You may find it difficult to remember someone’s favorite foods or to recall their favorite movies. But their favorite music? Today’s my mother’s birthday; she’s been gone a long time. This guy she loved.
The King Cole Trio (Nat King Cole, piano & vocals; Oscar Moore, guitar; Johnny Miller, bass), “It is Better to Be by Yourself” (Breakfast in Hollywood, 1946)
[T]he things we feel in life are not experienced in the form of ideas, and so their translation into literature, an intellectual process, may give an account of them, explain them, analyse them, but cannot recreate them as music does, its sounds seeming to take on the inflections of our being, to reproduce that inner, extreme point of sensation which is that thing that causes us the specific ecstasy we feel from time to time and which, when we say ‘What a beautiful day! What beautiful sunshine!’, is not conveyed at all to our neighbour, in whom the same sun and the same weather set off quite different vibrations.
—Marcel Proust, The Prisoner (1925), trans. Carol Clark
On July 29, 1946, Charlie Parker was arrested in Los Angeles, after starting a fire in his hotel room. Earlier that day, unable to score heroin, scratchy, drunk on whiskey, he recorded this track, which, depending on your point of view, is either one of the worst records he ever made (Parker’s view) or, despite (because of?) its raggedyness, among the greatest (Charles Mingus’s opinion). After his arrest he was confined, for six months, at Camarillo State Mental Hospital.
Charlie Parker, “Lover Man” (CP, alto saxophone; Howard McGhee, trumpet; Jimmy Bunn, piano; Bob Kesterson, bass; Roy Porter, drums), rec. 7/29/46
The cafeteria in the hospital’s basement was the saddest place in the world, with its grim neon lights and gray tabletops and the diffuse forboding of those who had stepped away from suffering children to have a grilled cheese sandwich.
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The next day, I set up an iPod dock and played music, not only in the willfully delusional belief that music would be good for a painful, recovering brain but also to counter the soul-crushing hospital noise: the beeping of monitors, the wheezing of respirators, the indifferent chatter of nurses in the hallway, the alarm that went off whenever a patient’s condition abruptly worsened.
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One early morning, driving to the hospital, I saw a number of able-bodied, energetic runners progressing along Fullerton Avenue toward the sunny lakefront, and I had a strong physical sensation of being in an aquarium: I could see out, the people outside could see me (if they chose to pay attention), but we were living and breathing in entirely different environments.
Classical music would be better off if folks quit calling it “classical music.”
Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951), Op. 19, Six Little Piano Pieces
Michel Beroff, piano, live
Vodpod videos no longer available.
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
My music must be short.
Lean! In two notes, not built, but “expressed.”
And the result is, I hope, without stylized and sterilized drawn-out sentiment.
That is not how man feels; it is impossible to feel only one emotion.
Man has many feelings, thousands at a time, and these feelings add up no more than apples and pears add up. Each goes its own way.
This multicoloured, polymorphic, unlogical nature of our feelings, and their associations, a rush of blood, reactions in our senses, in our nerves; I must have this in my music.
It should be an expression of feeling, as if really were the feeling, full of unconscious connections, not some perception of “conscious logic.”
Arnett Cobb, tenor saxophonist, August 10, 1918-March 24, 1989
“Texas Blues,” live (with Ellis Marsalis, piano; Chris Severin, bass; Johnny Vidacovich, drums), 1984, New Orleans
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“The Nearness of You” (mislabeled “Misty” on YouTube), live (with Wild Bill Davis, piano; Bernard Upsom, bass; Frankie Dunlop, drums), 1982, Germany (Berlin)
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One of my favorite moments comes at 2:48: “I hear ya, I hear ya.”
Sonny Rollins, Joe Lovano, et al., talk about Ben Webster
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mail
You are sending out some great stuff at all times. . . . It’s always interesting, and the one you sent out today, Onmutu Mechanicks, was especially cool, since I hadn’t ever crossed their path.
music clip of the day 