I don’t want to hear nobody but the drums . . .
—Shirley Caesar
Shirley Caesar (with guests, including Ira Tucker [Dixie Hummingbirds] at 5:30-), “I Feel Like Praising Him,” live
**********
lagniappe
musical thoughts
It’s always difficult to remember what your name is when you’re in the midst of all this music.
—Daniel Blumin, WFMU-FM, last night’s show
24 hours of ragas
On Thursday, June 21st WKCR-FM will feature a historic first in radio broadcast: a live raga marathon with 24 musicians performing in 24 hours! Curated by Brooklyn Raga Massive and HarmoNYom, the festival will start on Wednesday, June 20th at midnight and end on Thursday June 21st at midnight. Raga, which literally means “to color the mind,” are musical modes in Indian Classical Music that correspond with specific times of the day or the night. All Ragas in the festival will correspond to the time of their performance. Read more for the schedule of the festival:
12am Neel Murgai – Sitar
1am Sameer Gupta and Ehren Hanson – Tabla Duo
2am Achyut Joshi – Vocal
3am Iklhaq Hussain – Sitar
4am Anjana Roy and Sanjay Rajan Pal – Sitar and Tabla
5am Akshay Anantapadmanabhan – Mridangam
6am Indrajit Roy Chowdhury – Sitar
7am Daisy Paradis – Sitar
8am Samarth Nagarkar – Vocal
9am Eric Fraser – Flute
10am Falu Shah – Vocal
11am Shanti Sivani – Vocal
12pm Steve Gorn – Flute
1pm Karavika – Violin & Cello
2pm Gargi Shinde – Sitar
3pm Camila Celin – Sarod
4pm Kedar Naphade – Harmonium
5pm Vivek Rudrapatna – Carnatic Violin
6pm Jay Gandhi – Flute
7pm Andrew Mendelson – Sitar
8pm Arun Ramamurthy – Carnatic Violin
9pm Ashvin Bhogendra – Carnatic Vocal
10pm Oded Tzur – Saxophone
11pm Kiran Ahluwalia – VocalOn Tabla & Harmonium accompaniment:
Nitin Mitta, Sameer Gupta, Ehren Hanson, Naren Budhakar, Dan Weiss, Stephen Celluci, Andrew ShantzOn Mridingam accompaniment:
Akshay Anantapadmanabhan
*****
Nikhil Banerjee, sitar (with Kanai Dutta, tabla)
Rag Bhimpalasri, Rag Multani (35:42-)
Live, Netherlands (Rotterdam), 1970
**********
lagniappe
musical thoughts
There’s no “Indian music” in India.
Turn it off: cellphone, email, Twitter—the whole modern rot.
Let this, and nothing else, surround you.
Frederic Chopin, Nocturne in D-flat major, Op. 27, No. 2
Martha Argerich (piano), live, Germany (Saarbrücken), 1972
**********
lagniappe
musical thoughts
In the right hands there are no notes—only mysteries.
*****
reading table
Then I considered the spiritual bread that a newspaper constitutes, still warm and moist as it emerges from the press and the morning mist in which it has been delivered at crack of dawn to the housemaids who take it to their masters with a bowl of milk, this miraculous loaf, multiplied ten-thousandfold and yet unique, which stays unchanged for everyone while proliferating across every threshold.
—Marcel Proust, The Fugitive (translated from French by Peter Collier)
Spirits need a lift?
Consider this: how much wonderful music—more than a lifetime’s worth—waits to be heard for the first time.
Morton Feldman, For Philip Guston (1984)*
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
More Feldman?
And here.
And here.
**********
lagniappe
musical thoughts
Q. This is a tough question, but what would be your five Desert Island disks?
John Luther Adams: I’d want music I could live inside for a long time; music that’s complex and enigmatic enough that there’s always something new to discover. Off the top of my head, my choices might be . . .
One of Morton Feldman’s major works, probably the Second String Quartet. Or maybe For Philip Guston.
**********
*For piano, celesta, piccolo, flute, alto flute, glockenspiel, vibraphone, marimba, chimes.
Ken Vandermark (saxophone) & Paal Nilssen-Love (drums)
Live, Romania (Bucharest), 2010
**********
lagniappe
musical thoughts
Last night, while I was listening to these guys at a little club on Chicago’s near northwest side (The Hideout), a thought kept running through my head: there’s nothing like live music; there’s nothing at all like live music; there’s nothing at all in this world even remotely like live music.
John Luther Adams, “Red Arc/Blue Veil” (excerpt)
Live, University of Kentucky, 2008
Clint Davis, piano
Charlie Olvera, vibraphone, crotales
Jason Corder, Jordan Munson, video
(Originally posted on 2/10/11.)
**********
lagniappe
musical thoughts
One of the functions of music is to remind us how much more beautiful the world is than it needs to be.
only rock ’n’ roll
This’ll wake you up.
The Men, “Open Your Heart,” live, SXSW (Austin, Tx.), 3/6/12
***
More?
Here’s the whole show.
**********
lagniappe
musical thoughts
The pop music being made in the 1960s sounded nothing like that of the 1920s. But, today, the formula employed by The Men (and many other bands)—electric guitar + bass + drums + volume + energy—is the same one the MC5 was using when I first heard them in August of 1968, in Chicago’s Lincoln Park, during the Democratic Convention. What, if anything, does it mean that pop music—some of it, anyway—has changed so little in the last 40 years?
If I knew I had a week to live (as someday I will, whether I know it or not), this is one of the things I’d want to hear.
Johann Sebastian Bach, Chaconne in D minor for solo violin (Partita for Violin No. 2 [BWV 1004]); Isaac Stern (violin), live
Another take?
Here (Nathan Milstein).
And here (Gidon Kremer).
**********
lagniappe
musical thoughts
On one stave, for a small instrument, the man writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings. If I imagined that I could have created, even conceived the piece, I am quite certain that the excess of excitement and earth-shattering experience would have driven me out of my mind.
—Johannes Brahms, in a letter to Clara Schumann (translated from German)
Happy Birthday, Blind Willie and Tammy!
Blind Willie McTell (5/5/1898-8/19/59), “Dying Crapshooter’s Blues” (1940)
*****
Tammy Wynette (5/5/42-4/6/98), medley (“Apartment No. 9,” “D-I-V-O-R-C-E,” “Stand By Your Man”), TV show
**********
lagniappe
musical thoughts
Imagine what this country would be like if everything were as fine as the music.
two takes
“Feel Like Going Home” (C. Rich)
Charlie Rich (vocals & piano), demo, 1973
*****
Tom Jones with Mark Knopfler (guitar), TV performance, 1996
**********
lagniappe
musical thoughts
I don’t think I ever recorded anyone who was better as a singer, writer, and player than Charlie Rich. It is all so effortless, the way he moves from rock to country to blues to jazz.
—Sam Phillips (Sun Records)
*****
radio
Happy Birthday, Charles!
*****
reading table
I thought that you were an anchor in the drift of the world;
but no: there isn’t an anchor anywhere.
There isn’t an anchor in the drift of the world. Oh no.
I thought you were. Oh no. The drift of the world.
—William Bronk,* “The World” (mp3 [Hudson Falls, NY, 1978], Selected Poems [1995])
***
*Bronk, who died in 1999, was recently inducted, posthumously, into the ultra-exclusive MCOTD Hall of Fame, joining tenor saxophonist Von Freeman and poet Wislawa Szymborska.
music clip of the day 