Word: soils
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...most significant thing about Marsalis' career is not his personal success. It is the fact that, largely under his influence, a jazz renaissance is flowering on what was once barren soil. Straight-ahead jazz music almost died in the 1970s as record companies embraced the electronically enhanced jazz-pop amalgam known as fusion. Now a whole generation of prodigiously talented young musicians is going back to the roots, using acoustic instruments, playing recognizable tunes and studying the styles of earlier jazzmen, from King Oliver and Louis Armstrong to Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker and John Coltrane. Moreover, with major record labels...
...fact, it is precisely because of the limits he places on his poetic demesne that Heaney gains an almost unlimited expressive control. For instead of moving outwards, he burrows "inwards and downwards," sifting the Irish soil and Irish soul for meaning and metaphor, retraversing locales and themes until the subtlest shifts and shadings take on great meaning. He delves, too, into his own and his country's past and finds them richly veined with continuities...
...Heaney does literally dig in many of his poems, stripping away the soil layer by layer and showing us the peat, potatoes, bones, down to the "wet centre" of "Atlantic seepage...
...that was swept away by bad government policy and greed. Homesteading was a tragedy in most of the plains, pitting small farmers against the relentless weather. It was no contest. But then the government compounded the problem -- and still does -- by offering crop subsidies, and those who broke the soil became manacled to a marginal existence. Some still hang on, but time runs against them...
Speculation that Saudi Arabia will be quickly transformed by the influence of all those Americans on its soil is probably also misconceived. In recent decades Saudi Arabia has absorbed several hundred thousand Westerners, many of them oil-industry experts, without being significantly changed by their presence. One reason is that the foreigners have been kept secluded in luxurious fenced-in compounds that look remarkably like American suburbs...