A world without drums?
What would it sound like?
Rashied Ali, drummer, July 1, 1933-August 12, 2009
Rashied Ali Quintet (RA, drums; Joris Teepe, bass; Greg Murphy, piano; Lawrence Clark, tenor saxophone; Josh Evans, trumpet), live, Europe, 2008
#1
Vodpod videos no longer available.*****
#2A
Vodpod videos no longer available.***
#2B
Vodpod videos no longer available.***
#2C
Vodpod videos no longer available.More? Here.
scenes from New Orleans
an occasional series
Some music you listen to. Some you inhabit.
Rara Haiti, live, New Orleans (Jazz Fest), 5/11
Vodpod videos no longer available.Sometimes it takes years—decades even—before you’re really able to hear somebody’s music. The other day, for instance, I put on a CD by this guy, a jazz pianist and composer whose music, which I first encountered 20 or 30 years ago, I’d admired more than enjoyed. I put this on expecting to do some work while it played in the background. But it refused to cooperate. Instead of staying put, it jumped out of the speakers, grabbed me, wouldn’t let go. No work got done.
Herbie Nichols, pianist, composer
January 3, 1919-April 12, 1963
“The Third World”
With Al McKibbon, bass; Art Blakey, drums
Blue Note, 1955
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“Applejackin'”
With Al McKibbon, bass; Max Roach, drums
Blue Note, 1955
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“House Party Starting”
With Al McKibbon, bass; Max Roach, drums
Blue Note, 1955
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lagniappe
reading table
Like so many of life’s varieties of experience, the novelty of a diagnosis of malignant cancer has a tendency to wear off.
—Christopher Hitchens, “Unspoken Truths,” Vanity Fair, 6/11
scenes from New Orleans
(an occasional series)
Free Spirit Brass Band, live, New Orleans (Bourbon Street), 3/20/11
Vodpod videos no longer available.More Hound Dog
Hound Dog Taylor & The Houserockers (Brewer Phillips, guitar; Ted Harvey, drums), “Roll Your Moneymaker,” live, Ann Arbor Blues Festival, 1973
Vodpod videos no longer available.More? Here. And here. And here.
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lagniappe
reading table
M. Abel Bonnard, of Villeneuve-Saint-Georges, who was playing billiards, put out his left eye falling on his cue.
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On the bowling lawn a stroke leveled M. Andre, 75, of Levallois. While his ball was still rolling he was no more.
—Félix Fénéon, trans. Luc Sante, Novels in Three Lines (collecting, as the back cover puts it, “more than a thousand items that appeared anonymously in the French newspaper Le Matin in 1906—true stories of murder, mayhem, and everyday life”)
If you were 23 (like my son Alex), this might be your favorite band too.
The Pains of Being Pure At Heart
Live, Chicago (Lincoln Hall), 4/27/11
“Belong”
Vodpod videos no longer available.***
“Heart In Your Heartbreak”
Vodpod videos no longer available.***
“Everything With You”
Vodpod videos no longer available.what’s new
an occasional series
I’ve got a song for you to listen to . . .
—my (23-year-old) son Alex
tUnE-yArDs, “Bizness”
take 1: live, Austin (SXSW), 3/18/11
Vodpod videos no longer available.***
take 2: recording & video, 2011
Vodpod videos no longer available.
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lagniappe
reading table
John Ashbery, “Interesting People of Newfoundland”
(Skip the gaseous intro; the good stuff starts at 1:02.)
When you’re young you can’t imagine that the things that make your life sing won’t always be there. Then you get older. And they aren’t.
Hound Dog Taylor & The Houserockers (Brewer Phillips, guitar; Ted Harvey, drums), “Sadie,” live, Ann Arbor Blues Festival, 1973
More? Here.
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langiappe
This arrived yesterday, in response to an email letting her know that she was featured here (with Hazel Dickens):
Thanks for letting me know about this. We said goodbye to Hazel yesterday and singing was never more difficult. She was my musical guide and my beloved friend. Smart, funny, complicated, always real. She’ll live in my music, and my life, forever. “Fly away, Little Pretty Bird.”
Ginny
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Hazel Dickens, “Pretty Bird,” 1967
Vodpod videos no longer available.more sounds from the desert
Tinariwen, “Cler Achel,” live, London, 2007
Vodpod videos no longer available.**********
lagniappe
The desert is where I feel the most comfortable, the most at ease, the most relaxed. It’s also where I’m inspired to create music. To be honest, I don’t like spending too long away from the desert now. Well, that’s to say, I still like touring and travelling and seeing different parts of the globe, but I also like to be at home. And in the desert there are a lot of people who can help us . . . by hiring us a house, by cooking, by playing music with us. We can’t take all those people with us if we go and record in Bamako or Paris.
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Assouf means nostalgia, homesickness. We’ve all felt it a lot, ever since the time of exile began after the first [Tuareg] rebellion in 1963. It’s the feeling that is most important in our music. But it also means other things. It’s like a pain that you can’t see and can’t touch, a pain that lives in your heart. It means loneliness and separation too. When I was living in Algeria and Libya in the 1980s and 1990s I felt assouf a lot, and that’s when I wrote a lot of the songs I play today.
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In the desert, everybody is always moving. That’s our culture. It’s very very hard sometimes to get together, or to stay in the same place. We need our freedom. So Tinariwen has survived because really almost every Tamashek musician in the northeast of Mali or the south of Algeria is part of Tinariwen. And if just two of them come together to sing our songs, that’s enough for it to be Tinariwen. In the past, that’s how our concerts happened. Hassan and Abdallah might perform in Bamako or Abidjan while I was hundreds of miles away in Tamanrasset or someplace. So I know that some people have been frustrated for example when I haven’t been present on stage in America. But that’s how Tinariwen has always been, loose and flexible. Otherwise we could never survive.
joy, n. a source of keen pleasure or delight. E.g., the singing of Eddie Jefferson.
Eddie Jefferson, jazz singer, August 3, 1918-May 9, 1979
Live (with Richie Cole, alto saxophone; John Campbell, piano; Kelly Sill, bass; Joel Spencer, drums), Chicago (Jazz Showcase), 5/6/79 (days later, outside a jazz club in Detroit, he was shot to death)
Vodpod videos no longer available.**********
lagniappe
art beat: yesterday at the Art Institute of Chicago
Mark Rothko, Untitled (Purple, White, and Red), 1953
No painting has held my gaze more often, or meant more to me, than this. It’s different every time I see it.
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reading table
ROTHKO: Look at the tension between the blocks of color: the dark and the light, the red and the black and the brown. They exist in a state of flux—of movement. They abut each other on the actual canvas, so too do they abut each other in your eye. They ebb and flow and shift, gently pulsating. The more you look at them the more they move . . . They float in space, they breathe . . . Movement, communication, gesture, flux, interaction; letting them work . . . They’re not dead because they’re not static. They move through space if you let them, this movement takes time, so they’re temporal. They require time.
—John Logan, Red (2009)
