Steve Reich, Bang on a Can All-Stars (Robert Black, bass; David Cossin, drums; Evan Ziporyn, piano; Bryce Dessner & Derek Johnson, guitars)
Rehearsal, 2×5 (S. Reich), 2009
Paul Cezanne, Madame Cezanne in a Yellow Chair, 1888-90
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Here’s what’s on its right.
Paul Cezanne, The Basket of Apples, c. 1893
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And here’s what’s on the adjacent wall.
Paul Cezanne, Harlequin, 1888-90
(on loan from the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.)
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I still work with difficulty, but I seem to get along. That is the important thing to me. Sensations form the foundation of my work, and they are imperishable, I think. Moreover, I am getting rid of that devil who, as you know, used to stand behind me and forced me at will to “imitate”; he’s not even dangerous any more.
—Paul Cezanne (last letter to his son Paul, dated October 15, 1906, a week before his death; quoted in Ambroise Vollard, Cezanne)
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Art ______ of Chicago
In the department of duh, after decades of going there and decades of listening to them, I’ve just noticed the verbal similarity between the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Ensemble of Chicago.
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.
If you’re away from home, how good it is to find a musical sanctuary, as I have the last two Fridays at Harvard’s Paine Concert Hall; last night I heard this string quartet play, wonderfully, music by Brahms and two contemporary composers (Adam Roberts, James Yannatos).
Chiara Quartet, Jefferson Friedman: String Quartet No. 2 (excerpt)
Live, New York (Le Poisson Rouge), 2010
Vodpod videos no longer available.
Are we ever better—more focused, more receptive, more supple—than when we’re listening to live music?
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lagniappe
art beat
Edward Hopper, Room in Brooklyn (1932), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
I find it hard to understand why some folks wall themselves off from classical music. Jazz, blues, rock, classical: it’s all music. Sure, the musical lines and paragraphs—the units of expression—are usually (though not always) longer and more complex in classical music. But that’s simply a matter of form. Raymond Carver and Marcel Proust, for all their formal differences, both take you places you can’t get to any other way. So too do both Beethoven and Art Pepper, both Magic Sam and Mozart.
Bela Bartok, String Quartet No. 1 in A minor, 3rd movement
The Parker Quartet, live, 11/23/09
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.
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.
Spontaneity, immediacy, freshness—they can be as important in classical music as they are in jazz. What I love about this performance, for instance, is that he never stops searching. It’s as if he’s encountering this piece for the first time and unable to conceal his astonishment.
I am so used to it by now
that when the traffic falls silent,
I think a storm is coming.
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Lonely
No one is calling me. I can’t check the answering machine because I have been here all this time. If I go out, someone may call while I’m out. Then I can check the answering machine when I come back in.
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Nietszche
Oh, poor Dad. I’m sorry I made fun of you.
Now I’m spelling Nietszche wrong, too.
Some music circles back on itself, over and over, slowing time.
John Luther Adams (not to be confused with the other John Adams)
“In the White Silence,” 1998 (excerpt)/The Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble, Tim Weiss, conductor (2003 recording)
Vodpod videos no longer available.
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“Red Arc/Blue Veil” for piano, percussion, and tape sounds (excerpt)/live, Kentucky (Lexington [University of Kentucky]), 2008/Clint Davis, piano; Charlie Olvera, vibraphone, crotales
Vodpod videos no longer available.
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
Adams talks about his music
Vodpod videos no longer available.
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I admire a radio station where you can’t be certain when you first tune in—as happened to me yesterday afternoon, while working, when I turned on WKCR-FM (broadcasting from Columbia University)—whether they’re playing a recording or having technical difficulties.
