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.
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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.
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?
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])
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
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)
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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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.
Listen to dreams by j cole—text message from my 18-year-old son Luke
J. Cole (featuring Brandon Hines), “Dreams” (2009)
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commercial for next week’s made-for-TV movie
J.’s got a plan to get the girl of his dreams.
And it just might work—if it doesn’t land him in the electric chair.
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You can’t tell everyone the truth all the time, and you certainly can’t tell anyone the whole truth, ever, because it would take too long.—Lydia Davis, “Our Trip” (Samuel Johnson Is Indignant)
Listen to “Sunny Day” by Akon and Wyclef.—Luke (my 18-year-old son, on the phone the other night)
Akon with Wyclef Jean, “Sunny Day” (2008)
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One of the things I find intriguing about contemporary popular music is the widespread practice (particularly in hip-hop) of featuring guest artists, usually, it seems, people whose style and approach are very different from one’s own. Implicit in this is the notion that hearing two different musical personalities can make for a more interesting and rewarding experience than hearing just one. And including another artist opens a song up, making it less a fixed, static thing and more a vehicle for improvisation and variation, something subject to different takes, whose content and texture ultimately depend to a large extent on the identity and contributions of the featured guest.
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My son called from Minnesota the other day to tell me that the weather was terrible, his car had been towed, he didn’t like his job, and he had a cold and a sore throat. Is it bad that the only motherly advice I could think to give him was to listen to Fats Waller [2/9/10]?
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The drummer’s comments were great [Brian Blade, 2/13/10]. You layin’ down a pretty good groove your own self, Richard.
Lupe blogged last week about the passing of 87-year-old historian Howard Zinn (A People’s History of the United States), posting a photo of the two of them—Messrs. Zinn and Fiasco—together.
Talib Kweli & Hi-Tek, “Memories Live” (2000; sampling Ann Peebles, “I Can’t Stand the Rain,” 1973 [yesterday’s post])
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Very cool! [DeLois Barrett Campbell and the Barrett Sisters, 1/3/10]
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Great clip! Enjoyed seeing Jack Paar, too, and loved the way the camera eased back to show the drummer at work with the brushes. [Blossom Dearie, 1/7/10]
“Hey, Dad, listen to this . . .”—my 18-year-old son Luke
Mr. J. Medeiros, “Constance”
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wow, somehow i did not know Tommy Johnson [12/16/09], just fine. Luke’s guy [Passion Pit, 12/15/09] was good too.
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Responding a couple days late to your Passion Pit [12/15/09] posting. I was first exposed to Passion Pit last year when my son . . . wrote a paper on the role of bloggers in the distribution of music. He tracked Passion Pit’s hits on My Space in relation to hits on a well-respected music blogger, Stereogum, and a music blogging compilation Hype Machine. Although he started off on the premise that the blogs and internet distribution of music was a new and democratic form of distribution of music, I believe he ended up concluding that the music blogs were just another way to exploit artists. . . . I do not recall all of the details, but there appeared to be a number of examples where a music blog became successful (lots of hits – I couldn’t believe how may, like hundreds of thousands) off of the free distribution of music by up and coming bands. Then the blog was bought out and/or funded by one of the large music/entertainment conglomerates without anything going to the artists.
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i think feldman [12/5/09, 11/7/09] is the discovery i’ve enjoyed most thru your clips (which i consistently enjoy, but much of the other music i know). i played him for my students during the 3-week term, along with an Eno video installation and Malick’s Days of Heaven (still my favorite movie ever). it made for an interesting contrast between the few who appreciated such work and the many who were bored/nervous/offended because “nothing happens.”
