Wednesday, 2/22/12
old stuff
Jimmie Lunceford and his Dance Orchestra, “Rhythm Coming to Life Again,” “Rhythm Is Our Business,” “You Can’t Pull the Wool Over My Eyes,” “Moonlight on the Ganges,” “Nagasaki,” “Jazznochracy,” 1936
More? Here.
music clip of the day
jazz/blues/rock/classical/gospel/more
Category: jazz
2012
Saturday, 2/18/12
passings
In?
Out?
No matter—he played it all.
Jodie Christian, February 2, 1932-February 13, 2012, Chicago-based pianist; cofounder, AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians)
With Eddie Harris, tenor saxophone (Melvin Jackson, bass; Billy Hart drums), “Listen Here” (with a nod at the end to “Freedom Jazz Dance”), live, Montreux, 6/20/1969
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With Roscoe Mitchell, soprano saxophone (Malachi Favors, bass, et al.), live, Chicago, 1984
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lagniappe
reading table
A dead beetle lies on the path through the field.
Three pairs of legs folded neatly on its belly.
Instead of death’s confusion, tidiness and order.
The horror of this sight is moderate,
its scope is strictly local, from the wheat grass to the mint.
The grief is quarantined.
The sky is blue.
To preserve our peace of mind, animals die
more shallowly: they aren’t deceased, they’re dead.
They leave behind, we’d like to think, less feeling and less world,
departing, we suppose, from a stage less tragic.
Their meek souls never haunt us in the dark,
they know their place,
they show respect.
And so the dead beetle on the path
lies unmourned and shining in the sun.
One glance at it will do for meditation—
clearly nothing much has happened to it.
Important matters are reserved for us,
for our life and our death, a death
that always claims the right of way.
—Wislawa Szymborska, “Seen From Above,” (translated from Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh)
2012
Wednesday, 2/15/12
the ecstatic impulse
Pharoah Sanders, tenor saxophonist, composer, bandleader, 1940-
“You’ve Got To Have Freedom” (P. Sanders)
Take 1: Live (with William Henderson, piano; James Leary, bass; Kharon Harrison, drums), Los Angeles, 2011
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Take 2: Live (with John Hicks, piano; Walter Booker, bass; Idris Muhammad, drums), Los Angeles, 1981 (Live [Evidence])
More? Here.
Jazz, R&B, gospel—listening to him you’re reminded, again, that they all come from the same place.
2012
Thursday, 2/9/12
how to cast a spell
Tip #1: Be under one yourself.
Gretchen Parlato (with Taylor Eigsti, piano; Alan Hampton, bass; Mark Guiliana, drums), “Better Than,” live, Germany (Stuttgart), 2010
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lagniappe
reading table
thin wall—
with the moonlight
comes the cold—Kobayashi Issa, 1824 (translated from Japanese by David G. Lanoue)
2012
Wednesday, 2/8/12
not for the faint of heart
Weasel Walter (drums), Peter Evans (trumpet), Mary Halvorson (guitar), live, Toronto (Placebo Space), 2011
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lagniappe
reading table
We call it a grain of sand,
but it calls itself neither grain nor sand.
It does just fine without a name,
whether general, particular,
permanent, passing,
incorrect, or apt.Our glance, our touch mean nothing to it.
It doesn’t feel itself seen and touched.
And that it fell on the windowsill
is only our experience, not its.
For it, it is no different from falling on anything else
with no assurance that it has finished falling
or that it is falling still.The window has a wonderful view of a lake,
but the view doesn’t view itself.
It exists in this world
colorless, shapeless,
soundless, odorless, and painless.The lake’s floor exists floorlessly,
and its shore exists shorelessly.
Its water feels itself neither wet nor dry
and its waves to themselves are neither singular nor plural.
They splash deaf to their own noise
on pebbles neither large nor small.And all this beneath a sky by nature skyless
in which the sun sets without setting at all
and hides without hiding behind an unminding cloud.
The wind ruffles it, its only reason being
that it blows.A second passes.
A second second.
A third.
But they’re three seconds only for us.Time has passed like a courier with urgent news.
But that’s just our simile.
The character is invented, his haste is make-believe,
his news inhuman.—Wislawa Szymborska (1923-2012), “View with a Grain of Sand” (translated from Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh)
2012
Tuesday, 2/7/12
Some tracks, the first time you hear them (as I did this a couple weeks ago), you wonder how you ever got along without them.
Joe McPhee (tenor saxophone) with Otis Greene (alto saxophone), Mike Kull (electric piano), Herbie Lehman (organ), Dave Jones (guitar), Tyrone Crabb (bass), Bruce Thompson & Ernest Bostic (percussion), “Shakey Jake” (Nation Time, 1970; reissued 2009)
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lagniappe
random thoughts
Remember when there was a whole season—not just a storm or two—called “winter”?
2012
Monday, 2/6/12
A lot of trumpet players try to bowl you over. This guy, whose last album appeared on many year-end top-10 lists (When the Heart Emerges Glistening, Blue Note), does something different. He gets under your skin.
Ambrose Akinmusire (ah-kin-MOO-sir-ee) Quintet (AA, trumpet; Walter Smith III, tenor saxophone; Fabian Almazan, piano; Harish Ragavan, bass; Justin Brown, drums); live, New York (Jazz Standard), 2011
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
musical thoughts
Everything you don’t love, make sure that’s not in your playing.
—Steve Coleman (saxophonist, composer, bandleader) to Ambrose Akinmusire
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passings
Wislawa Szymborska (vees-WAH-vah shim-BOR-ska), poet
July 2, 1923-February 1, 2012
The world—whatever we might think when terrified by its vastness and our own impotence, or embittered by its indifference to individual suffering, of people, animals, and perhaps even plants, for why are we so sure that plants feel no pain; whatever we might think of its expanses pierced by the rays of stars surrounded by planets we’ve just begun to discover, planets already dead? still dead? we just don’t know; whatever we might think of this measureless theater to which we’ve got reserved tickets, but tickets whose lifespan is laughably short, bounded as it is by two arbitrary dates; whatever else we might think of this world—it is astonishing.
But “astonishing” is an epithet concealing a logical trap. We’re astonished, after all, by things that deviate from some well-known and universally acknowledged norm, from an obviousness we’ve grown accustomed to. Now the point is, there is no such obvious world. Our astonishment exists per se and isn’t based on comparison with something else.
Granted, in daily speech, where we don’t stop to consider every word, we all use phrases like “the ordinary world,” “ordinary life,” “the ordinary course of events” . . . But in the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone’s existence in this world.
—Wislawa Szymborska, Nobel Lecture (excerpt, translated from Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh), 12/7/96
More Szymborska? Here. And here. And here. And here.
Until 1996, when she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, I’d never heard of her. Since then I’ve read virtually everything of hers that’s appeared in translation. How much does she mean to me? Well, she’s one of two charter members (the other’s saxophonist Von Freeman) of the ultra-exclusive MCOTD Hall of Fame.
2012
Thursday, 2/2/12
most useless label?
world music
indie rock
free jazz
The competition’s fierce.
Mostly Other People Do the Killing (Moppa Elliott, bass; Peter Evans, trumpet; Jon Irabagon, alto saxophone; Kevin Shea, drums), live, London (The Vortex), 7/14/11
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lagniappe
art beat: yesterday at the Art Institute of Chicago (after a hearing at the nearby federal court building)
Vincent van Gogh
The Bedroom (1889)
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Self-Portrait (1887)
With van Gogh, the life continually threatens to overtake the art; the challenge is to look with fresh eyes.
2012
Monday, 1/23/12
Yesterday we left off in 1977; let’s fast-forward 33 years.
Von Freeman (tenor saxophone), with Mike Allemana (guitar), Matt Ferguson (bass), Michael Raynor (drums); “Lester Leaps In,” live, Chicago (New Apartment Lounge, 75th St.), 2010
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lagniappe
This year, as I’ve mentioned before, Von was awarded, along with bassist Charlie Haden, singer Sheila Jordan, trumpeter Jimmy Owens, and drummer Jack DeJohnette, an NEA (National Endowment of the Arts) Jazz Masters Fellowship—“the highest honor that our nation bestows on jazz artists.” Here’s the NEA’s video tribute.
music clip of the day 