saxophonists

"Wayne Shorter, who turns eighty this month, and Sonny Rollins are two of the finest saxophonists living today."

"While Lester Young might have had a warm tone, Stan Getz's was even more relaxed and wispy, especially on the jazz-bossa nova albums he did with Brazilian pianist Antonio Carlos Jobim and singer and guitarist Joao Gilberto, including the 1963 album Getz/Gilberto, which included "The Girl From Ipanema." Sure, Getz's tone was perfectly suited for bossa nova, but the tenor player could also work his around bop tunes. His playing is especially gorgeous and fluid on Focus, which included string arrangements by arranger Eddie Sauter."

"With his instantly recognizable biting and clear tone, tenor player Sonny Rollins, who turns 83 in September, is regarded by some as the greatest living saxophonist today. Inspired by Lester Young and Coleman Hawkins, Rollins had an ability to rarely repeat himself when improvising, even during lengthy solos. He was just in his mid-twenties when Saxophone Colossus was released, and the title of the disc was more than fitting. Rollins was already a titan of the tenor evidenced by cuts like "St. Thomas," one of his most well known compositions."

"Some folks thought Rahsaan Roland Kirk's playing multiple horns at once was a gimmick. Granted, the guy looked like a madman with all sorts of woodwinds strapped around him, with maybe a tenor sax or manzello and stritch (both obscure saxophones) in his mouth at the same time, but Kirk was a hell of an improviser, often harmonizing with himself. There's a live recording of Kirk playing "Sentimental Journey" on one horn and Dvorak's "New World Symphony" on the other, and Kirk said it's splitting the mind into two parts. "It's like making one part of your mind say, 'Ob-la-di' and make the other part of your mind say 'What does it mean'?" Not only was Kirk a damn fine saxophonist but his flute playing, while scatting, heavily influenced Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull."

"When it comes to modern-day bassists, the creative Keeler stands tall above the field. The son of musician Fred Keeler, who jammed with the likes of Bob Dylan, Jesse has made a name for himself as the driving force within Canadian dance-punk duo Death From Above 1979 and the electronic-tinged MSTRKRFT. Whether talking dance, techno, electronica, punk, or pure rock, Keeler is a dynamic musician who continues experimenting with his overall sound. Keeler is usually sporting his see-through bass, which screams and howls with an almost haunting vibe."

"Known for her (Asabe Cropper) unique Kente culture, her traditional ‘Tekuwaa’ (headgear) her horns, beads, kente outfit and that silky voice with the Ada lyrics, she dazzled Ghanaians, together with her brother Kenteman, to woo the hearts of many Ghanaians in the ‘90s."

"If the King can do no wrong, it is akin to looking down upon him, because the King is not being treated as a human being. The King can do wrong."

"I do some things that are within my rights and then they see that it is something that is all right. So they begin to understand that I am doing things not for my own enrichment or my own interest. It is for the whole country."

"All Thais should realise this point a lot and behave and perform our duties accordingly, our duty for the sake of the public, for stability, security for our nation of Thailand."

"Some complained they were asked too much to sacrifice for the sake of common interest that they were annoyed to hear. They might think what they would get in return if they keep sacrificing. Actually, doing good for the sake of common interest does not bear fruits only to the public but also to the individuals...."

"Sufficiency means to lead a reasonably comfortable life, without excess, or overindulgence in luxury, but enough. Some things may seem to be extravagant, but if it brings happiness, it is permissible as long as it is within the means of the individual. This is another interpretation of the sufficiency economy or system. Last year, when I mentioned the word sufficiency, I mentally translated it and actually spelled it out as self-sufficiency; that is why I said sufficiency for the individual. In fact, this sufficiency economy has a wider meaning than just self-sufficiency. Self-sufficiency means that the individual produces the things to fulfill his own needs without having to purchase them from others; the individual can live entirely on his own."

"You can stay in the frame of the law, You do what the law says. That is, if you say something, the Prime Minister or a minister must countersign, and if he is not there to countersign, we cannot speak. That is one way to do it - do nothing, just nothing at all. The other way is to do too much, use the influence we have to do anything. That doesn't work either. We must be in the middle, and working in every field."

"If we are a highly advanced country, there is only oneway to go: backwards. Mind you, those highly industrializedcountries are bound to go down, and down in a very dangerous way. On the other hand, if we use a “poor man’s”method of administration, without being too dogmatic about theory, but with the spirit of Unity in mind, that is, with mutual tolerance, we will have more stability."

"If they want to write about me in a good way, they should write how I do things that are useful. If they want to criticize me, I don't care, I don't mind. But they must criticize me fairly. Usually the criticism is not fair. Or the praise, even the praise sometimes is not fair."

"My philosophy has been to take things day by day. When I talk about this philosophy it makes people perhaps a little surprised."

"The Nation belongs to everyone, not one or two specific people. The problems exist because we don't talk to each other and resolve them together. The problems arise from 'bloodthirstiness'. People can lose their minds when they resort to violence. Eventually, they don't know why they fight each other and what the problems they need to resolve are. They merely know that they must overcome each other and they must be the only winner. This no way leads to victory, but only danger. There will only be losers, only the losers. Those who confront each other will all be the losers. And the loser of the losers will be the Nation.... For what purpose are you telling yourself that you're the winner when you're standing upon the ruins and debris?"

"It is highly important to encourage and help people inearning their living and supporting themselves with adequatemeans, because those who are gainfully employed andself-supporting are capable of contributing definitelytowards higher levels of development."

"Thailand has been a peaceful nation for a long time; this is because of the existence of national solidarity and because members of society have performed their duty in a complementary manner with each other for the interest of the whole nation."

"Development of the nation must be carried out in stages, starting with the laying of the foundation by ensuring the majority of the people with their basic necessities through the use of economical means and equipment in accordance with theoretical principles. Once reasonably firm foundation has been laid and in effect, higher levels of economic growth and development should next be promoted."

"I must say that I tended to rise to the occasion more when there was a programmatic theme, and you can start to visualize things easier that was as opposed to going from one tune to another, without ever getting anywhere. If you are thinking about writing a suite then it's more of an inspirational challenge I think. I must be honest and say that I did those four Moon Suite pieces very quickly. It wasn't unusual for everything to be last minute and I was constantly finishing off the last one for the copyists to be able to bring it to the studio half an hour before the end of the session."

"When you’re by yourself and you’re doing something that is physically quite demanding it might be almost more readily available to get to that space. People always call it out of body or you’re on autopilot, but none of those things are exactly true. You become the thing you’re making rather than the person making it. That’s a good place to be."

"We go through life being told by every story and bit of media that we can consume that for everybody there’s this corollary person or soulmate. And you’ll know each other and they’ll just get you and know what’s going on in your heart and mind. That terrible narrative that’s sold to us, prepackaged in every form, pretty much ruins every relationship—romantic, friendly and otherwise. The acknowledgement of the real rub of being conscious, to the degree that we are, is that no matter how much the company of others we seek, the underlying source of our discontent, and constantly looking for or describing different causes for it, is that ultimately you’re alone in your head. You’re the only thing that will ever think those thoughts. And there’s no amount of companionship, comradery or family that will ever penetrate that barrier. Your life and death, there’s a solitude to it."

"Every piece of music in a way, is like a child, this thing that I’ve given birth to. Every single piece of music that I’ve written, I remember every thing about it. I remember the decisions that I made when I was writing it, and how it was recorded and mixed, and what I’d do different. Every piece becomes personal."

"Most simply put, emotions are what influence me the most. I start with a feeling, which could be a feeling of the piece I’d like to write, or the feeling I have for a movie or scene I’m scoring, and then I begin to try to translate that feeling into music. Once I can get the music to give me the same feeling I have by listening to it, then I feel like I’m headed in the right direction and I begin to hone it from there."

"Studies of thought and modes of reasoning have been central in the history of anthropology from the nineteenth century to the present day."

"In anthropological research, it is impossible to keep single variables constant. If one were to place a group of natives into an artificial, controlled situation, the resulting interaction would lose the very context that guarantees its authenticity, and the result would be useless. The closest anthropologists get to the methodological ideals of the experiment is therefore through comparison. One would then compare two or several societies with many similarities, but with one or a few striking differences."

"Holism in anthropology thus entails the identification of internal connections in a system of interaction and communication. The word has gone somewhat out of fashion in recent years, particularly because many anthropologists now study fragmented worlds, which are only integrated in a piecemeal fashion. Nevertheless, the examples above indicate that holism today is to do with contextualisation rather than postulating the existence of tightly integrated and stable entities. In the analytical methodology of anthropology, context may actually be the key concept. It refers to the fact that every phenomenon must be understood with a view to its dynamic relationship with other phenomena. No forms of belief, technologies, marriage systems or economic practices (to mention a few examples) have any meaning whatsoever unless they are understood in a wider context."

"It should be noted here that a research area which has grown rapidly since the 1980s is the aforementioned STS field, that is, the sociological study of technology and science. Here, western science and technology are studied as cultural products, and many of its practitioners adhere to the so-called symmetry principle proposed by the French sociologist Bruno Latour, which entails that the same terminology and the same methods of analysis should be used for failures as for successes; in other words, that what we are doing is looking at science as a social fact, not as truth or falsity. Similarly, most anthropologists would argue that our task consists of making sense of ‘the others’, not judging whether they are right or wrong."

"Although it is necessary to be conscious of variation, the problem of boundaries, political misuse, change, flows and conceptual inaccuracy, it would be tantamount to intellectual suicide for anthropology if it were to discard a concept that tells us that people with different backgrounds, who have been raised in very different environments, live – to a greater or lesser extent – in different life-worlds and see the world in different ways. Thus, it seems necessary to keep the culture concept, but in an ideal world, it would be locked securely in a cupboard and taken out only when it was needed. In most cases where the culture concept is used cursorily today – inside and outside of anthropology – it would prove unnecessary to unlock the cupboard."

"In my view, there are many exciting possibilities for cooperation between social and cultural anthropologists on the one hand, and scholars with a biological perspective on the other, but they are often lost in aggressive academic turf wars and a failure to engage seriously with each other’s points of view."

"All cultural translation necessitates some interpretation and simplification. No sane reader would be able to make sense of a text which consisted exclusively of directly translated, unmediated quotations from informants. Compression and editing are therefore necessary elements of cultural translation. Moreover, no matter how outstanding an anthropologist is, as a fieldworker, as a writer and as an analyst, the text always represents a selection, and it will always to a greater or lesser extent be marked by the subjectivity of the translator."

"The broad standardisation of culture represented in nationalism would not have been possible without a modern mass medium such as the printed book (and, later, the newspaper). Thus it may be said that writing has not only influenced thought about the world, but also thought about who we are. It has made it technologically possible to imagine that you belong to the same people as millions of other persons whom you will never meet."

"The art of cultural translation consists in oscillating between distance and nearness, between one’s own concepts and the native ones, or – to put it differently – making the exotic familiar and the familiar exotic."

"The world, as it is perceived by human beings, is to a certain extent shaped by language. However, there is no agreement as to just what the relationship between language and non-linguistic reality is."

"Many social scientists, including anthropologists, have been interested in the power inherent in gender relations, often described through the idiom of female oppression. It can be argued that men usually tend to exert more power over women than vice versa. In most societies, men generally hold the most important political and religious positions, and very often men control the formal economy. In some societies, it may even be prescribed for women to cover their body and face when they appear in the public sphere, and, paradoxically, these practices sometimes become more common as their societies become more modern. On the other hand, women are often capable of exerting considerable informal power, not least in the domestic sphere. Anthropologists cannot state unequivocally that women are oppressed before they have investigated all aspects of their society, including how the women (and men) themselves perceive their situation. One cannot dismiss the possibility that certain women in western Asia (the Middle East) see the ‘liberated’ western woman as more oppressed – by professional career pressure, demands to look good and other expectations – than themselves. When studying societies undergoing change, which perhaps most anthropologists do today, it is important to look at the value conflicts and tensions between different interest groups that are particularly central. Often these conflicts are expressed through gender relations."

"The relationships between mother, father and children, family trees and genealogies, preferential treatment of relatives and alliances through marriage furnish us with some of the few really good and useful comparative concepts we have in anthropology. They exist everywhere in one form or another, and they differ in interesting ways. If the ultimate goal is to discover the unity of humanity through its manifold appearances, the profession cannot afford to let go of the still rich gold mine of kinship."

"The great enigma of anthropology can be phrased like this: All over the world, humans are born with the same cognitive and physical apparatus, and yet they grow into distinctly different persons and groups, with different societal types, beliefs, technologies, languages and notions about the good life. Differences in innate endowments vary within each group and not between them, so that musicality, intelligence, intuition and other qualities that vary from person to person are quite evenly distributed globally."

"The world is far too complex, and variation between societal types is too vast, for a categorisation dividing it into two mutually exclusive kinds of society to be meaningful. In addition, as argued above, one cannot once and for all draw the boundaries of a society. For this reason, it is more accurate to state that anthropologists study social life rather than saying that they study societies."

"Kinship builds upon two complementary principles: descent and marriage. But both can be manipulated and fiddled with, by natives as well as by anthropologists. There exists a considerable critical literature about kinship; some of it was mentioned briefly at the beginning of this chapter, and we now turn to a slightly more detailed examination."

"In our day and age, the perspectives from anthropology are just as indispensable as those from philosophy. Anthropology can teach important lessons about the world and the global whirl of cultural mixing, contact and contestation – but it can also teach us about ourselves. Goethe once said that ‘he who speaks no foreign language knows nothing about his own’. And although anthropology is about ‘the other’, it is ultimately also about ‘the self’. For it can tell us that almost unimaginably different lives from our own are meaningful and valuable, that everything could have been different, that a different world is possible, and that even people who seem very different from you and me are, ultimately, like ourselves. Anthropology takes part in the long conversation about what it is to be human, and gives flesh and blood to these fundamental questions. It is a genuinely cosmopolitan discipline in that it does not privilege certain ways of life above others, but charts and compares the full range of solutions to the perennial human challenges. In this respect, anthropology is uniquely a knowledge for the twenty-first century, crucial in our attempts to come to terms with a globalised world, essential for building understanding and respect across real or imagined cultural divides. And make no mistake, anthropology holds out the keys to a world which has the potential of changing the lives of those who choose to enter it."

"As mentioned, no society has a prescriptive practice. The rules are always adjusted to fit the bumpy and contradictory world of experience. It must nevertheless be admitted that absolute rules exist everywhere. The incest prohibition exists in all societies, even if it has often been pointed out that it varies in its significance and compass; in some societies, it is limited to the kin we might call close family, that is, people with the same biological mother and father and their relatives in direct lines of descent; but usually half-siblings are included in the incest prohibition, and often the prohibition is extended to include what we might call more remote relatives."

"Both evolutionary scientists and anthropologists, who approach the phenomena from very discrepant points of view, have, in other words, reached the conclusion that reciprocity, which creates enduring social bonds based on trust and mutual obligations, is a fundamental aspect of human life."

"We still ask of our diverse world how it can be that people, born with roughly the same inborn potentials and opportunities, can turn out to be so different, and, in the next instance, what they can still be said to have in common. Still, anthropologists insist on giving priority of place to local life-worlds and on a methodological openness intended to prevent ethnocentric misjudgements. For, as Clifford Geertz has put it, if all you crave is home truths, you might as well stay at home."

"Anthropology is an intellectually challenging, theoretically ambitious subject which tries to achieve an understanding of culture, society and humanity through detailed studies of local life, made sense of through comparison and contextualisation. But it is also a form of storytelling about the lives that you and I could have led, but didn’t because we were busy living our own lives."

"Anthropological theory may be compared to a large crossroads with busy traffic and a few, temporarily employed traffic policemen who desperately try to force the unruly traffic to follow the rules. (There are, it must be admitted, a number of minor crashes and other accidents almost every day.) Or it could be described, more harmoniously, as a coral reef, where the living corals literally build upon the achievements of their deceased predecessors."

"To simplify somewhat, one may say that anthropology primarily offers two kinds of insight. First, its practitioners produce knowledge about the actual cultural variation in the world; studies may deal with, say, the role of caste and wealth in Indian village life, technology among highland people in New Guinea, religion in southern Africa, life on the Wall Street stock exchange, the political importance of kinship in the Middle East, or concepts about life and the cosmos in the Amazon basin. Although most anthropologists are specialists in one or two regions, it is necessary to be knowledgeable about global cultural variation, and about humanity as such, in order to be able to say anything interesting about one’s region, topic or people. Second, anthropology offers methods and theoretical perspectives enabling the practitioner to explore, compare and understand these varied expressions of the human condition. In other words, the subject offers both things to think about and things to think with. But anthropology is not just a toolbox; it is also a craft which teaches the novice how to obtain a certain kind of knowledge and what this knowledge might say something about."

"It must be added that many anthropologists are satisfied with one or two periods of fieldwork, that not all field studies last for a year or more, and that there are a lot of different ways in which an anthropological investigation can be undertaken, only a few of which have been dealt with here. Yet certain methodological requirements are definite and non-negotiable. Contextualisation is one; another consists of aiming to understand the world of the natives as far as possible in the way they themselves understand it, as a basis for further analysis."

"What characterises anthropological research today more than anything is the recognition of complexity; the world is complex, cultures are complex, communities are complex, and analytical strategies must acknowledge complexity."

"Above all, there is no simple one-to-one relationship between culture and ethnic identity, despite what many still believe. There are ethnic groups with great internal cultural variation, and there are clear boundaries between ethnic groups whose mutual cultural differences are difficult to spot. Often, the variation within the group is greater on key indicators than the systematic differences between the groups."

"In spite of the lack of clarity in the concept of society, the word is doubtless necessary. In everyday language, words denoting local communities, large-scale society and global society exist, and all refer to actually existing entities, existing at different systemic levels. Humans are integrated in (that is, they participate in and contribute to) several social systems, some operating at a large scale, others at a small scale. When anthropologists delineate their field of study, the level of scale is determined by the issues at hand."