Monday, 9/17/12
street music: London
Dave Crowe, beatbox, 2011
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street music: London
Dave Crowe, beatbox, 2011
sounds of Cuba
Live, Santiago de Cuba, 6/21/10
sounds of Haiti
Rara music, live, Leogane
The parade never ends.
Rebirth Brass Band, New Orleans (Treme Sidewalk Steppers Annual Second Line Parade), 2/6/12
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lagniappe
A highly anticipated moment of the social aid and pleasure club parade season is when the Treme Sidewalk Steppers emerge from the African-American Museum. First, comes the call of the trumpet and then a flash of color can be spied as a member waves a feathered fan and dances out the door. One by one, the Steppers strut their stuff as they energetically file down the sidewalk with a “look-at-me” attitude. Those in the waiting crowd on Gov. Nicholls Street, peer through the iron fence that surrounds the lovely building and gardens, trying to get a better look at the spectacle. They cheer at the triumph.
The Treme Sidewalk Steppers . . . was established in 1994 by a group of friends who were enthusiastic second line followers.
“We’d always go to the parades and parade on the sidewalk and have fun,” Sidewalk Steppers president Charlie Brown explains, “so we decided we might as well come up with our own.”
Brown as well as some dozen or so originators, including New Birth Brass Band’s Tanio Hingle and Kerry “Fat Man” Hunter, all hailed from the Treme so the name of their club was a natural. “That’s our neighborhood; that’s where we’re from,” Brown proudly states. “Being the oldest Black neighborhood in America and being raised around all these different musicians and just to have the culture makes it special to us. It’s in your blood–that’s what makes it so authentic with us.
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Since most of the club’s members grew up in the Treme neighborhood, they boast deep roots in and respect for the second-line culture. The Steppers take that base and serve it up with its certain, individual style and personality.
“We try to keep it in the tradition but we have our own little swagger,” Brown says. “We try to be unique in our dress and our ways. We love the fun in dancing and showing off our little parade gear. We take pride in it. We don’t take shortcuts with our parade.”
The Sidewalk Steppers’ outfits are usually specially designed and tailored for them rather than store-bought. Creating their decorative fans is a group effort that’s accomplished under the direction of original member Corey Holmes. . . .
While some clubs keep the colors of their outfits secret, the Treme Sidewalk Steppers declare them right on the route sheet . . .
“We want the people to know,” Brown explains. “Maybe our followers would like to dress in the colors we’re wearing. We invite that. We really love the people that love us and we appreciate them all. The followers made us–they made us as good as we are or are supposed to be.”
The Treme Sidewalk Steppers also kept the second liners in mind when drawing up the parade route. The procession primarily travels on wide thoroughfares like Basin Street, Broad Street, N. Claiborne Ave. and St. Bernard Ave. that offer the crowd room to move.
“We use main streets so people can be comfortable and we try to spread out so you can enjoy us and view us well,” he explains.
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“The Sidewalk Steppers mean everything to me,” Brown says with deep sincerity. “We give thanks to all the people who came before and how they gave this history to us and showed us the way.”
Some places actually exist because they could never be imagined.
Treme Sidewalk Steppers Second Line, Rebirth Brass Band (with guest Troy “Trombone Shorty” Andrews, trumpet), New Orleans, 2/1/09
Happy Mardi Gras!
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lagniappe
Mardi Gras in New Orleans (with Arthur Hardy)
I don’t know what these folks call this stuff, but one thing I’m sure of: it ain’t “world music.”
Sobanza Mimanisa (“Orchestra of Light”), “Kiwembo,” live
Democratic Republic of Congo (Kinshasa), c. 2005
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lagniappe
reading table
The 100 Most Powerless New Yorkers
Have you noticed that power lists, which have been spreading like the clap lately, from the Time 100 to the Forbes 500, tell you things you already know about the rich and famous and give publicity to people who already have more of it than they know what to do with? For the rest of us, here’s a power list to get 2012 going in the right direction. They’re in no particular order. (Like it really matters.)
1. Weed-delivery guys
The reason so many marijuana arrests are of black and Hispanic people is not because they smoke weed more. White New Yorkers, by the NYPD’s own numbers, have a higher per-capita rate of contraband when they’re arrested. However, white people stay safe in their apartments while colored folks deliver drugs to them. Delivering drugs puts you on the bottom of a pyramid scheme where you usually earn less than minimum wage, making you vulnerable to homicide and giving you about as much of a chance of becoming a rich kingpin as being a production assistant or a media intern gives you of becoming a celebrity. . . .
—Steven Thrasher, Village Voice, 1/11/12
Who needs a stage when you’ve got the subway?
“Diamonds And Pearls,” Washington, D.C.
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“Thin Line Between Love And Hate,” New York
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“Stand By Me,” Chicago
Today, in celebration of our second birthday, we revisit a few favorites from our first month.
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If I didn’t have kids, would my ears be stuck, forever, on “repeat”?
Here’s something my younger son Luke, who just started college, played for me recently, after first pronouncing it, with quiet but absolute authority, the best thing this guy has done (already Luke’s learned that what’s important isn’t to be right; it’s to seem right).
Lupe Fiasco, “Hip Hop Saved My Life,” live, Los Angeles, 2008
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And here’s a track my older son Alex played for me a couple weeks ago, before heading back to school.
Dirty Projectors, “Stillness Is The Move”
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Koan for aging parents: What is the sound of a childless house?
(Originally posted 9/14/09.)
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May, 2012
Nobel-Prize-winning economist devises a way to turn faces—images of them, that is—into marketable commodities: the more expressive the face, the greater the value.
March, 2013
Haiti is named one of the world’s wealthiest countries.
Arcade Fire, “Haiti” (Funeral, 2004)
(Originally posted 9/23/09.)
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Performances like this usually fall somewhere between disappointing and disastrous. So many things can—and usually do—go wrong when you take a bunch of folks who’re used to leading their own bands and throw them together onstage. People trip all over each another; flash trumps feeling. But this performance, with Albert King, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Paul Butterfield, and (at the end) B.B. King, has plenty of strong moments—some funny ones, too. Listen to Albert bark at Paul:“Turn around!” (0:39) And watch Albert outfox B.B. First he invites him back onstage (4:40) and then, just when B.B.’s about to take flight (5:55), he cuts him off—faster than you can say “wham”—with his own (wonderful) solo. So much for Emily Post.
Stevie Ray Vaughan, Albert King, Paul Butterfield, B.B. King, live, 1987
(Originally posted 9/18/09.)
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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])
(Originally posted 9/11/09.)
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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.)
(Originally posted 9/8/09.)
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Here—with a shout-out to my brother Don, with whom (at the age of 15) I saw the MC5 in Chicago’s Lincoln Park during the 1968 Democratic Convention (when nobody outside the Detroit/Ann Arbor area [including us] knew who they were)—is an awfully good cover, from what might seem an unlikely source, of one of their “greatest hits.”
Jeff Buckley, “Kick Out The Jams,” live, Chicago, 1995
And here, courtesy, apparently, of the Department of Defense, is (silent) footage of the scene in Lincoln Park on August 25, 1968—the day the MC5 (who appear here fleetingly) played.
(Originally posted 9/7/09.)
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If influence were compensable, Claude Jeter of the Swan Silvertones—a huge influence on Sam Cooke, Curtis Mayfield, Eddie Kendricks (Temptations), Al Green, even Paul Simon (who took inspiration from a line in the Swans’ “hit” “Mary, Don’t You Weep” [“I’ll be a bridge over deep water if you trust in my name”] when he wrote “Bridge Over Troubled Water”)—would have, when he passed earlier this year at the age of 94, died a wealthy man.
Swan Silvertones, “Only Believe,” live
New York Times obit
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lagniappe
When he leaves the house [in NYC], he whistles his favorite tune, ‘What A Friend We Have In Jesus,’ while greeting the assorted neighborhood junkies and prostitutes who knew him mainly as sometime manager of the [Hotel] Cecil. ‘What’s new, Jeter,’ they ask. ‘Nothing new, nothing good, just thank God for life up here with these heathens and muggers.’
—Anthony Heilbut, The Gospel Sound: Good New and Bad Times(1971)
(Originally posted 9/13/09.)
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Without a song, each day would be a century.
music clip of the day 