Yeah, I love Mozart and Chopin, but I don’t want to listen to them every day. I don’t want to listen to anything every day. This stuff, to these ears, is utterly exhilarating.
Nels Cline (guitar), Dave Rempis (saxophones), Devin Hoff (bass), Frank Rosaly (drums), live, Chicago (Hideout), 2011
#1
#2
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
I discovered that there’s a kind of a hidden connection between R&B and free jazz: the need for that kind of visceral connection with the audience and for something to happen that moves people. I think that beyond R&B, it’s a feature of black music — the moment the solo builds and builds and at a certain point, it hits that cry. Knowing when that needs to happen is something that players from that tradition seem to have.
With Johnny Paycheck (vocals & bass), et al., “Things Have Gone To Pieces,” TV show, 1960s
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lagniappe
George Jones, the definitive country singer of the last half-century, whose songs about heartbreak and hard drinking echoed his own turbulent life, died on Friday in Nashville. He was 81.
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Mr. Jones was a presence on the country charts from the 1950s into the 21st century, and as early as the 1960s he was praised by listeners and fellow musicians as the greatest living country singer. He was never a crossover act; while country fans revered him, pop and rock radio stations ignored him. But by the 1980s, Mr. Jones had come to stand for country tradition. Country singers through the decades, from Garth Brooks and Randy Travis to Toby Keith and Tim McGraw, learned licks from Mr. Jones, who never bothered to wear a cowboy hat.
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George Glenn Jones was born with a broken arm in Saratoga, Tex., an oil-field town, on Sept. 12, 1931, to Clare and George Washington Jones. His father, a truck driver and pipe fitter, bought George his first guitar when he was 9, and with help from a Sunday school teacher he taught himself to play melodies and chords. As a teenager he sang on the streets, in Pentecostal revival services and in the honky-tonks in the Gulf Coast port of Beaumont. Bus drivers let him ride free if he sang. Soon he was appearing on radio shows, forging a style modeled on Lefty Frizzell, Roy Acuff and Hank Williams.
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In his last years, Mr. Jones found himself upholding a traditional sound that had largely disappeared from commercial country radio. “They just shut us off all together at one time,” he said in a 2012 conversation with the photographer Alan Mercer. “It’s not the right way to do these things. You just don’t take something as big as what we had and throw it away without regrets.”
“They don’t care about you as a person,” he added. “They don’t even know who I am in downtown Nashville.”
From The Blues Accordin’ to Lightnin’ Hopkins (1967) by Les Blank, who was remembered here last week:
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free music
Another friend, with whom I worked, thirty-some years ago, at Alligator Records, writes:
Hi Richard,
I continue to receive these [notices of new blog posts] and explore them as I can. I wonder if you might share this with your email list?
It’s a free, downloadable sampler from Alligator Records to celebrate Public Radio Music Month! Seventeen soulful free blues, roots rock and R&B performances by some of the stars of Alligator Records’ current artist roster and a few of our beloved heritage artists. From Chicago to Texas, from New Orleans to California, a collection of some of Alligator’s best “Genuine Houserockin’ Music.” Join us in celebrating Public Radio Music Month! Download it here: http://tinyurl.com/AlligSampler.
Thanks. Of course you’ve heard this music yourself, but there might be some good things you had forgotten.
Last Saturday, with my wife Suzanne and son Alex, I heard these folks at Fitzgerald’s, a wonderful club in Berwyn (just outside Chicago) that I’ve been going to since long before Alex, now twenty-five, was born. Some people, if given the chance to be anywhere in the world on a Saturday night, might choose Paris. Others might take Rome. London would likely get some votes, New York too. For me, last Saturday anyway, there was nowhere I would rather have been than Berwyn.
They sounded so good last Sunday—let’s hear some more.
Pastor B. L. Blade with Daniel Lanois (guitar, vocals), Brian Blade (drums), et al.
“The Maker” (D. Lanois), excerpt (“Oh, river rise from your sleep.”)
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lagniappe
random thoughts
How strange it seems sometimes, like the other day in the shower, to have hands and feet.
From Zion Baptist Church in Shreveport to Miles Davis Hall in Montreux.
Black Dub (Daniel Lanois, guitar, pedal steel guitar, vocals; Brian Blade, drums; Trixie Whitley, guitar, keyboards, vocals; Jim Wilson, bass, vocals), Montreux, Switzerland, 2011
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Set list (courtesy of YouTube):
1) Intro
2) Surely
3) I Believe In You
4) Steel
5) The Collection Of Marie Claire
6) Silverado
7) The Messenger
8) I’d Rather Go Blind
9) Ring The Alarm
music clip of the day 