New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, 2010/part 1
Scene 1: Sousaphone Parade
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Scene 2: Brian Blade & The Fellowship
Want more Brian Blade? Here.
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Scene 3: Mardi Gras Indians (Members of the Golden Star Hunters, Carrolton Hunters, et al.), Backstage
Want more Mardi Gras Indians? Here.
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What was it like to live—people may wonder someday—back before everyone had, each day, their own personal soundtrack?
Tom Ze, “Mae” (Gespenster [trailer])
As I mentioned a while back, I’m leaning toward a career, in the next life, as a tap-dancer.
Marilyn Miller, “All I Want To Do, Do, Do Is Dance” (Sally, 1929)
Want more? Here.
Originally, Morton Feldman was commissioned to compose the score for the film [Something Wild], but when the director heard the music, he promptly withdrew his commission, opting to enlist Aaron Copland instead. The reaction of the baffled director [Jack Garfein] was said to be, ‘My wife is being raped and you write celesta music?’
Morton Feldman, “Something Wild in the City: Mary Ann’s Theme,” 1960
[T]he greatest rock is birthed from equal parts intelligence and stupidity.—Chris Bohn (The Wire, 2/10)
Jandek
“Real Wild,” live, Glasgow, 2004
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Live, Houston, 2009
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Much speculation has been made over the true identity of the mysterious singer/songwriter Jandek, and his equally obscure record label, Corwood Industries. For over 25 years, the artist released album after album of twisted, ghostly, and utterly unique songs that crooned a tale of despair.
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Jandek played his first ever concert on October 17th, 2004 in Glasgow, Scotland as part of the Instal Festival, accompanied by Richard Youngs on bass, and Alexander Neilson on drums. The name Jandek did not appear on any of the promotional material for the festival. Some members of the audience, in disbelief, recognized the man from his album covers and could not mistake the sound for any other. Word quickly spread that Jandek had indeed performed . . . —Raphi Gottesman
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art beat
Joseph Cornell, Hotel Eden (c. 1945)
This guy, like Captain Beefheart, studied at the Howlin’ Wolf School of Vocal Alchemy.
Tom Waits, “Make It Rain,” live (TV broadcast), 2004
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lagniappe
More on William Eggleston and Alex Chilton
Yesterday, while at the Art Institute, I stopped again at the William Eggleston exhibit (previously mentioned here and here), which runs through May 23rd. It includes not only the album cover I posted earlier (Big Star’s Radio City), but also this one. Eggleston, an accomplished piano player, once accompanied Chilton on a track—the Nat King Cole classic “Nature Boy,” which appears on Big Star’s Third/Sister Lovers (expanded reissue), produced by Jim Dickinson, as well as Keep an Eye on the Sky (2009 boxed set).
looking back
Today, celebrating our 200th post, we revisit a few favorites.
If I didn’t have kids, would my ears be stuck, forever, on “repeat”?
Here’s something my younger son Luke, who just started college, played for me recently, after first pronouncing it, with quiet but absolute authority, the best thing this guy has done (already Luke’s learned that what’s important isn’t to be right; it’s to seem right).
Lupe Fiasco, “Hip Hop Saved My Life,” live, Los Angeles, 2008
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And here’s a track my older son Alex played for me a couple weeks ago, before heading back to school.
Dirty Projectors, “Stillness Is The Move”
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Koan for aging parents: What is the sound of a childless house?
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How to be both solid and fluid, both fat and delicate. How to make the beat breathe. These are things that, as a child, Philly Joe Jones began to learn while dancing—tap-dancing. Just watch the way Thelonious Monk, listening to this solo, rocks back and forth (1:25-1:50), as if he’s about to break into a little dance himself.
Philly Joe Jones, live (with Thelonious Monk), 1959
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He breathed our history as/his walking beat . . . The Man/So Hip/A City/Took/His/Name.—Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones, in Eulogies [1996])
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The first time I stood before a judge at Chicago’s Criminal Courts Building at 26th and California—this was back in the ’70s (when I was working at Alligator Records)—it was to speak on behalf of this man, Hound Dog Taylor. The day before, during a drunken argument at his apartment, he’d shot his longtime guitarist Brewer Phillips (who survived). In his own way, Hound Dog was a pretty canny guy. When he told me about this incident over the phone, shortly after it happened, he put it this way: “Richard, they say I shot Phillip.”
(No, don’t touch that dial; these stills are way out of focus—which, for Hound Dog, seems just right.)
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Hound Dog Taylor and the Houserockers, live, Ann Arbor Blues Festival, 1973
“Wild About You Baby”
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“Taylor’s Rock”
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“I Held My Baby”
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Here’s Arthur Russell, the “seminal avant-garde composer, singer-songer-writer, cellist, and disco producer” who died in 1992 at the age of 40 (of AIDS-related complications) and is the subject of both a recent documentary, Wild Combination, and a new book, Hold On To Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-1992.
Arthur Russell
“Get Around To It”
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“You And Me Both”
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“This Is How We Walk on the Moon”
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“That’s Us/Wild Combination”
(Yeah, the fact that I’m posting four tracks by this guy shows how much his music, which I just encountered recently, has been getting under my skin.)
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Here one of the greatest American artists of the 20th century (composer Morton Feldman [1926-1980]) pays homage to another (painter Mark Rothko [1903-1970]).
Morton Feldman, “Rothko Chapel” (composed in 1971; first performed, at Houston’s Rothko Chapel, in 1972)
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
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I first heard this guy back in the mid-1970s, after reading a review in the New York Times, by the late Robert Palmer, of his first album, The Gospel Saxophone of Vernard Johnson—and I’ve been listening to him ever since.
Vernard Johnson, saxophone
Live, Texas (Roanoke)
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lagniappe
reading table
Music . . . helped me to go deeper inside myself, to find new things there: the variety which I had vainly sought in life and in travel, yet the longing for which was stirred in me by the surge of sound whose sunlit wavelets came to break at my feet.
—Marcel Proust, The Prisoner (Trans. Carol Clark)
Trying to capture jazz in standard notation can be like trying to translate poetry into another language—what you wind up with is everything but the poetry. So composer/trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith (who, like many of his peers, eschews “jazz” as a label for his music) invented his own system of graphic notation.
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Wadada Leo Smith (trumpet) with his Golden Quartet (Vijay Iyer [piano], John Lindberg [bass], Ronald Shannon Jackson [drums]); Eclipse, 2005
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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Part 6
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Part 7
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Part 8
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lagniappe
art beat
Earlier this month, when I mentioned the exhibit of William Eggleston’s photographs that’s currently at the Art Institute—posting an album cover that you’ll find in a display case there—I didn’t expect that Big Star would appear here again before the month’s end. But then I didn’t expect that Alex Chilton would pass away, either. Alex had more than simply an artistic interest in Eggleston and his work. He’d known the photographer, who was a good friend of his parents, since he was a little boy. Here, again, is the image Alex chose for that album cover, followed by a couple more from this exhibit.
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Career plans for the next life? At the moment, I’m leaning toward tap-dancing.
Teddy Hale, c. 1950
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Gregory Hines, early 1980s
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Will Gaines, My Home Is My Shoes (2009)
music clip of the day 