(no subject)

If anyone knows where I can get a transcript of Danny Glover's speech at the relief concert at Lincoln Center tonight, cough it up -- that one was a keeper. ETA: Never mind; I found it.

Also, music fans may want to pass on to any musical N'awlins refugees they know -- Wynton Marsalis has established the Higher Ground Relief Fund in association with Jazz at Lincoln Center with the apparent goal of benefiting New Orleans musicians whose homes and livelihoods were impacted by the hurricane.

There's no information about how to contact the fund and, um, ask for relief, but it's there. :)

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John Coltrane once said, "The main thing a musician would like to do is to give a picture to the listener of the many wonderful things he knows and senses in the universe". When Miles Davis asked him "How come you play so long," he said, "It took that long to get it all in". New Orleans is the site of so many wonderful things, the city being a great crossroads to diverse people, languages, architecture, cuisines, and rhythms through the centuries. But it has also been the site of shameful things: slavery, exploitation, and neglect.

It is a tribute to jazz musicians that they sought to get it all in. The music itself -- vital, transformative, seductive, subversive, and often improvised -- provided the record that tied each generation to the next. Out of suffering and hardship we have heard time and again jazz artists rediscover possibilities; such is the power of imagination and hence the critical importance of this evening's effort.

When the hurricane struck the Gulf and the floodwaters rose, tore through New Orleans plunging its remaining population into a carnival of misery, it did not turn the region into a third-world country as it has been said disparagingly, described in the media: it revealed one.

It revealed the disaster within the disaster: grueling poverty rose to the surface like a bruise on our skin. But the storm not only revealed the poverty of those most vulnerable, those left behind, it revealed the poverty of skewed priorities that put the shoulder of technology to the wheel of death rather than life, creating killing machines that are now called "smart" and surveillance systems that, in the words of the great Guianese(?) poet Martin Carter(?), "are watching you sleep and aiming at your dreams".

Mother Nature revealed the poverty of a mindset that narrowly views security as a military issue, that is blind to the role of culture in sustaining the mental health and social well-being of people, which is also the basis for economic productivity. Blind to the role of culture in education, through which we are prepared for our responsibilities in a democracy, and hostile to the role of culture in the search for truth.

Hurricane Katrina revealed, more than anything else, a poverty of imagination.

-- Danny Glover, Jazz At Lincoln Center: Higher Ground Hurricane Benefit, 9/17/05.