A few good quotes and connections

Charlie Black, a freshman from University of Texas, happened to go see Louis Armstrong at a club in 1931. He knew nothing of jazz and never heard of Louis Armstrong.

“He played mostly w/ his eyes closed. Letting flow from that inner space of music things that had never existed.

He was the first genius I’d ever seen. It is impossible to underestimate the significance of a 16 year old southern boy seeing genius for the first time in a black person.

We literally never saw a black man in anything but a servants capacity.

Louis opened my eyes wide and put to me a choice: Blacks, the saying went, were ‘all right in their place’, but what was the place of such a man, and of the people from which he sprung?’”

Charles L. Black

Excerpt from Ken Burns’ Jazz Documentary

Charles L. Black went on to become a distinguished teacher of Constitutional Law at Yale and in 1954 was on the team of lawyers to convince the Supreme Court in Brown vs. Board of Education that segregating school children on the basis of race and color was unconstitutional.

Thanks to Scott Elkin for transcribing: http://scottelkin.com/music/charles-l-black-on-louis-armstrong/comment-page-1/#comment-38323

In talking about Duke Ellington's Music in Ken Burn's Jazz, writer Stanley Crouch said:

"You know, if you can get to this, come on in, you know what I mean? ‘Cause that’s always in the music, in Duke Ellington’s music there’s always, “Hey, come on in, you know.” You know, all kinds of ways, come on in. Sometimes this, sometimes he’d grab you by the arm and say, “Come on in.” Sometimes, “Hey, why don’t you come on in here.” You know what I’m saying? Anything from those, you know he’s got those, you know he’s got that, it’s always that he’s always trying to pull you into something, you know. And it’s, so it’s got that, so there’s a kind of a welcoming quality that you associate with the highest form of civilization, I would suggest. See, because civilization in a certain sense can be reduced to the word welcome, you know, in some sense it can be that."

George Freidman, The Next 100 Years

Cultures live in one of three states. The first state is barbarism. Barbarians believe that the customs of their village are the laws of nature and that anyone who doesn't live the way they live is beneath contempt and requiring redemption or descruction. The third state is decadence decadents cynically believe that nothing is better than anything else. If they hold anyone in contempt, it is those who believe in anything. Nothing is worth fighting for.

Civilization is the second and most rare state. Civilized people are able to balance two contradictory thoughts in their minds. They believe that there are truths and theat their cultures approximate those truths. At the same time, they hold open in their mind the possibility that they are in error. The combination of belief and skepticism is inherently unstable. Cultures pass through barbarism to civilization and then to decadence as skepticism undermines self-certainty. Civilized people fight selectively but effectively. Obviously all cultures contain people who are barbaric, civilized, or decadent, but each culture is dominated at different times by one principle.