Gospel groups are hard to beat when it comes to longevity. This one got started, in Canton, Mississippi, in 1943. One of the founding members, Harvey Watkins, Sr., is featured here. He passed away in 1994; his son, lead singer Harvey Watkins, Jr., carries on today.
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my child’s rice cakes
my child’s rice cakes . . .
all in a row
—Kobayashi Issa, 1813 (translated from Japanese by David G. Lanoue)
“Until I Die,” Pilgrim Rest Baptist Church, Winston-Salem, N.C., 2001
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On the Death of Friends in Childhood
We shall not ever meet them bearded in heaven,
Nor sunning themselves among the bald of hell;
If anywhere, in the deserted schoolyard at twilight,
Forming a ring, perhaps, or joining hands
In games whose very names we have forgotten.
Come, memory, let us seek them there in the shadows.
—Donald Justice (Collected Poems, 2004)
***
“[We find] it impossible, when we have to analyze death, to imagine it in terms other than those of life.”
—Marcel Proust, The Fugitive (translated from French by Peter Collier)
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listening room: (some of) what’s playing
• The Dirtbombs, Ultraglide In Black (In the Red Records)
• Wild Flag (Merge Records)
• That’s What They Want: The Best of Jerry McCain (Excello)
• The Best of Slim Harpo (Hip-O)
• Ambrose Akinmusire, When the Heart Emerges Glistening (Blue Note)
• Lester Bowie’s Brass Fantasy, I Only Have Eyes For You (ECM)
• Anthony Braxton, 9 Compositions (Iridium)
• Chicago Tentet, American Landscapes 1 & 2 (Okka)
• Steve Lehman Octet, Travail, Transformation, and Flow (Pi Recordings)
• Joe McPhee, Nation Time (Unheard Music Series)
• Weasel Walter, Mary Halvorson, Peter Evans, Electric Fruit (Thirsty Ear)
• J. Berg’s Royal Rarities Vols. 2-3; A Cappella Archives, Vol. 3; Gospel Goldies, Vol. 2 (Rare Gospel)
• The Fisk Jubilee Quartet, There Breathes A Hope (Archeophone)
• This May Be My Last Time Singing: Raw African-American Gospel On 45 RPM 1957-1982 (Tompkins Square)
• Bach, Suites for Unaccompanied Cello, Pierre Fournier, (Archiv Production/DG)
• Mozart, Piano Sonatas Nos. 16 and 17, Peter Serkin, piano (Pro Arte)
• Arnold Schoenberg, Das Klavierwerk, Peter Serkin, piano (Arcana)
• The Art of Joseph Szigeti (Biddulph Recordings)
• Anton Webern, Five Movements For String Quartet, Op. 5; Six Bagatelles For String Quartet, Op. 9; String Quartet, Op. 28; Quartetto Italiano (Philips)
• Anton Webern, Complete Works for String Quartet and String Trio, Artis Quartet Wien (Nimbus)
• Music of Stefan Wolpe, Vol. 6, David Holzman, piano (Bridge)
—Bird Flight (Phil Schaap, jazz [Charlie Parker])
—Traditions in Swing (Phil Schaap, jazz)
—Eastern Standard Time (Carter Van Pelt, Jamaican music)
—Rag Aur Taal (various, Indian)
Tom Jones with Mark Knopfler (guitar), TV performance, 1996
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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.
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.
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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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.
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?”
Johnny Horton
Recording (Billboard Hot Country Singles, #9), 1956
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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])
The keyboard is the stage on which the fingers dance.
Sviatoslav Richter, piano
TV performance (CBC, Toronto),* 1964
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even grass and vines
don’t part willingly . . .
lantern for the dead
—Kobayashi Issa, 1822 (translated from Japanese by David G. Lanoue)
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*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
The tree of country music has lots of eccentric branches.
The Handsome Family, “My Friend” (2009)
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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.
*MD, trumpet; David Liebman, saxophone; Pete Cosey, guitar, percussion; Reggie Lucas, guitar; Michael Henderson, bass; Al Foster, drums; Mtume, percussion.
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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)
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)
