Lester Young, August 27, 1909-March 15, 1959
(nicknamed “Pres” [or “Prez”] by Billie Holiday, who called him the “president of tenor saxophonists”)
Who else is at once so earthy and so ethereal?
Jammin’ the Blues (1944)
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On Lester Young
B.B. King:
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Lee Kontiz:
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Joe Lovano:
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Want more?
One of my favorite radio stations, WKCR-FM (based at Columbia University and available on-line), is celebrating Pres’s birthday in the best possible way—playing his music all day. (Actually, they’re playing his music for 36 hours straight, until the middle of the day tomorrow, when they’ll begin playing the music of Charlie Parker, whose birthday is Sunday, for the next 36 hours.)
If spirit could be sold, New Orleans would be rich.
Rebirth Brass Band, live, New Orleans, 2009
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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])
Woody Shaw/Johnny Griffin Quintet (Woody Shaw, trumpet; Johnny Griffin, tenor saxophone; John Hicks, piano; Reggie Johnson, bass; Alvin Queens, drums), “Night in Tunisia,” live, Germany (Koln), 1986
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Now there’s a great trumpet player. He [Woody Shaw] can play different from all of them.
—Miles Davis
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Anthony Braxton on playing with Woody Shaw.
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reading table
Look after the sound and the sense will take care of itself.
—Adam Phillips, London Review of Books, 7/22/10 (reviewing Christopher Ricks’ True Friendship: Geoffrey Hill, Anthony Hecht and Robert Lowell Under The Sign Of Eliot And Pound)
They weren’t glamorous. And they couldn’t have been paying a whole lot. But everybody, it seemed, wanted to play with them.
Delaney & Bonnie
With Eric Clapton (guitar), Dave Mason (guitar), Bobby Whitlock (vocal); “Poor Elijah-Tribute to Robert Johnson”; live (TV broadcast), England, 1969
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With Eric Clapton (guitar), George Harrison (guitar), Bobby Whitlock (keyboards), Carl Radle (bass), Jim Gordon (drums); “Comin’ Home”; live, England, 1969
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With Duane Allman (guitar), Gregg Allman (organ), King Curtis (tenor saxophone); “Only You Know And I Know”; live, 1971
(The bass player, whoever he is, is the MVP here—he lights up everything [check out, for instance, 1:06-1:56].)
Here’s a big birthday shout-out to my wife Suzanne, who’s not nearly as crazy as I am about music—not nearly as crazy, period—but is crazy enough that she kept going out with me after I took her on our first date, in the summer of 1974, to Chicago’s Jazz Showcase (then on Lincoln Avenue) to see this guy, whose multimedia performance that night featured some of this footage—the stuff with the pyramids.
Sun Ra & His Arkestra in Egypt and Italy, 1971
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Even in the excesses of this era there were few audiences prepared for an ominous, ragtag group of musicians in Egyptian robes, Mongolian caps (Mongolian, as from the planet Mongo of Flash Gordon), and B-movie spacesuits who played on a variety of newly invented or strangely modified electronic instruments (the sun harp, the space organ, the cosmic side drum) and proclaimed the greatness of the most ancient of races (this, the Sun Ra of the Solar-Myth Arkestra); or, on yet another night, a merry band in jester’s motley, jerkins, and pointed caps (a la Robin Hood or perhaps the Archers of Arboria) who marched or crawled through the audience, chanting cheerful songs about travel to Venus. It was intensely dramatic music, moving from stasis to chaos and back, horn players leaping about, or rolling on the bandstand, sometimes with fire eaters, gilded muscle men, and midgets, an all-out assault on the senses. At the end of the evening the musicians and dancers moved among the audience, touching them, surrounding them, inviting them to join the Arkestra in marching off to Jupiter.
—John F. Szwed, Space Is The Place: The Lives And Times Of Sun Ra (1997)
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Sun Ra’s consistent statement, musically and spoken, is that this is a primitive world. Its practices, beliefs, religions, are uneducated, unenlightened, savage, destructive, already in the past. . . . That’s why Sun Ra returned only to say he left. Into the future. Into Space.
—Amiri Baraka (formerly known as LeRoi Jones)
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Silence is music. There are different kinds of silence, each silence is a world all of its own . . . silence is an integral part of all music . . .
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When you meet a man
You meet a scheme of words
Patterns of concept
A concepted being
Whose very birth conception is called.
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The earth cannot move without music. The earth moves in a certain rhythm, a certain sound, a certain note. When the music stops the earth will stop and everything upon it will die.
music clip of the day 
