07 March 2008

Mingus Among Us (Even After His Eviction)

My cousin Scott sent me an email with these two videos juxtaposed. As he puts it, "they're a bittersweet pair."

In the first, jazz legend Charles Mingus is evicted from a property he was trying to turn into a music school for children, and then arrested. In the second, we get to see children - an awesome Japanese high school band - performing a Mingus composition. Is it justice if the person wronged isn't righted until after his death?



3 comments:

S said...

No, not justice at all. But, I suppose, better than nothing.

Unknown said...

Those are excellent videos, Ron. They both tell a story I didn’t know, even though I’ve listened to Mingus for 40 or so years. What this portrayed certainly wasn’t “justice”—at least not God’s justice, which is so different from what we human’s call “justice.”

BTW, when I began viewing the first video, I was frustrated because I had no audio. Then I remembered that I left the computer on while I napped and checked the settings. The audio was muted, probably by an exploring cat.
Those are excellent videos, Ron. They both tell a story I didn’t know, even though I’ve listened to Mingus for 40 or so years. What this portrayed certainly wasn’t “justice”—at least not God’s justice, which is so different from what we human’s call “justice.”

BTW, when I began viewing the first video, I was frustrated because I had no audio. Then I remembered that I left the computer on while I napped and checked the settings. The audio was muted, probably by an exploring cat.

Ron Davison said...

S-mom,
It is hard to tell if Mingus would have been amused or outraged. He certainly seemed philosophical about things.

SS-Nick,
That's actually a pretty funny visual, your cat poking around the keyboard to change settings. Maybe his ears are just more sensitive than yours and he was trying to turn the volume down to something more tolerable.