With some music, it’s the particular sound a musician coaxes out of his instrument that gets under your skin. Here’s one of the dirtiest, snakiest electric guitar sounds around.
Group Doueh (featuring Baamar Salmou AKA Doueh on electric guitar), live, Western Sahara
Playing music is not really susceptible to theory much. Circumstances affect it so much.
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Personally, I`ve found that the kind of thing that I like is going into somebody else’s area and not playing their music but doing whatever I do in their area.
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I like duos with percussionists. I like the songs that percussionists sing.
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You can’t always wait for a composer to write the music you want to play.
This track comes from The Widow’s Might, a wonderful DVD with nearly 700 gospel songs in mp3 format (everything played on Sinner’s Crossroads in 2009) that’s available as a $75 premium from WFMU-FM.
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lagniappe
The Caravans’ star then was Inez, whom they called the High Priestess. She looks the part. A coffee-colored woman with high Indian cheekbones and an intense, almost drugged stare, she can sing higher natural notes than anyone on the road. Tina [Albertina Walker] said, ‘The rest of us sang awhile, but the folks really wanted to hear Inez whistle.’
—Anthony Heilbut, The Gospel Sound: Good News and Bad Times (6th ed. 2002)
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Determination is important. You’ve got to be determined to live what you sing as well as sing what you sing. God understands the . . . difficulty that we go through for the truth. The Bible says your determination will be rewarded because God sees it when no one else does.
The Matisse exhibit at Chicago’s Art Institute (which I returned to yesterday) closes on June 20th, then opens at New York’s Museum of Modern Art on July 18th. I have only one word of advice: Go!
If you want to stay right where you are, don’t even bother with this clip. But if, instead, you’d like to go somewhere you may never have been before, well, this might be just the ticket.
Gyorgy Ligeti (1923-2006), Three Etudes, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, piano
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lagniappe
I listen to all kinds of music—new music, old music, music of my colleagues, everything.
—Gyorgy Ligeti (whose influences included not only the usual suspects [Chopin, Debussy, et al.] but also Thelonious Monk and Bill Evans and the Rainforest Pygmies and fractal geometry)