love it or hate it
Weasel Walter (drums), Mary Halvorson (guitar), Peter Evans (trumpet), live, New York (Death By Audio, Brooklyn), 2012
serendipity
Yesterday. Late afternoon, working on an old murder case. Happen upon this: windows open, letting in a breeze.
Mary Halvorson Quintet (MH, guitar, compositions; Jon Irabagon, alto saxophone; Jonathan Finlayson, trumpet; John Hebert, bass; Ches Smith, drums), “Love in Eight Colors,” “Hemorrhaging Smiles,” live, Washington, D.C., 2013
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lagniappe
reading table
From now on
it’s all clear profit,
every sky.—Kobayashi Issa (1763-1827), on his fiftieth birthday (translated from Japanese by Robert Hass)
what’s new
Have you heard the new Julia Holter? This is honestly, seriously good. It may be the best album I’ve heard this year.
—my son Alex (now twenty-five), before playing me this track
Julia Holter, “World,” 2013
sounds of Chicago
Edward Wilkerson, tenor saxophone (with Kidd Jordan, tenor saxophone; Henry Grimes, bass, violin; Isaiah Spencer, drums, et al.), live, Chicago, 2010
alone
Paal Nilssen-Love (drums), live, Norway (Kongsberg Jazzfestival), 2011
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lagniappe
reading table
Faces are motion, which is why all the photos of you are bad. Even the most natural-looking portrait is a sentence interrupted, one note of an aria, held. Though faces themselves hide a deeper motion. You seem to sit there and meet my eyes across the table, but you are so many other places, clinging here for a moment against all the currents that will soon sweep you onward. We are so moved by the faces caught in the windows of trains going the other way because they tell us how all faces really are.
—James Richardson, “Ten-Second Essay #134”
Today, our fourth birthday, we revisit our first post.
*****
One left Cuba after the revolution, the other stayed. Here they play together: pianists—father and son—Bebo and Chucho Valdes.
*****
taking a break
I’m taking some time off—back soon.
After hearing Molly, it seems hard—no, impossible—to listen to him without thinking of her.
Nick Drake (1948-1974), “Day Is Done” (Five Leaves Left, 1969)
alone
Jürg Frey (1953-), A Memory of Perfection (2010)
Mira Benjamin (violin), live, London, 2013
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lagniappe
reading table
Two more words from Seamus Heaney, who died Friday in a Dublin hospital:
noli timere
[don’t be afraid]—text message to his wife minutes before his death
this morning
I seem to be falling in love with someone who’s been dead twenty years.
Molly Drake, 1916-1993 (mother of singer-songwriter Nick Drake, 1948-1974)
“I Remember”
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“The First Day”
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“How Wild The Wind Blows”
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lagniappe
found words
Yesterday, walking in the garden at Chicago’s Millenium Park, I came upon a small sign, close to the dirt, that read:
THIS AREA
IS IN
TRANSITION.WE APPRECIATE
YOUR
UNDERSTANDING.CHECK BACK
SOON.
For over thirty years he’s been taking me places no one else does.
Henry Threadgill’s Zooid, live, New York, 2013
#1
#2
*****
It’s not just notes on a page. Threadgill really reaches out and grabs you by the lapels. Someone else described it to me as ‘every time Threadgill enters, it’s like the curtains just parted.’ He has this way of cutting right through the texture of the music.
—pianist Vijay Iyer
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lagniappe
reading table: passings
Between my fingers and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.—Seamus Heaney (April 13, 1939-August 30, 2013), “Digging” (excerpt)
music clip of the day 