Why take a straight path when you can take a crooked one?
Sheila Jordan (with Steve Kuhn, piano; David Finck, bass; Billy Drummond, drums; Mark Feldman and Barry Finclair, violin; Vincent Lionti, viola; Harold Birston, cello), “Autumn in New York,” live, 2008, New York (on her 80th birthday)
captivating, adj. capturing interest as if by a spell. E.g., Betty Carter.
Betty Carter (with Cyrus Chestnut, piano), “Once Upon A Summertime,” live, Japan, 1993
(Watch how she moves when giving way to Cyrus Chestnut’s piano solo [3:40-54]: the elegance of a dancer, the dignity of a queen.)
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If you’re sitting in that audience ready to fight me from the very beginning, I’m going to have a hard time getting to you. But if you’ve got a heart at all, I’m going to get it.—Betty Carter
You can talk about her exquisite phrasing: the way she hovers around the beat. But that sort of musical shoptalk barely scratches the surface. Other singers may be able to express joy, or pain, or regret, or longing, or other feelings. But how many other singers are able to convey so many different emotions all at once?
Billie Holiday (with Jimmy Rowles, piano), “My Man,” live
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I hate straight singing. I have to change a tune to my own way of doing it. That’s all I know.
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No two people on earth are alike, and it’s got to be that way in music or it isn’t music.
—Billie Holiday
“Check out Gonzales”—a longtime friend (in a recent email)
Gonzales, Piano Vision (2007)
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(Yo, Scott: Thanks!)
Whatever it is Dylan’s doing these days when he opens his mouth, it’s beyond singing.
Bob Dylan (with Ry Cooder, guitar; Van Dyke Parks, piano), “Do Re Mi,” live (TV broadcast), 2009
genius at work
Thelonious Monk with saxophonist Charlie Rouse, working out a number, “Boo Boo’s Birthday,” during a recording session, 1967
*****
Thelonious Monk (with Charlie Rouse, tenor saxophone; Ben Riley, drums; Larry Gales, bass), “Boo Boo’s Birthday” (Underground [Columbia], 1968)
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reading table
One of the great discoveries I made in college, besides Bach (10/19/09, 10/24/09, 12/25/09) and Blind Willie Johnson (11/15/09) and Bill Evans (11/18/09) and Hound Dog Taylor (10/30/09), was John Berryman. Hearing him read his poetry, not long before he died (jumping off a bridge in Minneapolis), changed my life. Really. That night made me realize, in ways that I never had before, just how lively and surprising and exciting poetry could be. It made me realize, too, that what a great poem offers is an experience—one you can’t get anywhere else. And so I have Berryman to thank not only for his own poems (especially The Dream Songs [which would be on my desert-island packing list]) but also for making Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Wislawa Szymborska, Charles Simic, et al., such important figures in my life. Just as my life would be immeasurably poorer without Thelonious Monk (11/2/09, 11/25/09, today) and Vernard Johnson (12/6/09) and Morton Feldman (11/7/09, 12/5/09) and Lester Bowie (9/8/09, 10/28/09), so too would it be without them.
This recording, for all its technical shortcomings (headphones help), captures some of what I heard in Berryman that night almost 40 years ago. Blustery and grandiose and vulnerable, jazzy and funny: he was all these things—and more.
This is not a cultural occasion, ladies and gentlemen, in case you were misled by anyone. This is an entertainment.—John Berryman
John Berryman (1914-1972), live, Iowa City, 1968
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John Lee Hooker, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Dinu Lipatti: where else would you find these three artists together, performing back to back, besides a cyberstage?
John Lee Hooker, “Blues For Christmas” (1949)
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Rahsaan Roland Kirk (tenor saxophone, manzello, flute, stritch), “We Free Kings” (1961)
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Dinu Lipatti, “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” Johann Sebastian Bach/Hess transcription (1947)
Here’s another record, featuring another of blues’ greatest voices, that was made in Memphis in the 1920s.
Sleepy John Estes (1899[or 1904]-1977), “The Girl I Love She Got Long Curly Hair” (1929, Memphis)
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i’m standing there watching the parade/feeling combination of sleepy john estes. jayne mansfield. humphry [sic] bogart/mortimer snerd. murph the surf and so forth . . .—Bob Dylan (liner notes to Bringing It All Back Home [1965])
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. . . Bob Dylan stalked [Ry] Cooder for months asking him for advice on how to play one particular Sleepy John Estes lick.—Paul Duane
Last week a recording of his complete works for solo piano (so far), Oppens Plays Carter (on Chicago-based Cedille Records), was nominated for a Grammy.
This week he celebrated his 101st birthday.
Next week?
Elliott Carter, Quintet for Piano (1997), Ursula Oppens, The Arditti Quartet, live
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Part 2
Want more? Here.
Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Miles Davis: so many of the greatest figures in jazz weren’t just great musicians, or composers, or arrangers. They were great bandleaders. As important to their artistic success as anything else was their ability to find, and showcase, players who could make the music come alive—people like Johnny Hodges and Ben Webster and Jimmy Blanton and Lester Young and Freddie Green and Jo Jones and John Coltrane and Bill Evans and Tony Williams.
That small circle of elite bandleaders includes this man. He hired musicians who played their instruments like no one else (Eric Dolphy, Jaki Byard, et al.). He gave them a musical setting in which structure and freedom were exquisitely balanced. And together they made music that sounds (even on something familiar) like nothing else.
Charles Mingus Sextet (with Johnny Coles, trumpet; Jaki Byard, piano; Eric Dolphy, alto saxophone and bass clarinet; Clifford Jordan, tenor saxophone; Dannie Richmond, drums), “Take the A Train,” live, Norway (Oslo), 1964
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I nominate Charles Mingus one of America’s greatest composers—Ran Blake (in the liner notes to his recent album Driftwoods)
music clip of the day 