passings
DJ Rashad, October 9, 1979-April 26, 2014
Live, Chicago (Pitchfork Music Festival), 2013
*****
“I Don’t Give A Fuck” (sampling Tupac Shakur’s dialogue in Juice), 2013
*****
“I’m Gone” (remixing Gil Scott-Heron’s “Home Is Where The Hatred Is”), 2011
only rock ’n’ roll
MC5: A True Testimonial (2002)
Thanks to my brother Don for the tip. We first encountered these guys in Chicago’s Lincoln Park during the 1968 Democratic Convention. The park is still there. But that moment, when, as a teenager, nothing mattered more than intensity and attitude, is long gone.
**********
lagniappe
found words
Sometimes it’s hard to tell the advertising from the conceptual art. Last night, while driving to Hyde Park to hear pianist Rafal Blechacz, I came upon a billboard:
BE AMBITIOUS.
NOT THIRSTY.
Who knew Diet Coke could be so deep?
only rock ’n’ roll
Black Dub (Daniel Lanois, guitar, vocals; Trixie Whitley, keyboards, vocals; Jim Wilson, bass, vocals; Brian Blade, drums), “Ring the Alarm,” live, Vancouver, 2011
**********
lagniappe
art beat
Danny Lyon (1942-), Four Boys, Uptown, Chicago (1965)
never enough
Frederic Chopin (1810-1849), Piano Sonata No. 3 in B minor
Rafal Blechacz (1985-), piano, live
1st Movement
2nd Movement
3rd Movement
4th Movement
*****
can’t wait
Tomorrow Blechacz (pronounced, I just learned, BLEH-hatch), who recently won the 2014 Gilmore Artist Award,* will be at the University of Chicago’s Mandel Hall, playing Bach and Beethoven and Chopin.
***
*New York Times (1/8/14):
[O]ne of the great windfalls of the music world . . . the $300,000 Gilmore Artist Award . . . is given every four years to an unsuspecting pianist deemed worthy of a great career by a panel of anonymous judges who conduct their worldwide talent search in secret.
old stuff
Jeannette and Her Synco Jazzers (Mary Lou Williams, piano, et al.), “The Bumps” (rec. 1927, Chicago)
**********
lagniappe
musical thoughts
Whistling was said to be popular among ancient Chinese hermits as a way of achieving oneness with nature.
—Laughing Lost in the Mountains: Poems of Wang Wei (translations by Tony Barnstone, Willis Barnstone, Xu Haixin)
sounds of Chicago
Mixon Singers, live, Chicago, 2013
**********
lagniappe
art beat
Walter Unbehaun (a 74-year-old client sentenced this week, in Chicago, to 42 months for bank robbery), African Preacher (Kankakee County Jail, 2014)
*****
reading table
God’s Grandeur
by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)The world is charged with the grandeur of God.It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oilCrushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soilIs bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;And though the last lights off the black West wentOh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —Because the Holy Ghost over the bentWorld broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
sounds of Chicago
Before “A Change Is Gonna Come,” before “Chain Gang,” before “You Send Me,” before . . .
Soul Stirrers (feat. Sam Cooke [1931-1964])
“Touch the Hem of His Garment,” 1956
***
“Nearer My God To Thee,” live, Los Angeles, 1955
**********
lagniappe
reading table
Gray hairs being plucked,
and from below my pillow
a cricket singing—Matsuo Basho (1644-1694; translated from Japanese by Sam Hamill)
sounds of Chicago
Edward Wilkerson Jr.’s Shadow Vignettes, “Defender” (E. Wilkerson Jr.), live
**********
lagniappe
random thoughts
What would it be like to live in a world where each moment was a small, but undeniable, miracle?
sounds of Chicago
Oshwa, “Old Man Skies,” live (recording session), Chicago, 2013
alone
Jason Adasiewicz (vibraphone), “Stake,” live, Chicago, 2009
**********
lagniappe
reading table
Dream Song 1
By John Berryman (1914-1972)Huffy Henry hid the day,
unappeasable Henry sulked.
I see his point,—a trying to put things over.
It was the thought that they thought
they could do it made Henry wicked & away.
But he should have come out and talked.All the world like a woolen lover
once did seem on Henry’s side.
Then came a departure.
Thereafter nothing fell out as it might or ought.
I don’t see how Henry, pried
open for all the world to see, survived.What he has now to say is a long
wonder the world can bear & be.
Once in a sycamore I was glad
all at the top, and I sang.
Hard on the land wears the strong sea
and empty grows every bed.
