Last night I completed a long, meandering journey I began several years ago, finishing the last of the seven volumes of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. If you’ve ever thought about making this trip yourself, I have just one word of advice: go. The minutes, and hours, I’ve spent in Proust’s company—often just a few pages at a time—are among the most rewarding, and pleasurable, I’ve had.
This guy I stumbled upon yesterday afternoon, listening to the radio.* It had been a hard weekend; my 88-year-old mother-in-law died Saturday. These were just the sounds I needed, though I didn’t realize it—spare, precise, open.
The recapture of Timbuktu was done by moonlight. More than 250 French troops parachuted down to the northern entrance of the fabled desert city, while an armoured column sealed the southern exit.
After close to a year of occupation by Islamists, which has driven more than half the population from Mali’s cultural heart and left an unknown toll on its famous libraries and shrines, the ordeal was over.
“Not a shot was fired,” said a French Colonel who declined to give his name, but confirmed he had led the 12-day operation to retake the city.
By this afternoon the city’s maze of dusty streets were being patrolled by French and Malian troops for remaining militants and crowds had gathered at every corner chanting: “Vive la France, vive le Mali!”
Women and children mobbed two pick-up trucks of Malian soldiers that arrived after the French force had sealed the city. One man was dressed from head to foot in a costume that he had fashioned from hand-stitched Tricolore flags. Many of the women were dressed in vivid colours and had removed their veils to replace them with flags.
Mohamed Ibrahim Traore, a shopkeeper whose store has been closed for months said the women were happy “because they don’t have to put on the veils on their face”. “Today we got our liberty back,” he said. “Every Malian deserves their liberty, the Frency army and the Malian army have given us this.”
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A crowd had gathered at the house of singer Akia Coulibaly. Dressed in a turquoise wrap she stopped her street show briefly to recount how life has been since last April when Timbuktu fell into the hands of Islamists.
“We are having a party,” she shouted over the din. “We haven’t danced or sung while they have been here. They cut hands, they beat people. We have been prisoners.”
Butch Morris, who created a distinctive form of large-ensemble music built on collective improvisation that he single-handedly directed and shaped, died on Tuesday in Brooklyn. He was 65.
The cause was cancer, said Kim Smith, his publicist and friend. Mr. Morris, who lived in the East Village, died at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Fort Hamilton.
Mr. Morris referred to his method as“conduction,” short for “conducted improvisation.” He defined the word, which he trademarked, as “an improvised duet for ensemble and conductor.”
He would often begin a performance by setting a tempo with his baton and having his musicians develop a theme spontaneously and then seize on the musical ideas he wanted to work with, directing the ensemble with a vocabulary of gestures and signals. An outstretched upward palm, up or down to indicate volume, meant sustain; a U shape formed with thumb and forefinger meant repeat; a finger to the forehead meant to remember a melodic phrase or a rhythm that he would summon again later.
He introduced this concept in 1985 and at first met resistance from musicians who were not willing to learn the vocabulary and respond to the signals; he was often in a position of asking artists to reorient themselves to his imagination and make something new out of familiar materials. But he demanded to be taken seriously, and he was. After 10 years he had made enough recordings to release “Testament,” a well-received 10-disc set of his work. After 20, he had become an internationally admired creative force, presenting conductions at concert halls worldwide and maintaining regular workshops and performances at the East Village spaces Nublu, Lucky Cheng’s and the Stone.
Mr. Morris, who also played cornet, began his career as a jazz musician in Los Angeles. After settling in New York in the early 1980s, he took his place among both the downtown improvising musicians of the Kitchen and the Knitting Factory and the purveyors of multidisciplinary, mixed-media art flourishing in the city.
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In decades of workshops around the world, and for a stretch, from 1998 to 2001, at Bilgi University in Istanbul, he taught his signals and gestures. Some of these were common to all conductors; some were adapted from the California jazz bandleaders Horace Tapscott and Charles Moffett, whom he had known early in his career (he also cited Sun Ra, Lukas Foss and Larry Austin’s “Improvisations for Orchestra and Jazz Soloists’’ as influences); many were his own.
He said he didn’t care whether people thought his music was jazz or not, although he himself saw it as derived from jazz but not beholden to it. “As long as I’m a black man playing a cornet,” he reasoned, “I’ll be a jazz musician in other people’s eyes. That’s good enough for me. There’s nothing wrong with being called a jazz musician.”
Merle Haggard, TV show (music starts at 1:15), 1986
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Blaze Foley (1949-1989)
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What makes this song work? For me two things stand out; both relate to the first line of the hook (“If I could only fly . . .”). One is the sounds of the words: the repeated “f’s,” the long “i” and the “y.” The other is what happens with the melody: the little step up on the second syllable of “only.” To me it suggests, fleetingly, what it might feel like, as imagined by the singer, to take flight—”if only.”
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lagniappe
Here’s one more take—Blaze, boozy, somebody’s backyard, 1985.
Toru Takemitsu (1930-1996), And then I knew ’twaswind (1992)
Aureole Trio, New Hampshire (Monadnock Music), 2011
My life sometimes seems to consist of a series of trips, back and forth, between the sublime and the wretched. Yesterday afternoon, for instance, I stumbled upon this—a piece I’d never heard before—during a break from work. What was I working on? An oral argument I’ll be presenting this morning before a three-judge panel of the federal court of appeals in Chicago, on behalf of a guy, now in his mid-50s, who spends each day, as he has for decades, in a cell about 45 miles southwest of the city, where he’s serving a sentence of “natural life.”
music clip of the day 