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Category: reading table

2012

Sunday, 4/22/12

two takes

“Feel Like Going Home” (C. Rich)

Charlie Rich (vocals & piano), demo, 1973

*****

Tom Jones with Mark Knopfler (guitar), TV performance, 1996

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lagniappe

musical thoughts

I don’t think I ever recorded anyone who was better as a singer, writer, and player than Charlie Rich. It is all so effortless, the way he moves from rock to country to blues to jazz.

—Sam Phillips (Sun Records)

*****

radio

Happy Birthday, Charles!

All Mingus, all day: WKCR-FM.

*****

reading table

I thought that you were an anchor in the drift of the world;
but no: there isn’t an anchor anywhere.
There isn’t an anchor in the drift of the world. Oh no.
I thought you were. Oh no. The drift of the world.

—William Bronk,* “The World” (mp3 [Hudson Falls, NY, 1978], Selected Poems [1995])

***

*Bronk, who died in 1999, was recently inducted, posthumously, into the ultra-exclusive MCOTD Hall of Fame, joining tenor saxophonist Von Freeman and poet Wislawa Szymborska.

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2012

Thursday, 4/19/12

This guy’s a rare bird. Long a respected concert pianist, he’s also become a notable writer, appearing recently in the New Yorker and the New York Times Sunday Book Review.

Jeremy Denk, piano
Charles Ives, Concord Sonata (excerpt [“The Alcotts”])
Live, New York, 2012

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lagniappe

reading table

My Ives addiction started one summer at music camp, at Mount Holyoke College. I was twenty and learning his Piano Trio. There’s an astounding moment in the Trio where the pianist goes off into a blur of sweet and sour notes around a B-flat-major chord. I knew the moment was important, but I wondered, was my sound too vague or too clear? (A recurring interpretative problem in Ives is discovering the ideal amount of muddle.) I was also puzzled about where this phrase was going. I’d been taught that phrases were supposed to go somewhere, yet this musical moment seemed serenely determined to wander nowhere.

—Jeremy Denk, “Flight of the Concord,” New Yorker, 2/6/12

*****

yesterday

After posting the Peter Brötzmann clip and the AOL headlines, I drove a hundred miles to see a client serving a life sentence at the Pontiac Correctional Center, then stopped at a nearby restaurant for a mid-afternoon lunch, where I overheard the cook ask a patron: “Did you see where that guy was killed by a swan?”

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2012

Monday, 4/16/12

two takes

“Honky Tonk Man” (J. Horton, et al.)

Dwight Yoakam
Live, mid-1980s

*****

Johnny Horton
Recording (Billboard Hot Country Singles, #9), 1956

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lagniappe

reading table

Hank Williams . . . was essentially the first rock star. He was a hillbilly singer, but he was a rock star. As Chet Atkins said, the year that Elvis hit, it ruined country music. Because they had rural America and southern America’s teenage audience. And then they couldn’t keep them. Elvis had changed everything.

***

I was a Monkees kid. For a ten-year-old like myself, the Monkees were a cultural access point that the Beatles weren’t. I was an oldest kid, teaching myself, and the Beatles were a bit beyond my grasp. Television delivers the Monkees to me in a different way; A Hard Day’s Night was not on TV in 1965. . . . The Monkees . . . came inside my living room, and there was a familiarity that allowed me to really understand what this new thing was. I had the first two Monkees albums, and I couldn’t have gotten a better education, retrospectively, in songwriting, when you think about it, than listening to Neil Diamond, Carole King, Boyce and Hart compositions. The world in two-and-a half to three minutes.

***

I had the jeans, the boots . . . There was a whole Hud element to that cowboy culture that I knew that could be introduced, the Route 66 Americana, not the Nashville Dixie country. Beyond James Dean, beyond Giant. This Route 66 Corvette cowboy. So let’s just call it that—it’s beyond Cadillac Cowboy. It’s Corvette cowboy.

—Dwight Yoakam (in Don McLeese, Dwight Yoakam: A Thousand Miles From Nowhere [2012])

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2012

Saturday, 4/14/12

The keyboard is the stage on which the fingers dance.

Sviatoslav Richter, piano
TV performance (CBC, Toronto),* 1964

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lagniappe

reading table

even grass and vines
don’t part willingly . . .
lantern for the dead

—Kobayashi Issa, 1822 (translated from Japanese by David G. Lanoue)

*****

*Johannes Brahms, Intermezzo in E Minor, Op. 116, No. 5
Sergei Prokofiev, Sonata No. 2 in D Minor, Op. 14
Maurice Ravel, Jeux d’eau, Alborada del gracioso

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2012

Saturday, 4/7/12

The tree of country music has lots of eccentric branches.

The Handsome Family, “My Friend” (2009)

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lagniappe

reading table

The Everyday Enchantment of Music
by Mark Strand
(Almost Invisible [2012])

A rough sound was polished until it became a smoother sound, which was polished until it became music. Then the music was polished until it became the memory of a night in Venice when tears of the sea fell from the Bridge of Sighs, which in turn was polished until it ceased to be and in its place stood the empty home of a heart in trouble. Then suddenly there was sun and the music came back and traffic was moving and off in the distance, at the edge of the city, a long line of clouds appeared, and there was thunder, which, however menacing, would become music, and the memory of what happened after Venice would begin, and what happened after the home of the troubled heart broke in two would also begin.

*****

Happy Birthday, Billie!

All Billie, all day—WKCR-FM.

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2012

Wednesday, 4/4/12

Welcome to the maelstrom.

Miles Davis Group,* live, Berlin, 1973

Part 1: Turnaroundphrase

***

Part 2: Turnaroundphrase, cont.; Tune in 5

*MD, trumpet; David Liebman, saxophone; Pete Cosey, guitar, percussion; Reggie Lucas, guitar; Michael Henderson, bass; Al Foster, drums; Mtume, percussion.

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lagniappe

reading table

Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that a spring was breaking
out in my heart.
I said: Along which secret aqueduct,
Oh water, are you coming to me,
water of a new life
that I have never drunk?

Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that I had a beehive
here inside my heart.
And the golden bees
were making white combs
and sweet honey
from my old failures.

Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that a fiery sun was giving
light inside my heart.
It was fiery because I felt
warmth as from a hearth,
and sun because it gave light
and brought tears to my eyes.

Last night as I slept,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that it was God I had
here inside my heart.

—Antonio Mochado (1875-1939), “Last Night As I Was Sleeping” (translated from Spanish by Robert Bly)

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2012

Wednesday, 3/21/12

career plans for the next life

If none of the other things I’ve mentioned pan out (tap dancer, rubboard player, reggae bassist), I might take a stab at playing guitar in a Malian band.

Salif Keita & Band, live, Germany (Leverkusener), 2010

Part 1

***

Part 2

***

Part 3

More? Here. And here.

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lagniappe

reading table

a glimpse of moon
over my home village . . .
then clouds

—Kobayashi Issa, 1807 (translated from Japanese by David G. Lanoue)

*****

taking a break

I’m going to take a little break—back soon.

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2012

Thursday, 3/15/12

Too much beauty in your life?

Well, I guess you can skip this.

Shivkumar Sharma, santoor
Hariprasad Chaurasia, bansuri (bamboo flute)
Raga Bhoopali, live, India (Mumbai), 1995 (music begins at 3:55)

More Pandit Sharma? Here.

More Pandit Chaurasia? Here.

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lagniappe

reading table

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.

—Jack Gilbert, “A Brief for the Defense” (Collected Poems, 2012)

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2012

Monday, 3/12/12

Some folks, seeking communion and transcendence, go to church. Others go hear hip-hop.

Yasiin Bey (formerly known as Mos Def) & Talib Kweli
Live, Paris, 3/9/12

More? Here. And here. And here. And here. And here.

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lagniappe

reading table

[I]t has been only in the past decade that we appear to have entered an aura-free universe in which all eras coexist at once—a state of possibly permanent atemporality given to us courtesy of the Internet. No particular era now dominates. We live in a post-era era without forms of its own powerful enough to brand the times. The zeitgeist of 2012 is that we have a lot of zeit but not much geist.

—Douglas Coupland, New York Times Book Review (on-line, 3/8/12; print, 3/11/12)

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2012

Sunday, 3/4/12

going back home

Davis Sisters, “I Believe I’ll Go Back Home”
TV Gospel Time (introduced by Brother Joe May), early 1960s

More? Here. And here.

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lagniappe

Here’s a secular take.

John Lee Hooker, “I Believe I’ll Go Back Home” (That’s My Story: John Lee Hooker Sings The Blues, 1960)

*****

reading table

Home is never what you think it is.

Meaning lies in meaning’s absence. The mist
Is always just about to lift.

—J. Allyn Rosser, “Sugar Dada” (excerpt)

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