sui generis, adj.A person or thing that is unique, in a class by itself. E.g., Anthony Braxton, composer, reed player, professor, MacArthur “genius” grant winner, one-time professional chess hustler.
Happy (Belated 66th) Birthday, Anthony! (born June 4, 1945)
Anthony Braxton with his 12+1tet, Ghost Trance Music
New York (Iridium), 2008
Vodpod videos no longer available.
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
I wanted to live. I wanted to be alive. This experience goes by very quickly. Part of the radiance of a moment, in my opinion, involves that which we call music.
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Suddenly, Coltrane solos become the “it” of music, when in fact, the records and the notated solos are the sonic footprints, the bone structure of what actually happened in the music.
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I wanted a system that would be equal to the dynamics of curiosity. I wanted to have a music where I could have some fun.
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There is the wonderful discipline of music and the ability of music to keep on opening up fresh prospects. I must say, what a discipline!
Charles Mingus, bassist, bandleader, composer
April 22, 1922-January 5, 1979
In celebration of Mingus’s birthday, WKCR-FM (broadcasting from Columbia University) is playing his music all day. We’re celebrating by revisiting some favorite clips.
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Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Miles Davis: so many of the greatest figures in jazz weren’t just great musicians, or composers, or arrangers. They were great bandleaders. As important to their artistic success as anything else was their ability to find, and showcase, players who could make the music come alive—people like Johnny Hodges and Ben Webster and Jimmy Blanton and Lester Young and Freddie Green and Jo Jones and John Coltrane and Bill Evans and Tony Williams.
That small circle of elite bandleaders includes this man. He hired musicians who played their instruments like no one else (Eric Dolphy, Jaki Byard, et al.). He gave them a musical setting in which structure and freedom were exquisitely balanced. And together they made music that sounds (even on something familiar) like nothing else.
Charles Mingus Sextet (with Johnny Coles, trumpet; Jaki Byard, piano; Eric Dolphy, alto saxophone and bass clarinet; Clifford Jordan, tenor saxophone; Dannie Richmond, drums), “Take the A Train,” live, Norway (Oslo), 1964
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lagniappe
I nominate Charles Mingus one of America’s greatest composers—Ran Blake (in the liner notes to his recent album Driftwoods)
(Originally posted 12/1/09.)
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No jazz composer since Thelonious Monk has a stronger voice.
Lyrical beauty, inexhaustible drive, deep feeling: what more could you ask for?
Charles Mingus Quintet (CM, bass; Dannie Richmond, drums; Eric Dolphy, alto saxophone, bass clarinet; Clifford Jordan, tenor saxophone; Jaki Byard, piano), live (TV broadcast), Belgium, 1964
“So Long, Eric”
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“Peggy’s Blue Skylight”
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“Meditations on Integration” (excerpt)
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lagniappe
. . . [Mingus’s] music was pledged to the abolition of all distinctions: between the composed and the improvised, the primitive and the sophisticated, the rough and the tender, the belligerent and the lyrical.—Geoff Dyer, But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz (1996)
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Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.
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I, myself, came to enjoy the players who didn’t only just swing but who invented new rhythmic patterns, along with new melodic concepts. And those people are: Art Tatum, Bud Powell, Max Roach, Sonny Rollins, Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Parker, who is the greatest genius of all to me because he changed the whole era around.
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In my music, I’m trying to play the truth of what I am. The reason it’s difficult is because I’m changing all the time.
Mozart was a kind of idol to me—this rapturous singing . . . that’s always on the edge of sadness and melancholy and disappointment and heartbreak, but always ready for an outburst of the most delicious music.
God the poet, the master of metaphor, wanting to comment on what a big, open, unruly country this is, put the birthdays of Ornette Coleman, born in 1930 in Fort Worth, Texas, and Bix Beiderbecke, born in 1903 in Davenport, Iowa, back to back.
Bix Beiderbecke, cornet, with Frankie Trumbauer and His Orchestra
“I’m Coming, Virginia,” “Way Down Yonder In New Orleans,” 1927
Vodpod videos no longer available.
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lagniappe
Speaking of Bix’s playing, Louis Armstrong said:
Those pretty notes went right through me.
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. . . “I’m Coming, Virginia” became the most beautiful thing in my life . . . The coherence of its long Bix solo still provides me with a measure of what popular art should be like: a generosity of effects on a simple frame. The melodic line is particularly ravishing at its points of transition: there are moments when even a silent pause is a perfect note, and always there is a piercing sadness to it, as if the natural tone of the cornet, the instrument of reveille, were the first sob before weeping.
—Clive James, London Times, 5/16/07
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radio
Yesterday, at WKCR-FM (broadcasting from Columbia University), it was all Ornette all day; today it’s Bix. (Listening to so much Ornette seems to have rearranged my brain cells—permanently, I hope.)
(Some of this was previously posted on Bix’s last birthday.)
Babbit was not quite as difficult as he seemed. He may have been dealing in abstruse relationships among myriad elements, but his listeners didn’t have to digest too many at once. From Webern, Babbit learned the art of deriving a set from successive transformations of a group of just three notes (“trichord”), which becomes a microcosm of the series. With these tiny motives in play, the texture tends to be less complicated than in the average post-Schoenbergian work. Composition for Four Instruments gives the impression of economy, delicacy, and extreme clarity; flute, clarinet, violin, and cello play solos, duets, and trios, coming together as a quartet only in the final section, and even there the ensemble dissolves into softly questing solo voices at the end. Thick dissonances are rare; like Japanese drawings, Babbitt’s scores are full of empty space.
—Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise (2007)
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There was only one. There were no “simultaneities” in this particular musical equation. Milton Byron Babbitt stands alone. He will never be popular. Nor will he cease to inspire.
music clip of the day 