Joe Sample, keyboard player, composer, February 1, 1939-September 12, 2014
Digable Planets with guests Lester Bowie (trumpet), Melvin “Wah Wah Watson” Ragin (guitar), Joe Sample (keyboards), “Flyin’ High in the Brooklyn Sky,” live, New York, 1990s
As much as I love Lester, a MCOTD Hall-of-Famer, this performance could get along without him. Same with Wah Wah Watson. Not Joe—he makes everybody sound better.
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My sons, now in their twenties, I love to pieces. But loving my guys doesn’t keep me from wishing I had a daughter, too.
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lagniappe
reading table
The funeral director opened the coffin
And there he was alone
From the waist up
I peered down into his face
And for a moment I was taken aback
Because it was not Gabriel
It was just some poor kid
Whose face looked like a room
That had been vacated.
—Edward Hirsch (1950-), opening lines of “Gabriel,” a forthcoming book-length elegy for his son, who died in 2011 at the age of 22 (quoted in Alec Wilkinson, “Finding the Words,” New Yorker, 8/4/14)
Snowy fields, bare trees, big sky: as my son Luke, now twenty-two, drives us from a family gathering in Nebraska to his place in Kansas City, these are some of the sounds that fill the car.
Today, celebrating his twenty-second birthday, we revisit a few of the many posts inspired by my son Luke.
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It’s impossible, sometimes, to separate our experience of music, especially pop music, from the surrounding circumstances. The other day, for instance, I was taking my son Luke back to school in Bloomington, Indiana. He was playing dashboard DJ. As we rolled through the hills of southern Indiana, nearing our destination, this came on after a long stretch of hip-hop (Lil Wayne, Eminem, Young Jeezy, Tyga, et al.), and the electronic intro, the Björk-like voice—they lit up the highway.
If you’d been in the back seat the other night, as my son Luke was zooming down the Kennedy Expressway—he was taking me home before heading back to school in Bloomington—here’s one of the things you would’ve heard jumping out of the radio.
music clip of the day 