clarinet | music clip of the day

Category: clarinet

Tuesday, 5/1/12

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

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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)

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*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.

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2012

Monday, 4/23/12

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.

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*CM, bass; Eric Dolphy, alto saxophone, flute, bass clarinet; Clifford Jordan, tenor saxophone; Jaki Byard, piano; Dannie Richmond, drums.

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2012

Wednesday, 4/18/12

Peter Brötzmann, reed player, composer, bandleader
German Blues, performances 1999-2002, interview 2000

You can have the blues even if you’re German . . .

—Peter Brötzmann

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found words: AOL Headlines

Autistic Cheerleader Inspires Her Squad

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Kayaker Drowns After Swan Attack

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2012

Tuesday, 3/13/12

Music doesn’t care who you are, where you come from, what you know. It asks only that you pay attention.

Stefan Wolpe (1902-1972), Piece in Three Parts for Piano and Sixteen Instruments (1961), Peter Serkin (piano), Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center (Oliver Knussen, cond.)

More? Here.

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2012

Saturday, 3/10/12

Happy (109th) Birthday, Bix!

How many sonic experiences are as dizzying as the one offered this time each year by WKCR-FM (Columbia University)? First there’s 24 hours, straight, of Ornette. The next 24? Bix, Bix, Bix.

Frankie Trumbauer and His Orchestra (feat. Bix Beiderbecke, cornet), “There’ll Come A Time (Wait and See),” 1928

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lagniappe

found words

A distinctive psychiatric hospital

—advertisement, New Yorker, 3/5/12

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2012

Monday, 3/5/12

Has there ever been a finer hour of jazz—of music—on TV?

The Sound of Jazz (CBS), 1957*

(A couple excerpts have been posted previously—here and here—but until the other day I’d never seen the whole show.)

*With Count Basie (piano), Thelonious Monk (piano), Billie Holiday (vocals), Jimmy Rushing (vocals), Coleman Hawkins (tenor saxophone), Ben Webster (tenor saxophone), Lester Young (tenor saxophone), Gerry Mulligan (baritone saxophone), Jimmy Giuffre (tenor saxophone, clarinet), Pee Wee Ellis (clarinet), Henry “Red” Allen (trumpet), Roy Eldridge (trumpet), Vic Dickenson (trombone), Danny Barker (guitar), Freddie Green (guitar), Jim Hall (guitar), Milt Hinton (bass), Jo Jones (drums), et al.

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2011

Monday, 12/26/11

This week we revisit a few favorites from the past year.

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[D]ance first and think afterwards . . . . It’s the natural order.

—Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (1953, 1955 [English-language premiere])

Al Minns & Leon James, New York (Savoy Ballroom, Harlem), 1950s

Vodpod videos no longer available.

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art beat

Helen Levitt, New York, c. 1940

(Originally posted 1/11/11.)

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2011

Saturday, 12/10/11

If sounds define a space as much as walls and windows, you don’t need to knock out a wall to open up a room—just play this.

International Contemporary Ensemble with Steve Lehman
Impossible Flow (S. Lehman), live, New York (Le Poisson Rouge), 4/19/11

The moment this ends I want to hear it again. Is there any higher compliment?

More Steve Lehman? Here.

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lagniappe

reading table

A strange old man
Stops me,
Looking out of my deep mirror.

—Kakinomoto no Hitomaro (c. 662-710; trans. Kenneth Rexroth)

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2011

Wednesday, 12/7/11

What a treat to hear a guitar-led group that sounds so fresh.

Nels Cline (guitar) and Friends play the music of Andrew Hill

Live, New York (Jazz Standard), 2007

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musical thoughts

The more one studies the harmony of music, and then studies human nature, how people agree and how they disagree, how there is attraction and repulsion, the more one will see that it is all music.

—Hazrat Inayat Khan (quoted at Nels Cline’s website)