Dave Brubeck: American jazz pianist and composer has died

Published December 5, 2012 | By Iowadawg

Dave Brubeck in 1965. All his life, he regarded himself as ‘a composer who plays the piano’. Photograph: CBS Photo Archive/CBS

Dave Brubeck, a pianist and composer whose distinctive mixture of experimentation and accessibility made him one of the most popular jazz musicians of the 1950s and ’60s, died Wednesday morning in Norwalk, Conn. He would have turned 92 on Thursday.

He died while on his way to a cardiology appointment, Russell Gloyd, his producer, conductor and manager for 36 years, said. Mr. Brubeck lived in Wilton, Conn.

In a long and successful career, Mr. Brubeck helped repopularize jazz at a time when younger listeners had been trained to the sonic dimensions of the three-minute pop single. His quartet’s 1959 recording of “Take Five” was the first jazz single to sell a million copies.

Mr. Brubeck experimented with time signatures and polytonality and explored musical theater and the oratorio, baroque compositional devices and foreign modes. But he did not always please the critics, who often described his music as schematic, bombastic and — a word he particularly disliked — stolid. His very stubbornness and strangeness — the polytonality, the blockiness of his playing, the oppositional push-and-pull between his piano and Paul Desmond’s alto saxophone — makes the Brubeck quartet’s best work still sound original.

Outside of the group’s most famous originals, which had the charm and durability of pop songs (“Take Five,” “Blue Rondo à la Turk,” “It’s a Raggy Waltz”), some of its best work was in its overhauls of standards like “You Go to My Head,” “All the Things You Are” and “Pennies From Heaven.”

David Warren Brubeck was born on Dec. 6, 1920, in Concord, Calif., near San Francisco. Surrounded by farms, his family lived a bucolic life: his father, Pete, was a cattle buyer for a meat company, and his mother, Elizabeth, was a choir director at the nearby Presbyterian church. When Mr. Brubeck was 11, the family moved to Ione, Calif., where his father managed a 45,000-acre cattle ranch and owned his own 1,200 acres.

Islam’s Rise and the West’s Denial

Following yesterday’s dire but needed warning in essay format from Algeria, author William Kilpatrick expounds, via Islam’s Rise and the West’s Denial: Catholic World Report.

One thing that the West doesn’t grasp is that Islam is a political religion with political ambitions. Omar Ahmad, the co-founder of the Council on American Islamic Relations, has said that “Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith but to be dominant. The Koran should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on earth.” Numerous Islamic authorities have expressed similar sentiments. The supposedly moderate Imam Feisal Rauf, the initiator of the Ground Zero mosque project, wrote an article for the Huffington Post containing the observation, “What Muslims want is a judiciary (in the US) that ensures that the laws are not in conflict with the Qur`an and the Hadith.” What he means is that US law must be brought in line with Islamic sharia law. Since very many provisions of sharia law are considered criminal under US law, that would mean the overthrow of much of our legal code.

Many Catholics also fail to realize the political nature of Islam and imagine that a mosque, like a church, is simply a place of worship. But a mosque is more than that. Political and community issues are dealt with in a mosque, and calls to jihad are frequently issued in mosques. For example, many of the “Arab Spring” demonstrations were set in motion from mosques following the Friday sermons. Moreover, there are many instances of mosques being used for mentoring terrorists or for storing arms and explosives. According to a popular Muslim poem:

The mosques are our barracks,

the domes our helmets

the minarets our bayonets

And the faithful our soldiers

Many Muslims think of Islam not only as a religion but also as an army—an army with a mission of subjugation. That’s why the penalty for apostasy is death. Just as a deserter from an army in time of war may be punished with the death penalty, so also a deserter from the army of Islam.

The political nature of Islam ought to give pause to Catholics who think they can dialogue with Muslims in the same way they dialogue with Baptists or Jews. A recently concluded series of Catholic-Muslim dialogues sponsored by the USCCB highlights the problem. It turns out that the bishops’ dialogue partners are all members of Muslim activist groups with links to the Muslim Brotherhood. One of the counterparts, Sayyid Syeed, is a prominent figure in the Islamic Society of North America—a group that was designated as an unindicted co-conspirator in a massive terrorist funding scheme. One wonders if the bishops fully understand who they are dealing with.

Read it all HERE>

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This is via TB:

When former AutoZone employee Devin McClean grabbed his gun from his car and chased an armed robber out of his store, he didn’t think his quick thinking would get him fired…but it did.

“I was in fear of my life as soon as he walked through the door and I see the gun. Your heart just starts pounding,” McClean told NewsChannel 3.

As it turns out, McClean’s Yorktown, Va., store was being robbed by the so-called “fake-beard bandit” (probably the worst nickname in the history of crime), a criminal who had already knocked over about 30 businesses in the Virginia Peninsula area.

As the gunman forced the manager to unlock the store’s safe, McClean, a 23-year-old Air Force veteran, slipped out the back to retrieve his Glock 40 from his truck.

“I waited for him to go up toward the front, I ran out of the restroom, ran out to my truck where I keep my own personal weapon, grabbed my weapon, came back into the store and confronted the guy,” McClean recalls.

“When I yelled ‘freeze’ and I said ‘Stop! Drop the weapon,’ he threw his hands up with his gun still in his hand he started running,” the former AutoZone employee adds. “I felt like it was my responsibility to step in.”

The gunman wisely chose to flee.

“I watched him run down the street,” McClean told Fox News. “I came back inside and made sure my manager was okay and he called the police.”

But although the store’s manager was grateful for his employee’s bravery, McClean was fired two days later — right before Thanksgiving.

“It’s pretty much getting slapped in the face doing something that you feel was right everybody else around you feels you were right,” says McClean.

Other than to reiterate the company’s zero tolerance policy on weapons inside stores, AutoZone representatives refuse to comment on McClean’s firing.

And being laid off couldn’t have come at a worse time for McClean: He’s about to be a father.

“We’re having a little boy,” he said. “I remember when the guy came in with that gun. My initial thought was I want to make it home to my family. I want to have the opportunity to meet my son and for my son to meet his dad. And for someone to come in and shove a gun in your face?”

The former AutoZone employee explains that his decision to go back into the store and rescue his co-workers was informed by lessons he learned in the U.S. Air Force.

“Never leave a man behind,” he said. “I’m not going to leave my brother in a room with a guy with a gun — that’s threatening his life.”

“If I can save somebody’s life, I put that way above a store policy,” he adds.

And you better believe there’s been some backlash against the company for its decision to terminate McClean.

Fox News provides the details:

Cam Edwards, of NRA News, called AutoZone’s decision an “injustice.”

“It may have been corporate policy to fire Devin McLean, but it’s also an injustice. He came to the aid of a fellow employee threatened by an armed robber and was canned. They should have named him employee of the year.”

He said the nation needs more people like McLean.

“He had the chance to run away but instead he chose to arm himself with his legally owned gun and save the life of his supervisor,” Edwards told Fox News. “Wouldn’t we all like to work with someone like Devin?”

Customers have launched a boycott against the company on Facebook and a petition has been started urging them to rehire McLean.

(so be boycotting autzone until they rehire this hero! though bob costas would have said he should have used a knife)

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Sheila Jackson Lee Has Graduated from the Joe Biden School of Wild Over Exaggeration (she is proof that there are enough dumbass Texans to keep voting her in)

Palestinians: What The UN Brought

Rand Paul If Were Not the Party of Limited Government What Are We?

Harry Reid blocks vote on Obama’s fiscal cliff proposal(he knows the vote would be AGAINST obama…hahahaha..and the senate is democrat controlled)

Egyptians Hit by Dawning Realization that Obama’s on the DICTATOR’s Side- Not Theirs/Democracy

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This is via TH:

Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) warned his conference on Wednesday that leaders are “watching” how the rank-and-file vote to determine committee assignments, according to sources in the closed-door meeting.

Boehner addressed the firestorm over the removal of four lawmakers from plum committee assignments at the weekly GOP conference meeting.

According to Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R-Kan.), one of the lawmakers denied a spot on his current committee in the next Congress, Boehner did note “that we [leadership] have punished four members, he claimed that it had nothing to do with their conservative ideology, but had to do with their voting patterns.”

Also removed from committee spots were Reps. Justin Amash (R-Mich.), Walter Jones (R-N.C.) and David Schweikert (Ariz.).

Huelskamp added that Boehner warned GOP lawmakers that “there may be more folks that will be targeted … ‘we’re watching all your votes.”

“It was a message to the Republican conference in general, especially the comment today that there may be more punishment coming if you don’t vote the right way,” Huelskamp said.

A source at the conference meeting disputed Huelskamp’s characterization of Boehner’s point, noting that the Speaker said “some votes factored into [the decision to remove lawmakers from committee assignments] but it wasn’t just [votes], it was a bigger picture than all that, that caused this to happen.”

The crux of the problem is that Democrats have successfully employed a “divide and conquer” strategy when outspoken GOP House members “gratuitously bad mouth the leadership,” a separate source told The Hill.

“That [GOP members] run to the press to get their own headlines and that divides us and that’s really where Boehner’s coming from,” the source said.

Another GOP source who was in the room corroborated that Boehner addressed the question of a supposedly punishing conservatives.

The source quoted Boehner as saying, “the Steering Committee this week decided to remove committee assignments from four members, and replace them with other members. This was not done lightly. This is something the Committee took seriously, and hopes never to have to do again.”

According to the source, Boehner continued, “the Committee’s decision had nothing to do with ideology. For those suggesting otherwise, I’d respectfully suggest that you look at some of the people the Steering Committee put in charge of committees. I’d also suggest you look at some of the members who were added to the committees by the Steering Committee. If you do that and come away with the conclusion that there was a ‘conservative purge,’ I’d be interested hearing the rationale.”

Huelskamp addressed the conference, receiving, he said, a “warm reception from some and silence from others,” and requested that leaders provide “that list of votes used in the Steering Committee to reward or punish members.”

Huelskamp said his request for committee votes was met by “stony silence” from leadership, and said Boehner’s refusal to release the votes was akin to stabbing him in the back.

“Where I come from in Kansas if you want to stab a guy you look him in the eye,” he said. “You don’t go behind a closed door.”

Huelskamp declined to say if he would vote for Boehner to retain his speakership in January.

“The Fiesta Bowl with K-State is the same day,” he said, indicating that he may abstain.

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