QuadTalk
May 31, 2019
Happy Birthday, Allison

A capriciously disseminated newsletter written by a hemp-inspired quadriplegic jester who, like King Lear, impotently screams ineffective vitriol at the raging antediluvian squalls of societal indifference that violently smash the planet and callously destroy the things I love. I cry, defeated by a redoubtable sea of troubles as my siblings, whose pursuits of happiness do not coincide with the status quo, are mowed down by ignorant privilege while comfortably content indifference ignores the anguished cries of people's suffering simply because they don't look the same.
— SSTJazzVocalist

#Wheelchairistocracy #GroovicusMaximus #BrianKempIsACheater
@frangeladuo
Preamble

Welcome to QuadTalk. I am Rusty Taylor, a complete, level C-4 spinal cord injury who, for thirty-three years (and counting), has been unable to perform even the most rudimentary acts of daily living, and, as such, I am a victim of the nefarious for-profit healthcare system we, the citizens of the U.S.A., have callously ignored for too long. This will not be a media blitz of superfluity; I am a vitriolic antagonist against the status quo, so if you are naively looking for a feelgood story about a “poor li’l ol’ cripple boy” who done good against the odds, then I suggest you go find the Hallmark Channel and infuse your brain with enough endorphins to make you forget that separating children from their families is simply morally unconscionable or that a casual rapist majestically sits as Supreme Court judge. Otherwise, welcome...

CAVEAT

This newsletter is inspired by my capricious Muse. Unfortunately, I alone am responsible for its content and dissemination. I have no proof-reader or editor nor do I have corporate sponsors to moderate my tone and style, so...

I alone am responsible for all the typos contained herein, and all I can do is promise to try not to make additional grievous errors. Please excuse an occasional rhetorical mistake. They are unintentional.
—SSTJazzVocalist

Uncivil Hormonal Wars

I think back to when I was a teenaged boy, and, immediately, my loins ache for the memory of when the hormones in my body were raging war on my pubescent energy, the kind o’ red MAGA-hat wearin’ rage of sexual urgency that created a storm of emotion that made rational reasoning as nonexistent as a mentally acute and racially sensitive Trump supporter. I couldn’t think of anything that wouldn’t catalyze overt reactionary tumescence. I could visit my octogenarian great grandmother and watch her drool as she eats mush, my cousin’s stifling back emetic gastro-intestinal rejection as the viscous sebaceous loop of saliva from Gran’ma Jackson’s oral cavity wraps around the fingers of my cousin’s hand that holds an impotent napkin’s intention to mop up anile clumsiness… as a teenager, I could watch this then, without any sense of... well, of anything ... then, suddenly, I’d be thinking about a woman’s breasts… and I liked it.

The thought of attaining immediate carnal knowledge commanded 99% of my cerebral intentions. It may happen to everybody of the same age, but, at the same time, I had the confidence of a hummingbird in a hurricane, so balanced against the urgency of sensual gratification was a crippling lack of self confidence. I am no psychiatrist, but that sounds like adolescence to me.

My adolescence was experienced during the mid to late 70s. Charles Angels was the most sophisticated form of dramatic art in my eyes. If I were to look at that show now, I would laugh at how unrealistic it is, a cops an’ robbers show starring Barbie and her friends fighting nefarious thugs while wearing bikinis. ‘Bout as likely as believing that the only couple engaging in coitus on Gilligan’s Island were the Howells. I reckon that every older generation says it, but it was a simpler time when I was young, which is true because I didn’t know anything. In many ways, few things in my life have changed.

Then come the 80s. Eddie Murphy is the funniest mother-fucker on the planet, a comedian that simply had to have been inspired by Richard Pryor. Everything was shiny, expensive, childishly simple. Outrageously DeLorean. Studio 54. Fake millionaire Donald Trump’s stooping Marla Maples. I remember going through a college dormitory and saw a police show called Miami Vice; Crockett or Tubbs (I never knew which one was which) shot one of his adversaries and blood splattered.

To the children of today, the fictionalized but graphic realism of the television show’s violence may seem as innocuous as drinking a glass of pure water that’s never been touched by human hands and bottled by a mega corporation who has somehow wrested legal control over public waters so much so that now even aboriginal natives cannot use the water for irrigation or to even slake their thirsts without penalty; however, before I witnessed this television show’s visually sanguine massacre, the fictional violence shown on television was childish. Many bullets were fired, but there was hardly any blood; Cowboys and Indians would “swap lead” in gunfights with many casualties except... no equestrian deaths; even violence in the news was ameliorated (possibly as a result of the extreme violence shown by the network news during the Vietnam War [1] ).

Right now, our kids see more violence in video games than anything that the more senior of our nation’s citizens get through their preferred news media; that’s why seniors are so cynical about the violence that is so obvious in contemporary society, a violence that they feel is, virtually, nonexistent; they can, therefore, take that vacation abroad to meet strangers who look and act an awful lot like they do, but I digress…

Television in the 70s lacked the violence that is now as ubiquitous as the number of school shootings or the number of times a minority is unjustifiably shot by racist police. Seems like the kids today are not as emotionally innocent as I was at their age, but it’s a pattern that seems to be repeated throughout the history of humanity; however, this desensitizing is an idiosyncrasy that will soon create different, unexpected results.

I read a recent report that strongly suggests that young people are not having as much sex as people in the past. The report cites the fact that with the supernumerary diversions offered by handheld video apparatuses, couples have many more things to do than enjoy sex; the antiquated idea that “sex is better than ennui” is no longer a valid justification to release excessive positive energy in a sensual way that should be fun for everyone participating… sometimes not.

Nowadays, young adults are discovering that there exists many more diversions to fill the social ennui that we all endure because of our status as citizens of the most powerful military nation on the planet, which means, I suppose, that we are all nationally privileged. And this is convenient, yes, but what do we do with this opportunity? Some spend inordinate hours playing video games, and the video games are viscerally stimulating. I imagine (because, as a spinal cord injury, I have not felt the hormonal urges that make sex so covetous) that these video games stimulate the same carnal sensations of sex with much more attention to personal enjoyment and without the obligation to reciprocate, which is probably a bane to people of all genders who lack self confidence; it’s easier to acquiesce to emotionless sex than to attempt a relationship that will, possibly statistically, end in failure, but I digress… The point is (or was supposed to be) that sex is becoming increasingly less important diversion, and that scares the hell out of people who have nothing with which to replace the enjoyment of human contact.

I do not have to spend any time worrying about defending my life. I have been deigned the gift, by ineffable puissance, of being born in a time and place that allows me an opportunity to get stoned off my ass and rhetorically pursue whatever topic intrigues me at any given moment (with an archived history of writing superfluous cerebral tripe that continuously inspires me). I have no family to support; I do not have access to connubial urges; I have no partner to assuage my ignorance; and I have only a few years left to find my ultimate terrestrial realization. This affords me an opportunity to view the world more objectively than before my rejection of Capitalistic cupidity and its accompanying religious extortion of individual cerebral enlightenment, and I can see that we are all living in an epoch that is on the verge of major social change. Oligarchic patriarchy is insidiously being destroyed by a more communally influenced matriarchy, and the impotent men currently receiving most of the superficial wealth are not going down quietly. Instead, they will, childishly, fold their arms across their chests and pout.

Cry Baby
For some reason, some people call this man a genuis



I sit and I watch people whom I still love as they fawn over a man who is morally repugnant and has the mental acuity of a desiccated raisin. These are the same people who belong to religious cults that want our nation to be a theocracy but only via a Christian religion (which one? I don’t know...); although, the religious institution must also accept the current interpretation of Capitalism, which is not only unsustainable but, in my eyes, dichotomous to the Christian precept of utilitarian community. The way I see it, with the assistance (or hindrance) of botanical pharmacology, the reason that these cultish followers of dogmatic restrictions is that they want to save the institution of marriage, but for strictly personal reasons.

Marriage is, on its most basic level, a contract between two people who want to shout to the world their intentions to remain a couple for the rest of their lives. There are many reasons why people want to make this commitment, but they, the reasons for marriage, can be honorable or not.

One never forgets youth’s restless acquiescence to her id, to the corporeal sensations’ charging through her body like the Keystone Cops with too much youthful ignorance and exuberance; I am no longer importuned by hormonal aggression to covet sex. As an outsider who has never been in a serious personal relationship for any significant amount of time; I, who for 33 years have not felt the urgency of sensual lust that, in my youth, caused me to do some ridiculous shit just to get a giggle out of a girl; I am not longer similarly stimulated, but I probably remember this unnerving urgency more vividly because my hormonal encroachment stopped immediately when, at the age off 22, I broke my neck and survived, which may not have been the apex of my youthful, sybaritic-centered, chemically induced emotional chaos with surging turgid rigidity, but it was close enough to it. At twenty-two, my body was vernal and ready to experience everything, but this importunate urgency ceased... immediately. Talk about your mixed blessing.

I did not go through the slow, torpid process of losing interest in carnal intrigue; I lost it immediately… when my anxious energy was near its highest, most volatile potential... when consummation of my turgid intentions was near its most irritatingly influential, I went from a radish-raging inferno to nothing... but I watched the desire for sex and youthful exuberance wane in others… insidiously… creeping at its petty pace from day to day until the last syllable of recorded time. The thing is, between intimate couples, this waning of carnal intensity is very rarely experienced at the same rate (which, I imagine, can be calculated with differential mathematics), and this, obviously, creates conflict.

The marriage contract is the problem... at least in its current state, but nobody wants to admit it because... well, it don’t look so good for some folks; although, the times are a-changing, and let’s face it, marriage has been an arrangement by men for the sake of men since mankind discovered exploitation; I’m sure there is a Latin phrase for that [2] ; marriage was created by men to keep their women from straying, but the marriage contract has loopholes that allow men extracurricular carnal activities with impunity. The patriarchal influence on society has been implemented to benefit one individual male who needs a small group of men to assist him, and they, in turn, need other men, and so on… until the hierarchy looks like a pyramid with the one point on top receiving most of the resources gathered by the much larger base on the bottom.

Marriage ain’t dead; it’s just going to go through major changes, and one reason is that the younguns of today are finding that sex shouldn’t be restrictive; it should be creative as well as fun. The body is not sacred; it is a biological machine that strongly encourages survival of the species. Sex should be recreational, and not every individual pursuit of happiness mirrors everyone else’s. Mike Pence’s mantra about one-man/one-woman, exclusively binary sex’s using only certain acceptable positions... is limiting. Younguns of today have many more diversions other than sex to simulate the stimulation of intercourse through binary manipulation, so it, sex, will very soon no longer be the main impetus for marriage. People will soon get married because they truly want to spend as much time as possible with one other person, or, maybe, a few persons, or, maybe… something I am unable to understand… yet.

Point is... or was supposed to be… women and young people are tired of being supplicated by an impotent man who hoards wealth for himself. What happens next remains to be experienced, but the futuristic society will probably be destroyed like Atlantis, and mankind will, once again, fall back into the atavistic influence of patriarchal authority.

Peace Through Music

___________________________
[1] I remember when I was about 6-8 (1970-72), the news showed the video of the Vietnamese man being shot in the head really rocked my prepubescent world. I felt as I did when I saw Crockett or Tubbs shoot his villain and saw the blood splatter... that is nearly redundant in today's zeitgeist.

[2] According to my computer’s translator, the Latin translation of 'by men for the sake of men' is 'homines per homines,' but I really don’t know.

Make Stages Wheelchair Accessible
Returning to Work After A Three-Day Weekend
OK. I’m back. Took a little time to prepare myself for last Friday’s gig… the Opelika Songwriters Festival for which I sang harmony to songs written by my good friend (and aspiring singer/songwriter) Ted McVay; I really wanted to be in the right frame of mind, so I unplugged… took a few weeks off from terrestrial musings during the incipience of May, focused on my lowly personal position within the hierarchy of the Universe, and I prepared, mentally, to sing my friend’s music: For a bit more than a fortnight, I read William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies” (taking notes because...) and did a lot of singing to keep my voice in shape.

My friend Ted McVay is a singer/songwriter who is trying to get noticed in the local scene. I, personally, think he’s got serious skills. He’s written songs that evoke pathos and humor with the emotion and wit of a sage; he’s a retired university professor, a storyteller with a sardonic, satiric sharpness and an aching heart. He’s a cinch as a solo act, but he’s also got a groovy knack for writing interesting melodies, and some of his songs beg for harmonies, which I provide. (Incidentally, some of his songs beg for more harmonies, but I digress…)

Ted and I are in the process of developing a unique style that is the synergy of our respective gifts, so when he asked me to sing harmony with him for the festival, I said yes… enthusiastically, like a kid in a candy shop who has parents that possess really good dental insurance, but I did not want to catalyze an embarrassing auricular blunder, so I prepared, and it seems to have worked out. After an interminable early spring when I learned about the festival, we finally played together last Friday evening, and we sounded great.

Of course, the Memorial Day weekend was the hottest weekend of the year thus far; the highs were in the upper 90s, and it was only May 24th! Ted and I were scheduled to play at 8:15 CT, but I got to the festival early, and let’s just say that the entire event catered very little, if at all, to the handicapped population... however, I can’t really blame the festival’s promoters.

Like in jazz, the singer/songwriters scene is a small but passionate segment of society, a microscopic microcosm within a total population of humanity that’s as insignificant as a pimple on the ass of an adult grey whale, and this past weekend was the inaugural event that, hopefully, will continue and grow in the future, so I can’t harp on the event’s inaccessibility when it is trying, very desperately, just to get started. I will, however, attempt to become more visible in the scene, and then, hopefully, the ubiquity of my iron horse will catalyze the verticals to adopt the inclusive acceptance of a more physically diverse clientele. [1] Instead, I’d like to focus on the positive.

I was early, but that’s normal when I’m singing. As a quadriplegic, I have to prepare for many contingencies. (I imagine that there are many parents out there, especially the parents of a tribe of children, who are thinkin’, “No shit, Sherlock.”) As previously adumbrated, the day was hotter ‘an a firewoman’s headband , so I had/have to be careful. [2] Ted and I were scheduled to play on the outside patio of a restaurant called Ma Fia’s, which is, incidentally, a couple doors down from Eighth and Rail, the lounge that holds my jazzonian family’s weekly jazz jam. Anyway, my father and I went to get a greasy hamburger at Jefferson’s, a nearby food joint that serves what is classified as American Cuisine ( ‘roun heah [around here], it’s called ‘Merckin food ) while Ted, his wife Cathy, and my mother hung around Ma Fia’s, eating hors d’oeuvres and drinking sangrias under a tent with a half dozen electric fans’ supplementing casual breezes that amicably ruffled the humming hemp canvases of huge fringed umbrellas that shielded plastering placid humid disinterest against buzzing communal ebullience.

The first act of the evening is playing when I get there... Mitch Emmons, a single musician singing and playing acoustic guitar. He has a pleasant voice and a positive vibe, but he seems a relative newcomer with potential. Occasionally, he fumbles, but his music is genuine, his heart is in the right place, and he has charm. As he plays, the wind and fans are blowing, bringing relief from an intense thought-absorbing heat; high cumulus clouds dot the sky like giant cotton balls slowly waltzing around and in front of the roiling, broiling lethargic sun as it bores down on our planet with the aggression of thermal nuclear war but the disinterest of an anteater’s destroying the architectural integrity of a massive and complex anthill. The night amenably, insidiously drains its light into crepuscular intrigue; Mother Nature holds her breath in anticipation.

The following act is Pam Bedwell, a singing guitarist who, too, seems to be a newcomer with potential. She has songs with groovy, heart-wrenching moments, but she has yet to gain the experience needed to overcome the idiosyncrasies of playing live music. She’s hard to hear, only occasionally singing directly into the mic so that her poignant lyrics can be heard and deciphered over the disinterested night life of a small southern township where most folks are colloquially greeted with a smile and a kind word, a small hamlet with southern charm and the more progressive tolerance of social diversity steeping within a community of academia residing on the outskirts of Auburn University. Still, we are in the South...

A troglodyte cruises through the parking lot on a growling motorcycle while “Sweet Home Alabama” blares toward the dusky sunset… our singer patiently waits for him to park. Miss Pam is also competing with another festival act that’s across the street (and railroad tracks), and that band has a drummer. Regardless, Pam Bedwell does a really nice job, and the small restaurant crowd is happy. Toward the end of her act, my nervous energy gets to me, and I take a stroll away from the venue and toward the railroad tracks along 8th Street (now you know how Eighth and Rail got its name), and I begin to warm up my voice.

When I return to the venue, Pam is ending her set. Ted and I set up quickly; he plays guitar and sings; I just sing, so set up is quick. Miss Grace runs the sound, and she’s done a wonderful job. We’re outside on the patio between the storefront and the parking lot, no introduction, so Ted starts the set by introducing his “mostly autobiographical” song entitled “Ball and Chain,” which he dedicates to his wife Cathy who is absorbing the night with the alacrity of a kaleidoscopic butterfly’s attraction to wafting floral fluorescence.

Our singing seemed to last for but a brief moment, but I remember the magic of our voices’ weft and warp through the tapestry of the night air. As previously adumbrated, Ma Fia’s restaurant is but a few doors down from Eight and Rail, and some of the latter’s patrons line the sidewalk outside its front door to listen. I reckon they’ll let me an’ Ted know what they thought when we see them at next Tuesday’s jazz jam. Regardless, the restaurant crowd digs our sound; passersby on the sidewalk noticeably linger, and they’re smiling; Cathy and my parents are beaming; Ted is excited, and I am proud that I didn’t overtly mess up.

Peace Through Music

___________________________
[1] The sight of my “seemingly everywhere” wheelchair will embarrass people who walk upright to better prepare for the physically handicapped to participate in future festivals.

[2] As an SCI (Spinal Cord Injury), I do not perspire enough to cool my body down when temperatures get above 90° F, so I really have to be careful. Twice, during the incipience of my paralysis, I temporarily lost my sight because my body overheated. I no longer take any chances.


Peace and Love
Progressive Aphorisms
I remember back when George W[ar Criminal] Bush somehow charmed his way into the presidency (with or without... maybe... cyber assistance (he did lose the popular vote to Al Gore, who should’ve been prez during 9/11, but I digress...)). His voters claimed he’d find the mastermind behind the World Trade Center and Pentagon bombings. He didn’t, or... well, he did give a heads up and access to planes for some of his close and personal Saudi Arabian friends and. then went after illusory WMDs to kill Saddam Hussein while Osama Bin Laden trekked through the desert with a dialysis machine. However, after Barack Obama and the Navy Seals killed Bin Laden, Bush’s supporters suddenly lost interest. They then whined that Obama was bragging. A few years later, they sold their souls to one the biggest braggarts since... ever.
—SSTJazzVocalist
 
 
[T]he word "collud[ e ]" was used in communications with the Acting Attorney General confirming certain aspects of the investigation's scope and that the term has frequently been invoked in public reporting about the investigation. But collusion is not a specific offense or theory of liability found in the United States Code, nor is it a term of art in federal criminal law.
---The Mueller Report
 
 
It is interesting to observe the discourse of kith and kin who are, frankly, academically impaired in that they've only acquired a high school level of formal education; they have convinced themselves that they don't need any more education because everything they need to know they learned in elementary school; they hold steadfast to religious dogma to which they were introduced as children and never revised to include a more mature understanding of Life's idiosyncrasies, i.e. they believe that their absurd irrationally passionate faith eclipses objective reasoning even to the point of rejecting scientific methodology or, more disheartening, they vote for a political party that puts children into cages, endangers the lives of school children who suffer the indignity of dramatic safety drills because the GOP and NRA refuse to legislate common sense gun legislation, a party that denies the overwhelming scientific evidence of global warming, etc. Yet they also claim to steadfastly adhere to a Christianity that, somehow, accepts these social absurdities.
—SSTJazzVocalist
 
 
Dear Sarah Huckabee Sanders, did your parents modify your credentials to get you into college, 'cause you seem to lack any mental acuity? I, personally, adduce that your rhetoric lacks the perspicacity necessary to earn a diploma from any credible academic institution of advanced learning. I ask because, well... the current disclosing that very wealthy and famous parents have, shamelessly, altered test scores and other malfeasance, including representing their scions as athletes of sports that they've never played, to acquire for their unqualified children the illusion of academic success. I ask because the website for Ouachita Baptist University, your alma mater, boasts of their Michael D. Huckabee School of Education. Isn't Mike yo' daddy? Did you earn your grades or did yo' daddy, once again, he'p his little girl attain a social status that her lack of understanding belies? According to wikipedia... “With the release of the Mueller Report in April 2019, it was shown that Sanders had admitted to investigators that she had made false statements to the public as press secretary.” Did she learn to lie at Ouachita Baptist University?
—SSTJazzVocalist


Robert Mueller just read a nine minute written report wherein he simply reiterated what he’s already written in the report. Basically, here’s a fictionalized version of what’s transpired:
 
Mueller: Read the goddamn report! As far as I interpret my role in this process, and as a representative of the DOJ, I cannot indict a sitting president; the only way to extirpate a presidential weed is through the process of Impeachment, which is ALWAYS, Constitutionally, initiated by Congress, more specifically, by the House of Representatives. However, there is enough evidence outlined in the report for Impeachment, but I am unable to initiate the process. Again, read the goddamn report. I am out of here. I am retiring. I do not want to testify, but I will; although, I shall merely rehash what I have written in the report.
 
William Barr: Robert Mueller has exculpated the greatest president in the history of U.S. History.
 
Donald Trump: Is that teenaged beauty pageant contestant available for a gourtmet meal of Burger King and KFC? She looks an awful lot like my daughter, and I am feeling rather randy as I sit here on the presidential throne and tweet really rad tweets about Low I.Q. Joe Biden while praising murderous dictators as true heroes unlike John McCain who was captured. I like cake while bombing Iraq... or Syria... “the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake that you’ve ever seen and President Xi was enjoying it...”
—SSTJazzVocalist



I'm A Quadriplegic; You Might Not Understand

My body is currently revolting against something. I am sweating fairly regularly, and I think it’s my back, more specifically my spinal column, that’s really out of line, but I don’t really know. And my spasms, after I lay down at night for a few hours, are really intense. Few know how aggravating it is to be lying in bed, asleep, then, slowly, nearly imperceptibly, the muscles in my back start to tighten, and I awaken, realizing that I am about to start to violently spasm, and, more often than not, I do; although, sometimes my spasms are gentle waves that slowly rock me from side to side until I drift back to Morpheus’ kingdom, but... sometimes the spasms are dramatic and they jerk me into an imbroglio of spastic intensity that excites my legs, arms, and stomach muscles to contract and relax so emphatically that my bones snap; I, for a few seconds, am unable to inhale or exhale, then air rushes from my lungs and through my throat and makes me barbarically grunt with stern incoherent defiance. Of course, when I hit my Pipe of Inspiration, the spasms assuage nearly immediately. Luckily, I am so physically fucked up, it is very unlikely that I will ever be arrested for marijuana, but then, I am a white dude, well... at least I look like a white dude. (And yes, I am publicly admitting that I am a beneficiary of looking, speaking, and acting like a white dude. You think I would have gotten to experience the wonderful life I’ve had if I were a black man? Or black woman? Latino? Really?)

This has me wondering about what I would be doing if I were in a for-profit nursing home; although, I know: I’d be dead, another statistic casualty of opioid abuse. Let’s face it: my paralysis is becoming a time- and resource-consuming phenomenon. Plus, my state, Georgia, is still anti-marijuana even though it has voted for medicinal marijuana, but none of the doctors really understand the law that’s awkwardly written, so instead of using marijuana, the only pragmatic option for relief from my spasms for the for-profit healthcare system our congress sponsors, would be opioids... and a bed... until I slip on through to the other side and begin confabulating with Jim Morrison.

Peace Through Music


#Wheelchairistocracy #GroovicusMaximus #BrianKempIsACheater




Volatile Aquiline Volition



The grandest canary-coiffed white wizard, 
hypocritically deified by impiety, 
a viscous gritty, charco-salved Vulcan smithy 
in the guilty gilded facade of bullish bovine aggression, 
idiotically usurps the chinz-gilded throne, 

Beyond the horizon, 
a nearly imperceptible pulse of energy, 
more sensed than felt, 
swells into a tsunami of fledgling avian enthusiasm 
that insidiously seeps into intense indifference 
with vernal distaff intrigue.

Fuliginous aggression chokes the patriotic eagle 
as the fatigued noble bird summons the urges 
to reengage the battle, 
and the distant, sibilant cacophony 
hisses with the buzz-jolting importunity 
of innocuous infantile narcissism
encouraging aquiline resolve. 


by Rusty Taylor
May 2019

It Ain't Jazz, But...

Opelika Songwriters Festival
May 24-26, 2019

I ain't braggin' (yes I am), but Ted and I share a special, synergetic harmony that'll transcend music-genre stereotypes and touch the souls of listeners who are passionate about music . Additionally, Ted's lyrical wit and compassionate tone encourages the active listener to experience the gamut of emotions from heart-wrenching sorrow to riotous laughter and... yodeling. For more info, click here .
Dr. David Banks is the current president of the Columbus Jazz Society that has been extant since 1977. If you'd like to receive an email containing area jazz events, send him an email, and get added to his distribution list by clicking here .

Interesting Free Podcasts


Shameless Solicitation

It’s time. I need money to pay for someone to help me because I’m wearing out my family. I’m hoping to solicit enough money to overpay someone to help me throughout the day and night for a weekend... or longer; my septuagenarian parents need a break. Please read my story, and if you can, donate a few bucks. If a bunch of folks give just a little, I can stay home; otherwise, I will consider going into a nursing home. I am tired of being a burden on my family. If you are unable to donate, your support will be just as appreciated. Thank you very much.

Read my story...
...or you can buy my CD of jazz Vocals

Abel 2's MISSION STATEMENT:

To enhance the Quality of Life of People with Disabilities and the Under-served by Creating Music and Arts opportunities for Employment and Enjoyment!