music clip of the day

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Category: guitar

Sunday, January 26th

Little Richard, Jerry Lee—they’ve got nothing on this gal.

Rev. Julius Cheeks (lead vocals), Marge Cheeks (piano), Knights of Washington, D.C., “Morning Train,” TV show (TV Gospel Time), early 1960s

Tuesday, January 7th

Henry Theadgill’s Zooid,* live, New York (Roulette), 2012


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lagniappe

radio

Today WKCR-FM (Columbia University) is featuring Threadgill and a host of other musicians who came out of Chicago in the ’60s and ’70s.

In May of 1977, members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) collaborated with students at WKCR to present “Chicago Comes to New York,” a four-day music festival at Columbia University’s Wollman Auditorium.  Join us starting midnight on January 7, 2014 as we revisit this momentous event with a 24-hour marathon broadcast featuring music and interviews by the AACM.

Thirty members of the AACM came to New York with their families and friends for the festival, many for the first time. The festival also included an on-air component in the form of a ninety-hour broadcast of music and interviews with AACM artists. Over the last year, two recent WKCR alums restored and digitized the entire collection of reel-to-reel tapes from the festival, hearing the music for the first time since it was recorded.

Celebrate the incredibly important work that members of the AACM have been doing to promote artistic freedom and self-determination for nearly half a century. Help us revitalize and share these unique pieces of recorded history that WKCR is so privileged to have regained access to.

WKCR-FM

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*Henry Threadgill (alto saxophone, flute), Liberty Ellman (acoustic guitar), Jose Davila (tuba), Elliot Humberto Kavee (drums), Zachary Lober (bass), Christopher Hoffman (cello), Ben Gerstein (trombone), Jacob Garchik (trombone), Stephanie Richards (trumpet), Jonathan Finlayson (trumpet).

Friday, January 3rd

what’s new

Darkside, live, Paris (Pitchfork Music Festival), 10/31/13


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lagniappe

art beat

Lee Friedlander (1934-), Japan (Kyoto), 1981

1. Kyoto, 1981

Friday, December 27th

sweet soul music

D’Angelo and The Soultronics (Questlove, drums; Pino Palladino, bass; Chalmers “Spanky” Alford, guitar; Frank Lacy, trombone, trumpet; Anthony Hamilton, vocals, et al.), “Send It On,” live, London, 2000


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lagniappe

art beat

Helen Levitt (1913-2009), New York, c. 1940

helen-levitt-ny-four-girls-running-in-street-1950

Thursday, December 26th

what’s new

Julianna Barwick, live (studio performance), Seattle, 11/22/13

“Look Into Your Own Mind”


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“Crystal Lake”


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lagniappe

reading table

The Snow Man
by Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

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Stevens’s poems force us, as great poems always do, to live in the occasion of their language—not simply to extract a ‘meaning’ from the language. The point is not so much to understand the poems (for when we understand something, we don’t need it anymore, and we don’t read it again); the point is to inhabit the poems. By doing so, we recognize that our humanity is not constituted by our ‘mastery’ of something. It is constituted by our willingness to humble ourselves to the ‘mystery’ of something.

James Longenbach

Friday, December 20th

alone

Bill Frisell (guitar), “Nowhere Man,” “In My Life,” “Strawberry Fields Forever,” live, Washington, D.C., 2012


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lagniappe

random thoughts

Of this I am sure: The longer I live the more mysterious—the more unknowable—is life.

Friday, December 13th

only rock ’n’ roll

Superchunk, “Void” (2013)


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lagniappe

reading table

Cormac McCarthy, particularly in a book like Blood Meridian, is writing an English very remote from our own. It’s more like the King James Bible on acid, right?

—David Foster Wallace (1962-2008), in Quack This Way: David Foster Wallace & Bryan A. Garner Talk Language and Writing (2013)

Thursday, December 12th

passings

Jim Hall, guitarist, December 4, 1930-December 10, 2013

With Joe Lovano (tenor saxophone), “In a Sentimental Mood” (D. Ellington), live, Italy (Umbria Jazz Festival), 1996


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With Bill Evans (piano), Undercurrent (“My Funny Valentine,” “I Hear a Rhapsody,” “Dream Gypsy,” “Romain,” “Skating in Central Park,” “Darn that Dream,” “Stairway to the Stars,” “I’m Getting Sentimental Over You”), 1962


When I was in college in the early ’70s, this album was a frequent late-night companion. Since then I’ve listened to it more times than I could count. It never grows old.

Wednesday, December 11th

sounds of Chicago

Son Seals, “On My Knees,” live (TV show), 1980s


Musical notation has its place. Sometimes, though, it’s useless. How could marks on a piece of paper ever capture his attack?

Sunday, December 8th

sounds of Chicago

The Stars of Heaven, live, Chicago, 2012


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lagniappe

art beat

John H. White, Chicago (south side), 1973

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