hard-to-peg | music clip of the day

Wednesday, 9/5/12

Happy (100th) Birthday, John!

John Cage, composer, September 5, 1912-August 12, 1992

Today, celebrating his centennial, we revisit past clips.

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10/9/09

No matter where you are, this landscape is just around the corner.

John Cage (1912-1992), In a Landscape (1948); Stephen Drury, piano

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lagniappe

musical thoughts

Music is a means of rapid transportation.

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What I’m proposing, to myself and other people, is what I often call the tourist attitude—that you act as though you’ve never been there before. So that you’re not supposed to know anything about it. If you really get down to brass tacks, we have never been anywhere before.

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As far as consistency of thought goes, I prefer inconsistency.

—John Cage

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5/22/10

Here’s a piece that sounds different every time you hear it.

John Cage, 4’ 33” (1952); David Tudor, piano

lagniappe

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musical thoughts

I didn’t wish it [4′ 33″] to appear, even to me, as something easy to do or as a joke. I wanted to mean it utterly and be able to live with it.

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Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music.

—John Cage

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3/8/12

John Cage, Two (1987)

Live, Netherlands (Amsterdam), 2009
Dante Boon (piano), Rutger van Otterloo (soprano saxophone)

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Recording, 1991 (hat Art)
Marianne Schroeder (piano), Eberhard Blum (flute)

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lagniappe

musical thoughts

Every something is an echo of nothing.

—John Cage, Silence (1961)

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7/23/12

Monday, n. the day the weekly tide of confusion rolls in.

How about something simple?

John Cage (1912-1992), Six Melodies (for violin and keyboard; dedicated to Josef & Anni Albers), 1950; Annelie Gahl (violin) & Klaus Lang (electric piano), 2010

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lagniappe (new stuff)

radio

Today it’s all Cage all day at WKCR-FM.

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art beat: more from Sunday’s stop at the Art Institute of Chicago

Agnes Martin, Untitled #12, 1977 (detail)

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another birthday, closer to home

Today also marks the birthday of MCOTD—our third.

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Thursday, 8/30/12

playing this weekend at the Chicago Jazz Festival

Matt Wilson’s Arts & Crafts* (Sunday, 3:30 p.m.)
“We See” (T. Monk), live, New York, 2011

(Paul Motian, this guy—drummers seem to have a particular feeling for Monk.)

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Steve Coleman and Five Elements** (Sunday, 7:10 p.m.)
Live, New York, 2010

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Ken Vandermark’s Made To Break Quartet*** (Sunday, 2:20 p.m.)
Live, Barcelona, 2011

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*MW, drums; Terell Stafford, trumpet; Gary Versace, piano; Martin Wind, bass.

**SC, alto saxophone; Jonathan Finlayson, trumpet; Tim Albright, trombone; Miles Okazaki, guitar; David Virelles, piano; Thomas Morgan, bass; Marcus Gilmore, drums.

***KV, reeds; Christof Kurzmann, electronics; Devin Hoff, bass; Tim Daisy, drums.

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Wednesday, 8/29/12

who you’d be swept away by—right now—
if you were a 24-year-old male*

Jessie Ware, live, London, 7/18/12

“Night Light”

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“Taking In Water”

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“Running”

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lagniappe

radio: final day of WKCR’s Pres-&-Bird Birthday Marathon

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*Based on a sample of one—my son Alex.

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Tuesday, 8/28/12

Need a ticket to an enchanted forest?

John Luther Adams, songbirdsongs (1974-80)

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lagniappe

radio: day two of WKCR’s Pres-&-Bird Birthday Marathon

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Monday, 8/27/12

Everybody knows the boat is leaking . . .

Leonard Cohen, “Everybody Knows,” live, London, 2008

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lagniappe

talking (Canadian TV, 1997)

(Yeah, the interviewer is often obnoxious; but, despite [because of?] that, this is one of the more intriguing “celebrity interviews” I’ve heard.)

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reading table

Returning To My Cottage
by Wang Wei (699-759 [trans. David Young])

A bell in the distance
the sound floats
down the valley

one by one
woodcutters and fishermen
stop work, start home

the mountains move off
into darkness

alone, I turn home
as great clouds beckon
from the horizon

the wind stirs delicate vines
and water chestnut shoots
catkin fluff sails past

in the marsh to the east
new growth
vibrates with color

it’s sad
to walk in the house
and shut the door.

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radio: 72 hours of Pres & Bird

Celebrating the birthdays of Lester Young (8/27) and Charlie Parker (8/29), WKCR-FM (broadcasting from Columbia University) will be playing their music all day today, tomorrow, and Wednesday.

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Friday, 8/24/12

timeless

Sly and the Family Stone

“Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Again),” TV Show (Soul Train), 1974

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“In Time,” Fresh, 1973

Jazz legend Miles Davis was so impressed by the song “In Time” . . . that he made his band listen to the track repeatedly for a full 30 minutes. Composer and music theorist Brian Eno cited Fresh as having heralded a shift in the history of recording, “where the rhythm instruments, particularly the bass drum and bass, suddenly [became] the important instruments in the mix.”

—Wikipedia

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lagniappe

art beat: more from Tuesday’s stop at the Art Institute of Chicago

Roy Lichtenstein, Landscape in Fog (1996)

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It’s impossible, sometimes, to separate our experience of music, especially pop music, from the surrounding circumstances. The other day, for instance, I was taking my son Luke back to school in Bloomington, Indiana. He was playing dashboard DJ. As we rolled through the hills of southern Indiana, nearing our destination, this came on after a long stretch of hip-hop (Lil Wayne, Eminem, Young Jeezy, Tyga, et al.), and the electronic intro, the Björk-like voice—they lit up the highway.

Ellie Goulding, “Lights”