Why not start the week with a slap in the face?
Savages, “City’s Full,” “Shut Up,” “She Will,” “Husbands,” live (studio performance), Seattle, 2013
two takes
“Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen”
Bessie Griffin (with Charles Barnett, piano), live, Switzerland (Montreux Jazz Festival), 1981
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Albert Ayler (AA, saxophone; Call Cobbs, piano; Henry Grimes, bass; Sunny Murray, drums), recording, 1964
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lagniappe
reading table
To live is to lose ground.
—E. M. Cioran (1911-1995; translated from French by Richard Howard)
My son Luke, now twenty-two and living in Kansas City, checks in:
Just got done with an assessment and had some time to listen to some music. Really digging this song lately—thought you might.
Wale (featuring Sam Drew), “LoveHate Thing,” 2013
Today, our fourth birthday, we revisit our first post.
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One left Cuba after the revolution, the other stayed. Here they play together: pianists—father and son—Bebo and Chucho Valdes.
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taking a break
I’m taking some time off—back soon.
After hearing Molly, it seems hard—no, impossible—to listen to him without thinking of her.
Nick Drake (1948-1974), “Day Is Done” (Five Leaves Left, 1969)
alone
Jürg Frey (1953-), A Memory of Perfection (2010)
Mira Benjamin (violin), live, London, 2013
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lagniappe
reading table
Two more words from Seamus Heaney, who died Friday in a Dublin hospital:
noli timere
[don’t be afraid]—text message to his wife minutes before his death
this morning
I seem to be falling in love with someone who’s been dead twenty years.
Molly Drake, 1916-1993 (mother of singer-songwriter Nick Drake, 1948-1974)
“I Remember”
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“The First Day”
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“How Wild The Wind Blows”
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lagniappe
found words
Yesterday, walking in the garden at Chicago’s Millenium Park, I came upon a small sign, close to the dirt, that read:
THIS AREA
IS IN
TRANSITION.WE APPRECIATE
YOUR
UNDERSTANDING.CHECK BACK
SOON.
If I were to compile a short list, numbering, say, six or seven, of folks I wish I could’ve heard live, this guy, whom I’ve been listening to for over forty years, would be on it.
Blind Willie Johnson (1897-1945), singer, guitarist
“God Don’t Never Change” (New Orleans, 1929)
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“It’s Nobody’s Fault But Mine” (Dallas, 1927)
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“Jesus Make Up My Dying Bed” (Dallas, 1927)
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“John The Revelator” (Atlanta, 1929; with Willie B. Harris, his wife)
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“The Rain Don’t Fall On Me” (Atlanta, 1929; with WBH)
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“Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground” (Dallas, 1927)
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lagniappe
reading table
Seamus Heaney (April 13, 1939-August 30, 2013), “The Given Note,” Paris, 2013
***
On the most westerly Blasket
In a dry-stone hut
He got this air out of the night.Strange noises were heard
By others who followed, bits of a tune
Coming in on loud weatherThough nothing like melody.
He blamed their fingers and ear
As unpractised, their fiddling easyFor he had gone alone into the island
And brought back the whole thing.
The house throbbed like his full violin.So whether he calls it spirit music
Or not, I don’t care. He took it
Out of wind off mid-Atlantic.Still he maintains, from nowhere.
It comes off the bow gravely,
Rephrases itself into the air.
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Last October, with my son Alex, I heard him read at the Art Institute of Chicago. Nobel Prize winner, Professor of Poetry at Oxford, Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard—none of that was on display. He seemed not the least self-impressed, nor even much interested in himself. What interested him, it was clear, was language. With each poem, he seemed to be saying: “Come in, sit down. Let’s listen, together.”
For over thirty years he’s been taking me places no one else does.
Henry Threadgill’s Zooid, live, New York, 2013
#1
#2
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It’s not just notes on a page. Threadgill really reaches out and grabs you by the lapels. Someone else described it to me as ‘every time Threadgill enters, it’s like the curtains just parted.’ He has this way of cutting right through the texture of the music.
—pianist Vijay Iyer
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lagniappe
reading table: passings
Between my fingers and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.—Seamus Heaney (April 13, 1939-August 30, 2013), “Digging” (excerpt)
three takes
“Grits Ain’t Groceries” (T. Turner; AKA “All Around the World”)
Little Milton with Bonnie Raitt, TV show (Late Night with Conan O’Brien), 1997
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Little Milton, recording, 1969
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Little Willie John, recording, 1955
