Time travel’s easy on the net. With this guy we started, the other day, with music he made just last month. Then we headed back to the ’70s. Today we go back even farther—to the ’60s.
Leon Russell, Shindig! (TV)
“Hi-Heel Sneakers,” 10/28/1964
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“Roll Over Beethoven,” 11/18/1964
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“Jambalaya,” 2/3/1965
(Yeah, the guy in front with the banjo—that’s Glen Campbell.)
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lagniappe
reading table
Gregory Corso, “Marriage”
Want to read this yourself? Here.
1961
Newton Minow, Chair of the FCC, proclaims TV a “vast wasteland.”
1964
CBS News asks, with a straight face, what jazz “reveals” about “the nature of man” (God, too).
Lennie Tristano Quintet (Lennie Tristano, piano; Lee Konitz, alto saxophone; Warne Marsh, tenor saxophone; Sonny Dallas, bass; Nick Stabulas, drums), “Subconscious Lee,” live, New York (The Half Note), 1964, CBS TV Broadcast: Look Up and Live
Want more of Lennie Tristano? Here.
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Frank O’Hara (in his NYC apartment), “Having a Coke with You,” 1966
recipe
3 strings
~20 hands
~10 voices
2 feet
Mix lightly; let rise.
Malem Mustafa Bakbou, gimbri; live; Gnawa lila; Morocco (Marrekech), 1990
Want more music from Morocco? Here.
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Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
—Samuel Beckett, Worstword Ho (1983)
two takes
I’m too close to heaven, I just can’t turn around . . .
“Too Close To Heaven”
Brooklyn All-Stars (featuring Hardie Clifton), live, 1989
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Bessie Griffin, live
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radio gems: gospel
Sinner’s Crossroads
WFMU-FM
Jersey City, New Jersey; Mt. Hope, New York
Thursday, 8-9 p.m. (EST) (archived shows)
One of my all-time favorite radio shows.
*****
reading table
Shelby had been fooled about Florida, but that was okay. She wasn’t the first. She’d imagined a place that was warm and inviting and she’d gotten a place that was without seasons and sickeningly hot. She’d wanted palm trees and she’d gotten grizzly, low oaks. She’d wanted surfers instead of rednecks. She’d thought Florida would make her feel glamorous or something, and there was a region of Florida that might’ve done just that, but it wasn’t this part. It was okay, though. It was something different. It wasn’t the Midwest. It wasn’t a place where you could look around and plainly see, for miles, that nothing worthwhile was going on.
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“Everybody calls this the real Florida . . . . I don’t understand an expression like that. Is part of the state imaginary?”
—John Brandon, Citrus County (2010)
The Reverend Al Green
Memphis (Full Gospel Tabernacle Church), Sunday, 6/15/08
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your rice field
my rice field
the same green—Kobayashi Issa, 1815
*****
art beat: closing today
The Jazz Loft Project, W. Eugene Smith in NYC, 1957-1965 (Chicago Cultural Center)
To these ears, this is just inches shy of insufferable—too cute, too precious, too fey. But those inches make all the difference. As it is, I find it beguiling.
Clare and the Reasons, “Wake Up (You Sleepyhead),” 2009
For those who’re interested in such genealogical details (and are old enough to remember), Clare is the daughter of Geoff Muldaur.
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Utterly unbelievable, incontrovertibly real: his poems, at their best, have the associative logic of a dream.
Russell Edson, “Let Us Consider”
three takes
“Milky White Way”
The Trumpeteers (1947, Baltimore)
*****
Elvis Presley (1960, Nashville)
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The Trumpeteers, live (TV broadcast, with “I John Saw the Number”), 1960s
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all roads lead (on Friday, anyway) to Bay City, Michigan
Friday morning: I post ? and the Mysterians’ “96 Tears,” which was recorded in 1966 in, yep, Bay City, a town of about 35,000 on Lake Huron that also gave the world Madonna (she was born there) and the Bay City Rollers their name (the first dart landed on Arkansas but “Arkansas Rollers” lacked pizazz).
Friday afternoon: I stop by a book fair in Chicago, where I buy one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever seen—a rare one by a favorite poet (William Bronk, Careless Love And Its Apostrophes, Red Ozier Press, 1985, limited edition [175 copies])—from a dealer (Jett W. Whitehead) based in, where else, Bay City.
Let’s lift the bandstand.
—Thelonious Monk
Woody Shaw/Johnny Griffin Quintet (Woody Shaw, trumpet; Johnny Griffin, tenor saxophone; John Hicks, piano; Reggie Johnson, bass; Alvin Queens, drums), “Night in Tunisia,” live, Germany (Koln), 1986
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Now there’s a great trumpet player. He [Woody Shaw] can play different from all of them.
—Miles Davis
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Anthony Braxton on playing with Woody Shaw.
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Look after the sound and the sense will take care of itself.
—Adam Phillips, London Review of Books, 7/22/10 (reviewing Christopher Ricks’ True Friendship: Geoffrey Hill, Anthony Hecht and Robert Lowell Under The Sign Of Eliot And Pound)
Everything I learned, I learned here in the church as a little girl.
—Sharon Jones
Sharon Jones, “Gospel Sunday,” New York (Queens)
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In this short Life that only lasts an hour
How much—how little—is within our power—Emily Dickinson (#1292)
Alternate career plan for the next life (if the tap-dance thing doesn’t work out): rubboard player.
C.J. Chenier & the Red Hot Louisiana Band, “Jolie Blonde” & “Jambalaya,” New York City, 2008
Like the Blasters and Brave Combo, these guys played last weekend (Sunday the 4th) at FitzGerald’s American Music Festival.
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. . . I received five hundred thousand discrete bits of information today, of which maybe twenty-five are important. And how am I going to sort that out, you know?
—David Foster Wallace (in David Lipsky, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace [2010])
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great minds at work
When you see your starting pitcher win a game, that means you’ve played a good baseball game.
—Lou Piniella, talking with Ron Santo on WGN Radio before last night’s Cubs game
music clip of the day 
