drums | music clip of the day

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

*****

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.

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2012

Wednesday, 4/25/12

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.)

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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.

*****

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

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2012

Saturday, 4/21/12

The Wailers, live, Los Angeles, 1973*

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lagniappe

musical thoughts

Music comes up more often in my work as a criminal defense lawyer than you might think. Recently I devoted a lot of time to a case involving a Jamaican guy, a sweet-tempered 64-year-old Rasta, who was charged with a federal immigration offense. It helped a lot, early in our relationship, to be able to talk about seeing Bob Marley in the mid-70s at a small Chicago club (Quiet Knight). And when I’d see him at the jail, talking about music (Marley, Sugar Minott, Gregory Isaacs, et al.) gave us a way to leave behind, if only briefly, the concrete walls and the locked doors and the glass window separating us. (At his sentencing hearing earlier this week, the judge, rejecting the prosecutor’s call for a minimum of 70 months’ incarceration, gave him 30 months, meaning, with credit for time served and “good time,” he’ll do less than a year.)

*****

*In 1974, following the departure of Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer (AKA Bunny Livingston), the band became known as Bob Marley and the Wailers.

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2012

Friday, 4/20/12

passings

Levon Helm, drummer, singer, songwriter, actor, etc.
May 26, 1940-April 19, 2012

Live, 2/12, Woodstock, NY (Levon’s home)

“Ophelia”

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“The Weight”

*****

“When I Go Away,” recording (Electric Dirt, 2009)

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Levon Helm will always hold a special place in my heart. He was as great of an actor as a musician. For me watching him play the role of my daddy in Coal Miner’s Daughter is a memory I will always treasure.

—Loretta Lynn

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When I heard The Band’s Music from Big Pink, their music changed my life. And Levon was a big part of that band. Nigel Olson, my drummer, will tell you that every drummer that heard him was influenced by him. He was the greatest drummer and a wonderful singer and just a part of my life that was magical. They once flew down to see me in Philadelphia and I couldn’t believe it. They were one of the greatest bands of all time. They really changed the face of music when their records came out. I had no idea he was sick so I’m very dismayed and shocked that he died so quickly. But now my son [Zachary Jackson Levon Furnish-John] has his name.

—Elton John

***

He was my bosom buddy friend to the end, one of the last true great spirits of my or any other generation. This is just so sad to talk about. I still can remember the first day I met him and the last day I saw him. We go back pretty far and had been through some trials together. I’m going to miss him, as I’m sure a whole lot of others will too.

—Bob Dylan

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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

*****

Kayaker Drowns After Swan Attack

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2012

Tuesday, 4/17/12

Happy (70th) Birthday, Han!

Han Bennink, drummer, percussionist, visual artist, etc.

Han Bennink (drums) & Guus Janssen (piano), “One Bar”
Live, Japan (Chiba), 2010

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lagniappe

You’ve got to hand it to WKCR-FM. There are a few stations, here and there, that might spin a track or two in honor of the Dutch drummer’s 70th birthday. Somebody might even give him an hour or two. But who, other than a station deeply in tune with Bennink’s own inspired lunacy, would stage a five-day marathon?

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2012

Monday, 4/16/12

two takes

“Honky Tonk Man” (J. Horton, et al.)

Dwight Yoakam
Live, mid-1980s

*****

Johnny Horton
Recording (Billboard Hot Country Singles, #9), 1956

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reading table

Hank Williams . . . was essentially the first rock star. He was a hillbilly singer, but he was a rock star. As Chet Atkins said, the year that Elvis hit, it ruined country music. Because they had rural America and southern America’s teenage audience. And then they couldn’t keep them. Elvis had changed everything.

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I was a Monkees kid. For a ten-year-old like myself, the Monkees were a cultural access point that the Beatles weren’t. I was an oldest kid, teaching myself, and the Beatles were a bit beyond my grasp. Television delivers the Monkees to me in a different way; A Hard Day’s Night was not on TV in 1965. . . . The Monkees . . . came inside my living room, and there was a familiarity that allowed me to really understand what this new thing was. I had the first two Monkees albums, and I couldn’t have gotten a better education, retrospectively, in songwriting, when you think about it, than listening to Neil Diamond, Carole King, Boyce and Hart compositions. The world in two-and-a half to three minutes.

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I had the jeans, the boots . . . There was a whole Hud element to that cowboy culture that I knew that could be introduced, the Route 66 Americana, not the Nashville Dixie country. Beyond James Dean, beyond Giant. This Route 66 Corvette cowboy. So let’s just call it that—it’s beyond Cadillac Cowboy. It’s Corvette cowboy.

—Dwight Yoakam (in Don McLeese, Dwight Yoakam: A Thousand Miles From Nowhere [2012])

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2012

Sunday, 4/15/12

Deep River Choir, Amiri Baraka (spoken words), David Murray (tenor saxophone), “Oh Freedom,” live

One reason this works so well is that none of the participants—not the singers, not Amiri Baraka, not David Murray—tries to take the performance over. How refreshing, and inspiring, in an age whose motto seems to be “look at me,” to come across folks so intent on serving—not dominating—a performance.