Sunday, 12/25/11
Let’s go to church.
Solomon Burke, “Silent Night” (Savoy, 1982)
music clip of the day
jazz/blues/rock/classical/gospel/more
Category: hard-to-peg
2011
Friday, 12/23/11
where I’d like to be tonight
Po’ Monkey’s, Merigold, Mississippi, 2010
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lagniappe
reading table
Charles Simic, “1938”
*****
random thoughts
Life’s often said to be too short.
Too short for what?
2011
Wednesday, 12/21/11
La Monte Young, The Well-Tuned Piano
Part 1
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Part 2
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Part 3
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Part 4
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Part 5
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lagniappe
Minimalism proper begins with La Monte Young, the master of the drone. He was born in 1935 in a tiny dairy community in Idaho, and spent his childhood listening to the secret music of the wide-open landscape—the microtonal chords of power lines, the harsh tones of drills and lathes, the wailing of far-off trains, the buzzing songs of grasshoppers, the sound of the wind moving over Utah Lake and whistling through the cracks of his parents’ log cabin. In 1940 he moved to Los Angeles with his family. As he later said, he fell in love with California’s ‘sense of space, sense of time, sense of reverie, sense that things could take a long time, that there was always time.’
—Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (2007)
2011
Wednesday, 12/14/11
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”
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“That’s Us/Wild Combination”
*****
Terrace of Unintelligibility, live studio performance, 1985
Part 1
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Part 2
(First three clips originally posted 11/23/09.)
2011
Saturday, 12/10/11
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.
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lagniappe
reading table
A strange old man
Stops me,
Looking out of my deep mirror.—Kakinomoto no Hitomaro (c. 662-710; trans. Kenneth Rexroth)
2011
Wednesday, 12/7/11
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
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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.
2011
Monday, 12/5/11
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
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#2
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#3
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#4
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#5
2011
Saturday, 12/3/11
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
2011
Wednesday, 11/30/11
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?
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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.
music clip of the day 