Some tracks, the first time you hear them (as I did this a couple weeks ago), you wonder how you ever got along without them.
Joe McPhee (tenor saxophone) with Otis Greene (alto saxophone), Mike Kull (electric piano), Herbie Lehman (organ), Dave Jones (guitar), Tyrone Crabb (bass), Bruce Thompson & Ernest Bostic (percussion), “Shakey Jake” (Nation Time, 1970; reissued 2009)
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lagniappe
random thoughts
Remember when there was a whole season—not just a storm or two—called “winter”?
Animal Collective, Unitled/“Brothersport”
Live, Chicago (Pitchfork Festival), 7/15/11
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Want to hear the entire set?
Jazz, classical, gospel, rock: the names may be different, but what they offer is the same—a way, pleasurably, to lose your mind.
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lagniappe
In the evening darkness at a place outside New York, an outlook where/you can perceive eight million people’s homes in a single glance. . . ./Schubert’s being played in some room/there and for someone the tones at this moment are more real than everything else.
—Tomas Transtromer, “Schubertiana” (excerpt), trans. Samuel Charters
Here, in an undated audio clip, Transtromer, winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature, talks about this poem and reads it in this English translation.
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Transtromer suffered a stroke in 1990, at the age of fifty-nine, which robbed him of speech and impaired the use of his right arm. Rather than delivering the customary [Nobel] laureate’s address when he accepts the award, on December 10th, he will play a piece on the piano using only his left hand.
—Dan Chiasson, “Night Thoughts: The poetry of Tomas Transtromer,” New Yorker, 10/31/11
Slim and The Supreme Angels, “I Wanna Go”
Live, North Carolina (Branch Memorial Tabernacle, Goldsboro), c. 1996
Vodpod videos no longer available.
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lagniappe
reading table
—“Never again, never again!”
—And yet there’s a contradiction: “never again” isn’t eternal, since you yourself will die one day.
“Never again” is the expression of an immortal.
—Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary (trans. Richard Howard, 2010)
More of these handwritten diary entries, which were written after Barthes’ mother died, can be found here. (Thanks to Orange Crate Artfor the tip.)
music clip of the day 