sounds of Chicago
This is a track I coproduced. It was the last thing recorded that night, an afterthought. The lights had just been turned down. The room was nearly dark.
Carey Bell’s Blues Harp Band,* “Woman In Trouble” (Living Chicago Blues, Vol. 1; Grammy Nominee), Alligator, 1978
*CB, vocals, harmonica; Lurrie Bell, guitar; Bob Riedy, piano; Aron Burton, bass; Odie Payne, Jr., drums.
love it or hate it
Weasel Walter (drums), Mary Halvorson (guitar), Peter Evans (trumpet), live, New York (Death By Audio, Brooklyn), 2012
only rock ’n’ roll
Here’s something from the show I saw the other night.
Savages, “She Will,” live, Chicago (Metro), 9/16/13
In the hope-I-die-before-I-get-old department, it occurred to me, as I was driving home from this show, that I’ve been doing variations on this particular theme—going out into the dark night to hear live music—for at least, uh, let’s see, yeah, it must be at least forty-five years, since it was 1968, when I was fifteen, that my brother Don and I, after seeing the Velvet Underground at Chicago’s Kinetic Playground, were arrested and taken to the police station. The charge? Curfew.
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
The best music, you can seek some shelter in it momentarily, but it’s essentially there to provide you something to face the world with.
—Bruce Springsteen
serendipity
Yesterday. Late afternoon, working on an old murder case. Happen upon this: windows open, letting in a breeze.
Mary Halvorson Quintet (MH, guitar, compositions; Jon Irabagon, alto saxophone; Jonathan Finlayson, trumpet; John Hebert, bass; Ches Smith, drums), “Love in Eight Colors,” “Hemorrhaging Smiles,” live, Washington, D.C., 2013
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lagniappe
reading table
From now on
it’s all clear profit,
every sky.—Kobayashi Issa (1763-1827), on his fiftieth birthday (translated from Japanese by Robert Hass)
last night*
Savages (Jehnny Beth, vocals; Gemma Thompson, guitar; Ayse Hassan, bass; Fay Milton, drums), live, England (Glastonbury Festival, Somerset), 2013
*I saw them at Metro, a club on Chicago’s north side, near Wrigley Field. The way drummer Fay Milton rode the beat, like a wave that kept surging, surging, surging, reminded me at times of Keith Moon. Is there any higher compliment?
sounds of Chicago
Edward Wilkerson, tenor saxophone (with Kidd Jordan, tenor saxophone; Henry Grimes, bass, violin; Isaiah Spencer, drums, et al.), live, Chicago, 2010
alone
Paal Nilssen-Love (drums), live, Norway (Kongsberg Jazzfestival), 2011
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lagniappe
reading table
Faces are motion, which is why all the photos of you are bad. Even the most natural-looking portrait is a sentence interrupted, one note of an aria, held. Though faces themselves hide a deeper motion. You seem to sit there and meet my eyes across the table, but you are so many other places, clinging here for a moment against all the currents that will soon sweep you onward. We are so moved by the faces caught in the windows of trains going the other way because they tell us how all faces really are.
—James Richardson, “Ten-Second Essay #134”
Why not start the week with a slap in the face?
Savages, “City’s Full,” “Shut Up,” “She Will,” “Husbands,” live (studio performance), Seattle, 2013
For over thirty years he’s been taking me places no one else does.
Henry Threadgill’s Zooid, live, New York, 2013
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*****
It’s not just notes on a page. Threadgill really reaches out and grabs you by the lapels. Someone else described it to me as ‘every time Threadgill enters, it’s like the curtains just parted.’ He has this way of cutting right through the texture of the music.
—pianist Vijay Iyer
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lagniappe
reading table: passings
Between my fingers and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.—Seamus Heaney (April 13, 1939-August 30, 2013), “Digging” (excerpt)
can’t wait: Chicago Jazz Festival, 8/29-9/1
The Engines (9/1; Dave Rempis, saxophones, Jeb Bishop, trombone; Kent Kessler [filling in for Nate McBride], bass; Tim Daisy, drums), live, Columbia, South Carolina, 2013
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music clip of the day 