What better way to start the workweek?
Joe Lee Wilson, singer, December 22, 1935-July 17, 2011
Archie Shepp, “Money Blues” (featuring Joe Lee Wilson, lead vocals)
Things Have Got To Change (Impulse!), 1971
Part #1
Vodpod videos no longer available.***
Part #2
Vodpod videos no longer available.**********
lagniappe
Around Joe Lee (excerpt)
Vodpod videos no longer available.old stuff
(an occasional series)
Duke Ellington, “Black Beauty” (1928)
Vodpod videos no longer available.The right music, heard at the right moment, can change your whole day.
The Staple Singers, “I’m Coming Home” (Vee-Jay), 1959
Vodpod videos no longer available.**********
lagniappe
Happy Birthday, Lionel!
Today trumpet player Lionel Ferbos, who was born when William Howard Taft was president and tonight can be heard at New Orleans’ Palm Court Jazz Cafe, turns 100.
The Lionel Ferbos Band, “When You’re Smiling”
Live, New Orleans (Norwegian Seamen’s Church), 8/28/09
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For some years, trumpeter Lionel Ferbos has been touted as the oldest active jazz musician in New Orleans. Come this weekend, he’ll qualify for another honorific: The only active jazz musician in New Orleans whose age has crossed into triple digits.
John McCusker / The Times-Picayune
Lionel Ferbos, photographed in May 2011.Ferbos first learned trumpet in 1926, at age 15, inspired by seeing Phil Spitalny and his All-Girl Orchestra at the Orpheum Theater. He played in 1930s bands led by Captain John Handy and Walter “Fats” Pichon. He worked on a crew digging a City Park lagoon before getting hired for a Depression-era Works Progress Administration band, making around $13 a week.
Sheetmetal work eventually paid the bills, even as he continued to moonlight as a musician. He joined Lars Edegran’s New Orleans Ragtime Orchestra in the early 1970s, which toured in Europe, and in 1979 played trumpet and sang in the touring musical “One Mo’ Time.” He has maintained a regular gig at the Palm Court Jazz Cafe on Decatur Street for more than two decades.
—Keith Spera, The Times-Picayune, 7/13/11
Happy (75th) Birthday, Albert!
Albert Ayler, tenor saxophonist, July 13, 1936-November 25, 1970
*****
Albert Ayler Trio (Albert Ayler, ts; Gary Peacock, bass; Sunny Murray, drums), Spiritual Unity (ESP), 1964
“Ghosts: First Variation”
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“The Wizard”
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“Spirits”
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“Ghosts: Second Variation”
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lagniappe
random thoughts
OK, let’s talk physics. One problem with the term “free jazz” is that it suggests a sound world in which there’s no center of gravity—a world where everything pushes outward, where centrifugal force rules. But the reality, with many of the greatest artists, is different. Centripetal, not centrifugal, force is king. The musicians push inward, not outward, toward a center none ever inhabits individually but, collectively, they are always moving toward.
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The contributions of Gary Peacock and Sunny Murray are hard to overstate. Sidemen? There are none.
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Like Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler is at heart a blues musician—one who, like Ornette, expanded the blues vocabulary.
*****
radio
Today, from noon to 9 p.m. (EST), WKCR-FM (broadcasting from Columbia University) is all Albert Ayler.
John Luther Adams, Inuksuit (excerpt)
New York (Park Avenue Armory), 2/20/11
Vodpod videos no longer available.
More? Here.
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lagniappe
Scored for a flexible ensemble of between nine and ninety-nine percussionists, “Inuksuit” is intended for outdoor performance, and it had its première on a mountainside in Banff, Canada, in 2009. Adams at first resisted the idea of taking the piece indoors, because the interaction with nature was integral to his conception. After inspecting the Armory, though, he grasped its possibilities; the space is more a man-made canyon than a concert hall. He settled on a corps of seventy-six musicians, including five piccolo players. Arrays of drums, gongs, cymbals, bells, and numerous smaller instruments were set up on the main floor of the Drill Hall; atop catwalks on all sides; and in the hallways that connect to smaller rooms at the front of the building. In any rendition of “Inuksuit,” the performers are given four or five pages of music—the notation imitates the shapes of the Inuit markers—which they execute at their own pace. Musicians with portable instruments are instructed to move about freely. Prearranged signals prompt a move from one page to the next. The result is a composition that on the microcosmic level seems spontaneous, even chaotic, but that gathers itself into a grand, almost symphonic structure.
At 4 P.M. on a Sunday, thirteen hundred people assembled in the Drill Hall to hear the piece, variously standing, sitting, or lying on the floor. First came an awakening murmur: one group of performers exhaled through horns and cones; others rubbed stones together and made whistling sounds by whirling tubes. Then one member of the ensemble—Schick, perched above the entrance to the Drill Hall—delivered a call on a conch shell. With that commanding, shofar-like tone, the sound started to swell: tom-toms and bass drums thudded, cymbals and tam-tams crashed, sirens wailed, bells clanged. It was an engulfing, complexly layered noise, one that seemed almost to force the listeners into motion, and the crowd fanned out through the arena.
***
It is tricky to write about an event such as this. Because both ensemble and audience were in motion, no two perceptions of the performance were the same, and no definitive record of it can exist. Furthermore, anyone who ventures to declare in a public forum that “Inuksuit” was one of the most rapturous experiences of his listening life—that is how I felt, and I wasn’t the only one—might be suspected of harboring hippie-dippie tendencies. The work is not explicitly political, nor is it the formal expression of an individual sensibility, although John Luther Adams certainly deserved the ecstatic and prolonged ovation that greeted him when he acknowledged the crowd from the center of the Drill Hall. In the end, several young couples seemed to deliver the most incisive commentary when, amid the obliterating tidal wave of sound, they began making out.
—Alex Ross, New Yorker, 3/14/11
*****
Happy Birthday, Suzanne!
As I mentioned on this date last year, the first time my wife Suzanne and I went out together (September 1974, Chicago’s Jazz Showcase), we saw the man who put the sui in sui generis.
Sun Ra, Space Is the Place (1974), excerpt
Vodpod videos no longer available.*****
speaking of birthdays
How often do you get to say “Happy 100th Birthday”?
Well, here’s your chance.
As I learned the other day from WKCR-FM’s Phil Schaap, who’s been encouraging folks to send this guy a birthday card (I mailed mine yesterday), the oldest performing jazz musician, trumpeter Lionel Ferbos, who plays at New Orleans’ Palm Court Jazz Cafe, turns 100 on July 17th. Birthday greetings can be mailed (remember mail?) to 5543 Press Dr., New Orleans, LA 70126.
Here’s another take on the brass band.
Ray Anderson’s Pocket Brass Band (RA, trombone; Lew Soloff, trumpet;
Matt Perrine, sousaphone; Bobby Previte, drums)
Live, Powerplay Studio, Switzerland (Maur), 5/27/10
Vodpod videos no longer available.*****
Live, Trondheim Jazz Festival (Norway), 5/14/10
Vodpod videos no longer available.**********
lagniappe
art beat
Cy Twombly, April 25, 1928-July 5, 2011
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The death of Cy Twombly has an oddly catastrophic feel—oddly because he was eighty-three and a canonical master, but catastrophic because he takes with him a certain epochal, now thoroughly historical, sense of wide-open liberty in very high culture. Such was the cynosure of new art in New York sixty years ago, when Twombly had his first show of startlingly scrawly, somehow furiously languid paintings and drawings. Unlike the heroes of Abstract Expressionism and his comrades Rauschenberg and Johns, he never drove that afflatus. Rather, he took it as a routine state of mind and soul. This could seem dandyishly insolent of him: shrugging off the requirement for logical necessity in big-time avant-garde art. He made clear that he did what he felt like doing. His feeling-like-doing-it was the point, ever just a dramatic whisker short of pointlessness. Who did he think he was?
—Peter Schjeldahl, New Yorker (blog), 7/6/11
Happy Birthday, Pops!*
Louis Armstrong, “Basin Street Blues” (three takes)
#1 (live, 1959, Germany [Stuttgart])
Vodpod videos no longer available.***
#2 (live, 1953, New Orleans)
Vodpod videos no longer available.***
#3 (recording, 1928, Chicago)
Vodpod videos no longer available.**********
lagniappe
more
Louis Armstrong & His Hot Five, “West End Blues,” 1928, Chicago
*****
radio
The federal government, in its wisdom, gives you the day off so you can listen to Louis Armstrong.
—Phil Schaap, 7/2/11, Traditions in Swing, WKCR-FM
(broadcasting from Columbia University), which today is all Pops, all day
*****
reading table
Summer afternoon — summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.
—Henry James
*Louis Armstrong gave July 4th as his birthday, something that was determined, after his death, not to be true—at least not literally.
Here’s a different take—one deeply indebted to Lester Bowie—on the
brass band.
Dave Douglas & Brass Ecstasy
DD, trumpet; Louis Bonilla, trombone; Vincent Chancey, horn (AKA French horn); Marcus Rojas, tuba; Nasheet Waits, drums
“Bowie,” recording session (Spirit Moves, 2009)
Vodpod videos no longer available.***
“Spirit Moves,” “This Love Affair,” “Twilight of the Dogs”
Live, Washington, D.C., 2009
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lagniappe
reading table
How can I possibly sleep
This moonlit evening?
Come, my friends,
Let’s sing and dance
All night long.—Ryokan (1758-1831), trans. John Stevens
scenes from New Orleans
(an occasional series)
Rebirth Brass Band, live, Maple Leaf Bar (where RBB plays Tuesday nights), New Orleans, 2011
“Big Chief”
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“I Like It Like That”
nadir, n. the lowest point.
On July 29, 1946, Charlie Parker was arrested in Los Angeles, after starting a fire in his hotel room. Earlier that day, unable to score heroin, scratchy, drunk on whiskey, he recorded this track, which, depending on your point of view, is either one of the worst records he ever made (Parker’s view) or, despite (because of?) its raggedyness, among the greatest (Charles Mingus’s opinion). After his arrest he was confined, for six months, at Camarillo State Mental Hospital.
Charlie Parker, “Lover Man” (CP, alto saxophone; Howard McGhee, trumpet; Jimmy Bunn, piano; Bob Kesterson, bass; Roy Porter, drums), rec. 7/29/46
More? Here.
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lagniappe
rewarding the deserving
So often, it seems, when arts awards are announced, my initial reaction is: “Huh?” Not this time. The National Endowment of the Arts just announced their 2012 Jazz Masters Awards, which recognize, with Lifetime Honors, “living musicians for career-long achievement.” And the winners are Jack DeJohnette, Jimmy Owens, Charlie Haden, Sheila Jordan, and Von Freeman.
*****
reading table
The cafeteria in the hospital’s basement was the saddest place in the world, with its grim neon lights and gray tabletops and the diffuse forboding of those who had stepped away from suffering children to have a grilled cheese sandwich.
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The next day, I set up an iPod dock and played music, not only in the willfully delusional belief that music would be good for a painful, recovering brain but also to counter the soul-crushing hospital noise: the beeping of monitors, the wheezing of respirators, the indifferent chatter of nurses in the hallway, the alarm that went off whenever a patient’s condition abruptly worsened.
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One early morning, driving to the hospital, I saw a number of able-bodied, energetic runners progressing along Fullerton Avenue toward the sunny lakefront, and I had a strong physical sensation of being in an aquarium: I could see out, the people outside could see me (if they chose to pay attention), but we were living and breathing in entirely different environments.
—Aleksandar Hemon, “The Aquarium: A Child’s Isolating Illness” (behind a paywall), New Yorker, 6/13 & 20/2011
music clip of the day 