can’t wait: Chicago Jazz Festival, 8/29-9/1
Wadada Leo Smith, trumpet (8/30), Louis Moholo, drums, Steve Noble, drums, live, London, 2010
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lagniappe
reading table
What a glut of books! Who can read them?
—Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621)
can’t wait: Chicago Jazz Festival, 8/29-9/1
Hamid Drake, drums (artist-in-residence at this year’s festival) and Pasquale Mirra, vibraphone, live, Sardinia (Osilo), 2012
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reading table
In this mortal frame of mine, which is made of a hundred bones and nine orifices, there is something, and this something can be called, for lack of a better name, a wind-swept spirit, for it is much like thin drapery that is torn and swept away by the slightest stirring of the wind.
—Matsuo Basho (1644-1694), “The Records of a Travel-Worn Satchel” (excerpt, translated from Japanese by Noboyuki Yuasa)
alone
Earl Hines (1903-1983; piano), “I Ain’t Got Nobody,” 1928
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reading table
“At Lake Haptacong” (excerpt)
By David Ferry (1924-)The trees look thinly leaved, as if it were
Late autumn, early spring, or winter in a place
Where dead leaves cling to trees all winter long.You cannot tell what weather or season it is.
My mother, as in all those early pictures,
Although in this one already having lostHer girlish slimness, looks sexually alive,
Full of energy, her hair dark, abundant,
Her smile generous (though maybe less so thanIn the pictures taken a few years earlier).
Somewhere in this picture there is inscribed
The source or secret, somewhere inscribed the cause,Of the anxious motherly torment of disapproval,
The torment not resisted by my father,
Visited by my mother on my sister,The baby in the picture, torment that was
Perhaps in turn the cause of the alcoholism
That, many years later, the baby in the pictureWon out over. But it’s all unreadable
In this charming family photograph which, somehow,
Perhaps because of the blankness of the sky,Looks Russian, foreign, of no country I know.
There are all kinds of blues, too.
Joe McPhee Survival Unit 3 (JM, alto saxophone; Fred Lonberg-Holm, cello; Michael Zerang, drums), live, London, 2010
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reading table
Dream Song 40
By John Berryman (1914-1972)I’m scared a lonely. Never see my son,
easy be not to see anyone,
combers out to sea
know they’re goin somewhere but not me.
Got a little poison, got a little gun,
I’m scared a lonely.I’m scared a only one thing, which is me,
from othering I don’t take nothin, see,
for any hound dog’s sake.
But this is where I livin, where I rake
my leaves and cop my promise, this’ where we
cry oursel’s awake.Wishin was dyin but I gotta make
it all this way to that bed on these feet
where peoples said to meet.
Maybe but even if I see my son
forever never, get back on the take,
free, black & forty-one.
Back in the ’70s, when I was in college, I heard John Berryman read his poetry, an experience that opened my ears and mind in all kinds of ways. He moved so swiftly, and gracefully, from one register to another, leaping back and forth between high and low as if nothing could be more natural. Today he joins a select group—tenor saxophonist Von Freeman, trumpeter Lester Bowie, singer Dorothy Love Coates, poets Wislawa Szymborska and William Bronk—in the MCOTD Hall of Fame.
old school
Stevie Wonder, live (TV show), Germany, 1974
It doesn’t take long, sometimes, to realize how strong something is. With this, for instance, I could listen all day, happily, to a loop of the first ninety seconds.
Offstage she may be quiet, even shy. Onstage? That’s a different story: she’s filled with the Spirit.
Chicago Mass Choir (feat. Pam Crawford), “He’s Gonna Work It Out”
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lagniappe
radio
Today, his 112th birthday, it’s all Louis Armstrong all day at WKCR-FM (Columbia University).
last night
I heard these guys at a small Chicago club (Hideout)—what a storm.
Peter Brötzmann (reeds), Ken Vandermark (reeds), Hamid Drake (drums), Chad Taylor (drums), live, Slovenia (Ljubljana), 7/3/13
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
When our minds are filled with music, they’re free of everything else.
alone
Ran Blake (1935-), “Over the Rainbow” (H. Arlen & E. Harburg), live, Portugal (Lisbon), 2010
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reading table
Even in Kyoto—
hearing the cuckoo’s cry—
I long for Kyoto.—Matsuo Basho (1644-1694; translated from Japanese by Robert Hass)
baseball and boogie–woogie
In advance of tonight’s All-Star game, here’s the answer to a baseball trivia question: Who’s the finest musician ever to work between the foul lines? This guy, “the progenitor of boogie-woogie piano,” played for the Chicago All-Americans, a Negro league team, during World War I, then worked for twenty-five years as a groundskeeper for the Chicago White Sox.
Jimmy Yancey (1894 [or 1898]-1951), piano, “Yancey Stomp,” 1939
3n
Matthew Shipp Trio (MS, piano; Michael Bisio, bass; Whit Dickey, drums), live, Cold Spring, N.Y., 2011
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Don’t be too eager to ask
What the gods have in mind for us . . .—Horace (65 BC-25 BC), Ode I.11 (excerpt; translated from Latin by David Ferry)
music clip of the day 