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Category: jazz

2009

Thursday, 12/31/09

In the public imagination, the guitar’s associated with freedom and individuality. The musical reality’s different. Guitarists travel in herds; few stray from the pack. One who has gone his own way is this man, who’s played with everyone from Muddy Waters (as a session musician for Chicago-based Chess Records) to Miles Davis (as a member of his group [1973-1975]). He employs a variety of unusual tunings and effects. He sounds like no one else.

Pete Cosey, guitar

“Calypso Frelimo” (excerpt), Pete Cosey’s Children of Agharta (JT Lewis, drums; Gary Bartz and John Stubblefield, saxophones & flute; Matt Rubano, bass; Johnny Juice, turntables; Baba Israel, words and beats; Kyle Jason, voice; Bern Pizzitola, guitar; Wendy Oxenhorn, harmonica), live, 2002, New York

*****

Live (with Melvin Gibbs, bass; JT Lewis, drums; Johnny Juice, congas and turntables)

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He’s [Pete Cosey’s] the guy who, after Hendrix, showed you how ‘out’ you could go with guitar playing, particularly in the improvised context.—Greg Tate

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2009

Tuesday, 12/29/09

Is there any greater joy than to hear something fresh?

Steve Lehman (saxophonist, composer, bandleader), talking and playing, 2009

Want more? Here (click on the “listen” tab).

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. . . the most important thing, and the most important element of the music, and the most important compositional step is deciding who it is that you’re going to work with—even more so than what notes they’re going to play, or what context you’re going to put them in.—Steve Lehman

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2009

Monday, 12/28/09

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)

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reading table

One of the great discoveries I made in college, besides Bach (10/19/09, 10/24/09, 12/25/09) and Blind Willie Johnson (11/15/09) and Bill Evans (11/18/09) and Hound Dog Taylor (10/30/09), was John Berryman. Hearing him read his poetry, not long before he died (jumping off a bridge in Minneapolis), changed my life. Really. That night made me realize, in ways that I never had before, just how lively and surprising and exciting poetry could be. It made me realize, too, that what a great poem offers is an experience—one you can’t get anywhere else. And so I have Berryman to thank not only for his own poems (especially The Dream Songs [which would be on my desert-island packing list]) but also for making Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Wislawa Szymborska, Charles Simic, et al., such important figures in my life. Just as my life would be immeasurably poorer without Thelonious Monk (11/2/09, 11/25/09, today) and Vernard Johnson (12/6/09) and Morton Feldman (11/7/09, 12/5/09) and Lester Bowie (9/8/09, 10/28/09), so too would it be without them.

This recording, for all its technical shortcomings (headphones help), captures some of what I heard in Berryman that night almost 40 years ago. Blustery and grandiose and vulnerable, jazzy and funny: he was all these things—and more.

This is not a cultural occasion, ladies and gentlemen, in case you were misled by anyone. This is an entertainment.—John Berryman

John Berryman (1914-1972), live, Iowa City, 1968

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

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2009

Friday, 12/25/09

John Lee Hooker, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Dinu Lipatti: where else would you find these three artists together, performing back to back, besides a cyberstage?

John Lee Hooker, “Blues For Christmas” (1949)

*****

Rahsaan Roland Kirk (tenor saxophone, manzello, flute, stritch), “We Free Kings” (1961)

*****

Dinu Lipatti, “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” Johann Sebastian Bach/Hess transcription (1947)

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2009

Tuesday, 12/8/09

When melody’s felt rhythmically, and rhythm melodically, you don’t need drums for the music to dance.

Oran Etkin’s Group Kelenia (Oran Etkin, clarinet; Makane Kouyate, percussion; Lionel Loueke, guitar; Joe Sanders, bass), live (radio recording session), New York, 2009

Want more? Here.

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2009

Thursday, 12/3/09

One of the through lines of Steve Lacy’s long career—whether playing with traditional (“Dixieland”) jazz bands, or Thelonious Monk, or Cecil Taylor, or his own groups—was the sound of joy.

Steve Lacy Four (Steve Lacy, soprano saxophone, with Steve Potts, alto saxophone; Jean Jacques Avenel, bass; Oliver Johnson, drums), “Prospectus,” live, Prague, 1990

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‘Make the drummer sound good.’—Steve Lacy (recalling something Thelonious Monk told him [in Robin D. G. Kelly, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original [2009]])

*****

Steve Lacy, talking and playing:

Part 1

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Part 2

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Part 3

*****

I have always admired Steve’s perseverance and commitment to perfecting his art . . . He is the prime example of someone who has fought for artistic integrity.—Sonny Rollins

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2009

Tuesday, 12/1/09

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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I nominate Charles Mingus one of America’s greatest composers—Ran Blake (in the liner notes to his recent album Driftwoods)

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2009

Thursday, 11/26/09

Wobbly and splayed, this performance of the Jobim classic sounds more like a soundtrack for my life than the silky Getz/Gilberto original ever could.

Ran Blake, “The Girl From Ipanema”

*****

Stan Getz/Astrud Gilberto (with a very young Gary Burton on vibes), “The Girl From Ipanema” (1964 [charted at #5 on the Billboard Hot 100]; this is from the 1964 movie “Get Yourself A College Girl”)

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mail

The immediacy of the e-world never ceases to amaze. After posting yesterday’s clip, I sent Sam Newsome an email—I’d happened upon his e-address at his website—to let him know that his music was being featured here. A few hours later, this was in my e-mailbox: “Thanks, Richard. It looks like I’m in good company. Peace, S”

*****

reading table

On this Thanksgiving Day, here’s a favorite quote.

Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.—Henry James

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2009

Wednesday, 11/25/09

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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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])

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2009

Wednesday, 11/18/09

While living in New York for a few months in the early 1970s (after my first year of college), I often heard Bill Evans at a place in Greenwich Village, the Top of the Gate, where, for the price of a beer, you could linger all night. Hunched over the piano, he looked at times as if he was about to fall inside and disappear.

Bill Evans, “My Foolish Heart,” live (TV broadcast), Sweden, 1964

*****

Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett, Fred Hersch, Brad Mehldau: the list of piano players who wouldn’t sound the way they do but for Bill Evans, whose approach to harmony made him the most influential piano player in jazz since Bud Powell, goes on and on and on.

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The ‘open’ voicings that [Bill] Evans used [i.e., leaving out a chord’s root note] were not new . . . . They had been there in ‘classical’ music since the early part of the century, since Bartok and Stravinsky. But they were new to jazz, and they opened up melody and flow in new ways.—Martin Williams, The Jazz Tradition (2d ed. 1983)

*****

Bill [Evans] had this quiet fire that I loved on piano. The way he approached it, the sound he got was like crystal notes or sparkling water cascading down from some clear waterfall.

—Miles Davis (in Miles Davis with Quincy Troupe, Miles: The Autobiography [1989])

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