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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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.
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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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lagniappe
“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 