Sunday, South Africa; Monday, Morocco; today let’s head to the center—the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire).
Konono No. 1, “Lufuala Ndonga”
Happy (80th) Birthday, Sonny!
Sonny Rollins (with Jim Hall, guitar; Bob Crenshaw, bass; Ben Riley, drums), live (TV broadcast), 1962
Part 1 (“The Bridge”)
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Part 2 (“God Bless the Child”)
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Part 3 (“If Ever I Would Leave You”)
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lagniappe
The great tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins turns 80 on Tuesday, awash in more than the usual veneration. The MacDowell Colony last month awarded him its Edward MacDowell Medal. This week Abrams is publishing “Saxophone Colossus: A Portrait of Sonny Rollins,” a handsome art book featuring photographs by John Abbott, with an essay by Bob Blumenthal. And Friday night Mr. Rollins will walk onstage at the Beacon Theater.
It won’t be just another Sonny Rollins concert, if there even is such a thing. In addition to his working band, Mr. Rollins has reached out to several guests. The guitarist Jim Hall is the most eagerly anticipated: at 79, he is indisputable jazz royalty himself, and a trusted partner from one of the most celebrated stretches of Mr. Rollins’s career. (Consult the ageless 1962 album “The Bridge.”) Mr. Hall sat in with Mr. Rollins in New England one night this summer. Before that they hadn’t played together since 1991, in a Carnegie Hall concert that also included the gifted young trumpeter Roy Hargrove, now 40, who will rejoin them here.
—Nate Chinen, New York Times, 9/1/10
*****
Interview (2009) (encountering W.E.B. DuBois as a child in Harlem, playing with Bud Powell at nineteen, using drugs, studying yoga in India, aging, etc.)
Morocco—it’s just a click away.
Musical Brotherhoods from the Trans-Saharan Highway, excerpts (2007)
two takes
This just in from my older (22-year-old) son Alex:
Have you heard the new Arcade Fire? It’s incredibly good, totally different from their older stuff—poppy and catchy.
Arcade Fire, “The Suburbs”
The Suburbs (8/10)
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live, New York (Madison Square Garden), 8/5/10
More? Here.
Happy Birthday, Pres!
Lester Young, August 27, 1909-March 15, 1959
(nicknamed “Pres” [or “Prez”] by Billie Holiday, who called him the “president of tenor saxophonists”)
Who else is at once so earthy and so ethereal?
Jammin’ the Blues (1944)
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On Lester Young
B.B. King:
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Lee Kontiz:
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Joe Lovano:
*****
Want more?
One of my favorite radio stations, WKCR-FM (based at Columbia University and available on-line), is celebrating Pres’s birthday in the best possible way—playing his music all day. (Actually, they’re playing his music for 36 hours straight, until the middle of the day tomorrow, when they’ll begin playing the music of Charlie Parker, whose birthday is Sunday, for the next 36 hours.)
When I die, I’m moving to New Orleans for the funeral.
Funeral, Trumpeter John Brunious, New Orleans, 2/23/08
street music
Whatever it is, this guy’s got it.
Who would’ve thought this would be so good?
Tom Jones & Janis Joplin, “Raise Your Hand,” live (TV broadcast), 1969
I have no idea what they’re saying.
It makes no difference.
I could listen to this all day.
(That’s why God made “replay.”)
The South African Gospel Singers, live, Wales (Brecon Jazz Festival), 2006
replay: a clip too good for just one day
If spirit could be sold, New Orleans would be rich.
Rebirth Brass Band, live, New Orleans, 2009
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lagniappe
Brass band musicians are a wild bunch. They’re hard to control. The street funk that the Rebirth Brass Band plays definitely isn’t traditional—it might be in thirty years time.
—Lajoie “Butch” Gomez (in Mick Burns, Keeping the Beat on the Street: The New Orleans Brass Band Renaissance [2006])
(Originally posted on 9/11/09.)
