piano | music clip of the day

Category: piano

2010

Saturday, June 5, 2010

replay: a clip too good for just one day

If you want to stay right where you are, don’t even bother with this clip. But if, instead, you’d like to go somewhere you may never have been before, well, this might be just the ticket.

Gyorgy Ligeti (1923-2006), Three Etudes, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, piano

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I listen to all kinds of music—new music, old music, music of my colleagues, everything.

—Gyorgy Ligeti (whose influences included not only the usual suspects [Chopin, Debussy, et al.] but also Thelonious Monk and Bill Evans and the Rainforest Pygmies and fractal geometry)

(Originally posted 10/6/09.)

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2010

Friday, June 4, 2010

The rock & roll mansion boasts a particularly spacious lunatic wing.

Jerry Lee Lewis, “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On,” live (TV broadcast), 1957

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2010

Monday, May 31, 2010

impeccable, adj. faultless, flawless; irreproachable. E.g., Hank Jones.

Hank Jones, July 31, 1918-May 16, 2010

“Oh, What A Beautiful Mornin’,” live, Paris, 2009

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“This Is This” (with Joe Lovano, saxophone), live

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“Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child” (with Charlie Haden, bass), 1995

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When you listen to a pianist, each note should have an identity, each note should have a soul of its own.—Hank Jones

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mail

Really dumb!

[Micachu & The Shapes, 5/29/10]

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2010

Sunday, May 30, 2010

You’re sitting, in 1926, in the back of a little church in Dallas. It’s hot and the windows are open. This woman, who’s been at the piano since you walked in, begins to play.

Arizona Dranes, piano, “Crucifixion,” 1926

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2010

Thursday, May 27, 2010

Chicago, Texas, Louisiana, West Coast—blues comes in lots of different shades.

Freddie King, with Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown; live (TV broadcast [The !!!! Beat]), 1966

Part 1

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Part 2 (“Funnybone”)

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Part 3 (“Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag”)

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2010

Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Funeral last week.

Ill this week.

What to listen to?

Beethoven, Piano Sonata No. 32 in C minor, Op. 111/Claudio Arrau, piano (1970)

1st Movement

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2nd Movement

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A fascinating lecture-recital on this sonata, by pianist Andras Schiff, can be heard here.

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Speaking of the second movement, pianist Alfred Brendel said:

. . . perhaps nowhere else in piano literature does mystical experience feel so immediately close at hand.

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2010

Saturday, May 22, 2010

Here’s a piece that sounds different every time you hear it.

John Cage, 4’ 33” (1952)/David Tudor, piano

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I didn’t wish it [4′ 33″] to appear, even to me, as something easy to do or as a joke. I wanted to mean it utterly and be able to live with it.

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Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music.

—John Cage

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mail

Thank you so much for this.

—Robert Ambrose (in response to an email letting him know that he and Bent Frequency were featured here)

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art beat

Tomorrow’s the last day to see the William Eggleston exhibit at Chicago’s Art Institute.

Want more? Here. Here.

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2010

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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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.)