No matter where you are, this landscape is just around the corner.
John Cage (1912-1992), “In a Landscape” (1948)/Stephen Drury, piano
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lagniappe
Music is a means of rapid transportation.
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What I’m proposing, to myself and other people, is what I often call the tourist attitude—that you act as though you’ve never been there before. So that you’re not supposed to know anything about it. If you really get down to brass tacks, we have never been anywhere before.
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As far as consistency of thought goes, I prefer inconsistency.
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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lagniappe
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)
The Cubs couldn’t seem to make up their minds this season. Were they—as often seemed to be the case—god-awful? Or, taking the longer view, were they simply mediocre? Oh, well. Instead of dwelling on this dismal season, let’s remember one of the brightest spots in Chicago baseball history. Here’s the finest musician ever to work between the foul lines: blues and boogie-woogie piano player Jimmy Yancey, who, for 25 years (1925-50), was a White Sox groundskeeper.
Jimmy Yancey, “Rolling the Stone” (1939)
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“I can’t believe the season is over—but it is.”—WGN Radio Cubs broadcaster Pat Hughes, after yesterday’s game (a loss to Arizona, 5-2)
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.
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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.”
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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
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Jackson Browne, Bruce Springsteen, and Bonnie Raitt, live, Los Angeles, 1990
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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
music clip of the day 