Pete Cosey, guitar player, October 9, 1943-May 30, 2012
Miles Davis, “Ife,” live, Austria (Vienna), 1973
With Pete Cosey, guitar (solo begins at 5:30) and percussion; Dave Liebman, flute, soprano and tenor saxophones; Reggie Lucas, guitar; Michael Henderson, bass; Al Foster, drums; James Mtume Forman, conga and percussion
*****
Here’s an earlier post (12/31/09):
In the public imagination, the guitar’s associated with freedom and individuality. The musical reality’s different. Guitarists travel in herds; few stray from the pack. One who has gone his own way is this man, who’s played with everyone from Muddy Waters (as a session musician for Chicago-based Chess Records) to Miles Davis (as a member of his group [1973-1975]). He employs a variety of unusual tunings and effects. He sounds like no one else.
Pete Cosey, guitar
“Calypso Frelimo” (excerpt), Pete Cosey’s Children of Agharta (JT Lewis, drums; Gary Bartz and John Stubblefield, saxophones & flute; Matt Rubano, bass; Johnny Juice, turntables; Baba Israel, words and beats; Kyle Jason, voice; Bern Pizzitola, guitar; Wendy Oxenhorn, harmonica), live, 2002, New York
*****
Live (with Melvin Gibbs, bass; JT Lewis, drums; Johnny Juice, congas and turntables)
**********
lagniappe
. . . the guy who, after Hendrix, showed you how ‘out’ you could go with guitar playing, particularly in the improvised context.
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.
**********
lagniappe
reading table
my child’s rice cakes
my child’s rice cakes . . .
all in a row
—Kobayashi Issa, 1813 (translated from Japanese by David G. Lanoue)
Chuck Brown and the Soul Searchers, live
Capital Centre, Landover, Md., 1987
*****
Louis Jordan and his Tympany Five, recording, 1948
**********
lagniappe
random thoughts
Last night, sitting at Wrigley Field with my brother Don (something we’ve been doing together for over 50 years), I thought of a line my younger son Luke, who turns 21 next month, wrote in elementary school in response to a prompt: “When I am 100 I will not be able to play baseball with my brother.” (P.S. Cubs 3, Cards 2—their second straight walk-off victory.)
Music comes up more often in my work as a criminal defense lawyer than you might think. Recently I devoted a lot of time to a case involving a Jamaican guy, a sweet-tempered 64-year-old Rasta, who was charged with a federal immigration offense. It helped a lot, early in our relationship, to be able to talk about seeing Bob Marley in the mid-70s at a small Chicago club (Quiet Knight). And when I’d see him at the jail, talking about music (Marley, Sugar Minott, Gregory Isaacs, et al.) gave us a way to leave behind, if only briefly, the concrete walls and the locked doors and the glass window separating us. (At his sentencing hearing earlier this week, the judge, rejecting the prosecutor’s call for a minimum of 70 months’ incarceration, gave him 30 months, meaning, with credit for time served and “good time,” he’ll do less than a year.)
*****
*In 1974, following the departure of Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer (AKA Bunny Livingston), the band became known as Bob Marley and the Wailers.
When we last saw Miles, playing in Germany in 1967, he was wearing a suit and tie. Here, two years later, his wardrobe is headed in a new direction. So is his music.
Miles Davis Quintet,* live, France (Antibes), 1969
“Milestones,” “Footprints,” “’Round Midnight”
*MD, trumpet; Wayne Shorter, tenor and soprano saxophones; Chick Corea, electric piano; Dave Holland, bass; Jack DeJohnette, drums.
Slim and the Victory Aries, live, Paducah, Kentucky, c. 2008
“Alright Now”
***
“Shoes”
**********
lagniappe
musical thoughts
[I]n the African-American gospel tradition, the music is the liturgy. . . . If Jesus spoke in parables because it was hard, otherwise, for him to make clear what he intended, gospel music has a similar form, a parabolic form, as if to suggest: what we want you to know about God is in the shape of this statement, in the experience of singing this music and listening to this music. If you can be transported here, inside the church, by this music, you can be transported out there.
Dan Penn (guitar, vocals) & Spooner Oldham (keyboards), TV show, 1999
***
This is one of the sadder, and stranger, love songs I know. “I’ll do funny things if you want me to”: someone who’ll “do funny things” on command but isn’t, as far as we can tell, otherwise funny is someone who’s desperate to please. And that, to me, is what this song’s about more than anything else—desperation. This is a guy who’ll “do anything.” He’s “hanging on a string.”
music clip of the day 