Here’s bassist/composer Sirone (AKA Norris Jones), who passed away last month (10/22) at the age of 69. The list of musicians he played with is long and deep—John Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, Dewey Redman, Cecil Taylor, et al. He was a member of the Revolutionary Ensemble, the critically acclaimed trio that also included violinist Leroy Jenkins.
This quartet performance, from last year, features an unusual mix of instruments: tenor saxophone, drums, bass, cello. How deeply felt is this music? Look at the smiles Sirone and cellist Nioka Workman exchange toward the end (8:35 and following).
Project L’Afrique Garde (with Sirone [bass], Nioka Workman [cello], Michael Wimberly [drums and percussion], Abdoulaye N’Diaye [tenor saxophone]), live, New York, 2008
Mary Travers, who died last week at the age of 72, was one of the first recording artists I ever heard perform live. I don’t recall the exact year, but it would have been in the early 1960s, when I was nearing the end of elementary school or just starting junior high. My father, responding to our growing musical enthusiasm, took my older brother (Don) and me to see Peter, Paul, and Mary, who were performing at one of Chicago’s midsized concert halls (which one, I’m not sure at the moment [old age, etc.]; it would have been the Auditorium, Orchestra Hall, the Opera House, or the Arie Crown Theater).
The details of the music we heard that night are fuzzy. But what I do remember, vividly, with this and other shows that we saw together in the early ’60s (Kingston Trio, Beach Boys, et al.), is how exciting it was, at that age, to hear live music—what an event it was. It was something to plan for and look forward to. It was something that involved, on the night of the concert, traveling into the city and, once inside the hall, finding your seats and waiting, eagerly, for the lights to go down, for the spotlight to come on, for the performers to walk onstage, and for the magic of hearing sounds in the dark to take hold.
I don’t know that I ever properly thanked my father (who died in 1977 at the age of 49) for these early musical adventures. I do know that the feeling I first experienced while on them—that, in listening to live music, you left the humdrum of daily life for something magical—has never faded.
Here, to remember Mary Travers, are two clips. In the first she’s singing background, along with several others, for Bob Dylan. The second is of Peter, Paul, and Mary.
Bob Dylan; Peter, Paul, and Mary; Joan Baez; Pete Singer; Freedom Singers; live, Newport Folk Festival (Rhode Island), 1963
If influence were compensable, Claude Jeter of the Swan Silvertones—
a huge influence on Sam Cooke, Curtis Mayfield, Eddie Kendricks (Temptations), Al Green, even Paul Simon (who took inspiration from a line in the Swans’ “hit” “Mary, Don’t You Weep” [“I’ll be a bridge over deep water if you trust in my name”] when he wrote “Bridge Over Troubled Water”)—would have, when he passed earlier this year at the age of 94, died a wealthy man.
“When he leaves the house [in NYC], he whistles his favorite tune, ‘What A Friend We Have In Jesus,’ while greeting the assorted neighborhood junkies and prostitutes who knew him mainly as sometime manager of the [Hotel] Cecil. ‘What’s new, Jeter,’ they ask. ‘Nothing new, nothing good, just thank God for life up here with these heathens and muggers.'”—Anthony Heilbut, The Gospel Sound: Good News and Bad Times (1971)
Here’s Jim Dickinson—the great Memphis-and-Mississippi-based piano player, session musician (Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Ry Cooder, et al.), record producer (John Hiatt, Albert King, the Replacements, et al.), father of Luther and Cody Dickinson (of the Grammy-nominated North Mississippi Allstars)—who died last month (8/15) at the age of 67. In this clip, he’s listening, with the Rolling Stones, to a playback of “Wild Horses” (Sticky Fingers [1971]), on which he played piano. Somehow it seems appropriate to remember Dickinson with a clip in which you hardly see him (he’s the guy sitting next to Keith [:53]). So many of the finest session musicians and record producers work their magic this way: listening to the music, you hardly notice them; but take them away and the music would be a whole other color—as different as blue and green.
*****
Here Dickinson talks about a session he produced (Boister):
— “They managed to overcome their educations real well.”
— “They’re all capable of soloing ad nauseam.”
— “You can feel them feeling it.”
*****
Not only did Dickinson play piano and produce records; he also, now and then, wrote songs. Here are two takes on a song he wrote with Ry Cooder and John Hiatt, “Across the Borderline.”
Bob Dylan and Tom Petty, live, Buffalo, 1986
***
Jackson Browne, Bruce Springsteen, and Bonnie Raitt, live, Los Angeles, 1990
**********
lagniappe
“Some of the records I’ve done, really obscure things, will be the ones that somebody will tell you saved their lives. You’ll meet a weird guy in Amsterdam who’ll say ‘I had the gun in my mouth until I heard that record.’ So you never know, you just never know.”—Jim Dickinson
“As a producer, it really is all about taste. And I’m not the greatest piano player in the world, but I’ve got damn good taste. I’ll sit down and go taste with anybody.”—Jim Dickinson
Here—with a shout-out to my nephew Chris Balmes (who sent me this news [and frequently seems to display astonishingly good taste for one so young])—is gospel singer Marie Knight, who died this week in New York at the age of 89.
“Up Above My Head” (she sang on Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s 1947 “hit” recording)
Just finished Zeitoun, Dave Eggers’ intimate look at New Orleans just before, during, and after Katrina, through the eyes of one man and his family, which recently got a rave in the New York Times Book Review. Four-word review: moves quickly, deeply moving.
*****
Recently read Colm Toibin’s novel Brooklyn, which tells the story of a young woman who, in the 1950s, emigrates, reluctantly, from Ireland to America. One of the quietest novels—I mean that as a compliment—I’ve ever read. (Novelist Claire Messud’s thoughtful essay-review in the New York Review of Books is well worth reading.)
music clip of the day 