cornet | music clip of the day

Category: cornet

Saturday, 11/12/11

Labels are often worse than useless. This guy, for instance, is often tagged as “cerebral.” But here’s something you can’t—I can’t, anyway—listen to without smiling.

Anthony Braxton, Composition No. 58
Taylor Ho Bynum Chicago Big Band,* live, 2009, Chicago

*****

Here’s another take—Braxton’s original recording (The Complete Arista Recordings of Anthony Braxton [Mosaic], rec. 1976).

More? Here.

**********

lagniappe

reading table

To obtain the value
of a sound, a movement,
measure from zero.

***

A sound has no legs to stand on.

***

The world is teeming: anything can
happen.

—John Cage, “2 Pages, 122 Words on Music and Dance” (excerpts)

*Taylor Ho Bynum & Josh Berman (cor), Jaimie Branch (tpt), Jeb Bishop & Nick Broste (tb), Nicole Mitchell (fl), Caroline Davis, Keefe Jackson & Dave Rempis (saxes), Jeff Parker (g), Jason Adasiewicz (vib), Nate McBride (b), Tim Daisy & Tomas Fujiwara (d)

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2011

Tuesday, 9/13/11

What a joy to find, as I did yesterday, new sounds that provide so much pleasure.

Starlicker (Rob Mazurek, cornet; Jason Adasiewicz, vibraphone; John Herndon, drums), “Horseshoes,” live, Iowa (Dubuque), 2011

Vodpod videos no longer available.

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2011

Monday, July 4, 2011

Happy Birthday, Pops!*

Louis Armstrong, “Basin Street Blues” (three takes)

#1 (live, 1959, Germany [Stuttgart])

Vodpod videos no longer available.

***

#2 (live, 1953, New Orleans)

Vodpod videos no longer available.

***

#3 (recording, 1928, Chicago)

Vodpod videos no longer available.

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lagniappe

more

Louis Armstrong & His Hot Five, “West End Blues,” 1928, Chicago

http://youtu.be/NmmFKu4FEbc

*****

radio

The federal government, in its wisdom, gives you the day off so you can listen to Louis Armstrong.

—Phil Schaap, 7/2/11, Traditions in Swing, WKCR-FM
(broadcasting from Columbia University), which today is all Pops, all day

*****

reading table

Summer afternoon — summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.

—Henry James

*Louis Armstrong gave July 4th as his birthday, something that was determined, after his death, not to be true—at least not literally.

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2011

Thursday, 3/10/11

Happy (108th) Birthday, Bix!

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.

*****

. . . “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

*****

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.)