music clip of the day
jazz/blues/rock/classical/gospel/more
Category: piano
2011
Monday, July 4, 2011
Happy Birthday, Pops!*
Louis Armstrong, “Basin Street Blues” (three takes)
#1 (live, 1959, Germany [Stuttgart])
Vodpod videos no longer available.***
#2 (live, 1953, New Orleans)
Vodpod videos no longer available.***
#3 (recording, 1928, Chicago)
Vodpod videos no longer available.**********
lagniappe
more
Louis Armstrong & His Hot Five, “West End Blues,” 1928, Chicago
*****
radio
The federal government, in its wisdom, gives you the day off so you can listen to Louis Armstrong.
—Phil Schaap, 7/2/11, Traditions in Swing, WKCR-FM
(broadcasting from Columbia University), which today is all Pops, all day
*****
reading table
Summer afternoon — summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.
—Henry James
*Louis Armstrong gave July 4th as his birthday, something that was determined, after his death, not to be true—at least not literally.
2011
Saturday, 6/25/11
nadir, n. the lowest point.
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
More? Here.
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lagniappe
rewarding the deserving
So often, it seems, when arts awards are announced, my initial reaction is: “Huh?” Not this time. The National Endowment of the Arts just announced their 2012 Jazz Masters Awards, which recognize, with Lifetime Honors, “living musicians for career-long achievement.” And the winners are Jack DeJohnette, Jimmy Owens, Charlie Haden, Sheila Jordan, and Von Freeman.
*****
reading table
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.
***
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.
***
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.
—Aleksandar Hemon, “The Aquarium: A Child’s Isolating Illness” (behind a paywall), New Yorker, 6/13 & 20/2011
2011
Thursday, 6/23/11
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
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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.”
2011
Wednesday, 6/22/11
His blues seem bottomless.
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
Vodpod videos no longer available.***
“The Nearness of You” (mislabeled “Misty” on YouTube), live (with Wild Bill Davis, piano; Bernard Upsom, bass; Frankie Dunlop, drums), 1982, Germany (Berlin)
Vodpod videos no longer available.One of my favorite moments comes at 2:48: “I hear ya, I hear ya.”
2011
Monday, 6/20/11
Here’s another take on the blues.
Ben Webster Quartet (BW, tenor saxophone; Stan Tracey, piano; Rick Laird, bass; Jackie Dougan, drums), “Poutin’,” live
Vodpod videos no longer available.More? Here. And here. And here.
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lagniappe
Sonny Rollins, Joe Lovano, et al., talk about Ben Webster
Vodpod videos no longer available.*****
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.
2011
Saturday, 6/4/11
What would it be like to wake up in the morning, have a cup of coffee, then sit down at the piano and try, again, to open this up, let it breathe, let it sing?
David Holzman, piano/recording session, 7/10/10
Music of Stefan Wolpe, Volume 6 (Bridge Records), 2011
Stefan Wolpe (1902-1972), Four Studies on Basic Rows (Passacaglia)
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lagniappe
I asked him to teach my class of young English student composers—feeling really that he at least would give the students one worthwhile class. He started talking about his Passacaglia, a piano work built of sections each based on a musical interval—minor second, major second, and so on. At once, sitting at the piano, he was caught up in a meditation on how wonderful these primary materials, intervals, were; playing each over and over again on the piano, singing, roaring, humming them, loudly, softly, quickly, slowly, short and detached or drawn out and expressive. All of us forgot time passing, when the class was to finish. As he led us from the smallest one, a minor second, to the largest, a major seventh—which took all afternoon—music was reborn, new light dawned, we all knew we would never again listen to music as we had. Stefan had made each of us experience very directly the living power of these primary elements. From then on indifference was impossible. Such a lesson most of us never had before or since, I imagine.
2011
Friday, 6/3/11
scenes from New Orleans
an occasional series
Neville Brothers (with Irvin Mayfield, trumpet)
“Indian Red,” live, New Orleans (Jazz Fest), 5/8/11
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lagniappe
art beat
Lance Rosenfield, New Orleans, 2/5/08 (young Mardi Gras Indian preparing for his first Mardi Gras with the Wild Magnolias)
2011
Tuesday, 5/31/11
favorites
(an occasional series)
She’s going to be a big star someday.
Nneka, live
Vodpod videos no longer available.(Originally posted 2/15/11.)
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It used to be that music came from a particular place. No more. Whether it’s Sohrab Saadat Ladjevardi (the Iranian saxophonist who’s lived in Germany, in Japan, and now in New York City [2/18/10]), or Burkina Electric (whose members come from Burkina Faso, from Germany, and from New York City [by way of Austria] [2/22/10]), or this singer, who’s lived (and has homes) in Nigeria and in Germany, much of today’s most intriguing music has its ears and heart and feet on more than one continent.
Nneka, “Heartbeat”
Take 1: recording/video
*****
Take 2: live, Philadelphia, 2009
*****
Take 3: J. Period Remix, featuring Talib Kweli
(Originally posted 2/27/10.)
2011
Monday, 5/23/11
flicks
(an occasional series)
Rosco Gordon & The Red Tops, “Chicken In The Rough”
Rock Baby, Rock It! (1957)
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lagniappe
radio
Lloyd Knibb Memorial Broadcast: Eastern Standard Time, WKCR-FM (broadcasting from Columbia University), 5/21/11 (archived).
music clip of the day 