FIRSTS - NEIL ARMSTRONG 1st MAN ON THE MOON DIES

Neil Alden Armstrong (August 5, 1930 – August 25, 2012)

So there are a few historical signposts in history for every generation where you remember where you where when you heard the news. The biggies for my father's generation there was the bombng of Pearl Harbor and V-J Day. For my grandparents it was all defined by a larger event, The Great Depression. My generation remembers where they were when Kennedy was shot, The Beatles on Ed Sullivan and watching Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon.

When JFK announced the space program it was thrilling to a boy of seven years old. When John Glenn orbited the Earth, I was transfixed. I didn't miss one launch from Cape Canaveral (nee Kennedy). Walter Cronkite kept me posted. I read all about the astronauts, did book reports on them. I was transfixed by every thing about them as was everyone I knew. We'd get in the little yellow and red tepee in the backyard having ditched our Indian headdresses for empty cardboard ice cream buckets we'd scavenged from Baskin-Robbins and spray painted silver to use as helmets.

I was 12 years old and a child of the 60s when Apollo 11 set off for the moon. We had been dropped off at Green Oak Ranch Boys Camp in Vista, California for another summer time week of archery, horseback riding, making lanyards, studying nature and tormenting our camp counselors. But the first thing we did was run to the mess hall to watch television as Neil Armstrong took those historic steps. Of course, at the time we would never doubt the validity of anything we'd seen on TV.

Why just a couple of years earlier I was appalled when I was at the West Hollywood Sheriff's station where my father was Captain and I saw them bring in some "hippie protesters". One of the more vociferous among the young placard carrying, colorfully clothed "trouble-makers" was Bob Denver from Gilligan's Island. I was very upset that they had arrested him since I didn't even know he'd finally made it off the island. But I digress...

But the moon landing fueled our imaginations. It made us see the Earth from space for the first time and something in me felt a little scared. Finally, for the first time in my young life was I aware of the fragile nature of existence as I knew it. I was beginning to think of bigger questions than who had to pretend to be astronaut Michael Collins and stay in the tepee when we played Moon Landing in the backyard.


Here's the NYTimes Obit of Neil Armstrong
Below is a 51 minute special report on the APOLLO 11 moon landing from YouTube:

And as is always of interest to note, there are always other theories...here is a smattering of them from gawker.com.    

photo of Neil Armstrong: NASA. Original photo of moon over the mtns. from Rt. 38 outside of Redlands, CA (c)2011 Brad Riesau

JAZZ NEWS - RON MILES "QUIVER" w/ FRISELL & BLADE

Trumpet Luminary RON MILES Releases Quiver (Enja/Yellowbird), October 9 Live Recording Featuring Trio with BILL FRISELL and BRIAN BLADE Master trumpeter Ron Miles injects his radiant, lyrical tone directly into the lifeblood of American music on his latest release, Quiver. A compelling, inviting trio date with guitarist Bill Frisell and drummer Brian Blade, Quiver combines the singing melodicism of American folk musics, the heightened communication of the most progressive jazz forms, and an entrancing, airy openness. The album finds three genre-defying musical masters at their creative best, lacing easy camaraderie with virtuosic interaction. “I conceived it so that there was a lot of space in the music,” Miles told writer and session annotator Chip Stern, “which just makes it a perfect vehicle for Brian and Bill, who are so purposeful in the way they think through a phrase with all of the silences intact and create all of this motion and energy without any wasted gestures or by playing a whole bunch of notes.” Miles is solidly grounded in the jazz tradition yet open to all manner of ethnic, popular and classical sources - let alone down-home American folk. Just try not to be intoxicated by the joyous hoedowns and hosannas of “Just Married,” in which country music and blues share a glorious two-step. Miles’ keen sense of those qualities which elevate the joy and drama of the very earliest jazz recordings enlivens the trio’s forays into roots elements of the music as well as its more modern iterations on Quiver. On “Guest Of Honor,” Miles infuses post-modern nods towards Scott Joplin with personal and political feeling. “Honor is my son’s name,” Miles explains. “I always wanted to do something syncopated in a ragtime manner, and it got me thinking about Scott Joplin and the opera which preceded ‘Treemonisha,’ which was ‘A Guest Of Honor.’ We don’t actually know what the music sounds like, because it was never sent to the copyright office. Apparently ‘A Guest Of Honor’ referenced the story of how Booker T. Washington was invited to the White House by Teddy Roosevelt, with all the controversy that subsequently ensued. And so while we tend to think of Joplin writing upbeat music such as “Maple Leaf Rag,” here he was writing political operas as far back as 1903.” On Miles’ more modernist conceptions, from the jagged hesitations and stutter steps of “Bruise” to the Ornettish exposition of “Rudy Go Round,” the composer’s love of extended forms, asymmetrical abstractions, and dramatic syncopated dances between dissonant and consonant elements rings just as true as his forays into the music’s earliest roots - as do the torchy tenderness and lyric splendor of his balladic interpretations, such as “Days Of Wine And Roses” and “Queen B.” The music on Quiver expands brilliantly on the technical and spiritual foundations this Denver-based, 49-year-old musical trailblazer has crafted for himself since graduating from the Manhattan School of Music in 1986. The album is a logical evolution of Heaven, his deceptively quiescent 2002 duet recital with Frisell. “If we were going to add a third person,” Miles says, “we both agreed it should be Brian more than anyone else because he is one of the most musical drummers on the scene.” In fact, it’s hard to imagine many other drummers approaching this music with both the pianistic elegance and intellectual discretion to lay back and allow the action to come to him - never truncating the conversation with some nervous compulsion to fill every inch of space with excitement. Witness how Blade sets the table for the old-timey jazz feeling of Miles’ brilliant re-working of that Roaring Twenties chestnut “There Ain’t No Sweet Man Worth The Salt of My Tears” with some of the most beautifully inflected mallet phrases this side of Big Sid Catlett and Elvin Jones, even as Frisell gets up on his Charlie Christian soap-box, while Miles seemingly channels the spirit of Lester Bowie in his solo passages. In short, on Quiver Miles brings the history of jazz up to date by neither disregarding its history or by remaining enslaved to it, instead giving an extremely personal account of the divergent branches of the music’s immeasurably rich family tree. “Listening to composers the likes of Scott Joplin, James Reese Europe, Jelly Roll Morton and Duke Ellington on one hand, and improvisers such as Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry on the other, is both humbling and inspiring,” Miles concludes. “And as much as anything, after a lifetime’s study, what this music has given me is a sense of the enormity of spirituality; of being American, of being African-American; of how privileged I am to walk that path and how much work I still have to do. There are so many people who’ve inhabited this music: living it, writing it, playing it, listening to it. So you just find a way to be you in it, to find your way in it. That’s what we’re trying to do on Quiver.” Release Date: October 9, 2012 Ron Miles official site www.enjarecords.com Publicity Contact: Matt Merewitz - Fully Altered Media 347-384-2839 matt@fullyaltered.com fullyaltered.com twitter.com/fullyaltered