piano | music clip of the day

Category: piano

Saturday, May 15, 2010

replay: a clip too good for just one day

The world became a less interesting place the day Lester Bowie died.

Digable Planets (with Lester Bowie [trumpet], Joe Sample [keyboard], Melvin “Wah-Wah Watson” Ragin [guitar]), “Flying High in the Brooklyn Sky,” live

Want to hear more of Lester? Here.

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lagniappe

Part of the job of a musician is that of a messenger. If you ain’t ready to be a messenger, forget it. You need to get a job in the post office or somewhere. If you ain’t ready to travel, pack up your family, or pack up yourself and hit the road, you’re in the wrong business. Because that’s what music is about. It’s about spreading knowledge and education, and re-education. It’s about spreading. You have got to travel with it to spread the word. Like all the people in the past that have had to travel to spread the music.

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It’s life itself that this [music] is about.

—Lester Bowie (in George E. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music [2008])

(Originally posted 10/28/09.)

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Friday, May 14, 2010

no redeeming value whatsoever

Andre Williams & His Orchestra, “Sweet Little Pussycat” (1966)

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Andre Williams, 2010

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Thursday, May 13, 2010

Dear MCOTD,

What would go well with a bottle of sleeping pills?

Chet Baker, “Almost Blue” (Let’s Get Lost [1988])

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lagniappe

Here’s a big birthday shout-out to my 19-year-old son Luke, who’s opened my ears to more things than I could ever count.

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Wednesday, 5/12/10

Is the greatest electric guitar player of all time a guy who died in 1942?

Charlie Christian, July 29, 1916-March 2, 1942

“Waiting for Benny” (1941 [recorded at a Benny Goodman session, while the engineers were testing the equipment])

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Live, New York (Minton’s), 1941

“Swing To Bop”

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“Stompin’ at the Savoy”

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TV news piece, Oklahoma City, 2007 (following CC’s induction into the Jazz Hall of Fame)

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Monday, 5/10/10

YouTube giveth, and YouTube taketh away.

I’ve posted other clips that were subsequently removed by YouTube. But this is the first time where I’ve posted something that was removed the very same day.

Oh, well—more tomorrow.

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When the tempo is perfect, the music unfolds in what seems to be the only way it could. “Fast” and “slow” lose their meaning. Time disappears.

Frederic Chopin, 24 Preludes for Solo Piano, Op. 28/Friedrich Gulda, piano

Nos. 15, 10, 9, 3, 4

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Nos. 7, 13, 21, 24

Want more? Here.

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Friday, May 7, 2010

New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, 2010/part 1

Scene 1: Sousaphone Parade

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Scene 2: Brian Blade & The Fellowship

Want more Brian Blade? Here.

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Scene 3: Mardi Gras Indians (Members of the Golden Star Hunters, Carrolton Hunters, et al.), Backstage

Want more Mardi Gras Indians? Here.

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lagniappe

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Thursday, April 29, 2010

Happy (111th) Birthday, Duke!

At least one day out of the year all musicans should just put their instruments down, and give thanks to Duke Ellington.

—Miles Davis

Duke Ellington and His Orchestra

“C Jam Blues,” 1942

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“Mood Indigo,” “Sophisticated Lady,” “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing),” “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore,” 1943

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It is becoming increasingly difficult to decide where jazz starts or where it stops, where Tin Pan Alley begins and jazz ends, or even where the borderline lies between between classical music and jazz. I feel there is no boundary line.

—Duke Ellington

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Radio Ellington: All Duke, All Day

WKCR-FM (broadcasting from Columbia University)

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Thursday, 4/22/10

Happy Birthday, Mingus!

No jazz composer since Thelonious Monk has a stronger voice.

Lyrical beauty, inexhaustible drive, deep feeling: what more could you ask for?

Enormously influential, his music served as a bridge between the compositional elegance of Duke Ellington and the freewheeling rambunctiousness of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Henry Threadgill, David Murray, et al.

Charles Mingus Quintet (CM, bass; Dannie Richmond, drums; Eric Dolphy, alto saxophone, bass clarinet; Clifford Jordan, tenor saxophone; Jaki Byard, piano), live (TV broadcast), Belgium, 1964

“So Long, Eric”

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“Peggy’s Blue Skylight”

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“Meditations on Integration” (excerpt)

Want more? Here.

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lagniappe

. . . [Mingus’s] music was pledged to the abolition of all distinctions: between the composed and the improvised, the primitive and the sophisticated, the rough and the tender, the belligerent and the lyrical.—Geoff Dyer, But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz (1996)

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Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.

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I, myself, came to enjoy the players who didn’t only just swing but who invented new rhythmic patterns, along with new melodic concepts. And those people are: Art Tatum, Bud Powell, Max Roach, Sonny Rollins, Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Parker, who is the greatest genius of all to me because he changed the whole era around.

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In my music, I’m trying to play the truth of what I am. The reason it’s difficult is because I’m changing all the time.

—Charles Mingus

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Radio Mingus: all Mingus, all the time

In celebration of Mingus’s birthday, WKCR-FM (broadcasting from Columbia University) is playing his music all day.

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2010

Wednesday, 4/21/10

Bob Dylan/1965, part 3

“Like A Rolling Stone,” live (with Mike Bloomfield, guitar; Jerome Arnold, bass; Barry Goldberg, piano; Al Kooper, organ; Sam Lay, drums), Newport Folk Festival, July, 1965

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Press Conference, San Francisco, December, 1965

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

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2010

Tuesday, 4/20/10

Bob Dylan/1965, part 2

“Maggie’s Farm,” live (with Mike Bloomfield, guitar; Jerome Arnold, bass; Barry Goldberg, piano; Al Kooper, organ; Sam Lay, drums), Newport Folk Festival, July, 1965