What better way to start the workweek?
Joe Lee Wilson, singer, December 22, 1935-July 17, 2011
Archie Shepp, “Money Blues” (featuring Joe Lee Wilson, lead vocals)
Things Have Got To Change (Impulse!), 1971
Part #1
Vodpod videos no longer available.***
Part #2
Vodpod videos no longer available.**********
lagniappe
Around Joe Lee (excerpt)
Vodpod videos no longer available.only rock ’n roll
(an occasional series)
The great thing about rock ’n roll is you don’t have to understand
a single word for it to make perfect sense.
Hasil Adkins, “She Said”
Take 1: live
Vodpod videos no longer available.***
Take 2: recording (1964)
Vodpod videos no longer available.
More? Here.
**********
lagniappe
only rock ’n roll
(an occasional series)
Oneida, “The Adversary,” Ireland, 10/07
Vodpod videos no longer available.The right music, heard at the right moment, can change your whole day.
The Staple Singers, “I’m Coming Home” (Vee-Jay), 1959
Vodpod videos no longer available.**********
lagniappe
Happy Birthday, Lionel!
Today trumpet player Lionel Ferbos, who was born when William Howard Taft was president and tonight can be heard at New Orleans’ Palm Court Jazz Cafe, turns 100.
The Lionel Ferbos Band, “When You’re Smiling”
Live, New Orleans (Norwegian Seamen’s Church), 8/28/09
***
For some years, trumpeter Lionel Ferbos has been touted as the oldest active jazz musician in New Orleans. Come this weekend, he’ll qualify for another honorific: The only active jazz musician in New Orleans whose age has crossed into triple digits.
John McCusker / The Times-Picayune
Lionel Ferbos, photographed in May 2011.Ferbos first learned trumpet in 1926, at age 15, inspired by seeing Phil Spitalny and his All-Girl Orchestra at the Orpheum Theater. He played in 1930s bands led by Captain John Handy and Walter “Fats” Pichon. He worked on a crew digging a City Park lagoon before getting hired for a Depression-era Works Progress Administration band, making around $13 a week.
Sheetmetal work eventually paid the bills, even as he continued to moonlight as a musician. He joined Lars Edegran’s New Orleans Ragtime Orchestra in the early 1970s, which toured in Europe, and in 1979 played trumpet and sang in the touring musical “One Mo’ Time.” He has maintained a regular gig at the Palm Court Jazz Cafe on Decatur Street for more than two decades.
—Keith Spera, The Times-Picayune, 7/13/11
what’s new
(an occasional series)
James Blake, “The Wilhelm Scream,” Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, 7/14/11
Vodpod videos no longer available.*****
favorites
(an occasional series)
Hearing JB brought this MCOTD fave to mind (originally posted 11/23/09).
Here’s Arthur Russell, the “seminal avant-garde composer, singer-songwriter, cellist and disco producer” who died in 1992 at the age of 40 (of AIDS-related complications) and is the subject of both a recent documentary, Wild Combination, and a new book, Hold On To Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-1992.
Arthur Russell
“Get Around To It”
*****
“You And Me Both”
*****
“This Is How We Walk on the Moon”
*****
“That’s Us/Wild Combination”
(Yeah, the fact that I’m posting four tracks by this guy shows how much his music, which I just encountered recently, has been getting under my skin.)
**********
[Russell’s] various distinctions—folkie, art-music songwriter and improviser, dance-club maven—seem incoherent until you hear several of his records. When musicians get angry about being categorized by critics, I usually feel frustrated: readers, after all, want to know what the record sounds like. With Russell, I take the musicians’ angle. Just listen to it and you’ll understand.
—Ben Ratliff, “The Many Faces, and Grooves, of Arthur Russell,” New York Times, 2/29/04
*****
For Arthur, there was no cachet to being eclectic. Rather, he played across genre because it would have required a colossal and entirely counterproductive effort on his part to stick to one sound. . . . Drifting into an ethereal, gravity-defying zone, Arthur had come to embody the interconnectivity of music.
—Tim Lawrence, Hold On To Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-1992 (2009).
It takes a village, in Fela’s world, to put on a show.
Fela Anikulapo Kuti, October 15, 1938-August 2, 1997
Live, Paris, 1981
Part 1
Vodpod videos no longer available.***
Part 2
Vodpod videos no longer available.**********
lagniappe
1938 Born 15 October in Abeokuta, Nigeria to politically active and middle class family.
1958 Sent to London to train as a doctor, but instead enrolled in the Trinity College of Music. Formed Koola Lobitos in 1961.
1969 Took Koola Lobitos to Los Angeles. His political zeal was fired when he befriended radical black activists including Angela Davis.
1971 Kuti renames his band Afrika 70 (and later Eygpt 80), and, newly politicised, he determines to give voice to Nigeria’s underclass.
1974 After he enraged the Nigerian establishment, the army almost destroyed Kuti’s home while trying to arrest him.
1977 In a second government-sanctioned attack, 1,000 soldiers descended on Kuti’s compound. He suffered a fractured skull, arm and leg in the onslaught and his 82-year old mother was thrown from an upstairs window. He left for voluntary exile in Ghana.
1978 Ghanian authorities deported Kuti back to Lagos. On his arrival he married 27 women simultaneously. Divorcing them in 1986, he said: ‘ no man has the right to own a woman’s vagina’.
1979 Founded his own political party MOP (Movement of the People)
1984 Jailed in Nigeria for five years on what was regarded as sham currency smuggling charges, and released in 1986 after a change of government.
1996 Arrested and released on an alleged drug charge.
1997 Died of complications from Aids aged 59.
*****
only rock ’n roll
(an occasional series)
13th Floor Elevators
TV broadcast, 1966
“You’re Gonna Miss Me” (Billboard Hot 100, #55)
*****
Live, San Francisco (Avalon Ballroom), 1966
“Gloria”
Vodpod videos no longer available.***
“You Really Got Me”
Vodpod videos no longer available.More of Roky Erickson? Here.
Someday, just as I sometimes do with my own father, who’s been gone for over thirty years, my older son Alex, now twenty-three, will recall occasions, after I’m gone, when he and I went out to hear live music together, like, for instance, last night, when we saw this group, from Africa, who are on their first U.S. tour.
Group Doueh, live, England (Bristol), 5/10/11
Vodpod videos no longer available.two takes
The Mighty Clouds of Joy, “I Made A Step,” live
Switzerland (Montreux Jazz Festival), 1981
Vodpod videos no longer available.***
Nashville, 2005
Vodpod videos no longer available.**********
lagniappe
Greatest musical intersection in the world?
Chicago’s South Side, W. 36th St. (Honorary Sam Cooke Way, as of this month) and S. Cottage Grove Ave. (Honorary Albertina Walker & The Caravans Drive)
Photo credit: Bob Marovich, The Black Gospel Blog
music clip of the day 