You can learn how to play the harmonica. You can learn how to sing. What you can’t learn is the most important thing—presence.
Junior Wells (vocal and harmonica), Buddy Guy (guitar), “Cryin’ Shame” (AKA “Country Girl”), live, Chicago, 1970 (Chicago Blues)
Want more? Here.
What the world needs now?
Nah, not love.
What the world needs now—what it cries out for, daily—is inspired silliness.
Brave Combo, live
“The Denton Polka,” Texas (Denton), 2007
*****
“Louie, Louie,” Illinois (Berwyn [FitzGerald’s]), 2008
Brave Combo played a wild set Sunday night (the 4th) at FitzGerald’s American Music Festival—everything from “Beer Barrel Polka” to a hard-rockin’ “Hokey Pokey” to a polka-inflected “Ode to Joy” (“Any Beethoven fans in the house?”) to a Tejano-style “America the Beautiful.” By the end of the 90-minute set, everybody’s IQ, it seemed, had gone up 15 points. Or was it down?
How many songs are so 4th-of-July perfect?
The Blasters, “American Music”
Take 1
Live, Illinois (Champaign), 1985
*****
Take 2
Live, Los Angeles, 2010
On Saturday night these guys played this, in overdrive, at FitzGerald’s American Music Festival, a wonderful 4-day event that just celebrated its 30th anniversary.
looking back
Today, celebrating our 300th post, we revisit a few favorites.
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3/12/10
Both Chicago blues artists. Both guitar players. Both influenced by other kinds of music.
Musical personalities? They could hardly be more different.
Buddy Guy, “Let Me Love You Baby,” live
*****
Fenton Robinson, “Somebody Loan Me A Dime,” live, 1977
***
Back in the 1970s, when I was at Alligator Records, I had the pleasure of working with Fenton, co-producing his album I Hear Some Blues Downstairs (a Grammy nominee). He didn’t fit the stereotype of a bluesman. Gentle, soft-spoken, serious, introspective: he was all these things. He died in 1997.
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3/3/10
What other pop star has made such stunning contributions as a guest artist?
Sinead O’Connor
With Willie Nelson, “Don’t Give Up”
*****
With the Chieftains, “The Foggy Dew”
*****
With Shane MacGowan, “Haunted”
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5/28/2010
two takes
“La-La Means I Love You”
The Delfonics, live, 2008 (originally recorded 1968)
*****
Bill Frisell, live, New York (Rochester), 2007
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
Music . . . carr[ies] us smoothly across the tumult of experience, like water over rocks.
—Vijay Iyer, liner notes, Historicity (2009)
The other night, after falling asleep, my older son Alex (now 22) had an unexpected visitor—this guy showed up and began to play.
Vijay Iyer Trio (VI, piano; Marcus Gilmore, drums; Stephan Crump, bass)
“Galang,” recording session (Historicity), New York (Systems Two Studios), 2009
*****
“Questions of Agency,” live, New York (The Stone), 2007
*****
Playing and Talking about Historicity, 2009
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lagniappe
Presto! Here is the great new jazz piano trio.
—Ben Ratliff, New York Times (9/9/09)
Muscular, unadorned, direct: his playing conjures the old Chicago, when there was no Millennium Park, no flowers blooming in the middle of the street, no dining al fresco (unless you had nowhere else to eat).
Fred Anderson, tenor saxophonist, co-founder of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), club owner (Velvet Lounge), March 22, 1929-June 24, 2010
Live, with DKV (Ken Vandermark, tenor saxophone; Kent Kessler, bass; Hamid Drake, drums), Chicago (Hideout), 2008
(Hamid Drake is among my favorite drummers; he’s the perfect foil, in his buoyancy and drive, for Anderson’s dark, searching, sometimes brooding lines.)
*****
“Spirits Came In,” live (with Kidd Jordan, tenor saxophone; William Parker, bass; Hamid Drake, drums), live, New York (Vision Festival), 2002
*****
Live (with Jaribu Shahid, bass; Hamid Drake, drums), France (Le Mans), 2005
Part 1
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Part 2
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Part 3
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Part 4
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Part 5
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Part 6
The other day, as I waited for a train at an underground station in downtown Chicago, an older black guy started singing this song, accompanying himself on acoustic guitar, and at that moment everything—this song, this singer, this place—seemed all of a piece and I was no longer waiting.
Curtis Mayfield (with David Sanborn, alto saxophone; Hiram Bullock, guitar; David Lindley, steel guitar; George Duke, piano; Phillipe Saisse, keyboard; Tom Barney, bass; Omar Hakim, drums), “It’s All Right,” live (TV broadcast [Sunday Night]), 1989
Greatest prison band of all time?
No contest.
Who could beat the one that Art Pepper and this guy—both followed Charlie Parker down the path of heroin addiction—led in the 1960s at San Quentin?
Frank Morgan (alto saxophone, with Claude Black, piano; Clifford Murphy, bass; Sean Dobbins, drums), “Well You Needn’t,” live, Ohio (Toledo), 2006
lagniappe
The greatest big band I ever played with was in San Quentin. Art Pepper and I were proud of that band. We had Jimmy Bunn and Frank Butler [whom Jo Jones called “the greatest drummer in the world”], and some other musicians who were known and some who weren’t, but they could play. We played every Saturday night for what they called a Warden’s Tour, which showed paying visitors only the cleanest cell blocks and exercise yards. But people would take that tour just to hear the band.
***
Art and I played more when we were in San Quentin together than when we were on the outside.
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Art led the way for me to recover. He got out of prison before me and started traveling all over the world before I did. He showed me by example that it could be done, and I’ll always love him for that.
—Frank Morgan
My favorite alto sax player?
There are days when I’d say this is the guy.
Art Pepper, September 1, 1925-June 15, 1982
“Red Car” (excerpt), live (Art Pepper: Notes From A Jazz Survivor [1982])
*****
“Mambo Koyama,” live, Italy, 1981
*****
“What’s New?” (1956)
*****
“Over the Rainbow” (1982)
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lagniappe
The epigraph to Straight Life: The Story of Art Pepper by Art and Laurie Pepper (1979):
What is the use of talking and there is no end of talking,
There is no end of things in the heart.—Ezra Pound [“Exile’s Letter,” from the Chinese poet Li Po; as punctuated in SL]
music clip of the day 