An attentive reader/listener—someone I’ve listened to music with for over fifty years (which reduces the pool of possible correspondents to, uh, one)—wrote yesterday to tell me about an amazing bargain: a recording of Morton Feldman’s For Bunita Marcus (last mentioned here, previously featured here) that’s available, in MP3 format, for 89¢.
Sonny Rollins (with Jim Hall, guitar; Bob Crenshaw, bass; Ben Riley, drums), live (TV broadcast), 1962
Part 1 (“The Bridge”)
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Part 2 (“God Bless the Child”)
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Part 3 (“If Ever I Would Leave You”)
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lagniappe
The great tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollinsturns 80 on Tuesday, awash in more than the usual veneration. The MacDowell Colony last month awarded him its Edward MacDowell Medal. This week Abrams is publishing “Saxophone Colossus: A Portrait of Sonny Rollins,” a handsome art book featuring photographs by John Abbott, with an essay by Bob Blumenthal. And Friday night Mr. Rollins will walk onstage at the Beacon Theater.
It won’t be just another Sonny Rollins concert, if there even is such a thing. In addition to his working band, Mr. Rollins has reached out to several guests. The guitarist Jim Hall is the most eagerly anticipated: at 79, he is indisputable jazz royalty himself, and a trusted partner from one of the most celebrated stretches of Mr. Rollins’s career. (Consult the ageless 1962 album “The Bridge.”) Mr. Hall sat in with Mr. Rollins in New England one night this summer. Before that they hadn’t played together since 1991, in a Carnegie Hall concert that also included the gifted young trumpeter Roy Hargrove, now 40, who will rejoin them here.
—Nate Chinen, New York Times, 9/1/10
*****
Interview (2009) (encountering W.E.B. DuBois as a child in Harlem, playing with Bud Powell at nineteen, using drugs, studying yoga in India, aging, etc.)
Last night I heard, for the first time, one of the most beautiful recordings of piano music I’ve ever encountered—a new recording of Morton Feldman’s For Bunita Marcus by Louis Goldstein, which can be heard, in its entirety, in the second half of an archived program of Alternating Currents, a weekly radio show out of Milwaukee. This performance lasts about 70 minutes. Coming out of it, I felt different than I did going in: lighter, clearer, awash in shimmering overtones.
While at the Art Institute the other day, I wandered into a small room of paintings by this guy—who, in his early 20s (in the 1950s), moved to New York to study music with Lennie Tristano.
Robert Ryman, from The Elliot Room (Charter Series), 1985-87
Earl Hines, Bud Powell, this guy, Bill Evans, Cecil Taylor, maybe one or two others: they don’t just play the piano; they hear the music—and the instrument—in a new way.
Lennie Tristano, “You Don’t Know What Love Is,” live, Copenhagen, 1965
music clip of the day 
