Your 16-year-old daughter dies, suddenly, in a car accident.
What do you do?
If you’re pianist/composer Kenny Werner, what you do is create music.
Kenny Werner, No Beginning No End (featuring Joe Lovano, tenor saxophone), recording session, New York (NYU), 2009
If you’re in a dark mood, the last thing you want is something light.
Alfred Schnittke, String Trio (1985)/Moscow Conservatory, live
Want more of Schnittke’s music? Here.
beauty from behind bars
Tadd Dameron wrote and arranged this while serving time for a federal drug crime.
Blue Mitchell Orchestra (Blue Mitchell, trumpet, with [among others] Clark Terry, trumpet; Tommy Flanagan, piano; Willie Ruff, French horn; Philly Joe Jones, drums), “Smooth as the Wind” (1961)
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Federal Bureau of Prisons
Federal Medical Center (as it’s now called)
Lexington, Kentucky
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Tadd Dameron
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lagniappe
Sarah Vaughan, live, “If You Could See Me Now” (Tadd Dameron)
*****
radio gems: jazz
Bird Flight
WKCR-FM
New York (Columbia University)
Monday-Friday, 8:20-9:30 a.m. (EST)
I know of nothing, in radio or anywhere else, like Phil Schaap’s daily meditations on the music of Charlie Parker, which he’s been offering now, five days a week, for over twenty-five years. At its best, his show enthralls. At its worst, well, sometimes you wish Phil would play a little more music and talk a little less. But even when he goes on longer than perhaps he should, your tendency, as with a charmingly eccentric uncle, is to excuse his excesses.
crystalline, adj. Clear and transparent like crystal. E.g., Mitsuko Uchida playing Mozart.
Mozart, Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor, KV. 466/Mitsuko Uchida (piano and conducting), Camerata Salzburg, live, Germany (Salzburg), 2001
Part 1 (first movement)
Part 2 (first movement, cont.)
Part 3 (second movement)
Part 4 (third movement)
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lagniappe
I like to make the gestures of the piano concerto, so big and public, much smaller and intimate, as if I were sitting alone or simply dreaming.
—Mitsuko Uchida
Many years ago, when I was younger than my sons are now (22, 19), I listened to this album (Forever Changes) day after day after day.
Arthur Lee and Love, “Alone Again Or,” “A House Is Not A Motel,” England (London), 2003
two takes
This just in from my older (22-year-old) son Alex:
Have you heard the new Arcade Fire? It’s incredibly good, totally different from their older stuff—poppy and catchy.
Arcade Fire, “The Suburbs”
The Suburbs (8/10)
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live, New York (Madison Square Garden), 8/5/10
More? Here.
Sheer beauty—sometimes it seems like more than enough.
Ingram Marshall, Fog Tropes II (String Quartet and Tape)/Kronos Quartet
*****
what a world
Until yesterday morning, I’d never heard of this guy. I happened upon him while looking up someone else (in Kyle Gann’s American Music in the Twentieth Century). Intrigued by what I read, I did a search on YouTube, which led to this piece. Mesmerized by what I heard, I listened to it several times over the course of the day. Today I’m posting it here. So the last 24 hours, in relation to this music, have gone like this: utter ignorance —> chance encounter —> first listen —> sharing with others.
I was about 16 when I had an experience that I recollect in nearly Proustian detail, listening for the first time to the String Quartet in C-sharp Minor, op. 131. I was sitting in a friend’s living room when her father put a recording of it on the hi-fi. I remember everything about those three-quarters of an hour back in 1961 or ’62: the room in which I was sitting and the direction in which I was facing; the single, exposed Bozak speaker vibrating like an exotic organism in the unfinished wooden box that Mr. L. had built to contain it; the quickly dawning realization that the first movement was the most overwhelming piece of music I had ever heard—a feeling that comes back to me whenever I listen to it, in real sound or mentally, as at this moment; and I remember (but this memory comes also from countless later listenings) the mysterious, throbbing sound of the first violin’s statement of the opening subject in that recording, made by the Budapest Quartet in the early 1950s.
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I am now several years older than Beethoven lived to be. I still think of him as my alpha and omega, but in a different sense: as the author of music that transformed my existence at the onset of adulthood and that continues to enrich it more than any other music as I approach what are often referred to as life’s declining years. His music still gives me as much sensual and emotional pleasure as it gave me 50 years ago, and far more intellectual stimulation than it did then. It adds to the fullness when life feels good, and it lengthens and deepens the perspective when life seems barely tolerable. It is with me and in me. A thousand or 5,000 or 10,000 years from now, Beethoven and our civilization’s other outstanding mouthpieces may still have much to communicate to human beings—if any of our descendants are still around—or they may seem remote, cold, obscure. But what matters most in Beethoven’s case is his belief that we are all part of an endless continuum, whatever our individual level of awareness may be. In the Ninth Symphony, he used Schiller’s words to tell us explicitly what many of his other works, especially his late works, tell us implicitly: that the “divine spark” of joy and the “kiss for the whole world,” which originate “above the canopy of stars,” must touch and unite us all. The spark is there, he said, and so is the kiss; we need only feel and accept their presence.—Harvey Sachs
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Beethoven, String Quartet No. 14 in C-sharp minor, op. 131/1st Movement
Budapest Quartet, 1943
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Busch Quartet, 1936
Originally, Morton Feldman was commissioned to compose the score for the film [Something Wild], but when the director heard the music, he promptly withdrew his commission, opting to enlist Aaron Copland instead. The reaction of the baffled director [Jack Garfein] was said to be, ‘My wife is being raped and you write celesta music?’
Morton Feldman, “Something Wild in the City: Mary Ann’s Theme,” 1960
Composed almost a century ago, these tiny pieces—haiku-like in their compression—still astonish.
Anton Webern (1883-1945), Six Bagatelles for String Quartet, Op. 9 (1911-13)/LaSalle Quartet
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lagniappe
The 15th of September 1945, the day of Anton Webern’s death, should be a day of mourning for any receptive musician. We must hail not only this great composer but also a real hero. Doomed to a total failure in a world of ignorance and indifference he inexorably kept on cutting out his diamonds, his dazzling diamonds, the mines of which he had such a perfect knowledge.—Igor Stravinsky
music clip of the day 