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Mingus Ah Um


dave9199

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Yeah. Latin. . . I had to learn latin really quickly when I arrived at boarding school in Swaziland and was two years behind all the others. When the teacher was the headmaster, there was no escape. I was reading Cicero in record time!

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When they list a Latin adjective in a dictionary or exercise book, they always give the three endings, e.g. optimus, optima, optimum, shortened to optimus, -a, -um. As was said, this is for the masculine, feminine and neuter cases.

I was made to grind through this junk for three whole years at high school. It was like math in a way. All you had to do was memorize the rules and regurgitate it on the tests. At that time, any high school student would have known exactly where the Mingus album title came from. I don't think there are any hidden, freudian meanings. It was just a school cliché during that era. I also recall the gem "hasta - a spear, when addressed".

I am glad to see that the schools have largely dumped the Latin since then. What a waste of time.

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I am glad to see that the schools have largely dumped the Latin since then. What a waste of time.

I guess it all depends on the teacher.

I took four years of Latin in high school and learned more about writing, culture, history, and life in general than in all of my other courses combined.

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Latin was not offered to me during my public schooling, and I've never taken it as a class, but if reinstituting it would serve to put as much as a tiny in in the vocabularyphobia of today's society, I'd be all in favor of it.

If I HAD have had latin, I might even know what the proper word for "vocabularyphobia" is. What is it - lexiphobia?

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30 years later I still profit from my Latin courses in high school: it was the basis for so many European languages that developped as mutations of it: Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Catalan, Romanian ... it helps me a lot to read these languages and understand a substantial part of them even though I never learned them proper.

Ignoring Latin would be like learning jazz without ever taking notice of the basics Satchmo and Hawk introduced ....

Edited by mikeweil
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I have no Satchmo or Hawk. Well, I have The Hawk In Hi-Fi on Bluebird but somehow I imagine this is not representative of his work. Sorry, no one showed me the way here... :w

Latin is far too practical to be taught in today's worthless schools.

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Noj, that Bluebird represents Hawk well enough. . .Hawk was so versatile and so HUGE an artist that it would take a dozen sessions to really show a few important sides of him!

Hey, I spent a long time in jazz before I got really deeply into what Armstrong and Hawkins and others had done. . . . When I did get there, though, it really opened up my mind and heart and was so important in my life!

Latin. . . well. . . not quite so change invoking! B)

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I don't know about today's schools. . . . You know when I came back from a British-established-run boarding school in M'Babane, Swaziland (Waterford-Kamhlaba---man they even have a website these days!) to the junior year of highschool in Burton, Ohio. . . I learned practically nothing besides American Government and American History. Boredom and depression really set in. I couldn't believe how the kids acted in school either!

I did not learn Latin there!

Edited by jazzbo
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Noj, that Bluebird represents Hawk well enough. . .Hawk was so versatile and so HUGE an artist that it would take a dozen sessions to really show a few important sides of him!

Hey, I spent a long time in jazz before I got really deeply into what Armstrong and Hawkins and others had done. . . . When I did get there, though, it really opened up my mind and heart and was so important in my life!

Latin. . . well. . . not quite so change invoking! B)

Thanks for the reply, Lon. I'll have to give Hawk In Hi-Fi another spin, but to be honest I didn't dig it too much the first few listens. I think the strings may have somehow been responsible, though I have nothing against strings in general.

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Yeah, it's nowhere near his best, but the show is always Hawk himself, and he plays really well on that to my ears, with that wonderful sound that conjures up ghosts and images, and the strength and power even in the tenderest moments. . . . In that way I feel it is representative of his work.

I was listening Sunday to his two Moodsville sessions, out on cd by OJC, both with Tommy Flanagan on piano. . . . Man, that is some great stuff. Worth checking out to see other sides of this duodecagonal (at least!) artist!

hawkins181.gif

hawkins709.gif

Edited by jazzbo
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