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
music clip of the day
jazz/blues/rock/classical/gospel/more
Category: hard-to-peg
2011
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.
2011
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)
2011
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
2011
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.
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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)
2011
Friday, 11/11/11
Who needs a stage when you’ve got the subway?
“Diamonds And Pearls,” Washington, D.C.
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“Thin Line Between Love And Hate,” New York
*****
“Stand By Me,” Chicago
music clip of the day 