Southern Bookman

Looking for light in hour of darkness

As a lifelong Democrat, I’m used to debacles like Kamala Harris’ crushing defeat to Donald Trump.

Harris’ downfall is more overwhelming than those of George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, John Kerry and Hillary Clinton.

Unlike the GOP victors in those elections, even Ronald Reagan, Trump vows to dismantle the governmental programs that have led to American progress and prosperity since Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Trump’s destructive agenda threatens research, education, health care, safe workplaces, wilderness areas, environmental programs, arts, a free media and the economy.

Mourning in America has come for progressives who believed they were on the right side of history.

Yet the future will bring unexpected surprises. 

I still trust in Martin Luther King Jr.’s  promise that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice.

 

 

Farewell Quincy Jones, protean musical superstar

Quincy Jones understood how to bring out the best in an astonishingly array of performers.

Jones, who died Sunday at age 91 at his home in Bel Air, Calif., ranged from lush musical arrangements to multilayered walls of sound depending upon the talents of the singers whose hits he arranged and produced.

He let Frank Sinatra’s voice and Count Basie’s band engage in swinging discourse. Basie’s piano and the orchestra’s performance back Sinatra with pleasant restraint before lifting off.

Although Jones admired the young Lesley Gore’s vocal range and ability to sing on key, he surrounded her “It’s My Party” with waves of music that she soars above.

Eddie Van Halen’s snarling guitar solo on Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” challenges and illuminates Jackson’s incendiary chorus.

After a career as a jazz trumpeter and big band leader, Jones dominated pop music as a composer and arranger.

His reach extended to Hollywood, where he wrote and arranged the scores for a number of TV shows and movies.

Only a widely respected man of Jones’ diplomacy and discernment could have brought virtually every musical superstar together to record the “We Are the World” video.

Quincy Jones’ music spanned the world.