Here, in the city where concert halls are made of asphalt, is one of the most famous Mardi Gras Indian tribes, the Wild Magnolias.
Wild Magnolias, live, New Orleans, 2008
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lagniappe
“It was this kind of willful, wildly romantic attention to beauty—crumbling and fading beauty needing constant attention—that made this city [New Orleans] so unlike any other and such an unparalleled sort of environment for a builder.”—Dave Eggers, Zeitoun
Here’s Jim Dickinson—the great Memphis-and-Mississippi-based piano player, session musician (Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Ry Cooder, et al.), record producer (John Hiatt, Albert King, the Replacements, et al.), father of Luther and Cody Dickinson (of the Grammy-nominated North Mississippi Allstars)—who died last month (8/15) at the age of 67. In this clip, he’s listening, with the Rolling Stones, to a playback of “Wild Horses” (Sticky Fingers [1971]), on which he played piano. Somehow it seems appropriate to remember Dickinson with a clip in which you hardly see him (he’s the guy sitting next to Keith [:53]). So many of the finest session musicians and record producers work their magic this way: listening to the music, you hardly notice them; but take them away and the music would be a whole other color—as different as blue and green.
*****
Here Dickinson talks about a session he produced (Boister):
— “They managed to overcome their educations real well.”
— “They’re all capable of soloing ad nauseam.”
— “You can feel them feeling it.”
*****
Not only did Dickinson play piano and produce records; he also, now and then, wrote songs. Here are two takes on a song he wrote with Ry Cooder and John Hiatt, “Across the Borderline.”
Bob Dylan and Tom Petty, live, Buffalo, 1986
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Jackson Browne, Bruce Springsteen, and Bonnie Raitt, live, Los Angeles, 1990
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lagniappe
“Some of the records I’ve done, really obscure things, will be the ones that somebody will tell you saved their lives. You’ll meet a weird guy in Amsterdam who’ll say ‘I had the gun in my mouth until I heard that record.’ So you never know, you just never know.”—Jim Dickinson
“As a producer, it really is all about taste. And I’m not the greatest piano player in the world, but I’ve got damn good taste. I’ll sit down and go taste with anybody.”—Jim Dickinson
Muddy Waters, Saul Bellow, Steppenwolf Theater Company (John Malkovich, John Mahoney, Gary Sinise, Laurie Metcalf, et al.), Curtis Mayfield: a lot of great artists, musical and otherwise, have come out of Chicago in the last 50 years. Among the greatest is this group: the Art Ensemble of Chicago. While the horn players (Roscoe Mitchell, Joseph Jarman, Lester Bowie) got the lion’s share of the attention, what gave their music its juice—what made it dance—was (as you’ll hear) one of the finest rhythm sections ever: Malachi Favors, bass; Don Moye, drums.
Art Ensemble of Chicago, live, Poland (Warsaw), 1982 (in four parts)
Part 1 of 4
Part 2 of 4
Part 3 of 4
Part 4 of 4
(I talk about the AEC in the past tense because, while recordings are still released under this name from time to time, with two key members [they were all “key members”] now dead—trumpeter Lester Bowie [1999] and bassist Malachi Favors [2004]—it just isn’t [nor could it be] the same.)
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Many things in life don’t quite seem, alas, to live up to their billing. It appears that the RSS (Real Simple Syndication) service that’s referenced in the righthand column (under “Subscribe”) may fall into this category—at least, that is, for those of us who are (as the expression goes) of a certain age. The problem seems to lie at the threshold: “real simple.”
Anyway, in the life’s-too-short, keep-it-simple-stupid department, if you’d like to “subscribe” to this blog, just send me an email (rmcleeselaw@aol.com) with “subscribe” in the subject line and—voila!—you’ll be added to an ever-growing email list that will have you receiving an e-notice whenever there’s a new blog post. As indicated in the “About” section (see righthand column), this whole thing started from a very small (like, oh, two, sometimes three, folks) email list, which then grew, then grew some more. One of many miraculous things about electronic communication is that there’s always room for one more.
Here—with a shout-out to my brother Don, with whom (at the age of 15) I saw the MC5 in Chicago’s Lincoln Park during the 1968 Democratic Convention (when nobody outside the Detroit/Ann Arbor area [including us] knew who they were)—is an awfully good cover, from what might seem an unlikely source, of one of their “greatest hits.”
Jeff Buckley, “Kick Out The Jams,” live, Chicago, 1995
And here, courtesy, apparently, of the Department of Defense, is (silent) footage of the scene in Lincoln Park on August 25, 1968—the day the MC5 (who appear here fleetingly) played.
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lagniappe
Von Freeman, the now-86-year-old tenor saxophonist—he still sounds terrific—toward the end of his Chicago Jazz Festival set yesterday afternoon in Grant Park, after introducing two young musicians: “I was that age once—I just don’t remember when.”
Here—with a shout-out to my nephew Chris Balmes (who sent me this news [and frequently seems to display astonishingly good taste for one so young])—is gospel singer Marie Knight, who died this week in New York at the age of 89.
“Up Above My Head” (she sang on Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s 1947 “hit” recording)
Just finished Zeitoun, Dave Eggers’ intimate look at New Orleans just before, during, and after Katrina, through the eyes of one man and his family, which recently got a rave in the New York Times Book Review. Four-word review: moves quickly, deeply moving.
*****
Recently read Colm Toibin’s novel Brooklyn, which tells the story of a young woman who, in the 1950s, emigrates, reluctantly, from Ireland to America. One of the quietest novels—I mean that as a compliment—I’ve ever read. (Novelist Claire Messud’s thoughtful essay-review in the New York Review of Books is well worth reading.)
music clip of the day 