piano | music clip of the day

Category: piano

Friday, 1/20/12

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

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lagniappe

Genetically, I’m pure Greek. Psychologically, environmentally, culturally, by choice, I’m a member of the black community.

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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.

—Johnny Otis

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Wednesday, 1/11/12

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

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Monday, 1/9/12

What do you get when you combine a pianist who plays with the percussive intensity of a drummer and a drummer who plays with the melodic buoyancy of a pianist?

Cecil Taylor (piano), Max Roach (drums), live
New York (Columbia University), 2000

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lagniappe

art beat: more from Thursday’s stop at the Art Institute of Chicago (after a hearing at the nearby federal court building)

Mark Rothko, Painting (1953-54)

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Saturday, 1/7/12

Roy Hargrove Quintet,* “Strasbourg/Saint Denis,” live, Paris, 2008

What better way to begin the new year than with live music, which is what I did last Sunday (with my wife Suzanne and older son Alex), catching these guys at Chicago’s Jazz Showcase, where they played an ebullient set for the overflow crowd.

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lagniappe

reading table

In January baseball lives in the imagination.

Now he was stuck at this ramshackle ballpark between a junkyard and an adult bookstore on the interstate outside Peoria.

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“The shortstop is a source of stillness at the center of the defense. He projects this stillness and his teammates respond.”

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When your moment came, you had to be ready, because if you fucked up, everyone would know whose fault it was. What other sport not only kept a stat as cruel as the error but posted it on the scoreboard for everyone to see?

—Chad Harbach, The Art of Fielding (2011)

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*RH, trumpet; Justin Robinson, alto saxophone; Gerald Clayton, piano; Danton Boller, bass; Montez Coleman, drums

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2012

Sunday, 1/1/12

Dionne goes to church.

Dionne Warwick, “Up Where We Belong,” live, c. 1985
New Hope Baptist Church, Newark, New Jersey
Ann Drinkard Moss (Dionne’s aunt), Choir Director

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lagniappe

art beat

Helen Frankenthaler, December 12, 1928-December 27, 2011

Mountains and Sea (1952)

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2011

Saturday, 12/31/11

more favorites from the past year

I sometimes feel as if I’m making my way, page by page, through a book titled The 10,000 Musical Performances You Must Hear Before You Die. Rarely does a week go by that I’m not astonished, at least once, by something I’ve never heard before. Yesterday it was this tiny gem.*

Sergei Prokofiev, Vision Fugitive No. 18, Con una dolce lentezza
Sviatoslav Richter (1915-1997), piano

Vodpod videos no longer available.

*S. Richter, Richter Rediscovered: Carnegie Hall Recital 1960 (RCA)

(Originally posted 5/5/11.)

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Classical music would be better off if folks quit calling it “classical music.”

Arnold Schoenberg, Op. 19, Six Little Piano Pieces
Michel Beroff, piano, live

Vodpod videos no longer available.

(Originally posted 6/23/11.)

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2011

Monday, 12/26/11

This week we revisit a few favorites from the past year.

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[D]ance first and think afterwards . . . . It’s the natural order.

—Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (1953, 1955 [English-language premiere])

Al Minns & Leon James, New York (Savoy Ballroom, Harlem), 1950s

Vodpod videos no longer available.

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lagniappe

art beat

Helen Levitt, New York, c. 1940

(Originally posted 1/11/11.)

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2011

Thursday, 12/22/11

John Coltrane, Dorothy Love Coates, this guy: the genre makes no difference; some folks play like (as Buddhists put it) their hair is on fire.

Bach, Partita No. 4 in D Major, BMV 828
Glenn Gould, live, Canada, 1981

1: Ouverture

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2: Allemande

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3: Courante

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4: Aria

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5: Sarabande

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6: Menuet

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7: Gigue

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lagniappe

heaven, n. a condition or place of great happiness, delight, or pleasure. E.g., WKCR-FM’s annual Bach Festival, which begins today, at 3 p.m., and runs until midnight New Year’s Eve.

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2011

Wednesday, 12/21/11

La Monte Young, The Well-Tuned Piano

Part 1

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Part 2

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Part 3

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Part 4

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Part 5

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lagniappe

Minimalism proper begins with La Monte Young, the master of the drone. He was born in 1935 in a tiny dairy community in Idaho, and spent his childhood listening to the secret music of the wide-open landscape—the microtonal chords of power lines, the harsh tones of drills and lathes, the wailing of far-off trains, the buzzing songs of grasshoppers, the sound of the wind moving over Utah Lake and whistling through the cracks of his parents’ log cabin. In 1940 he moved to Los Angeles with his family. As he later said, he fell in love with California’s ‘sense of space, sense of time, sense of reverie, sense that things could take a long time, that there was always time.’

—Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (2007)