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
#1
#2
*****
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
#1
#2
more
O.V. Wright (1939-1980)
“God Blessed Our Love,” “When A Man Loves A Woman,” live, Japan, 1979
*****
“I’d Rather Be Blind, Crippled, And Crazy” (Back Beat, 1973)
*****
“A Nickel And A Nail” (Back Beat, 1975)
old school
O.V. Wright (1939-1980), “Into Something (Can’t Shake Loose)”
Live, Japan, 1979
*****
No other soul singer—not Otis Redding, not Al Green, no one—gives me such chills.
Stevie Wonder with Prince, “Superstition” (S. Wonder), live, Paris, 2010
Not many stars would handle this the way Prince does. Actually, what’s most impressive is what he doesn’t do. Given a guitar solo, he doesn’t try to steal the show—or even draw attention. Instead, he feeds the groove.
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lagniappe
reading table
Sophistication is upscale conformity.
***
What is more yours than what always holds you back?
***
The heart is a small, cracked cup, easy to fill, impossible to keep full.
—James Richardson, “Even More Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays from Vectors 3.0” (excerpts)
can’t wait: Chicago Jazz Festival, 8/29-9/1
Wadada Leo Smith, trumpet (8/30), Louis Moholo, drums, Steve Noble, drums, live, London, 2010
#1
#2
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lagniappe
reading table
What a glut of books! Who can read them?
—Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621)
music clip of the day 