two takes
“Take Five” (P. Desmond)
Ceramic Dog (Marc Ribot, guitar; Shahzad Ismaily, bass & percussion; Ches Smith, drums), live, Netherlands (Amsterdam), 2013
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Dave Brubeck Quartet (DB, piano; Paul Desmond, alto saxophone; Eugene Wright, bass; Joe Morello, drums), live, Germany, 1966
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lagniappe
art beat: yesterday at the Art Institute of Chicago
Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849), Bullfinch and Weeping Cherry Tree, 1834
tonight
I’m going, with my son Alex, to hear a quartet led by this Chicago-based saxophonist at the Hideout, a small club on the city’s northwest side.
Nick Mazzarella Trio (NM, alto saxophone; Anton Hatwich, bass; Frank Rosaly, drums), live, “Do Not Disturb,” live, Asheville, N.C., 2011
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
Make the drummer sound good.
only rock ’n’ roll
Wax Idols
“All Too Human,” 2011
*****
“When It Happens,” 2013
Yeah, I love Mozart and Chopin, but I don’t want to listen to them every day. I don’t want to listen to anything every day. This stuff, to these ears, is utterly exhilarating.
Nels Cline (guitar), Dave Rempis (saxophones), Devin Hoff (bass), Frank Rosaly (drums), live, Chicago (Hideout), 2011
#1
#2
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
I discovered that there’s a kind of a hidden connection between R&B and free jazz: the need for that kind of visceral connection with the audience and for something to happen that moves people. I think that beyond R&B, it’s a feature of black music — the moment the solo builds and builds and at a certain point, it hits that cry. Knowing when that needs to happen is something that players from that tradition seem to have.
—guitarist Marc Ribot
passings
George Jones, September 12, 1931-April 26, 2013
With Johnny Paycheck (vocals & bass), et al., “Things Have Gone To Pieces,” TV show, 1960s
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lagniappe
George Jones, the definitive country singer of the last half-century, whose songs about heartbreak and hard drinking echoed his own turbulent life, died on Friday in Nashville. He was 81.
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Mr. Jones was a presence on the country charts from the 1950s into the 21st century, and as early as the 1960s he was praised by listeners and fellow musicians as the greatest living country singer. He was never a crossover act; while country fans revered him, pop and rock radio stations ignored him. But by the 1980s, Mr. Jones had come to stand for country tradition. Country singers through the decades, from Garth Brooks and Randy Travis to Toby Keith and Tim McGraw, learned licks from Mr. Jones, who never bothered to wear a cowboy hat.
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George Glenn Jones was born with a broken arm in Saratoga, Tex., an oil-field town, on Sept. 12, 1931, to Clare and George Washington Jones. His father, a truck driver and pipe fitter, bought George his first guitar when he was 9, and with help from a Sunday school teacher he taught himself to play melodies and chords. As a teenager he sang on the streets, in Pentecostal revival services and in the honky-tonks in the Gulf Coast port of Beaumont. Bus drivers let him ride free if he sang. Soon he was appearing on radio shows, forging a style modeled on Lefty Frizzell, Roy Acuff and Hank Williams.
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In his last years, Mr. Jones found himself upholding a traditional sound that had largely disappeared from commercial country radio. “They just shut us off all together at one time,” he said in a 2012 conversation with the photographer Alan Mercer. “It’s not the right way to do these things. You just don’t take something as big as what we had and throw it away without regrets.”
“They don’t care about you as a person,” he added. “They don’t even know who I am in downtown Nashville.”
—Jon Pareles, New York Times, 4/26/13
Who better to sing about a ghost town than a band that’s survived not only Katrina but three—yes, three—homicides?*
Hot 8 Brass Band, “Ghost Town,” New Orleans, 2012
*As detailed in Wikipedia, in 1996 “seventeen-year-old trumpet player Jacob Johnson was found shot execution-style in his home”; in 2004 “trombone player Joseph ‘Shotgun Joe’ Williams was shot dead by police in controversial circumstances”; and in 2006 “drummer Dinerral “Dick” Shavers was shot and killed while driving with his family,” with a bullet intended for his fifteen-year-old stepson.
passings
Richie Havens, January 21, 1941-April 22, 2013
“All Along The Watchtower” (B. Dylan), live, Mountain Jam (Hunter, N.Y.), 2009
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lagniappe
reading table
Nakamichi, 1892 (Japanese Death Poems, Yoel Hoffman, ed.)
Ice in a hot world:
my life
melts.
Chicago: 1970s
Junior Wells (vocals, harmonica), Buddy Guy (guitar), et al., live, Theresa’s, 48th & Indiana, Chicago, 1970s
He knocked me out with his concept of space, his lightness of touch, his understatement.
Ahmad Jamal Trio (AJ [1930-], piano; Israel Crosby [1919-1962], bass; Vernel Fournier [1928-2000], drums), “Excerpts From The Blues” (not “Ahmad’s Blues”), TV show, 1959
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