Dionne Warwick, “Don’t Make Me Over” (B. Bacharach & H. David), 1962 Billboard Hot 100 #21, R&B #5
TV broadcast
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Recording
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When I first began, the kind of music I was recording was so unorthodox. It was like nothing else that was being played on radio at the time, and most people said, ‘Well, she won’t be around that long.’
Paul Motian, drummer, composer, collaborator, bandleader March 25, 1931-November 22, 2011
Paul Motian Trio (PM, drums; Joe Lovano, saxophone; Bill Frisell, guitar), “It Should’ve Happened a Long Time Ago” (P. Motian), live, New York (Village Vanguard), 2005
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lagniappe
Sometimes he would strip a beat to absolute basics, the sound of brushes on a dark-toned ride cymbal and the abrupt thump of his low-tuned kick drum. Generally, a listener could locate the form, even when Mr. Motian didn’t state it explicitly.
“With Paul, there was always that ground rhythm, that ancient jazz beat lurking in the background,” said the pianist Ethan Iverson, one of the younger bandleaders who played with and learned from him toward the end.
Mr. Motian’s final week at the [Village] Vanguard was with Mr. Osby and Mr. Kikuchi, in September. “He was an economist: every note and phrase and utterance counted,” Mr. Osby said on Tuesday. “There was nothing disposable.”
Take 2: remix by Organized Noize Dungeon Family (Big Boi) (released 7/24/11)
Vodpod videos no longer available.
(Originally posted 7/26/11.)
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Today we remember him with a mix of new clips and old favorites.
Gil Scott-Heron, April 1, 1949-May 27, 2011
“The Bottle,” live, Jamaica (Montego Bay, Reggae Sunsplash), 1983 Cool Runnings: The Reggae Movie (1983)
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I’m New Here (2010)
“Where Did The Night Go”
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“Me And The Devil” (Robert Johnson)
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It’s a remix world.
“New York Is Killing Me” (2010), Chris Cunningham remix
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Here’s the original track, followed by a couple more remixes.
Vodpod videos no longer available.
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With Nas
Vodpod videos no longer available.
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With Mos Def
Vodpod videos no longer available.
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langiappe
musical thoughts
In the dark times, will there also be singing? Yes, there will be singing. About the dark times.
—Bertolt Brecht
(Originally posted 5/30/11.)
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Lloyd Knibb, drummer(Skatalites, etal.)
March 8, 1931-May 12, 2011
Lloyd Knibb’s importance to Jamaican music can’t be overstated. The inventor of the ska beat at Coxson Dodd’s Studio One, Knibb created a sound that spread like wildfire the world over.
—Carter Van Pelt, host, Eastern Standard Time, WKCR-FM
kaleidoscopic, adj. 1. changing form, pattern, color, etc., in a manner suggesting a kaleidoscope. 2. continually shifting from one set of relations to another. E.g., Azealia Banks’ “212” (2011).
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lagniappe
reading table
In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing, and running the risk of flattening all communication into a single, homogeneous surface, the function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of written language.
—Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium (1988 [trans. Patrick Creagh])
Janis Joplin, “Get It While You Can” (J. Ragovoy)
Live, TV broadcast (The Dick Cavett Show), 1970
If she had lived, what would she sound like, at 68, today?
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lagniappe
reading table
We shall not ever meet them bearded in heaven,
Nor sunning themselves among the bald of hell;
If anywhere, in the deserted schoolyard at twilight,
Forming a ring, perhaps, or joining hands
In games whose very names we have forgotten.
Come, memory, let us seek them there in the shadows.
—Donald Justice, “On the Death of Friends in Childhood”
Howard Tate, singer, August 13, 1939-December 2, 2011
“Get It While You Can” (J. Ragovoy)
Live (with Jerry Ragovoy, piano), Paris, 2003
Like a lot of performances, this gets better as it goes along. At first he seems a bit tentative. He’s trying to find his way. Then, at around 1:07, he starts to settle in and, before long, he’s inhabiting the song. If this were a recording session and I had a hand in it, I know what I’d do as this was ending. I’d ask them, without missing a beat, to keep going: “Again, from the top.”
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Recording, 1967
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lagniappe
Howard Tate, 72, an immensely talented soul singer who dropped out of the music business in frustration after the often brilliant albums he made in the late 1960s and early 1970s failed to reach a wide audience, died Friday of multiple myeloma and leukemia in his apartment in Burlington City.
Born in Georgia and raised in Philadelphia, Mr. Tate returned to recording and performing in the 2000s after a chance encounter in a South Jersey supermarket led to his rediscovery.
Working with Philadelphia producer and songwriter Jerry Ragovoy, Mr. Tate recorded one undeniably classic album: Get It While You Can, a 1966 release on Verve whose title track became much better known when sung by Janis Joplin.
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Neither his debut nor the subsequent Reaction (1969) and Howard Tate (1972) earned him a large audience. Mr. Tate, who had sung early in his career with organist Bill Doggett and with his fellow North Philadelphia soul man Garnet Mimms (in the doo-wop group The Gainors), wound up disappearing from the music business altogether – an absence that made his legend grow stronger.
Without music in his life, Mr. Tate, who was raised in the neighborhood around 13th and Norris Streets, sold insurance and raised six children. He started drinking after his daughter was killed in a fire in his Wynnefield home in 1976, he told The Inquirer in 2004. After his marriage crumbled, his life took a harrowing turn.
“I turned to cocaine, and it was the worst thing I could have ever done,” he said. “It destroyed my willpower. I became homeless, roaming around those drug neighborhoods in Camden. I actually thought I was going to be found dead in an alley. It was like I was waiting to die.”
Instead, however, the Baptist preacher’s son turned to the Lord. In 1994, he founded the Gift of the Cross Church and began preaching in living rooms in West Philadelphia and South Jersey.
Presumed dead by many, he ran into a former member of Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes in a Willingboro supermarket on New Year’s Day in 2001, who told him that an oldies DJ, Phil Casem of WNJC in Sewell, N.J., had been making inquiries about his whereabouts on the radio.
Two years later, Mr. Tate returned with Rediscovered, an album that included “Either Side of the Same Town,” a song Elvis Costello and Ragovoy, who died earlier this year, wrote for Mr. Tate. With his remarkable voice miraculously preserved after nearly three decades out of action, he returned to performing, and released two more albums, A Portrait of Howard (2006) and Blue Day (2008).
Mimms, now pastor of the Bottom Line Revival Church in Cheltenham, recalled Tuesday the days when he sang lead and Mr. Tate sang tenor in the Gainors, the quintet that came together after Mimms got out of the U.S. Army in 1958.
“We were very close,” said Mimms, who introduced Mr. Tate to Ragovoy and had his own Ragovoy-penned classic soul hit, “Cry Baby,” in 1963.
Mr. Tate “was a very nice dresser, and very famous with the young ladies,” Mimms said. “He was an all outgoing guy, and his falsetto was unique. I had a high range myself, but I couldn’t do that falsetto stuff he did. He could come out of his natural, and go right into it. He had a great voice.”
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