The Test Tube and the Scale

  American voters who cast ballots electing Donald Trump 47th President of the United States fell, with some overlap, into one of three groups: those who trusted in his supposed business acumen, hoping they, or the national economy, would somehow benefit from it; those who were enthralled by the mien of his celebrity, mistakenly assuming it was an imprimatur of top tiered success; and those who identified with his bigotry, anticipating that the office of the Presidency would once again sanction their indecency. Americans are enamored of confidence, and we’re a sucker for the con. Conditioned by postwar mass media to accept an idealized, archetypal image of the American consumer as the omniconfident gender normative freak of normality whose transubstantiated bones we still gnaw at today, we offered ourselves as committed adherents to a consumer cult as wildly uncontrollable as any organized religion we have imagined. Rock and roll quickly became a viable opposition to this cleverly ...

  In 1953, only two years following the completion of the studio sessions for The Amazing Bud Powell, the pianist returned to WOR Studios in New York to resume the series. The two years were a period of intense personal crises for Powell. Hospitalizations, arrests, prolonged stays in mental institutions where he was administered electro convulsive therapy, on and off drug use, even a court ordered declaration of mental incompetency resulting in a loss of legal and financial autonomy; the harrowing drama of these circumstances impacted Powell’s playing style considerably. Though still in possession of extraordinary technical dexterity, Powell’s approach to his instrument is distinctly less playful than on The Amazing Bud Powell, having tasked himself instead with reconfiguring the failed mental processes that on The Amazing Bud Powell, Volume 2, are fixed to cohere brilliantly as mid-century jazz artistry. Playing with a smaller band, Powell takes a carefully considered full measure...