Here, at Luther Vandross’s funeral, Stevie testifies.
Stevie Wonder, “I Won’t Complain,” live, New York (The Riverside Church), 2005
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For as long as you’ve got a harp in your heart, God’s got a hymn for your hurt. And as long as you’ve got a hymn, then you’ve got hope.—Maurice O. Wallace (funeral sermon, quoted in Karla FC Holloway, Passed On: African American Mourning Stories [2002])
No matter where you are, this landscape is just around the corner.
John Cage (1912-1992), “In a Landscape” (1948)/Stephen Drury, piano
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Music is a means of rapid transportation.
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What I’m proposing, to myself and other people, is what I often call the tourist attitude—that you act as though you’ve never been there before. So that you’re not supposed to know anything about it. If you really get down to brass tacks, we have never been anywhere before.
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As far as consistency of thought goes, I prefer inconsistency.
—John Cage
Here the World Saxophone Quartet brings it all back home, performing in the high school gymnasium in Lovejoy (AKA Brooklyn), Illinois, a little town (with an interesting history) near St. Louis, where baritone sax player Hamiet Bluiett, now in his 60s, grew up. (If you have time for only one of these clips, check out Part 3, where everyone, including the kids, gets down with the O’Jays’ “For The Love Of Money.”)
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
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For another take on the first of these pieces (“Hattie Wall”)—this one featuring Bill T. Jones, dancer/choreographer extraodinaire—go here.
This ain’t no duke. No earl. No prince. This is the (once and forever) King of Zydeco.
Clifton Chenier, “I’m A Hog For You,” live, New Orleans (New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival), 1978
More:
Clifton Chenier, “Josephine Par Se Ma Femme”
(Here’s a birthday shout-out to my brother Doug [a fan of this New Orleans festival].)
Delicacy and drive: they aren’t often found in equal measure. They are here.
Don Pullen & the African-Brazilian Connection, “El Matador,” live, Japan, 1992
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All the music you’ve ever heard in your life is somewhere in your head.—Don Pullen
If you want to stay right where you are, don’t even bother with this clip. But if, instead, you’d like to go somewhere you may never have been before, well, this might be just the ticket.
Gyorgy Ligeti (1923-2006), Three Etudes, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, piano
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I listen to all kinds of music—new music, old music, music of my colleagues, everything.—Gyorgy Ligeti (whose influences included not only the usual suspects [Chopin, Debussy, et al.] but also Thelonious Monk and Bill Evans and the Rainforest Pygmies and fractal geometry)
The Cubs couldn’t seem to make up their minds this season. Were they—as often seemed to be the case—god-awful? Or, taking the longer view, were they simply mediocre? Oh, well. Instead of dwelling on this dismal season, let’s remember one of the brightest spots in Chicago baseball history. Here’s the finest musician ever to work between the foul lines: blues and boogie-woogie piano player Jimmy Yancey, who, for 25 years (1925-50), was a White Sox groundskeeper.
Jimmy Yancey, “Rolling the Stone” (1939)
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“I can’t believe the season is over—but it is.”—WGN Radio Cubs broadcaster Pat Hughes, after yesterday’s game (a loss to Arizona, 5-2)
On July 22, 1955, Sam Cooke took the stage at Los Angeles’s Shrine Auditorium. He was 24 years old. He sang that day with the Soul Stirrers, the gospel group he joined—as the new lead singer—when he was 19.
Sam Cooke with the Soul Stirrers, “Nearer My God To Thee,” live, 1955, Los Angeles
More:
Sam Cooke with the Soul Stirrers, “Be With Me Jesus,” live, 1955, Los Angeles
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Sam [Cooke] was shaped in large measure by the Soul Stirrers during their rehearsals. He reacted to them as they pushed him, like a good rhythm section inspires an instrumentalist.—Art Rupe (in Peter Guralnick, Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke [2005])
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Of course, Sam did his best work in gospel. How you gonna take somebody who loves what he’s doing and turn him around and put him in something unfamiliar and he’s gonna be as free and natural as he was at home?—Dorothy Love Coates (in Anthony Heilbut, The Gospel Sound: Good News and Bad Times [1971])
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reading table
How astonishing to see, yesterday, for the first time, a film snippet (the only known to exist) of Anne Frank.
This apparently dates from 1941, when Anne was 13. The couple walking out of the building are newlyweds—the woman’s a neighbor. That’s Anne leaning out the window.
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Yesterday I also heard this episode of the radio show “This American Life,” which features people whose lives were changed by books.
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Also yesterday (big day), while driving around doing this and that, I heard bits and pieces of this interview with the great Nick Hornby (author of, among other things, High Fidelity).
more New Orleans drumming
Here, following up on Wednesday’s post, are two New Orleans drummers who embrace the Muhammad Ali aesthetic: float like a butterfly (0:56-1:58, etc.), sting like a bee (1:59, etc.).
Dwayne Williams and Jason Slack, live (before a gig), Hudson, New York
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You could always tell a New Orleans drummer the minute you heard him play his bass drum because he’d have that parade beat connotation.—Earl Palmer
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From yesterday’s Cubs radio broadcast (during a truly miserable loss—12-3 to Arizona—in a season that’s been full of ’em), here’s Pat Hughes on partner Ron Santo’s career as a base-stealer: “35 stolen bases, 41 times caught stealing: that’s sort of a risky proposition—but I bet the umpires missed a lot of calls.”
Who says white folks can’t dance?
Del Shannon, “Runaway,” TV Performance
music clip of the day 