Just as the Dutch Golden Age (1598-1660) came at a time when the rest of Europe was plunged into everlasting
and devastating war, so American culture reached it's Golden Era when Europe (1914-1945) was fighting it's final
civil war from which it never fully recovered. Bernard Berkhout.
"I sell music, not prejudice" Benny Goodman on racial separation.
"Rock'nRoll?, That's our church music."
Louis Armstrong (Gary Giddins, Satchmo, The Genius of Louis Armstrong)
Something for dancers and musicians to think about: (sounding quite
pretentious, but right to the point when you think about it for
a while) is point 4 of the opening of the second chapter of Oswald
Spengler's The Decline of the West (1917):
Life, perpetually fulfilling itself as an element of
becoming, is what we call "the present," and it possesses
that mysterious property of "direction," which men have
tried to rationalize by means of the enigmatic word "time".
I would never have thought that my experience of playing jazz would
one day appear to have been described so accurately by a guy in
Munich in 1917!
'Dan zie je: de hemel is vol ontroostbare geliefden/ gelukkige
minnaars in de armen van anderen/ en klagen mag niet./ Dat wil de
vrouw van God niet hebben./ Overal klinkt muziek:/ nooit samen,/
altijd solo/ iedereen speelt mooier.' Adriaan Jaeggi
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