No one could convince me, when I’m listening to the clarinet, that any instrument is more beautiful.
Shabaka Hutchings, clarinet, with Kit Downes, keyboards; John Edwards, bass; Mark Sanders, drums; Leafcutter John, electronics; live, London (St. Sepulchre-without-Newgate), 7/14/11
Vodpod videos no longer available.Great music, unlike great food, doesn’t fill you up.
It leaves you wanting more.
Bach, Partita No. 2 in C minor, BWV 826
Martha Argerich, piano, live, Switzerland (Verbier Festival), 2008
Part 1
Vodpod videos no longer available.
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Part 2
Vodpod videos no longer available.More Bach? Here. And here. And here. And here. And here. And here. And here. And here. And here. And here. And here.
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reading table
Last night, opening a book at random, I came upon this—another reminder that Emily Dickinson, surely one of my desert-island writers, takes a backseat to no one when it comes to strangeness.
I see thee better — in the Dark —
I do not need a Light —
The Love of Thee — a Prism be —
Excelling Violet —I see thee better for the Years
That hunch themselves between —
The Miner’s Lamp — sufficient be —
To nullify the Mine —And in the Grave — I see Thee best —
Its little Panels be
Aglow — All ruddy — with the Light
I held so high, for Thee —What need of Day —
To those whose Dark — hath so — surpassing Sun —
It deem it be — Continually —
At the Meridian?—Emily Dickinson
Happy Birthday, Thelonious!
Thelonious Monk, composer, pianist, bandleader
October 10, 1917-February 17, 1982
Monk’s music—its exquisite mix of logic and lyricism—sometimes makes me think of Mozart.
“’Round Midnight” (AKA “’Round About Midnight”) (T. Monk)
Take 1: Bill Evans Trio (BE, piano; Eddie Gomez, bass; Marty Morrell, drums), live, Sweden, 1970
Vodpod videos no longer available.***
Take 2: Don Pullen (piano), rec. 1984 (Don Pullen Plays Monk)
Vodpod videos no longer available.***
Take 3: Milt Jackson (vibes), live, Japan, 1990
Vodpod videos no longer available.More Monk? Here. And here. And here. And here.
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
If it wasn’t for music, man, life wouldn’t be nothing—it’s all about music.
—Thelonious Monk
*****
Sonny Rollins talks about Monk:
Vodpod videos no longer available.*****
radio
All Monk, all day: WKCR-FM (broadcasting from Columbia University).
It’s easy to forget, sometimes, just how great somebody could be.
B.B. King, “How Blue Can You Get?”
Live, Sing Sing Prison (Ossining, New York), 1972
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lagniappe
last night
W. S. Merwin, who just finished a term as U.S. Poet Laureate, gave a reading at Chicago’s downtown library, where he talked about this and that:
The English language is a great dump. Everything that has come into it has stayed there.
***
Poetry begins . . . with listening.
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I wanted to be open . . . to anything that sounded like poetry.
***
To animals the meaning is the sound—and that’s pretty close to poetry.
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Time is one of the great human fictions.
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Many of the most important things we do are not calculated. They take us by surprise.
***
What the arts are made of is nothing but pure attention.
*****
radio
Happy (100th) Birthday, Papa Jo! WCKR-FM’s Centennial Festival, mentioned Monday, continues until noon tomorrow.
serendipity
The other night, as I listened to the radio,* this (“Patient Observation”) floated out of the speakers.
Falling From Trees, Neon Productions, music by Peter Broderick
Premiered at The Place, London, 1/09
Excerpt, Part 2, “Patient Observation”
Vodpod videos no longer available.***
Full Length
Vodpod videos no longer available.***
Falling From Trees is a 30-minute production set in a psychiatric hospital that delves into the mind of a resident patient. The piece explores how a neurological disease can alter your sense of self and relationship to the world and people around you. Peter Broderick’s score has been created solely on piano and strings; it is also the first time Broderick has created music specifically for dance.
*Mudd Up! with DJ/Rupture, WFMU-FM, Monday, 8 p.m. (EST), archived shows here
three takes
Blues guitarists—great ones, anyway—aren’t instrumentalists; they’re singers with two voices.
“Born Under A Bad Sign” (W. Bell, B.T. Jones)
Albert King, live, Sweden, 1980
Vodpod videos no longer available.***
Albert King, recording, 1967 (Stax)
Vodpod videos no longer available.***
Jimi Hendrix, recorded in 1969 (Blues, 1994)
Vodpod videos no longer available.What makes this last take effective? Part of it is the phrasing: Jimi, like Albert, doesn’t play anything that couldn’t be sung.
More Albert? Here.
Don Byron New Gospel Quintet (DB, tenor saxophone & clarinet; DK Dyson, vocals; Xavier Davis, piano; Brad Jones, bass; Pheeroan akLaff, drums), “Precious Lord” (T. A. Dorsey), live, Brazil (São Paulo), 2010
Vodpod videos no longer available.Last night I heard these folks live at the University of Chicago. Whenever I go out and hear someone, I’m reminded, again, that even (especially?) today, when records and the ’net make more music more available than ever before, there’s no substitute for live music. No recording offers the textures and nuances of a great live performance. (Never, for instance, have I heard a recording that truly reproduces the sounds of a drum kit, much less the interplay between horn and drums.) Not only is there more to hear live, your focus is sharper: you know you won’t have another opportunity to experience these sounds. And when you go to a club or a concert hall, you become, for that night, a member of an ad hoc musical community—something you can’t do sitting in your living room.
Morton Feldman, For Christian Wolff (flute, piano, celesta; 1986)
Vodpod videos no longer available.Listening to this, you can find it hard to remember, after an hour or so, what the world sounded like before it began playing.
More? Here. And here. And here. And here. And here. And here.
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lagniappe
Imagine a long, narrow hallway with paintings—subtle, shimmering abstracts by Mark Rothko—hung along both walls. Imagine walking through the hallway, stopping to examine one painting closely before moving on to the next. Imagine the hallway extends for three miles without an exit. This should give you some idea of what listening to For Christian Wolff is like. What might be hell to some people could be an all-too-brief time spent in paradise for others.
—Art Lange, Fanfare, July/August 2009
*****
At the beginning of Morton Feldman’s “For Christian Wolff” at the Alternative Museum last Sunday afternoon, Nils Vigeland – who played the piano and celesta to Eberhard Blum’s flute – invited listeners with other engagements or expired patience to leave at will.
The few who did walk out before this three-and-a-half-hour musical experience was over neither insulted the spirit of the late Mr. Feldman’s piece nor necessarily missed anything. This music, with its trancelike exposition of simple intervals, can haunt one as much in one hour as it can in three.
“For Christian Wolff” is music whose internal clock has stopped. It offers us the moment, invites us to forget what has already happened and discourages any curiosity about the future. Mr. Wolff was on hand to honor his late colleague. His introductory words – which said little about either the music, the composer or himself – seemed terribly appropriate to the occasion.
***
“For Christian Wolff” . . . gives us a deflected image of silence. Like the shadows of Plato’s cave, it is a corporeal flicker of pure nothingness – the kind of music that in the heavens surely sets the toes of gods to tapping.
—Bernard Holland, New York Times, 4/1/90
Happy (85th) Birthday, Trane!
John Coltrane, September 23, 1926-July 17, 1967
John Coltrane Quartet (JC, tenor saxophone; McCoy Tyner, piano; Jimmy Garrison, bass; Elvin Jones, drums), “I Want To Talk About You,” live, Sweden (Stockholm), 1962
Vodpod videos no longer available.More? Here. And here. And here. And here.
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lagniappe
radio
All Trane, all day: WKCR-FM (broadcasting from Columbia University).
music clip of the day 