(https://www.vox.com/2018/6/20/17486446/family-separation-reunification-trump-executive-order-immigration)
". . . Trump . . . signed an executive order to end the large-scale practice of splitting up families at the US-Mexico border. . . claims will end family separation . . .The order doesn’t provide relief for the approximately 2,300 kids who have already been separated from their families since the administration’s policy was announced in early May. Those children will remain separated from their parents as they remain in federal custody and won’t immediately be reunited, according to a report in the New York Times. . . “There will not be a grandfathering of existing cases,” Kenneth Wolfe, a spokesperson for the Administration for Children and Families, a division of the Department of Health and Human Services. . ."
(based upon https://www.quora.com/How-do-recording-artists-decide-on-the-order-of-the-songs-on-their-CDs)
There isn't a rule of thumb , but there is planning. Look at it as a Classical concert, grouping songs in "moods", then intentionally create longer pauses between the groups.
When Lou Reed was ordering the tracks on New York. He struggled to find the right musical and topical arc until someone suggested he put them in the order in which they were recorded. In that order, the tracks told the story he was hoping for. Y
In a traditional pop context, records were sequenced with the hits or prospective singles "up front" - typically the lead single would be the first song and the other expected singles would follow to round out the first side.
Some try to make sure that successive songs are not in the same key.
The number one track (and usually the last) are the 'great' tracks that leave an impression.
If it's a concept album that tells a story through the songs, then the order is pretty much fixed to begin with. If it is just a collection of singles, they might look at the dynamics - try and mix up the heavy and the soft, the fast and the slow, etc.
Put a lot of thought into the order of the songs to create a good “flow” and the best overall listening experience from start to finish. Open with a song that represents your overall sound fairly well, and break up the “mood” every 3 songs or so.
The whole process is just about placing familiar tracks somewhere in the middle, intros and soon to be released tracks at the beginning and the less appealing at the end - it's about fluidity and using the songs at the beginning as singles as they help sell the album.
It's given a lot less thought than it used to. Nowadays most albums are bought online and when you download it you can put it in any order you want. If you are like me you will put your favourites first and the fillers at the end. Another thing to come into it is the shuffle mode on most players nowadays.
(http://www.popmatters.com/feature/183929-the-18-stock-ways-of-beginning-and-ending-a-song/)
". . . Songs rarely play in a randomly determined order; artists and bandmates often agonize over the playlist for weeks or months. . . Think of an album like a movie or a book. Directors and writers order their scenes and chapters in a very specific way to illuminate narrative and thematic content, and in any good film or piece of literature, each section builds off the others so that there’s a satisfying conclusion. . . But . . . it’s not something that calls attention to itself, since each part works together organically to make this seamless whole. . . taking care not to make songs appear one after the other if they are too similar in structure, tone or style. . .the first and last songs of every album—the intro and outro songs, as I’m going to call them—hold special importance. These are the tracks that introduce the listener to the artist’s world and compel you to come back again. . ."
Ring In The Rightness
from OHO's forthcoming release Gazebo [OHO is Jay Graboski, David Reeve & Ray Jozwiak]
(from John Adams by David McCullough)
". . . To Adams nothing had changed about human nature since the time of trhe ancients. Inequities within society were inevitable, no matter the political order. Human beings were capable of great good, but also great evil. Thus it had always been and thus it would ever be. He quoted Rousseau's description of th "that hideous sight, the human heart," and recounted that even Dr. Priestley had said that such were the weaknesses and folly of men, "their love of domination, selfishness, and depravity," that none could be elevated above others without risk of danger. . . How he wished it were not so, Adams wrote. Thucydides had said the source of all evils was "a thirst of power, from rapacious and ambitious passions," and Adams agreed. . ."
. . . in the name of humor. Purportedly Sonny Rollins' own words. . . possibly. . . but undoubtedly re-arranged . . .
(from http://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/sonny-rollins-words)
I started playing the saxophone when I was thirteen years old. There
were some other kids on my block who had taken it up, and I thought that
it might be fun. I later learned that these guys’ parents had forced
them into it.
* * *
The saxophone sounds
horrible. Like a scared pig. I never learned the names of most of the
other instruments, but they all sound awful, too. Drums are O.K.,
because sometimes they’ll drown out the other stuff, but it’s all pretty
bad. Jazz
might be the stupidest thing anyone ever came up with. The band starts a
song, but then everything falls apart and the musicians just play
whatever they want for as long they can stand it. People take turns
noodling around, and once they run out of ideas and have to stop, the
audience claps. I’m getting angry just thinking about it.
Sometimes we would run through the same song over and over again to see if anybody noticed. If someone did, I don’t care.
* * *
There
was this one time, in 1953 or 1954, when a few guys and I had just
finished our last set at Club Carousel, and we were about to pack it in
when in walked Bud Powell and Charlie Parker. We must have jammed
together for five more hours, right through sunrise. That was the worst
day of my life.
* * *
We always dressed
real sharp: pin-stripe suits, porkpie hats, silk ties. As if to conceal
the fact that we were spending all our time playing jazz in some
basement. I remember Dexter Gordon was doing a gig at the 3
Deuces, and at one point he leaned into the microphone and said, “I
could sell this suit and this saxophone and get far away from here.” The
crowd laughed.
* * *
I really don’t know why
I keep doing this. Inertia, I guess. Once you get stuck in a rut, it’s
difficult to pull yourself out, even if you hate every minute of it.
Maybe I’m just a coward. If I could do it all over again, I’d probably be an accountant or a process server. They make good money.
* * *
Once
I played the Montreux Jazz Festival, in Switzerland, with Miles Davis. I
walked in on him smoking cigarettes and staring at his horn for what
must have been fifteen minutes, like it was a poisonous snake and he
wasn’t sure if it was dead. Finally Miles stood up, turned to his band,
and said, “All right, let’s get through this, and then we’ll go to the
airport.” He looked like he was about to cry.
* * *
I
released fifty-odd albums, wrote hundreds of songs, and played on God
knows how many session dates. Some of my recordings are in the Library
of Congress. That’s idiotic. They ought to burn that building to the
ground. I hate music. I wasted my life.
. . . in proper order. . . they sound more like this . . .
(from http://www.mensjournal.com/magazine/sony-rollins-the-colossus-20130819)When I visited Sonny Rollins at his home in Germantown, New York, a semi-hardscrabble hamlet 100 miles up the Hudson River, the 82-year-old jazzman they call the Saxophone Colossus was doing his laundry. "Oh, man, come on in, man," Sonny said in his reedy, slightly high-pitched voice as he stuck his head out the back door of the modest house, blood-orange skullcap on his kingly, lantern-jawed head. Jumble of shirts fresh from the dryer in his arms, he led me through the cluttered kitchen to a sitting room. "Be with you in a minute," he said with a sigh.
For Sonny, certainly one of the greatest tenor-saxophone players in the history of the instrument invented by Adolphe Sax in 1841, and a key figure in jazz for more than half a century, it is a drag any time "the celestial Big Picture" is infringed upon by "the Little Picture," which the musician defines as "that day-to-day crap you have to put up with on this misbegotten planet.". . .
"That was my life back then – I thought it would always go on like that, never change," Sonny said. Now, on "the wrong side of 81," he could feel the metronome inside his head ticking away, each instant too precious to be squandered on the puny minutiae of the day-to-day.
For instance, only that week he'd spent nearly the entire morning down in the Big Apple, making an episode of The Simpsons. Sonny played a holographic image of himself that hovers, godlike, outside the bedroom window of perhaps his best-known mainstream musical disciple, Lisa Simpson. Sonny had three lines, which he dutifully repeated over and over again, coached by a voice on a speakerphone originating 3,000 miles away in Los Angeles. Later, Sonny said that taking all morning to produce a hologram visible only to a TV cartoon character was "kind of strange," especially for someone who'd managed to cut albums like Tenor Madness and Saxophone Colossus in a few short hours on a two-track machine located in Rudy Van Gelder's Hackensack, New Jersey, studio.
"Technology, man," Sonny said with a shrug. "All this little stuff interrupts my chain of thought. Consequently, I haven't been able to properly practice my horn the way I have to," he said, emerging from the laundry room in a loose-fitting khaki shirt, a pair of baggy gray sweatpants, and thick white socks stuffed into open-toe leather slippers. "If I don't get to practice, work on my embouchure and scales, then I can't play correctly, and if I can't play correctly, I can't work out my ideas, and if I can't work out my ideas, then I go crazy." . . .
One of the great stories in the annals of jazz, or any other modern creative endeavor, Sonny's two-year "sabbatical," time spent practicing alone on the desolate, decrepit walkway of the Williamsburg Bridge in New York, remains the jazzman's emblematic moment. It was a radical move. After all, Sonny had already fronted groups that included Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, and Max Roach. Saxophone Colossus, recorded in 1956 and including all-time classic performances of "St. Thomas," "Strode Road," and "Blue 7," established him as a star.
Yet Sonny wasn't happy. "It wasn't like I was playing bad," he told me. "I just knew I could get better, that I had to get better."
The original plan had been to woodshed in his Grand Street apartment on the Lower East Side, but the lady next door had just had a baby, and he thought if he played too loud he'd give the child "bad ears." That's what led him to the bridge – 135 feet above the roiling East River, he could really let loose under the sky and the stars with the whole city laid out before him. Musicians all over town thought he was nuts. Why did he need all this practice? He was the best; wasn't that good enough? But those people didn't hear what Sonny heard. He was nothing but a glorified beginner, Sonny believed, a work in progress. There were places he needed to go. When he got there, that's when he'd come back.
Tell Sonny that the image of the brilliant jazzman seeker – the lone figure amid the chaotic howl of the city, blowing his horn in quest of a bit of sanity – has always been a source of personal inspiration and he will be touched by the comment. Mention that he's your favorite player, along with Sidney Bechet and Johnny Hodges, and he'll shake his head slowly. "To be put with those guys, wow. That's a real compliment." Go on to say that you always hummed "St. Thomas" for your children when they were tiny, and a few years later your daughters made you a birthday card with a handmade tinfoil saxophone in the middle of roughly drawn treble clefs along with the words Sonny Rollins, and the Colossus will begin to tear up. . .
"You mean, like you're going to play this music and the rivers are suddenly going to run backward?" I asked, trying to be funny. After all, he was already perhaps the greatest single improviser in the history of jazz. No one had his emotional range, the ability to one moment be riffing like a musical stand-up comedian and then, abruptly, be tearing your heart out with the abject blues of the human condition. What about that fabulous opening to Monk's "Misterioso"? How about that spectacular ending to "God Bless the Child"?
This made Sonny laugh. When Sonny laughs, you know it. He bends his neck back nearly 45 degrees, casts his eyes skyward, and his mouth becomes a widening circle. Ha-ha-ha, he goes, loudly, like howling at the moon, albeit with perfect breath control.
"Don't you see, that's exactly the point," Sonny chortled as he clamped his skullcap onto to his head. "Those notes you mention, those notes have already been blown."
. . . I'm sure the latter is much more accurate . . .
OHO's
"Ocean City Ditty," the
CD single is now available at http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/oho4
(and, if
you're in town, at Trax On Wax on Frederick Rd. in Catonsville, MD)
My latest solo release, '2014' of original, instrumental piano music, can be downloaded digitally at:
(or you can copy-and-paste this URL directly to
your browser: http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/rayjozwiak4)
(Thanks to: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/06/25/youre-being-silly-foxs-neil-cavuto-mocks-michele-bachmanns-impeachment-talk/ and wikipedia.com)
Neil Cavuto (Fox News) exhibited behavior fitting, refreshing and long-overdue when he questioned outgoing Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) about House Republicans’ threat to sue President Barack Obama, accusing them of engaging in political theater that they know will not go anywhere in the courts.
“You’re conflating issues and you’re being silly,” Cavuto told Bachmann. “Where was your rage when Democrats were going after President Bush on the same use of executive orders? Because I think you knew then that that was a waste of time then and I think you know in your heart of hearts this is a waste of time now. There are far more important things that I think you guys have to be addressing than filing lawsuits past each other.”House Speaker John Boehner announced Wednesday he plans to file suit against President Obama over his alleged abuse of executive power.
Take note American press and media, Mr. Neil Cavuto exhibits journalistic standards.
Neil Cavuto became the managing editor of business news and television anchor of Your World with Neil Cavuto on Fox News Channel in July 1996, later becoming a vice president of business news in March 2006. He serves all three positions concurrently. Your World is Fox's main business news program. Before joining Fox, he hosted Power Lunch on CNBC and contributed to NBC's Today. He worked with the Public Broadcasting Service for 15 years. He was also a New York City bureau chief. He has been awarded numerous times by his peers in the journalism industry, including recognition by the Wall Street Journal as the best interviewer in business news, best business television interviewer four consecutive years, and five nominations for Cable ACE awards Cavuto was also awarded the 1980 Hellinger Award, the highest award for graduating journalism students from St. Bonaventure University. Cavuto has interviewed many high profile business, political and world leaders.
OHO's
"Ocean City Ditty," the
CD single is now available at http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/oho4
(and, if
you're in town, at Trax On Wax on Frederick Rd. in Catonsville, MD)
My latest solo release, '2014' of original, instrumental piano music, can be downloaded digitally at:
(or you can copy-and-paste this URL directly to
your browser: http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/rayjozwiak4)
