Friday, June 11, 2010
music to levitate by
Dizzy Gillespie & Louis Armstrong, “Umbrella Man,” live (TV broadcast), 1959
music clip of the day
jazz/blues/rock/classical/gospel/more
Category: jazz
2010
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
guitar players who sound like nobody else, part 3
Sonny Sharrock (1940-1994)
Live (with Melvin Gibbs, bass; Abe Speller & Pheeroan Aklaf, drums), New York (Knitting Factory), 1988
*****
“Who Does She Hope To Be?” (with Pharoah Sanders, tenor saxophone; Charles Moffett, bass; Elvin Jones, drums), 1991
2010
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
guitar players who sound like nobody else, part 2
Derek Bailey (1930-2005)
With tap-dancer Will Gaines, live, 1995
Want more of Will Gaines? Here.
*****
Playing (and talking) for friends, New York, 2001
*****
With the Shaking Ray Levis, live, New York, 2003
*****
“Laura,” 2002
**********
lagniappe
Playing music is not really susceptible to theory much. Circumstances affect it so much.
***
Personally, I`ve found that the kind of thing that I like is going into somebody else’s area and not playing their music but doing whatever I do in their area.
***
I like duos with percussionists. I like the songs that percussionists sing.
***
You can’t always wait for a composer to write the music you want to play.
—Derek Bailey
2010
Monday, May 31, 2010
impeccable, adj. faultless, flawless; irreproachable. E.g., Hank Jones.
Hank Jones, July 31, 1918-May 16, 2010
“Oh, What A Beautiful Mornin’,” live, Paris, 2009
*****
“This Is This” (with Joe Lovano, saxophone), live
*****
“Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child” (with Charlie Haden, bass), 1995
**********
lagniappe
When you listen to a pianist, each note should have an identity, each note should have a soul of its own.—Hank Jones
*****
Really dumb!
2010
Monday, May 17, 2010
In embracing music from another continent, this guy—a Gypsy born in Belgium who grew up near Paris—was way ahead of his time.
Django Reinhardt, January 23, 1910-May 16, 1953
Quintette du Hot Club de France
Live, “J’attendrai Swing,” 1939
*****
Live, “Echoes of France,” 1945
It’s something of a miracle that Django was able, physically, to make music at all. When he was eighteen, his left hand was badly injured in a fire, leaving his fourth and fifth fingers permanently curled toward the palm.
**********
lagniappe
Jazz attracted me because in it I found a formal perfection and instrumental precision that I admire in classical music, but which popular music doesn’t have.—Django Reinhardt
*****
With Duke Ellington (1939)
2010
Thursday, May 13, 2010
Dear MCOTD,
What would go well with a bottle of sleeping pills?
Chet Baker, “Almost Blue” (Let’s Get Lost [1988])
**********
lagniappe
Here’s a big birthday shout-out to my 19-year-old son Luke, who’s opened my ears to more things than I could ever count.
2010
Wednesday, 5/12/10
Is the greatest electric guitar player of all time a guy who died in 1942?
Charlie Christian, July 29, 1916-March 2, 1942
“Waiting for Benny” (1941 [recorded at a Benny Goodman session, while the engineers were testing the equipment])
*****
Live, New York (Minton’s), 1941
“Swing To Bop”
***
“Stompin’ at the Savoy”
lagniappe
TV news piece, Oklahoma City, 2007 (following CC’s induction into the Jazz Hall of Fame)
2010
Friday, May 7, 2010
New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, 2010/part 1
Scene 1: Sousaphone Parade
*****
Scene 2: Brian Blade & The Fellowship
Want more Brian Blade? Here.
*****
Scene 3: Mardi Gras Indians (Members of the Golden Star Hunters, Carrolton Hunters, et al.), Backstage
Want more Mardi Gras Indians? Here.
**********
lagniappe
2010
Thursday, April 29, 2010
Happy (111th) Birthday, Duke!
At least one day out of the year all musicans should just put their instruments down, and give thanks to Duke Ellington.
—Miles Davis
Duke Ellington and His Orchestra
“C Jam Blues,” 1942
*****
“Mood Indigo,” “Sophisticated Lady,” “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing),” “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore,” 1943
lagniappe
It is becoming increasingly difficult to decide where jazz starts or where it stops, where Tin Pan Alley begins and jazz ends, or even where the borderline lies between between classical music and jazz. I feel there is no boundary line.
—Duke Ellington
*****
Radio Ellington: All Duke, All Day
WKCR-FM (broadcasting from Columbia University)
2010
Thursday, 4/22/10
Happy Birthday, Mingus!
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)
Want more? Here.
**********
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.
***
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
*****
Radio Mingus: all Mingus, all the time
In celebration of Mingus’s birthday, WKCR-FM (broadcasting from Columbia University) is playing his music all day.
music clip of the day 
