Repeat them often enough and words lose their literal shapes, dissolving into pure feeling.
Heavenly Gospel Singers, “I Stepped in the Water One Day,” live, St. James Missionary Baptist Church, Canton, Mississippi, 1978
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lagniappe
reading table
. . . Heaven have mercy on us all—Presbyterians and Pagans alike—for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly needing mending.
—Herman Melville (1819-1891), Moby-Dick
alone
Soundtrack to a dream I wish I’d had last night.
Tristan Murail (1947-), “Comme un oeil suspendu et poli par le songe . . .”; Mireia Vendrell, piano, live
summer in the city
Pitchfork Music Festival, Chicago (Union Park), July 19-21
Run The Jewels (El-P & Killer Mike), “36” Chain”
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Swans, “Oxygen”
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Savages, “She Will”
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lagniappe
found words
More are surviving crash landings
—front page headline, USA Today, 8/9/13
There are all kinds of blues, too.
Joe McPhee Survival Unit 3 (JM, alto saxophone; Fred Lonberg-Holm, cello; Michael Zerang, drums), live, London, 2010
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lagniappe
reading table
Dream Song 40
By John Berryman (1914-1972)I’m scared a lonely. Never see my son,
easy be not to see anyone,
combers out to sea
know they’re goin somewhere but not me.
Got a little poison, got a little gun,
I’m scared a lonely.I’m scared a only one thing, which is me,
from othering I don’t take nothin, see,
for any hound dog’s sake.
But this is where I livin, where I rake
my leaves and cop my promise, this’ where we
cry oursel’s awake.Wishin was dyin but I gotta make
it all this way to that bed on these feet
where peoples said to meet.
Maybe but even if I see my son
forever never, get back on the take,
free, black & forty-one.
Back in the ’70s, when I was in college, I heard John Berryman read his poetry, an experience that opened my ears and mind in all kinds of ways. He moved so swiftly, and gracefully, from one register to another, leaping back and forth between high and low as if nothing could be more natural. Today he joins a select group—tenor saxophonist Von Freeman, trumpeter Lester Bowie, singer Dorothy Love Coates, poets Wislawa Szymborska and William Bronk—in the MCOTD Hall of Fame.
There are all kinds of music.
Silence (excerpt), 2012
Silence tells the story of a field recordist (played by Eoghan Mac Giolla Bhríde, also co-writer of the film with director Pat Collins) who returns to his native Ireland after 15 years living in Berlin, spending his days wandering through north west Ireland and recording the soundscapes.
—Wire
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lagniappe
reading table
As I grow to understand life less and less, I learn to love it more and more.
—Jules Renard (1864-1910)
More sounds from the shadows.
Evan Parker (tenor saxophone) and Ned Rothenberg (alto saxophone), live, Silver Spring, Md. (Sonic Circuits Festival of Experimental Music), 2009
If this dialogue were translated into English, how would it read?
old school
Stevie Wonder, live (TV show), Germany, 1974
It doesn’t take long, sometimes, to realize how strong something is. With this, for instance, I could listen all day, happily, to a loop of the first ninety seconds.
Offstage she may be quiet, even shy. Onstage? That’s a different story: she’s filled with the Spirit.
Chicago Mass Choir (feat. Pam Crawford), “He’s Gonna Work It Out”
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lagniappe
radio
Today, his 112th birthday, it’s all Louis Armstrong all day at WKCR-FM (Columbia University).
alone
John Cage (1912-1992), Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano (1946-1948); Louis Goldstein, piano, live, Winston-Salem, N.C. (Reynolda House Museum of American Art), 1982
What I love about this performance is its directness. He doesn’t treat these pieces as arty exotica. He plays them as simply and naturally, as musically, as one might play Bach, or Mozart, or Chopin.
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
I remember loving sound before I ever took a music lesson. And so we make our lives by what we love.
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A sound does not view itself as thought, as ought, as needing another sound for its elucidation, as etc.; it has not time for any consideration–it is occupied with the performance of its characteristics: before it has died away it must have made perfectly exact its frequency, its loudness, its length, its overtone structure, the precise morphology of these and of itself.
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They say, “you mean it’s just sounds?” thinking that for something to just be a sound is to be useless, whereas I love sounds just as they are, and I have no need for them to be anything more than what they are. I don’t want them to be psychological. I don’t want a sound to pretend that it’s a bucket or that it’s president or that it’s in love with another sound. I just want it to be a sound.
old school
James Brown and The Famous Flames, “Out of Sight”
Live (T.A.M.I. Show), 1964
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lagniappe
reading table
Here’s a cheery thought for the end of the week.
In life, there are no happy endings.
music clip of the day 