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Category: musical thoughts

2013

Saturday, March 9th

Happy (83rd) Birthday, Ornette!

Ornette Coleman Quartet (OC, alto saxophone; Don Cherry, pocket trumpet; Charlie Haden, bass; Billy Higgins, drums), live, Spain (Barcelona), 1987

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musical thoughts

How can I turn emotion into knowledge? That’s what I try to do with my horn.

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It’s not that I reject categories. It’s that I don’t really know what categories are.

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You take the alphabet of the English language. A to Z. A symbol attached to a sound. In music you have what are called notes and the key. In life you’ve got an idea and an emotion. We think of them as different concepts. To me, there is no difference.

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The violin, the saxophone, the trumpet: Each makes a very different sound but the very same notes. That’s pretty heavy, you know? Imagine how many different races make up the human race. I’m called colored, you’re called white, he’s called something else. We still got an asshole and a mouth. Pardon me.

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I don’t try to please when I play. I try to cure.

—Ornette Coleman

*****

radio

All Ornette, all day: WKCR-FM (Columbia University).

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2013

Monday, March 4th

alone

John Cage, Solo for flute, from Concert for Piano (1958); Eric Lamb, flute (International Contemporary Ensemble); Chicago, 2012


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musical thoughts

Music is theater for the ear. Take this performance. The phrasing, the interplay between sound and silence—this unfolds like something by Samuel Beckett.

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taking a(nother) break

Back in a while.

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2013

Saturday, March 2nd

last night

I heard a concert, at the University of Chicago, devoted to the work of this man, a composer, a longtime professor, a MacArthur “genius” grant recipient. The performances featured different combinations of violin, viola, cello, clarinet, and piano. The music was often thorny. Occasionally whimsical. Frequently emphatic. Sometimes beautiful. And wholly absorbing.

Ralph Shapey (1921-2002), String Quartet No. 6 (1963)
The Lexington Quartet of the Contemporary Players of the University of Chicago

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#2

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musical thoughts

To me, [it’s] very important that [the audience] can recall it as an emotional experience; as though it were something they could hold in their hands.

—Ralph Shapey

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2013

Thursday, February 28th

serendipity

Something I just bumped into.

Trio WAZ (Ed Wilkerson, tenor saxophone; Tatsu Aoki, bass; Michael Zerang, drums), live, Michigan (Lakeside, concert presented by Portoluz), 2010


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musical thoughts

Color.

Texture.

Density.

Sometimes they’re more important than melody, or harmony, or rhythm.

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reading table

“The Snow Man”
by Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

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2013

Tuesday, February 19th

Kidd Jordan Quartet (KJ, tenor saxophone; Billy Bang, violin; William Parker, bass; Hamid Drake, drums), New York (Vision Festival), 2008

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musical thoughts

We tend to take musical instruments for granted, as if their existence were inevitable. But the fact that something exists doesn’t mean it had to. We could’ve been born into a world that never heard a violin.

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reading table

“What kind of heaven is that, you can’t have your records?”

—Michael Chabon, Telegraph Avenue

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2013

Monday, February 18th

yesterday afternoon 

I took a journey that began in late 18th-century Austria, proceeded to mid-20th-century Russia, and concluded in early 20th-century France. Joseph Haydn, Dmitri Shostakovich, Maurice Ravel—they were the hosts. These folks, playing at the University of Chicago’s new Logan Arts Center, were the guides. If one day I learned that my life would be over at midnight, I’d be happy to spend the afternoon, after lunching at a Mexican restaurant (maybe Nuevo Leon on 18th Street), listening to a string quartet.

Pacifica Quartet, New York, 2009; Leo Janacek (1854-1928), String Quartet No. 2 (“Intimate Letters”), first movement

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2013

Saturday, February 16th

alone

Johann Sebastian Bach, Violin Sonata No. 1 in G minor, 2nd movement (fugue)
Henryk Szeryng (1918-1988), violin


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musical thoughts

A world where Bach could be heard via the internet by anyone, anywhere, anytime, could seem, so long as other things were overlooked, a paradise.

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From an interview with composer and conductor Pierre Boulez:

Q. What is the main problem with young conducting students?

A. They think too much or too little.

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2013

Monday, February 4th

Miles

Miles Davis Quintet (MD, trumpet; Wayne Shorter, tenor saxophone; Herbie Hancock, piano, Ron Carter, bass; Tony Williams, drums), live, Europe (Karlsruhe, Germany; Stockholm, Sweden), 1967

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musical thoughts

Miles may not be the greatest trumpet player in the history of jazz, but he’s arguably the greatest bandleader. Only someone with supreme self-confidence could do what he did. A brilliant judge of talent, a leader who expected, and enabled, others to flourish, he could seem, at times, the least interesting player in his own band.

*****

reading table

Winter solitude—
in a world of one color
the sound of wind.

—Matsuo Basho (1644-1694, translated from Japanese by Robert Hass)

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2013

Friday, 1/25/13

You can only hear with the ears you’ve got. And the ones I’ve got came of age in another era. But is it merely reflexive nostalgia to ask: Is there anything today—anything at all—that can compare with this?

Otis Redding (1941-1967), with Booker T.  & the M.G.’s* and The Mar-Keys,** “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” (O. Redding & J. Butler), live, Monterey Pop Festival, 1967

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reading table

What advice would you give to people who are looking to be happy?

For starters, learn how to cook.

—“Questions for Charles Simic: In-Verse Thinking,” interview by Deborah Solomon, New York Times, 2/3/08

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*Booker T. Jones, organ; Steve Cropper, guitar; Donald “Duck” Dunn, bass; Al Jackson, Jr., drums.

**Wayne Jackson, trumpet; Joe Arnold, alto saxophone; Andrew Love, tenor saxophone.

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2013

Monday, 1/21/13

last night

I went back to Northwestern’s Pick-Staiger Hall—they’re in the midst of a Winter Chamber Music Festival—where I heard this string quartet, along with this clarinetist, play this piece.

Aaron Jay Kernis (1960-), Perpetual Chaconne (2012); Calder Quartet with John Bruce Yeh (clarinet), 2012

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musical thoughts

When we go out to hear live music, we realize, again, something that seldom occurs to us when we listen at home: the world, in its messy unpredictability, its insistent particularity, is way more interesting than we are.

*****

the music of words

Martin Luther King, Jr., Shreveport, La. (Galilee Baptist Church), 1958

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