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)
***
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.
You could listen to his music, and nothing else, every day for the rest of your life and never touch bottom.
Bach, Chaconne in D minor for solo violin (Partita for Violin No. 2 [BWV 1004])/Gidon Kremer (violin), live
Another take? Here.
Wealthiest state in the nation?
If music were money, it might be this.
Nathan Abshire (accordion), “Ma Negresse” (AKA “Pine Grove Blues”)
Take 1
With The Balfa Brothers (Dewey Balfa, fiddle), live, Louisiana (Dedans le Sud de la Louisiane [1974])
*****
Take 2
Live, Louisiana (Mamou [Fred’s Lounge]), 1976
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lagniappe
Thanks, Richard, for another tremendous clip. Art Pepper [6/21/10] left us way too soon. Along with his music, I loved his autobiography. Keep up the great work.
*****
Thanks so much!
—L. [Laurie Pepper, Art’s wife, in response to an email letting her know that Art’s music was being featured here [6/21/10]]
In embracing music from another continent, this guy—a Gypsy born in Belgium who grew up near Paris—was way ahead of his time.
Django Reinhardt, January 23, 1910-May 16, 1953
Quintette du Hot Club de France
Live, “J’attendrai Swing,” 1939
*****
Live, “Echoes of France,” 1945
It’s something of a miracle that Django was able, physically, to make music at all. When he was eighteen, his left hand was badly injured in a fire, leaving his fourth and fifth fingers permanently curled toward the palm.
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lagniappe
Jazz attracted me because in it I found a formal perfection and instrumental precision that I admire in classical music, but which popular music doesn’t have.—Django Reinhardt
*****
With Duke Ellington (1939)
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.
***
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
*****
Beethoven, String Quartet No. 14 in C-sharp minor, op. 131/1st Movement
Budapest Quartet, 1943
*****
Busch Quartet, 1936
Happy (111th) Birthday, Duke!
At least one day out of the year all musicans should just put their instruments down, and give thanks to Duke Ellington.
—Miles Davis
Duke Ellington and His Orchestra
“C Jam Blues,” 1942
*****
“Mood Indigo,” “Sophisticated Lady,” “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing),” “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore,” 1943
lagniappe
It is becoming increasingly difficult to decide where jazz starts or where it stops, where Tin Pan Alley begins and jazz ends, or even where the borderline lies between between classical music and jazz. I feel there is no boundary line.
—Duke Ellington
*****
Radio Ellington: All Duke, All Day
WKCR-FM (broadcasting from Columbia University)
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
street music
Dublin
On Grafton Street
Some music—like, say, Emil Gilels performing Beethoven’s Waldstein sonata or Ben Webster playing “Old Folks” or Al Green singing “Jesus Will Fix It”—transports you to another place. Other music, like this, transforms the space around you.
Steve Reich, “Music for 18 Musicians” (1974-76)
Part 1
Excerpt (beginning), live, Cincinnati, 2008
*****
Part 2
Excerpt, recording (Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble)
*****
Part 3
Excerpt (ending), live, Tokyo, 2008
*****
I first encountered Steve Reich’s music in 1971, while in college and living for a few months in New York. At a concert at New York University, I heard Reich and his ensemble perform his then-new piece “Drumming.” Stunning, mesmerizing, it was unlike anything my 19-year-old ears had ever heard.
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lagniappe
The other day, I watched as Steve Reich walked away from Carnegie Hall, where celebrations of his seventieth birthday were under way, and out into his native city. Trim and brisk, he darted into West Fifty-seventh Street, fell back before oncoming traffic, bopped impatiently in place, then darted forth again. He soon disappeared into the mass of people, his signature black cap floating above the crowd. Perhaps I should have lamented the fact that one of the greatest living composers was moving around New York unnoticed, but lamentation is not a Reichian state of mind, and I thought instead about how his work has blended into the cultural landscape, its repeating patterns and chiming timbres detectable all over modern music. Brian Eno, David Bowie, David Byrne, and a thousand d.j.s have paid him heed. On Fifty-seventh Street, Reich-inflected sounds may have been coursing through the headphones of a few oblivious passersby.
Three decades ago, New York’s leading institutions would have nothing to do with Reich. A riot broke out when Michael Tilson Thomas presented “Four Organs” at Carnegie in 1973: one woman tried to stop the concert by banging on the edge of the stage with her shoe. Now uptown is lionizing the longtime renegade.
***
Reich changed music, and he also changed how music relates to society. In the face of early incomprehension, he took a do-it-yourself approach to getting his work before the public. Nonclassical musicians were among his models: he saw John Coltrane some fifty times, and marvelled at how the great man would unleash mind-bending sounds, pack up his sax, and disappear into the night. With his namesake ensemble, Reich performed in galleries, clubs, and wherever else he felt welcome. The effects of this paradigm shift can be seen on any day of the week in New York, as composer-led ensembles proliferate.
***
The Reich ensemble retains most of its original members, and they remain an awesome force, even as shaggy hairdos have given way to dignified shocks of white. At Zankel Hall, they played Part I of “Drumming,” a phase-shifting tour de force in which bongos are struck with sticks. I was curious to see how they would compare with two sharp young ensembles who had performed the same stretch of music in recent weeks—So Percussion, at Symphony Space, and four Juilliard percussionists, at Carnegie. The youngsters drummed with effortless grace, as if the score were written into their genetic code. But the veterans more than held their own, bringing to bear a kind of disciplined wildness, in the spirit of the Ghanaian drummers with whom Reich studied before he wrote the piece. The energy that blazed up at climactic moments could have powered the hall in a blackout.
music clip of the day 
