music clip of the day

jazz/blues/rock/classical/gospel/more
2011

Sunday, 7/17/11

The right music, heard at the right moment, can change your whole day.

The Staple Singers, “I’m Coming Home” (Vee-Jay), 1959

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lagniappe

Happy Birthday, Lionel!

Today trumpet player Lionel Ferbos, who was born when William Howard Taft was president and tonight can be heard at New Orleans’ Palm Court Jazz Cafe, turns 100.

The Lionel Ferbos Band, “When You’re Smiling”
Live, New Orleans (Norwegian Seamen’s Church), 8/28/09

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For some years, trumpeter Lionel Ferbos has been touted as the oldest active jazz musician in New Orleans. Come this weekend, he’ll qualify for another honorific: The only active jazz musician in New Orleans whose age has crossed into triple digits.

lionel ferbos 2011 portrait.jpgJohn McCusker / The Times-Picayune
Lionel Ferbos, photographed in May 2011.

Ferbos first learned trumpet in 1926, at age 15, inspired by seeing Phil Spitalny and his All-Girl Orchestra at the Orpheum Theater. He played in 1930s bands led by Captain John Handy and Walter “Fats” Pichon. He worked on a crew digging a City Park lagoon before getting hired for a Depression-era Works Progress Administration band, making around $13 a week.

Sheetmetal work eventually paid the bills, even as he continued to moonlight as a musician. He joined Lars Edegran’s New Orleans Ragtime Orchestra in the early 1970s, which toured in Europe, and in 1979 played trumpet and sang in the touring musical “One Mo’ Time.” He has maintained a regular gig at the Palm Court Jazz Cafe on Decatur Street for more than two decades.

—Keith Spera, The Times-Picayune, 7/13/11

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2011

Saturday, 7/16/11

what’s new
(an occasional series)

James Blake, “The Wilhelm Scream,” Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, 7/14/11

Vodpod videos no longer available.

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 favorites
(an occasional series)
Hearing JB brought this MCOTD fave to mind (originally posted 11/23/09).

Here’s Arthur Russell, the “seminal avant-garde composer, singer-songwriter, cellist and disco producer” who died in 1992 at the age of 40 (of AIDS-related complications)  and is the subject of both a recent documentary, Wild Combination, and a new book, Hold On To Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-1992. 

Arthur Russell

“Get Around To It”

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“You And Me Both”

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“This Is How We Walk on the Moon”

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“That’s Us/Wild Combination”

(Yeah, the fact that I’m posting four tracks by this guy shows how much his music, which I just encountered recently, has been getting under my skin.)

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[Russell’s] various distinctions—folkie, art-music songwriter and improviser, dance-club maven—seem incoherent until you hear several of his records. When musicians get angry about being categorized by critics, I usually feel frustrated: readers, after all, want to know what the record sounds like. With Russell, I take the musicians’ angle. Just listen to it and you’ll understand.

—Ben Ratliff, “The Many Faces, and Grooves, of Arthur Russell,” New York Times, 2/29/04

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For Arthur, there was no cachet to being eclectic. Rather, he played across genre because it would have required a colossal and entirely counterproductive effort on his part to stick to one sound. . . . Drifting into an ethereal, gravity-defying zone, Arthur had come to embody the interconnectivity of music.

—Tim Lawrence, Hold On To Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-1992 (2009).

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