Walk into a blues bar on Chicago’s south or west side in the mid-1970s:
this would jump out of the jukebox.
Syl Johnson, “Take Me To The River,” live, 1975, Memphis
If you have any doubts about the transformative powers of music, watch this. I’ve spent more hours than I could count in prisons, state and federal, in Illinois and Ohio and Wisconsin, meeting with clients. Never have I seen folks so relaxed.
Johnny Cash, live, San Quentin, 1969
“I Walk the Line”
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“Folsom Prison Blues”
Vodpod videos no longer available.***
“Orange Blossom Special”
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“Jackson” (with June Carter Cash)
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lagniappe
reading table
There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book.
—Patti Smith (after winning this year’s National Book Award for nonfiction for her memoir Just Kids)
Looking for a reason to be hopeful?
None of these musicians (or the conductor) is over the age of 18.
John Adams, Shaker Loops (1978), first movement (“Shaking and Trembling”), live
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John Adams, rehearsing this music:
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It is a strange business, composing music in twenty-first-century America. The job is difficult in itself: it is slow, solitary, and intensely cerebral. You have to believe deeply in yourself to get through the process. You have to be possibly a little mad. When you are done, you have in your hands not a finished object—a painting that can be put up on a wall or a novel that can be read at one sitting—but a set of abstract notations that other musicians must learn and perform. Then you step back into the culture at large, where few people embrace, or even notice, what you do. In this country, classical music is widely regarded as a dead or alien form—so much so that jazz aficionados routinely say, “Jazz is America’s classical music.” To make the counterargument that America’s classical music is America’s classical music is somehow to admit that the battle is lost. In such a climate, composers easily become embittered.
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When I visited Adams at his house in Brushy Ridge, last June, he was pondering the composer’s relationship with the mass culture. “I like to think of culture as the symbols that we share to understand each other,” he said. “When we communicate, we point to symbols that we have in common. If people want to make a point, they reach for a reference. It might be a Woody Allen movie, or a John Lennon lyric, or ‘I’m not a crook.’ When I was young, I came to realize that twelve-tone music, or for that matter, all contemporary music, was so far divorced from communal experience that it didn’t appear on the national radar screen. It would be nice to hear someone say, ‘Look at that gas station in the moonlight. It’s pure John Adams.’”
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The music of John Adams, unlike so much classical composition of the last fifty years, has the immediate power to enchant.
—Alex Ross, “The Harmonist,” The New Yorker, 1/8/01
two takes
Some lyrics sound as though they want to be read; others would look silly on the page but, unlike the page-worthy, they sing.
“If I Had A Boat” (Lyle Lovett)
Lyle Lovett, live (TV broadcast), 2004
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The Holmes Brothers, State Of Grace (Alligator), 2007
lagniappe
Gregory Isaacs/p.s.
Yesterday’s link to WKCR-FM’s Memorial Broadcast didn’t work right (only a fraction of the show could be accessed), but it does now.
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reading table
To fall into despair is just a high-class way of turning into a dope. I choose to laugh, and laugh at myself no less than at others.
—Saul Bellow, Letters (2010) (as quoted in yesterday’s New York Times review)
Gregory Isaacs, July 15, 1951-October 25, 2010
[Gregory Isaacs’ friend and former manager Don Hewitt] said of Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones that when he was introduced to Mr. Isaacs, “he carried on like he’d met Jesus.”
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In a 2001 interview, Mr. Isaacs reflected on his legacy. “Look at me as a man who performed works musically,” he said. “Who uplift people who need upliftment, mentally, physically, economically—all forms. Who told the people to live with love ’cause only love can conquer war, and to understand themselves so that they can understand others.”
—Rob Kenner, New York Times (obituary, 10/25/10)
Live, London (Brixton Academy), 1984
“Number One”
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“Night Nurse”
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“Border”
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“Sad Mood Tonight” (1994)
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“Kingston 14” (Made in Jamaica, 2006)
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Want more? Here: “Gregory Isaacs Memorial Broadcast,” Eastern Standard Time, WKCR-FM (broadcasting from Columbia University), 11/6/10.
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reading table
No battle that can be won is worth fighting.
What makes this guy such a great guitarist?
He doesn’t show off.
“Lead”? “Rhythm”? To him it’s all one.
He doesn’t play over the drummer—he plays with him.
Keith Richards (with Willie Nelson, Ryan Adams, Hank Williams III), “Dead Flowers,” live (TV broadcast), 2002
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I’m not here just to make records and money. I’m here to say something and to touch other people, sometimes in a cry of desperation: ‘Do you know this feeling?’
—Keith Richards, Life (2010)
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reading table
As the fiftieth birthday approaches, you get the sense that your life is thinning out, and will continue to thin out, until it thins out into nothing . . . . Then fifty comes and goes, and fifty-one, and fifty-two. And life thickens out again. Because there is now an enormous and unsuspected presence within your being like an undiscovered continent. This is the past.
—Martin Amis, The Pregnant Widow (2010)
replay: clips too good for just one day
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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. . . [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 on 4/22/10.)
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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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I nominate Charles Mingus one of America’s greatest composers—Ran Blake (in the liner notes to his recent album Driftwoods)
(Originally posted on 12/1/09.)
Time travel’s easy on the net. With this guy we started, the other day, with music he made just last month. Then we headed back to the ’70s. Today we go back even farther—to the ’60s.
Leon Russell, Shindig! (TV)
“Hi-Heel Sneakers,” 10/28/1964
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“Roll Over Beethoven,” 11/18/1964
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“Jambalaya,” 2/3/1965
(Yeah, the guy in front with the banjo—that’s Glen Campbell.)
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reading table
Gregory Corso, “Marriage”
Want to read this yourself? Here.
Violins teach us what it would be like to fly.
Henry Cowell, Symphony No. 13 (“Madras,” 1956-58), excerpt (first two movements), San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra, live, San Francisco, 2005
Want to hear all five movements? Here.
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Henry Cowell, the all-American composer of the 20th century, did it all. “I want to live in the whole world of music,” he said. He was “the open sesame of new music in America,” John Cage said.
He was famous once and is now all but forgotten. There was a time when Leopold Stokowski championed him in New York, as did Eugene Ormandy in Philadelphia and Serge Koussevitzky in Boston. Schoenberg thought the world of him. So did Busoni. But since Cowell’s death in 1965, the musical establishment has concluded his music, and particularly the plentiful late orchestral music, doesn’t hold up.
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A century ago, he was a teenage piano pioneer in Menlo Park, Calif. He was the first to hit clusters of tones on the piano with fist and forearm (Bartók noticed) and the first to play directly on the piano strings. He all but invented the concept of world music and was on the front line of flexible phrasing, extreme polyrhythms, percussion music and mechanical music. He was a celebrated pedagogue. Cage, Burt Bacharach, George Gershwin and Lou Harrison were among those who found their own voices through him. Cowell, who was born in 1897, was known in New York, Berlin and Moscow by the ’20s. He helped found the study of ethnomusicology at UC Berkeley. He published and organized the concerts of progressive music from all over.
Cowell is primarily known for is his Bohemianism, which led to the creation of the California school of music and, sadly, for his arrest on morals charges. He was publicly shamed in a celebrity trial for having had consensual oral sex with young men and sentenced to 15 years in San Quentin.
After four years of incarceration, he was paroled and eventually pardoned by Gov. Earl Warren so that he could become a musical ambassador for the State Department. He moved to New York and taught at the New School for Social Research, traveled and absorbed the musics of Asia and Latin America, wrote 21 symphonies and much else. When Malaysia was looking for a national anthem in the ’50s, the country turned to him and Benjamin Britten for help.
—Mark Swed, Los Angeles Times (blog), 1/31/10
Here’s more of Leon Russell and J.J. Cale—together.
Leon Russell, J.J. Cale, live, Los Angeles, 1979
“Going Down”
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“I Got The Same Old Blues”
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“Boiling Pot”
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“Corrine, Corrina”
music clip of the day 