passings
Claudio Abbado, conductor, June 26, 1933-January 20, 2014
Gustav Mahler (1860-1911), Symphony No. 5 (4th Movt.); Lucerne Festival Orchestra (Claudio Abbado, cond.), live, 2004
I love watching him conduct: his hands and arms embody the music, moving with the grace, and the precision, of a ballet dancer.
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lagniappe
reading table
[T]he time of death is every moment . . .
—T. S. Eliot, “The Dry Salvages”
passings
Roy Campbell Jr., trumpeter, September 29, 1952-January 9, 2014
Live (RC, pocket trumpet; Rasul Siddik, trumpet; Jobic Le Masson, piano; Aldridge Hansberry, drums), Paris, 2006
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lagniappe
reading table
In the dirty city
one rare glimpse—
mountain moon—Matsuo Basho (1644-1694, translated from Japanese by David Young)
passings
Phil Everly, singer, songwriter, guitar player, January 19, 1939-January 3, 2014
“Wake Up Little Susie,” 1957
This song I heard constantly, on the radio, on our basement jukebox, everywhere, when I was five. Twenty years later, I married a woman named Suzanne. Coincidence?
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“All I Have To Do Is Dream,” “Cathy’s Clown,” 1960
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“Claudette,” “Walk Right Back,” “Crying in the Rain,” “Cathy’s Clown,” “Love Is Strange,” “When Will I Be Loved?,” “So Sad (To Watch Love Go Bad),” “Bird Dog,” “Be-Bop-a-Lula,” “Barbara Allen,” “A Long Time Gone,” “Step It Up and Go,” “Bye Bye Love,” “Wake Up Little Susie,” “Devoted to You,” “Love Hurts,” “(‘Til) I Kissed You,” “All I Have to Do Is Dream,” “Lucille,” “Let It Be Me,” 1983
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When Phil and I hit that one spot where I call it The Everly Brothers, I don’t know where it is. ‘Cause it’s not me and it’s not him. It’s the two of us together.
passings
Larry Lujack, disc jockey, June 6, 1940-December 18, 2013
Live, WCFL-AM (Chicago), 12/23/72 (not ’73)
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lagniappe
Christmas, 1936
Fats Waller, “Swingin’ Them Jingle Bells” (1936)
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random thoughts
Sometimes I feel like a TV that works only on certain channels.
passings
Jim Hall, guitarist, December 4, 1930-December 10, 2013
With Joe Lovano (tenor saxophone), “In a Sentimental Mood” (D. Ellington), live, Italy (Umbria Jazz Festival), 1996
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With Bill Evans (piano), Undercurrent (“My Funny Valentine,” “I Hear a Rhapsody,” “Dream Gypsy,” “Romain,” “Skating in Central Park,” “Darn that Dream,” “Stairway to the Stars,” “I’m Getting Sentimental Over You”), 1962
When I was in college in the early ’70s, this album was a frequent late-night companion. Since then I’ve listened to it more times than I could count. It never grows old.
passings
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?
passings
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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taking a break
I’m taking some time off—back in a while.
If I were to compile a short list, numbering, say, six or seven, of folks I wish I could’ve heard live, this guy, whom I’ve been listening to for over forty years, would be on it.
Blind Willie Johnson (1897-1945), singer, guitarist
“God Don’t Never Change” (New Orleans, 1929)
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“It’s Nobody’s Fault But Mine” (Dallas, 1927)
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“Jesus Make Up My Dying Bed” (Dallas, 1927)
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“John The Revelator” (Atlanta, 1929; with Willie B. Harris, his wife)
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“The Rain Don’t Fall On Me” (Atlanta, 1929; with WBH)
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“Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground” (Dallas, 1927)
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lagniappe
reading table
Seamus Heaney (April 13, 1939-August 30, 2013), “The Given Note,” Paris, 2013
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On the most westerly Blasket
In a dry-stone hut
He got this air out of the night.Strange noises were heard
By others who followed, bits of a tune
Coming in on loud weatherThough nothing like melody.
He blamed their fingers and ear
As unpractised, their fiddling easyFor he had gone alone into the island
And brought back the whole thing.
The house throbbed like his full violin.So whether he calls it spirit music
Or not, I don’t care. He took it
Out of wind off mid-Atlantic.Still he maintains, from nowhere.
It comes off the bow gravely,
Rephrases itself into the air.
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Last October, with my son Alex, I heard him read at the Art Institute of Chicago. Nobel Prize winner, Professor of Poetry at Oxford, Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard—none of that was on display. He seemed not the least self-impressed, nor even much interested in himself. What interested him, it was clear, was language. With each poem, he seemed to be saying: “Come in, sit down. Let’s listen, together.”
For over thirty years he’s been taking me places no one else does.
Henry Threadgill’s Zooid, live, New York, 2013
#1
#2
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It’s not just notes on a page. Threadgill really reaches out and grabs you by the lapels. Someone else described it to me as ‘every time Threadgill enters, it’s like the curtains just parted.’ He has this way of cutting right through the texture of the music.
—pianist Vijay Iyer
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lagniappe
reading table: passings
Between my fingers and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.—Seamus Heaney (April 13, 1939-August 30, 2013), “Digging” (excerpt)
passings
J.J. Cale, singer, songwriter, guitarist, December 5, 1938-July 26, 2013
Today, remembering him, we revisit an earlier post.
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What was it like growing up in the 1950s in the lonesome state of Oklahoma?
Leon Russell knows.
So does this guy.
J.J. Cale (with Eric Clapton), “After Midnight” (J. Cale), live, Dallas, 2004
Who supplies the juice here?
It ain’t the guitar god from England.
It’s the grizzled guitar player from the state with the funny shape (:38-1:12, 1:41-44, 2:14-48, 3:36-50, 4:20-44).
(Originally posted 11/1/10.)
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