Mick Hartley

Otis Rush 1934-2018

The legendary Chicago blues guitarist died yesterday, at the age of 84:

Rush on Saturday succumbed to complications from a stroke he suffered in 2003, his longtime manager Rick Bates said.

Born in Philadelphia, Mississippi, Rush settled in Chicago as an adult and began playing the local clubs, wearing a cowboy hat and sometimes playing his guitar upside down for effect.

He catapulted to international fame in 1956 with his first recording on Cobra Records of I Can’t Quit You Baby, which reached No 6 on the Billboard R&B charts.

He was a key architect of the Chicago “West Side Sound” in the 1950s and 1960s, which modernised traditional blues to introduce more of a jazzy, amplified sound.

“He was one of the last great blues guitar heroes. He was an electric god,” said Gregg Parker, CEO and a founder of the Chicago Blues Museum.

Rush loved to play to live audiences, from small clubs on Chicago’s West Side to sold-out venues in Europe and Japan.

“He was king of the hill in Chicago from the late 1950s into the 1970s and even the 80s as a live artist,” Bates said.

Here he is, live in Berlin, mid-Sixties, introduced by Roosevelt Sykes:

A fabulous beginning as he steps up to the mike and lets forth with that holler. Then his guitar solo - left-handed guitar, but with the strings set up for a right-hander - messing around and teasing for the first twelve bars before a quick adjustment to the controls and he's off with those glorious bending high notes.

From the same concert, Junior Wells Hoodoo Man Blues, with Rush backing.

"I Can't Quit You Baby" was his first single, in 1956 - later, of course, covered by Led Zeppelin. Other hits included Double Trouble - live in 1986 with Eric Clapton - and All Your Love (I Miss Loving).

 

Bronzeville

More 1941 Chicago from Russell Lee:

April 1941. "Scene in Negro section of Chicago, Illinois."

April 1941. "Kitchenette apartments on South Parkway, Chicago, Illinois. These are rented to Negroes." 

April 1941. "South Side Chicago, 47th Street (Bronzeville)."
[Photos: Shorpy/Russell Lee for the Farm Security Administration]

Bronzeville - remembering 47th Street:

Ella Fitzgerald played there often. So did Lena Horne, Duke Ellington, Josephine Baker, Louis Armstrong and countless others. They played in legendary clubs like Chez Paree, the Parkway Ballroom, Gerri's Palm Tavern, and the Regal Theatre located on or around 47th Street, during the heyday of Chicago's Bronzeville community on the South Side. By day, 47th Street was a vibrant commercial district; at sundown it was transformed into a throbbing center of nightlife....

 

Chinese urban

From German photographer Peter Bialobrzeski's series The Raw and the Cooked:

Shanghai 2010

Shanghai 2010

Hong Kong 2009

Shanghai 2010

Shanghai 2010

Shanghai 2010

Shanghai 2010

Shenzhen 2009

Shenzhen 2001
[Photos: Peter Bialobrzeski]

The "Raw and the Cooked" presumably refers to the contrast between the old and new architecture. These are long exposure night-time shots, giving an other-worldly feel to the images.

Goodbye Liza Jane

A Bob Wills musical short from 1946:

What I love about these old clips - apart from Uncle Bob himself - is the standard of musicianship. We get four solos squeezed in here, all of them top class - honky tonk piano from Millard Fillmore Kelso, Junior Barnard on guitar, then muted trumpet, and pedal steel.

With Tommy Duncan on vocals and the McKinney Sisters.

No Israelis onboard

More from Germany at Tablet, this time from David Patrikarakos:

On Tuesday, a German court rejected an appeal by an Israeli passenger barred from boarding a Kuwait Airways flight because the airline refuses to allow Israelis on its planes.

The ban is not imposed on politicians or military personnel or even settlers. The passenger, Adar M (he cannot be fully named for legal reasons), a Frankfurt-based student, was barred from boarding the flight for no other reason than he is Israeli. The racism of the airline’s policy could not be any clearer. And yet the suit was dismissed.  [...]

The whole affair has been hugely embarrassing for Germany. Earlier this year, acting minister of transport, Christian Schmidt, wrote to the Kuwaiti minister of labour, economics and social affairs, Hind Al-Sabeeh, regarding what he called the “disconcerting” policy of Kuwait Airways. It is “fundamentally unacceptable to exclude citizens because of their nationality,” wrote Schmidt. 

But Germany has nevertheless restricted its actions to words. And M no longer feels the same about the place in which he lives.....

Hampstead Blues

By Spaniards Inn, and at The Hill Garden:

 

Vivian Maier in colour

I've featured Chicago nanny and secret photographer Vivian Maier a few times - here, for instance, here, and here - but always in black and white. She did dabble in colour photography though, later on, and there's a gallery of some of her work here, on the occasion of a forthcoming exhibition, Vivian Maier: The Color Work, in New York. I've added some more from the website devoted to her work, run by John Maloof:

Location and date unknown © Estate of Vivian Maier

Location and date unknown © Estate of Vivian Maier

New York City, 1959 © Estate of Vivian Maier

Chicagoland, 1975 © Estate of Vivian Maier

Location and date unknown © Estate of Vivian Maier

Location unknown, 1960 © Estate of Vivian Maier

1977, © Estate of Vivian Maier

1978, © Estate of Vivian Maier

1979, © Estate of Vivian Maier

Chicago, August 1975, © Estate of Vivian Maier

Chicago, October 1976, © Estate of Vivian Maier

May 1976, © Estate of Vivian Maier

I am, I'll admit, particularly taken with those fabulous yellow shorts.

Lockside

On the Hertford Union Canal, Hackney Wick:

Germany's romance with Iran

It's not a subject that seems to arouse much interest, as Benjamin Weinthal notes, yet surely it should - especially from a country with Germany's history:

In a remarkable comment that was ignored by the German media last month, the president of the country’s roughly 100,000-member Central Council of Jews suggested that Germany has failed to internalize the lessons of the Holocaust. According to Dr. Josef Schuster, Angela Merkel’s flourishing trade with a regime in Tehran that is both the leading state sponsor of terrorism in the world and also the world’s top sponsor of lethal anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial, is incompatible with the spirit of the Federal Republic’s own foundational commitments, and with the laws of a country where Holocaust denial is a crime punishable by up to five years in prison.

To understand Schuster’s frustration and disappointment with German society, it is worth citing his critique: “It seems paradoxical that Germany—as a country that is said to have learned from its horrendous past and which has a strong commitment to fight anti-Semitism—is one of the strongest economic partners of a regime [Tehran] that is blatantly denying the Holocaust and abusing human rights on a daily basis. Besides, Germany has included Israel’s security as a part of its raison d’être. As a matter of course this should exclude doing business with a fanatic dictatorship that is calling for Israel’s destruction, pursuing nuclear weapons and financing terror organizations around the world.”  [...]

So what animates Germany’s devotion to Iran’s murderous regime, and its lack of solidarity—in both words and practice—with Israel? Economic interests are certainly front and center. Germany exported $3.42 billion in merchandise to Iran in 2017. Economic analysts said shortly after the 2015 nuclear deal was reached that German-Iranian trade could soon surpass $10 billion per year. Approximately 120 German companies operate inside the Islamic Republic, and 10,000 German businesses conduct trade with Iran. It should be noted that the German government not only rejects U.S. sanctions but also provides state credit guarantees to German companies that do business in the Islamic Republic, as means of facilitating German trade with Iran.  [...]

Today’s Germans, it seems, will never forgive Israel for the Holocaust. The preoccupation with turning Israel into a human punching bag expresses itself across all walks of life in Germany. The sociological forces unfolding in Germany do not portend even a semblance of a solid base of support for Israel. In contrast to the situation in the United States, where there are broad swaths of grassroot support for Israel that inform power politics, German support for Israel has been a project of the country’s political elite, which now seems preoccupied with increasing trade with a murderous theocracy bent on Israel’s destruction. The absorption of over one million Muslim refugees and economic migrants into German society, many of whom were socialized to despise Israel and Jews, adds to the already existing anti-Israel hysteria in the country.

What if it’s the other Korea that changes?

In his latest piece, Joshua Stanton at One Free Korea elaborates on his concern about the current rapprochement between North and South Korea. The North has resolutely defied any attempts to change or liberalise, despite years of the Sunshine Policy and other failed attempts to woo Pyongyang away from its hardline totalitarianism. Could it now be that it's not the North but the South that's in danger of changing?

Even before they came to power, Moon and his allies used defamation suits to suppress debate about their history of anti-anti-North Korean, pro-North Korean, and anti-American views. Now, although North Korea is as totalitarian as ever, the South’s freedoms of speech and press are under an accelerating attack of censorship to silence the ruling party’s political opponents, North Korean defectors, and critics of Pyongyang’s human rights abuses.

As always with Stanton, he's marshalled plenty of evidence to support his case.