passings
Jimmy Scott, singer, July 17, 1925-June 12, 2014
“Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” live, New York (Birdland), 2000
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lagniappe
reading table
If you were to open up Iona’s chest and pour all the grief out of it, you would probably flood the entire planet, yet it is not visible.
—Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), “Grief” (often rendered as “Misery”; translated from Russian by Rosamund Bartlett)
Ornette, at 84, still plays some of the most haunting blues I’ve ever heard.
Ornette Coleman (alto saxophone), with Henry Threadgill (alto saxophone), David Murray (tenor saxophone), Savion Glover (tap dance), et al., live, New York (Prospect Park), 6/12/14
*****
With Don Cherry (trumpet), Charlie Haden (bass), Billy Higgins (drums), The Shape Of Jazz To Come, 1959
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lagniappe
art beat
Bruce Davidson (1933-), East 100th St., New York, 1966
basement jukebox
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)
basement jukebox
Howlin’ Wolf, “Moanin’ at Midnight,” 1951*
Who needs chord changes?
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
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.
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*HW (AKA Chester Burnett [1910-1976], vocals, harmonica), Willie Johnson (guitar), Willie Steel, drums.
sounds of Chicago
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:
This is not a valid command.
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
#1
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#2
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#3
*****
*Here’s how they sounded that night. (Give it a few seconds.)
Christmas ain’t all reindeer and candy canes.
Blind Lemon Jefferson, “Christmas Eve Blues,” 1928
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Leroy Carr, “Christmas In Jail—Ain’t That A Pain,” 1929
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Sonny Boy Williamson II, “Sonny Boy’s Christmas Blues,” 1951
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John Lee Hooker, “Blues For Christmas,” 1959
sounds of Chicago
Son Seals, “On My Knees,” live (TV show), 1980s
Musical notation has its place. Sometimes, though, it’s useless. How could marks on a piece of paper ever capture his attack?
two takes
“Don’t Start Me Talkin'” (S. Williamson)
Sonny Boy Williamson II (AKA Aleck [or Alex] “Rice” Miller), recording, 1955
*****
Bob Dylan, TV show (David Letterman), 1984
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lagniappe
reading table
There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.
—Herman Melville (1819-1891), Moby-Dick
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)
music clip of the day 