music clip of the day

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Category: saxophone

2009

Saturday, 10/17/09

Charlie Parker & Igor Stravinsky

Walk into any record store and one would have been over here and the other over there. But that made no difference to the kinship they felt.

*****

Jazz musicians sat up in their seats when Stravinsky’s music started playing; he was speaking something close to their language. When Charlie Parker came to Paris in 1949, he marked the occasion by incorporating the first notes of the Rite into his solo on ‘Salt Peanuts’. Two years later, playing Birdland in New York, the bebop master spotted Stravinsky at one of the tables and immediately incorporated a motif from Firebird into ‘Koko’, causing the composer to spill his scotch in ecstasy.—Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (2007)

*****

Charlier Parker & Dizzy Gillespie, “Hot House,” live (TV broadcast), 1952

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971), The Firebird (excerpt; 1910), Berlin Philharmonic (Simon Rattle conducting), live, 2005

*****

Want to try a little experiment?

Play the Parker clip for about, say, 10-20 seconds. Then go to the Stravinsky clip and do the same. Then back. And forth. And back. And forth.

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2009

Friday, 10/9/09

Here the World Saxophone Quartet brings it all back home, performing in the high school gymnasium in Lovejoy (AKA Brooklyn), Illinois, a little town (with an interesting history) near St. Louis, where baritone sax player Hamiet Bluiett, now in his 60s, grew up. (If you have time for only one of these clips, check out Part 3, where everyone, including the kids, gets down with the O’Jays’ “For The Love Of Money.”)

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

*****

For another take on the first of these pieces (“Hattie Wall”)—this one featuring Bill T. Jones, dancer/choreographer extraodinaire—go here.

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2009

Monday, 9/21/09

Here, on this last day of summer, saxophonist Albert Ayler takes the Gershwin classic to the far shores of the blues—where (as you’ll hear) the livin’ most certainly ain’t easy.

Albert Ayler, “Summertime”

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lagniappe

reading table

Yesterday, I happened upon this radio interview with New Yorker literary critic (and Harvard professor) James Wood, which I found quite interesting (but then, as an old English Lit major [and one-time high school English teacher], I’m a sucker for this sort of stuff). (Bonus: It’s followed by an interview with director Jane Campion, talking about her new John Keats/Fanny Brawne movie, Bright Star. Oh, and speaking of poetry: If you’d like to receive, via email, a daily dose of one of the finest Japanese haiku poets, you can subscribe to “Issa Haiku-a-Day” here [you’ll be glad you did].)

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2009

Tuesday, 9/15/09

Cigarettes, Scotch, amphetamines, cocaine: alto saxophonist Paul Desmond consumed them all, often in prodigious quantities. But that didn’t muddy his playing. It would be hard to find, anywhere in music, a sound more pure.

Paul Desmond, live, Monterey (California), 1975

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lagniappe

“I have won several prizes as the world’s slowest alto player, as well as a special award in 1961 for quietness.”—Paul Desmond

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2009

Friday, 9/11/09

New Orleans Music Festival/day 2 of 3

If spirit could be sold, New Orleans would be rich.

Rebirth Brass Band, live, New Orleans, 2009

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lagniappe

“Brass band musicians are a wild bunch. They’re hard to control. The street funk that the Rebirth [Brass Band] plays definitely isn’t traditional—it might be in thirty years time.”—Lajoie “Butch” Gomez (in Mick Burns, Keeping the Beat on the Street: The New Orleans Brass Band Renaissance [2006])

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2009

Tuesday, 9/8/09

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 of 4

Part 2 of 4

Part 3 of 4

Part 4 of 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 (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.

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