Here, in MP3 format, is a track featuring a guy we listened to the other day: Cecil Taylor, with drummer Tony Williams (“Morgan’s Motion,” from Williams’ 1978 album The Joy of Flying).
One of the things I love about M.I.A. is that she doesn’t let any of the usual stuff get in her way. Take her dancing, for instance: she’s, uh, not real good at it—at least not by the usual standards. Does that stop her? Nah.
Donny Hathaway died in 1979 at the age of 33. He was a casualty of mental illness. Afflicted with severe chronic depression and ultimately diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, he leapt to his death out of a New York City hotel room.
To see him there in the studio at about 21 years old, directing all these real big session guys like he’d been doing it for years, was a tremendous sight to see. But he always believed in himself. He always believed in his talent. He wasn’t conceited about it, but he knew he could do anything these guys could do and almost certainly better. I’d have loved to sign him as artist, but it wasn’t to be.
*****
Bassist Christian McBride on Donny Hathaway:
You can tell that he listened to Stravinsky. He listened to Debussy. He was a musician who was the full 360-degree circle.
John Legend & The Roots, live (recording studio), 2010
***
Baby Huey & the Babysitters, 1971 (The Baby Huey Story: The Living Legend, produced by Curtis Mayfield and released, posthumously [the singer died, at 26, in 1970], on Curtom Records)
I must have seen Baby Huey & the Babysitters at least a half-dozen times. In the late ’60s they played the Chicago area teen clubs. Tight rhythm section, punchy horns, soulful vocals—what could be, at 16, a finer date?
When your kids go back to college (as my older son Alex did Saturday and my younger son Luke ten days ago), it’s not just their voices you no longer hear around the house; it’s also the voices they listen to—like this guy, for instance (a Luke favorite).
Mike Posner, “Cooler Than Me,” live, Los Angeles, 2010
So where would she [M.I.A.] live if visas and tour plans weren’t a factor? She pauses for a moment, then says, “Space. I’m over Earth.” She laughs. “Earth is so 2000-and-fucking-9.”
Speaking of prison music, here—thanks to a tip from my (19-year-old) son Luke—is the indomitable Lil Wayne, phoning in a verse for a new Drake track from Rikers Island (New York City), where he’s serving a year after pleading guilty to a gun charge.
Lil Wayne, Rikers Island/Drake, “Light Up” (2010)
lagniappe
Even behind bars, Lil Wayne can’t catch a break. The incarcerated rapper has reportedly been caught with a contraband MP3 player inside Rikers Island prison.
Weezy’s secret jams were discovered during a routine search on Tuedsay morning, when officials found unauthorised headphones and the charger for an MP3 player hidden in his dustbin. “We found the items wrapped in an aluminum potato chip bag, in a garbage can,” an anonymous official told Fox News. Officers then scoured the “housing area” where Wayne is incarcerated, uncovering a matching MP3 player in the cell of another inmate.
While prisoners are permitted to purchase an AM/FM radio and basic headphones from the Rikers Island commissary, inmates are banned from using fancy headphones, MP3 players, or, even, chargers for MP3 players. Weezy and his fellow inmate will be charged with possession of contraband, and “some discipline can follow”, the official said.
Lil Wayne is serving a one-year prison sentence for weapons infractions, stemming from an incident in July 2007. Although sentencing was repeatedly postponed, he was eventually jailed in early February. A month before beginning his term, Weezy told Rolling stone that he was “looking forward to” prison. “I’ll have an iPod, and I’ll make sure they keep sending me beats,” he said.
Officials were quick to point out that the seized MP3 player is not, in fact, an iPod. We’re not sure what this means except, perhaps, that they may wish to check the other empty crisp packets … just in case.
One of the things I love about M.I.A. is that she doesn’t let any of the usual stuff get in her way. Take her dancing, for instance: she’s, uh, not real good at it—at least not by the usual standards. Does that stop her? Nah.
Part of the job of a musician is that of a messenger. If you ain’t ready to be a messenger, forget it. You need to get a job in the post office or somewhere. If you ain’t ready to travel, pack up your family, or pack up yourself and hit the road, you’re in the wrong business. Because that’s what music is about. It’s about spreading knowledge and education, and re-education. It’s about spreading. You have got to travel with it to spread the word. Like all the people in the past that have had to travel to spread the music.
*****
It’s life itself that this [music] is about.
—Lester Bowie (in George E. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music[2008])
WKCR-FM (broadcasting from Columbia University) is hosting a Country Music Festival through tomorrow, playing “full programs of country radio’s heyday from the 1930s to the 1960s” —Grand Ole Opry, Sage Brush Round Up, Louisiana Hayride, Mother’s Best Flour, etc.
music clip of the day 