Here, to wrap up this festival, is one of the best performances by Otis Rush I’ve ever heard (which makes it one of the best blues performances I’ve ever heard [which makes it, etc.]).
Otis Rush (with Fred Below, drums), “I Can’t Quit You Baby,” live, Germany, 1966
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I was staying with my sister and messing around with the guitar every day for my own amusement. Then she took me around and introduced me to Muddy Waters, Jimmy Rogers, Little Walter, and the first time I saw that onstage, it inspired me to play. I thought that was the world.—Otis Rush
“Ships On The Ocean” (with Buddy Guy, guitar), live, Chicago (Theresa’s Lounge, 48th & Indiana), mid-1970s
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“Hoodoo Man Blues” (with Otis Rush, guitar; Fred Below, drums), live, Germany, 1966
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After Buddy [Guy] and Junior [Wells] did their show in Frankfurt [during a 1970 European tour opening for the Rolling Stones], Mick Jagger came into the dressing room and started to talk to Junior about a certain harmonica technique. First, Mick played for Junior, who listened carefully. Then, Junior pointed to his head and told Mick that the blues sound Mick was looking for was something he had to feel in his mind. It wasn’t just a matter of playing the instrument. He had to understand what the blues experience was all about and then bring it forth on his own.—Dick Waterman, Between Midnight And Day (2003).
Muddy Waters (with James Cotton, harmonica; Otis Spann, piano; Pat Hare, guitar; Andrew Stevenson, bass; Francis Clay, drums), “Got My Mojo Working,” live, Newport Jazz Festival, 1960
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Soon after he got to Chicago, Muddy [Waters] began playing the blues for his friends in relaxed moments, and that led to work playing at rent parties, for small tips and all the whiskey he could drink. ‘You know,’ he said, refilling his glass with champagne, ‘I wanted to go to Chicago in the late thirties, ’cause Robert Nighthawk came to see me and said he was goin’ and get a record. He says, you go along and you might get on with me. I thought, oh, man, this cat is just jivin’, he ain’t goin’ to Chicago. I thought goin’ to Chicago was like goin’ out of the world. Finally he split, and the next time I heard he had a record out. So I started asking some of my friends that had went to Chicago, Can I make it with my guitar? ‘Naww, they don’t listen to that kind of old blues you’re doin’ now, don’t nobody listen to that, not in Chicago. So when I finally come to Chicago, the same person that told me that . . . Dan’s wife, my sister, that’s the same person I started playin’ every Saturday night for, at the rent party in her apartment. Peoples is awful funny.’ He chuckled, savoring the irony. ‘So I started playing for these rent parties, and then I run into Blue Smitty and Jimmy Rogers and we got somethin’ goin’ on. We started playing little neighborhood bars on the West Side, five nights a week, five dollars a night. It wasn’t no big money, but we’s doin’ it.’ They were doing it, all right; they were creating modern blues and laying the groundwork for rock and roll.—Robert Palmer, Deep Blues (1981)
Much has been written about gospel’s influence on popular music. What’s sometimes overlooked is that influence traveled in the other direction, too. Take this song, for instance: a big hit in gospel circles, it borrows heavily from an old pop song, “That Lucky Old Sun” (1949).
Cassietta George, “Walk Around Heaven All Day” (begins at 3:45; CG, who wrote the lyrics, sang lead on the Caravans’ 1964 recording), preceded by “I Must Tell Jesus,” live
If I were a piece of music (as Barbara Walters might put it), here’s the one I’d want to be (today, anyway): deceptively simple, continually (albeit subtly) changing, perpetually fresh.
Morton Feldman, Triadic Memories, excerpt (1981)/Aki Takahashi, piano
(Feldman’s late piano pieces, including this one, accompany more of my daily life than any other music. Among other things, they work wonders when sleep won’t come [I mean that as a compliment]: slip the CD into the bedside Bose player, turn the volume down, hit the repeat button, and drift.)
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[Triadic Memories is] Feldman’s greatest piano piece, and thus one of the great piano works of the 20th century.—Kyle Gann
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Some modernist composers such as Stockhausen want to embrace everything in their music. Others work by exclusion, ruthlessly paring their music down until only the essential core remains. The American composer Morton Feldman, who died in 1987 aged 61, was perhaps the most ruthless of all these great renouncers. He didn’t want lyricism or complication or any of the storm and stress and conflict that go with ‘expression.’ What he wanted was to ‘tint the air’ with gentle sounds, revealed in slowly changing patterns.—Ivan Hewitt
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Even if you’re not up for discerning the grand construction in Feldman’s meditative, pared-down music, its medicinal value is so strong that, while I was recovering from surgery, it worked as well as Motrin—or the Mozart piano concertos I have used after a wisdom-teeth extraction. Think of what Feldman could do for hangovers.—David Patrick Stearns
No matter how many years I listen to music, there’s still nothing like the thrill of hearing, for the first time, something that grabs you by the collar—as this did last night—and doesn’t let go.
Alfred Schnittke (1934-1998), Concerto for Piano and Strings (1979)/Evgeny Svetlanov, piano, Sinfonie Orchester der USSR
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
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In the Christian’s automobile, no need to worry about a parking space. Amen![The Dixie Hummingbirds, 1/10/10]
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I want you to know how much I enjoy the music posts. I learn a lot about many people I really don’t know, and those that I do make for great listening again.
[T]he only time I’ve ever seen Monk act like a little boy and looking up to somebody [was in the presence of Duke Ellington]. That was his idol.—Joe Termini (quoted in Robin D. G. Kelley, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original [2009])
I began listening to this piano sonata many years ago, after discovering, at our local library, a recording of it by Claudio Arrau, which I proceeded to check out over and over again (until I finally bought it). Since then I’ve also heard recordings by Artur Schnabel and Wilhelm Kempff and Solomon and Andras Schiff, as well as this one (thanks to my brother-in-law John, who gave it to me as a present years ago). As with any masterpiece, there’s no such thing as a “definitive” performance; it’s inexhaustible. Different performances reveal different dimensions. Listen to the way the dark, subdued second movement opens up to the joyous third movement: it’s one of the most hopeful passages of music I know—one I never tire of hearing.
Beethoven, Piano Sonata No. 21 in C major, Op. 53 (“Waldstein”)/Emil Gilels, piano (1972)
Part 1 (beginning of 1st Movement)
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Part 2 (end of 1st Movement and 2nd Movement [begins at 2:41])
music clip of the day 