A world without drums?
What would it sound like?
Rashied Ali, drummer, July 1, 1933-August 12, 2009
Rashied Ali Quintet (RA, drums; Joris Teepe, bass; Greg Murphy, piano; Lawrence Clark, tenor saxophone; Josh Evans, trumpet), live, Europe, 2008
#1
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#2A
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#2B
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#2C
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Sometimes it takes years—decades even—before you’re really able to hear somebody’s music. The other day, for instance, I put on a CD by this guy, a jazz pianist and composer whose music, which I first encountered 20 or 30 years ago, I’d admired more than enjoyed. I put this on expecting to do some work while it played in the background. But it refused to cooperate. Instead of staying put, it jumped out of the speakers, grabbed me, wouldn’t let go. No work got done.
Herbie Nichols, pianist, composer
January 3, 1919-April 12, 1963
“The Third World”
With Al McKibbon, bass; Art Blakey, drums
Blue Note, 1955
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“Applejackin'”
With Al McKibbon, bass; Max Roach, drums
Blue Note, 1955
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“House Party Starting”
With Al McKibbon, bass; Max Roach, drums
Blue Note, 1955
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lagniappe
reading table
Like so many of life’s varieties of experience, the novelty of a diagnosis of malignant cancer has a tendency to wear off.
—Christopher Hitchens, “Unspoken Truths,” Vanity Fair, 6/11
If you were 23 (like my son Alex), this might be your favorite band too.
The Pains of Being Pure At Heart
Live, Chicago (Lincoln Hall), 4/27/11
“Belong”
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“Heart In Your Heartbreak”
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“Everything With You”
Vodpod videos no longer available.What to make of it—a world that includes, each day, countless acts of unspeakable cruelty but also this?
Ernest Bloch, Concerto Grosso No. 2 for string orchestra (1952)
Zuercher Akademie Kammerensemble (Christopher Morris Whiting, conductor)
1st Movement
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2nd Movement
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3rd Movement
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4th Movement
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what’s new
an occasional series
I’ve got a song for you to listen to . . .
—my (23-year-old) son Alex
tUnE-yArDs, “Bizness”
take 1: live, Austin (SXSW), 3/18/11
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take 2: recording & video, 2011
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lagniappe
reading table
John Ashbery, “Interesting People of Newfoundland”
(Skip the gaseous intro; the good stuff starts at 1:02.)
more sounds from the desert
Tinariwen, “Cler Achel,” live, London, 2007
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lagniappe
The desert is where I feel the most comfortable, the most at ease, the most relaxed. It’s also where I’m inspired to create music. To be honest, I don’t like spending too long away from the desert now. Well, that’s to say, I still like touring and travelling and seeing different parts of the globe, but I also like to be at home. And in the desert there are a lot of people who can help us . . . by hiring us a house, by cooking, by playing music with us. We can’t take all those people with us if we go and record in Bamako or Paris.
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Assouf means nostalgia, homesickness. We’ve all felt it a lot, ever since the time of exile began after the first [Tuareg] rebellion in 1963. It’s the feeling that is most important in our music. But it also means other things. It’s like a pain that you can’t see and can’t touch, a pain that lives in your heart. It means loneliness and separation too. When I was living in Algeria and Libya in the 1980s and 1990s I felt assouf a lot, and that’s when I wrote a lot of the songs I play today.
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In the desert, everybody is always moving. That’s our culture. It’s very very hard sometimes to get together, or to stay in the same place. We need our freedom. So Tinariwen has survived because really almost every Tamashek musician in the northeast of Mali or the south of Algeria is part of Tinariwen. And if just two of them come together to sing our songs, that’s enough for it to be Tinariwen. In the past, that’s how our concerts happened. Hassan and Abdallah might perform in Bamako or Abidjan while I was hundreds of miles away in Tamanrasset or someplace. So I know that some people have been frustrated for example when I haven’t been present on stage in America. But that’s how Tinariwen has always been, loose and flexible. Otherwise we could never survive.
joy, n. a source of keen pleasure or delight. E.g., the singing of Eddie Jefferson.
Eddie Jefferson, jazz singer, August 3, 1918-May 9, 1979
Live (with Richie Cole, alto saxophone; John Campbell, piano; Kelly Sill, bass; Joel Spencer, drums), Chicago (Jazz Showcase), 5/6/79 (days later, outside a jazz club in Detroit, he was shot to death)
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lagniappe
art beat: yesterday at the Art Institute of Chicago
Mark Rothko, Untitled (Purple, White, and Red), 1953
No painting has held my gaze more often, or meant more to me, than this. It’s different every time I see it.
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reading table
ROTHKO: Look at the tension between the blocks of color: the dark and the light, the red and the black and the brown. They exist in a state of flux—of movement. They abut each other on the actual canvas, so too do they abut each other in your eye. They ebb and flow and shift, gently pulsating. The more you look at them the more they move . . . They float in space, they breathe . . . Movement, communication, gesture, flux, interaction; letting them work . . . They’re not dead because they’re not static. They move through space if you let them, this movement takes time, so they’re temporal. They require time.
—John Logan, Red (2009)
The Heart asks Pleasure – first –
—Emily Dickinson (588, excerpt)
Steve Reich, Bang on a Can All-Stars (Robert Black, bass; David Cossin, drums; Evan Ziporyn, piano; Bryce Dessner & Derek Johnson, guitars)
Rehearsal, 2×5 (S. Reich), 2009
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lagniappe
art beat: Art Institute of Chicago
A sea of Cezanne’s blues surrounds The Bay of Marselleilles, Seen From L’Estaque (4/18/11).
Here’s what’s on its left.
Paul Cezanne, Madame Cezanne in a Yellow Chair, 1888-90
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Here’s what’s on its right.
Paul Cezanne, The Basket of Apples, c. 1893
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And here’s what’s on the adjacent wall.
Paul Cezanne, Harlequin, 1888-90
(on loan from the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.)
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I still work with difficulty, but I seem to get along. That is the important thing to me. Sensations form the foundation of my work, and they are imperishable, I think. Moreover, I am getting rid of that devil who, as you know, used to stand behind me and forced me at will to “imitate”; he’s not even dangerous any more.
—Paul Cezanne (last letter to his son Paul, dated October 15, 1906, a week before his death; quoted in Ambroise Vollard, Cezanne)
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Art ______ of Chicago
In the department of duh, after decades of going there and decades of listening to them, I’ve just noticed the verbal similarity between the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Ensemble of Chicago.
Happy (89th) Birthday, Mingus!
Charles Mingus, bassist, bandleader, composer
April 22, 1922-January 5, 1979
In celebration of Mingus’s birthday, WKCR-FM (broadcasting from Columbia University) is playing his music all day. We’re celebrating by revisiting some favorite clips.
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Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Miles Davis: so many of the greatest figures in jazz weren’t just great musicians, or composers, or arrangers. They were great bandleaders. As important to their artistic success as anything else was their ability to find, and showcase, players who could make the music come alive—people like Johnny Hodges and Ben Webster and Jimmy Blanton and Lester Young and Freddie Green and Jo Jones and John Coltrane and Bill Evans and Tony Williams.
That small circle of elite bandleaders includes this man. He hired musicians who played their instruments like no one else (Eric Dolphy, Jaki Byard, et al.). He gave them a musical setting in which structure and freedom were exquisitely balanced. And together they made music that sounds (even on something familiar) like nothing else.
Charles Mingus Sextet (with Johnny Coles, trumpet; Jaki Byard, piano; Eric Dolphy, alto saxophone and bass clarinet; Clifford Jordan, tenor saxophone; Dannie Richmond, drums), “Take the A Train,” live, Norway (Oslo), 1964
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lagniappe
I nominate Charles Mingus one of America’s greatest composers—Ran Blake (in the liner notes to his recent album Driftwoods)
(Originally posted 12/1/09.)
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No jazz composer since Thelonious Monk has a stronger voice.
Lyrical beauty, inexhaustible drive, deep feeling: what more could you ask for?
Enormously influential, his music served as a bridge between the compositional elegance of Duke Ellington and the freewheeling rambunctiousness of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Henry Threadgill, David Murray, et al.
Charles Mingus Quintet (CM, bass; Dannie Richmond, drums; Eric Dolphy, alto saxophone, bass clarinet; Clifford Jordan, tenor saxophone; Jaki Byard, piano), live (TV broadcast), Belgium, 1964
“So Long, Eric”
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“Peggy’s Blue Skylight”
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“Meditations on Integration” (excerpt)
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lagniappe
. . . [Mingus’s] music was pledged to the abolition of all distinctions: between the composed and the improvised, the primitive and the sophisticated, the rough and the tender, the belligerent and the lyrical.—Geoff Dyer, But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz (1996)
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Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.
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I, myself, came to enjoy the players who didn’t only just swing but who invented new rhythmic patterns, along with new melodic concepts. And those people are: Art Tatum, Bud Powell, Max Roach, Sonny Rollins, Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Parker, who is the greatest genius of all to me because he changed the whole era around.
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In my music, I’m trying to play the truth of what I am. The reason it’s difficult is because I’m changing all the time.
—Charles Mingus
(Originally posted 4/22/10.)
can’t wait
(an occasional series)
Group Doueh, Chicago (Old Town School of Folk Music), 6/26/11
Live, Europe, 2009
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Doueh (guitar), Tony Allen (drums)
Live, rehearsal, Western Sahara (Dakhla), 2010
More Group Doueh? Here. More Tony Allen? Here.
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lagniappe
I live in Dakhla [in Western Sahara]. There are other groups in the area, but Group Doueh is the main group for this area. We are the most in demand group for weddings and parties.
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The power of Jimi Hendrix’s guitar is something that is inspirational on so many levels.
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The main group is myself on guitar and tinidit. My wife Halima and friend Bashiri are the vocalists. My son Jamal is the keyboardist. There are also many percussionists that play with us from time to time. Also other singers will perform with us depending on who is available for certain weddings or parties.
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For many years, most of our material was recorded on cassette. I have had many cassette recorders, some two-track, four-track and eight-track models. Now I am able to record digitally to a 16-track model. I am always experimenting to get the best situation. We always record at home and we record all of our performances.
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[T]here really is no [music] industry [in Western Sahara]. I am an industry unto myself. I record music and have two shops that sell music to the community. Most of the recordings are done at home in makeshift studios, and cassettes or CDs are sold throughout the region.
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art beat: yesterday at the Art Institute of Chicago
Paul Cezanne, The Bay of Marselleilles, Seen From L’Estaque, c. 1885
The greatest jazz musicians—Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, Von Freeman, et al.—can be identified by just one note. Cezanne’s that way, too. His blues are all his own.
music clip of the day 