we really reflect on their meaning?  What is clear to me is that people who call themselves "conservative" do not believe, and have never believed that these words carry any truth whatsoever.   They believe in a society structured and ruled by class.  This is not me talking - it is directly from Burke, via Kirk, in The Conservative Mind.

A class based society is profoundly at variance with everything the United States professes to stand for.  But this is the goal of the Rethugs and thier rich, regressive backers - the Koch brothers, and others of their ilk.

Make no mistake, this assault on unions, along with the Rethug assault on Social Security is part of a master plan to reform society into a modern version of feudalism, where trans-national mega-corporations with no loyalty to anything nor anybody, have and control all the wealth, while you and I are reduced to abject povery, and our children and grandchildren become their serfs.

This country is not broke, as I heard Sir Boner of Orange state the other night.  This is a rich country with enormous and growing  wealth disparity.  The plan is working -  it's been working for over 30 years - and the end game is total control of all wealth by a tiny minority, while the rest of us struggle at the edge of starvation.

This is the true road to serfdom, and it is playing out before our very eyes. 

If we will allow it.
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Some Thoughts on Fascism

Over at G&T, Ed said:

I try not to think about 2002 and 2003. America was a truly awful thing to see while it was pregaming the Iraq War. Watching the American public, desperate as it was to lash out incoherently in post-9/11 rage, swallow one tablespoon of horseshit after another as the previous administration engaged in the greatest marketing campaign in history was not pleasant. It was a real reminder – not a Teabagger's "Obama = Hitler" reminder – of how thin the line between American-style democracy and fascism really is.

In comments, bb asked:

I know Dave likes to do the Top 10 thing, but owing to the fact that we have a wide spectrum of Leftist thought here, can a few of y'all give a Top 5 things that we should do/be that would move us a few notches away from "fascism" (We have had discussions before on exactly what is meant by that term – so a working definition from you might be attached)

 ladiesbane responded

And when we discuss Democracy versus Facism, I agree that we should define our terms. I can easily see a Democratically elected leader who espouses a Facistic philosophy: authoritarian control of social behavior rather than liberty of person; ultra-nationalism rather than patriotism; State attitude of division rather than unity, discriminating against a designated set of Other among the populace; definition of dissent as treason; utter negation of anything that questions authority; and so forth. Economic principles and class divisions are no longer relevant to a definition of Fascism — Classism is a separate problem. But if we have (crypto-)Fascists in office, we elected them, right?

My response:

@ bb

OK. I'll take the bait. But first, I'll remind you that there is essentially NO leftist thought in the U.S. these days. For decades, the political debate has been between the right and the far right. Only thus can a centrist conservative like B. Hoover Obama be described as some sort of raving leftist commie socialist.

It sometimes amuses me to see the world in cartoon images. As such, Fascism is the devil sitting on democracies right shoulder, always tempting her down the road to serfdom. Imagine a demonic Donald Duck perched on the statue of Liberty.

Fascism is fundamentally control of the government by business interests – essentially the inverse of socialism – along with control of people's minds by a combination of religious and patriotic – no, make that NATIONALISTIC – jingoistic drum beating. Ladiesbane, above, has a pretty good sad litany of characteristics.

Since corporations have no soul, they are totally immune to any feelings of conscience or sympathy as the population becomes impoverished, and the corporate overlords grow ever richer. Since government is the only entity large and powerful enough to provide a counterbalance to big business, when business controls government, the people get {expletive deleted} hard.

The top five things to move away from fascism, obviously have to do with getting business out of government, and un-brainwashing the population. (as they occur to me – not rank ordered)

a) Reverse the appalling Citizens United decision: corporations – and most especially trans-nationals who are loyal to nobody – are not people, and we give them quasi-human rights at our peril.

b) Real election reform. I don't have a formula, but multi-million dollar elections are a distortion of democracy that invites corporate control.

c) The right almost exclusively owns the airwaves. There are enormous stretches of countryside where the only a.m. talk you can get is Rush, Sean, and the idiot Beck. Somehow restore parity in the exposure to ideas.

d) Education: Americans are staggeringly ignorant of history, and knowledge of how government works, and methods of rational discourse and critical thinking. Fascists, conservatives, and religionists hate education. They want a population trained only well enough to operate machinery and follow orders – not well enough to engage in free thought.

e) Big business loves monopolies and hates free enterprise. Bring back real entrepreneurial capitalism. This means prohibiting mergers that eliminate competition, and breaking up any too-big-too-fail organization.

And, at no extra charge:

f) Instituting tax policies that are genuinely progressive and loophole resistant to reverse and impede the flow of wealth into the hands of the mega-rich.

Then I added:

I got it from Mussolini himself:

Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.
-  Benito Mussolini

Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power.
- Benito Mussolini

Fascism, the more it considers and observes the future and the development of humanity, quite apart from political considerations of the moment, believes neither in the possibility nor the utility of perpetual peace.
- Benito Mussolini

This highlights the other characteristic of fascism – that it degenerates nationalism into an excessively warlike stance. Comparing W to fascists was not so over-the-top as his supporters would have the rest of us believe. It's no coincidence that his grandfather made a fortune bankrolling the Nazis.

And BTW – American industrialists in the 30's were in LOVE with the Nazis, and fervently hoped for an American version of fascism.

And now they're getting it.

Characteristics of fascism can be found here and here.

Of course, none of my proscriptive solutions is even remotely possible.  We're screwed.
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What the Hell Friday - Trained Dolphins, Monkey Submarines, and the Hot Chick from MythBusters

The Big Polluter formerly known as British Petroleum, then BP-Amoco, now just BP, will always be BRITISH PETROLEUM in our minds and hearts.  This Colbert clip is a few days old, but since the crude spew will probably go on for weeks and months, its not likely to get stale any time soon.

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Oil Containment Solution Randomizer
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Fox News

And if you didn't actually know there was a hot chick on MythBusters:

Reagan Era Income Distribution

I think we can, without too much argument, define the middle class as the middle income quintile.

This graph plots the top income level of the first four quitiles.  Data from The U.S. Census Bureau.

The middle class is bounded by the pink and yellow lines.  The top income of the middle quartile did not crack through the $30,000 ceiling until 1984.  Stated another way, until 1984, $30,000 was above the top of middle class income.

The next graph indicates the tops of four quintiles, and the bottom limit of the of the top 5%.

In 1980, it only took $50,000 to burst into the top 5%.  With the passage of time, the spreading of the lines indicates the increasing wealth disparity, which is among the most prominent aspects of the Reagan legacy.

The slopes of the various lines indicate how much your income would have to increase at various levels to avoid sliding down through the social strata.

And slide they did -- at the bottom, anyway.  This post shows that Reagan and Bush I were pretty good at increasing the poverty rolls.

Not a Good First Day of School for Some

Speaking of education - this is heartbreaking.

The number of homeless students has approximately doubled in many school districts, and now totals over 1,000,000 nationally.

Another tragic symptom of the current depression.

Sunday Music Blogging

It's been a long time since I've thought about - or even remembered the existence of - the Chapin brothers: Harry*, of Cat's Cradle** fame, and Tom, who hosted "Make a Wish"*** way back in the day when my kids were very young, indeed.

Here they each have a take on the modern system of education.

Harry First (embedding disabled at YouTube ?!?)

Flowers are Red.

Then Tom



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* With a hat tip to EOTAW.
** No damned cat. No damned cradle. Oops! Wrong damned link.
*** I think a blogger is what I'll be. Imagine all the possibilities.