What more could you ask for, when you’re old, than to be able, still, to dance?
Drummers Roy Haynes (87, facing the camera) & Jack DeJohnette (69, back to the camera), tap dancing, New York (NEA Jazz Masters Luncheon), 2012
joy, n. looking for something else and happening upon this.
Jack DeJohnette’s Special Edition (JD, drums; Rufus Reid, bass; Marty Erlich, bass clarinet; John Purcell, alto saxophone; Howard Johnson, tuba, baritone saxophone), live, Poland (Warsaw), 1983
Part 1
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Part 2
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Part 3
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Part 4
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lagniappe
reading table
First, I’ll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later. The robbery is the more important part, since it served to set my and my sister’s lives on the courses they eventually followed. Nothing would make complete sense without that being told first.
Our parents were the least likely two people in the world to rob a bank. They weren’t strange people, not obviously criminals. No one would’ve thought they were destined to end up the way they did. They were just regular—although, of course, that kind of thinking became null and void the moment they did rob a bank.
—Richard Ford, Canada (2012)
the other night
exhilarating, adj. making you feel happy, excited, and full of energy. E.g., the music of Anthony Braxton.
Ken Vandermark, arrangments, bass clarinet; Nick Mazzarella, alto saxophone; Mars Williams, alto saxophone; Dave Rempis, baritone saxophone; Josh Berman, cornet; Jeb Bishop, trombone; Jason Adasiewicz, vibraphone; Nate McBride, bass; Tim Daisy, drums; live, Chicago (Elastic, 2830 N. Milwaukee), 6/21/12
Composition No. 6 C (A. Braxton)
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Composition No. 69 J (A. Braxton)
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lagniappe
Anthony Braxton sat perched on a piano bench one recent afternoon, hands folded in his lap, wearing an intent but unreadable expression. Angled away from the piano in a no-frills rehearsal space in Brooklyn, he faced the dozen or so vocalists that currently make up his Syntactical Ghost Trance Music Choir. The singers, arranged in a semicircle, were tackling Mr. Braxton’s “Composition No. 256,” staring hard at their sheet music while trying to keep track of their conductor. It was starting to seem as if the piece, a slippery, scalar proposition, were getting the best of them.
“O.K.,” said Taylor Ho Bynum, the conductor, waving the singers to a halt. Mr. Bynum, a cornetist, composer, bandleader and former student of Mr. Braxton’s at Wesleyan University, took a moment to describe the cues and signals that would further convolute the interpretation of the piece. “When in doubt, we follow Braxton,” he said.
“Which is to say, you know it’s going to be wrong!” Mr. Braxton fired back, laughing.
Mr. Bynum nodded, deadpan. “We’d follow Braxton off a cliff.”
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Mr. Braxton, 66, has been a force in the American avant-garde since the 1960s, when he emerged in his native Chicago as a member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. Within the first decade of his arrival, he was being toasted in some circles as “the new messiah, the new Charlie Parker-John Coltrane-Ornette Coleman,” as Whitney Balliett put it in The New Yorker.
As a composer, conceptualist and saxophonist, Mr. Braxton exemplified the steep intellectualization of one wing of jazz’s avant-garde; his compositions often included notation in the form of pictographs and algebraic formulas, and he wrote pieces not only for jazz ensembles but also for classical orchestras (in one memorable instance, for four of them at once). One piece from 1971, “Composition 19 (For 100 Tubas),” finally had its premiere five years ago as a rumbling overture to that year’s Bang on a Can Marathon in Lower Manhattan.
“I wanted to have an experience like my role models,” Mr. Braxton said after the rehearsal, at a nearby pub. “Karlheinz Stockhausen, Charlie Mingus, Iannis Xenakis, Sun Ra, Hildegard von Bingen. The people who were thinking large scale and small scale. I might not have been able to get the money to do what I would have liked to do. But you can still compose it and have the hope that maybe in the future it can be realized.”
Mr. Braxton has often suggested that his sprawling output — and the equally irreducible theoretical discourse surrounding it — should be understood as a single body of work. To that end, his music has become a bit more accessible recently, thanks to a spate of archival releases. But that hasn’t made things easier for Mr. Braxton.
“This is a somewhat frustrating time cycle for me, in the sense that I rarely work anymore,” he said. “My work has been marginalized as far as the jazz-business complex is concerned, or the contemporary-music complex.” Were it not for his tenured post at Wesleyan, where he has taught for more than 20 years, “maybe I would be driving a taxicab or something,” he said.
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“I had never thought that I would be involved in narrative structures,” Mr. Braxton said [of his new opera Trillium J]. “As a young guy, I was more interested in abstract modeling. But as I got older, I began to see that there was no reason to limit myself to any intellectual or conceptual postulate, when in fact I’m a professional student of music.”
—Nate Chinen, “Celebrating a Master of the Avant-Garde,” New York Times, 10/4/11
Happy (Day After) Father’s Day
Nas (son) with Olu Dara (father), “Bridging the Gap” (2004)
(sampling Muddy Waters’ “Mannish Boy”)
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lagniappe
Here’s more from the old man.
David Murray Octet, “Dewey’s Circle” (DM, tenor saxophone; Olu Dara, trumpet; Butch Morris, cornet; George Lewis, trombone; Henry Threadgill, alto saxophone; Anthony Davis, piano; Wilber Morris, bass; Steve McCall, drums), Ming (Black Saint, 1980)
*****
Muddy Waters, “Mannish Boy” (Chess, 1955)
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lagniappe
reading table
People are mysterious, unfathomable—like divinities: natural objects for reverence. But our habits of thought turn the people around us into objects, the means for our self-protection.
—Lama John Makransky, “Family Practice,”
Tricycle, Summer 2001
Ken Vandermark (saxophone) & Paal Nilssen-Love (drums)
Live, Romania (Bucharest), 2010
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
Last night, while I was listening to these guys at a little club on Chicago’s near northwest side (The Hideout), a thought kept running through my head: there’s nothing like live music; there’s nothing at all like live music; there’s nothing at all in this world even remotely like live music.
old stuff
Fred Astaire (with Ginger Rogers), “I Won’t Dance”
Roberta, 1935
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lagniappe
radio
Driving around yesterday afternoon, I happened upon a new series on NPR’s All Things Considered, “Mom and Dad’s Record Collection.” “[M]usicians, writers, even politicians” talk about a “song they discovered through a parent and how it shaped them.” First up was singer and actress Audra McDonald, who can be heard here.
two takes
“Human Nature” (S. Porcaro & J. Bettis)
Vijay Iyer Trio (VI, piano; Stephan Crump, bass; Marcus Gilmore, drums), live (studio performance [KPLU-FM]), 2011
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Michael Jackson, recording (Thriller), 1982
The parade never ends.
Rebirth Brass Band, New Orleans (Treme Sidewalk Steppers Annual Second Line Parade), 2/6/12
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lagniappe
A highly anticipated moment of the social aid and pleasure club parade season is when the Treme Sidewalk Steppers emerge from the African-American Museum. First, comes the call of the trumpet and then a flash of color can be spied as a member waves a feathered fan and dances out the door. One by one, the Steppers strut their stuff as they energetically file down the sidewalk with a “look-at-me” attitude. Those in the waiting crowd on Gov. Nicholls Street, peer through the iron fence that surrounds the lovely building and gardens, trying to get a better look at the spectacle. They cheer at the triumph.
The Treme Sidewalk Steppers . . . was established in 1994 by a group of friends who were enthusiastic second line followers.
“We’d always go to the parades and parade on the sidewalk and have fun,” Sidewalk Steppers president Charlie Brown explains, “so we decided we might as well come up with our own.”
Brown as well as some dozen or so originators, including New Birth Brass Band’s Tanio Hingle and Kerry “Fat Man” Hunter, all hailed from the Treme so the name of their club was a natural. “That’s our neighborhood; that’s where we’re from,” Brown proudly states. “Being the oldest Black neighborhood in America and being raised around all these different musicians and just to have the culture makes it special to us. It’s in your blood–that’s what makes it so authentic with us.
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Since most of the club’s members grew up in the Treme neighborhood, they boast deep roots in and respect for the second-line culture. The Steppers take that base and serve it up with its certain, individual style and personality.
“We try to keep it in the tradition but we have our own little swagger,” Brown says. “We try to be unique in our dress and our ways. We love the fun in dancing and showing off our little parade gear. We take pride in it. We don’t take shortcuts with our parade.”
The Sidewalk Steppers’ outfits are usually specially designed and tailored for them rather than store-bought. Creating their decorative fans is a group effort that’s accomplished under the direction of original member Corey Holmes. . . .
While some clubs keep the colors of their outfits secret, the Treme Sidewalk Steppers declare them right on the route sheet . . .
“We want the people to know,” Brown explains. “Maybe our followers would like to dress in the colors we’re wearing. We invite that. We really love the people that love us and we appreciate them all. The followers made us–they made us as good as we are or are supposed to be.”
The Treme Sidewalk Steppers also kept the second liners in mind when drawing up the parade route. The procession primarily travels on wide thoroughfares like Basin Street, Broad Street, N. Claiborne Ave. and St. Bernard Ave. that offer the crowd room to move.
“We use main streets so people can be comfortable and we try to spread out so you can enjoy us and view us well,” he explains.
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“The Sidewalk Steppers mean everything to me,” Brown says with deep sincerity. “We give thanks to all the people who came before and how they gave this history to us and showed us the way.”
two takes
“Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most” (T. Wolf & F. Landesman)
Bob Dorough, vocals & piano (Right On My Way Home, 1997)
*****
Betty Carter, vocals (Inside Betty Carter, 1964)
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lagniappe
reading table
Alcove
by John Ashbery
(Planisphere, 2009)
Is it possible that spring could be
once more approaching? We forget each time
what a mindless business it is, porous like sleep,
adrift on the horizon, refusing to take sides, “mugwump
of the final hour,” lest an agenda—horrors!—be imputed to it,
and the whole point of its being spring collapse
like a hole dug in sand. It’s breathy, though,
you have to say that for it.
And should further seasons coagulate
into years, like spilled, dried paint, why,
who’s to say we weren’t provident? We indeed
looked out for others as though they mattered, and they,
catching the spirit, came home with us, spent the night
in an alcove from which their breathing could be heard clearly.
But it’s not over yet. Terrible incidents happen
daily. That’s how we get around obstacles.
music clip of the day 