April | 2012 | music clip of the day

Saturday, 4/21/12

The Wailers, live, Los Angeles, 1973*

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lagniappe

musical thoughts

Music comes up more often in my work as a criminal defense lawyer than you might think. Recently I devoted a lot of time to a case involving a Jamaican guy, a sweet-tempered 64-year-old Rasta, who was charged with a federal immigration offense. It helped a lot, early in our relationship, to be able to talk about seeing Bob Marley in the mid-70s at a small Chicago club (Quiet Knight). And when I’d see him at the jail, talking about music (Marley, Sugar Minott, Gregory Isaacs, et al.) gave us a way to leave behind, if only briefly, the concrete walls and the locked doors and the glass window separating us. (At his sentencing hearing earlier this week, the judge, rejecting the prosecutor’s call for a minimum of 70 months’ incarceration, gave him 30 months, meaning, with credit for time served and “good time,” he’ll do less than a year.)

*****

*In 1974, following the departure of Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer (AKA Bunny Livingston), the band became known as Bob Marley and the Wailers.

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2012

Friday, 4/20/12

passings

Levon Helm, drummer, singer, songwriter, actor, etc.
May 26, 1940-April 19, 2012

Live, 2/12, Woodstock, NY (Levon’s home)

“Ophelia”

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“The Weight”

*****

“When I Go Away,” recording (Electric Dirt, 2009)

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lagniappe

Levon Helm will always hold a special place in my heart. He was as great of an actor as a musician. For me watching him play the role of my daddy in Coal Miner’s Daughter is a memory I will always treasure.

—Loretta Lynn

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When I heard The Band’s Music from Big Pink, their music changed my life. And Levon was a big part of that band. Nigel Olson, my drummer, will tell you that every drummer that heard him was influenced by him. He was the greatest drummer and a wonderful singer and just a part of my life that was magical. They once flew down to see me in Philadelphia and I couldn’t believe it. They were one of the greatest bands of all time. They really changed the face of music when their records came out. I had no idea he was sick so I’m very dismayed and shocked that he died so quickly. But now my son [Zachary Jackson Levon Furnish-John] has his name.

—Elton John

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He was my bosom buddy friend to the end, one of the last true great spirits of my or any other generation. This is just so sad to talk about. I still can remember the first day I met him and the last day I saw him. We go back pretty far and had been through some trials together. I’m going to miss him, as I’m sure a whole lot of others will too.

—Bob Dylan

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2012

Thursday, 4/19/12

This guy’s a rare bird. Long a respected concert pianist, he’s also become a notable writer, appearing recently in the New Yorker and the New York Times Sunday Book Review.

Jeremy Denk, piano
Charles Ives, Concord Sonata (excerpt [“The Alcotts”])
Live, New York, 2012

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lagniappe

reading table

My Ives addiction started one summer at music camp, at Mount Holyoke College. I was twenty and learning his Piano Trio. There’s an astounding moment in the Trio where the pianist goes off into a blur of sweet and sour notes around a B-flat-major chord. I knew the moment was important, but I wondered, was my sound too vague or too clear? (A recurring interpretative problem in Ives is discovering the ideal amount of muddle.) I was also puzzled about where this phrase was going. I’d been taught that phrases were supposed to go somewhere, yet this musical moment seemed serenely determined to wander nowhere.

—Jeremy Denk, “Flight of the Concord,” New Yorker, 2/6/12

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yesterday

After posting the Peter Brötzmann clip and the AOL headlines, I drove a hundred miles to see a client serving a life sentence at the Pontiac Correctional Center, then stopped at a nearby restaurant for a mid-afternoon lunch, where I overheard the cook ask a patron: “Did you see where that guy was killed by a swan?”

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2012

Wednesday, 4/18/12

Peter Brötzmann, reed player, composer, bandleader
German Blues, performances 1999-2002, interview 2000

You can have the blues even if you’re German . . .

—Peter Brötzmann

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lagniappe

found words: AOL Headlines

Autistic Cheerleader Inspires Her Squad

*****

Kayaker Drowns After Swan Attack

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2012

Tuesday, 4/17/12

Happy (70th) Birthday, Han!

Han Bennink, drummer, percussionist, visual artist, etc.

Han Bennink (drums) & Guus Janssen (piano), “One Bar”
Live, Japan (Chiba), 2010

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lagniappe

You’ve got to hand it to WKCR-FM. There are a few stations, here and there, that might spin a track or two in honor of the Dutch drummer’s 70th birthday. Somebody might even give him an hour or two. But who, other than a station deeply in tune with Bennink’s own inspired lunacy, would stage a five-day marathon?

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2012

Monday, 4/16/12

two takes

“Honky Tonk Man” (J. Horton, et al.)

Dwight Yoakam
Live, mid-1980s

*****

Johnny Horton
Recording (Billboard Hot Country Singles, #9), 1956

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lagniappe

reading table

Hank Williams . . . was essentially the first rock star. He was a hillbilly singer, but he was a rock star. As Chet Atkins said, the year that Elvis hit, it ruined country music. Because they had rural America and southern America’s teenage audience. And then they couldn’t keep them. Elvis had changed everything.

***

I was a Monkees kid. For a ten-year-old like myself, the Monkees were a cultural access point that the Beatles weren’t. I was an oldest kid, teaching myself, and the Beatles were a bit beyond my grasp. Television delivers the Monkees to me in a different way; A Hard Day’s Night was not on TV in 1965. . . . The Monkees . . . came inside my living room, and there was a familiarity that allowed me to really understand what this new thing was. I had the first two Monkees albums, and I couldn’t have gotten a better education, retrospectively, in songwriting, when you think about it, than listening to Neil Diamond, Carole King, Boyce and Hart compositions. The world in two-and-a half to three minutes.

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I had the jeans, the boots . . . There was a whole Hud element to that cowboy culture that I knew that could be introduced, the Route 66 Americana, not the Nashville Dixie country. Beyond James Dean, beyond Giant. This Route 66 Corvette cowboy. So let’s just call it that—it’s beyond Cadillac Cowboy. It’s Corvette cowboy.

—Dwight Yoakam (in Don McLeese, Dwight Yoakam: A Thousand Miles From Nowhere [2012])

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2012

Sunday, 4/15/12

Deep River Choir, Amiri Baraka (spoken words), David Murray (tenor saxophone), “Oh Freedom,” live

One reason this works so well is that none of the participants—not the singers, not Amiri Baraka, not David Murray—tries to take the performance over. How refreshing, and inspiring, in an age whose motto seems to be “look at me,” to come across folks so intent on serving—not dominating—a performance.

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2012

Saturday, 4/14/12

The keyboard is the stage on which the fingers dance.

Sviatoslav Richter, piano
TV performance (CBC, Toronto),* 1964

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lagniappe

reading table

even grass and vines
don’t part willingly . . .
lantern for the dead

—Kobayashi Issa, 1822 (translated from Japanese by David G. Lanoue)

*****

*Johannes Brahms, Intermezzo in E Minor, Op. 116, No. 5
Sergei Prokofiev, Sonata No. 2 in D Minor, Op. 14
Maurice Ravel, Jeux d’eau, Alborada del gracioso