It used to be that music came from a particular place. No more. Whether it’s Sohrab Saadat Ladjevardi (the Iranian saxophonist who’s lived in Germany, in Japan, and now in New York City [2/18/10]), or Burkina Electric (whose members come from Burkina Faso, from Germany, and from New York City [by way of Austria] [2/22/10]), or this singer, who’s lived (and has homes) in Nigeria and in Germany, much of today’s most intriguing music has its ears and heart and feet on more than one continent.
transported, adj. emotionally moved, ecstatic. E.g., Glenn Gould playing Bach.
Bach, Partita No. 2 in C Minor (excerpt), Glenn Gould, piano, live (from The Art of Piano: Great Pianists of the 20th Century)
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lagniappe
I think that if I were required to spend the rest of my life on a desert island, and to listen to or play the music of any one composer during all that time, that composer would almost certainly be Bach. I really can’t think of any other music which is so all-encompassing, which moves me so deeply and so consistently, and which, to use a rather imprecise word, is valuable beyond all of its skill and brilliance for something more meaningful than that—its humanity.
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The nature of the contrapuntal experience is that every note has to have a past and a future on the horizontal plane.
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We do not play the piano with our fingers but with our mind.
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In the best of all possible worlds, art would be unnecessary. Its offer of restorative, placative therapy would go begging a patient. . . . The audience would be the artist and their life would be art.
The term “sideman” can be misleading. It suggests a leader/soloist who reigns supreme while the other musicians serve merely as accompanists. But the strongest jazz performances, especially live ones, rarely work that way—they’re all about interplay. Here, on piano, bass, and drums, are three of the finest jazz musicians in recent memory. Each contributes mightily to the quality of this performance. All, alas, are now gone.
David Murray, tenor saxophone, with John Hicks, piano; Fred Hopkins, bass; Ed Blackwell, drums; “Morning Song,” live, New York (Village Vanguard), 1986
Part 1
Here are just a few of the things I love about what these guys do:
:14-16, :45-48, 1:17-20: Hopkins can be both fat and precise, funky and elegant. What other bassist pops so impeccably?
4:04-4:22: This is pure Blackwell: a delicate counterpoint dance that lifts everything without ever calling attention to itself.
5:25-42, 6:00-05: Some musicians play “inside” the chord changes and structure, some play “outside”; only a few, like Hicks, are able to do both at once, delineating the changes and structure while at the same time subverting them.
In a recent NIH-funded study, conducted over a period of six months, individuals suffering from clinical depression who listened to this man’s music for ten minutes a day fared significantly better, as measured by the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (HDRS), than those who did not.
Here, to wrap up this festival, is one of the best performances by Otis Rush I’ve ever heard (which makes it one of the best blues performances I’ve ever heard [which makes it, etc.]).
Otis Rush (with Fred Below, drums), “I Can’t Quit You Baby,” live, Germany, 1966
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lagniappe
I was staying with my sister and messing around with the guitar every day for my own amusement. Then she took me around and introduced me to Muddy Waters, Jimmy Rogers, Little Walter, and the first time I saw that onstage, it inspired me to play. I thought that was the world.—Otis Rush
Muddy Waters (with James Cotton, harmonica; Otis Spann, piano; Pat Hare, guitar; Andrew Stevenson, bass; Francis Clay, drums), “Got My Mojo Working,” live, Newport Jazz Festival, 1960
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lagniappe
Soon after he got to Chicago, Muddy [Waters] began playing the blues for his friends in relaxed moments, and that led to work playing at rent parties, for small tips and all the whiskey he could drink. ‘You know,’ he said, refilling his glass with champagne, ‘I wanted to go to Chicago in the late thirties, ’cause Robert Nighthawk came to see me and said he was goin’ and get a record. He says, you go along and you might get on with me. I thought, oh, man, this cat is just jivin’, he ain’t goin’ to Chicago. I thought goin’ to Chicago was like goin’ out of the world. Finally he split, and the next time I heard he had a record out. So I started asking some of my friends that had went to Chicago, Can I make it with my guitar? ‘Naww, they don’t listen to that kind of old blues you’re doin’ now, don’t nobody listen to that, not in Chicago. So when I finally come to Chicago, the same person that told me that . . . Dan’s wife, my sister, that’s the same person I started playin’ every Saturday night for, at the rent party in her apartment. Peoples is awful funny.’ He chuckled, savoring the irony. ‘So I started playing for these rent parties, and then I run into Blue Smitty and Jimmy Rogers and we got somethin’ goin’ on. We started playing little neighborhood bars on the West Side, five nights a week, five dollars a night. It wasn’t no big money, but we’s doin’ it.’ They were doing it, all right; they were creating modern blues and laying the groundwork for rock and roll.—Robert Palmer, Deep Blues (1981)
If I were a piece of music (as Barbara Walters might put it), here’s the one I’d want to be (today, anyway): deceptively simple, continually (albeit subtly) changing, perpetually fresh.
Morton Feldman, Triadic Memories, excerpt (1981)/Aki Takahashi, piano
(Feldman’s late piano pieces, including this one, accompany more of my daily life than any other music. Among other things, they work wonders when sleep won’t come [I mean that as a compliment]: slip the CD into the bedside Bose player, turn the volume down, hit the repeat button, and drift.)
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lagniappe
[Triadic Memories is] Feldman’s greatest piano piece, and thus one of the great piano works of the 20th century.—Kyle Gann
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Some modernist composers such as Stockhausen want to embrace everything in their music. Others work by exclusion, ruthlessly paring their music down until only the essential core remains. The American composer Morton Feldman, who died in 1987 aged 61, was perhaps the most ruthless of all these great renouncers. He didn’t want lyricism or complication or any of the storm and stress and conflict that go with ‘expression.’ What he wanted was to ‘tint the air’ with gentle sounds, revealed in slowly changing patterns.—Ivan Hewitt
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Even if you’re not up for discerning the grand construction in Feldman’s meditative, pared-down music, its medicinal value is so strong that, while I was recovering from surgery, it worked as well as Motrin—or the Mozart piano concertos I have used after a wisdom-teeth extraction. Think of what Feldman could do for hangovers.—David Patrick Stearns
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