Is the greatest electric guitar player of all time a guy who died in 1942?
Charlie Christian, July 29, 1916-March 2, 1942
“Waiting for Benny” (1941 [recorded at a Benny Goodman session, while the engineers were testing the equipment])
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Live, New York (Minton’s), 1941
“Swing To Bop”
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“Stompin’ at the Savoy”
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TV news piece, Oklahoma City, 2007 (following CC’s induction into the Jazz Hall of Fame)
New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, 2010/part 2
Scene 1: Parade of the New Orleans Social Aid and Pleasure Club
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Scene 2: Chouval Bwa
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Scene 3: Trombone Shorty and Orleans Avenue, “Backatown” (record-store performance)
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Scene 4: Pinettes Brass Band (outside another record store)
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New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, 2010/part 1
Scene 1: Sousaphone Parade
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Scene 2: Brian Blade & The Fellowship
Want more Brian Blade? Here.
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Scene 3: Mardi Gras Indians (Members of the Golden Star Hunters, Carrolton Hunters, et al.), Backstage
Want more Mardi Gras Indians? Here.
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Me and a million other dudes said ‘later’ to picking cotton.—Wilson Pickett (in Gerri Hershey, Nowhere to Run: The Story of Soul Music [1994])
Wilson Pickett, live, Germany, 1968
“Stagger Lee”
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“Funky Broadway”
Want more? Here.
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listening room
The UPS guy left a tiny box yesterday—the new albums by Roky Erickson and Gil Scott-Heron. Who’s next? Sly Stone?
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The Bobby Dylan clip was very nice and linked to Manfred Mann—sweet. Thanks.
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Thanks, Richard! Emails like yours are the main reason I have some energy every week to sit down and grind through another show. Many thanks.
—Kevin [Nutt, host of Sinner’s Crossroads on WFMU-FM, responding to an email notifying him of this mention]
Happy (111th) Birthday, Duke!
At least one day out of the year all musicans should just put their instruments down, and give thanks to Duke Ellington.
—Miles Davis
Duke Ellington and His Orchestra
“C Jam Blues,” 1942
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“Mood Indigo,” “Sophisticated Lady,” “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing),” “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore,” 1943
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It is becoming increasingly difficult to decide where jazz starts or where it stops, where Tin Pan Alley begins and jazz ends, or even where the borderline lies between between classical music and jazz. I feel there is no boundary line.
—Duke Ellington
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Radio Ellington: All Duke, All Day
WKCR-FM (broadcasting from Columbia University)
Imagine that you were talking with someone who’d been blind all his life.
How would you describe this guy’s act?
Wayne Cochran & the C.C. Riders, live (TV broadcast [The Jackie Gleason Show]), 1968
Happy Birthday, Mingus!
No jazz composer since Thelonious Monk has a stronger voice.
Lyrical beauty, inexhaustible drive, deep feeling: what more could you ask for?
Enormously influential, his music served as a bridge between the compositional elegance of Duke Ellington and the freewheeling rambunctiousness of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Henry Threadgill, David Murray, et al.
Charles Mingus Quintet (CM, bass; Dannie Richmond, drums; Eric Dolphy, alto saxophone, bass clarinet; Clifford Jordan, tenor saxophone; Jaki Byard, piano), live (TV broadcast), Belgium, 1964
“So Long, Eric”
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“Peggy’s Blue Skylight”
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“Meditations on Integration” (excerpt)
Want more? Here.
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. . . [Mingus’s] music was pledged to the abolition of all distinctions: between the composed and the improvised, the primitive and the sophisticated, the rough and the tender, the belligerent and the lyrical.—Geoff Dyer, But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz (1996)
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Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.
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I, myself, came to enjoy the players who didn’t only just swing but who invented new rhythmic patterns, along with new melodic concepts. And those people are: Art Tatum, Bud Powell, Max Roach, Sonny Rollins, Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Parker, who is the greatest genius of all to me because he changed the whole era around.
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In my music, I’m trying to play the truth of what I am. The reason it’s difficult is because I’m changing all the time.
—Charles Mingus
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Radio Mingus: all Mingus, all the time
In celebration of Mingus’s birthday, WKCR-FM (broadcasting from Columbia University) is playing his music all day.
The Rock ’ n’ Roll Guide To Getting Girls (excerpt)
“Treat Her Right”
Roy Head, live (TV broadcast), 1965
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Bob Dylan, live (TV studio, rehearsal [David Letterman Show]), 1984
street music
Milan
Saxophonist outside Duomo di Milano
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reading table
Hearing John Berryman read his poetry changed my life, as I said a while back. I was in college at the time. A year later, he was dead—a suicide (jumping off a bridge in Minneapolis, where he lived and taught). Here, in Dublin in 1967, he reads one of his Pulitzer-Prize-winning Dream Songs (29). Drunk, mannered, idiosyncratic: yes, yes, yes. Obscure at times to the point of opacity: yes. But also (to these ears) exquisitely controlled, deeply moving, utterly unforgettable.
(Want to read this yourself? Here.)
listening to history
The sound quality may be pretty raggedy, but that hardly matters—this is history.
Albert Ayler, tenor saxophone (“Love Cry,” “Truth Is Marching In,” “Our Prayer”), live, John Coltrane’s funeral, St. Peter’s Lutheran Church, New York, July 21, 1967
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Click for a clearer image.
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Pinelawn Memorial Park, Farmingdale, New York
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Trane was the father. Pharoah was the son. I was the holy ghost.—Albert Ayler
music clip of the day 