You can talk about her exquisite phrasing: the way she hovers around the beat. But that sort of musical shoptalk barely scratches the surface. Other singers may be able to express joy, or pain, or regret, or longing, or other feelings. But how many other singers are able to convey so many different emotions all at once?
Billie Holiday (with Jimmy Rowles, piano), “My Man,” live
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I hate straight singing. I have to change a tune to my own way of doing it. That’s all I know.
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No two people on earth are alike, and it’s got to be that way in music or it isn’t music.
The well of Chicago gospel runs so deep it sometimes seems bottomless.
DeLois Barrett Campbell and The Barrett Sisters, “The Storm Is Passing Over,” live, 1982 (featured in the documentary Say Amen, Somebody)
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[DeLois Barrett Campbell and the Barrett Sisters’] harmony is special, probably the best in female gospel.—Anthony Heilbut, The Gospel Sound: Good News and Bad Times (1975 ed.)
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DeLois Barrett Campbell & The Barrett Sisters
The O’Neal Twins
The Clark Sisters
The Louvin Brothers
The Delmore Brothers
The Stanley Brothers
The Everly Brothers
The Beach Boys
The Bee Gees
Kate & Anna McGarrigle
The Jackson Five
The Isley Brothers
The Neville Brothers
The list goes on, and on, and . . .
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“Thanks very much for that—a really nice blog!”—Tristan Murail (12/26/09 [in response to an email letting him know that his music was being featured here])
In the public imagination, the guitar’s associated with freedom and individuality. The musical reality’s different. Guitarists travel in herds; few stray from the pack. One who has gone his own way is this man, who’s played with everyone from Muddy Waters (as a session musician for Chicago-based Chess Records) to Miles Davis (as a member of his group [1973-1975]). He employs a variety of unusual tunings and effects. He sounds like no one else.
Pete Cosey, guitar
“Calypso Frelimo” (excerpt), Pete Cosey’s Children of Agharta (JT Lewis, drums; Gary Bartz and John Stubblefield, saxophones & flute; Matt Rubano, bass; Johnny Juice, turntables; Baba Israel, words and beats; Kyle Jason, voice; Bern Pizzitola, guitar; Wendy Oxenhorn, harmonica), live, 2002, New York
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Live (with Melvin Gibbs, bass; JT Lewis, drums; Johnny Juice, congas and turntables)
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He’s [Pete Cosey’s] the guy who, after Hendrix, showed you how ‘out’ you could go with guitar playing, particularly in the improvised context.—Greg Tate
Musicians (and composers) fall into two camps: less-is-more and more-is-more.
The less-is-more camp may, in turn, be divided into the less-less-is-more and the more-less-is-more.
And the less-less-is-more . . .
Jon Hassell and Maarifa Street (Jon Hassell, trumpet; Peter Freeman, bass, laptop; Hugh Marsh, violin; Steve Shehan, percussion, laptop), live, Serbia (Belgrade), 2006
. . . Jon Hassell’s ideas and techniques have so thoroughly permeated lo- and hi-brow contemporary electronic music, albeit often in a third or fourth hand way . . . that it’s difficult to think what contemporary music would sound like without his influence. . . . there’s categorically no doubt that Hassell has had as an important effect on contemporary music as Miles Davis or Jimi Hendrix or James Brown or the Velvet Underground.—The Wire
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More on John Berryman (12/28/09): Here Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet Philip Levine recalls John Berryman (also Robert Lowell) as a teacher at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
He [John Berryman] took that class with a seriousness I had never seen before. . . . He was entrancing. He was magnetic. . . . He had a marvelous sense of humor. . . . He really took this seriously. He was a great teacher. He was the greatest teacher I ever had—and an inspiration.—Philip Levine
. . . the most important thing, and the most important element of the music, and the most important compositional step is deciding who it is that you’re going to work with—even more so than what notes they’re going to play, or what context you’re going to put them in.—Steve Lehman
Thelonious Monk with saxophonist Charlie Rouse, working out a number, “Boo Boo’s Birthday,” during a recording session, 1967
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Thelonious Monk (with Charlie Rouse, tenor saxophone; Ben Riley, drums; Larry Gales, bass), “Boo Boo’s Birthday” (Underground [Columbia], 1968)
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reading table
One of the great discoveries I made in college, besides Bach (10/19/09, 10/24/09, 12/25/09) and Blind Willie Johnson (11/15/09) and Bill Evans (11/18/09) and Hound Dog Taylor (10/30/09), was John Berryman. Hearing him read his poetry, not long before he died (jumping off a bridge in Minneapolis), changed my life. Really. That night made me realize, in ways that I never had before, just how lively and surprising and exciting poetry could be. It made me realize, too, that what a great poem offers is an experience—one you can’t get anywhere else. And so I have Berryman to thank not only for his own poems (especially TheDream Songs [which would be on my desert-island packing list]) but also for making Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Wislawa Szymborska, Charles Simic, et al., such important figures in my life. Just as my life would be immeasurably poorer without Thelonious Monk (11/2/09, 11/25/09, today) and Vernard Johnson (12/6/09) and Morton Feldman (11/7/09, 12/5/09) and Lester Bowie (9/8/09, 10/28/09), so too would it be without them.
This recording, for all its technical shortcomings (headphones help), captures some of what I heard in Berryman that night almost 40 years ago. Blustery and grandiose and vulnerable, jazzy and funny: he was all these things—and more.
This is not a cultural occasion, ladies and gentlemen, in case you were misled by anyone. This is an entertainment.—John Berryman
Chicago’s not only the blues capital of the world; it’s the birthplace of gospel. Both could be found on Maxwell Street. The other day we went there to hear some blues (12/22/09). Here’s some gospel.
Carrie Robinson (AKA Carrie Robbins, Mary Washington), “Power To Live Right,” Chicago’s Maxwell Street, circa 1964
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Wow! [Lou Rawls and the Pilgrim Travelers, 12/20/09]
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OK, so I’m a meathead, but I much prefer John Lee Hooker [12/25/09, to Tristan Murail, 12/26/09].
Food, people, music: part of what fascinates is variousness. Take the world of contemporary classical music: it’s inhabited not only by Elliott Carter’s thorny dissonance (11/19/09, 12/12/09), but also by this composer’s spectral elegance.
Tristan Murail (1947-), “Le Lac pour ensemble” (2001)/Argento Chamber Ensemble
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
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Composers who have taken inspiration from spectralist methods . . . aren’t tune-happy populists by any means. But they have brought a new sensuousness to European music. In place of the spastic gesturing that was de rigueur during the Cold War era, their work often unfolds in meditative, deep-breathing lines. While spectralist music would hardly serve as the soundtrack to a yoga session, it does have the capacity to generate a state of eerie calm. In a way, it is the European counterpart to American minimalism, which, back in the nineteen-sixties, returned emphatically to musical ABCs.—Alex Ross
