Among the many things I love about his playing, which dances, always, is the balance of simplicity and complexity—it’s never more complex than it is simple, never simpler than it is complex.
Old and New Dreams (Don Cherry [1936-1995], pocket trumpet; Dewey Redman [1931-2006], tenor saxophone; Charlie Haden [1937-], bass; Ed Blackwell [1929-1992], drums), live
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lagniappe
reading table
Art is not in some far-off place.
—Lydia Davis, “Extracts from a Life” (The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, 2009)
Some sounds once they enter your brain they never leave.
Perfume, “Baby Cruising Love” (2008)
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lagniappe
reading table
How little we know,
and when we know it!
*****
We close in on ourselves,
then yelp that the world is awry.
*****
We had macaroni for lunch every day
except Sunday, when a small quail was induced
to be served to us. Why do I tell you these things?
You are not even here.
Album version (good kid, m.A.A.d city), released 10/22/12
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lagniappe
reading table
David Ferry, “The Birds,” Boston University, 2011
This poem appears in Ferry’s latest collection, Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations, which just won the National Book Award. Ferry, now in his late 80s, has said of the book’s title: “It’s not entirely personal. I think everybody’s slightly off the rails. Me too, but I don’t mean it’s my exclusive territory. Yours and mine.”
*****
*Based on a sample of one, my son Luke, who’s home for the holiday.
Whatever their differences, they’ve got something in common.
Nobody’s more important than the drummer.
If the drums aren’t happening, nothing is.
*****
reading table: passings
“The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart”
How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say, God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words
get it all wrong. We say bread and it means according
to which nation. French has no word for home,
and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people
in northern India is dying out because their ancient
tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost
vocabularies that might express some of what
we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would
finally explain why the couples on their tombs
are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands
of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,
they seemed to be business records. But what if they
are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve
Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.
O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,
as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind’s labor.
Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts
of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred
pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what
my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this
desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script
is not language but a map. What we feel most has
no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds.
*****
“By Small and Small: Midnight to Four A.M.”
For eleven years I have regretted it,
regretted that I did not do what
I wanted to do as I sat there those
four hours watching her die. I wanted
to crawl in among the machinery
and hold her in my arms, knowing
the elementary, leftover bit of her
mind would dimly recognize it was me
carrying her to where she was going.
—Jack Gilbert, February 18, 1925-November 11, 2012
Conlon’s music has such an outrageous, original character that it is literally shocking. It confronts you. Like Emerson said of Thoreau, ‘We have a new proposition.’
This music is the greatest discovery since Webern and Ives . . . something great and important for all music history! His music is so utterly original, enjoyable, perfectly constructed but at the same time emotional . . . for me it’s the best of any composer living today.
Conlon Nancarrow, an expatriate American composer whose frustrations with the limitations of live performance technique led him to compose almost exclusively for mechanical player pianos, and who was widely regarded as one of the few truly visionary composers of the century, died on Sunday at his home in Mexico City. He was 84.
Mr. Nancarrow, who was a jazz trumpeter before he turned his attention to formal composition, was fascinated throughout his life by the complex relationships that resulted when competing rhythms were set against each other. His best-known works, the more than 40 Studies for Player Piano, dazzle the ear with torrential figuration, thick counterpoint, colliding meters and melodies that draw on everything from blues and Spanish music to the spiky abstractions of free atonality.
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Mr. Nancarrow was born in Texarkana, Ark., on Oct. 27, 1912, and undertook his musical studies at the Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music from 1929 to 1932. He later studied privately in Boston with Nicolas Slonimsky, Walter Piston and Roger Sessions. In 1936, he went to Spain to fight against Franco with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, and upon his return to the United States, in 1939, he became involved in the growing new music scene in New York, both as a composer and as a critic for the magazine Modern Music.
His stay in New York was brief, however. In 1940, when the United States Government refused to renew his passport because of his outspoken Socialist views, he moved to Mexico City. He became a Mexican citizen in 1956. Until 1981, when he attended a performance of his music in San Francisco, he had returned to the United States only once, in 1947, to obtain a machine for cutting his own piano rolls, the long paper strips that drive player pianos.
Mr. Nancarrow’s interest in mechanical pianos can be traced to the mid-1930’s, when he found pianists unable to play works like the Toccata for Violin and Piano and the Prelude and Blues (both composed in 1935) at the speeds or with the clarity that he demanded. Soon after his arrival in Mexico City, he bought two Ampico player pianos, which he modified by covering their hammers with leather and steel straps in order to make their attacks sharper.
He also began composing directly onto piano rolls, and for about four decades he composed exclusively this way. But with the renewed interest in his music that began in the 1970’s and picked up speed in the 1980’s, he became acquainted with virtuosic young players like Ms. [Ursula] Oppens and Mr. [Yvar] Mikhashoff, and pioneering new music ensembles like the Arditti Quartet, in England. Reconsidering his attitude toward live music-making, he began accepting commissions for piano, chamber and orchestral works, and produced a series of vivid scores that includes the rhythmically vital and texturally vivid ”Piece No. 2 for Small Orchestra,” the ”Three Canons for Ursula” and the String Quartet No. 3.
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