Friday, August 16th
sounds of Mali
Tired of having your feet on the ground?
Salif Keita, live, Netherlands (Hertme), July 6th
“A Demain”
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“Yamore”
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“Madan”
music clip of the day
jazz/blues/rock/classical/gospel/more
2013
2013
Thursday, August 15th
Strangeness, in today’s musical world, is sadly undervalued.
Daniel Higgs (vocals, banjo), live, London (Cafe Oto), 2011
#1
#2
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lagniappe
art beat: Tuesday at the Art Institute of Chicago (after a hearing at the nearby federal court building)
Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849), Cranes at Umezawa Manor in Sagami Province (from Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji)
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reading table
Speaking of insomnia, last night I came upon this.
Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life the less man has to do with aught that looks like death.
—Herman Melville (1819-1891), Moby-Dick
2013
Wednesday, August 14th
sounds of Egypt
Some singers once you begin listening to them you cannot stop.
Umm Kulthum (spelled variously in English; c. 1904-1975), “Enta Omri” (You Are My Life), live, Paris (Olympia Theater), 1967
Listening to this one night at 2:30 a.m., after waking up and getting a glass of milk, I couldn’t make up my mind: Is YouTube a good thing, or a bad thing, for insomniacs?
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lagniappe
found words
Scores Are Killed as Forces Storm Camps of Morsi Backers
—Headline, New York Times website, today
2013
Tuesday, August 13th
alone
Earl Hines (1903-1983; piano), “I Ain’t Got Nobody,” 1928
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lagniappe
reading table
“At Lake Haptacong” (excerpt)
By David Ferry (1924-)The trees look thinly leaved, as if it were
Late autumn, early spring, or winter in a place
Where dead leaves cling to trees all winter long.You cannot tell what weather or season it is.
My mother, as in all those early pictures,
Although in this one already having lostHer girlish slimness, looks sexually alive,
Full of energy, her hair dark, abundant,
Her smile generous (though maybe less so thanIn the pictures taken a few years earlier).
Somewhere in this picture there is inscribed
The source or secret, somewhere inscribed the cause,Of the anxious motherly torment of disapproval,
The torment not resisted by my father,
Visited by my mother on my sister,The baby in the picture, torment that was
Perhaps in turn the cause of the alcoholism
That, many years later, the baby in the pictureWon out over. But it’s all unreadable
In this charming family photograph which, somehow,
Perhaps because of the blankness of the sky,Looks Russian, foreign, of no country I know.
2013
Monday, August 12th
sounds of Brazil
Gilberto Gil (1942-; vocals, guitar) with Dominguinhos (1941-2013; accordion), “Lamento Sertanejo,” live, 2010
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
What would it be like to live in a world that sounded everywhere the same?
2013
Sunday, August 11th
Repeat them often enough and words lose their literal shapes, dissolving into pure feeling.
Heavenly Gospel Singers, “I Stepped in the Water One Day,” live, St. James Missionary Baptist Church, Canton, Mississippi, 1978
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lagniappe
reading table
. . . Heaven have mercy on us all—Presbyterians and Pagans alike—for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly needing mending.
—Herman Melville (1819-1891), Moby-Dick
2013
Saturday, August 10th
alone
Soundtrack to a dream I wish I’d had last night.
Tristan Murail (1947-), “Comme un oeil suspendu et poli par le songe . . .”; Mireia Vendrell, piano, live
2013
Friday, August 9th
summer in the city
Pitchfork Music Festival, Chicago (Union Park), July 19-21
Run The Jewels (El-P & Killer Mike), “36” Chain”
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Swans, “Oxygen”
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Savages, “She Will”
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lagniappe
found words
More are surviving crash landings
—front page headline, USA Today, 8/9/13
2013
Thursday, August 8th
There are all kinds of blues, too.
Joe McPhee Survival Unit 3 (JM, alto saxophone; Fred Lonberg-Holm, cello; Michael Zerang, drums), live, London, 2010
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lagniappe
reading table
Dream Song 40
By John Berryman (1914-1972)I’m scared a lonely. Never see my son,
easy be not to see anyone,
combers out to sea
know they’re goin somewhere but not me.
Got a little poison, got a little gun,
I’m scared a lonely.I’m scared a only one thing, which is me,
from othering I don’t take nothin, see,
for any hound dog’s sake.
But this is where I livin, where I rake
my leaves and cop my promise, this’ where we
cry oursel’s awake.Wishin was dyin but I gotta make
it all this way to that bed on these feet
where peoples said to meet.
Maybe but even if I see my son
forever never, get back on the take,
free, black & forty-one.
Back in the ’70s, when I was in college, I heard John Berryman read his poetry, an experience that opened my ears and mind in all kinds of ways. He moved so swiftly, and gracefully, from one register to another, leaping back and forth between high and low as if nothing could be more natural. Today he joins a select group—tenor saxophonist Von Freeman, trumpeter Lester Bowie, singer Dorothy Love Coates, poets Wislawa Szymborska and William Bronk—in the MCOTD Hall of Fame.
2013
Wednesday, August 7th
There are all kinds of music.
Silence (excerpt), 2012
*****
Silence tells the story of a field recordist (played by Eoghan Mac Giolla Bhríde, also co-writer of the film with director Pat Collins) who returns to his native Ireland after 15 years living in Berlin, spending his days wandering through north west Ireland and recording the soundscapes.
—Wire
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lagniappe
reading table
As I grow to understand life less and less, I learn to love it more and more.
—Jules Renard (1864-1910)
