In the public imagination, the guitar’s associated with freedom and individuality. The musical reality’s different. Guitarists travel in herds; few stray from the pack. One who has gone his own way is this man, who’s played with everyone from Muddy Waters (as a session musician for Chicago-based Chess Records) to Miles Davis (as a member of his group [1973-1975]). He employs a variety of unusual tunings and effects. He sounds like no one else.
Pete Cosey, guitar
“Calypso Frelimo” (excerpt), Pete Cosey’s Children of Agharta (JT Lewis, drums; Gary Bartz and John Stubblefield, saxophones & flute; Matt Rubano, bass; Johnny Juice, turntables; Baba Israel, words and beats; Kyle Jason, voice; Bern Pizzitola, guitar; Wendy Oxenhorn, harmonica), live, 2002, New York
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Live (with Melvin Gibbs, bass; JT Lewis, drums; Johnny Juice, congas and turntables)
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lagniappe
He’s [Pete Cosey’s] the guy who, after Hendrix, showed you how ‘out’ you could go with guitar playing, particularly in the improvised context.—Greg Tate
John Lee Hooker, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Dinu Lipatti: where else would you find these three artists together, performing back to back, besides a cyberstage?
Yesterday’s clip roamed all over the world. Today we travel to one city, Chicago. This is the Chicago of another era, where, on Sunday morning, on the near west side, on Maxwell Street, you could hear—right on the street—some of the greatest musicians in the world, including this man, one of the finest slide guitar players of all time.
Robert Nighthawk (AKA Robert Lee McCollum; 1909-1967), “Eli’s Place,” live, Chicago’s Maxwell Street, circa 1964
Moment for moment, this record, made in 1931 (up north in Wisconsin), remains one of the most astonishing performances in all of blues.
Skip James (1902-1969), “I’m So Glad” (1931, Grafton, Wisconsin [famously covered by Cream on both their first and last albums: Fresh Cream, 1966; Goodbye, 1969])
Old records, where everyone involved is long dead, don’t just appeal to the senses—they’re springboards for the imagination. Here’s a record that was made, in Memphis, over 80 years ago. It features one of the greatest voices in blues.
Close your eyes.
Open your imagination.
They’re just about ready to record.
What’s the room look like?
What’s the last thing they say before they start?
Tommy Johnson (1896-1956), “Cool Drink of Water Blues” (1928, Memphis)
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lagniappe
On the deepest level, a recording . . . is an invitation to time travel, a chance to resurrect the voices of the dead, a way to indulge a deep instinctual yearning to slow the passage of time. With a recording, we can preserve that fleeting moment, and play it again and again, according to our will. In his penetrating book “The Recording Angel,’’ Evan Eisenberg calls record listening “a séance where we get to choose our ghosts.’’—Jeremy Eichler, 12/13/09
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For about twenty years Tommy Johnson was perhaps the most important and influential blues singer in the state of Mississippi. He was one of the few black musicians to whom that much abused epithet ‘legendary’ rightfully applies.—David Evans
Rev. Utah Smith, Vernard Johnson, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, et al.: to those who have “ears to hear,” has any church given more than the Church of God in Christ (COGIC)?
Sister Rosetta Tharpe
“Didn’t It Rain,” live, England (Manchester), 1964
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“Up Above My Head,” live (TV broadcast)
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“Strange Things Happening Everyday” (1944)
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lagniappe
One of Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s many fans was Johnny Cash. She was, according to daughter Rosanne, his favorite singer.
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Other [black] churches were modeling themselves after mainline white Protestant institutions. They had a piano and an organ, and that was it. They had prepared literatures and other things. But the Church of God in Christ came out of African tradition, its call-and-response mode. . . . There is a definite COGIC style, and it has influenced the whole of gospel music. . . . Rosetta Tharpe and all of those personalities, they all sang in the Church of God in Christ. Utah Smith with “Two Wings”? COGIC. The Church of God in Christ has always been in the vanguard of expressing music.
One thing the Church of God in Christ understood very early on was that if you want to hold children in church, let ’em sing. If they’re not saved, let ’em sing. They’ll get saved. Let ’em hang around the church long enough, let ’em fall in love with singing. I don’t know anybody that’s a preacher in this church, a missionary in this church, that did not start off singing in the choir. If you were a child in this church, you sang. Even if you couldn’t carry a note in a bucket. The choir is where I began. I blew saxophone—and every now and again I still do. I’ve blown alto, soprano, and tenor. But basically I did my blowing and my music in the church. And so I have my musical part that I played in the church. My brother was the organist for the church. My other brother, Nathan, is the organist here [at Temple Church of God in Christ in Memphis]. He’s minister of music for this church. And we have an adult choir, and a youth choir, and our Sunshine Band, little children. So singing plays a part from the cradle to the grave.—Rev. Dr. David Hall (in Alan Young, Woke Me Up This Morning: Black Singers and the Gospel Life [1997])
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Today MCOTD celebrates its100thpost! (Hmmm . . . if this is where we are now, where would we be without music?)
When melody’s felt rhythmically, and rhythm melodically, you don’t need drums for the music to dance.
Oran Etkin’s Group Kelenia (Oran Etkin, clarinet; Makane Kouyate, percussion; Lionel Loueke, guitar; Joe Sanders, bass), live (radio recording session), New York, 2009
Mixing a record, as I learned when I worked at Alligator Records (back in the 1970s), involves a seemingly countless number of decisions. After a few hours, everyone starts to get a little punch-drunk. By the end of the night, for instance, this track had morphed—in the warped warble of engineer Freddie Breitberg (AKA, in his personal mythology, Eddie B. Flick)—into “Serve Me Rice For Supper.”
Jimmy Johnson, “Serves Me Right To Suffer” (Living Chicago Blues, Vol. 1, Alligator Records, 1977 [Grammy Nominee])
. . . Van Gogh’s letters are the best written by any artist . . . Their mixture of humble detail and heroic aspiration is quite simply life-affirming.—Andrew Motion, The Guardian (11/21/09)
music clip of the day 