guitar | music clip of the day

Category: guitar

Saturday, May 29, 2010

Sometimes you don’t feel like Beethoven.

Or Miles Davis.

Or the Soul Stirrers.

What you want is a jolt.

Micachu & The Shapes, “Lips”

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lagniappe

This is what I call PR.

[Mica Levi of Micachu & The Shapes is] the most singular artist leading the future-pop frontier, with an instinctual understanding of music only possible from one of those rare lives where rhythms, melodies, discord and noise have underpinned every last waking second.

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Born in Guildford and raised in Watford, Mica Levi couldn’t have had much more of a musical upbringing if she was conceived between Mozart and an oboe and forced to grow up inside a grand piano.

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‘Lips’ is a short, sharp procession of maddening fret-hits and taunting vocal refrains that lead you everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

—Rough Trade Records

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live music on the radio

One of my favorite radio stations, WFMU-FM, is broadcasting live today from the Primavera Sound Festival in Barcelona: the Almighty Defenders, Cold Cave, Van Dyke Parks, et al.

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Friday, May 28, 2010

two takes

“La-La Means I Love You”

The Delfonics, live, 2008 (originally recorded 1968)

*****

Bill Frisell, live, New York (Rochester), 2007

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Thursday, May 27, 2010

Chicago, Texas, Louisiana, West Coast—blues comes in lots of different shades.

Freddie King, with Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown; live (TV broadcast [The !!!! Beat]), 1966

Part 1

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Part 2 (“Funnybone”)

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Part 3 (“Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag”)

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Monday, May 24, 2010

music from Mali

Sometimes the groove is so deep and so wide and so relaxed that, even if someone’s talking over it in a language you don’t understand at all, you just want to lie down in it and stay there.

Ali Farka Toure, guitar and vocals, “Ai du”

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Friday, May 21, 2010

Jenny said when she was just five years old
There was nothin’ happening at all
Every time she puts on the radio
There was nothin’ goin’ down at all
Not at all

Then one fine mornin’, she puts on a New York station
You know, she couldn’t believe what she heard at all
She started shakin’ to that fine, fine music
You know, her life was saved by rock and roll . . .

—Lou Reed, “Rock & Roll” (The Velvet Underground, Loaded [1970])

*****

Bo Diddley, “Hey, Bo Diddley,” “Bo Diddley,” live (TV broadcast [Ed Sullivan Show]), 1955

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lagniappe

This well may be the human race’s greatest ever achievement.

—YouTube comment

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Thursday, May 20, 2010

These guys sounded awfully good the other day—let’s hear some more.

Trombone Shorty and Orleans Avenue, “Orleans & Claiborne,” live, New Orleans, 2010

There are a lot of things to like about this performance. One is the way Shorty, following two hot solos (tenor, baritone), doesn’t try to out-blow those guys. Instead, he changes directions (3:20). Sometimes nothing packs more punch than restraint. (Yeah, I don’t know why this clip cuts off when it does, either.)

Want more? Here.

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lagniappe

passings

Soon I’ll be leaving for a funeral—my uncle, Hugh Frebault. Nine days ago we sat and talked and laughed for over an hour; now he’s silent. Does life get any more understandable as you get older? I don’t think so—if anything, it seems to become only more mysterious, more unfathomable.

Blind Willie Johnson, “Dark Was The Night – Cold Was The Ground” (1927, Dallas)

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2010

Monday, May 17, 2010

In embracing music from another continent, this guy—a Gypsy born in Belgium who grew up near Paris—was way ahead of his time.

Django Reinhardt, January 23, 1910-May 16, 1953

Quintette du Hot Club de France

Live, “J’attendrai Swing,” 1939

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Live, “Echoes of France,” 1945

It’s something of a miracle that Django was able, physically, to make music at all. When he was eighteen, his left hand was badly injured in a fire, leaving his fourth and fifth fingers permanently curled toward the palm.

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lagniappe

Jazz attracted me because in it I found a formal perfection and instrumental precision that I admire in classical music, but which popular music doesn’t have.—Django Reinhardt

*****

With Duke Ellington (1939)

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2010

Saturday, May 15, 2010

replay: a clip too good for just one day

The world became a less interesting place the day Lester Bowie died.

Digable Planets (with Lester Bowie [trumpet], Joe Sample [keyboard], Melvin “Wah-Wah Watson” Ragin [guitar]), “Flying High in the Brooklyn Sky,” live

Want to hear more of Lester? Here.

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lagniappe

Part of the job of a musician is that of a messenger. If you ain’t ready to be a messenger, forget it. You need to get a job in the post office or somewhere. If you ain’t ready to travel, pack up your family, or pack up yourself and hit the road, you’re in the wrong business. Because that’s what music is about. It’s about spreading knowledge and education, and re-education. It’s about spreading. You have got to travel with it to spread the word. Like all the people in the past that have had to travel to spread the music.

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It’s life itself that this [music] is about.

—Lester Bowie (in George E. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music [2008])

(Originally posted 10/28/09.)