What I get from this guy I can’t quite put my finger on. But I do know this:
I don’t get it anywhere else.
Arthur Russell (1951-1992), singer, songwriter, cellist
“You And Me Both”
*****
“This Is How We Walk on the Moon”
*****
“That’s Us/Wild Combination”
*****
Terrace of Unintelligibility, live studio performance, 1985
Part 1
***
Part 2
(First three clips originally posted 11/23/09.)
If sounds define a space as much as walls and windows, you don’t need to knock out a wall to open up a room—just play this.
International Contemporary Ensemble with Steve Lehman
Impossible Flow (S. Lehman), live, New York (Le Poisson Rouge), 4/19/11
The moment this ends I want to hear it again. Is there any higher compliment?
More Steve Lehman? Here.
**********
lagniappe
reading table
A strange old man
Stops me,
Looking out of my deep mirror.—Kakinomoto no Hitomaro (c. 662-710; trans. Kenneth Rexroth)
What a treat to hear a guitar-led group that sounds so fresh.
Nels Cline (guitar) and Friends play the music of Andrew Hill
Live, New York (Jazz Standard), 2007
**********
lagniappe
musical thoughts
The more one studies the harmony of music, and then studies human nature, how people agree and how they disagree, how there is attraction and repulsion, the more one will see that it is all music.
recipe
1 river
1 bridge
1 brass band
Mix lightly.
Raya Brass Band, live, Poughkeepsie, New York
Walkway Over The Hudson Grand Opening, 10/3/09
#1
***
#2
***
#3
***
#4
***
#5
three takes
“N’teri”
Habib Koité, live, c. 2007
*****
Regina Carter (violin), Yacouba Sissoko (kora), Will Holshouser (accordion)
Live, radio broadcast (KPLU-FM), 2011
Kora, violin, accordion—even the names of these instruments sound good together. You have, in succession, words of two, three, and four syllables. Consonants repeat (k/c, r, n), as do vowels (o, a). The last word (“accordion”) echoes both syllables of the first (“kora”), reversing them, as well as the end of the second (“violin”). What does any of this mean? Nothing—it’s simply, for me, a small source of additional pleasure.
*****
Habib Koité, recording, 2007
lunch yesterday
Could Van Morrison ever have imagined, in 1969, while recording Moondance, that “Into the Mystic” would serve, in 2011, as aural accompaniment for Wendy’s Natural-Cut Fries with Sea Salt?
**********
lagniappe
reading table
John Berryman, “Dream Song 14,” Ireland (Dublin), 1967
Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have noInner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as achilles,who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.
You can’t write a song like this, you can’t play it like this, unless your ears are open to all kinds of music.
Allen Toussaint, “Southern Nights,” live
**********
lagniappe
reading table
If they find a copy of Richard Yates’s Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, they buy it. It is as if they’ve found a baby on the front step. They peek inside, examine the dog-earing, the marginal scribbles. Or perhaps it’s a clean copy, which carries its own kind of sadness. In either case, they embrace it, though they already have multiple copies. Those are irrelevant to the one they would be abandoning if they left the book behind. This is a hostess gift you can give any fiction writer, guaranteed to delight her even though she already has it. Regifting becomes an act of spreading civilization.
—Ann Beattie, Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life (2011), “7 Truths About Writers” (#2)
OK, that’s enough clarity.
There’s a place, too, for utter mayhem.
Karp, live, Alabama, 1996
Hands down one of the most important videos on youtube
—superdude593, YouTube
music clip of the day 