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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)
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
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)
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
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”?
Chrome, “Meet You In The Subway” (1979, record; 1984, video)
So much of our musical experience resists explanation. Take this track, for instance. As soon as it’s over, I want to hear it again. Why? No idea.
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lagniappe
mail: two posts, two messages, same correspondent
Last Monday (Koko Taylor/Louis Jordan):
Great boost!
Yesterday (Brother Anthony Wynn/Sensimo):
what the fuck!?!
music clip of the day 