Jay Wrote

So What Worship and The Atheist-Agnostic Monarch Conundrum So What Miles Davis’ solo in ‘Round Midnight , piercing and quiet against sophisticated fills by Red Garland (p), Philly Jo Jones (d), Paul Chambers (b). The trumpet rings out… do I hear spit skitter across the horn’s bell? John Coltrane (ts) and Julian “Cannonball” Adderly (as) trade solos; the faint echoes following their lines rise and retreat depending on the direction the saxes swung towards in that corner of Columbia’s 30th Street Studio in 1959 NYC. Next, on to So What , with Bill Evans: piano and James Cobb: drums from Kind of Blue , recorded a few years earlier. One of humanity’s greatest achievements. I cannot describe the creativity, teamwork, concentration and completeness that make up these blues and ballads and other iterations of America’s classical music - jazz. According to the Kind of Blue album notes by Bill Evans, “Miles conceived these settings only hours before … you will hear something close ...

I am hauling out boxes and binders of Americana Family history, collected and created by my mother. In my youth, she and her mother discussed the who’s who and The when and where of the Walkers, Dukes, the Johnsons and the Abbotts. In Salem, they were the convicted witches and their accusers. The first Duke Vermonter, reported Ruth, came over from Quebec in a hay wagon, A Huguenot, a “French Jew” she said, who dodged the pitch-forks of the revenuers. On the dining room table, tintypes, daguerreotypes, faded paper portraits from St. Johnsbury studios. Yellowed newspaper clippings -- death notices and 95th birthday celebrations, poorly afixed in notebooks with deteriorating cellophane tape. In my boxes now, my mother’s handwritten family trees on pre-printed pedigree charts. She invented her own cross-referencing system and squeezed in irresistable details. “Nathan Hanson. In Capt. Sam Runnel’s Co. of Col. Mooney’s Regiment, NH defense of RI, Rev. War. A private.” C...

https://www.ifglobal.org/images/stories/groningen-d.pdf.   slightly changed but still OLD: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1576285,  

Inheritance  We are descendants of the Schwenkfelders, religious rebels who fled Silesia (now southwest Poland) in the early 1700s. They worshiped in their homes without church, priest or catechism. The sect was at odds with Luther and the Pope. Bibles and land were seized. Children were taken from families so that they would not grow to doubt the transubstantiation of the host or subordination to the state or Rome. Unrepentant Schwenkfelders were chained to oars on Mediterranean galleys and conscripted to fight Ottoman invaders. They were denied burial in consecrated ground - made to lay their dead under cow paths outside their village of Harpersdorf.  Early in the 18th century, they loaded possessions into wheelbarrows and fled westward in darkness. Three Dutch merchants of Harlem, the Van Buychanse brothers, provided succor and hired a ship to take one hundred forty Schwenkfelders to Pennsylvania, America's most tolerant colony. The inspiration for the Van Buych...