Yesterday’s clip roamed all over the world. Today we travel to one city, Chicago. This is the Chicago of another era, where, on Sunday morning, on the near west side, on Maxwell Street, you could hear—right on the street—some of the greatest musicians in the world, including this man, one of the finest slide guitar players of all time.
Robert Nighthawk (AKA Robert Lee McCollum; 1909-1967), “Eli’s Place,” live, Chicago’s Maxwell Street, circa 1964
Wednesday’s featured artist, Curtis Mayfield, was so popular and influential among Jamaican musicians, including the early Wailers (back when the group included Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer [before becoming “Bob Marley and . . .”]), that one British deejay dubbed him the “Godfather of Reggae.”
The Wailers (with Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, and Bunny Wailer), “Keep On Moving” (1972)
Want more? Here (don’t miss “Soul Shakedown Party”).
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The Impressions (with Curtis Mayfield), “I Gotta Keep on Moving” (1964)
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reading table
It’s odd to think back on the time—not so long ago—when there were distinct stylistic trends, such as “this season’s colour” or “abstract expressionism” or “psychedelic music.” It seems we don’t think like that any more. There are just too many styles around, and they keep mutating too fast to assume that kind of dominance.
As an example, go into a record shop and look at the dividers used to separate music into different categories. There used to be about a dozen: rock, jazz, ethnic, and so on. Now there are almost as many dividers as there are records, and they keep proliferating.
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We’re living in a stylistic tropics. There’s a whole generation of people able to access almost anything from almost anywhere, and they don’t have the same localised stylistic sense that my generation grew up with. It’s all alive, all “now,” in an ever-expanding present, be it Hildegard of Bingen or a Bollywood soundtrack. The idea that something is uncool because it’s old or foreign has left the collective consciousness.
I think this is good news. As people become increasingly comfortable with drawing their culture from a rich range of sources—cherry-picking whatever makes sense to them—it becomes more natural to do the same thing with their social, political and other cultural ideas. The sharing of art is a precursor to the sharing of other human experiences, for what is pleasurable in art becomes thinkable in life.—Brian Eno, 11/18/09
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MEMO
To: Elliott Carter
From: MCOTD
Happy 101st Birthday!
Take away the hand drums and the music of this man—another of the great artists to come out of Chicago in the last 50 years—would have a whole different flavor.
Curtis Mayfield (with Master Henry Gibson on hand drums), “Move On Up,” live, The Netherlands (The Hague), 1987
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In the Sixties, you had percussionists like Master Henry Gibson that was playing with Curtis Mayfield and he was pretty much used as melodic accents. When you listen to a lot of Curtis’ work after the Impressions, rather than a horn player he’s got Henry Gibson out front on percussions. A lot of people had missed that in the sense of compositional expression.—Kahil El’Zabar
This take?
Or that?
Move the voice forward?
Back?
Make the guitar brighter?
Darker?
Enough bass?
Too much?
Enough room sound?
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])
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The ’net’s filled with enough dreck for a thousand lifetimes; but then, as happened the other day (after hearing about it on the radio), you come across something that’s simply stunning—like the new, complete collection of the letters of Vincent van Gogh.
. . . 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)
Here’s another musician who, like Dinu Lipatti (Tuesday’s post), died way too young: the great Chicago blues artist Magic Sam (AKA Samuel Maghett). He suffered a fatal heart attack just months after this performance. He was 32.
Magic Sam, live (TV broadcast), Germany, 1969
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Facebook seems to have expanded into new markets. “Sign up,” they say, “to connect with [t]he late, great Magic Sam.”
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.)
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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” 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
The Cubs couldn’t seem to make up their minds this season. Were they—as often seemed to be the case—god-awful? Or, taking the longer view, were they simply mediocre? Oh, well. Instead of dwelling on this dismal season, let’s remember one of the brightest spots in Chicago baseball history. Here’s the finest musician ever to work between the foul lines: blues and boogie-woogie piano player Jimmy Yancey, who, for 25 years (1925-50), was a White Sox groundskeeper.
Jimmy Yancey, “Rolling the Stone” (1939)
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“I can’t believe the season is over—but it is.”—WGN Radio Cubs broadcaster Pat Hughes, after yesterday’s game (a loss to Arizona, 5-2)
Saturday night he sings soul, Sunday morning gospel. Here, at Christian Tabernacle Church on the south side of Chicago, is Otis Clay, a label mate of Al Green at Hi Records.
Otis Clay, live, Chicago
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“How can you sing of amazing grace and all God’s wonders without using your hands?”—Mahalia Jackson
Muddy Waters, Saul Bellow, Steppenwolf Theater Company (John Malkovich, John Mahoney, Gary Sinise, Laurie Metcalf, et al.), Curtis Mayfield: a lot of great artists, musical and otherwise, have come out of Chicago in the last 50 years. Among the greatest is this group: the Art Ensemble of Chicago. While the horn players (Roscoe Mitchell, Joseph Jarman, Lester Bowie) got the lion’s share of the attention, what gave their music its juice—what made it dance—was (as you’ll hear) one of the finest rhythm sections ever: Malachi Favors, bass; Don Moye, drums.
Art Ensemble of Chicago, live, Poland (Warsaw), 1982 (in four parts)
Part 1 of 4
Part 2 of 4
Part 3 of 4
Part 4 of 4
(I talk about the AEC in the past tense because, while recordings are still released under this name from time to time, with two key members [they were all “key members”] now dead—trumpeter Lester Bowie [1999] and bassist Malachi Favors [2004]—it just isn’t [nor could it be] the same.)
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Many things in life don’t quite seem, alas, to live up to their billing. It appears that the RSS (Real Simple Syndication) service that’s referenced in the righthand column (under “Subscribe”) may fall into this category—at least, that is, for those of us who are (as the expression goes) of a certain age. The problem seems to lie at the threshold: “real simple.”
Anyway, in the life’s-too-short, keep-it-simple-stupid department, if you’d like to “subscribe” to this blog, just send me an email (rmcleeselaw@aol.com) with “subscribe” in the subject line and—voila!—you’ll be added to an ever-growing email list that will have you receiving an e-notice whenever there’s a new blog post. As indicated in the “About” section (see righthand column), this whole thing started from a very small (like, oh, two, sometimes three, folks) email list, which then grew, then grew some more. One of many miraculous things about electronic communication is that there’s always room for one more.
Here—with a shout-out to my brother Don, with whom (at the age of 15) I saw the MC5 in Chicago’s Lincoln Park during the 1968 Democratic Convention (when nobody outside the Detroit/Ann Arbor area [including us] knew who they were)—is an awfully good cover, from what might seem an unlikely source, of one of their “greatest hits.”
Jeff Buckley, “Kick Out The Jams,” live, Chicago, 1995
And here, courtesy, apparently, of the Department of Defense, is (silent) footage of the scene in Lincoln Park on August 25, 1968—the day the MC5 (who appear here fleetingly) played.
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Von Freeman, the now-86-year-old tenor saxophonist—he still sounds terrific—toward the end of his Chicago Jazz Festival set yesterday afternoon in Grant Park, after introducing two young musicians: “I was that age once—I just don’t remember when.”
music clip of the day 