Bad news: You’ve heard nothing this good in who knows how long.
Good news: You’re about to hear this.
Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers (AB, drums; John Gilmore, tenor saxophone; Lee Morgan, trumpet; John Hicks, piano; Victor Sproles, bass), “On The Ginza,” “Lament for Stacey,” “The Egyptian,” “I Can’t Get Started,” “Buhaina’s Delight,” live (TV show), London, 1964
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Robert Frank (1924-), Rooming house—Bunker Hill, Los Angeles, 1955/56
William Parker’s In Order To Survive (WP, bass; Hamid Drake, drums, MCOTD Hall of Fame; Cooper-Moore, piano, vocals; Lewis Barnes, trumpet; Rob Brown, alto saxophone), “Hymn,” live, New York, 2013
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He isn’t doing that right—that was a very important one. It was what Astaire claimed he was thinking whenever he watched himself onscreen, and I noted that third-person pronoun. This is what I understood by it: that for Astaire the person in the film was not especially connected with him. And I took this to heart, or rather, it echoed a feeling I already had, mainly that it was important to treat oneself as a kind of stranger, to remain unattached and unprejudiced in your own case. I thought you needed to think like that to achieve anything in this world. Yes, I thought that was a very elegant attitude.
William Parker’s In Order To Survive (WP, bass, composition; Hamid Drake, drums, MCOTD Hall of Fame;* Lewis Barnes, trumpet; Rob Brown, alto saxophone; Cooper-Moore, piano), “Criminals in the White House,” live, New York, 2013
*With saxophonists Von Freeman and Henry Threadgill; trumpeter Lester Bowie; gospel singer Dorothy Love Coates; composer Morton Feldman; poets John Berryman, William Bronk, and Wislawa Szymborska; and photographer Helen Levitt.
These guys, from Australia, are playing at Constellation.
The Necks, live, London, 2016
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The Imaginary Iceberg
by Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)
We’d rather have the iceberg than the ship,
although it meant the end of travel.
Although it stood stock-still like cloudy rock
and all the sea were moving marble.
We’d rather have the iceberg than the ship;
we’d rather own this breathing plain of snow
though the ship’s sails were laid upon the sea
as the snow lies undissolved upon the water.
O solemn, floating field,
are you aware an iceberg takes repose
with you, and when it wakes may pasture on your snows?
This is a scene a sailor’d give his eyes for.
The ship’s ignored. The iceberg rises
and sinks again; its glassy pinnacles
correct elliptics in the sky.
This is a scene where he who treads the boards
is artlessly rhetorical. The curtain
is light enough to rise on finest ropes
that airy twists of snow provide.
The wits of these white peaks
spar with the sun. Its weight the iceberg dares
upon a shifting stage and stands and stares.
The iceberg cuts its facets from within.
Like jewelry from a grave
it saves itself perpetually and adorns
only itself, perhaps the snows
which so surprise us lying on the sea.
Good-bye, we say, good-bye, the ship steers off
where waves give in to one another’s waves
and clouds run in a warmer sky.
Icebergs behoove the soul
(both being self-made from elements least visible)
to see them so: fleshed, fair, erected indivisible.
Howlin’ Wolf (vocals, harmonica; 1910-1976), “How Many More Years,” “Moanin’ at Midnight,” 1951
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We drew from the models, and you cannot imagine how fantastically boring it can be to look hour after hour at a beautiful body. But an ugly body can be fascinating.
—photographer Lisette Model (1901-1983), quoted in Colm Toibin, “That Little Minx” (reviewing Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer and Silent Dialogues: Diane Arbus and Howard Nemerov), London Review of Books, 3/2/17
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