My 18-year-old son Luke, who was home from college over the weekend, played me this track yesterday—something by another college guy, 21 years old and a senior at Duke, who leaves campus every weekend to do shows all over the country. We were driving into the city and Luke, who’d burned this on a CD, slid the disc into the dashboard player. “I love this song,” he said. “It makes me feel good inside. It’s the beat. And his voice is so good.”
Mike Posner (with Big Sean), “Speed of Sound” (2009)
The most difficult part of the [music] business today is deciding whether I should commit the dollars to signing an unknown or wait until the artist has a hit. Then there are guys like Mike Posner. I would bet on him for the future and today.—Marty Bandier, the 68-year-old chief executive of Sony/ATV Music Publishing
[Growing up in the Mississippi Delta, C. L. Franklin] listened to all sorts of music. Even though his family was very poor, they owned a stand up Victrola. He loved listening to Roosevelt Sykes, and he listened to other blues singers. He also listened to a preacher out of Atlanta, J. M. Gates, who ultimately recorded an enormous number of three minute sermons in the twenties and thirties. . . .
The social pattern surrounding the use of the Victrola was very interesting. It was not unusual for the people who didn’t own a Victrola to buy the records and bring them to the home of a friend who did. It became another way of socializing. Even in very strict religious households, children were allowed to listen to music as long as they didn’t dance or cross their legs. They listened to the blues as well as recorded hymns and sermons. B.B. King tells the story about how, as a child, there was no distinction between Saturday night and Sunday morning—that the same people who were at the juke joints were in church pews on Sunday morning. . . .
King said that whenever he was in Detroit, no matter how late he was up on Saturday night playing a gig, he was in the first row at New Bethel Baptist—C. L. Franklin’s church—at 10:45 Sunday morning. He called Reverend Franklin ‘my main preacher.’—Nick Salvatore(author of Singing in a Strange Land: C. L. Franklin, the Black Church, and the Transformation of America [2005])
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reading table
The “Chicago” issue of Granta arrived in the mail this week, and it looks awfully promising. Let’s see: Don DeLillo (on Nelson Algren), Aleksander Hemon (on [I think] playing soccer in the city’s parks), Thom Jones (on working at a General Mills factory in West Chicago), Richard Powers (on the Great Flood of 1992), etc. Oh, and there are some stunning photos, too—not of the city’s grand historic architecture, but of Cabrini Green and the Robert Taylor Homes and the Henry Horner Homes. (A shout-out to my brother Don for tipping me off to this issue.)
To almost everyone’s surprise but his own, he [Morton Feldman] turned out to be one of the major composers of the twentieth century, a sovereign artist who opened up vast, quiet, agonizingly beautiful worlds of sound . . . . In the noisiest century in history, Feldman chose to be glacially slow and snowily soft.—Alex Ross
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Earlier in my life there seemed to be unlimited possibilities, but my mind was closed. Now, years later and with an open mind, possibilities no longer interest me. I seem content to be continually rearranging the same furniture in the same room.—Morton Feldman
Speaking of mood-brightening, how nice to hear this week, via email, from a couple regular reader/listeners:
—“ever since J turned me on to your blog . . . I have been in love with it. . . . It is a fantastic way to start the day.”
—“I just wanted to let you know how much I enjoyed the clips of Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk—two of my absolute favorite musicians of all time. Keep up the great work, I’m amazed that you can keep to the daily regimen of posting. Your readers are the beneficiaries. Keep it up and a big thank you.”
For much of his life he wrestled with inner demons. Hospitalized repeatedly, he was treated with ECT (electroshock). But when he was seated at the piano, his fingers moved across the keyboard with the grace and elegance of a ballet dancer.
He was so expressive, such emotion flowed out of him! There are different kinds of emotion: there is the easy, superficial kind, and there is another kind, that doesn’t make you laugh or cry, that doesn’t make you feel anything but a sense of sheer perfection. It’s a feeling we sometimes get with Beethoven. . . . It’s not that it’s beautiful in the sense of pretty or brilliant, it’s something else, something much deeper. . . . If I had to choose one single musician for his artistic integrity, for the grandeur of his work, it would be Bud Powell. He was in a class by himself.—Bill Evans (in Francis Paudras, Dance of the Infidels: A Portrait of Bud Powell[1986])
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Sonny Rollins on Bud Powell
(The way Sonny, trying to describe Bud’s playing, shakes his head—first at around 1:35, then again at around 3:30—says more than any words could.)
If you were a musician, could anything be worse than to find, one day, that unlike the day before, and the day before that, and all the other days you could remember, you were no longer able to play your instrument? That’s what happened, in 1958, to this man, the great British classical pianist Solomon Cutner (known professionally simply as Solomon). Then 56 years old and at the height of his career, he suffered a stroke. It left his right arm paralyzed, silencing him for the rest of his life, which lasted another 32 years.
Beethoven, Piano Sonata No. 23 in F minor (“Appassionata” [1804])/Solomon, piano
1st Movement
2nd Movement
3rd Movement
lagniappe
Andras Schiff on Beethoven’s piano sonatas
In London a couple years ago, pianist Andras Schiff explored Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas in a series of much-acclaimed lecture-recitals, which can be heard here.
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Thelonious Monk and Beethoven, Bach, Chopin, et al.
Thelonious Monk possessed an impressive knowledge of, and appreciation for, Western classical music, not to mention an encyclopedic knowledge of hymns and gospel music, American popular songs, and a variety of obscure art songs that defy easy categorization. For him, it was all music. Once in 1966, a phalanx of reporters in Helsinki pressed Monk about his thoughts on classical music and whether or not jazz and classical can come together. His drummer, Ben Riley, watched the conversation unfold: ‘Everyone wanted him to answer, give some type of definition between classical music and jazz . . . So he says, ‘Two is one,’ and that stopped the whole room. No one else said anything else.’ Two is one, indeed. Monk loved Frédéric Chopin, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Beethoven, and Bach, and like many of his peers of the bebop generation, he took an interest in Igor Stravinsky.—Robin D. G. Kelley, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (2009)
Thelonious Monk, “Epistrophy,” live (TV broadcast), Paris, 1966
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Thelonoius Monk, “’Round Midnight,” live (TV broadcast)
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You can tell a lot about Monk’s music—about the centrality of dance, about the interplay between melody and rhythm, about the way a melody’s irregular accents override the pulse (making the dance melodic)—just by watching, in the second performance, the way his right foot moves.
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lagniappe
He played each note as though astonished by the previous one, as though every touch of his fingers on the keyboard was correcting an error and this touch in turn became an error to be corrected and so the tune never quite ended up the way it was meant to be.
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You had to see Monk to hear his music properly. The most important instrument in the group—whatever the format—was his body.
—Geoff Dyer, But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz (1996)
Aretha didn’t have to wait until she was grown to be great. She was great when she was 14.
Aretha Franklin (at 14, vocal and piano), “Precious Lord,” live, Detroit (New Bethel Baptist Church, where her father, Rev. C. L. Franklin, was pastor), 1956
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lagniappe
reading table
The film rights to Zeitoun, mentioned a while back, have been acquired by Jonathan Demme, who’s going to make an animated movie of it.
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I’m nearing the end of Billy Sothern’s Down in New Orleans: Reflections from a Drowned City. It’s a mixed bag. Some sections are weighed down by political observations that quickly become predictable. But others are alive with the sights and sounds and smells of the streets.
music clip of the day 