Live, Washington, D.C (Atlas Performing Arts Center), 10/9/13
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
Music should be no more complex than it needs to be. And no matter how complicated it may actually be, it should never seem that way to the listener. If it does, immediacy has deteriorated into abstraction.
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*TB, alto saxophone; Oscar Noriega, bass clarinet, clarinet; Matt Mitchell, piano; Ches Smith, percussion.
John Cage (1912-1992), In a Landscape (1948); Keiko Shichijo (piano), live, Amsterdam, c. 2009
This I could listen to all day, all week, all month.
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
I find that music is humans’ most advanced achievement, more so than painting and writing, because it’s more mysterious, more magical, and it acts in such a direct way.
When I turn to rock ’n’ roll, I’m not looking for poetry. I go to poetry for poetry. Nor am I looking for brilliant musicianship. That I can find in classical music and in jazz. I’m not looking for roof-raising fervor, either. Gospel music gives me that. What I’m looking for when I turn to rock ’n’ roll is something I can’t find anywhere else—rock ’n’ roll.
Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre, saxophonist, March 26, 1936-November 9, 2013
From the New York Times obituary (Nate Chinen, 11/14/13):
Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre, a saxophonist who was a founding member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, a pioneering Chicago avant-garde coalition, died on Saturday in the Bronx. He was 77.
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Present at the association’s first meeting in 1965, Mr. McIntyre later articulated its objectives in an in-house newsletter, The New Regime. The priority, he wrote, was creative autonomy. But he also touched on sociopolitical issues: “We are trying to balance an unbalanced situation that is prevalent in this society.”
Maurice Benford McIntyre was born on March 24, 1936, in Clarksville, Ark., and raised in Chicago. His father was a pharmacist, his mother an English teacher. He studied music at Roosevelt University in Chicago until a drug habit derailed him, leading to a three-year stretch in prison, in Lexington, Ky., where he later said he got most of his musical education.
After returning to Chicago, he met the pianist Muhal Richard Abrams and the saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell, who were developing an aesthetic revolving around strictly original music. Mr. McIntyre became a fixture in Mr. Abrams’s Experimental Band and appeared on Mr. Mitchell’s 1966 album, “Sound,” the first release under the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians banner. Mr. McIntyre released his first album, “Humility in the Light of the Creator,” in 1969, the year that he adopted the name Kalaparusha Ahrah Difda, a confluence of terms from African, Indian and astrological sources. (He later modified it to Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre.) Like many of his fellow association musicians, he began performing in Europe.
He moved to New York in 1974 and spent a productive stretch at the Creative Music Studio in Woodstock. But his career foundered in the ’80s and ’90s, and he took to busking — a practice he continued even after making several comeback albums, notably “Morning Song,” in 2004.
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Talking and playing, New York, 2010
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Live (with Karl Berger, vibes, piano; Tom Schmidt, bass; Jack DeJohnette, drums; Jumma Santos, drums, percussion), “Ismac,” Woodstock, N.Y., 1975
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Recording (with J.B. Hutto, vocals, guitar; Sunnyland Slim, organ, et al.), “Send Her Home to Me,” 1968
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Recording (with Malachi Favors, bass; M’Chaka Uba, bass; Thurman Barker, drums; Ajaramu [A. J. Shelton], drums), “Humility in the Light of the Creator” (Alternate), 1969
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
A human life. A series of notes. Which is more permanent?
People talk about getting enough of this or that in their daily diet. But what about beauty? There’s an epidemic, unreported by TV, radio, newspapers, of beauty malnutrition.
Lou Harrison (1917-2003), Threnody for CarlosChavez (1978);William Winant Percussion Group with David Abel (viola), live, Berkeley, Calif., 2010
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lagniappe
art beat: Friday at the Art Institute of Chicago (while waiting for the jury to return a verdict in a trial involving an alleged conspiracy to steal millions of dollars of diamonds)
Paul Cezanne, The Bay of Marseilles, Seen From L’Estaque, c. 1885
This guy, like another New Yorker,* contains multitudes.
John Zorn (with Marc Ribot, guitar; John Medeski, keyboards, et al.), live, Poland (Warsaw), 2013
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
All the various styles are organically connected to one another. I’m an additive person—the entire storehouse of my knowledge informs everything I do. People are so obsessed with the surface that they can’t see the connections, but they are there.
—John Zorn
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*Walt Whitman (“Song of Myself”): “I am large, I contain multitudes.”
Lou Reed, singer, songwriter, guitarist, March 2, 1942-October 27, 2013
Live (with Robert Quine [1942-2004], guitar; Fernando Saunders, bass; Fred Maher, drums), New York (Bottom Line), 1983
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
All great rock comes from a particular place. Take Lou Reed. Could he have emerged from Detroit? Nah—too self-conscious, too arty. San Francisco? Unh-uh—way too abrasive. He could only have come from one place, the city where, as the joke has it, a tourist goes up to someone and asks: “Can you tell me the way to the Empire State Building—or should I just go fuck myself?”
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