can’t wait: Chicago Jazz Festival, 8/29-9/1
Wadada Leo Smith, trumpet (8/30), Louis Moholo, drums, Steve Noble, drums, live, London, 2010
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lagniappe
reading table
What a glut of books! Who can read them?
—Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621)
sounds of Ethiopia
Mahmoud Ahmed & Badume’s Band, “Era Mela Mela,” live, Switzerland (Geneva), 2010
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lagniappe
random thoughts
Someday I will be remembered in the past tense as today, her birthday, my mother is.
can’t wait: Chicago Jazz Festival, 8/29-9/1
Hamid Drake, drums (artist-in-residence at this year’s festival) and Pasquale Mirra, vibraphone, live, Sardinia (Osilo), 2012
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lagniappe
reading table
In this mortal frame of mine, which is made of a hundred bones and nine orifices, there is something, and this something can be called, for lack of a better name, a wind-swept spirit, for it is much like thin drapery that is torn and swept away by the slightest stirring of the wind.
—Matsuo Basho (1644-1694), “The Records of a Travel-Worn Satchel” (excerpt, translated from Japanese by Noboyuki Yuasa)
sounds of Mali
Tired of having your feet on the ground?
Salif Keita, live, Netherlands (Hertme), July 6th
“A Demain”
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“Yamore”
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“Madan”
Strangeness, in today’s musical world, is sadly undervalued.
Daniel Higgs (vocals, banjo), live, London (Cafe Oto), 2011
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lagniappe
art beat: Tuesday at the Art Institute of Chicago (after a hearing at the nearby federal court building)
Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849), Cranes at Umezawa Manor in Sagami Province (from Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji)
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reading table
Speaking of insomnia, last night I came upon this.
Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life the less man has to do with aught that looks like death.
—Herman Melville (1819-1891), Moby-Dick
sounds of Egypt
Some singers once you begin listening to them you cannot stop.
Umm Kulthum (spelled variously in English; c. 1904-1975), “Enta Omri” (You Are My Life), live, Paris (Olympia Theater), 1967
Listening to this one night at 2:30 a.m., after waking up and getting a glass of milk, I couldn’t make up my mind: Is YouTube a good thing, or a bad thing, for insomniacs?
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lagniappe
found words
Scores Are Killed as Forces Storm Camps of Morsi Backers
—Headline, New York Times website, today
sounds of Brazil
Gilberto Gil (1942-; vocals, guitar) with Dominguinhos (1941-2013; accordion), “Lamento Sertanejo,” live, 2010
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
What would it be like to live in a world that sounded everywhere the same?
There are all kinds of blues, too.
Joe McPhee Survival Unit 3 (JM, alto saxophone; Fred Lonberg-Holm, cello; Michael Zerang, drums), live, London, 2010
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lagniappe
reading table
Dream Song 40
By John Berryman (1914-1972)I’m scared a lonely. Never see my son,
easy be not to see anyone,
combers out to sea
know they’re goin somewhere but not me.
Got a little poison, got a little gun,
I’m scared a lonely.I’m scared a only one thing, which is me,
from othering I don’t take nothin, see,
for any hound dog’s sake.
But this is where I livin, where I rake
my leaves and cop my promise, this’ where we
cry oursel’s awake.Wishin was dyin but I gotta make
it all this way to that bed on these feet
where peoples said to meet.
Maybe but even if I see my son
forever never, get back on the take,
free, black & forty-one.
Back in the ’70s, when I was in college, I heard John Berryman read his poetry, an experience that opened my ears and mind in all kinds of ways. He moved so swiftly, and gracefully, from one register to another, leaping back and forth between high and low as if nothing could be more natural. Today he joins a select group—tenor saxophonist Von Freeman, trumpeter Lester Bowie, singer Dorothy Love Coates, poets Wislawa Szymborska and William Bronk—in the MCOTD Hall of Fame.
There are all kinds of music.
Silence (excerpt), 2012
Silence tells the story of a field recordist (played by Eoghan Mac Giolla Bhríde, also co-writer of the film with director Pat Collins) who returns to his native Ireland after 15 years living in Berlin, spending his days wandering through north west Ireland and recording the soundscapes.
—Wire
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lagniappe
reading table
As I grow to understand life less and less, I learn to love it more and more.
—Jules Renard (1864-1910)
More sounds from the shadows.
Evan Parker (tenor saxophone) and Ned Rothenberg (alto saxophone), live, Silver Spring, Md. (Sonic Circuits Festival of Experimental Music), 2009
If this dialogue were translated into English, how would it read?
music clip of the day 