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Ciao Joao

From the NYT obituaries, Jon Pareles writes about Donato's life:

João Donato, a Brazilian composer, musician and producer who was a pioneer of bossa nova and who went on to cross-pollinate music across the Americas, died on Monday in Rio de Janeiro. He was 88.

His death, in a hospital, was announced on his Instagram page. Brazilian news media reported that the cause was pneumonia.

Mr. Donato was in the coterie of Rio de Janeiro musicians — among them Antonio Carlos Jobim, João Gilberto and the guitarist Luiz Bonfá — who developed the subtle swing and harmonic sophistication of bossa nova in the mid-1950s.

But Mr. Donato didn’t confine himself to any genre. In a recording career that extended from the 1950s into the current decade, he released some three dozen albums as a leader and collaborated with a wide range of artists on many more. Although he was best known as a keyboardist, he was also a singer, accordionist and trombonist.

As a pianist, Mr. Donato was known for his blend of a frisky, restlessly syncopated, harmonically intricate left hand with relaxed, sure-footed right-hand melodies. As a composer, producer and arranger, he constantly — and playfully — fused and stretched idioms and production styles. He once said he had a “sweet tooth for funky ideas.”

Mr. Donato played MPB (as Brazilian popular music is widely known; the letters stand for “música popular brasileira”), jazz, funk, salsa, American pop and pan-American hybrids that were entirely his own. He worked with generations of Brazilian musicians, including the singer and movie star Carmen Miranda; the singers Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Milton Nascimento and Marisa Monte; and the rapper Marcelo D2.

He also recorded with Eddie Palmieri, Michael Franks, Mongo Santamaría and Ali Shaheed Muhammad from A Tribe Called Quest. Throughout his life, he sought new grooves.

The president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, said on Twitter: “João Donato saw music in everything. He innovated, he passed through samba, bossa nova, jazz, forró, and in the mixture of rhythm built something unique. He kept creating and innovating until the end.”

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Worldwide FM · Gilles Peterson: Joao Donato Mix

Interview with Charlie Smith

 

 

From an interview with poet/novelist Charlie Smith in Bomb Magazine in 2010:

JR Okay. Let’s see, my first question for you: the relation of poetry and novels. There seems to be some kind of mystical connection, poets as novelists—apropos here, James Dickey, E. E. Cummings, Jessica Hagedorn. Insights?

CS I don’t see that very often—novelists writing poems that have any kind of power and authority particularly, and vice versa. Many of the poets I know don’t read novels at all; they don’t read any fiction. And my close friends who are novelists don’t read any poems; they are not even interested in reading mine. So I don’t know if there is that kind of crossover. It’s not necessary, in fiction, to concentrate in the same way—to bring the same intensity, spirit, language, into the line—as it is in writing a poem.

In my case, I just happened to write both right at the beginning. I was exposed to both as a youngster and then, in boarding school, we were required in ordinary assignments to write short stories and poems. I fell in love with both, and began to write both on my own. What I began to see was that the two disciplines could cross over to a certain extent. Poems can cross over to fiction, but I haven’t seen fiction cross over to poems much. A fiction line in a poem—I mean, you sometimes run into what passes as poetry, which is often just prose chopped up into lines, but it doesn’t have intensity. Real poems can’t exist anywhere but in the lines of the poem. If you try to take a fiction line and insert it into a poem, it’ll sag like a swayback mare. I found that to be pretty strictly true, at least in my case. But it’s possible to take poems and shift them into fiction; I used to take poems and de-line them like you debone a trout. Then, I’d just lay them into a page of fiction and they would pass perfectly well. I did it in most of my earlier novels: Canaan (1984), Shine Hawk (1988), The Lives of the Dead (1990) . . . There may have been others. Before poetry broke loose from the continental shelf, it was the easiest thing to haul lines over to the fiction side.

I try to bring as much energy and penetration into my fiction as possible. To hold onto the line of expression as earnestly as possible, like you’re holding onto a mustang out in the desert, letting it be fully itself but, as firmly and inevitably as possible, bringing it into the remuda. Because I also write poems, I have access—if I’m lucky—to those particular acts of imagination that take place in a poem—I can sometimes see that things that appear to be disparate actually are connected.

I tend to like fiction that jumps and yips, fiction that moves around, that’s got language barreling through it. The best at it in my generation are probably Denis Johnson, Javier Marías, and Martin Amis. Maybe if I’d never written a poem I would still seek something like that out. I hope I would.

From The Recent Plena Libre Concert at Creative Alliance

Last Friday we attended the Plena Libre concert at Creative Alliance. Needless to say we had a great time dancing to their positive music. Here are some images from our evening.

Vallejo Nocturno 2023 Copyright

Freedmen

Adam Serwer writes in the Atlantic:

In order to argue that the Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment did not intend to authorize racially specific efforts to alleviate inequality, Thomas finds himself forced to explain the existence of the Freedmen’s Bureau, which was reauthorized in 1866 by the same Congress that approved the Fourteenth Amendment. To square this circle, Thomas insists that the term freedmen was a “formally race-neutral category” and a “decidedly underinclusive proxy for race.”

The 1866 Freedmen’s Bureau Act then expanded upon the prior year’s law, authorizing the Bureau to care for all loyal refugees and freedmen … Importantly, however, the Acts applied to freedmen (and refugees), a formally race-neutral category, not blacks writ large. And, because “not all blacks in the United States were former slaves,” “‘freedman’” was a decidedly underinclusive proxy for race.

If “freedmen” were a “formally race-neutral category,” then the Fourteenth Amendment does not authorize race-conscious efforts to remedy racial discrimination, and affirmative action cannot be constitutional. As an originalist, Thomas is supposed to interpret the Fourteenth Amendment as it was understood at the time it was written. He is attempting to reconcile his philosophy of judicial interpretation with what the history actually says; the other originalist justices do not really try, perhaps aware of the awkwardness of doing so. The problem, though, is that Thomas’s interpretation is obviously incorrect. His efforts at reconciliation ultimately illustrate the extent to which “originalism” is merely a process of exploiting history to justify conservative policy preferences, and not a neutral philosophical framework.

“Freedmen” cannot be a “formally race-neutral category,” because American slavery was not a formally race-neutral institution. Moreover, an extensive historical record illuminates the intentions of the lawmakers who passed the Freedmen’s Bureau Acts. They certainly did not see the term freedmen as racially neutral, and they intended the bureau to protect the rights of Black people in the South, whether formerly enslaved or not. We know this because they said so; the insistence to the contrary is the result of conservatives projecting their version of “color blindness” backwards through time.

“I don’t think Justice Thomas is correct—freedman was widely used as a synonym for Black,” Eric Foner, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Reconstruction, a historian cited in Thomas’s concurrence, told me in an email. “Ninety percent of Blacks were slaves in 1860, and everyone knew whom the Freedman’s Bureau Act was meant to assist.”

Republican lawmakers in the 1860s did not believe that targeting aid to Black people contradicted, as Thomas writes, a “commitment to equal rights for all citizens, regardless of the color of their skin.” They saw such racially conscious efforts as fulfilling that commitment. These lawmakers did not share modern liberal sensitivities either—contemporary perspectives on interracial marriage and integrated schools would have been foreign to nearly all of them, except perhaps Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner. Figuring out what the words they wrote meant at the time they wrote them requires understanding the very different dynamics of their era.

“The obvious problem is the mutually reinforcing relationship and considerable—if not complete—overlap between status and race at the time. The fact that not every Black person was recently freed didn’t make freedman a ‘race neutral’ term as used and understood during the 1860s,” Stephen West, a history professor at Catholic University, told me. “When Americans of the time talked about freedmen, they knew they were talking about Black people. And they knew that the association of Blackness with slavery marked the lives of Black people who hadn’t been recently enslaved.”

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It violates the Constitution

 

Jamelle Bouie writes in the latest NYT:

Kagan wrote something unusual. She didn’t just challenge the chief justice’s reasoning, she questioned whether the court’s decision was even constitutional.

“From the first page to the last, today’s opinion departs from the demands of judicial restraint,” Kagan wrote. “At the behest of a party that has suffered no injury, the majority decides a contested public policy issue properly belonging to the politically accountable branches and the people they represent.”

She continued: “That is a major problem not just for governance, but for democracy too. Congress is of course a democratic institution; it responds, even if imperfectly, to the preferences of American voters. And agency officials, though not themselves elected, serve a President with the broadest of all political constituencies. But this Court? It is, by design, as detached as possible from the body politic. That is why the Court is supposed to stick to its business — to decide only cases and controversies, and to stay away from making this Nation’s policy about subjects like student-loan relief.”

The court, Kagan concluded, “exercises authority it does not have. It violates the Constitution.”

It’s a remarkable statement. To say that the Supreme Court can violate the Constitution is to reject the idea that the court is somehow outside the constitutional system. It is to remind the public that the court is as bound by the Constitution as the other branches, which is to say that it is subject to the same “checks and balances” as the legislature and the executive.

Kagan’s dissent, in other words, is a call for accountability. For Congress, especially, to exercise its authority to discipline the court when it oversteps its bounds.

Democrats may or may not get this particular message. But John Roberts heard it loud and clear. “It has become a disturbing feature of some recent opinions to criticize the decisions with which they disagree as going beyond the proper role of the judiciary,” he wrote in his opinion. “It is important that the public not be misled either. Any such misperception would be harmful to this institution and our country.”