Brave Combo played a wild set Sunday night (the 4th) at FitzGerald’s American Music Festival—everything from “Beer Barrel Polka” to a hard-rockin’ “Hokey Pokey” to a polka-inflected “Ode to Joy” (“Any Beethoven fans in the house?”) to a Tejano-style “America the Beautiful.” By the end of the 90-minute set, everybody’s IQ, it seemed, had gone up 15 points. Or was it down?
Today, celebrating our 300th post, we revisit a few favorites.
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3/12/10
Both Chicago blues artists. Both guitar players. Both influenced by other kinds of music.
Musical personalities? They could hardly be more different.
Buddy Guy, “Let Me Love You Baby,” live
*****
Fenton Robinson, “Somebody Loan Me A Dime,” live, 1977
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Back in the 1970s, when I was at Alligator Records, I had the pleasure of working with Fenton, co-producing his album I Hear Some Blues Downstairs (a Grammy nominee). He didn’t fit the stereotype of a bluesman. Gentle, soft-spoken, serious, introspective: he was all these things. He died in 1997.
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3/3/10
What other pop star has made such stunning contributions as a guest artist?
Sinead O’Connor
With Willie Nelson, “Don’t Give Up”
*****
With the Chieftains, “The Foggy Dew”
*****
With Shane MacGowan, “Haunted”
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5/28/2010
two takes
“La-La Means I Love You”
The Delfonics, live, 2008 (originally recorded 1968)
*****
Bill Frisell, live, New York (Rochester), 2007
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
Music . . . carr[ies] us smoothly across the tumult of experience, like water over rocks.
Muscular, unadorned, direct: his playing conjures the old Chicago, when there was no Millennium Park, no flowers blooming in the middle of the street, no dining al fresco (unless you had nowhere else to eat).
Fred Anderson, tenor saxophonist, co-founder of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), club owner (Velvet Lounge), March 22, 1929-June 24, 2010
Live, with DKV (Ken Vandermark, tenor saxophone; Kent Kessler, bass; Hamid Drake, drums), Chicago (Hideout), 2008
(Hamid Drake is among my favorite drummers; he’s the perfect foil, in his buoyancy and drive, for Anderson’s dark, searching, sometimes brooding lines.)
*****
“Spirits Came In,” live (with Kidd Jordan, tenor saxophone; William Parker, bass; Hamid Drake, drums), live, New York (Vision Festival), 2002
*****
Live (with Jaribu Shahid, bass; Hamid Drake, drums), France (Le Mans), 2005
The other day, as I waited for a train at an underground station in downtown Chicago, an older black guy started singing this song, accompanying himself on acoustic guitar, and at that moment everything—this song, this singer, this place—seemed all of a piece and I was no longer waiting.
Curtis Mayfield (with David Sanborn, alto saxophone; Hiram Bullock, guitar; David Lindley, steel guitar; George Duke, piano; Phillipe Saisse, keyboard; Tom Barney, bass; Omar Hakim, drums), “It’s All Right,” live (TV broadcast [Sunday Night]), 1989
Who could beat the one that Art Pepper and this guy—both followed Charlie Parker down the path of heroin addiction—led in the 1960s at San Quentin?
Frank Morgan (alto saxophone, with Claude Black, piano; Clifford Murphy, bass; Sean Dobbins, drums), “Well You Needn’t,” live, Ohio (Toledo), 2006
lagniappe
The greatest big band I ever played with was in San Quentin. Art Pepper and I were proud of that band. We had Jimmy Bunn and Frank Butler [whom Jo Jones called “the greatest drummer in the world”], and some other musicians who were known and some who weren’t, but they could play. We played every Saturday night for what they called a Warden’s Tour, which showed paying visitors only the cleanest cell blocks and exercise yards. But people would take that tour just to hear the band.
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Art and I played more when we were in San Quentin together than when we were on the outside.
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Art led the way for me to recover. He got out of prison before me and started traveling all over the world before I did. He showed me by example that it could be done, and I’ll always love him for that.
Muddy Waters, Saul Bellow, Steppenwolf Theater Company (John Malkovich, John Mahoney, Gary Sinise, Laurie Metcalf, et al.), Curtis Mayfield: a lot of great artists, musical and otherwise, have come out of Chicago in the last 50 years. Among the greatest is this group: the Art Ensemble of Chicago. While the horn players (Roscoe Mitchell, Joseph Jarman, Lester Bowie) got the lion’s share of the attention, what gave their music its juice—what made it dance—was (as you’ll hear) one of the finest rhythm sections ever: Malachi Favors, bass; Don Moye, drums.
Art Ensemble of Chicago, live, Poland (Warsaw), 1982 (in four parts)
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
(I talk about the AEC in the past tense because, while recordings are still released under this name from time to time, with two key members [they were all “key members”] now dead—trumpeter Lester Bowie [1999] and bassist Malachi Favors [2004]—it just isn’t [nor could it be] the same.)
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subscribe
Many things in life don’t quite seem, alas, to live up to their billing. It appears that the RSS (Real Simple Syndication) service that’s referenced in the righthand column (under “Subscribe”) may fall into this category—at least, that is, for those of us who are (as the expression goes) of a certain age. The problem seems to lie at the threshold: “real simple.”
Anyway, in the life’s-too-short, keep-it-simple-stupid department, if you’d like to “subscribe” to this blog, just send me an email (Richard McLeese/rmcleeselaw@aol.com) with “subscribe” in the subject line and—voila!—you’ll be added to an ever-growing email list that will have you receiving an e-notice whenever there’s a new blog post. As indicated in the “About” section (see righthand column), this whole thing started from a very small (like, oh, two, sometimes three, folks) email list, which then grew, then grew some more. One of many miraculous things about electronic communication is that there’s always room for one more.
Cab Calloway and His Orchestra; Nicholas Brothers, dancers; “Jumpin’ Jive”
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lagniappe
Fred Astaire told the [Nicholas] brothers that the “Jumpin’ Jive” number in Stormy Weather was the greatest number he had ever seen on film. He would have been more impressed had he known that the choreography was filmed all in one take.
—Constance Valis Hill, Tap Dancing America: A Cultural History (2010)
music clip of the day 