Post Script for 03/23/2007 Webcast

After the snow-out of the week previous Brown Samana was back in business and flush with the fever of the season. There's a blooming sense of freedom inherent in spring fever that juxtaposes ironically with the slow death of true personal liberties as they are trampled beneath the goose-step of our prevailing culture of neo-conservative/neo-liberal/neo-facist global capitalism. Reflexively I felt obliged to spin a "freedom" mix. Neil Young, Devo and Traffic were all represented as well as Sonny Rollins and Oscar Peterson. And then the jazz took over entirely. Johnny Griffin, Lee Morgan, Hank Mobley, Curtis Fuller and John Coltrane blew the doors off the 1077A studio @ HomeGrownRadioNJ.com as horns upon horns rolled forth. We moved back to Oscar Peterson to bring it into the station for the Rob G. take-over.

Onion headlines were featured near the end as were those of Democracy Now!, an always provocative news show with which we at HGRNJ are in the process of affiliating. DN! is one of the sole remaining sources of truth available to we balance of meat puppets and I couldn't be happier we're bringing it aboard.

As I write, I'm diggin' this Stan Getz with Cal Tjader I've just picked up. You all can expect some of that this coming week.

Post-Script for 03/02/2007 Webcast

I hadn't conducted a remote interview for a while going into last evening's Brown Samana, at least not since HGRNJ upgraded our telephone interface with the big board. So when my buddy Danno called to verify some on-air speculation as to the release date of O' Brother Where Art Thou? (2000), I couldn't resist the temptation to drag him on the air. We began by joking a bit and discussing the film and the music from the film, which I had been playing. Danno had more on his mind though and we fell easily into the same old anti-capitalist ranting which so often dominates my on-air spiel as well as Danno's and my private conversations. We weren't covering any new ground, but as we spoke I came to appreciate the value of rehashing the usual suspects and revisiting again and again the well trod paths of one's own evolution of thought. There's always something new to be gleaned from what had once appeared to be picked clean. And so it was that Friday evening. As I listened to Danno lay it out for me, woe upon woe, it struck me that he is the embodiment of the fatal flaw in a capitalist ideology.

Danno is a good man, someone who deeply and genuinely cares about the well being of others–his friends and acquaintances especially, but all of humanity just as certainly. No one who knows him can dispute this fact. They will all attest to his generosity and humility, to his willingness to give of himself freely and without expectation of return. They will, however, also tell you of his complete incapacity for salesmanship, self-promotion and entitlement. It is unfortunately this latter rather than the former which defines his level of "success" in a capitalist system. So what does capitalism teach us to be? What type of human being is "naturally" selected for extinction if the struggle for survival is staged within a capitalist construct? A man like Danno who is willing to work and to contribute to humanity at large to the best of his ability should not have to face the spectre of an impoverished retirement fraught with economic and social pitfalls. And he's one of the lucky ones in possession of intelligence and interpersonal skills and U.S. citizenship. We need to stop trying to solve our problems within a capitalist construct and start thinking outside that particular box, if you'll allow the cliche. There are real solutions out there. All we need as a society is to want to solve our problems. Do we? I mean, do we really want to?

Friday 02/23/07 on Brown Samana

I've been been hunched over a post intended to air out my feeling of disconnect between current events as they are defined and discussed by the plutocratic elite and mainstream media and the actual issues, buried out-of-sight, which are much more pressing (and O-pressing) than the things we do talk about. The post was meant to be a "postscript" to the 02/16/07 webcast during which I babbled randomly on the coming war with Iran and the candidacy of HRH/HRC (Her Royal Highness/Hillary Rodham Clinton). The post began to spin out of control and I was left pondering the dynamic balance between the on-air and on-line aspects of Brown Samana. So it remains lost in the ether for the time being, but perhaps I'll be able to work through some of it on the air this evening between 7pm and 10 pm on HomeGrownRadioNJ.com.

I'll also be playing jazz featuring pianist Wynton Kelly, especially as he appears in a rhythm section with bassist Paul Chambers which he does on Freddie Freeloader from the landmark 1959 Miles Davis record Kind of Blue. Also look for some Hank Williams Sr., Art Blakey, Ike & Tina, Harry Chapin's 30,000 Pounds of Bananas and much more.

This Friday on Brown Samana

As I write this, Mongo Santamaria snakes his way through the little white umbilical connecting my brain to my iPod. And Baby, I'm feelin' it for tomorrow evening's webcast. So look out for some of that and some other of the Afro-Cuban ilk. Also I'm thinking Sonny Clark, bop pianist from the 50's as well as the Doc & Dawg record from David Grisman's Acoustic Disc label on which the Dawg buts his mandolin virtuosity up against the solidly, deftly picked guitar and mellow, grounded vocal of Doc Watson.

In between the music it may be necessary to air out this whole thing with Iran. Does anyone else feel as though we've already been through this bullshit. From the doublespeak and ironic posturing of the Ass-Hole-in-Chief et al, to the sparrow fart of an opposition by the opposition party, to the complicity of the "liberal" New York Times it's looking like here-we-go-again time for a humanity held hostage by the agenda of Skull & Boneheads and the Retards For a New American Century. There was even a photo in the Times of various cylindrical casings billed as Iranian "captured explosive devices" and looking a bit too eerily like tubes. How do they keep a straight face?

Post Script for 02/09/07 Webcast

There is little in print and wide distribution which is more fun to read aloud than the various, iconic adventures of Sherlock Holmes, especially if one attempts to do so a la Basil Rathbone / Lt. Commander Data. The unique intellect of Arthur Conan Doyle's title character aside, Holmes' often casual though piercingly acute belittlement of Dr. Watson balanced by his generosity with the choice seat by his warm parlor fire is itself enough to inspire a reader to both loathe and swoon. That being said I hope there are at least one or two (among my total three or four) listeners who found half as much pleasure in having been read as I in reading the introductory pages of The Hound of the Baskervilles last Friday evening.

Those who soldiered through were rewarded by Sonny Rollins and his Blue 7, one of the brightest gems in what many see as his crowning achievement, the 1956 record Saxophone Colossus. Half a century later Rollins, as hip a septuagenarian as ever scratched a beard, is still making records. His just released Sonny, Please is high-up on my "to acquire" list. So far I've been able to keep it in my pants (my wallet, that is), though I'm sure that record will be gracing the Brown Samana time slot before long.

We did spin some bluegrass which led unexpectedly to Stephane Grappelli through Mark O'Connor's Heroes, a must have for any fiddle-o-phile. On the 1992 release O'Connor collects duet sessions he played with each of his many, you guessed it...heroes. We selected for the webcast a Bill Monroe tune Gold Rush on which O'Connor teamed with Byron Berline, one time fiddler in Monroe's Bluegrass Boys. We also heard O'Connor and Grappelli take on the Rodgers and Hart composition This Can't Be Love. There was also some Buddy Guy, Neil Young, Boris Garcia, Lucinda Williams and a set of tracks from the Richard Linklater film Dazed and Confused. For full details on the evenings set please vist Jojo's playlist.

Music! Music! Music! I tell ya' there's a world of social commentary welling up inside. Stay tuned.