Kidd Jordan Quartet (KJ, tenor saxophone; Billy Bang, violin; William Parker, bass; Hamid Drake, drums), New York (Vision Festival), 2008
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
We tend to take musical instruments for granted, as if their existence were inevitable. But the fact that something exists doesn’t mean it had to. We could’ve been born into a world that never heard a violin.
*****
reading table
“What kind of heaven is that, you can’t have your records?”
Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five
“West End Blues” (Joe “King” Oliver), 1928
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King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band
“Dipper Mouth Blues” (Joe “King” Oliver), 1923
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lagniappe
reading table
America, to me, should be shouting all the time, a bunch of shouting voices, most of them wrong, some of them nuts, but please, not just one droning glamorous reasonable voice.
—George Saunders, “My Flamboyant Grandson” (In Persuasion Nation)
Last night I completed a long, meandering journey I began several years ago, finishing the last of the seven volumes of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. If you’ve ever thought about making this trip yourself, I have just one word of advice: go. The minutes, and hours, I’ve spent in Proust’s company—often just a few pages at a time—are among the most rewarding, and pleasurable, I’ve had.
Miles Davis Quintet (MD, trumpet; Wayne Shorter, tenor saxophone; Herbie Hancock, piano, Ron Carter, bass; Tony Williams, drums), live, Europe (Karlsruhe, Germany; Stockholm, Sweden), 1967
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
Miles may not be the greatest trumpet player in the history of jazz, but he’s arguably the greatest bandleader. Only someone with supreme self-confidence could do what he did. A brilliant judge of talent, a leader who expected, and enabled, others to flourish, he could seem, at times, the least interesting player in his own band.
*****
reading table
Winter solitude—
in a world of one color
the sound of wind.
—Matsuo Basho (1644-1694, translated from Japanese by Robert Hass)
Rev. F. W. McGee (with Arizona Dranes, piano and vocals, and congregation), “Fifty Miles of Elbow Room,” 1930
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langniappe
reading table
He was little more than a ruin, but a superb one, or perhaps not even a ruin so much as that most romantic of beautiful objects, a rock in a storm. Lashed on all sides by the waves of suffering, of anger at suffering, and of the rising tide of death, by which he was surrounded, his face, crumbling like a block of stone, still kept the style, the hauteur I had always admired; it was worn away like one of those beautiful but half-obliterated classical heads with which we are still always glad to ornament a study. Only it seemed to belong to a period more ancient than before, not only because of the way in which its once more lustrous material had become rough and broken, but because an expression of subtlety and playfulness had been succeeded by an involuntary, an unconscious expression, constructed out of illness, the struggle against death, mere resistance and the difficulty of living. The arteries, all their suppleness gone, had given his once beaming face a sculptural rigidity. And although the Duc had no inkling of this, his neck, his cheeks, his forehead all displayed indications that the human being within, as if obliged to cling tenaciously to each minute, seemed to be buffeted by a tragic gale, while the white strands of his thinner but still magnificent hair lashed with their spume the flooded promontory of his face. And I realized that, like the strange, unique glints which only the approach of an all-engulfing storm gives to rocks normally a different colour, the leaden grey of the stiff, worn cheeks, the almost white, foam flecked grey of the swelling locks, the weak light still emanating from the scarcely seeing eyes, were not unreal colours, far from it, all too real, but uncanny, and borrowed from the palette and the lighting, inimitable in its terrifying and prophetic shades of darkness, of old age, and of the proximity of death.
—Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again (translated from French by Ian Patterson)
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What a strange thing!
to be alive
beneath cherry blossoms.
—Kobayashi Issa (translated from Japanese by Robert Hass)
Bobby Bradford (cornet), Glenn Ferris (trombone), Mark Dresser (bass), “Purge” (G. Ferris), Los Angeles, 2009
A mathematician could, I’m sure, estimate how many different instrumental combinations you could expect to hear in your lifetime. What that number would be I have no idea. What I do know is that this particular combination—cornet, trombone, bass—is one that, in over fifty years of listening, I’ve never heard before.
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lagniappe
radio
Today the folks at WKCR-FM (Columbia University) are remembering trumpeter Roy Eldridge, who was born on this date in 1911 and lived until 1987, in the best possible way—they’re playing his music all day.
*****
reading table
[W]hen, in a simple case, one sees the barrister step forward, raise a robed arm and begin declaiming in an ominous voice, nobody dares look at their neighbors. Because to begin with one thinks it is grotesque, but then it seems it might be wonderful, and one waits to make up one’s mind.
—Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again (translated from French by Ian Patterson)
