Lil’ Ed & The Blues Imperials, “Find My Baby,” live
Vodpod videos no longer available.
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mail
In response to yesterday’s post, a reader writes:
No, you were right the first time, the movement to bebop was immense progress. . . . To deny progress in art or politics is bad politics, tho there are clearly eddies and flows as we know from being currently enmeshed in a backward eddy.
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reading table
They don’t live long
but you’d never know it—
the cicada’s cry.
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Awake at night—
the sound of the water jar
cracking in the cold.
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Even in Kyoto—
hearing the cuckoo’s cry—
I long for Kyoto.
If one sign of a great performance is that the moment it ends you want to hear it again, this one delivers—I just listened to it three times (may go back for three more).
Spencer Taylor & The Highway Q.C.’s, “I’ve Got Shoes,” live
Vodpod videos no longer available.
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lagniappe
radio
WGN Radio continues its celebration of the life of Ron Santo today, rebroadcasting one of “Ron’s Greatest Games” (Carlos Zambrano’s 9/14/08 no-hitter) at 2 p.m. (CST), with other special programs before and after.
Waking up one morning, you hear news that’s both unsurprising and unbelievable: a Cubs radio broadcaster who’s been around forever died.
Later in the day you find yourself wondering: “When I die, what music should I have at the funeral?”
(WGN Radioremembers Ron Santo today at 1 p.m. [CST] with a rebroadcast of Kerry Wood’s 20-strikeout game [5/6/1998], followed by other special broadcasts.)
*****
replay: a clip too good for just one day
two takes
If God plays a musical instrument, I bet it’s the cello.
Bach, Suite No. 5 in C minor for Unaccompanied Cello, 4th Movement (Sarabande)
Mixing a record, as I learned when I worked at Alligator Records (back in the 1970s), involves a seemingly countless number of decisions. After a few hours, everyone starts to get a little punch-drunk. By the end of the night, for instance, this track had morphed—in the warped warble of engineer Freddie Breitberg (AKA, in his personal mythology, Eddie B. Flick)—into “Serve Me Rice For Supper.”
Jimmy Johnson, “Serves Me Right To Suffer” (Living Chicago Blues, Vol. 1, Alligator Records, 1977 [Grammy Nominee])
. . . Van Gogh’s letters are the best written by any artist . . . Their mixture of humble detail and heroic aspiration is quite simply life-affirming.—Andrew Motion, The Guardian (11/21/09)
Once upon a time this music was all over Chicago. Going out to hear this guy, for instance, was about as hard as going out for a hamburger.
*****
replay: clips too good for just one day
The first time I stood before a judge at Chicago’s Criminal Courts Building at 26th and California—this was back in the ’70s (when I was working at Alligator Records)—it was to speak on behalf of this man, Hound Dog Taylor. The day before, during a drunken argument at his apartment, he’d shot his longtime guitarist Brewer Phillips (who survived). In his own way, Hound Dog was a pretty canny guy. When he told me about this incident over the phone, shortly after it happened, he put it this way: “Richard, they say I shot Phillip . . .”
(No, don’t touch that dial; these stills are way out of focus—which, for Hound Dog, seems just right.)
*****
Hound Dog Taylor and the Houserockers, live, Ann Arbor Blues Festival, 1973
“Wild About You Baby”
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“Taylor’s Rock”
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“I Held My Baby”
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Hound Dog . . . . [would] play things that are technically wrong, and [he’d] . . . make people like it. . . . [He’d] just get up there and go for it.—Elvin Bishop
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When I saw Hound Dog Taylor and the HouseRockers as a three-piece, I said, ‘There it is. There’s your future right there.’—George Thorogood
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Hound Dog Taylor is one of my favorites. He used this raw dog blues, you know.—Vernon Reid
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A Facebook page devoted to Hound Dog, who died over 30 years ago (1975), currently lists 434 “Fans” (now over 1,000) who come from, let’s see, Orlando and Indonesia and Cedar Rapids and Sweden and Austin and Australia and . . .
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When I die, they’ll say ‘he couldn’t play shit, but he sure made it sound good!’—Hound Dog Taylor
Few musicians, on any instrument, give me so much joy.
Ed Blackwell, October 10, 1929-October 7, 1992
Mal Waldron Quintet (Mal Waldron, piano, with Ed Blackwell, drums; Reggie Workman, bass; Charlie Rouse, saxophone; Woody Shaw, flugelhorn), “The Git-Go,” live, New York (Village Vanguard), 1986
I’ve been playing with Blackwell over 20 years. We used to play when I first went to Los Angeles. Blackwell plays the drums as if he’s playing a wind instrument. Actually, he sounds more like a talking drum. He’s speaking a certain language that I find is very valid in rhythm instruments.
Very seldom in rhythm instruments do you hear rhythm sounding like a language. I think that’s a very old tradition, because the drums, in the beginning, used to be like the telephone—to carry the message.
In one of my clearest memories of the drummer Ed Blackwell, he sat in an Indian restaurant drawing percussion notation on the tablecloth with a felt-tipped pen. The waiters looked on, aghast, as the splodgy black figures spread across their white linen, but Blackwell, rapt in concentration behind his dark glasses, remained oblivious. Music was all that mattered to him, the drums in particular, and there was a particular point he needed to make.
***
Blackwell was a deeply serious artist who, whatever his circumstances, put the music first and insisted his associates did likewise. In New York percussion circles he was seen as a teacher. He often quoted the Chinese adage, ‘Neglect your art for a day, and it will neglect you for two’, and would actively pursue other drummers whom he respected, should he feel they reneged on commitment.
I never saw him without a pair of drumsticks or homemade mallets in his hand; these he would employ constantly as much to accentuate a point as to strengthen his wrists. Some percussionists have made a cabaret act from beating out rhythms on any available surface; Blackwell would do it to fill in gaps in conversation. He played drums like that, too: the perfect listener, who could equally stimulate and inspire with his enviable grasp of polyrhythmic possibilities.
No jazz musician can claim greater authenticity than a New Orleans birth. It is the most African of US cities, where Yoruba religious practice continues and the Second Line that accompanies street-parades moves with an African strut. From the moment he could walk, Blackwell was part of that Second Line and as a child he danced in the street for pennies. That characteristic dancestep and the ‘double-clutching’ two-beat of the parade bass drum remained features of his playing, securely anchoring his adventurousness in an earlier memory.
This is the first project, in my 30-year career, that I have devoted to the music of someone else. It grew out of “Sitting by the Window,” a homage to Curtis Mayfield that I wrote for my band In Order To Survive. The current project develops this inspiration while trying to call upon the spirit in which Curtis Mayfield wrote his songs. We are trying to let that spirit find its voice today through musicians who not only know Mayfield’s songs, but more importantly, know themselves. They are familiar with the language of a music that includes Curtis Mayfield as well as Sun Ra.
I grew up listening to Smokey Robinson, The Temptations, Martha and The Vandellas, Gladys Knight and The Pips, and Curtis Mayfield and The Impressions. In my mind, their music was not separate from Marian Anderson, Count Basie, Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster, Don Byas, Sarah Vaughn, Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, Cecil Taylor, Bill Dixon, and Louis Armstrong. All this music is part of an African American tradition that comes out of the blues. The roots of the jazz known as avant-garde are also in the blues, the field holler, and the church. Avoiding artificial separations is the key to understanding the true nature of the music. All these artists ultimately speak using this reservoir of sounds and colors that we can use to paint our own music.
The music that passed through the life and work of Curtis Mayfield cannot be duplicated. The question becomes, how can it then continue? I also ask myself this question in connection to Duke Ellington or Thelonious Monk. It always seemed to me that when Ellington died, the music physically died with him. We were left orphaned, with just the recorded part of his work and all these notes on paper, but that is not the reality. Once you realize this truth, you can find a different way to proceed to re-create the songs. Paradoxically, you can only find a way to play the music by initially affirming that it cannot be done. Let us imagine the Creator: part of his voice was expressed through Duke Ellington, a part through Albert Ayler, another part through Curtis Mayfield. The method doesn’t consist in following or imitating anyone’s style; the method consists of plunging into the Tone World, which is the source of all music. You can’t counterfeit a music. One can only collect strands and begin to weave a new tapestry out of them.
Curtis Mayfield was a prophet, a preacher, a revolutionary, a humanist, and a griot. He took the music to its most essential level in the America of his day. If you had ears to hear, you knew that Curtis was a man with a positive message—a message that was going to help you to survive. He was in the foreground, always in the breach, both soft and powerful at the same time. For these reasons, his music still resounds in my heart.
Live (as I heard it Thursday night), this music hits like a tidal wave, washing over you, engulfing you.
Percy Gray, Jr. & the Chicago Mass Choir (joined by, among others, Joe Ligon [Mighty Clouds of Joy] at 7:00-8:05), “God Is My Everything,” Musical Tribute to the late Albertina Walker, live, Chicago (Apostolic Church of God, 63rd & Dorchester), 10/14/10
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lagniappe
technical stuff
In the stuff-you-may-already-know department, there are sites—like this—where you can convert YouTube clips to mp3s.
music clip of the day 