music clip of the day

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Category: hard-to-peg

Thursday, January 16th

sounds of Chicago

Hieroglyphic Being (AKA Jamal Moss), “Space Is The Place (But We Stuck Here On Earth)”

Wednesday, January 8th

William Basinski, “Silent Night,” 2004

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lagniappe

musical thoughts

If all we ever listen to are things that sound like things we’ve heard before, aren’t we living, however comfortably, in an echo chamber?

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taking a break

I’m taking some time off—back in a while.

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).

Saturday, January 4th

Lucid, supple, propulsive: This stuff I could listen to all day.

Steve Lehman Octet (SL, alto saxophone; Jonathan Finlayson, trumpet; Tim Albright, trombone; Jeremy Viner, tenor saxophone; Jose Avila, tuba; Chris Dingman, vibraphone; Drew Gress, bass; Tyshawn Sorey, drums)

Live, Germany (Moers Festival), 2010

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Live, 2011

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lagniappe

art beat

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

Friedlander-Cherry-Blossom-Time-47

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

Monday, December 30th

five takes

“Burning Love” (D. Linde)

Arthur Alexander, recording, 1972


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Elvis Presley, live, Greensboro, N.C., 1972


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Elvis Presley, recording, 1972


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Bruce Springstein, live, Italy (Florence), 2012


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The Korean Black Eyes, recording, 1974


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lagniappe

art beat

Weegee (AKA Arthur Fellig, 1899-1968)

weegee_09

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

Monday, December 23rd

passings

Larry Lujack, disc jockey, June 6, 1940-December 18, 2013

Live, WCFL-AM (Chicago), 12/23/72 (not ’73)


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lagniappe

Christmas, 1936

Fats Waller, “Swingin’ Them Jingle Bells” (1936)


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random thoughts

Sometimes I feel like a TV that works only on certain channels.

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.

Wednesday, December 18th

what’s new

Glasser, live, London (Boiler Room), 2013

“Forge”


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“Dissect”


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“Landscape”