Here’s another musician who, like Dinu Lipatti (Tuesday’s post), died way too young: the great Chicago blues artist Magic Sam (AKA Samuel Maghett). He suffered a fatal heart attack just months after this performance. He was 32.
Magic Sam, live (TV broadcast), Germany, 1969
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Facebook seems to have expanded into new markets. “Sign up,” they say, “to connect with [t]he late, great Magic Sam.”
This music, like Bach’s Six Suites for Unaccompanied Cello and music for unaccompanied violin, I first heard nearly forty years ago, when I was in college—and like Bach’s music, I’ve been listening to it ever since.
classic, n. 1. An artist, author, or work generally considered to be of the highest rank or excellence, especially one of enduring significance. E.g., Johann Sebastian Bach, Blind Willie Johnson.
Blind Willie Johnson (1897-1945)
“God Don’t Never Change” (1929, New Orleans)
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“John the Revelator” (1929, Atlanta)
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“Trouble Will Soon Be Over” (1929, Atlanta; video from “The Soul of a Man,” part 4 of Martin Scorsese’s PBS series “The Blues”)
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“Dark Was The Night – Cold Was The Ground” (1927, Dallas)
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[Blind Willie Johnson’s ‘Dark Was The Night – Cold Was The Ground’] is the most soulful, transcendent piece in all American music.—Ry Cooder
The first time I stood before a judge at Chicago’s Criminal Courts Building at 26th and California—this was back in the ’70s (when I was working at Alligator Records)—it was to speak on behalf of this man, Hound Dog Taylor. The day before, during a drunken argument at his apartment, he’d shot his longtime guitarist Brewer Phillips (who survived). In his own way, Hound Dog was a pretty canny guy. When he told me about this incident over the phone, shortly after it happened, he put it this way: “Richard, they say I shot Phillip . . .”
(No, don’t touch that dial; these stills are way out of focus—which, for Hound Dog, seems just right.)
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Hound Dog Taylor and the Houserockers, live, Ann Arbor Blues Festival, 1973
“Wild About You Baby”
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“Taylor’s Rock”
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“I Held My Baby”
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Hound Dog . . . . [would] play things that are technically wrong, and [he’d] . . . make people like it. . . . [He’d] just get up there and go for it.—Elvin Bishop
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When I saw Hound Dog Taylor and the HouseRockers as a three-piece, I said, ‘There it is. There’s your future right there.’—George Thorogood
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Hound Dog Taylor is one of my favorites. He used this raw dog blues, you know.—Vernon Reid
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A Facebook page devoted to Hound Dog, who died over 30 years ago (1975), currently lists 434 “Fans” who come from, let’s see, Orlando and Indonesia and Cedar Rapids and Sweden and Austin and Australia and . . .
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When I die, they’ll say ‘he couldn’t play shit, but he sure made it sound good!’—Hound Dog Taylor
With some music, it’s the particular sound a musician coaxes out of his instrument that gets under your skin. Here’s one of the dirtiest, snakiest electric guitar sounds around.
Group Doueh (featuring Baamar Salmou AKA Doueh on electric guitar), live, Western Sahara
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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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])
These clips really take me back, as I worked with blues guitarist Albert Collins, co-producing his 1978 album Ice Pickin’, when I was at Alligator Records. Not only was he an absolute joy onstage; he was, offstage, a real sweetheart.
Albert Collins, live, Germany (late 1970s)
More:
Albert Collins, “Frosty,” live, Germany, 1988
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odds & ends
MacArthur “genius” grant winner John Zorn composed a piece for Albert, “Two-Lane Highway,” which appears—with Albert on guitar—on Zorn’s album Spillane.
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Amaze your friends with your ability to answer this (seldom asked) question: Who’s “the first blues guitar book published in Hebrew in Israel” dedicated to?
Blues Guitar Festival/day 3 of 3
Performances like this usually fall somewhere between disappointing and disastrous. So many things can—and usually do—go wrong when you take a bunch of folks who’re used to leading their own bands and throw them together onstage. People trip all over each another; flash trumps feeling. But this performance, with Albert King, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Paul Butterfield, and (at the end) B.B. King, has plenty of strong moments—some funny ones, too. Listen to Albert bark at Paul: “Turn around!” (0:39) And watch Albert outfox B.B. First he invites him back onstage (4:40) and then, just when B.B.’s about to take flight (5:55), he cuts him off—faster than you can say “wham”—with his own (wonderful) solo. So much for Emily Post.
Stevie Ray Vaughan, Albert King, Paul Butterfield, B.B. King, live, 1987
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A radio station that’s well worth checking out, if you’re not already familiar with it, is WKCR-FM, which broadcasts from NYC’s Columbia University. Like pretty much everything else these days, it’s available on-line. Among other things, it features a daily dose of Charlie Parker on “Bird Flight” (M-F, 8:30-9:30 a.m. [EDT]), hosted by Phil Schaap (profiled last year, by David Remnick, in the New Yorker), as well as, on Sunday, two excellent shows devoted to Indian music (6:00-8:00 a.m. and 7:00-9:00 p.m. [EDT]). (Another nice thing: the folks there are readily accessible; while listening yesterday, for instance, I heard an intriguing piece [by Alfred Schnittke] that I didn’t get the name of; I emailed them a query and, by the end of the night, had a response from the DJ.)
Blues Guitar Festival/day 2 of 3
A blues guitarist backed by, let’s see, Dizzy Gillespie, Clark Terry, Zoot Sims, James Moody, and Teddy Wilson? With most blues artists that might seem odd. Not T-Bone Walker.
T-Bone Walker, live, England, 1966
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“When I heard T-Bone Walker play the electric guitar I had to have one. T-Bone Walker has a touch that nobody has been able to duplicate.”—B.B. King
“T-Bone Walker was a big influence on just about every guitar player around.”—Johnny Winter
“The first thing I can remember was my mother singing the blues as she would sit alone. I used to listen to her singing there at night, and I knew then that the blues was in me too.”—T-Bone Walker
Blues Guitar Festival/day 1 of 3
If you think blues and country never mingle, just listen to blues guitar great Earl Hooker. Backstage, he fools around, lovingly, with the country classic “Walkin’ the Floor Over You.” Onstage, he launches into a bluesy instrumental that’s as hyped up as a truck driver, past midnight, on his fifth cup of coffee. While some musicians (particularly in jazz) are famous for playing “behind the beat” (Lester Young, Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, et al.), Hooker keeps racing ahead of the beat, pushing so insistently that, at times, it feels like he might jump off the road altogether.
Earl Hooker, live, Germany, 1969
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“I used to listen to country and western and blues, John Lee Hooker, spirituals, the Bluegrass Boys, and Eddie Arnold. There was a radio station that come on everyday with country, spirituals, and the blues.”—Otis Rush
music clip of the day 