Monday, June 7, 2010
guitar players who sound like nobody else, part 1
John Fahey (1939-2001)
“On the Sunny Side of the Ocean,” live, Germany (Hamburg), 1978
music clip of the day
jazz/blues/rock/classical/gospel/more
Category: guitar
2010
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.
***
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.
***
‘Lips’ is a short, sharp procession of maddening fret-hits and taunting vocal refrains that lead you everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
*****
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.
2010
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
2010
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
*****
Part 2 (“Funnybone”)
*****
Part 3 (“Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag”)
2010
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”
2010
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 allThen 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
2010
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)
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
*****
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)
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.
*****
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.)
2010
Friday, May 14, 2010
no redeeming value whatsoever
Andre Williams & His Orchestra, “Sweet Little Pussycat” (1966)
lagniappe
Andre Williams, 2010
music clip of the day 
