Find a note that pleases you.
Then another.
And another.
—Cecil Taylor (when asked what advice he would give to a young musician)
Cecil Taylor, live, 1981 (Imagine the Sound)
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lagniappe
art beat
Going to an art museum you never know what you may encounter. This painting, for instance, I’d never laid eyes on—never even heard of the artist—until I happened upon it the other day at Chicago’s Art Institute.
Arthur Wesley Dow (American, 1857-1922), Boats at Rest
Madonna would’ve been a big star back then, too.
“Snake Hips (Do The Wiggle Waggle Woo),” Happy Days (1929), with Sharon Lynn (singer), Ann Pennington (dancer)
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reading table
As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking, — John, Isd, which was not his
name, the darkness sur-
rounds us, whatcan we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,drive, he sd, for
christ’s sake, look
out where yr going.—Robert Creeley (I Know a Man)
Want to hear Creeley read this? Here (MP3).
replay: clips too good for just one day
No jazz composer since Thelonious Monk has a stronger voice.
Lyrical beauty, inexhaustible drive, deep feeling: what more could you ask for?
Enormously influential, his music served as a bridge between the compositional elegance of Duke Ellington and the freewheeling rambunctiousness of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Henry Threadgill, David Murray, et al.
Charles Mingus Quintet (CM, bass; Dannie Richmond, drums; Eric Dolphy, alto saxophone, bass clarinet; Clifford Jordan, tenor saxophone; Jaki Byard, piano), live (TV broadcast), Belgium, 1964
“So Long, Eric”
*****
“Peggy’s Blue Skylight”
*****
“Meditations on Integration” (excerpt)
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lagniappe
. . . [Mingus’s] music was pledged to the abolition of all distinctions: between the composed and the improvised, the primitive and the sophisticated, the rough and the tender, the belligerent and the lyrical.—Geoff Dyer, But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz (1996)
*****
Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.
***
I, myself, came to enjoy the players who didn’t only just swing but who invented new rhythmic patterns, along with new melodic concepts. And those people are: Art Tatum, Bud Powell, Max Roach, Sonny Rollins, Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Parker, who is the greatest genius of all to me because he changed the whole era around.
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In my music, I’m trying to play the truth of what I am. The reason it’s difficult is because I’m changing all the time.
—Charles Mingus
(Originally posted on 4/22/10.)
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Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Miles Davis: so many of the greatest figures in jazz weren’t just great musicians, or composers, or arrangers. They were great bandleaders. As important to their artistic success as anything else was their ability to find, and showcase, players who could make the music come alive—people like Johnny Hodges and Ben Webster and Jimmy Blanton and Lester Young and Freddie Green and Jo Jones and John Coltrane and Bill Evans and Tony Williams.
That small circle of elite bandleaders includes this man. He hired musicians who played their instruments like no one else (Eric Dolphy, Jaki Byard, et al.). He gave them a musical setting in which structure and freedom were exquisitely balanced. And together they made music that sounds (even on something familiar) like nothing else.
Charles Mingus Sextet (with Johnny Coles, trumpet; Jaki Byard, piano; Eric Dolphy, alto saxophone and bass clarinet; Clifford Jordan, tenor saxophone; Dannie Richmond, drums), “Take the A Train,” live, Norway (Oslo), 1964
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lagniappe
I nominate Charles Mingus one of America’s greatest composers—Ran Blake (in the liner notes to his recent album Driftwoods)
(Originally posted on 12/1/09.)
Happy Birthday, Brownie!
Clifford Brown, October 30, 1930-June 26, 1956
“Oh, Lady Be Good,” “Memories of You,” live (TV broadcast [Soupy’s On, Detroit]), 1955
*****
Clifford Brown/Max Roach Quintet (Clifford Brown, trumpet; Max Roach, drums; Sonny Rollins, tenor saxophone; Richie Powell, piano; George Morrow, bass)
Live, “Get Happy”
*****
Live, Virginia (Norfolk, Continental Restaurant), 6/18/1956 (Last Concert)
“You Go To My Head”
***
“What’s New”
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lagniappe
Don’t take a trumpet player, man. You won’t need one after you hear this young cat, Clifford Brown.
—Charlie Parker (to Art Blakey, when he was going to work in Philadelphia in the early 1950s)
***
Out in California, we had a house, and we had a piano and vibes as well as trumpet and drums. Brownie could play all these instruments, you know. I would go out of the house and come back, and he would be practicing on anything, drums, vibes, anything. He loved music.
***
He was so well-rounded in all music. He liked Miles, Trane—who was very young then—and Louis Armstrong, and Lee Morgan, who spent alot of time with Clifford in Philly. Eric Dolphy was another good friend of ours. Music was his first love; I was his second, and math was his third. He was a wizard with figures and numbers; he used to play all kinds of mathematical games. . . .
There was only one time I didn’t travel with him. Our child, Clifford Jr., had been born, and I hadn’t taken him home yet to see the family. So Clifford said okay, and he put us on the plane; and of course that was when he was in the car accident and was killed. It was our second wedding anniversary and my 22nd birthday.
***
Without Brownie, it would be hard to imagine the existence of Lee Morgan or Freddie Hubbard or Booker Little or Woody Shaw or Wynton Marsalis.
*****
radio
Today, at WKCR-FM (broadcasting from Columbia University), it’s all Brownie, (almost) all day. (This birthday celebration will be interrupted in the middle of the day for coverage of the Columbia/Yale football game.)
So many ideas and so much feeling, so much energy and so much technique—it’s a wonder he doesn’t burst apart at the seams.
Jaki Byard, June 15, 1922-February 11, 1999
Live (with Reggie Workman, bass; Alan Dawson, drums), Germany (Berlin), 1965
Part 1 (“Free Improvisation”)
***
Part 2 (with Earl Hines, “Rosetta”)
Want more of Jaki Byard? Here and here (with Charles Mingus).
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lagniappe
In conversation (Cleveland, 1985):
1961
Newton Minow, Chair of the FCC, proclaims TV a “vast wasteland.”
1964
CBS News asks, with a straight face, what jazz “reveals” about “the nature of man” (God, too).
Lennie Tristano Quintet (Lennie Tristano, piano; Lee Konitz, alto saxophone; Warne Marsh, tenor saxophone; Sonny Dallas, bass; Nick Stabulas, drums), “Subconscious Lee,” live, New York (The Half Note), 1964, CBS TV Broadcast: Look Up and Live
Want more of Lennie Tristano? Here.
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lagniappe
reading table
Frank O’Hara (in his NYC apartment), “Having a Coke with You,” 1966
two takes
“Exit Music (For A Film)”
Radiohead, live
***
Brad Mehldau Trio, live, San Francisco
Few musicians, on any instrument, give me so much joy.
Ed Blackwell, October 10, 1929-October 7, 1992
Mal Waldron Quintet (Mal Waldron, piano, with Ed Blackwell, drums; Reggie Workman, bass; Charlie Rouse, saxophone; Woody Shaw, flugelhorn), “The Git-Go,” live, New York (Village Vanguard), 1986
Part 1
***
Part 2
***
Part 3
Want more of Ed Blackwell? Here.
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lagniappe
I’ve been playing with Blackwell over 20 years. We used to play when I first went to Los Angeles. Blackwell plays the drums as if he’s playing a wind instrument. Actually, he sounds more like a talking drum. He’s speaking a certain language that I find is very valid in rhythm instruments.
Very seldom in rhythm instruments do you hear rhythm sounding like a language. I think that’s a very old tradition, because the drums, in the beginning, used to be like the telephone—to carry the message.
*****
In one of my clearest memories of the drummer Ed Blackwell, he sat in an Indian restaurant drawing percussion notation on the tablecloth with a felt-tipped pen. The waiters looked on, aghast, as the splodgy black figures spread across their white linen, but Blackwell, rapt in concentration behind his dark glasses, remained oblivious. Music was all that mattered to him, the drums in particular, and there was a particular point he needed to make.
***
Blackwell was a deeply serious artist who, whatever his circumstances, put the music first and insisted his associates did likewise. In New York percussion circles he was seen as a teacher. He often quoted the Chinese adage, ‘Neglect your art for a day, and it will neglect you for two’, and would actively pursue other drummers whom he respected, should he feel they reneged on commitment.
I never saw him without a pair of drumsticks or homemade mallets in his hand; these he would employ constantly as much to accentuate a point as to strengthen his wrists. Some percussionists have made a cabaret act from beating out rhythms on any available surface; Blackwell would do it to fill in gaps in conversation. He played drums like that, too: the perfect listener, who could equally stimulate and inspire with his enviable grasp of polyrhythmic possibilities.
No jazz musician can claim greater authenticity than a New Orleans birth. It is the most African of US cities, where Yoruba religious practice continues and the Second Line that accompanies street-parades moves with an African strut. From the moment he could walk, Blackwell was part of that Second Line and as a child he danced in the street for pennies. That characteristic dancestep and the ‘double-clutching’ two-beat of the parade bass drum remained features of his playing, securely anchoring his adventurousness in an earlier memory.
*****
More from the Albertina Walker Musical Tribute
Michael McKay (voice), Delores Washington (voice), Juli Wood (alto saxophone), “I’m Still Here,” live, Chicago, 10/14/10
Great horn players don’t play—they sing.
Pharoah Sanders (tenor saxophone, with Paul Arslanian, harmonium), “Kazuko,” live, California (Marin Headland), 1982
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lagniappe
Trane was the father. Pharoah was the son. I was the holy ghost.
*****
Want more of the late Albertina Walker?
This week’s Gospel Memories (WLUW-FM)—available here—is devoted entirely to her music.
Albertina Walker, October 29, 1929-October 8, 2010
“I Can Go To God In Prayer” (joined, at the end, by Patti LaBelle), live, Chicago, 1991
*****
“Please Be Patient With Me” (with James Cleveland), live, Chicago, 1979
This track, which I first encountered 30 years ago, I never tire of hearing.
*****
“Lord Keep Me Day By Day,” live (James Cleveland’s funeral), Los Angeles, 1991
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lagniappe
Somebody gonna leave here feeling a little better than they did when they came in . . .
—Albertina Walker
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Happy Birthday, Monk!
In celebration of the birthday of Thelonious Monk (October 10, 1917-February 17 1982), WKCR-FM is playing his music all day—and we’re replaying some clips.
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Here is the onliest Thelonious.
Thelonious Monk, “Epistrophy,” live (TV broadcast), Paris, 1966
*****
Thelonoius Monk, “’Round Midnight,” live (TV broadcast)
*****
You can tell a lot about Monk’s music—about the centrality of dance, about the interplay between melody and rhythm, about the way a melody’s irregular accents override the pulse (making the dance melodic)—just by watching, in the second performance, the way his right foot moves.
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lagniappe
He played each note as though astonished by the previous one, as though every touch of his fingers on the keyboard was correcting an error and this touch in turn became an error to be corrected and so the tune never quite ended up the way it was meant to be.
***
You had to see Monk to hear his music properly. The most important instrument in the group—whatever the format—was his body.
—Geoff Dyer, But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz (1996)
(Originally posted 11/2/09.)
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Yeah, the format might seem a little strange: soprano saxophone, unaccompanied. But Monk’s musical language—its tangy mix of geometric elegance and off-kilter bluesiness—is rarely spoken this eloquently.
Sam Newsome, Thelonious Monk Medley, live, 2008
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lagniappe
The clarity and logic of his [Thelonious Monk’s] work might have been compared with the craft of an architect. Each phrase, each fragment, each plump chord had its exact place in his musicial structure.—Mimi Clar (in Robin D. G. Kelley, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original [2009])
*****
‘All jazz musicians are mathematicians unconsciously’ was a favorite theory of Monk’s.—Randy Weston (in Deborah Kapchan, Traveling Spirit Masters: Moroccan Gnawa Trance and Music in the Global Marketplace [2007])
(Originally posted 11/25/09.)
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genius at work
Thelonious Monk with saxophonist Charlie Rouse, working out a number, “Boo Boo’s Birthday,” during a recording session, 1967
*****
Thelonious Monk (with Charlie Rouse, tenor saxophone; Ben Riley, drums; Larry Gales, bass), “Boo Boo’s Birthday” (Underground [Columbia], 1968)
(Originally posted 12/28/09.)
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What did it sound like when Beethoven, seated at the piano, played Bach? For that we have to use our imagination. For this we don’t.
Thelonious Monk plays Duke Ellington, live, Berlin, 1969
“Satin Doll”
*****
“Sophisticated Lady”
*****
“Caravan”
*****
“Solitude”
(Yo, Michael: Thanks for the tip!)
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lagniappe
[T]he only time I’ve ever seen Monk act like a little boy and looking up to somebody [was in the presence of Duke Ellington]. That was his idol.—Joe Termini (quoted in Robin D. G. Kelley, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original [2009])
(Originally posted 1/13/10.)
music clip of the day 