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Category: bass

2011

Friday, May 20, 2011

Who else (besides, of course, Bob Dylan) has played so many different roles so brilliantly?

Miles Davis (with Robben Ford & guest Carlos Santana, guitars), “Burn”
Live, Giants Stadium, East Rutherford, New Jersey, 6/15/86

Listen to stuff long enough and it changes—or you do, anyway. Once I might have faulted this for being repetitive. But that’s a bit like faulting roast beef for being meat. Of course it’s repetitive. That’s part of what makes it soar.

More? Here.

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lagniappe

listening room: what’s playing

• Rashied Ali Quintet, Live In Europe (Survival Records)

• Paul Motian (with Chris Potter, Jason Moran), Lost In A Dream (ECM)

• Charlie Parker, The Complete Royal Roost Live Recordings on Savoy, Vol. 3 (Columbia Japan)

• Eric Dolphy At The Five Spot, Vol. 2 (with Booker Little, Mal Waldron, Richard Davis, Ed Blackwell; Prestige)

• Various Artists, Fire In My Bones: Raw + Rare + Other-Worldly African-American Gospel (1944-2007) (Tompkins Square)

• Reverend Charlie Jackson, God’s Got It: The Legendary Booker and Jackson Singles (CaseQuarter)

• Group Doueh, Guitar Music from the Western Sahara (Sublime Frequencies)

• Mozart: Piano Sonata No. 8 in A Minor, Helene Grimaud, Resonances (Deutsche Grammophon)

• Beethoven: Piano Sonata No. 23 (“Appasionata”) and No. 29 (“Hammerklavier”), Solomon, The Master Pianist (EMI Classics)

• Anton Webern: String Quartet, Six Bagatelles for String Quartet, String Quartet Op. 28, LaSalle Quartet (Brilliant Classics)

• Arnold Schoenberg: String Quartet in D major, LaSalle Quartet (Brilliant Classics)

• Roger Sessions: String Quartet No. 2, Julliard String Quartet (Composers Recordings)

• Morton Feldman: For Bunita Marcus, John Tilbury, Morton Feldman, All Piano (London HALL)

• WKCR-FM (broadcasting from Columbia University)
—Bird Flight (Phil Schaap, jazz [Charlie Parker])
—Morning Classical (Various)
—Amazing Grace (Various)

• WFMU-FM
—Mudd Up! (DJ/Rupture, “new bass and beats”)
—Sinner’s Crossroads (Kevin Nutt, gospel)
—Give The Drummer Some (Doug Schulkind, sui generis)
—Fool’s Paradise (Rex, sui generis)
—Transpacific Sound Paradise (Rob Weisberg, “popular and unpopular music from around the world”)

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2011

Wednesday, 5/18/11

 passings
(an occasional series)

Lloyd Knibb, drummer (Skatalites, et al.)
March 8, 1931-May 12, 2011

Lloyd Knibb’s importance to Jamaican music can’t be overstated. The inventor of the ska beat at Coxson Dodd’s Studio One, Knibb created a sound that spread like wildfire the world over.

—Carter Van Pelt, host, Eastern Standard Time, WKCR-FM

Skatalites, “Freedom Sound,” live, Belgium (Lokerse Festival), 1997

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Skatalites, “Latin Go Ska,” live, Los Angeles, 2007

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Skatalites, live, Los Angeles, 2007

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Skatalites, “(Straighten Up And) Fly Right”

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lagniappe

reading table

Spring

It would be
good to shrug
out of winter
as cicadas do:
look: a crisp
freestanding you
and you walking
off, soft as
new.

—Kay Ryan

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2011

Thursday, 5/12/11

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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More? Here.

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2011

Tuesday, 5/10/11

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

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2011

Friday, 5/6/11

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.

More? Here. And here. And here.

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2011

Tuesday, 5/3/11

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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2011

Saturday, 4/30/11

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.)

Vodpod videos no longer available.
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2011

Wednesday, 4/27/11

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.

—Ibrahim Ag Alhabib (songwriter, singer, guitarist)

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2011

Monday, 4/25/11

 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)

Vodpod videos no longer available.

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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.

*****

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)

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2011

Saturday, 4/23/11

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

Vodpod videos no longer available.

More? Here. And here.

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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.

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