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the-record-obituaries · 5 years ago

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Feb. 19, 2020: Obituaries

Chloe Huskey, 12

Miss Chloe Reese Huskey, age 12 of North Wilkesboro, daughter of Ronnie Huskey and Alisha Adams Huskey, passed away Saturday, February 15, 2020, at her home. Reese touched the lives of many with her infectious smile, her sincere kindness, and her incredible and courageous journey.

Funeral services will be held 2:00 PM, Thursday, February 20, 2020, at Fairplains Baptist Church with Pastor David Dyer officiating. The family will receive friends from 6:00 until 8:00 PM Wednesday, February 19, 2020, at Reins Sturdivant Funeral Home.

Reese was born February 7, 2008, in Catawba County to Ronnie and Alisha Adams Huskey. She was a member of Arbor Grove United Methodist Church. Reese was a student at Central Wilkes Middle School and attended North Wilkesboro and Wilkesboro Elementary Schools during her elementary school years.

She was preceded in death by her maternal grandfather; Gene Adams, her paternal grandfather; Troy Huskey and an uncle; Tommy Huskey.

Reese is survived by her parents of the home, maternal grandparents; Dean and Linda Absher of Wilkesboro and Cleo Huskey of North Wilkesboro, a sister; Reagan Adams of Charlotte, a brother; Reid Huskey of North Wilkesboro, aunts and uncles; Angel Minton and husband Jeff of Wilkesboro, Alison Thornton of Mooresville and Alison Huskey McCormick, cousins; Alex Minton, Lauren Minton, Raylan Minton, Aubree Thornton, Pierce Thornton, Cole Huskey, Alaina Grit, her special person, Deana Wyatt, and other relatives and friends who loved Reese very much.

The family would like to thank the doctors and staff of Levine's Children's Medical Center CVICU and Sanger Pediatric Heart Institute for their excellent care provided to Reese. A very special thank you to Mountain Valley Hospice for the incredible care and compassion provided to Reese and the entire family. The family appreciates all of the prayers and concerns extended to them during this time.

Flowers will be accepted or memorials may be made to Mountain Valley Hospice 401 Technology Lane Suite 200 Mount Airy, NC 27030, Camp Luck PO Box 5159 Charlotte, NC 28299, American Heart Association 10 Glenlake Pkwy NE South Tower Suite 400 Atlanta, GA 30328 or Ronald McDonald House Charities 26345 Network Place Chicago, IL 60673-1263.

Eldon Gentry, 81

Mr. Eldon Gentry age 81, of Roaring River passed away Saturday February 15, 2020 at SECU Hospice Center. Mr. Gentry was born March 30, 1938 in Wilkes County, to Lonnie Spurgeon and Ruby Walters Gentry.

Eldon was a Retired farmer and a member of Benham Baptist Church.

In addition to his parents, he was preceded in death by his wife, Mable Billings Gentry; and a brother, Bob Gentry. Survivors include: son, Eddie Gentry and wife Rhonda of Wilkesboro; brother, Raymond Gentry of Roaring River; granddaughter, Meagan Leigh Gentry of Raleigh, and several nieces and nephews.

A funeral service with be conducted Wednesday, February 19, 2020 at 2:00 pm at Benham Baptist Church, with Rev. Keith Lyon, and Rev. Joe Souther officiating. Burial will follow in the Church Cemetery. The family will receive friends Tuesday evening from 6:00-8:00 pm at Elkin Funeral Service.

In lieu of flowers, the family request that donations be made to Mtn. Valley Hospice and Palliative care, 688 N. Bridge St., Elkin N.C. 28621

William Jennings, 51

William "Billy" Jennings, age 51, of Hays, passed away, Saturday, February 15, 2020 at his home. He was born May 29, 1968 in Portsmouth, Virginia to Roy Glenn and Onnolea Jean Johnson Jennings. Billy loved his model car collection, building and collecting hundreds of models. He loved NASCAR, the Pittsburgh Steelers and golf. He Loved and adored his family. Mr. Jennings was preceded in death by his parents; and wife Chrystal Jennings.

Surviving are his wife, Natasha Wingler Jennings; daughters, Stormy Dawn Davalos and spouse Alejandro of North Wilkesboro, Shandy Rae Miller and spouse Daniel, Kaylea Gentle all of Hays; grandchildren, Davari Davalos, Leticia Davalos, Zaiden Davalos; sisters, Angela Jennings Reed of Jefferson, Vickie Fox of Hays.

Funeral service will be held 2:00 p.m. Wednesday, February 19, 2020 at Miller Funeral Chapel with Jamie Rollyson speaking. Burial will follow in Mt. Pleasant Baptist Church Cemetery. The family will receive friends at Miller Funeral Service from 12:00 until 2:00 on Wednesday, prior to the service. Flowers will be accepted. Memorials may be made to the SECU Family House, 1970 Baldwin Lane, Winston Salem, NC 27103. Miller Funeral Service is in charge of the arrangements.

Gary Miller, 66

Gary Wayne Miller, age 66, of Millers Creek, passed away Friday, February 14, 2020 at Alleghany Health. He was born June 11, 1953 in Wilkes County to Issac Lester and Adna Ruth Miller. Mr. Miller was preceded in death by his parents; his wife, Loretta Miller; several brothers and sisters. He was of the Baptist Faith and employed with W&L Motor Lines as a truck driver.

He is survived by his daughter, Rebecca Billings and spouse Dwayne of Millers Creek; son, Richard Bryant and spouse Shelley of Millers Creek; brother, Lee Miller of Millers Creek; sister, Louise Beverley of Greensboro; grandchildren, Christopher Queen and spouse Rebecca, and Breanna Billings all of Millers Creek.

Funeral service was February 17, at Miller Funeral Chapel with Rev. Danny Dillard and Rev. Don Bowling officiating. Burial followed in Miller Cemetery. Flowers will be accepted. Miller Funeral Service is in charge of the arrangements.

Linda Brown, 66

Mrs. Linda Mae Wagoner Brown, 66, of North Wilkesboro, passed away on February 12, 2020 at Wake Forest Baptist Hospital.

Linda was born on March 25, 1953 in Wilkes County to Dollie Odell Wagoner and Gladys Eddie Brown Wagoner.

Linda is preceded in death by her parents; sons, Randall Shannon Wagoner, Allen Parsons and many brothers and sisters.

Linda is survived by her husband, Christopher Brown; granddaughters, Kaitlyn Wagoner and Erica "Hannah" Wagoner both of North Wilkesboro ; mother in law and father in law, Vea and Paul Brown of North Wilkesboro; sisters, Marlene Testerman ( Jerry) of Millers Creek, Rebeca Blevins (Dewey) of Wilkesboro, Jeanne Shumate of Millers Creek, Sue Absher of Wilkesboro, Shirley Osborne (Robbie) Gallatin, TN, Sandra Stewart of Grover, NC; brothers, Fred Wagoner (Delores) Taylorsville, James Brown of Forrest City, Danny Brown (Kathy) of China Grove.

A visitation was held at the Mountlawn Memorial Park Chapel February 14, and graveside service followed.

Pastor Scott Wagoner be officiated. The family request no flowers or food please.

As an expression of sympathy, memorial contributions may be sent to the American Heart Association, 128 S Tryon St #1588, Charlotte, NC 28202.

Adams Funeral Home of Wilkes has the honor of serving the Brown Family.

Billy Anderson, 75

Mr. Billy George Anderson, 75, of North Wilkesboro, passed away on Tuesday, February 11, 2020 at his home.

Billy was born on August 3, 1944 in Wilkes County to John Olden Anderson and Johnsie Bell Miller Anderson.

Billy is preceded in death by his parents; son, Jason Dewayne Anderson; brother James "Jimmy" Anderson; sister, Mary Jane Lowe and grandson, Zackary Cochran.

Billy is survived by his wife of 57 years, Wanda Lee Cain Anderson; daughters, Gail Parks (Ricky) of Yadkinville, Penny Cochran (Larry) of North Wilkesboro; sons, Tim Anderson of Denver NC, Dalton Anderson (Anne) of North Wilkesboro; brother, David Lee Anderson of North Wilkesboro; five grandchildren and three great grandchildren.

A memorial service will be held February 22, at Adams Funeral Home of Wilkes Chapel, 2109 Moravian Falls Rd, Moravian Falls.

Rev. Charles Cain will be officiating.

Adams Funeral Home of Wilkes has the honor of serving the Anderson Family.

Kent Greer, 81

Mr. Kent Tracy Greer, age 81 of Wilkesboro, passed away Tuesday, February 11, 2020, at Wake Forest Baptist Hospital in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

A private burial service for the family was at Mount Lawn Cemetery in Boone, February 15. Masonic rites were conducted by Ashler #373 and Military Honors were provided by the United States Air Force Honor Guard. A Celebration of Life service followed with Reverend Shannon Critcher and Reverend Jim Gore officiated.

Mr. Greer was born on February 9, 1939, in Watauga County, North Carolina, to Walter Monroe and Viola Nichols Greer. He was a devoted husband to Kate for fifty-two years, a beloved father, and grandfather. He was a member of Millers Creek Baptist Church. Throughout his entire life, Kent had an adventuresome, entrepreneurial and get it done spirit. He served in the United States Air force for four years, which took him to several countries. Later, he took his wife, Kate, to many more countries abroad and all fifty states. Known for his sense of humor and fun-loving nature, Kent readily shared laughs, jokes, and hugs with people he knew and didn't know. Regularly, Kent stated, "I've had the best life of anybody I know."

In addition to his parents, he was preceded in death by his wife; Lenna Kate Greene Greer, a sister; Anna Lee Greene and four brothers; W.M. Greer, Jr., Fayne Greer, Brook Greer, and Quentin Greer.

He is survived by a daughter; Janet Greer Brown and husband Mike of Banner Ek, North Carolina, two sons; David Kent Greer and wife Nicole of Concord and Philip Ray Greer of Wilkesboro, six grandchildren; Zach Brown and wife Emily, Jenna Brown, Kent Richard Greer, Katelyn Greer, Tracy Greer, and wife Kelsey and Amanda Greer Stewart and husband Chris and four great-grandchildren.

In lieu of flowers, memorials may be made to the American Heart Association, PO Box 9, North Wilkesboro, NC 28659 or Mountain Valley Hospice, 201 Technology Lane, Suite 200, Mount Airy, NC 27030.

Brenda Savage, 74

Mrs. Brenda Joyce Caul Savage age 74 of Wilkesboro passed away Sunday February 9. 2020 at Wake Forest Baptist Health in Winston Salem.

Funeral Services were February 15, at Rickards Chapel AME Zion Church with Rev Richard Watts Officiating.

Mrs. Savage was born January 24, 1946 in Wilkes County to Anthony and Cynthia Marie Rouseau Caul. She retired from Tyson Foods and was a member of Rickards Chapel AME Zion Church.

In addition to her parents, she was preceded in death by a son, Bobby Joe Campbell and a brother Reginald Keith Caul.

She is survived by her husband, Lavon Savage, two daughters Yolanda Burgess and husband Stephen of Walnut Cove and Lola Porter of Statesville; two sons John Porter and wife Staci of Louisville, KY, Billy Campbell of Wilkesboro, and two step sons Terry Calhoun of Wilkesboro and Rashaun Calhoun of Wilkesboro; nine grandchildren, three great grandchildren and four sisters Jacqueline Barber and husband Marvin of Wilkesboro, Deborah Carlton of Wilkesboro, Linda Howell of Wilkesboro, Maria Harris and husband Ronald of Wilkesboro; and one brother Timothy Caul of New Philadelphia OH.

Flowers will be accepted.

William Childress, 64

Mr. William Cole Childress, better known as Bill, age 64, passed away Sunday, February 9, 2020 at his home in Moravian Falls.

Funeral services were February, 14, 2020 at Reins Sturdivant Chapel with Rev. Ronnie Murray and Pastor Rodney Blake officiating. Burial will be in Scenic Memorial Gardens. The family will receive friends from 1:00 until 2:00 prior to the service at Reins Sturdivant Funeral Home.

Mr. Childress was born March 19, 1955 in Wilkes County to Luther and Pauline Annalee Porter Childress. He retired from Louisiana Pacific after 44 years of service. Bill liked to fish, loved to go out on his boat and going to Auctions. He loved his family and grandchildren.

In addition to his parents, he was preceded in death by his wife; Ellie Minton Childress, a daughter; Jennifer Childress, two sisters; Florence White and Mary Kay Childress and a brother; Edward Gray Childress.

He is survived by a daughter; Sally Hampton of North Wilkesboro, three grandchildren; Katie Hackett, Michael Walker and Malcolm Walker, a great granddaughter; Journee Hackett, two sisters; Elizabeth Murray and husband, Ronnie of North Wilkesboro and Carolyn Parks and husband, Alan of Lenoir, a brother; Harold Childress and wife Betsy of North Wilkesboro and a girlfriend and caregiver; Virginia Dancy and her family of Purlear.

Flowers will be accepted or memorials may be made to Wake Forest Hospice 126 Executive Drive Suite 110 Wilkesboro, NC 28697 or American Cancer Society PO Box 9 North Wilkesboro, NC 28659.

James Garris, 94

James Arthur Garris, age 94, of Traphill, passed away Sunday, February 9, 2020 at Woltz Hospice Home. He was born June 9, 1925 in Wilkes County to Isom and Oma Wiles Garris. He was a member of Christian Home Baptist Church. He enjoyed coon hunting and fishing. James was preceded in death by his parents; his wife, Floie Prevette Garris; daughter, Lois Gregory; son, Willie Garris; brothers, Guilford Garris, Troy Garris, Lester Garris; sisters, Estelle Walls and Edith Tucker.

Surviving are his children, Billy Garris and spouse Janet of Traphill, Dottie Stanley of State Road, Buck Garris of Traphill; sisters, Cordie Bauguess of Traphill, Ruth Martin of Lexington; special friend, Mary Pruitt of Hays; eleven grandchildren; eighteen great grandchildren; and ten great great grandchildren.

Funeral service was February 13, at Miller Funeral Chapel with Rev. David Key officiating. Burial followed in Christian Home Baptist Church Cemetery. Flowers will be accepted or memorials may be made to Joan & Howard Woltz Hospice Home, 945 Zephyr Road, Dobson, NC 27017. A special thanks to Rose Glen Manor and Joan and Howard Woltz Hospice. Miller Funeral Service is in charge of the arrangements. Online condolences may be made to www.millerfuneralservice.com

Pallbearers were Scotty Garris, Marty Garris, Rocky Garris, Tracy Ward, Chris Gregory, Aaron Thomas.

Angel Brown, 31

Angel Nicole Brown, age 31, of North Wilkesboro, was called home early on Thursday, February 6, 2020 and left her worldly struggles behind. Angel was born June 3, 1988 in Wilkes County to Gary Maurice and Bessie Bell Bledsoe Brown. She enjoyed cooking, camping, wild crafting herbs and loved to sing.

Angel graduated from North Wilkes High School with honors and was a former cashier with Dollar General. She was preceded in death by her father, Gary Brown; grandparents, Ruth Ann Edwards and Faye S. Goss.

Surviving are her son, Channon Roark of the home; fiancé, Chancey Roark of the home; mother, Bessie Brown of Hays; sister, Ashley Brown and spouse Kenny Ashley of Hays; niece, Riley Ashley of Hays; nephew, Bentley Ashley of Hays.

Memorial service was February 16, at Miller Funeral Chapel with Rev. Robert Harris officiating. Flowers will be accepted or donations may be made to the family for her son, Channon.

Miller Funeral Service is in charge of the arrangements.

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kritikycz · 8 years ago

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Jdi na to

Dva týpkové mají různé životní osudy, než je náhoda svede dohromady. Rosco Frazer a Doug O’Riordan spolu zažijí pár zvláštních situací, když jsou nejprve považováni za zločince, posléze ovšem za super-tajné špióny a do rukou se jim dostane milión dolarů v hotovosti. Jako agenti Steinberg a Mason bojují proti organizaci šíleného gangstera K1, který má plán na ovládnutí země tak, že z lidskeho vědomí smaže čísla.

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Jdi na to was originally published on Kritiky.cz

#Al Nestor #Bud Spencer #Buffy Dee #Christine Troples #Dan Fitzgerald #Dan Rambo #David Huddleston #Faith Minton #Harold Bergman #Jeff Moldovan #Joe Hess #Riccardo Pizzuti #Susan Teesdale #Terence Hill #Woody Woodbury

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whileiamdying · 6 years ago

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THE PRIVATE WORLD OF THELONIOUS MONK

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Outside his music there is little but trouble; inside, little but genius

APRIL 1, 1960 NAT HENTOFF

IT has become inescapably hip in the past year to accept Thelonious Sphere Monk as one of the reigning council—and perhaps the lama—of modern jazz. He has been elevated from a cartoon to an icon, but in the process the man himself has remained as opaque and unpredictable as in his barren years.

Monk’s arrival at acceptance seemed to occur, in a way, without his active participation. The music, of course, was there to be argued about, mocked and praised, but there were no interviews (until recently), no friendships (slight or otherwise) with the critics, no letters to the trade-press editors or ghosted articles. There was no personal advocacy at all—except the playing and the writing. The music formed a recognizable entity, although a controversial one; behind it was mostly vapor in dark glasses and a goatee.

Monk’s ascent was more asymmetrical than most. He waited a good deal longer— more than twenty years—than is usual if a jazzman is to be called at all.

Although there were always a few musicians who at least partially understood and approved of what Monk was playing and writing, he did not—until the past two or three years—derive much moral support from most modern jazzmen. Some felt his fiercely percussive, unpredictable piano difficult to play with. His penchant for leaving large spaces in his playing left unseasoned sidemen with the sensation, in the middle of a chorus, of having stepped into an abandoned elevator shaft.

Others simply did not understand his music, and since many jazzmen are as conformist as they tell themselves the day people are, they did not try to pierce the veil for fear of being considered too unorthodox by their colleagues. There were those who agreed with most of the critics that while Monk had written a few intriguing tunes (’Round Midnight was the only one that had any real currency), he was a limited pianist who was more eccentric than creative, more an historical relic of the Minton’s dawn of bop than a lasting influence.

And since he was unable to get steady work, he couldn’t keep together and thus develop in a unit those few of the younger musicians who were not intimidated by him.

About three years ago, the inside line began to change. In 1957, Monk was hired at the Five Spot Café on New York’s lower East Side, and for the first time in years he could be heard six nights a week. The musicians began to come, began to understand, and started to spread the word. In a few months, the first question a New York musician in Los Angeles or London was likely to be asked by the resident faithful was, “Have you heard Monk lately? What’s he doing?” At the same time he was being recorded by a company, Riverside, that had come to realize he was developing into its most important property. Riverside promoted his records accordingly, and made new ones available at regular intervals.

The recognition gathered intensity and momentum until Monk’s records began to receive nearly unanimous and almost automatic imprimaturs by the critics, and he won more and more polls here and abroad. His compositions are beginning to be played by other groups, and he has become a major formative influence on jazzmen —not only pianists and writers, but players on all the instruments.

Now, on the few occasions when he can be persuaded to leave New York, Monk commands between $1,700 to $2,000 a week for his combo, something more than $1,000 for a single night’s work. As late as two years ago, he was being hired—usually as a single— for $350, and might have been able to get $800 a week for a group.

Two of the most qualified critics in jazz pay him tribute usually held for the dead. To Martin Williams, he is “a major composer— the first . . . since Ellington—and one whose work drastically extends the concept of composition in the idiom.” The flinty, sternly unsentimental André Hodeir talks of Monk’s “urgent beauty” and says it’s quite possible that future generations will regard Monk as the jazzman of our epoch.

Although he is, of course, aware of the change in the way he is regarded by others, Monk himself has not altered appreciably either in the pungent, angular force of his playing nor in the implacably intuitive way he conducts his personal fife. He has, however, begun to worry, an affliction he seldom experienced in his bleaker days. “I wonder,” he occasionally says to his wife, Nellie, or to Harry Colomby, his gentle manager who teaches English and history at Far Rockaway High School, "I wonder if it’ll last.”

The answer lies more with Monk than with external circumstances like changing public taste. Although recognition dawdled cruelly in arriving, Monk’s achievements have by now been so solidly accepted that he is assured of sizable listener support as long as he wants to appear in public. “Monk,” says his agent, Bert Block, of Joe Glaser’s huge and aggressive Associated Booking Corporation, “can be a big piece of property. It’s all according to how he acts.” Monk acts according to how he feels, and no one is ever quite sure how he’ll feel at any given time, nor even what he feels. He may often stay up two or three days, and he does not eat by clock since his periods of hunger do not always fall into regular rhythms.

In describing the musical experience of playing with Monk, tenor saxophonist John Coltrane also provides insight into Monk in any situation: “You have to be awake all the time. You never know exactly what’s going to happen. Rhythmically, for example, Monk creates such tension that it makes horn players think instead of falling into regular patterns. He may start a phrase from somewhere you don’t expect, and you have to know what to do. And harmonically, he’ll go different ways than you’d anticipate. One thing above all that Monk has taught me is not to be afraid to try anything so long as I feel it.”

The spontaneous acting out of his feelings—some of them anyway—also characterizes Monk off the stand. On a visit, if he feels like napping, he does. There are times, in his home or outside, when he doesn’t feel like talking, and he may not for several hours. This latter condition usually occurs when he’s worried, and if he’s sufficiently disturbed, he’ll answer no one, not even his wife, to whom he’s very close, except to say that nothing at all is bothering him.

He is often witty, particularly in his music. Jazz pianist Dick Katz has summarized the abrasive humor of Monk’s music:

“He has a beautifully developed sense of sarcasm together with a kind of left-handed veneration for things of the past (he can express respect for stride piano on several of his recordings while making some fun of it too). He has no patience with maudlin sentimentality, but unlike many of the young modernists who approach the sentimental balefully, he can spoof it gently while expressing positive feelings, as Fats Waller did.”

In conversation, Monk is of a literal turn of mind. “Would you,” a lecturer in jazz at Columbia University directed rather than asked him, “play some of your weird chords for the class?” Monk was affronted. “What do you mean weird? They’re perfectly logical chords.” Another time, a musician began portentously, “Well, everybody says. . . .” “What do you say?” Monk stopped him. He is impatient with interviewers, especially when they ask him speculative questions like the future of jazz. “I don’t know where it’s going,” he told Frank London Brown in Down Beat. “Maybe it’s going to hell. You can’t make anything go anywhere. It just happens.”

Monk is easily bored, and he will not long bear a situation he finds dull. He may suggest a walk to whoever is with him, or just leave. Walking is a favorite/avocation, as is riding around New York in his ’56 Buick. Monk has a great love for the city in which he was raised. When he does get into trouble, it’s almost always on the road.

Twice in the past two years, he has become involved in difficulties on the road, and both times were due in part to his losing his ability to communicate. Even close associates know times when Monk simply disconnects and will not be reached.

“Part of that disconnecting,” Hall Overton thinks, “has to do with what seems to be a deep distrust at times of his own capacity to communicate what he feels and of others’ ability to understand. He may figure at those times that he won’t be understood, so why try?” “Or,” says another musician, “he may just be escaping from reality.”

In any case, in the Fall of 1958, he, tenor-saxophonist Charlie Rouse and the Baroness Koenigswarter, a good friend, were driving to what was to be a week’s engagement for Monk at the Comedy Club in Baltimore. They stopped at a motel in Delaware and Monk went in to ask for a glass of water. Monk is an imposing figure. Slightly more than six feet tall and weighing around two hundred pounds, he is physically impressive more by the forceful solidity with which he stands and moves and the intensity of his look than by his mass itself. The motel owner was shocked at this sudden presence, reacted in a way Monk felt to be rude, and Monk, silent all the time, was slow in leaving. The owner, growing more frightened, called the police. Cops tried to pull Monk out of the car to which he had returned, but he held onto the steering wheel, claiming he hadn’t done anything to warrant their attention. About half a mile up the road, more police cars appeared, Monk was dragged from the car, thrown to the floor of a police vehicle, pummeled and hit on the hands as the baroness tried to tell the officers that Monk was a pianist.

Later, marijuana was found in a can in the trunk of the car. Charges of possession that were filed against Monk were dismissed, since no connection could be proved between him and the marijuana. He was fined for disturbing the peace. He also lost his New York police identity card without which no musician can work in any New York place where liquor is served. His manager, charging race prejudice was involved in the Delaware arrest, asked for a hearing before the New York State Liquor Authority, which must also pass on applicants for a card. Monk, though nervous, was thoroughly articulate and co-operative at the hearing. An incident underlined his concern for absolute candor. “Didn’t one of those people at the motel call you ‘nigger’?” asked his manager. “No,” said Monk. “I didn’t hear that. But they were acting weird.” He had felt prejudice, he later said, but he would not say what had not actually happened.

In the Spring of 1959, he was booked for a week at Boston’s Storyville. He had been up for some three days and nights without sleep. When he arrived, he came to the desk of the Copley Square Hotel, where Storyville is located, with a glass of liquor in his hand after having flitted around the lobby rather disconcertingly, examining the walls. He was refused a room, and at first also declined to accompany his sidemen to the Hotel Bostonian where they were staying. At about ten o’clock, he finally went on stand. The room was nearly full of expectant but patient people. He played two numbers, and came off. At 11:30, he played the same two numbers, sat motionless at the piano for what seemed like half an hour. His bewildered sidemen had left the stand after about eight minutes.

Monk began wandering around the club, obviously disturbed at not having a hotel room. He finally registered at the Bostonian, didn’t like the room, and left. He tried the Staffer, was refused there, and took a cab to the airport with the idea of going home, collecting his wife, Nellie, and taking a room with her for the rest of the week. Planes, however, were no longer running, and he was picked up by a state trooper to whom he would not or could not communicate. He later did reveal who he was, but it was too late, and he was taken to Grafton State Hospital near Worcester for observation.

He was lost there for a week. No one knew what had happened to him. The local Boston police were checked, but no one thought of trying the state police. A letter the hospital claims it sent to Nellie Monk never arrived. By accident, an acquaintance in Boston heard mention of Monk’s whereabouts on a local TV show. Nellie rushed to Massachusetts and secured his release. There had been no grounds on which he could be held. “It was the combination,” a friend later speculated, “of exhaustion after several days without sleep, the fact that he disconnected at first, and the fact that he was away from New York and Nellie.” It has been decided that his manager’s brother will travel with him, and this has worked out well.

YET much of the time Monk is dependable and concerned with fulfilling his responsibilities. Lapses do occur, but they happen less and less. A recording date was scheduled three days before the CBSTV Sound of Jazz program in December, 1957. Monk never showed up, and the late Billie Holiday’s accompanist, Mai Waldron, hastily substituted a solo for the record. Yet during the rehearsals and the subsequent program, Monk was on time, wholly co-operative, and one of the most stimulating parts of the program. He had stayed up for a couple of days, it was later learned, because he had been so anxious to do well on the show.

A few months before, after a rocky plane ride, Monk spent most of an opening night in Detroit playing with his elbows. “I’m sorry,” said a musician who has enormous admiration for Monk’s work, “but he or anybody else, genius or not, owes it to an audience to give the best he can.” Monk increasingly realizes his responsibilities to an audience, and his troubles on the road may be over. After a recent stay in San Francisco, the owner of the Black Hawk avowed: “Mr. Monk can play my club any time. He’s a gentleman. I don’t know what they’re talking about. This guy was straight with me.” Monk, in fact, was often early for the night’s work, was on time for every set, and even signed autographs. He was, reported Down Beat, “the very model of a model major jazz artist.” And George Wein wants him back at Storyville.

Monk, in short, remains self-absorbed, but is growing up in the way he relates to an audience. In 1949, Paul Bacon, one of the very few writers on jazz who understood Monk in the Forties, wrote in the French monthly, Jazz-Hot, that Monk was very egocentric and that the fact that he considered the world revolved around him gave him a remarkably direct vision of things, very much like that of a child. “To become an adult,” wrote Bacon, “it’s necessary to make a lot of concessions.”

Monk has stubbornly avoided concessions musically and otherwise—as much as he has been able to since boyhood. Drummer Denzil Best first began to play jobs with Monk when the latter was fifteen and is firm on the point that although Monk has certainly developed since then, his approach at the beginning was essentially what it is now. “People,” says Denzil, who was then a trumpeter, “would call his changes (chord progressions) wrong to his face. If he hadn’t been so strong in his mind, he might easily have become discouraged, but he always went his own way and wouldn’t change for anything.”

Thelonious (a family name which his father bore and his son now carries) was born October 10, 1920, in North Carolina, but was brought up in New York’s San Juan Hill section in the West Sixties close to the Hudson River, where he still lives with his wife and two children in the small apartment he’s occupied for nearly thirty years. The dominating piece of furniture in his crowded home is a baby-grand Steinway. The piano consumes, as Mrs. Monk puts it, “most of the living-room part of the kitchen.”

The neighborhood, as it was when Monk was a child, is largely underprivileged. There were scholarships available for children of musical capacity; but from the beginning, Monk’s playing was too unorthodox to qualify him despite the fact that his mother had three children to support on a minute income and the boy was obviously deeply involved with music. His mother, a former civil-service worker, is said to have been a strict disciplinarian and there were rigid demands on Thelonious to be neat, obedient, polite.

When he was about six, Monk began tentatively to trace melodies on the piano by ear. He had some formal lessons when he was about eleven, but he’s essentially an autodidact as pianist and composer. While quite young, he listened to all the jazz pianists he could find —Earl Hines, Art Tatum, Teddy Wilson and James P. Johnson, among them—partly as an antidote to the two years he played organ in a church. He had soon wearied of the predictable plush chords of the religious music and he found the Dixieland and much of the swing music of the time too limiting. “I never picked no special musicians to follow. Of course, you have to go through certain stages to learn how to play the piano, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re copying somebody’s style. I’ve learned from numerous pianists.”

One of the most accurate descriptions of how Monk plays was written by Paul Bacon in the Record Changer in 1948: “. . . he can make a rhythm seem almost separate, so what he does is inside it, or outside it. He may play for a space in nothing but smooth phrases and then suddenly jump on a part and repeat it with an intensity beyond description. His left hand is not constant—it wanders shrewdly around, sometimes playing only a couple of notes, sometimes powerfully on the beat, usually increasing it in variety and occasionally silent. . . . And Monk has a beat like the ocean waves— no matter how sudden, spasmodic, or obscure his little inventions, he rocks irresistibly on. . . . Monk is really making use of all the unused space around jazz, and he makes you feel that there are plenty of unopened doors.”

“Where many pianists less original than Monk,” Gunther Schuller noted recently in The Jazz Review, “are exclusively concerned with playing the ‘right’ (or acceptable) notes, Monk, at his most inspired, thinks of over-all shapes and designs or ideas . . . and, because he is a man of great talent, or perhaps even genius, he does play the right notes, almost as a matter of course.”

“He is one pianist,” Dick Katz says emphatically, “whose style you can’t steal. Anybody who tries is a fool.”

Nobody tried for a long time. Monk began playing in local bands when he was about thirteen, learning how to read orchestrations at a local community center.

Some four years later, he traveled the country as part of a unit accompanying a rocking evangelist. “Rock and roll or rhythm blues,” Monk said of this experience, “that’s what we were doing. She preached and healed and we played. And then the congregation would sing.”

One of the cities the healer visited was Kansas City, and Mary Lou Williams, the perennial modernist, heard Monk there for the first time. “He was playing the same style, to a large extent, that he is now. He told me that he was sick of hearing musicians play the same thing the same way all the time.”

Back in New York, Monk began twenty years of scuffling to find steady work. “I worked all over town. Non-union jobs; $20 a week, seven nights a week; and then the boss might fire you any time and you never got your money. I’ve been on every kind of job you can think of,” said Monk, remembering dance halls and bars, all over New York. “I really found out how to get around this city. There are a lot of things you can’t remember—except the heckling.” The work was infrequent, the heckling recurrent, because Monk’s style was unexpected, and he would not change.

In the late 1930’s, Monk began playing occasionally in Harlem with a few musicians with whom he felt some degree of rapport— the late Charlie Christian, Dizzy Gillespie, Idrees Sulieman, Charlie Parker and drummer Kenny Clarke with whom Monk wrote Epistrophy, one of the first modern jazz standards. Just as early jazz history has been romanticized into the “up the river from New Orleans” oversimplification, there also has been a fanciful condensation in the familiar yarn about the birth of bop at Minton’s in Harlem with the young insurgents like Monk, Parker and Gillespie pictured as carefully planning raids on the established harmonic and rhythmic order Monk recalls of the Minton’s era: “I was just playing a gig, trying to play music. While I was at Minton’s anybody sat in if he could play. I never bothered anybody. I had no particular feeling that anything new was being built. It’s true modern jazz probably began to get popular there, but some of these histories and articles put what happened over the course of ten years into one year. They put people all together in one time in one place. I’ve seen practically everybody at Minton’s, but they were just there playing. They weren’t giving any lectures.”

“If I hadn’t met Monk shortly after I first came to New York around 1945,” adds Miles Davis, “I wouldn’t have advanced as quickly as some say I did. He showed me voicings and progressions, and I remember Charlie Parker would take me down to listen to Monk all the time and make me sit in with him.”

But while Monk wasn’t lecturing either, he did become a valuable example. “He opened people’s ears,” says Mary Lou Williams. “If I hadn’t met Monk shortly after I first came to New York around 1945,” adds Miles Davis, “I wouldn’t have advanced as quickly as some say I did. He showed me voicings and progressions, and I remember Charlie Parker would take me down to listen to Monk all the time and make me sit in with him.”

Monk was the earliest champion of Bud Powell whose influence on modern jazz piano became as pervasive—until the Monk renaissance of a couple of years ago—as Charlie Parker’s on all instruments. It was Monk who insisted Bud sit in at Minton’s when Kenny Clarke, Dizzy and others were eager to expel him from the stand. Bud, strongly influenced by Monk musically, a few years later helped convince Cootie Williams to record Monk’s ’Round About Midnight, a wounding melody that Monk wrote when he was nineteen. As has often happened with jazz waiters, in return for the first recording of the tune, Monk found Cootie Williams listed with him as co-author. (Among other Monk jazz “standards” are Ruby, My Dear: Well, You Needn't; Off Minor; In Walked Bud and l Mean Yon.)

The Forties was a harsh time for Monk, as it was for most of the younger modernists whose music took a number of years to be accepted by even the basic jazz audience. Since Monk, however, was even more uncategorizable than the others, his jobs were fewer. There were quick stands like a week or so at the Savoy with Lucky Millinder in 1942 and a 1944 date with Coleman Hawkins on 52nd Street. Hawkins, unlike many jazzmen of his generation, was intrigued by and encouraged the modernists. Monk’s first record date was with Hawkins on four 78 r.p.m. sides made in 1944 on the Joe Davis label. Thirteen years later, Hawkins played as a sideman on a Monk Riverside album.

Monk made his first records under his own name for Blue Note, beginning in 1947. The company is consistently exploratory, and its artistic integrity—it has never, for example, issued a “jazz” version of a Broadway show—has sometimes led it to the brink of economic suicide. The main difficulty with recording Monk, recalls Alfred Lion, the label’s recording director, was finding musicians who could play with him, since what he was writing and playing was not in the conventional “bop” vein. “He didn’t then,” remembers Lion, “write much of anything down. The musicians had to learn what he was doing by ear. And even if he had written it all down, he might have changed his mind fifteen times between the time a musician had learned his part and the final take. You really had to have ears to play with him.”

The first Blue Note singles received some attention in Harlem and in the Negro sections of a few other large cities, but it took several years before white jazz listeners began to buy Monk. “They thought,” Lion reminisces sadly, “he lacked technique.”

Lion managed to get Monk jobs from time to time, often uptown, but underlines that “in those days, Monk was completely isolated. He rarely worked with the boppers—when they did get a little work —because he was going his own way; and so, in all those years into the Forties and Fifties, I doubt if he ever had a job that lasted more than two weeks at a time. Yet the audiences that did come to hear him were usually fascinated and were held by the fact that he always had a beat going.”

What scattered night-club work Monk had been getting in and around New York was cut off completely in 1951. Monk and a friend were arrested on a narcotics charge. The consensus of opinion among relatively disinterested observers at the time was that Monk, innocent, took a rap rather than risk being regarded—by himself—as a “drag” for putting full blame on his co-defendant. Monk served sixty days, a particularly nightmarish penalty for someone who abhors restraint as he does. “He kept his dignity though,” said a friend. “He never grovels, no matter how bad things get.”

Worse than the jail sentence was the loss of his police card. He was sustained by a few record dates, mostly for Prestige to which label he had switched in 1952; very infrequent engagements out of the city; and mostly by his intensely devoted wife, Nellie, who worked during most of Monk’s nearly silent years. When he did finally get steady work at the Five Spot in 1957, Nellie would leave their children with a baby sitter for part of most nights so that she could be with her husband. If she didn’t arrive, Monk would usually become restless and would eventually call her at home.

Nellie is tall, thin, nervous, and singularly attractive in the way that many people with oversize strength of spirit often are. “Thelonious had trouble getting work even before he lost the card,” she looks back. “Therefore, it wasn’t a sudden total calamity. People had told so many stories about his being unreliable and eccentric that it had always been hard. But during the worst years we didn’t feel the struggle as much as other people might have because we were very close, we felt each of us was doing the best he could, and we didn’t suffer for things we couldn’t have. In fact, nobody talked about them. If it was a matter of clothes, for instance, I felt it more important that he have them since he’s before the public.

“During those long stretches when he wasn’t working,” she continues, “it was torture for him not to be able to play. But you’d never know it from looking at him, and he didn’t get bitter. Anybody with less strength would have snapped. And he was continually omitted from things—records, concerts, and the like. We’d fisten to the all-night Birdland radio show, and maybe once in two months they’d play a record of his. There was no money; no place to go. A complete blank. He wasn’t even included in benefits. He even had to pay to get into Birdland.”

In 1957, with the help of a lawyer retained by Baroness Nica Koenigswarter, Monk regained his police card. The baroness, who is becoming somewhat of a misty legend on the New York scene, has befriended other jazzmen. She has helped Monk financially in the past, and Monk has occasionally found her home a good place in which to concentrate on composing. In fact, a few times the whole Monk family has lived there.

Monk’s ability to concentrate, however, can be formidable, no matter what the environment. Monk does not, however, work on a daily schedule. When he feels “right” he will compose. He won’t force himself. When he does work, as Dick Katz observes, “he works very hard, very intensely. He has a lot of fragments in his mind that he’ll keep coming back to in the process of composition, and he’s always especially concerned with getting the right bridge (the ‘inside,’ he calls it) for his songs. The inside, he insists, has to make you appreciate the outside.”

When Nellie was in the hospital and quite sick, Monk began to release some of his worry in music, and worked doggedly at Crepuscule with Nellie, one of his most tender compositions. It took him a month before he worked out the “inside” he felt was right.

“Everything fits so well,” adds John Coltrane, “once you get to see the inside.” Another musician discovered that “When you learn one of his pieces, you can’t learn just the melody and chord symbols. You have to remember the inner voicings and rhythms exactly. Everything is so carefully inter-related; his works are compositions in the sense that relatively few jazz ‘originals’ are.”

When rehearsing musicians in his works, Monk will take a long time to make sure they understand exactly what he wants. A few months ago, he was showing an orchestra how his piece, Little Rootie Tootie, went. Until they had absorbed his instructions, he had them take the number at a slow tempo, a tempo they assumed was the one he wanted. After he felt satisfied with their grasp of its inner workings he took it at considerably faster tempo. He hadn’t wanted them to be any more flustered at first than they needed to be.

During the same run of rehearsals, a young trumpet player persisted in taking conventional “bop” solos on Monk’s Friday the Thirteenth. The musician based his fluent improvisations on the chord changes of the tune with little concern for the rest of its parts. “If you know the melody,” Monk stopped him, “you can make a better solo.” “Do you want me to play the melody?” the musician asked. “If you know the melody,” Monk repeated, “you can make a better solo, and you won’t sound as if you're just running changes.”

“A good part of the success of what Monk does,” Dick Katz goes further in analyzing his music, “depends on the particular sounds, the tone qualities he gets out of the piano. He taught me one of his compositions note for note, but I couldn’t make it sound the way it was supposed to. The sound of the entire piece is important in his work, not just the melody alone. Of how many jazz composers besides Duke Ellington can one say that?”

“Even the sounds of the horns become different in his work,” says altoist-composer Gigi Gryce, “and you have to get exactly those sounds that he wants out of your instrument somehow if you want to keep working with him. He wrote a part for me once that was impossible. I was playing melody and at the same time was playing harmony to his part. In addition, the intervals between the notes were very wide. I told him I couldn’t do it. ‘You have an instrument, don’t you?’ he said. ‘Either play it or throw it away.’ And he left me. Finally, I was able to play it.”

Monk’s intentness on securing precisely what he wants occasionally results in his suddenly leaving the piano at a club or recording session, standing in front of the musicians and lunging into a dance. Onlookers usually regard Monk’s flailing steps as just another badge of his “eccentricity.” He dances, however, for a specific reason. “It’s as if he were conducting,” says Gryce. “It’s the way he gets what he wants. At one record date, some of the musicians were laughing as he danced without realizing that meanwhile, by following his rhythmic pulse, they were moving into the rhythm he wanted.” “Sometimes, when we’re deciding which take to issue for an album,” says his recording director, Orrin Keepnews, “he’ll do his dance. It’s his way of being sure the number is swinging right.” “When you’re swinging,” Monk once told his men, “swing some more!”

Even when seated at the piano, Monk’s feet slash into space like the climax of a switch-blade duel. Although physically in repose unto seeming torpor a fair amount of time off the stand, Monk at the piano becomes possessed by immense kinetic energy and plays, in fact, with all of his body.

“Monk is all music,” says Dick Katz, “not part piano, part music. A lot of what some fine pianists play is, by virtue of their considerable technique, more piano than music. They’ll do things of a mechanical, however fluent, nature that are related to the music only intellectually. Actually, Monk does many technical things other pianists would have difficulty with—long, unorthodoxly-fingered whole tone runs, for instance. They may sound slightly crude, but try to do them yourself. Or he’ll play a fast succession of chords built on fourths with every note clear as a bell. He gets into areas where the normal pianists wouldn’t go. It’s like what happened in early jazz history when self-taught musicians would extend the range and capacity of their instruments because they had no instruction books to tell them what they couldn’t or shouldn’t do.”

Thelonious can be challenging in other ways than music. “I used to have a phobia,” says Nellie, “about pictures or anything on a wall hanging just a little bit crooked. Thelonious cured me. He nailed a clock to the wall at a very slight angle, just enough to make me furious. We argued about it for two hours, but he wouldn’t let me change it. Finally, I got used to it. Now anything can hang at any angle, and it doesn’t bother me at all.”

Monk challenges his friends as well as his wife. “When Monk found out I was going back to Juilliard to study,” said Sahib Shihab with a grin, “he said, ‘Well, I hope you don’t come out any worse than you sound now.' I knew what he meant. He wasn’t putting down the way I was playing. He was referring to what has happened to several jazz musicians who go to school and then, when they get out, are scared to play certain things that don’t fit with what they’ve been taught. They lose that urgency of personal discovery that's jazz.”

#profiles #esquire magazine #thelonious monk #in english

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emmywagner · 6 years ago

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Noir... Jazzy feelings! How do you think I’m rolling? Let me know it. Let’s start a conversation. Write in the comments... ........... Noir... Sentimentos jazzísticos! O que você diria que estou sentindo agora? Fala pra mim. Vamos bater um papo. Escreva nos comentários... 🗣23:23🗣 #positivemindset #BeYou #jazz #NYC #harlem #beingmyself #peaceandblessings #roam #artbrut #wearenotalone #blackboysrock #spirituality #yogalife #beingaround #somosgratos #somoslindos #lgbtlivesmatter #musicsaveslives #goodvibesonly #peace #faith #autoestudo #health #happylife #spiritualgrowth #woke #awake #yogi (at Minton's Harlem) https://www.instagram.com/p/BsPUPUknOxL/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=xyvrrh83bvnv

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maxwellyjordan · 3 years ago

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Court declines to hear cases on religious rights, surveillance rulings

After adding two new cases to their merits docket on Friday, the justices issued more orders from their Oct. 29 conference on Monday morning. As expected, they did not add any additional cases to their docket, but they did clear away several of the high-profile petitions that they have repeatedly considered since returning from their summer recess. The justices once again did not act, however, on the petition for rehearing filed by Washington state florist Barronnelle Stutzman, who declined to make custom flower arrangements for a same-sex wedding because of her religious beliefs.

Abortion coverage by employers

The justices sent Roman Catholic Diocese v. Emami, a challenge to a New York regulation that requires employers to fund abortions through their employee health plans, back to the lower courts for another look. The regulation carves out an exemption for religious employers that primarily serve and employ people of the same religion, but that exemption does not extend to other religious groups, such as Catholic Charities. The diocese, represented by former U.S. Solicitor General Noel Francisco, went to federal court, arguing that the regulation violates the Constitution. An intermediate state appellate court upheld the regulation, concluding that it is a “neutral and generally applicable” rule that can survive under the court’s 1990 decision in Employment Division v. Smith.

Telling the court that the regulation “imposes enormous burdens” because of the religious groups’ opposition to abortion, the diocese urged the court to weigh in on whether the regulation is neutral and generally applicable when it “burdens a subset of religious organizations by forcing them to cover abortions” and whether the regulation interferes with the autonomy of religious entities. And if the regulation passes muster under current law, the diocese added, the court should consider whether to overrule Smith. “It cannot be,” the diocese concluded, that the “Constitution allows New York to require religious groups to participate in a practice so fundamentally in conflict with their religious beliefs.”

New York countered that the justices should deny review because the requirement only applies to insurance companies who provide insurance in New York. Employers don’t have to provide health insurance at all, New York stressed, and in any event adding coverage for abortions doesn’t impose any additional costs for insurance coverage. Moreover, New York added, the diocese didn’t raise its religious autonomy claims in the lower courts.

The justices considered the case at four consecutive conferences before issuing an order on Monday that vacated the state court’s ruling and sent the case back to the lower court for reconsideration in light of last summer’s decision in Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, in which the court ruled that Philadelphia’s refusal to make referrals to a faith-based foster-care agency that refused to certify same-sex couples as potential foster parents violated the Constitution. Three justices – one vote short of the four needed to review the case on the merits – indicated that they would have granted the diocese’s petition: Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch.

Hospital care for transgender patients

The justices denied review in Dignity Health v. Minton, in which they had been asked to weigh in on whether and when a Catholic hospital can be required to allow procedures that violate its religious beliefs. The question came to the court in a case filed by a transgender patient, Evan Minton, who wanted a hysterectomy and alleges that the hospital, Mercy San Juan Medical Center in Carmichael, California, refused to allow the doctor to perform it, in violation of state civil rights laws. In its defense, the hospital countered that requiring it to perform procedures that conflict with its religious beliefs would violate the Constitution’s free exercise clause.

A California appeals court rejected the hospital’s defense, pointing to the Supreme Court’s decision in Smith.

Mercy went to the Supreme Court in March 2020, telling the justices that the “case poses a profound threat to faith-based health care institutions’ ability to advance their healing ministries consistent with the teachings of their faith.” At that point, the court had already granted review in Fulton.

Minton urged the Supreme Court to stay out of the dispute, stressing that there was no final state court judgment on the federal questions in the case. But the court still held the case until it issued its decision in Fulton on June 17. The court then considered the Mercy’s petition several times before finally denying review on Monday, with Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch indicating that they would have granted review.

Public access to surveillance rulings

In 1978, Congress created the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, currently made up of 11 federal district court judges, to rule on the federal government’s applications for electronic surveillance orders in foreign intelligence investigations. Appeals from the FISC’s rulings go to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, made up of three more federal judges. The justices on Monday declined to hear an important case involving public access to the FISC’s rulings, over a dissent by justices from both ends of the ideological spectrum.

The dispute in American Civil Liberties Union v. United States stemmed from a motion that the ACLU filed with the FISC five years ago, seeking “opinions and orders containing novel or significant interpretations of law issued” over a 15-year period regarding the federal government’s online surveillance activities after the Sept. 11 attacks. A FISC judge dismissed the motion, reasoning that the FISC lacked the power to review the motion, and the FISCR agreed that it too lacked jurisdiction to consider the request.

Represented by Ted Olson, a former solicitor general during the George W. Bush administration, the ACLU came to the Supreme Court in April, asking the justices to weigh in on both whether the FISC has the power to review its motion and whether the First Amendment provides a right for the public to have access to at least some of the FISC’s significant opinions. The ACLU explained that although the FISC’s role may have originally been relatively narrow, that role has “changed fundamentally — due to both Congress’s expansion of” the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act “and the exponential growth in the capabilities of powerful surveillance technologies.” As a result, the ACLU wrote, the FISC now “writes opinions that include significant interpretations of FISA, other federal statutes, and the Constitution,” which “sometimes authorize broad surveillance regimes, with far-reaching implications for U.S. citizens and residents who are not the ostensible targets of the government’s surveillance.”

The federal government urged the justices to deny review, stressing that (among other things) federal law only allows them to grant review of cases that hail from the “courts of appeals” – which the FISCR is not. And in any event, the government concluded, the ACLU has other ways to get the FISC opinions it is seeking – for example, through the executive branch itself, or by filing requests under the Freedom of Information Act.

Gorsuch dissented from the denial of review, in an opinion joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Gorsuch noted that the government “does not merely argue that the lower court rulings should be left undisturbed because they are correct,” but also “presses the extraordinary claim that this Court is powerless to review the lower court decisions even if they are mistaken.” Stressing that the case “presents questions about the right of public access to Article III judicial proceedings of grave national importance,” but also about “the power of this Court to review the work of Article III judges in a subordinate court,” Gorsuch asked, “If these matters are not worthy of our time, what is?”

Capital punishment and intellectual disability

The court’s decision not to grant review in Coonce v. United States also drew a dissent from Sotomayor. Wesley Coonce, who sustained a severe brain injury when he was 20 and was later convicted of killing a federal inmate at the age of 29, had asked the justices to take up two issues: whether the Constitution allows the federal government to execute a defendant who was intellectually disabled when he committed his crime, because he became intellectually disabled after the age of 18, and whether and to what extent the Sixth Amendment right to confront adverse witnesses applies in capital sentencing hearings. The Department of Justice agreed with Coonce that the Supreme Court should send the case back to the lower courts for another look in light of the American Association of Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities’ recent change to its definition of intellectual disability, but the court on Monday denied review.

Sotomayor described the court’s refusal to send the case back to the lower courts as “deeply concerning, especially given the strength of Coonce’s claim.” To the best of her knowledge, she noted, the Supreme Court has always sent capital cases back to the lower courts for another look when both sides have agreed that it is the best course of action, particularly when “a new development has cast the decision below into such doubt.” The Supreme Court, she concluded, “has long emphasized the ‘need for reliability in the determination that death is the appropriate punishment in a specific case.’” Sending the case back to the lower courts, she reiterated, “was the least the Court could have done to protect this life-or-death interest.”

This article was originally published at Howe on the Court.

The post Court declines to hear cases on religious rights, surveillance rulings appeared first on SCOTUSblog.

from Law https://www.scotusblog.com/2021/11/court-declines-to-hear-cases-on-religious-rights-surveillance-rulings/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

#law #justice

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seeselfblack · 7 years ago

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Happy 100 Thelonious Monk...

Thelonious Monk is one of the greatest jazz musicians of all time and one of first creators of modern jazz.

Thelonious Monk is one of the greatest jazz musicians of all time and one of first creators of modern jazz and bebop. For much of his career, Monk played with small groups at Milton's Playhouse. Many of his compositions have become jazz standards, including "Well, You Needn't," "Blue Monk" and "Round Midnight." His spares and angular music had a levity and playfulness to it.

Musician. Thelonious Monk was born on October 10, 1917 in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. When he was just four, his parents, Barbara and Thelonious, Sr., moved to New York City, where he would spend the next five decades of his life.

Monk began studying classical piano when he was eleven but had already shown some aptitude for the instrument. "I learned how to read before I took lessons," he later recalled. "You know, watching my sister practice her lessons over her shoulder." By the time Monk was thirteen, he had won the weekly amateur competition at the Apollo Theater so many times that the management banned him from re-entering the contest.

At age seventeen, Monk dropped out of the esteemed Stuyvesant High School to pursue his music career. He toured with the so-called "Texas Warhorse," an evangelist and faith healer, before assembling a quartet of his own. Although it was typical to play for a big band at this time, Monk preferred a more intimate work dynamic that would allow him to experiment with his sound.

In 1941, Monk began working at Minton's Playhouse in Harlem, where he joined the house band and helped develop the school of jazz known as bebop. Alongside Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, he explored the fast, jarring, and often improvised styles that would later become synonymous with modern jazz.

Thelonious Monk's first known recording was made in 1944, when he worked as a member of Coleman Hawkins's quartet. Monk didn't record under his own name, however, until 1947, when he played as the leader of a sextet session for Blue Note.

Monk made a total of five Blue Note recordings between 1947 and 1952, including "Criss Cross" and "Evidence." These are generally regarded as the first works characteristic of Monk's unique jazz style, which embraced percussive playing, unusual repetitions and dissonant sounds. As Monk saw it, "The piano ain't got no wrong notes!" Though widespread recognition was still years away, Monk had already earned the regard of his peers as well as several important critics.

In 1947, Monk married Nellie Smith, his longtime sweetheart. They later had two children, whom they named after Monk's parents, Thelonious and Barbara. In 1952, Monk signed a contract with Prestige Records, which yielded pieces like "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes" and "Bags' Groove." The latter, which he recorded with Miles Davis in 1954, is sometimes said to be his finest piano solo ever.

Because Monk's work continued to be largely overlooked by jazz fans at large, Prestige sold his contract to Riverside Records in 1955. There, he attempted to make his first two recordings more widely accessible, but this effort was poorly received by critics.

Not content to pander ineffectively to a nonexistent audience, Monk turned a page with his 1956 album, Brilliant Corners, which is usually considered to be his first true masterpiece. The album's title track made a splash with its innovative, technically demanding, and extremely complex sound, which had to be edited together from many separate takes. With the release of two more Riverside masterworks, Thelonious Himself and Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane, Monk finally received the acclaim he deserved.

In 1957, the Thelonious Monk Quartet, which included John Coltrane, began performing regularly at the Five Spot in New York. Enjoying huge success, they went on to tour the United States and even make some appearances in Europe. By 1962, Monk was so popular that he was given a contract with Columbia Records, a decidedly more mainstream label than Riverside. In 1964, Monk became one of four jazz musicians ever to grace the cover of Time Magazine.

The years that followed included several overseas tours, but by the early 1970s, Monk was ready to retire from the limelight; save for his 1971 recordings at Black Lion Records and the occasional appearance at the Lincoln Center or Carnegie Hall, Monk spent his final years living quietly in seclusion. After battling serious illness for several years, he passed away from a stroke in 1982. He has since been inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, added to the Library of Congress's National Recording Registry, and featured on a United States postage stamp.

As a pioneering performer who managed to slip almost invisibly through the jazz community during the first half of his career, Monk is exactly the type of figure who invites rumor and exaggeration. The image the public has been left with is that of a demanding, eccentric recluse with an inborn gift for piano. The real person was more complex. "People don't think of Thelonious as Mr. Mom," his son points out, recalling his father changing diapers, "but I clearly saw him do the Mr. Mom thing, big-time."

Whatever Thelonious was to the media, it's clear what his legacy will be to jazz music: that of a true originator. Monk probably said it best when he insisted that a "genius is one who is most like himself."

See also:

- Atlantic.com’s Interview with Robin Kelly - The Secret Life of Thelonious Monk

- Whose Your Daddy

- The Women Who Made Thelonious Monk

- Monkzone.com

- NPR - In A New Biogeraphy, Monk Minus The Myth

- Thelonious Monk and a Siamese Cat...

- Newsweek - A LONG-LOST THELONIOUS MONK ALBUM IS FINALLY RELEASED NEARLY 60 YEARS LATER

#monk #Thelonious Monk #jazz #bee bop #black classical music #black historoy

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lurchsworld · 6 months ago

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Faith Minton Hurikan Rosy 1

#youtube

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joestreng · 5 years ago

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Giants Outlast Dodgers in 14

A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about Strat-O-Matic baseball and a simulation of a game I played made of up Giants and Dodgers from the 1982, 1993 and 2016 teams. Here’s a recap:

What started as an iconic battle of superstars ended as a war of attrition between forgotten hurlers as the Super Giants outlasted the Super Dodgers 7-6 in 14 innings at Candlestick Park. The match-up of ballclubs made up of players from three different eras gave more than 50,000 fans a long afternoon of disappointments and thrills.

Madison Bumgarner labored through five innings, giving up eight hits and six runs, all earned. His key mistake came in the third when he walked Brett Butler and Justin Turner to load them up for a Corey Seager grand slam. Bumgarner glared at Seager as the shortstop rounded the bases.

The Giants rebounded to tie the game in the bottom of the frame thanks to some sloppy defense behind 1982 phenom Fernando Venezuela. With two out, a run in and Barry Bonds on second, “El Toro” seemed to be out of the inning when Jack Clark rolled one over to Chase Utley at second. Utley booted it, opening the door for a run-scoring single from Buster Posey, a Brandon Belt walk and a bases clearing double from Brandon Crawford.

The rally breathed new life into the Super Giants. Darren Lewis led off the bottom of the fourth with a single and a steal and Matt Williams drove him in with a double.

Super Giants manager Bruce Bochy left himself open to a rare moment of second-guessing when he left Bumgarner in for one batter too many in the sixth. After giving up back-to-back singles to 1993 all-star Mike Piazza and 2016 first basemen Adrian Gonzalez, Bochy visited the mound to check on the 2014 World Series MVP. MadBum stayed in to face 1982 left fielder Dusty Baker who singled in the tying run. Bumgarner handed the ball over to Vida Blue who allowed Gonzalez to score on a fielder’s choice. The Dodgers had a 6-5 lead and the day wasn’t even half over yet.

“We felt pretty good with the lead and MadBum on the hill at that point,” said Bochy. “It’s on me that we couldn’t hold the lead and the game got out of hand the way that it did.”

1993 Dodger rookie Pedro Martinez and 2016 journeyman Joe Blanton held the Giants in check through the seventh. The Giants matched them with scoreless innings from Vida, Al Holland and 1982 closer Greg “Moon Man” Minton.

Super Dodger Manager Tommy Lasorda felt confident turning the game over to his lock-down bullpen in the eighth, calling on Pedro Baez. Lasorda’s faith wasn’t rewarded as Baez gave up a game-tying homer to Darren Lewis.

“How the f*** was I supposed to know that little f***in’ centerfielder would have the g**d*** game of his life,” Lasorda yelled after the game. “Four hits, two steals and a g**d*** homer against my best set-up guy? Who the f*** am I? Nostradamus?”

With the game tied at six, the teams settled in for a long slog. Rod Beck pitched an uneventful inning and two-thirds, while Kenley Jansen turned in two solid innings. At that point, the Giants turned to Doyle Alexander and the Dodgers to Jim Gott to go the rest of the way.

“I coulda put in Swifty or Burkett for a couple of innings, but they’re not relievers,” Bochy said afterwards. “Doyle was gonna stay in there to the end and he did the job.”

Alexander pitched three solid innings of relief, pitching around a lead-off double by Howie Kendrick in the 14th. Gott wasn’t as fortunate in the bottom of the inning, giving up singles to Williams and Jack Clark, then walking Posey to load the bases before giving Brandon Belt a free pass for the win.

“Get the f*** outta my face with that tape recorder,” Lasorda barked as he stormed away from reporters.

Game Notes:

1993 second baseman Robby Thompson had a day to forget, going oh-for seven and striking out five times.

Dodger bats were largely silent after tying the game in the sixth, with only three runners reaching scoring position in the next eight innings.

Alexander hit for himself in the 13th and reached on the second Dodger error of the day, this one charged to Corey Seager.

Both the Giants and Dodgers used six pitchers, with only three starters left for each team at the end of the game.

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the-record-newspaper · 5 years ago

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Wilkes reacts to COVID-19

From Record Staff Reports

With schools called off statewide in North Carolina for at least two weeks, Wilkes County Schools will offer breakfasts and lunches for children ages 1 through 18.

The meals started being offered on Tuesday, March 17. Meals may be picked up at the school site in the car line with the exception being Wilkes Early College High School, which is on the campus of Wilkes Community College.

Breakfasts will be served from 7:30 a.m. until 8:30 a.m. and lunch will be served from 11:30 a.m. until 12:30 p.m.

This information was released Monday afternoon following a minimal two-week school cancellations which was announced over the weekend.

On Tuesday The Governor closed dinning rooms in restaurants limiting food services to only take out and deliver. He assured that grocery stores would remain open, but urged citizens not to hoard and to leave items for people who can’t afford to stockpile food and other commodities.

Wilkes County has suddenly become a different world.

If you’ve been to the grocery store recently, you’ve bound to have noticed the toilet paper section.

It’s basically empty.

Why?

Folks across Wilkes, the state and the country are hoarding such items including hand sanitizers and bottled water it seems in case there is a mass mandated quarantine to halt or slow the spread of COVID-19.

But…toilet paper?

The New York Times quoted Health Secretary Alex M. Azar II as saying, “Toilet paper is not an effective way to prevent getting the coronavirus, but they’re selling out.”

Although there may be humor in that statement, local, state and national officials are not taking the threat of the spread of COVID-19 lightly.

And as of Sunday afternoon, the virus was knocking at Wilkes’ door with one confirmed case in Watauga County and possible cases under investigation in Yadkin County.

Although there have been talk of COVID-19 already being in Wilkes, no such report had been substantiated.

The Tribune in Elkin reported that there are two persons under investigation who have been tested for the corona virus, or COVID-19 as of Friday at 12:30 p.m. in Yadkin County. These individuals have been informed about the virus and how it is spread and are self-monitoring while waiting test results, according to a news release from Yadkin County Human Services Agency.

WBTV, a Charlotte-based television station, reported that a Boone-based staff member of the international relief charity Samaritan’s Purse tested positive for the coronavirus shortly after returning from an overseas trip.

According to the company, the employee returned nine days ago from countries “considered to be at lower risk at the time of travel.”

The staff member didn’t return to work and self-quarantined upon their return home. They were tested at their home by the Watauga County Health Department.

“We are working in full cooperation with the local health department in identifying other staff who may have been in contact with the employee who has tested positive, and though we can’t know for sure whether their contact was prior to or after the virus was contracted, each of these employees has also self-quarantined,” the organization said. The organization said it is reducing staff on its Boone headquarters and Wilkes campus effective immediately and moving many employees to work-from-home status, the WBTV report stated.

In Wilkes, and across North Carolina, schools are cancelled, MerleFest has been cancelled as well as many church services and most any other event where people usually gather in significant numbers.

As of Tuesday there have been 32 confirmed cases reported statewide. The counties which reported confirmed cases are: 14 in Wake County; four in Mecklenburg; two apiece in Hartnett, Johnston and Forsyth counties; and one apiece in Durham, Brunswick, Craven, Chatham, Cabarrus, Onslow, Wayne, Brunswick, Craven, and Watauga counties

***

According to the website for Centers for Disease Control and Prevention you should call your doctor if you think you have been exposed to COVID-19 and develop a fever and symptoms, such as cough or difficulty breathing.

Watch for symptoms.

Reported illnesses have ranged from mild symptoms to severe illness and death for confirmed coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) cases.

The following symptoms may appear 2-14 days after exposure.*

· Fever

· Cough

· Shortness of breath

*This is based on what has been seen previously as the incubation period of MERS-CoV viruses.

If you develop emergency warning signs for COVID-19 get medical attention immediately. Emergency warning signs include*:

· Difficulty breathing or shortness of breath

· Persistent pain or pressure in the chest

· New confusion or inability to arouse

· Bluish lips or face

*This list is not all inclusive. Please consult your medical provider for any other symptoms that are severe or concerning.

***

Record Editor Jerry Lankford asked some of his Facebook friends their thoughts on the virus. Here’s what they said:

Ashley Osborne Jones: “I’m not afraid. I am not stocking up on anything. I don’t live in fear. I have faith that I will be OK. If not I have already on hand two weeks worth of food and supplies.”

Melissa Triplett: “I’m not afraid. ‘Fear not, for I am with you, be not dismayed, for I am your God, I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.” Isaiah 41:103.’”

Rebecca Davis: “I could stand to shed some pounds. So with what food we have it will make do. We have growing grandchildren to feed in the home. They love to eat cereal. So milk, cereal, bread, peanut butter, jelly and eggs.”

Leslie Michelle Rivera-Cruz: “Not afraid at all. I’m only afraid of the consequences of fear.”

William M. Harden: “I’m not afraid but it’s because I have done my research on it. At the same time I’m not recklessly acting like it’s no big deal. I’m a young healthy man, but not everyone has my immune system. Not afraid of catching it (is very likely at some point) but am concerned for the elderly/youth/immune compromised that will have a harder time fighting it off. Stay educated and don’t panic you guys, it will only make the situation worse.”

Kellene Wells Bock: “I have a healthy respect for the virus but I’m not afraid. I think the steps being taken now should keep it to manageable status in the U.S. Not stocking up on anything because I don’t foresee steps taken in foreign countries being necessary in the U.S. (if people will just be smart) so we should be able to get what we need, once shelves get restocked.”

Anne Privette Johnson: “As an elderly woman with underlying health concerns Mom plans to stick close to the house. I made sure her prescriptions were filled and we have all her OTC meds. We keep toilet paper and paper towels on hand. I checked the pantry and inventoried cleaning supplies. We were in pretty good shape, so I picked up just a few things we needed. With schools closed I will be here more. I bought some breakfast items and sandwich fixings. I guess I didn’t stock up - just the normal grocery shopping. Prayers for everyone.”

Andy Rhodes: “I’m more afraid of main stream media hype than Covid19. Get your info from the CDC, not the nightly news frenzy of doom and gloom. Will I get Covid19, probably so, I am a nurse in a health care setting, am I worried? A little, but I’m confident all will be OK.”

Alayna Taylor Harden: “I’m far more bothered by/afraid of the hysteria than the actual virus. I know it’s a threat to certain people in our communities (and I say this as someone who has a compromised immune system and small kids), but this is far beyond reasonable precautions. The fact that sheer panic has been manufactured by the media is a very scary thing on its own.”

Lisa De Maio Brewer: “This is a very concerning virus. We've never seen anything like this in our lifetime. If we do not take it seriously, we will face the sad consequences. Seek wisdom!”

Terrie Byrd: “Yes I'm self quarantined due to my immune system not functioning properly. I'm both immune deficient and immune compromised. What I have in terms of antibodies fighting germs comes from 1,000 to 1,500 people in the form of plasma which I need to live. This is serious folks. Even with infusions, we are not protected from COVID 19. Please take care of yourself and follow the CDC guidelines. It's not a joke. It's real and it's here. Stay ahead of the curve. God bless us all. I'm in no way panicking, just being vigilant and exercising caution.”

Rita Roman: “I've been preparing for this for years and years.... food and water...oops forgot about the toilet paper. I'm staying motivated and happy. P.S. Just got off a cruise last Sunday. Everyone is staying in touch via Facebook. No one is sick. Living my life!!!”

Cheryl Shumate: “Well I’m 63 yrs old and yes I’m taking this very seriously. I have diabetes and an immune deficiency disorder along with several other problems. I’m staying in away from people as much as I can. I’m not one that bought 100 rolls of TP but I would like to have gotten a bottle of hand sanitizer for when I am out. Thinking of all the elderly we have in our county. I do pray daily for our nation and watch CDC updates.”

Jill Minton Woodie: “I remember when I was a young girl hearing a preacher talking about a pandemic that would affect the entire World and there would be thousands of people die from it. I really hadn’t thought of this message until this pandemic. This is very serious and I’m afraid it is going to get a lot worse. It is no joking matter. We are dealing with a virus that the mortality rate is 10 times worse than the flu, no medicine or vaccine. Also, a person can have the virus and show no symptoms and that is why we need to stay home. The United States don’t have enough ventilators to handle this crisis. We all have got to work together and help stop the spread of this virus. People if at all possible stay home and use common sense that the LORD gave you. GOD HELP US.”

So far, there have been no reports of business closures in Wilkes due to the virus.

Tyson Foods has released its virus-related policy:

The company announced that it is only allowing visitors considered essential into its offices and facilities. The determination of who is essential will be made by Enterprise Leadership Team (ELT) members.

Tyson Foods also announced changes impacting hourly employees, including:

• relaxing attendance policies in processing plants by eliminating punitive effect for missing work due to illness;

• waiving the five-consecutive day waiting period for short term disability benefits;

• waiving the co-pay, co-insurance and deductible for doctor visits for COVID-19 testing as well as eliminating pre-approval or preauthorization steps;

• waiving co-pays for use of telemedicine;

• relaxing refill limits for 30 day prescriptions of maintenance medication.

Many corporate Tyson employees will work remotely through March 27.

Management will determine which business personnel will be asked to continue working in the corporate offices while others operate from home.

Late last month, Tyson Foods suspended all international business travel on commercial carriers. Effective immediately, all U.S. commercial business travel has also been suspended. Exceptions must be approved by an (ELT) member.

The company encouraged Tyson personnel to avoid personal travel via cruise ships, airplanes and other common carriers.

“Depending on where you travel, you may be subject to self-quarantine for 14 days when you return. You should consider this and your ability to work remotely before traveling.”

The CDC says “currently there is no evidence to support transmission of COVID-19 associated with food.”

In addition, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported, “There is no evidence at this time to suggest that the Coronavirus is a foodborne pathogen.”

The USDA also said, “We are not aware of any reports at this time of human illnesses that suggest COVID-19 can be transmitted by food or food packaging.”

Tyson has an internal coronavirus page with access to videos and information about the virus, as well as the company’s efforts to address it.

Schools Closed

Wilkes County Schools will be closed for at least two weeks.

This comes as a directive from N.C. Gov. Roy Cooper who ordered all K-12 public schools in North Carolina to close for a minimum of two weeks in response to COVID-19. The executive order also bans gatherings of more than 100 people.

Cooper stated: “We do not have the luxury of a wait-and-see approach. These are hard decisions but they are necessary so we can learn more about the virus,” Cooper said. “We do not want any regrets in the rearview mirror, and I am guided by one objective – doing what we must to keep people from getting sick and to make sure that those who do can get excellent care.”

Wilkes County School Superintendent Mark Byrd in a recorded message sent out Sunday.

Byrd stated, “Monday, March 16 will be a required teacher workday. Bus drivers, teacher assistants and child nutrition workers should not report to work until you have further information.

“Parents will be contacted early this week by your child’s school with information about how you can help your child focus on learning during this two-week window. Our website and social media will be updated with information about what students can do to obtain meal service during this closure, beginning Tuesday, March 17.”

Wilkes Community College

All classes on all campuses of Wilkes Community College have been cancelled for a week.

The college website states: Wilkes Community College is adjusting its class schedule in accordance with guidance from state and local officials to proactively limit the spread of COVID-19.WCC will cancel all classes (Curriculum, Workforce Development, Career and College Readiness) for the week of March 16-22, 2020. Cancelled classes include all classes regardless of delivery method, including online, on-campus, and off-campus. All WCC facilities will be closed to students including Wilkes Campus, Ashe Campus, Alleghany Center, and Herring Hall.All full-time college employees should report to work on Monday, March 16, unless they are in self-quarantine.On March 23, the college plans to shift to a modified schedule with most classes transitioning to an online, hybrid, or otherwise adjusted format.An update will be provided by Friday, March 20 regarding the following week of classes and campus activities.

MerleFest 2020 Cancelled

For following is a press release posted by MerleFest officials at 4 p.m., on Friday, March 13:

In response to directives from North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper and growing concerns about the spread of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), Wilkes County officials have cancelled all mass gatherings of more than 100 people in Wilkes County through the end of April. Therefore, MerleFest 2020 has been cancelled. While this decision is disappointing for all of us, we fully support the directive from our county officials. The health, safety, and well-being of all involved with MerleFest is, and always will be, our primary concern.

As you all know, MerleFest serves as the largest fundraising event in support of the students of Wilkes Community College. The WCC Foundation, which plans and manages the festival each year, has already incurred significant costs in the lead up to MerleFest 2020.

We need your help. We are calling on all our loyal MerleFest fans and supporters to help alleviate the financial burden this puts on the college in this unprecedented moment of crisis. Please consider converting your festival purchase this year to a 100 percent tax deductible donation. This will help sustain the mission of MerleFest and its impact on WCC students.

We will be offering three options for those who have purchased MerleFest 2020 tickets through the official MerleFest ticketing system:

Option 1: Convert your purchase to a donation. Convert your festival purchase to a 100 percent tax deductible contribution to the WCC Foundation to help sustain the mission of MerleFest and its impact on WCC students.

Option 2: Roll your tickets forward. Ticket holders may roll purchases over to MerleFest 2021. This option allows fans to retain the same seat, package, parking, ticket, etc. at 2020 prices. The dates for next year’s festival are April 29 – May 2, 2021. Please consider the roll forward option in support of the festival.

Option 3: Refund. If for any reason, you feel that neither option 1 nor 2 is appropriate for you, we can certainly offer you a refund for your ticket order. All refunds must be requested by April 15. We will refund everything except service charges which are non-refundable.

IMPORTANT: All ticket holders must contact the MerleFest box office between March 16 and April 15 to confirm the option you are choosing. Failure to contact the box office by April 15 will result in an automatic roll forward of your tickets to 2021. You can contact the MerleFest box office Monday-Thursday 12 p.m.-5 p.m. and Friday 11 a.m.-3 p.m. Here are four ways to contact us:

Email: [email protected]

Mail: MerleFest Tickets, P.O. Box 120, Wilkesboro, NC 28697

Phone: (800) 343-7857

Visit our box office located in the Walker Center at Wilkes Community College, Wilkesboro, NC

We ask for your patience while we work through the transition process. We will add staff to handle your requests as quickly as possible, but it will just take time. Thank you for your support and we look forward to seeing you at MerleFest in April of 2021!

MerleFest, a four-day Americana music festival was set to run from Thursday, April 23, to Sunday, April 26, on the campus of Wilkes Community College in Wilkesboro. The event draws upwards to 80,000 participants from all over the country and the world each year and pumps million of dollars into the local economy and is WCC biggest fundraiser.

The Walker Center, also on the college campus, cancelled its Haggard Brothers with Special Guest Emi Sunshine concert that was scheduled for Friday, March 13. Center officials says they’re going to try to reschedule the event.

YMCA

Starting Monday and running through at least March 29, Wilkes Family YMCA in Wilkesboro and all other facilities of the YMCA are closed due to the coronavirus.

It was stated in a press release: “After much thoughtful consideration for the health of our members, staff and community as a whole, the YMCA of Northwest North Carolina will temporarily close all facilities. As we navigate these challenges ahead, please know that we never make a decision to close Y facilities in haste.”

N.C. Courts

Chief Justice Beasley Announces Judicial Branch Response to COVID-19 (Coronavirus)Effective Monday, March 16, superior court and district court proceedings will be rescheduled for at least 30 days, with some exceptions.

In an order entered today (Friday, March 13), the Chief Justice has directed that local courts postpone most cases in district and superior court for at least 30 days. While the work of the courts must continue and courthouses remain open, the first priority of the court system must be the health and safety of the public and of the employees who serve them.

“We must be proactive in taking steps to prioritize the health and safety of our fellow North Carolinians while also maintaining the integrity of our judicial system,” said Chief Justice Beasley. “Today’s order will allow us to drastically reduce the exposure caused by crowded sessions of court, which often bring hundreds of people at a time into our courthouses.”

Although the superior courts and district courts remain open, effective Monday, March 16, superior court and district court proceedings will be rescheduled for at least 30 days, with some exceptions. These exceptions include (see more in the Supreme Court Order)

the proceeding will be conducted remotely;

the proceeding is necessary to preserve the right to due process of law (e.g. a first appearance or bond hearing, the appointment of counsel for an indigent defendant, a probation hearing, a probable cause hearing, etc.);

the proceeding is for the purpose of obtaining emergency relief (e.g. a domestic violence protection order, temporary restraining order, juvenile custody order, judicial consent to juvenile medical treatment order, civil commitment order, etc.); or the senior resident superior court judge, chief business court judge, or chief district court judge determines that the proceeding can be conducted under conditions that protect the health and safety of all participants.

This emergency directive does not apply to any proceeding in which a jury has already been empaneled or to any grand juries already empaneled. It also does not prohibit a judge or other judicial officer from exercising any in chambers or ex parte jurisdiction conferred by law upon that judge or judicial officer, as provided by law.

Additionally, the superior courts and district courts are encouraged to liberally grant additional accommodations to parties, witnesses, attorneys, and others with business before the courts who are at high risk of severe illness from COVID-19.

All counties will post a notice at all court facilities directing any person who has likely been exposed to COVID-19 to not enter the courthouse. Any person who has likely been exposed and has business before the courts should contact the clerk of superior court’s office by telephone or other remote means for further instruction.

As the courts work to postpone thousands of cases, court officials will notify parties and their attorneys of new hearing and trial dates.

The Judicial Branch will be providing continuous updated information and answers to frequently asked questions on our website, NCcourts.gov. The public is encouraged to visit NCcourts.gov as a first resort to determine if a question can be answered without calling the local courthouse.

Sports and Field Trips

Also on Thursday, March 12, Wilkes County Schools released the following announcement:

“Effective March 12. 2020, Wilkes County Schools will suspend all field trips and will reevaluate this in early April. Wilkes County Schools will follow the recommendation of the NCHSAA (North Carolina High School Athletic Association)

and suspend the Spring Sports Season at the conclusion of tonight’s games (Thursday, March 12, 2020). This decision impacts practices as well as scheduled games for both middle and high schools.

Per the Governor’s recommendation, all gatherings of more than 100 people should be postponed. The governor did not recommend school closings at this time.

Again, we appreciate your understanding as we make decisions to ensure the safety of our students and our staff.”

Other cancellations

VFW: The Welcome Home Vietnam Veterans day, scheduled for Saturday, March 28, at VFW Post 1142 in North Wilkesboro, has been cancelled due to health concerns.

The post also cancelled its popular Saturday night dances until further notice.

The Veterans Coffee Call, that has been held the second Tuesday of each month, has been cancelled until further notice.

Shinetopia, a benefit concert, cook-off and bike show scheduled April 18 in North Wilkesboro has been cancelled.

Wilkes Senior Resources has cancelled all instructor-led classes until further notice, effective immediately. The center remains open for individual exercises and other individual activities.

Wilkes-Yadkin Home Builders Association’s annual raffle drawing set for March 19, at the Wilkesboro Civic Center, has been postponed. The drawing, which raises funds for the Joe Faw Scholarship and SkillsUSA, will be held at a later date.

***

But back to the hoarding hysteria

Apparently it has become somewhat out of hand.

One local business manager was heard saying that law enforcement had to be on hand as guards when trucks hauling restock items arrive at their store, and added that thefts of items were becoming more commonplace.

Another manager told about how some were taking advantage of the situation and buying up the most sought after goods and attempting to pirate them on the internet. They were allegedly caught and stopped.

According to one internet report a bottle of hand sanitizer bought for $8 at a drug store sold the same day for $138 on a website.

And there are cases of downright rudeness.

“Some people act like it’s my own personal fault that we’re out of certain items,” another manager said.

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