two takes
It’s spring!
“Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most” (T. Wolf & F. Landesman)
Betty Carter (1929-1998), Inside Betty Carter, 1964
*****
Bob Dorough (1923-), Right On My Way Home, 1997
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lagniappe
reading table
spring rain—
the uneaten ducks
are quacking—Kobayashi Issa, 1813 (translated from Japanese by David G. Lanoue)
old school
Arthur Conley (1946-2003), “Nothing Can Change This Love” (S. Cooke), live (TV show), Netherlands (Amsterdam), 2001
two takes
“When Something Is Wrong With My Baby” (I. Hayes & D. Porter)
Sam & Dave, live, Germany (Offenbach), 1967
***
Isaac Hayes, TV Show (Top of the Pops), England, 1995
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lagniappe
reading table
“The World Contracted to a Recognizable Image”
by William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)at the small end of an illness
there was a picture
probably Japanese
which filled my eyean idiotic picture
except it was all I recognized
the wall lived for me in that picture
I clung to it as a fly
basement jukebox
Magic Sam (AKA Samuel Maghett, 1937-1969), Cobra Records, Chicago
“All Your Love,” 1957
***
“Love Me with a Feeling,” 1957
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“Everything Gonna Be Alright,” 1958
***
“21 Days In Jail,” 1958
***
taking a break
I’m taking some time off—back soon.
a week in New Orleans: day two
Bon Mardi Gras
Professor Longhair, December 19, 1918-January 30, 1980
“Mardi Gras in New Orleans” (AKA “Go to the Mardi Gras”), 1950
***
“Big Chief”
***
“Tipitina” (with the Meters)
1 + 1 = infinity
Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975), Sonata for Viola (1975); Yuri Bashmet (viola), Ksenia Bashmet (Yuri’s daughter, piano)
This is the last thing Shostakovich composed before he died.
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lagniappe
Here’s another take on the last movement, with a younger Yuri Bashmet and Sviatoslav Richter.
#1
#2
serendipity
This guy I stumbled upon yesterday afternoon, listening to the radio.* It had been a hard weekend; my 88-year-old mother-in-law died Saturday. These were just the sounds I needed, though I didn’t realize it—spare, precise, open.
Jesse Stacken Trio,** “Bagatelle No. 4,” recording session (Bagatelles for Trio, 2012)
*WFMU-FM (Give the Drummer Radio, webstream), Destination: Out.
**JS, piano; Eivind Opsvik, bass; Jeff Davis, drums.
Miles
Miles Davis Quintet (MD, trumpet; Wayne Shorter, tenor saxophone; Herbie Hancock, piano, Ron Carter, bass; Tony Williams, drums), live, Europe (Karlsruhe, Germany; Stockholm, Sweden), 1967
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
Miles may not be the greatest trumpet player in the history of jazz, but he’s arguably the greatest bandleader. Only someone with supreme self-confidence could do what he did. A brilliant judge of talent, a leader who expected, and enabled, others to flourish, he could seem, at times, the least interesting player in his own band.
*****
reading table
Winter solitude—
in a world of one color
the sound of wind.—Matsuo Basho (1644-1694, translated from Japanese by Robert Hass)
soundtrack of a marriage
On my first date with Suzanne, in 1974, we went to Chicago’s Jazz Showcase (then upstairs on Lincoln, just south of Fullerton), where we saw Sun Ra & His Arkestra. With a start like that, how could one ever go wrong? When we got married, on this date in 1977, Von Freeman played at the wedding, with pianist John Young. Years later John told me: “When I marry ’em, they stay married.”
Sun Ra & His Arkestra, live, Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival, 1974
*****
Von Freeman, live (with John Young, piano), “Remember,” Chicago (Jazz Showcase), New Year’s Eve 1983 (according to the clip) or 1979 (according to NPR)
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lagniappe
Want to hear what Von and John sounded like on that cold, snowy night thirty-six years ago, at a church north of Chicago? Here (give it a few seconds). As you’ll hear, they played before, during (the processional was Ellington’s “In A Sentimental Mood”), and after the ceremony.
three takes
“Driving Wheel,” AKA “Driving Wheel Blues” (R. Sykes)
Buddy Guy & Junior Wells (BG, guitar; JW, harmonica and vocals; Jimmy Johnson, guitar; Dave Myers, bass; Odie Payne, drums), live, Portugal (Algarve Jazz Festival), 1978
*****
Junior Parker, 1961
*****
Roosevelt Sykes, 1936
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lagniappe
reading table
[I]t is out of adolescents who last a sufficient number of years that life makes old men.
—Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again (translated from French by Ian Patterson)
