jazz | music clip of the day

Category: jazz

Thursday, 9/16/10

What a joy it is to hear an improvising musician whose mind moves as fast as her fingers.

Geri Allen, live, Atlanta, 2009

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lagniappe

art beat

In 1932 I saw a photograph by Martin Munkacsi of three black children running into the sea, and I must say that it is that very photograph which was for me the spark that set fire to the fireworks . . . and made me suddenly realize that photography could reach eternity through the moment. It is only that one photograph which influenced me. There is in that image such intensity, spontaneity, such a joy of life, such a prodigy, that I am still dazzled by it even today.

—Henri Cartier-Bresson (the Cartier-Bresson exhibit continues at the Art Institute of Chicago through 10/3/10)

Martin Munkacsi, Three Boys at Lake Tanganyika, c. 1930

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radio: space is the place

Tonight, from 6-9 p.m. (EST), WKCR-FM (broadcasting from Columbia University) will be featuring recordings of live performances by Sun Ra & His Solar Arkestra at Soundscape, a New York loft space (West 52nd St. and 10th Ave.) that presented live music from 1979 to 1983.

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2010

Tuesday, 9/7/10

Happy (80th) Birthday, Sonny!

Sonny Rollins (with Jim Hall, guitar; Bob Crenshaw, bass; Ben Riley, drums), live (TV broadcast), 1962

Part 1 (“The Bridge”)

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Part 2 (“God Bless the Child”)

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Part 3 (“If Ever I Would Leave You”)

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lagniappe

The great tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins turns 80 on Tuesday, awash in more than the usual veneration. The MacDowell Colony last month awarded him its Edward MacDowell Medal. This week Abrams is publishing “Saxophone Colossus: A Portrait of Sonny Rollins,” a handsome art book featuring photographs by John Abbott, with an essay by Bob Blumenthal. And Friday night Mr. Rollins will walk onstage at the Beacon Theater.

It won’t be just another Sonny Rollins concert, if there even is such a thing. In addition to his working band, Mr. Rollins has reached out to several guests. The guitarist Jim Hall is the most eagerly anticipated: at 79, he is indisputable jazz royalty himself, and a trusted partner from one of the most celebrated stretches of Mr. Rollins’s career. (Consult the ageless 1962 album “The Bridge.”) Mr. Hall sat in with Mr. Rollins in New England one night this summer. Before that they hadn’t played together since 1991, in a Carnegie Hall concert that also included the gifted young trumpeter Roy Hargrove, now 40, who will rejoin them here.

—Nate Chinen, New York Times, 9/1/10

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Interview (2009) (encountering W.E.B. DuBois as a child in Harlem, playing with Bud Powell at nineteen, using drugs, studying yoga in India, aging, etc.)

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2010

Thursday, 9/2/10

Earl Hines, Bud Powell, this guy, Bill Evans, Cecil Taylor, maybe one or two others: they don’t just play the piano; they hear the music—and the instrument—in a new way.

Lennie Tristano, “You Don’t Know What Love Is,” live, Copenhagen, 1965

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2010

Friday, 8/27/10

Happy Birthday, Pres!

Lester Young, August 27, 1909-March 15, 1959
(nicknamed “Pres” [or “Prez”] by Billie Holiday, who called him the “president of tenor saxophonists”)

Who else is at once so earthy and so ethereal?

Jammin’ the Blues (1944)

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lagniappe

On Lester Young

B.B. King:

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Lee Kontiz:

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Joe Lovano:

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Want more?

One of my favorite radio stations, WKCR-FM (based at Columbia University and available on-line), is celebrating Pres’s birthday in the best possible way—playing his music all day. (Actually, they’re playing his music for 36 hours straight, until the middle of the day tomorrow, when they’ll begin playing the music of Charlie Parker, whose birthday is Sunday, for the next 36 hours.)

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2010

Thursday, 8/26/10

When I die, I’m moving to New Orleans for the funeral.

Funeral, Trumpeter John Brunious, New Orleans, 2/23/08

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2010

Saturday, 8/21/10

replay: a clip too good for just one day

If spirit could be sold, New Orleans would be rich.

Rebirth Brass Band, live, New Orleans, 2009

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lagniappe

Brass band musicians are a wild bunch. They’re hard to control. The street funk that the Rebirth Brass Band plays definitely isn’t traditional—it might be in thirty years time.

—Lajoie “Butch” Gomez (in Mick Burns, Keeping the Beat on the Street: The New Orleans Brass Band Renaissance [2006])

(Originally posted on 9/11/09.)

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2010

Wednesday, 8/11/10

Anyone can play fast.

Ben Webster (tenor saxophone, with Kenny Drew, piano; Niels-Henning Orsted Pedersen, bass; Alex Riel, drums), “How Long Has This Been Going On?”; live

Want more? Here. Here.

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2010

Saturday, 8/7/10

Let’s lift the bandstand.

—Thelonious Monk

Woody Shaw/Johnny Griffin Quintet (Woody Shaw, trumpet; Johnny Griffin, tenor saxophone; John Hicks, piano; Reggie Johnson, bass; Alvin Queens, drums), “Night in Tunisia,” live, Germany (Koln), 1986

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lagniappe

Now there’s a great trumpet player. He [Woody Shaw] can play different from all of them.

—Miles Davis

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Anthony Braxton on playing with Woody Shaw.

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reading table

Look after the sound and the sense will take care of itself.

—Adam Phillips, London Review of Books, 7/22/10 (reviewing Christopher Ricks’ True Friendship: Geoffrey Hill, Anthony Hecht and Robert Lowell Under The Sign Of Eliot And Pound)

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2010

Thursday, 8/5/10

He doesn’t pummel the beat, the way so many drummers do.

He pulls it out of the air.

Jo Jones (“Papa Jo” [as distinguished from “Philly Joe“]), October 7, 1911-September 3, 1985

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lagniappe

[W]hat really distinguished the great drummers I heard growing up, what really attracted me to men such as Sonny Greer, Chick Webb, Sid Catlett, Jo Jones and Kenny Clarke was that they all thought like composers, they all had their own way of hearing a band. They were all original thinkers who identified themselves when they played. And they stood out. They played like leaders.

—Max Roach