Happy (61st) Birthday, Don!*
Bobby Rydell, “Swingin’ School” (Billboard Hot 100, #5)
Live (TV broadcast), 1960
Of musical memories there is no end.
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You see what I am doing: there was an empty space left in the trunk which I am filling with hay; that’s how it is in our life’s baggage; no matter what we stuff it with it’s better than having empty space.
—Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons (1862)
*my brother & oldest musical companion
The doors to this church—the church of gospel music—are always open.
You don’t need to believe anything to enter. All you need are ears to hear.
Brooklyn All-Stars (featuring Joe Yawn), “No Cross, No Crown,” live
More? Here.
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even the pine tree
I planted grows old!
autumn dusk—Kobayashi Issa, 1803 (trans. David G. Lanoue)
Happy (70th) Birthday, Bob!
Being young—that’s so twentieth century.
What’s hot now?
Old age.
Bob Dylan, London, 1965 (65 Revisited [2007])
Vodpod videos no longer available.
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radio
All Dylan, all day, every day—The World’s Only Bob Dylan Radio Station.
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passings
(an occasional series)
Lloyd Knibb, drummer (Skatalites, et al.)
March 8, 1931-May 12, 2011
Lloyd Knibb’s importance to Jamaican music can’t be overstated. The inventor of the ska beat at Coxson Dodd’s Studio One, Knibb created a sound that spread like wildfire the world over.
—Carter Van Pelt, host, Eastern Standard Time, WKCR-FM
Skatalites, “Freedom Sound,” live, Belgium (Lokerse Festival), 1997
***
Skatalites, “Latin Go Ska,” live, Los Angeles, 2007
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Skatalites, live, Los Angeles, 2007
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Skatalites, “(Straighten Up And) Fly Right”
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Spring
It would be
good to shrug
out of winter
as cicadas do:
look: a crisp
freestanding you
and you walking
off, soft as
new.—Kay Ryan
Sometimes it takes years—decades even—before you’re really able to hear somebody’s music. The other day, for instance, I put on a CD by this guy, a jazz pianist and composer whose music, which I first encountered 20 or 30 years ago, I’d admired more than enjoyed. I put this on expecting to do some work while it played in the background. But it refused to cooperate. Instead of staying put, it jumped out of the speakers, grabbed me, wouldn’t let go. No work got done.
Herbie Nichols, pianist, composer
January 3, 1919-April 12, 1963
“The Third World”
With Al McKibbon, bass; Art Blakey, drums
Blue Note, 1955
***
“Applejackin'”
With Al McKibbon, bass; Max Roach, drums
Blue Note, 1955
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“House Party Starting”
With Al McKibbon, bass; Max Roach, drums
Blue Note, 1955
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Like so many of life’s varieties of experience, the novelty of a diagnosis of malignant cancer has a tendency to wear off.
—Christopher Hitchens, “Unspoken Truths,” Vanity Fair, 6/11
More Hound Dog
Hound Dog Taylor & The Houserockers (Brewer Phillips, guitar; Ted Harvey, drums), “Roll Your Moneymaker,” live, Ann Arbor Blues Festival, 1973
Vodpod videos no longer available.More? Here. And here. And here.
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M. Abel Bonnard, of Villeneuve-Saint-Georges, who was playing billiards, put out his left eye falling on his cue.
***
On the bowling lawn a stroke leveled M. Andre, 75, of Levallois. While his ball was still rolling he was no more.
—Félix Fénéon, trans. Luc Sante, Novels in Three Lines (collecting, as the back cover puts it, “more than a thousand items that appeared anonymously in the French newspaper Le Matin in 1906—true stories of murder, mayhem, and everyday life”)
what’s new
an occasional series
I’ve got a song for you to listen to . . .
—my (23-year-old) son Alex
tUnE-yArDs, “Bizness”
take 1: live, Austin (SXSW), 3/18/11
Vodpod videos no longer available.***
take 2: recording & video, 2011
Vodpod videos no longer available.
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John Ashbery, “Interesting People of Newfoundland”
(Skip the gaseous intro; the good stuff starts at 1:02.)
joy, n. a source of keen pleasure or delight. E.g., the singing of Eddie Jefferson.
Eddie Jefferson, jazz singer, August 3, 1918-May 9, 1979
Live (with Richie Cole, alto saxophone; John Campbell, piano; Kelly Sill, bass; Joel Spencer, drums), Chicago (Jazz Showcase), 5/6/79 (days later, outside a jazz club in Detroit, he was shot to death)
Vodpod videos no longer available.**********
lagniappe
art beat: yesterday at the Art Institute of Chicago
Mark Rothko, Untitled (Purple, White, and Red), 1953
No painting has held my gaze more often, or meant more to me, than this. It’s different every time I see it.
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ROTHKO: Look at the tension between the blocks of color: the dark and the light, the red and the black and the brown. They exist in a state of flux—of movement. They abut each other on the actual canvas, so too do they abut each other in your eye. They ebb and flow and shift, gently pulsating. The more you look at them the more they move . . . They float in space, they breathe . . . Movement, communication, gesture, flux, interaction; letting them work . . . They’re not dead because they’re not static. They move through space if you let them, this movement takes time, so they’re temporal. They require time.
—John Logan, Red (2009)
Take me to the water . . .
Take Me To The Water:
Immersion Baptism in Vintage Music and Photography 1890-1950
(Dust-to-Digital 2009)
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Three Lilies
“Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in
the morning.” Psalm 30Before dawn, under a thin moon disappearing
east, the planet Mercury, the messenger
and healer, came up vanishingly
into the blue beyond the garden where
three lilies at the bottom of the yard
arrayed white trumpets on iron stalks
under a slow, slow lightning from the sun.
I stood on a rotten step myself,
and smelled them from a hundred feet away.—Brooks Haxton (Uproar: Antiphonies to Psalms)
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listening room: what’s playing
• Billy Bang Quintet, Above and Beyond (Justin Time)
• The Complete Atlantic Recordings of Lennie Tristano, Lee Konitz & Warne Marsh (Mosaic)
• Bunky Green, The Salzau Quartet Live at Jazz Baltica (Traumton)
• Bombino, Agadez (Cumbancha)
• Friedrich Gulda, The Complete Gulda Mozart Tapes (Deutsche Grammaphon)
• Maryanne Amacher, Sound Characters (Tzadik)
• The Original Gospel Harmonettes (featuring Dorothy Love Coates), Love Lifted Me (Charly)
• Rev. Johnny L. Jones, The Hurricane That Hit Atlanta (Dust-to-Digital)
• Sinner’s Crossroads, Kevin Nutt, WFMU-FM (Thursday, 8-9 p.m. [EST])
• Gospel Memories, Bob Marovich, WLUW-FM (Saturday 10-11 a.m. [CST])
• Bird Flight, Phil Schaap, WKCR-FM (M-F, 8:20-9:30 a.m. [EST])
• Charles Mingus Birthday Broadcast, WKCR-FM, 4/22/11
“Cold, Cold Heart”
“I Can’t Help It (If I’m Still In Love With You)”
“I Saw The Light”
Who else, when it comes to syllables, does so much with so little?
Hank Williams (with others), “I Saw The Light”
TV broadcast (The Kate Smith Evening Hour), 3/26/52
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George Crosby remembered many things as he died, but in an order he could not control. To look at his life, to take the stock he always imagined a man would at his end, was to witness a shifting mass, the tiles of a mosaic spinning, swirling, reportraying, always in recognizable swaths of colors, familiar elements, molecular units, intimate currents, but also independent now of his will, showing him a different self every time he tried to make an assessment.
—Paul Harding, Tinkers (2009)
music clip of the day 