how to cast a spell
Tip #1: Be under one yourself.
Gretchen Parlato (with Taylor Eigsti, piano; Alan Hampton, bass; Mark Guiliana, drums), “Better Than,” live, Germany (Stuttgart), 2010
**********
lagniappe
reading table
thin wall—
with the moonlight
comes the cold—Kobayashi Issa, 1824 (translated from Japanese by David G. Lanoue)
Some tracks, the first time you hear them (as I did this a couple weeks ago), you wonder how you ever got along without them.
Joe McPhee (tenor saxophone) with Otis Greene (alto saxophone), Mike Kull (electric piano), Herbie Lehman (organ), Dave Jones (guitar), Tyrone Crabb (bass), Bruce Thompson & Ernest Bostic (percussion), “Shakey Jake” (Nation Time, 1970; reissued 2009)
**********
lagniappe
random thoughts
Remember when there was a whole season—not just a storm or two—called “winter”?
A lot of trumpet players try to bowl you over. This guy, whose last album appeared on many year-end top-10 lists (When the Heart Emerges Glistening, Blue Note), does something different. He gets under your skin.
Ambrose Akinmusire (ah-kin-MOO-sir-ee) Quintet (AA, trumpet; Walter Smith III, tenor saxophone; Fabian Almazan, piano; Harish Ragavan, bass; Justin Brown, drums); live, New York (Jazz Standard), 2011
Part 1
***
Part 2
***
Part 3
***
Part 4
**********
lagniappe
musical thoughts
Everything you don’t love, make sure that’s not in your playing.
—Steve Coleman (saxophonist, composer, bandleader) to Ambrose Akinmusire
*****
passings
Wislawa Szymborska (vees-WAH-vah shim-BOR-ska), poet
July 2, 1923-February 1, 2012
The world—whatever we might think when terrified by its vastness and our own impotence, or embittered by its indifference to individual suffering, of people, animals, and perhaps even plants, for why are we so sure that plants feel no pain; whatever we might think of its expanses pierced by the rays of stars surrounded by planets we’ve just begun to discover, planets already dead? still dead? we just don’t know; whatever we might think of this measureless theater to which we’ve got reserved tickets, but tickets whose lifespan is laughably short, bounded as it is by two arbitrary dates; whatever else we might think of this world—it is astonishing.
But “astonishing” is an epithet concealing a logical trap. We’re astonished, after all, by things that deviate from some well-known and universally acknowledged norm, from an obviousness we’ve grown accustomed to. Now the point is, there is no such obvious world. Our astonishment exists per se and isn’t based on comparison with something else.
Granted, in daily speech, where we don’t stop to consider every word, we all use phrases like “the ordinary world,” “ordinary life,” “the ordinary course of events” . . . But in the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone’s existence in this world.
—Wislawa Szymborska, Nobel Lecture (excerpt, translated from Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh), 12/7/96
More Szymborska? Here. And here. And here. And here.
Until 1996, when she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, I’d never heard of her. Since then I’ve read virtually everything of hers that’s appeared in translation. How much does she mean to me? Well, she’s one of two charter members (the other’s saxophonist Von Freeman) of the ultra-exclusive MCOTD Hall of Fame.
one of my desert-island singers
Dorothy Love Coates (1928-2002) & the Gospel Harmonettes
“I Won’t Let Go” (AKA “I’m Just Holding On”), live
More?
And here.
**********
lagniappe
Here’s the original recording (Specialty, 1950s).
*****
Were gospel to be more publicly acclaimed, she [Dorothy Love Coates] might have the stature of a Billie Holiday or a Judy Garland. Instead, for thousands of black people, she is the message carrier.
—Anthony Heilbut, The Gospel Sound: Good News and Bad Times (6th ed. 2002)
***
[I]t was obvious that Keith [Richards] and Gram [Parsons] enjoyed spending time together. . . . [W]e just all cared deeply about the same things. We just loved, for instance, to sit and listen to Dorothy Love Coates, the gospel singer.
(Quotes originally posted 3/28/10.)
Morton Feldman, For Bunita Marcus (1985)
John Tilbury, piano
According to iTunes, I’ve listened to this piece, which I often put on “repeat” before going to sleep, over a thousand times.
***
More Feldman?
And here.
And here.
**********
lagniappe
musical thoughts
Compositionally I always wanted to be like Fred Astaire.
***
I never feel that my music is sparse or minimal; the way fat people never really think they’re fat. I certainly don’t consider myself a minimalist at all.
***
No one has the Houdini school of composition.
*****
reading table
Last week a record store in Dupont Circle announced that it was closing. The immediate cause of its demise—it had outlasted national and regional chains—was Price Check, Amazon’s new idea for exterminating competition. It is an app that allows shoppers to scan the bar code on any item in any store and transmit it to Amazon for purposes of comparison, and if it compares favorably to Amazon’s price, Amazon’s special promotion promises a discount on the same item. In this way shoppers become spies, and stores, merely by letting customers through their doors, become complicit in their own undoing. It will not do to shrug that this is capitalism, because it is a particular kind of capitalism: the kind that entertains fantasies of monopoly. For all its technological newness, Amazon’s “vision” is disgustingly familiar. (“Amazon is coming to eat me,” a small publisher of fine religious books stoically told me a few weeks ago.) Nor will it do to explain that Amazon’s app is convenient, unless one is prepared to acquiesce in a view of American existence according to which its supreme consideration must be convenience. How easy must every little thing be? A record store in your neighborhood is also convenient, and so is a bookstore. There is also a sinister side to the convenience of online shopping: hours once spent in the sensory world, in the diversified satisfaction of material needs and desires, can now be surrendered to work. It appears to be a law of American life that there shall be no respite from screens. And so Amazon’s practices raise the old question of the cultural consequences of market piggishness. For there are businesses that are not only businesses, that also have non-monetary reasons for being, that are public goods. Their devastation in the name of profit may be economically legitimate, but it is culturally calamitous. In a word, wrong.
WHEN MY FRIEND at Melody Records told me about the death of his store, I was bereft. This was in part because he is my friend—after my father died, I received a letter from the Holocaust Museum informing me that he had made a donation in my father’s memory—and now he must fend for himself and his family and his staff in the American wreckage. But my dejection was owed also to the fact that this store was one of the primary scenes of my personal cultivation. For thirty years it stimulated me, and provided a sanctuary from sadness and sterility. “Going to Melody” was a reliable way of improving my mind’s weather. The people who worked there had knowledge and taste: they apprised me of obscure pressings of Frank Martin’s chamber music, and warned me about the sound quality of certain reissues of Lucky Thompson and Don Byas, and turned me on to old salsa and new fado. They even teased me about my insane affection for Rihanna. When they added DVDs to the store, my pleasures multiplied. (Also my amusements. Not long ago Marcel Ophuls’ great film arrived in the shop, and the box declared: “Woody Allen presents The Sorrow and The Pity.” Beat that.) Of course all these discs can be found online. But the motive of my visits to the store was not acquisitiveness, it was inquisitiveness. I went there to engage in the time-honored intellectual and cultural activity known as browsing.
IT IS A MATTER OF some importance that the nature of browsing be properly understood. Browsing is a method of humanistic education. It gathers not information but impressions, and refines them by brief (but longer than 29 seconds!) immersions in sound or language. Browsing is to Amazon what flaneurie is to Google Earth. It is an immediate encounter with the actual object of curiosity. The browser (no, not that one) is the flaneur in a room. Browsing is not idleness; or rather, it is active idleness—an exploring capacity, a kind of questing non-instrumental behavior. Browsing is the opposite of “search.” Search is precise, browsing is imprecise. When you search, you find what you were looking for; when you browse, you find what you were not looking for. Search corrects your knowledge, browsing corrects your ignorance. Search narrows, browsing enlarges. It does so by means of accidents, of unexpected adjacencies and improbable associations. On Amazon, by contrast, there are no accidents. Its adjacencies are expected and its associations are probable, because it is programmed for precedents. It takes you to where you have already been—to what you have already bought or thought of buying, and to similar things. It sells similarities. After all, serendipity is a poor business model. But serendipity is how the spirit is renewed; and a record store, like a bookstore, is nothing less than an institution of spiritual renewal.
—Leon Wieseltier, “Going To Melody,” The New Republic, 2/2/12
When I retire, I’m going to move to 19th century Paris. I’ll have a thirty-something mistress. And drink café au lait.
Frederic Chopin, 24 Preludes, Excerpt (1-7)
Maurizio Pollini, piano
Japan, 1982
**********
lagniappe
At last I have come into a dreamland.
—Harriet Beecher Stowe, in 1853, after arriving in Paris
*****
Want more? Here are the rest.
8-14
***
15-19
***
20-24
If you’re looking for sunshine, you’ll have to go elsewhere.
This is one of the saddest, darkest, most chilling things I know.
Nina Simone, “Black Is The Color Of My True Love’s Hair”
**********
lagniappe
reading table
[L]ife needs a lot of imaginative fixing, since it regularly fails to provide us with wild adventure and comfortable closure. ‘In life,’ Proust wrote in a notebook, ‘novels don’t finish.'”
—Michael Wood, “At the Movies,” London Review of Books, 1/5/12
With voices like these who needs microphones?
Davis Sisters, “On the Right Road,” live (TV Broadcast), c. 1964
**********
lagniappe
my back pages
Thirty-five years ago tonight—how could I possibly begin a sentence “thirty-five years ago tonight” and be referring to something that happened when I was, at least nominally, an adult? Well, this actually happened that night so I guess it must be possible. On that cold, clear January night, at a small church thirty miles north of Chicago, Suzanne and I were married. Yes, there was music. Tenor saxophonist Von Freeman and pianist John Young (now gone) played before and after the ceremony. The processional was Duke Ellington’s “In a Sentimental Mood,” played by Von alone. What did all this sound like? Thanks to my friend (and ace recording engineer) James C. Moore, these sounds can be heard, thirty-five years later, here (M4A—give it a few seconds).
passings
Johnny Otis, December 28, 1921-January 17, 2012, singer, songwriter, piano player, bandleader, disc jockey, TV host, etc.
“Willie and the Hand Jive” (The Johnny Otis Show), c. late 1950s
**********
lagniappe
Genetically, I’m pure Greek. Psychologically, environmentally, culturally, by choice, I’m a member of the black community.
***
Society wants to categorize everything, but to me it’s all African-American music. The music isn’t just the notes, it’s the culture—the way Grandma cooked, the way Grandpa told stories, the way the kids walked and talked.
Imagine what life would be like if people talked the way he played. Clear. Coherent. Concise. No wasted words. Or even syllables.
Hank Jones, “Willow Weep For Me,” live, New York (Carnegie Hall), 1994
music clip of the day 