old stuff
The great thing about the 21st century is that it’s so easy to leave.
Count Basie Orchestra (Don Byas, tenor saxophone; Harry “Sweets” Edison and Buck Clayton, trumpets; Freddie Green, guitar; Jo Jones, drums, et al.), “Dance of the Gremlins,” “Swingin’ the Blues,” 1941
only rock ’n’ roll
The Ex & Brass Unbound,* live, Dublin, 2010
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lagniappe
last night
He read at the Art Institute of Chicago, where I sat rapt and happy.
Seamus Heaney, “Postscript,” Dublin, 2011
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*Mats Gustafsson (baritone saxophone), Ken Vandermark (tenor saxophone), Wolter Wierbos (trombone), Roy Paci (trumpet).
Over eleven hundred posts and still I haven’t even touched on so many who meant so much to me when I was young—younger than my sons are now.
Tim Buckley (1947-75), singer, songwriter, guitarist
“Venice Beach (Music Boats by the Bay),” live (TV show, Los Angeles), 1970
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“Sing A Song For You,” live (TV show, BBC), 1969
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“Gypsy Woman,” recording (Happy Sad), 1969
Some folks sing with their feet.
Duke Ellington Orchestra, Bunny Briggs (dance), Jon Hendricks (vocal), “David Danced Before the Lord with All His Might,” live, San Francisco (Grace Cathedral), 1965
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lagniappe
reading table
And David danced before the Lord with all his might . . .
—2 Samuel 6:14 (King James)
street music: New Orleans
Brass band, 5/12
riveting
Anton Bruckner (1824-96), Symphony No. 5 in B flat major; Berlin Philharmonic (Wilhelm Furtwangler, cond.), live, Berlin, 1942
(Yeah, I realize this performance took place in Nazi Germany during World War II and, no, I don’t have anything profound, or even interesting, to say about how such beauty and such horror could coexist.)
old stuff
Count Basie Orchestra (feat. Jimmy Rushing [vocals] & Herschel Evans [tenor saxophone]), “When My Dreamboat Comes Home,” live (radio broadcast), New York (Savoy Ballroom, Harlem), 1937
The other day, driving to Rockford for a hearing in a murder case, listening to this for the first time, I couldn’t quit hitting the repeat button: “and once again the fields of gloom are adroitly plowed under.”
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
What music from today will folks be listening to in 2087?
Rarely has dying sounded so joyous.
Glen David Andrews, “I’ll Fly Away”
Live, New Orleans (Zion Hill Baptist Church), 2008
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lagniappe
reading table
[P]eople exist for us only in the idea that we have of them.
—Marcel Proust, The Fugitive (translated from French by Peter Collier)
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Each year on this auspicious day, alone and foreign
here in a foreign place, my thoughts of you sharpen;far away, I can almost see you reaching the summit,
dogwood berries woven into sashes, short one person.—Wang Wei (701-61), “9/9, Thinking of My Brothers East of the Mountains” (trans. from Chinese by David Hinton)
Sometimes more is more.
Anton Bruckner (1824-96), Symphony No. 8 in C minor; Vienna Philharmonic (Herbert von Karajan, cond.), live, Austria (Abbey of St. Florian), 1979
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
Once upon a time, before the human attention span began to shrink, people could actually sit still and pay attention to something—a single thing—for over an hour.
You don’t need to be asleep to be lost in a dream.
Maurice Ravel, Piano Concerto in G Major (1929-31); Martha Argerich, piano; Orchestre National de France (Charles Dutoit, cond.); live, Germany (Frankfurt), 1990
music clip of the day 