Wednesday, June 20th, 2012, 6:00 pm – 9:00 pm
[Garfield Park, Chicago]
Featuring Mucca Pazza, the Circus Punk Marching Band, Kaotic Drumline, Oper-a-matic, Food Trucks, and More!
Marching bands, both traditional and unique, will be lining up in our backyard space for a mid-summer’s night march. Chicago’s inspiring community drum corps Kaotic, as well as the fantastic punk rock marching band Mucca Pazza will be parading throughout our backyard spaces, in a non-traditional community parade. Instrument making stations will be stationed throughout the event. Come make your own parade.
Pete Cosey, guitar player, October 9, 1943-May 30, 2012
Miles Davis, “Ife,” live, Austria (Vienna), 1973
With Pete Cosey, guitar (solo begins at 5:30) and percussion; Dave Liebman, flute, soprano and tenor saxophones; Reggie Lucas, guitar; Michael Henderson, bass; Al Foster, drums; James Mtume Forman, conga and percussion
*****
Here’s an earlier post (12/31/09):
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
*****
Live (with Melvin Gibbs, bass; JT Lewis, drums; Johnny Juice, congas and turntables)
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lagniappe
. . . the guy who, after Hendrix, showed you how ‘out’ you could go with guitar playing, particularly in the improvised context.
Arthel Lane “Doc” Watson, singer, guitar player, songwriter
March 3, 1923-May 29, 2012
“Deep River Blues,” 1960s
Country musicians who love blues, blues musicians who love country (as I frequently encountered years ago working at Alligator Records): stories of race and music are often complex, resisting reduction to black and white.
The Dirtbombs, live, New York (Southpaw, Brooklyn), 2008
*****
Curtis Mayfield, recording (Sweet Exorcist), 1974
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lagniappe
found words
Yesterday, in Cambridge, Massachusetts (where I am for my son Alex’s college graduation), sitting on a brick sidewalk in Harvard Square, a panhandler with a sign:
On the morning after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., city officials in Boston, Massachusetts, were scrambling to prepare for an expected second straight night of violent unrest. Similar preparations were being made in cities across America, including in the nation’s capital, where armed units of the regular Army patrolled outside the White House and U.S. Capitol following President Johnson’s state-of-emergency declaration. But Boston would be nearly alone among America’s major cities in remaining quiet and calm that turbulent Friday night, thanks in large part to one of the least quiet and calm musical performers of all time. On the night of April 5, 1968, James Brown kept the peace in Boston by the sheer force of his music and his personal charisma.
Brown’s appearance that night at the Boston Garden had been scheduled for months, but it nearly didn’t happen. Following a long night of riots and fires in the predominantly black Roxbury and South End sections of the city, Boston’s young mayor, Kevin White, gave serious consideration to canceling an event that some feared would bring the same kind of violence into the city’s center. The racial component of those fears was very much on the surface of a city in which school integration and mandatory busing had played a major role in the recent mayoral election. Mayor White faced a politically impossible choice: anger black Bostonians by canceling Brown’s concert over transparently racial fears, or antagonize the law-and-order crowd by simply ignoring those fears. The idea that resolved the mayor’s dilemma came from a young, African American city councilman name Tom Atkins, who proposed going on with the concert, but finding a way to mount a free, live broadcast of the show in the hopes of keeping most Bostonians at home in front of their TV sets rather than on the streets.
Atkins and White convinced public television station WGBH to carry the concert on short notice, but convincing James Brown took some doing. Due to a non-compete agreement relating to an upcoming televised concert, Brown stood to lose roughly $60,000 if his Boston show were televised. Ever the savvy businessman, James Brown made his financial needs known to Mayor White, who made the very wise decision to meet them.
The broadcast of Brown’s concert had the exact effect it was intended to, as Boston saw less crime that night than would be expected on a perfectly normal Friday in April. There was a moment, however, when it appeared that the plan might backfire. As a handful of young, male fans—most, but not all of them black—began climbing on stage mid-concert, white Boston policemen began forcefully pushing them back. Sensing the volatility of the situation, Brown urged the cops to back away from the stage, then addressed the crowd. “Wait a minute, wait a minute now WAIT!” Brown said. “Step down, now, be a gentleman . . . Now I asked the police to step back, because I think I can get some respect from my own people.”
Brown successfully restored order while keeping the police away from the crowd, and continued the successful peacekeeping concert in honor of the slain Dr. King on this day in 1968.
music clip of the day 