After finishing, at midnight, their 24-hour Coleman Hawkins birthday celebration, the indefatigable folks at WKCR-FMdidn’t rest for even a minute. Instead they embarked on a 4-day, 96-hour celebration of pianist Teddy Wilson’s centennial.
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Happy Thanksgiving!
MCOTD gives thanks for
Lester Bowie and
Blossom Dearie and
The Dirtbombs;
for Mingus, Miles, Monk,
Bach, Beethoven, Bruckner, Bartok;
for WKCR-FM and WFMU-FM;
for Morton Feldman and
Elliott Carter and
Alfred Schnittke and
Tristan Murail;
for Hound Dog Taylor, Junior Wells, Sonny Boy Williamson, Magic Sam;
for The Ex, The Heptones, The Swan Silvertones, The Impressions, The Art Ensemble of Chicago;
for Von Freeman and Art Pepper and Vernard Johnson;
for Friedrich Gulda and Martha Argerich, Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Ursula Oppens;
for Ed Blackwell and
for Phillip Wilson;
for Julius Hemphill and
Henry Threadgill and
D’Angelo and
Dorothy Love Coates;
and for all the others—singers, musicians, composers, painters, photographers, printmakers, novelists, poets—who have graced this site;
and for you, who have found your way here, somehow, from Mongolia and Slovenia and Jamaica and Saudi Arabia; from Myanmar and Syria; from Angola, India, Ethiopia; from Finland, Thailand, Ireland, Iceland, and over 100 other countries.
Count Basie Orchestra (feat. Jimmy Rushing [vocals] & Herschel Evans [tenor saxophone]), “When My Dreamboat Comes Home,” live (radio broadcast), New York (Savoy Ballroom, Harlem), 1937
The other day, driving to Rockford for a hearing in a murder case, listening to this for the first time, I couldn’t quit hitting the repeat button: “and once again the fields of gloom are adroitly plowed under.”
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
What music from today will folks be listening to in 2087?
John Cage, composer, September 5, 1912-August 12, 1992
Today, celebrating his centennial, we revisit past clips.
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10/9/09
No matter where you are, this landscape is just around the corner.
John Cage (1912-1992), In a Landscape (1948); Stephen Drury, piano
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
Music is a means of rapid transportation.
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What I’m proposing, to myself and other people, is what I often call the tourist attitude—that you act as though you’ve never been there before. So that you’re not supposed to know anything about it. If you really get down to brass tacks, we have never been anywhere before.
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As far as consistency of thought goes, I prefer inconsistency.
—John Cage
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5/22/10
Here’s a piece that sounds different every time you hear it.
John Cage, 4’ 33” (1952); David Tudor, piano
lagniappe
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musical thoughts
I didn’t wish it [4′ 33″] to appear, even to me, as something easy to do or as a joke. I wanted to mean it utterly and be able to live with it.
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Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music.
Monday, n. the day the weekly tide of confusion rolls in.
How about something simple?
John Cage (1912-1992), Six Melodies (for violin and keyboard; dedicated to Josef & Anni Albers), 1950; Annelie Gahl (violin) & Klaus Lang (electric piano), 2010
Leonard Cohen, “Everybody Knows,” live, London, 2008
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lagniappe
talking (Canadian TV, 1997)
(Yeah, the interviewer is often obnoxious; but, despite [because of?] that, this is one of the more intriguing “celebrity interviews” I’ve heard.)
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reading table
Returning To My Cottage
by Wang Wei (699-759 [trans. David Young])
A bell in the distance
the sound floats
down the valley
one by one
woodcutters and fishermen
stop work, start home
the mountains move off
into darkness
alone, I turn home
as great clouds beckon
from the horizon
the wind stirs delicate vines
and water chestnut shoots
catkin fluff sails past
in the marsh to the east
new growth
vibrates with color
it’s sad
to walk in the house
and shut the door.
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radio: 72 hours of Pres & Bird
Celebrating the birthdays of Lester Young (8/27) and Charlie Parker (8/29), WKCR-FM(broadcasting from Columbia University) will be playing their music all day today, tomorrow, and Wednesday.
music clip of the day 