music clip of the day

jazz/blues/rock/classical/gospel/more

Category: reading table

2012

Thursday, 1/12/12

I don’t know what these folks call this stuff, but one thing I’m sure of: it ain’t “world music.”

Sobanza Mimanisa (“Orchestra of Light”), “Kiwembo,” live
Democratic Republic of Congo (Kinshasa), c. 2005

**********

lagniappe

reading table

The 100 Most Powerless New Yorkers

Have you noticed that power lists, which have been spreading like the clap lately, from the Time 100 to the Forbes 500, tell you things you already know about the rich and famous and give publicity to people who already have more of it than they know what to do with? For the rest of us, here’s a power list to get 2012 going in the right direction. They’re in no particular order. (Like it really matters.)

1. Weed-delivery guys

The reason so many marijuana arrests are of black and Hispanic people is not because they smoke weed more. White New Yorkers, by the NYPD’s own numbers, have a higher per-capita rate of contraband when they’re arrested. However, white people stay safe in their apartments while colored folks deliver drugs to them. Delivering drugs puts you on the bottom of a pyramid scheme where you usually earn less than minimum wage, making you vulnerable to homicide and giving you about as much of a chance of becoming a rich kingpin as being a production assistant or a media intern gives you of becoming a celebrity. . . .

—Steven Thrasher, Village Voice, 1/11/12

Leave a comment
2012

Tuesday, 1/10/12

What you want, sometimes, is to lose yourself, even if only briefly, in beauty.

Leo Janacek (1854-1928), String Quartet No. 1, “The Kreutzer Sonata,” excerpt (arr. Tognetti), Australian Chamber Orchestra

**********

lagniappe

random thoughts

When you’re young you want to find yourself; when you’re old you want to lose yourself.

*****

reading table

Variations for Two Pianos

for Thomas Higgins, pianist

by Donald Justice

There is no music now in all of Arkansas.
Higgins is gone, taking both his pianos.

Movers dismantled the instruments, away
Sped the vans. The first detour untuned the strings.

There is no music now in all of Arkansas.

Up Main Street, past the cold shopfronts of Conway,
The brash, self-important brick of the college,

Higgins is gone, taking both his pianos.

Warm evenings, the windows open, he would play
Something of Mozart’s for his pupils, the birds.

There is no music now in all of Arkansas.

How shall the mockingbird mend her trill, the jay
His eccentric attack, lacking a teacher?

Higgins is gone, taking both his pianos.
There is no music now in all of Arkansas.

Leave a comment
2012

Saturday, 1/7/12

Roy Hargrove Quintet,* “Strasbourg/Saint Denis,” live, Paris, 2008

What better way to begin the new year than with live music, which is what I did last Sunday (with my wife Suzanne and older son Alex), catching these guys at Chicago’s Jazz Showcase, where they played an ebullient set for the overflow crowd.

**********

lagniappe

reading table

In January baseball lives in the imagination.

Now he was stuck at this ramshackle ballpark between a junkyard and an adult bookstore on the interstate outside Peoria.

***

“The shortstop is a source of stillness at the center of the defense. He projects this stillness and his teammates respond.”

***

When your moment came, you had to be ready, because if you fucked up, everyone would know whose fault it was. What other sport not only kept a stat as cruel as the error but posted it on the scoreboard for everyone to see?

—Chad Harbach, The Art of Fielding (2011)

*****

*RH, trumpet; Justin Robinson, alto saxophone; Gerald Clayton, piano; Danton Boller, bass; Montez Coleman, drums

Leave a comment
2011

Saturday, 12/24/11

When I was little, I would go into Chicago to hear live music—Peter, Paul & Mary, Kingston Trio, Beach Boys—with my father. Then, as a teenager, I’d go into the city with my brother Don to hear the Velvet Underground and the MC5, the Who, Tim Hardin and Tim Buckley, Muddy Waters. Now I make these trips with my sons. The other night, for instance, my older son Alex (now 24 and home for the holidays) and I went to the Hideout, a small club on Chicago’s north side, not far from where I once went with my father (now gone) and my brother (now hundreds of miles away), to hear this guy.

Jason Adasiewicz’s Rolldown (JA, vibraphone; Josh Berman, cornet; Aram Shelton, alto saxophone; Jason Roebke, bass; Frank Rosaly, drums), “Hide,” live, c. 2008

**********

lagniappe

reading table

No, the human heart
Is unknowable.
But in my birthplace
The flowers still smell
The same as always.

—Ki no Tsurayuki (872-945; trans. Kenneth Rexroth)

Leave a comment
2011

Friday, 12/23/11

where I’d like to be tonight

Po’ Monkey’s, Merigold, Mississippi, 2010

**********

lagniappe

reading table

Charles Simic, “1938”

*****

random thoughts

Life’s often said to be too short.

Too short for what?

Leave a comment
2011

Tuesday, 12/20/11

kaleidoscopic, adj. 1. changing form, pattern, color, etc., in a manner suggesting a kaleidoscope. 2. continually shifting from one set of relations to another. E.g., Azealia Banks’ “212” (2011).

**********

lagniappe

reading table

In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing, and running the risk of flattening all communication into a single, homogeneous surface, the function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of written language.

—Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium (1988 [trans. Patrick Creagh])

Leave a comment
2011

Sunday, 12/18/11

It’s our lucky day. Down on the corner there’s a guy with a little guitar amp who just finished setting up. Let’s listen.

Rev. Billy H. Grady, “Holy Rock” (1965)

**********

lagniappe

reading table

Going too fast for myself I missed
more than I think I can remember

almost everything it seems sometimes
and yet there are chances that come back

that I did not notice when they stood
where I could have reached out and touched them

this morning the black shepherd dog
still young looking up and saying

Are you ready this time

—W. S. Merwin, “Turning”

Leave a comment
2011

Saturday, 12/10/11

If sounds define a space as much as walls and windows, you don’t need to knock out a wall to open up a room—just play this.

International Contemporary Ensemble with Steve Lehman
Impossible Flow (S. Lehman), live, New York (Le Poisson Rouge), 4/19/11

The moment this ends I want to hear it again. Is there any higher compliment?

More Steve Lehman? Here.

**********

lagniappe

reading table

A strange old man
Stops me,
Looking out of my deep mirror.

—Kakinomoto no Hitomaro (c. 662-710; trans. Kenneth Rexroth)

Leave a comment
2011

Friday, 12/9/11

Janis Joplin, “Get It While You Can” (J. Ragovoy)
Live, TV broadcast (The Dick Cavett Show), 1970

If she had lived, what would she sound like, at 68, today?

**********

lagniappe

reading table

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, “On the Death of Friends in Childhood”

Leave a comment
2011

Friday, 12/2/11

what’s new

Black Star (Talib Kweli, Yasiin Bey [formerly known as Mos Def])
TV broadcast (The Colbert Report), 2011

“Fix Up”

Vodpod videos no longer available.

***

“Astronomy (8th Light)”

Vodpod videos no longer available.

More? Here.

**********

lagniappe

reading table

I’m on a crowded ship
and I’ve been served the wrong breakfast.

This small mound
of soggy dough
is not what I ordered.

“Why don’t you just say
what you mean?”

Why don’t I?

*****

To be awake
is to discriminate

among birdcalls,
fruits, seeds,
“to work one’s way,”
as they say,

“through.”

*****

Apes can mind-read.
Studies show

what makes us human
is our tendency to point.

*****

I am not alone in this
sentence.

—Rae Armantrout, Money Shot (2011), misc. fragments

Leave a comment