Both Chicago blues artists. Both guitar players. Both influenced by other kinds of music.
Musical personalities? They could hardly be more different.
Buddy Guy, “Let Me Love You Baby,” live
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Fenton Robinson, “Somebody Loan Me A Dime,” live, 1977
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Back in the 1970s, when I was at Alligator Records, I had the pleasure of working with Fenton, co-producing his album I Hear Some Blues Downstairs (a Grammy nominee). He didn’t fit the stereotype of a bluesman. Gentle, soft-spoken, serious, introspective: he was all these things. He died in 1997.
God the poet, the master of metaphor, wanting to comment on what a big, open, unruly country this is, put the birthdays of Ornette Coleman, born in 1930 in Fort Worth, Texas, and Bix Beiderbecke, born in 1903 in Davenport, Iowa, back to back.
Bix Beiderbecke, cornet, with Frankie Trumbauer and His Orchestra, 1927
“I’m Coming, Virginia”
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“Singin’ the Blues”
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“Riverboat Shuffle”
lagniappe
Speaking of Bix’s playing, Louis Armstrong said:
Those pretty notes went right through me.
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Radio Bix: all Bix, all the time
As they did with Ornette’s birthday yesterday, WKCR-FM is celebrating Bix’s birthday by playing his music all day.
It used to be that music came from a particular place. No more. Whether it’s Sohrab Saadat Ladjevardi (the Iranian saxophonist who’s lived in Germany, in Japan, and now in New York City [2/18/10]), or Burkina Electric (whose members come from Burkina Faso, from Germany, and from New York City [by way of Austria] [2/22/10]), or this singer, who’s lived (and has homes) in Nigeria and in Germany, much of today’s most intriguing music has its ears and heart and feet on more than one continent.
1. Take a singer whose range includes about as many notes as he has fingers (on one hand).
2. Add a saxophonist who’s renowned for his melodic and harmonic inventiveness.
3. Mix?
Leonard Cohen with Sonny Rollins, “Who By Fire,” live (TV broadcast), 1989
These two mostly sound (to these ears) like, well, what they are: two distinctive artists whose musical worlds couldn’t be more different. But when Sonny finally leaves his world and enters Leonard’s—a world where melodic invention counts for nothing and subtle changes in inflection count for everything—the results are breathtaking (5:47 and following).
Do you know about my music on-line mag Doo Bee Doo Be Doo (which is looking for writers. What about you?)? Please visit http://www.doobeedoobeedoo.info
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Hope that sometime I will play in your city to have a chance to meet you.
I’ve been listening a lot lately to a box-set called ‘Goodbye Babylon’ which is 6 CDs of early 20th-century American religious music, black and white music, you know.
It’s got those Norfolk a cappella quartets and it’s got country singers, and there’s church services and everything. It’s the best compilation I’ve seen for years. It comes with a fantastic book. I find that so intriguing that I just listen again and again.—Brian Eno (quoted in L.A. Weekly)
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Sister O.M. Terrell
“The Bible’s Right” (1953, Nashville; included in Goodbye, Babylon)
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“Gambling Man” (1953, Nashville)
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“Swing Low, Chariot” (1953, Nashville)
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lagniappe
Ola Mae Long was born in Atlanta in 1911. She was raised by her mother, a laundress, near Decatur Street, and in 1922 she had a religious conversion at a revival. Thereafter, she began a street ministry under the auspices of the Fire Baptized Holiness Church of God, originally a South Carolina sect. Singing and playing guitar in the slide style, Terrell (her married name) spent the next half-century evangelizing on streets, in churches, and on the radio in South Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee.—Goodbye Babylon (accompanying book)
music clip of the day 