music clip of the day

Sunday, 11/14/10

MCOTD’s alter ego has a letter in today’s New York Times Book Review.

To the Editor:

In connection with his review of Stephen Sondheim’s “Finishing the Hat” (“Isn’t It Rich?” Oct. 31), Paul Simon, in the Up Front, says that when he wrote the refrain to “Bridge Over Troubled Water” — “Like a bridge over troubled water, I will lay me down” — he had “no idea where those words and melody came from.” It takes nothing away from Mr. Simon to note that one apparent source of inspiration for this line was the Swan Silvertones’ gospel song “Oh Mary Don’t You Weep,” which was released in 1959. That recording, which features the wonderful Claude Jeter on lead vocals, includes the ad-libbed line “I’ll be a bridge over deep water if you trust in my name.” Mr. Simon has previously acknowledged this link.

RICHARD MCLEESE
Oak Park, Ill.

The Swan Silvertones, “Oh Mary Don’t You Weep” (1959): MP3

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replay: a clip too good for just one day

If influence were compensable, Claude Jeter of the Swan Silvertones—a huge influence on Sam Cooke, Curtis Mayfield, Eddie Kendricks (Temptations), Al Green, even Paul Simon (who took inspiration from a line in the Swans’ “hit” “Oh Mary Don’t You Weep” [“I’ll be a bridge over deep water if you trust in my name”] when he wrote “Bridge Over Troubled Water”)—would have, when he passed earlier this year at the age of 94, died a wealthy man.

Swan Silvertones, “Only Believe,” live

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lagniappe

When he leaves the house [in NYC], he whistles his favorite tune, ‘What A Friend We Have In Jesus,’ while greeting the assorted neighborhood junkies and prostitutes who knew him mainly as sometime manager of the [Hotel] Cecil. ‘What’s new, Jeter,’ they ask. ‘Nothing new, nothing good, just thank God for life up here with these heathens and muggers.’

—Anthony Heilbut, The Gospel Sound: Good News and Bad Times (1971)

(Originally posted on 9/13/09.)

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2010

Saturday, 11/13/10

what’s new
(an occasional series)

The Books, “I Didn’t Know That” (2010)

(Want more of The Books? Here.)

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Prince Rama, “Om Namo Shivaya” (2010)

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Glasser, “Mirrorage” (2010)

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2010

Friday, 11/12/10

three takes

“Love Hurts” (Felice & Boudleaux Bryant)

Keith Richards & Norah Jones, live, Los Angeles, 2004 (Gram Parsons Tribute Concert)

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Gram Parsons & Emmylou Harris, live (radio broadcast), 1973

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The Everly Brothers, 1960

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2010

Thursday, 11/11/10

Looking for a reason to be hopeful?

None of these musicians (or the conductor) is over the age of 18.

John Adams, Shaker Loops (1978), first movement (“Shaking and Trembling”), live

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lagniappe

John Adams, rehearsing this music:

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It is a strange business, composing music in twenty-first-century America. The job is difficult in itself: it is slow, solitary, and intensely cerebral. You have to believe deeply in yourself to get through the process. You have to be possibly a little mad. When you are done, you have in your hands not a finished object—a painting that can be put up on a wall or a novel that can be read at one sitting—but a set of abstract notations that other musicians must learn and perform. Then you step back into the culture at large, where few people embrace, or even notice, what you do. In this country, classical music is widely regarded as a dead or alien form—so much so that jazz aficionados routinely say, “Jazz is America’s classical music.” To make the counterargument that America’s classical music is America’s classical music is somehow to admit that the battle is lost. In such a climate, composers easily become embittered.

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When I visited Adams at his house in Brushy Ridge, last June, he was pondering the composer’s relationship with the mass culture. “I like to think of culture as the symbols that we share to understand each other,” he said. “When we communicate, we point to symbols that we have in common. If people want to make a point, they reach for a reference. It might be a Woody Allen movie, or a John Lennon lyric, or ‘I’m not a crook.’ When I was young, I came to realize that twelve-tone music, or for that matter, all contemporary music, was so far divorced from communal experience that it didn’t appear on the national radar screen. It would be nice to hear someone say, ‘Look at that gas station in the moonlight. It’s pure John Adams.’”

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The music of John Adams, unlike so much classical composition of the last fifty years, has the immediate power to enchant.

—Alex Ross, “The Harmonist,” The New Yorker, 1/8/01

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2010

Wednesday, 11/10/10

two takes

Some lyrics sound as though they want to be read; others would look silly on the page but, unlike the page-worthy, they sing.

“If I Had A Boat” (Lyle Lovett)

Lyle Lovett, live (TV broadcast), 2004

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The Holmes Brothers, State Of Grace (Alligator), 2007

lagniappe

Gregory Isaacs/p.s.

Yesterday’s link to WKCR-FM’s Memorial Broadcast didn’t work right (only a fraction of the show could be accessed), but it does now.

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reading table

To fall into despair is just a high-class way of turning into a dope. I choose to laugh, and laugh at myself no less than at others.

—Saul Bellow, Letters (2010) (as quoted in yesterday’s New York Times review)

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2010

Tuesday, 11/9/10

Gregory Isaacs, July 15, 1951-October 25, 2010

[Gregory Isaacs’ friend and former manager Don Hewitt] said of Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones that when he was introduced to Mr. Isaacs, “he carried on like he’d met Jesus.”

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In a 2001 interview, Mr. Isaacs reflected on his legacy. “Look at me as a man who performed works musically,” he said. “Who uplift people who need upliftment, mentally, physically, economically—all forms. Who told the people to live with love ’cause only love can conquer war, and to understand themselves so that they can understand others.”

—Rob Kenner, New York Times (obituary, 10/25/10)

Live, London (Brixton Academy), 1984

“Number One”

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“Night Nurse”

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“Border”

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“Sad Mood Tonight” (1994)

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“Kingston 14” (Made in Jamaica, 2006)

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Want more? Here: “Gregory Isaacs Memorial Broadcast,” Eastern Standard Time, WKCR-FM (broadcasting from Columbia University), 11/6/10.

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lagniappe

reading table

No battle that can be won is worth fighting.

—T Bone Burnett (blog comment, 10/9/10)

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2010

Monday, 11/8/10

What makes this guy such a great guitarist?

He doesn’t show off.

“Lead”? “Rhythm”? To him it’s all one.

He doesn’t play over the drummer—he plays with him.

Keith Richards (with Willie Nelson, Ryan Adams, Hank Williams III), “Dead Flowers,” live (TV broadcast), 2002

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lagniappe

I’m not here just to make records and money. I’m here to say something and to touch other people, sometimes in a cry of desperation: ‘Do you know this feeling?’

—Keith Richards, Life (2010)

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reading table

As the fiftieth birthday approaches, you get the sense that your life is thinning out, and will continue to thin out, until it thins out into nothing . . . . Then fifty comes and goes, and fifty-one, and fifty-two. And life thickens out again. Because there is now an enormous and unsuspected presence within your being like an undiscovered continent. This is the past.

—Martin Amis, The Pregnant Widow (2010)

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2010

Sunday, 11/7/10

Leon Russell loved these guys so much—both, alas, have since passed—that, in 1974, he recorded them for his Shelter label.

The O’Neal Twins

“Jesus Dropped The Charges,” live

Take 1 (Say Amen, Somebody [1982])

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Take 2

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“It’s A Highway To Heaven,” live (Say Amen, Somebody [1982])

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“Power In The Blood,” live (TV broadcast), mid-1960s

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“He Chose Me,” live

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“He’ll Give You Peace In The Midst Of The Storm,” live, Texas (Dallas), 1981

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lagniappe

In a 2005 interview with the Post-Dispatch, Mr. [Edgar] O’Neal spoke about the early challenges. “We always had bookings and recordings, but when we started, black gospel was not readily accepted with the wide range it is today,” he said. “And the money wasn’t there.”

The O’Neals—with Edgar on piano and both brothers singing—challenged gospel tradition. “The main gospel thrust at the time (was) male quartets, and we were a piano group,” Mr. O’Neal said. “We were considered in a different category from the male singing groups. But then the quartets got into piano. It took some years as we stayed out there before our style took hold.”

—St Louis Post-Dispatch, 1/17/08

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The O’Neal Twins

Fontella Bass

Chuck Berry

Scott Joplin

Little Milton

Clark Terry

Ike & Tina Turner

When it comes to musical history, few cities are as rich as St. Louis.

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2010

Saturday, 11/6/10

replay: clips too good for just one day

No jazz composer since Thelonious Monk has a stronger voice.

Lyrical beauty, inexhaustible drive, deep feeling: what more could you ask for?

Enormously influential, his music served as a bridge between the compositional elegance of Duke Ellington and the freewheeling rambunctiousness of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Henry Threadgill, David Murray, et al.

Charles Mingus Quintet (CM, bass; Dannie Richmond, drums; Eric Dolphy, alto saxophone, bass clarinet; Clifford Jordan, tenor saxophone; Jaki Byard, piano), live (TV broadcast), Belgium, 1964

“So Long, Eric”

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“Peggy’s Blue Skylight”

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“Meditations on Integration” (excerpt)

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lagniappe

. . . [Mingus’s] music was pledged to the abolition of all distinctions: between the composed and the improvised, the primitive and the sophisticated, the rough and the tender, the belligerent and the lyrical.—Geoff Dyer, But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz (1996)

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Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.

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I, myself, came to enjoy the players who didn’t only just swing but who invented new rhythmic patterns, along with new melodic concepts. And those people are: Art Tatum, Bud Powell, Max Roach, Sonny Rollins, Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Parker, who is the greatest genius of all to me because he changed the whole era around.

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In my music, I’m trying to play the truth of what I am. The reason it’s difficult is because I’m changing all the time.

—Charles Mingus

(Originally posted on 4/22/10.)

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Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Miles Davis: so many of the greatest figures in jazz weren’t just great musicians, or composers, or arrangers. They were great bandleaders. As important to their artistic success as anything else was their ability to find, and showcase, players who could make the music come alive—people like Johnny Hodges and Ben Webster and Jimmy Blanton and Lester Young and Freddie Green and Jo Jones and John Coltrane and Bill Evans and Tony Williams.

That small circle of elite bandleaders includes this man. He hired musicians who played their instruments like no one else (Eric Dolphy, Jaki Byard, et al.). He gave them a musical setting in which structure and freedom were exquisitely balanced. And together they made music that sounds (even on something familiar) like nothing else.

Charles Mingus Sextet (with Johnny Coles, trumpet; Jaki Byard, piano; Eric Dolphy, alto saxophone and bass clarinet; Clifford Jordan, tenor saxophone; Dannie Richmond, drums), “Take the A Train,” live, Norway (Oslo), 1964

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lagniappe

I nominate Charles Mingus one of America’s greatest composers—Ran Blake (in the liner notes to his recent album Driftwoods)

(Originally posted on 12/1/09.)

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2010

Friday, 11/5/10

Time travel’s easy on the net. With this guy we started, the other day, with music he made just last month. Then we headed back to the ’70s. Today we go back even farther—to the ’60s.

Leon Russell, Shindig! (TV)

“Hi-Heel Sneakers,” 10/28/1964