music clip of the day

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Category: hard-to-peg

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

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 no

Inner 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.

More? Here. And here. And here.

Friday, 11/25/11

Can’t go another day without this guy?

Me, either.

Jackie Wilson, “Baby Workout,” TV broadcast (Shindig), 1965

More? Here. And here. And here. And here.

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lagniappe

reading table

morning after morning—
what day is it now
cuckoo?

—Kobayashi Issa, 1810 (trans. David G. Lanoue)

Monday, 11/21/11

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

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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)

Wednesday, 11/16/11

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

Sunday, 11/13/11

No one today—not even Mavis herself—takes you the places she did
in her prime.

The Staple Singers (featuring Mavis Staples), “We’ll Get Over”
TV broadcast (The Johnny Cash Show), 1969

Time for just a few notes? 2:37-40.

More Mavis? Here. And here. And here.

Saturday, 11/12/11

Labels are often worse than useless. This guy, for instance, is often tagged as “cerebral.” But here’s something you can’t—I can’t, anyway—listen to without smiling.

Anthony Braxton, Composition No. 58
Taylor Ho Bynum Chicago Big Band,* live, 2009, Chicago

*****

Here’s another take—Braxton’s original recording (The Complete Arista Recordings of Anthony Braxton [Mosaic], rec. 1976).

More? Here.

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lagniappe

reading table

To obtain the value
of a sound, a movement,
measure from zero.

***

A sound has no legs to stand on.

***

The world is teeming: anything can
happen.

—John Cage, “2 Pages, 122 Words on Music and Dance” (excerpts)

*Taylor Ho Bynum & Josh Berman (cor), Jaimie Branch (tpt), Jeb Bishop & Nick Broste (tb), Nicole Mitchell (fl), Caroline Davis, Keefe Jackson & Dave Rempis (saxes), Jeff Parker (g), Jason Adasiewicz (vib), Nate McBride (b), Tim Daisy & Tomas Fujiwara (d)

Friday, 11/11/11

Who needs a stage when you’ve got the subway?

“Diamonds And Pearls,” Washington, D.C.

*****

“Thin Line Between Love And Hate,” New York

*****

“Stand By Me,” Chicago

Wednesday, 11/9/11

love it or hate it

Marc Ribot, Elliott Sharp, live, New York (Cornelia Street Cafe), 8/4/10

More Marc Ribot? Here. And here. And here.

Tuesday, 11/8/11

what’s new

Can I put on a song?

—my (20-year-old) son Luke

M83, “Midnight City” (2011)

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lagniappe

random thoughts

Having grown up with 45s and LPs, I sometimes feel a bit like folks whose first records were 78s must have felt when I was young. Listen, for instance, to Pitchfork‘s review of M83’s new album (Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming):

Well, throughout the past decade, the 30-year old Gonzalez has honored the tremendous impact of growing up during the golden age of CD buying by implicitly serving as a patron saint for those who treat the weekly trip to the record store as a pilgrimage and still covet the album as a physical proposition: His output always comes stylishly packaged, with cover art worth obsessing over and credits that need to be scoured in order to spot the guest appearances.

The “golden age of CD buying”?