guitar players who sound like nobody else, part 3
Sonny Sharrock (1940-1994)
Live (with Melvin Gibbs, bass; Abe Speller & Pheeroan Aklaf, drums), New York (Knitting Factory), 1988
*****
“Who Does She Hope To Be?” (with Pharoah Sanders, tenor saxophone; Charles Moffett, bass; Elvin Jones, drums), 1991
guitar players who sound like nobody else, part 2
Derek Bailey (1930-2005)
With tap-dancer Will Gaines, live, 1995
Want more of Will Gaines? Here.
*****
Playing (and talking) for friends, New York, 2001
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With the Shaking Ray Levis, live, New York, 2003
*****
“Laura,” 2002
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lagniappe
Playing music is not really susceptible to theory much. Circumstances affect it so much.
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Personally, I`ve found that the kind of thing that I like is going into somebody else’s area and not playing their music but doing whatever I do in their area.
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I like duos with percussionists. I like the songs that percussionists sing.
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You can’t always wait for a composer to write the music you want to play.
—Derek Bailey
guitar players who sound like nobody else, part 1
John Fahey (1939-2001)
“On the Sunny Side of the Ocean,” live, Germany (Hamburg), 1978
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.
*****
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.
two takes
“La-La Means I Love You”
The Delfonics, live, 2008 (originally recorded 1968)
*****
Bill Frisell, live, New York (Rochester), 2007
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”)
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Part 3 (“Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag”)
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”
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
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)
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)
music clip of the day 
