Tuesday, 2/23/10
Innovation has its place. But sometimes you just want heart.
Ben Webster (tenor saxophone) with Teddy Wilson (piano), “Old Folks,” live, Denmark (Copenhagen), 1970
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music clip of the day
jazz/blues/rock/classical/gospel/more
2010
Monday, 2/22/10
Digital Africa is here . . . —DJ Spooky
Burkina Electric (Mai Lingani, vocals; Wende K. Blass, guitar, vocals; Lukas Ligeti [son of composer Gyorgy Ligeti], electronics, drums; Pyrolator [Kurt Dahlke], electronics), “Sankar Yaare”
Take 1: DJ Spooky Remix
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Take 2: Mapstation Remix
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lagniappe
Marilyn Monroe, DJ Andy Warhol Remix
2010
Sunday, 2/21/10
Ever wonder what Brian Eno has on his iPod?
I’ve been listening a lot lately to a box-set called ‘Goodbye Babylon’ which is 6 CDs of early 20th-century American religious music, black and white music, you know.
It’s got those Norfolk a cappella quartets and it’s got country singers, and there’s church services and everything. It’s the best compilation I’ve seen for years. It comes with a fantastic book. I find that so intriguing that I just listen again and again.—Brian Eno (quoted in L.A. Weekly)
*****
Sister O.M. Terrell
“The Bible’s Right” (1953, Nashville; included in Goodbye, Babylon)
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“Gambling Man” (1953, Nashville)
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“Swing Low, Chariot” (1953, Nashville)
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lagniappe
Ola Mae Long was born in Atlanta in 1911. She was raised by her mother, a laundress, near Decatur Street, and in 1922 she had a religious conversion at a revival. Thereafter, she began a street ministry under the auspices of the Fire Baptized Holiness Church of God, originally a South Carolina sect. Singing and playing guitar in the slide style, Terrell (her married name) spent the next half-century evangelizing on streets, in churches, and on the radio in South Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee.—Goodbye Babylon (accompanying book)
Want more? Here.
2010
Saturday, 2/20/10
Bessie Smith, Clifford Brown, Scott LaFaro, Duane Allman: the road where musicians lose their lives goes on, and on, and on.
Lil’ Dave Thompson, May 21, 1969-February 14, 2010 (killed in a car accident Sunday morning en route home to Greenville, Mississippi, after a Saturday night performance in Charleston, South Carolina)
“I Got The Blues,” live, Kentucky (Bowling Green), 2008
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“Lil’ Girl,” live, Pennsylvania (Blakeslee), 2008
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“Call Me, Baby,” live, South Carolina (Charleston), 2009
2010
Friday, 2/19/10
From Reminders for Daily Living (3d ed. 2007):
Always keep a cape handy.
James Brown, “Please, Please, Please,” live, 1964, California (Santa Monica), The T.A.M.I. Show
2010
Thursday, 2/18/10
More people than ever are cultural nomads. Take this guy, for instance: a Swiss-born Iranian, he moved to New York in 2008, after living in Japan. His music conjures places that can’t be found on any map—a jazz club in the desert, sand hills in Manhattan.
The Tehran-Dakar Brothers (Sohrab Saadat Ladjevardi, tenor saxophone, with Ladell McLin, guitar; Al MacDowell, bass; Lukas Ligeti [son of composer Gyorgy Ligeti], drums), live, New York, 2009
“Welcome New Iran”
*****
“Desert Blues”
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“Khorasan”
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“Tavalod”
2010
Wednesday, 2/17/10
transported, adj. emotionally moved, ecstatic. E.g., Glenn Gould playing Bach.
Bach, Partita No. 2 in C Minor (excerpt), Glenn Gould, piano, live (from The Art of Piano: Great Pianists of the 20th Century)
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lagniappe
I think that if I were required to spend the rest of my life on a desert island, and to listen to or play the music of any one composer during all that time, that composer would almost certainly be Bach. I really can’t think of any other music which is so all-encompassing, which moves me so deeply and so consistently, and which, to use a rather imprecise word, is valuable beyond all of its skill and brilliance for something more meaningful than that—its humanity.
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The nature of the contrapuntal experience is that every note has to have a past and a future on the horizontal plane.
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We do not play the piano with our fingers but with our mind.
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In the best of all possible worlds, art would be unnecessary. Its offer of restorative, placative therapy would go begging a patient. . . . The audience would be the artist and their life would be art.
—Glenn Gould
2010
Tuesday, 2/16/10
Delmar Allen “Dale” Hawkins, a rockabilly pioneer who gave the music world the hit “Oh! Suzy-Q,” died Saturday in Little Rock of colon cancer. He was 73.
Hawkins, originally from Goldmine, in Richland Parish, recorded his first hit in the KWKH Radio studios in downtown Shreveport in 1956 with then-15-year-old guitarist James Burton, who later went on to perform and record with Elvis Presley, Ricky Nelson, John Denver and Jerry Lee Lewis, among others.
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[Burton] recalled the guitar lick that became the hook for “Oh! Suzy-Q.”
“I wrote that little guitar lick when I was 14,” Burton recalled. “It got to be so pop in the club that Dale decided to write some lyrics to it and that became ‘Suzy-Q.’ It became a good record for him and (me) both.
“I was probably his first fan. He was a good guy, a good friend, and I think he lived life to the fullest, right up to the end.”
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Bassist Joe Osborn, whose career on hundreds of No. 1 and Top 10 hits includes work with Ricky Nelson, Johnny Rivers, the Carpenters, the Fifth Dimension and Bob Dylan, credits Hawkins with starting his career and transitioning him from the guitar to the electric bass.
“In 1956, I was working at Sears in the hardware department and Dale came in,” Osborn said. “‘Suzy-Q’ was already out and a hit, and he wanted me to play with his brother Jerry and his band at the Skyway Club. That’s how me and Dale started. If he hadn’t come in that day I’d still be at Sears, selling hardware.”
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In addition to his classic “Suzy-Q,” Hawkins recorded more than 40 songs on the “Chess” label. According to an obituary, he was the third entertainer to appear on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand and was the first white artist to perform at the “Apollo Theatre” in Harlem and the “Regal” in Chicago.
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In the mid-1980s, after moving to Arkansas and entering into a second career as a social worker and counselor, Hawkins returned to live performances in a comeback concert at then-Cowboys nightclub in Bossier City, an event put together by Oil City producer Tom Ayres.
Hawkins, a Navy veteran of the Korean War, is in the Rockabilly Hall of Fame and the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame.
Dale Hawkins (August 22, 1936-February, 13, 2010)
“Susie Q” (1956 [variously spelled over the years])
*****
“Little Pig” (1957)
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With James Burton (guitar), “Who Do You Love?”, live, Louisiana (Shreveport), 2008
2010
Monday, 2/15/10
Listen to “Sunny Day” by Akon and Wyclef.—Luke (my 18-year-old son, on the phone the other night)
Akon with Wyclef Jean, “Sunny Day” (2008)
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One of the things I find intriguing about contemporary popular music is the widespread practice (particularly in hip-hop) of featuring guest artists, usually, it seems, people whose style and approach are very different from one’s own. Implicit in this is the notion that hearing two different musical personalities can make for a more interesting and rewarding experience than hearing just one. And including another artist opens a song up, making it less a fixed, static thing and more a vehicle for improvisation and variation, something subject to different takes, whose content and texture ultimately depend to a large extent on the identity and contributions of the featured guest.
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lagniappe
My son called from Minnesota the other day to tell me that the weather was terrible, his car had been towed, he didn’t like his job, and he had a cold and a sore throat. Is it bad that the only motherly advice I could think to give him was to listen to Fats Waller [2/9/10]?
*****
The drummer’s comments were great [Brian Blade, 2/13/10]. You layin’ down a pretty good groove your own self, Richard.
2010
Sunday, 2/14/10
Where did Wilson Pickett (2/12/10) get that clenched, piercing, back-of-the-throat scream?
The Five Blind Boys of Mississippi (featuring Archie Brownlee)
“Never Turn Back” (1948)
*****
“Will Jesus Be Waiting?” (1952)
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“Save A Seat For Me” (c. 1956)
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“Leaning On The Everlasting Arms” (c. 1959)
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lagniappe
‘Archie started that scream you hear all the soul singers do,’ the great Ira Tucker of the Dixie Hummingbirds observed. ‘Now plenty of us used to scream, but Archie really brought it out.’—Arthur Kempton, Boogaloo: The Quintessence of American Popular Music (2005)
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After he left gospel, Sam Cooke once told a friend that he would always tear up when he would listen to Brownlee: ‘He’s the only one who could do that—to move me like that.’—Robert Darden, People Get Ready! A New History of Black Gospel Music (2004)
