Muddy Waters with Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Ronnie Wood, et al., “Mannish Boy,” live, Chicago (Checkerboard Lounge), 1981
Keith and Ronnie understand something many rockers don’t: the importance, in blues, of restraint. They also understand that when you’re a guest you don’t try to upstage the host. Mick, meanwhile, hasn’t got a clue.
three takes
“Dream Baby Dream” (A. Vega [Suicide])
Neneh Cherry & The Thing, The Cherry Thing, 6/12
*****
Bruce Springsteen, live (encore), 2005
*****
Suicide (long version), 1980
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lagniappe
random thoughts
Who says sports are frivolous? Baseball offers a veritable Ph.D. program in life’s hardest lessons. Good fortune is fleeting. Nothing can be taken for granted—ever. No matter how smooth the sailing, the shoals of despair are never far away. Yesterday, going into the bottom of the ninth, the Cubs were beating the Reds 3-0. Exit starter Ryan Dempster; enter closer Carlos Marmol. He gives up a walk. Then another. The next batter reaches on an error. Then there’s a line drive. The next batter? He walks, too. By the time Marmol crawls back to the dugout, the bases are loaded, there are no outs, and two runs are in. If nothing else, the pain would have come and gone more swiftly if the Reds had finished things right there. But they don’t. They add just one more run, tying the game. The Cubs come to bat. Nothing. The Reds score again and, finally, it’s over. Reds 4, Cubs 3. No tale from Greek mythology could have made the point more emphatically: fate is pitiless.
Weary of words?
You’ve come to the right place.
These guys take you places words don’t go.
Von Freeman,* tenor saxophone; Clifford Jordan, tenor saxophone (first solo); Willie Pickens, piano; Dan Shapera, bass; Robert Shy, drums; “Oleo” (S. Rollins), live, Chicago (Chicago Jazz Festival), 1988
More Clifford? Here.
Nothing hits the spot, sometimes, like a homicidal love song.
The Handsome Family, “My Beautiful Bride”
Live, Australia (Sydney), 2010
More? Here.
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lagniappe
art beat: Monday at the Art Institute of Chicago
Utagawe Hiroshige, Autumn Moon over Tama River (from the series Eight Views of the Environs of Edo), 1837-38
ready to levitate?
Peter Brötzmann Chicago Tentet,* “Aziz” (M. Zerang), recorded live in Chicago (Empty Bottle), 9/17/97 (Okka Disk OD-12022)
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lagniappe
art beat: yesterday at the Art Institute of Chicago (after meeting with a client at the nearby federal jail)
Utagawe Hiroshige, Suijin Shrine and Massaki on the Sumida River (from the series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo), c. 1856
*****
reading table
Were I to choose an auspicious image for the new millennium, I would choose . . . the sudden agile leap of the poet-philosopher who raises himself above the weight of the world, showing that with all his gravity he has the secret of lightness, and that what many consider to be the vitality of the times—noisy, aggressive, revving and roaring—belongs to the realm of death, like a cemetery for rusty old cars.
—Italo Calvino, “Lightness,” in Six Memos for the New Millenium (1988, translated from Italian by Patrick Creagh)
*****
*PB, tenor sax/clarinet/tarogato; Mars Williams, tenor/alto/soprano sax/clarinet; Ken Vandermark, tenor sax/clarinet/bass clarinet; Mats Gustafsson, baritone sax/fluteophone; Joe McPhee, pocket cornet/valve trombone/soprano sax; Jeb Bishop, trombone; Fred Lonberg-Holm, cello; Kent Kessler, bass; Michael Zerang, drums/percussion; Hamid Drake, drums/percussion.
Not even with all the fingers on all the hands of all the people in the city of Chicago could you count the possibilities offered by just three instruments.
Gyorgy Ligeti, Trio for Violin, Horn, and Piano (1982); Tomas Major (violin), Zora Sloka (horn), Denes Varjon (piano), 2009
Part 1
***
Part 2
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lagniappe
art beat: Sunday at the Art Institute of Chicago
Robert Rauschenberg, Short Circuit, 1955
two takes
“Run Joe” (L. Jordan, et al.)
Chuck Brown and the Soul Searchers, live
Capital Centre, Landover, Md., 1987
*****
Louis Jordan and his Tympany Five, recording, 1948
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lagniappe
random thoughts
Last night, sitting at Wrigley Field with my brother Don (something we’ve been doing together for over 50 years), I thought of a line my younger son Luke, who turns 21 next month, wrote in elementary school in response to a prompt: “When I am 100 I will not be able to play baseball with my brother.” (P.S. Cubs 3, Cards 2—their second straight walk-off victory.)
Charles Mingus Quintet,* “So Long Eric,” “Peggy’s Blue Skylight,” “Meditations On Integration” (all by Mingus), live (TV show), Belgium, 1964
Mingus’s music, it seems, has everything. Call it “simple” or “complex” and you’d be both right and wrong—it’s both. Compositional elegance is balanced, exquisitely, with improvisational unruliness. Rhythmic momentum is no less—and no more—important than melodic invention. Like Ellington and Monk, he will, I’m confident, still be listened to a hundred years from now.
(Excerpts from this program have been posted previously.)
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lagniappe
art beat: yesterday at the Art Institute of Chicago
Ludovico Carracci, The Vision of Saint Francis, c. 1602
Going to the Art Institute again, after being away for a while, I felt a bit like someone who doesn’t realize he’s starving until he finds himself at a feast.
*****
*CM, bass; Eric Dolphy, alto saxophone, flute, bass clarinet; Clifford Jordan, tenor saxophone; Jaki Byard, piano; Dannie Richmond, drums.
passings
In?
Out?
No matter—he played it all.
Jodie Christian, February 2, 1932-February 13, 2012, Chicago-based pianist; cofounder, AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians)
With Eddie Harris, tenor saxophone (Melvin Jackson, bass; Billy Hart drums), “Listen Here” (with a nod at the end to “Freedom Jazz Dance”), live, Montreux, 6/20/1969
***
With Roscoe Mitchell, soprano saxophone (Malachi Favors, bass, et al.), live, Chicago, 1984
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lagniappe
reading table
A dead beetle lies on the path through the field.
Three pairs of legs folded neatly on its belly.
Instead of death’s confusion, tidiness and order.
The horror of this sight is moderate,
its scope is strictly local, from the wheat grass to the mint.
The grief is quarantined.
The sky is blue.
To preserve our peace of mind, animals die
more shallowly: they aren’t deceased, they’re dead.
They leave behind, we’d like to think, less feeling and less world,
departing, we suppose, from a stage less tragic.
Their meek souls never haunt us in the dark,
they know their place,
they show respect.
And so the dead beetle on the path
lies unmourned and shining in the sun.
One glance at it will do for meditation—
clearly nothing much has happened to it.
Important matters are reserved for us,
for our life and our death, a death
that always claims the right of way.
—Wislawa Szymborska, “Seen From Above,” (translated from Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh)
lighter than air, funkier than dirt
Otha Turner (1907-2003) and the Rising Star Fife and Drum Band (with guest Luther Dickinson, guitar), “My Babe,” live, Memphis, 1990s
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lagniappe
art beat: more from Wednesday’s stop at the Art Institute of Chicago
Vincent van Gogh, The Poet’s Garden (1888)
*****
musical thoughts
Last night, at the University of Chicago’s Mandel Hall, I heard what may be the finest encore I’ve ever heard. After devoting the second half of his concert to Beethoven’s mammoth Diabelli Variations, pianist Peter Serkin, following several trips offstage to rapturous applause, sat down and played, slowly, meditatively, the Aria from Bach’s Goldberg Variations. As the last note was fading, if someone had turned to me and said, with the kind of confidence one often encounters in Hyde Park, that the greatest achievements in the history of humanity can be heard at the piano, I couldn’t have done anything other than agree.
music clip of the day 