J. B. Lenoir (1929-1967), “Mama Talk To Your Daughter,” 1954
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lagniappe
reading table
In the hospital yard stands a small annex surrounded by a whole forest of burdock, nettles, and wild hemp. The roof is rusty, the chimney is half fallen down, the porch steps are rotten and overgrown with grass, and only a few traces of stucco remain. The front facade faces the hospital, the back looks onto a field, from which it is separated by the gray hospital fence topped with nails. These nails, turned point up, and the fence, and the annex itself have that special despondent and accursed look that only our hospitals and prisons have.
—Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), “Ward No. 6” (opening paragraph; translated from Russian by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky)
Wolf’s harmonica playing was always the right amount. He would never do anything on the harmonica that would detract from you waiting to get back to Wolf’s voice. . . . There is a certain lonesomeness about the harmonica that just fit the Wolf’s character in voice, in song, in lyric; and he just played that just enough to titillate things he was going to do next with his voice.
Paul Butterfield (vocals, harmonica), Mike Bloomfield (guitar), Mark Naftalin (keyboards), et al., live, Boston, 1971
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lagniappe
found words
Automated response received yesterday, after calling my pharmacy to find out if a prescription was ready, getting a recorded recitation of the available options, and hitting “0” in the hope of reaching a non-virtual human being:
Thirty-seven years ago, at a church outside Chicago, my wife Suzanne and I were married. Saxophonist Von Freeman and pianist John Young played at the ceremony.* Afterward, at the nearby reception hall, this guy tickled the ivories. All three are now gone.
Blind John Davis (1913-1985), live, Canada, early ’80s
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*Here’show they sounded that night. (Give it a few seconds.)
Jimmy Witherspoon (vocals) with Art Pepper (alto saxophone), “Past Forty Blues,” live, Los Angeles, 1981
Art never fails to captivate. But it’s hard to watch this without mixed emotions. He looks, to these eyes, completely coked up. The next year, at the age of fifty-six, he suffered a fatal stroke.
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lagniappe
reading table
[W]hen a reader is grasped and held by a book, reading does not feel like an escape from life so much as it feels like an urgent, crucial dimension of life itself.
—Rebecca Mead, My Life in Middlemarch (reviewed by novelist Claire Messud in the Dec./Jan. 2014 Bookforum)
Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre, saxophonist, March 26, 1936-November 9, 2013
From the New York Times obituary (Nate Chinen, 11/14/13):
Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre, a saxophonist who was a founding member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, a pioneering Chicago avant-garde coalition, died on Saturday in the Bronx. He was 77.
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Present at the association’s first meeting in 1965, Mr. McIntyre later articulated its objectives in an in-house newsletter, The New Regime. The priority, he wrote, was creative autonomy. But he also touched on sociopolitical issues: “We are trying to balance an unbalanced situation that is prevalent in this society.”
Maurice Benford McIntyre was born on March 24, 1936, in Clarksville, Ark., and raised in Chicago. His father was a pharmacist, his mother an English teacher. He studied music at Roosevelt University in Chicago until a drug habit derailed him, leading to a three-year stretch in prison, in Lexington, Ky., where he later said he got most of his musical education.
After returning to Chicago, he met the pianist Muhal Richard Abrams and the saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell, who were developing an aesthetic revolving around strictly original music. Mr. McIntyre became a fixture in Mr. Abrams’s Experimental Band and appeared on Mr. Mitchell’s 1966 album, “Sound,” the first release under the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians banner. Mr. McIntyre released his first album, “Humility in the Light of the Creator,” in 1969, the year that he adopted the name Kalaparusha Ahrah Difda, a confluence of terms from African, Indian and astrological sources. (He later modified it to Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre.) Like many of his fellow association musicians, he began performing in Europe.
He moved to New York in 1974 and spent a productive stretch at the Creative Music Studio in Woodstock. But his career foundered in the ’80s and ’90s, and he took to busking — a practice he continued even after making several comeback albums, notably “Morning Song,” in 2004.
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Talking and playing, New York, 2010
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Live (with Karl Berger, vibes, piano; Tom Schmidt, bass; Jack DeJohnette, drums; Jumma Santos, drums, percussion), “Ismac,” Woodstock, N.Y., 1975
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Recording (with J.B. Hutto, vocals, guitar; Sunnyland Slim, organ, et al.), “Send Her Home to Me,” 1968
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Recording (with Malachi Favors, bass; M’Chaka Uba, bass; Thurman Barker, drums; Ajaramu [A. J. Shelton], drums), “Humility in the Light of the Creator” (Alternate), 1969
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
A human life. A series of notes. Which is more permanent?
music clip of the day 