This is the thing that became jazz. Armstrong dint invent any of this. Nor did he ever define it. But this is the take that characterized the jazz that would dominate the 20th century.
The opening cadenza is what jazz players and some observers call, "watch this dude stand up on his hind legs and blow".
It is, *technically*, insane. There's a thousand covers, perhaps the best from Nicholas Payton, but none of them, not even one, captured the *feel* of it.
Then we get a trombone break. So that's a thing, yo, a *break*, where you let a player be a star.
Then. Oh fuck me. We get a scat-clarinet duet. Armstrong didn't invent scat, but just *listen*, he collaborating vocally as an instrument. This is in fact the thing that Billie Holiday got.
Then we break to piano, and I ain't hatin' on nobody, but it's, well, it's a chance to catch our breath.
THEN. Sixteen beats of one note. FOUR MEASURES, and he retires from it with grace and aplomb.
And none of this wordy description can possibly encompass the extent to which this guy change the world, in that one take.
There is zero 20th c American music that was not shaped by this African-American genius who did not even know his birthday, cuz they dint record Black birthdays in the Storyville district in 1900.
All of American music, even American classical music, comes back to the legacy of chattel slavery. All of it. And the British invasion, too, cuz their mentors were our blues players.
You gotta turn to face the question.
You can deny this. You can go raga, or you can go Chinese opera, or you can love your Russian folktunes.
But if you love American popular music, any of it, you are loving the extraordinary contributions of slaves and their children.
And. That is *awful*. It makes you seem like a bad person, to have taken so much advantage of so many humans. I feel you.
Good. That's good.
That is the beginning of us declaring for love.
There are legitimate grumblings, the Armstrong New Orleans saga is, mmmmmm, it's complicated. That shit was going on in Chicago and New York, too, and Armstrongs one of maybe three who we might claim central. But. But. That's intramurals, that's just detail.
The point is that there is no "American" music that isn't directly or a degree or two of separation "Black American" music.
Which raises the question.
How are we treating with the sub-population that effectively created every kind of music we think of as American?
Not, maybe, so well.
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...get your fucking hands up, get on out of your seats, all eyes on me, all eyes on me...
Burnham's "Inside" is a rather astonishing piece of art.
This Pomplamoose cover of one of the songs in it just blows me away. I've been replaying it for four days.
I think you might like this just as it is. But after watching "Inside", you'll understand how pivotal this song is to, really, an incredible piece of work.
Wasn't having any fun with the last seed. Decided to go for a reset. Here's Oxygen Not Included Spaced Out, the big central asteroid variant, seed V-SNDST-C-742298558-0
Gonna go for 16 dupes, a two-column arrangement, 16 wide under the printer, 4 bedrooms wide to the right. There'll still be some improv, but I won't feel quite so "out of control" as I did with that last attempt. I need my chaos in smaller doses. :)
Chose a researcher (Brains), but then did something slightly different, took *two* builder/diggers (Digby and Dagby), instead of just one and an operator/supplier (Opus). I name my dupes by what they do so I can see at a glance who's doing what.
As a person who has been successfully coaching software development teams for twenty years, let me throw out a few ideas to chew over. With luck, maybe one of them will jiggle the frame enough for you to find a next step.
1) Nothing, *absolutely* nothing, always works. There are thousands of forces in play in a typical team or organization, and many of them are inherently or ontogenetically anti-change. I vary my game a *lot*, and I have a lot of variants to offer. And I still lose all the time.
2) My dog Wally likes to lead, when we're out on Tiger Patrol. But he only occasionally knows where we're actually going. He finesses this by frequently checking to make sure that he's leading where we want to go. This is *primo* coaching practice.
The first plank of my take on fixing the trade is MMMSS: If you want more value faster, take Many More Much Smaller Steps. Today I want to start laying this out for folks. This isn't gonna happen in one thread, but let's get started.
Before we dig in a little, let me remind you that I'm aiming here for geek comfort good, respite. I am far more concerned with changing the world right now than I am with changing code. I hope you are, too.
Please keep working for change outside the monitor.
Black Lives Matter.
The first thing to get about MMMSS is that it represents a radical change. It seems like a minor tweak, but it's not, it is a complete reversal of a whole body of existing trade practice, the model I call "Rework Avoidance Theory". To drive it home, maybe a picture will help.
Okay, gonna play some ONI Spaced Out. This is the variant where the starting world is still fairly large. Seed V-SNDST-C-68286727-0
Dunno how long I'll go, but what the hell, it's been quite a while. :)
Plenty of water, and the temperate biome seems reasonably wide. I'm thinking of a central 16-column with two wider wings on either side, ultimate census 24. And away we go!
First stop, the starter bathroom, cuz some things never change. Once that's complete, I'll bounce to the west of it and toss in my generator and get some research going.
Friday afternoon, got some surprisingly spicy but labeled plain hummus, and I chanced to watch an hour of my favorite ONI twitcher, but I'm days behind the current run-through, so now I am *studying* an old ONI twitch stream.
I do not intend to apologize for this.
It's been nearly a year since I played ONI for more than a few minutes. But I think I'm about ready again. Gonna play my first Spaced Out run. Got it started, realized I was gonna need some new inspiration, cuz my old designs aren't good for these tiny planetoids.
Lifegrow's a great watch for me, cuz on the one hand, he has my order/symmetry/cleanliness thing, but on the other hand, he's really good at the game, and on the third hand, he's *so* calm and patient, and on the fourth hand, he's profane and opinionated.