Watched an awesome video on Charles Mingus last night - my co-worker Marta loaned it to me. Mingus was an amazing personality and an amazing talent. Very inspiring to see footage of him I'd never seen before + the footage of Eric Dolphy was quite cool. These guys played music like their lives depended on it - and in Dolpy's case, he lost his life for pursuit of bringing his music to an audience that wanted to hear it . (He was killed by racist thugs in Germany while on tour; he'd been threatened there on previous tours)
Seeing the amount of work these characters put into their music for little or no material gain brought to light the fact that, in this age of extreme commercial radio conglomorates gobbling up the airwaves in order to push their crap "Product" on a sea of anesthetized zombies, people seem to care more about shopping for clothes at Old Navy than they do about true expression and artistic genius... aww, who am I kidding. I'm listening to Beyonce' on the mp3 player that's in the pocket of my Dockers right now. See you at TCBY after I get my hair cut at Super Cuts. Ciao, baby!