Yesterday’s email included this from my 18-year-old son Luke:
“i bet you might like this video it’s crazy and i like the song”
Passion Pit, “Sleepyhead” (2009 [album], 2008 [EP, single])
(If this clip stops, then starts, then stops again [as it sometimes does for me], the trick seems to be, as with other YouTube clips, to stop it yourself and allow the colored line at the bottom to fill in all the way before restarting it. It should then play without interruption.)
Something you like a lot, something you can’t stand: the difference between them isn’t always that great. Take this track, for instance. If, say, the musical backdrop were a bit sweeter, or the lyrics weren’t quite as spare, or the voice sounded a little less haggard, I’d probably hate it.
David Sylvian, “Darkest Dreaming” (1999)
Rev. Utah Smith, Vernard Johnson, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, et al.: to those who have “ears to hear,” has any church given more than the Church of God in Christ (COGIC)?
Sister Rosetta Tharpe
“Didn’t It Rain,” live, England (Manchester), 1964
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“Up Above My Head,” live (TV broadcast)
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“Strange Things Happening Everyday” (1944)
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lagniappe
One of Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s many fans was Johnny Cash. She was, according to daughter Rosanne, his favorite singer.
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Other [black] churches were modeling themselves after mainline white Protestant institutions. They had a piano and an organ, and that was it. They had prepared literatures and other things. But the Church of God in Christ came out of African tradition, its call-and-response mode. . . . There is a definite COGIC style, and it has influenced the whole of gospel music. . . . Rosetta Tharpe and all of those personalities, they all sang in the Church of God in Christ. Utah Smith with “Two Wings”? COGIC. The Church of God in Christ has always been in the vanguard of expressing music.
One thing the Church of God in Christ understood very early on was that if you want to hold children in church, let ’em sing. If they’re not saved, let ’em sing. They’ll get saved. Let ’em hang around the church long enough, let ’em fall in love with singing. I don’t know anybody that’s a preacher in this church, a missionary in this church, that did not start off singing in the choir. If you were a child in this church, you sang. Even if you couldn’t carry a note in a bucket. The choir is where I began. I blew saxophone—and every now and again I still do. I’ve blown alto, soprano, and tenor. But basically I did my blowing and my music in the church. And so I have my musical part that I played in the church. My brother was the organist for the church. My other brother, Nathan, is the organist here [at Temple Church of God in Christ in Memphis]. He’s minister of music for this church. And we have an adult choir, and a youth choir, and our Sunshine Band, little children. So singing plays a part from the cradle to the grave.—Rev. Dr. David Hall (in Alan Young, Woke Me Up This Morning: Black Singers and the Gospel Life [1997])
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Today MCOTD celebrates its 100th post! (Hmmm . . . if this is where we are now, where would we be without music?)
Last week a recording of his complete works for solo piano (so far), Oppens Plays Carter (on Chicago-based Cedille Records), was nominated for a Grammy.
This week he celebrated his 101st birthday.
Next week?
Elliott Carter, Quintet for Piano (1997), Ursula Oppens, The Arditti Quartet, live
Part 1
Part 2
Want more? Here.
Wednesday’s featured artist, Curtis Mayfield, was so popular and influential among Jamaican musicians, including the early Wailers (back when the group included Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer [before becoming “Bob Marley and . . .”]), that one British deejay dubbed him the “Godfather of Reggae.”
The Wailers (with Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, and Bunny Wailer), “Keep On Moving” (1972)
Want more? Here (don’t miss “Soul Shakedown Party”).
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The Impressions (with Curtis Mayfield), “I Gotta Keep on Moving” (1964)
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lagniappe
reading table
It’s odd to think back on the time—not so long ago—when there were distinct stylistic trends, such as “this season’s colour” or “abstract expressionism” or “psychedelic music.” It seems we don’t think like that any more. There are just too many styles around, and they keep mutating too fast to assume that kind of dominance.
As an example, go into a record shop and look at the dividers used to separate music into different categories. There used to be about a dozen: rock, jazz, ethnic, and so on. Now there are almost as many dividers as there are records, and they keep proliferating.
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We’re living in a stylistic tropics. There’s a whole generation of people able to access almost anything from almost anywhere, and they don’t have the same localised stylistic sense that my generation grew up with. It’s all alive, all “now,” in an ever-expanding present, be it Hildegard of Bingen or a Bollywood soundtrack. The idea that something is uncool because it’s old or foreign has left the collective consciousness.
I think this is good news. As people become increasingly comfortable with drawing their culture from a rich range of sources—cherry-picking whatever makes sense to them—it becomes more natural to do the same thing with their social, political and other cultural ideas. The sharing of art is a precursor to the sharing of other human experiences, for what is pleasurable in art becomes thinkable in life.—Brian Eno, 11/18/09
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MEMO
To: Elliott Carter
From: MCOTD
Happy 101st Birthday!
This is the kind of guy who gives discographers fits. According to Wikipedia: “On recordings, he is credited under many different names, including: Noel ‘Scully’ Simms, Noel ‘Skully’ Simms, Scully, Scully Simms, Skullie, Skully, Skully Simms, Zoot ‘Scully’ Simms, Mikey Spratt, Scollie, Zoot Sims, and Skitter.” Even in the course of a single book, Lloyd Bradley’s This Is Reggae Music, his name’s spelled two different ways (Skully, Scully).
Noel “Skully” Simms, live (recording session, Horace Andy, Livin’ It Up [2007])
lagniappe
Tuesday I emailed Oran Etkin, letting him know that his music was being featured here, and he sent this response: “That is great. Thank you. Are you the writer of the blog? I like the melodic rhythm and rhythmic melody idea.” In a later message, he added: “Great stuff. I’m checking out the 3-part Lacy interview. Checked out the Malian drumming and gospel sax stuff too.”
Take away the hand drums and the music of this man—another of the great artists to come out of Chicago in the last 50 years—would have a whole different flavor.
Curtis Mayfield (with Master Henry Gibson on hand drums), “Move On Up,” live, The Netherlands (The Hague), 1987
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lagniappe
In the Sixties, you had percussionists like Master Henry Gibson that was playing with Curtis Mayfield and he was pretty much used as melodic accents. When you listen to a lot of Curtis’ work after the Impressions, rather than a horn player he’s got Henry Gibson out front on percussions. A lot of people had missed that in the sense of compositional expression.—Kahil El’Zabar
When melody’s felt rhythmically, and rhythm melodically, you don’t need drums for the music to dance.
Oran Etkin’s Group Kelenia (Oran Etkin, clarinet; Makane Kouyate, percussion; Lionel Loueke, guitar; Joe Sanders, bass), live (radio recording session), New York, 2009
Want more? Here.
If you play a recording of American jazz for an African friend, even though all the formal characteristics of African music are there, he may say, as he sits fidgeting in his chair, ‘What are we supposed to do with this?’ He is expressing perhaps the most fundamental aesthetic in Africa: without participation, there is no meaning. When you ask an African friend whether or not he ‘understands’ a certain type of music, he will say yes if he knows the dance that goes with it.—John Miller Chernoff, African Rhythm and African Sensibility (1979)
West African Drummers & Dance Ceremony: Bobo celebration, Mali
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lagniappe
reading table
The End of Music?
We seem to be on the edge of a paradigm shift. Orchestras are struggling to stay alive, rock has been relegated to the underground, jazz has stopped evolving and become a dead art, the music industry itself has been subsumed by corporate culture and composers are at their wit’s end trying to find something that’s hip but still appeals to an audience mired in a 19th-century sensibility.
For more than half a century we’ve seen incredible advances in sound technology but very little if any advance in the quality of music. In this case the paradigm shift may not be a shift but a dead stop. Is it that people just don’t want to hear anything new? Or is it that composers and musicians have simply swallowed the pomo line that nothing else new can be done, which ironically is really just the ‘old, old story.’
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Of course, we could all just listen to all of our old albums, CD’s and mp3’s. In fact, nowadays that’s where the industry makes most of its money. We could also just watch old movies and old TV shows. There are a lot of them now. Why bother making any new ones? Why bother doing anything new at all? Why bother having any change or progress at all as long as we’ve got ‘growth’? I’m just wondering if this is in fact the new paradigm. I’m just wondering if in fact the new music is just the old music again. And, if that in fact it would actually just be the end of music.—Glenn Branca, 11/24/09
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Arrested Musical Development?
I think baby boomers have to a great extent been products of arrested musical development; that is they have stayed with those more popular music genres—even to the point of being more invested in ‘oldies’ of their development years than in current contemporary music—and have not grown in terms of their music sensibilities to embrace the more ‘serious’ forms of music, i.e. jazz, classical, contemporary chamber music, opera, etc. Supposedly when we grow and develop we don’t for example continue to read books and publications that are geared more towards children or teens. So why not the same relationship with music?—Willard Jenkins, 11/10/09
I first heard this guy back in the mid-1970s, after reading a review in the New York Times, by the late Robert Palmer, of his first album, The Gospel Saxophone of Vernard Johnson—and I’ve been listening to him ever since.
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Vernard Johnson
Live, Texas (Roanoke)
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“What Is This?”
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“I’ve Decided To Make Jesus My Choice” (The Gospel Saxophone of Vernard Johnson [Glori, 1974])
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lagniappe
Like Rev. Utah Smith and many other gospel greats (Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Arizona Dranes, et al.), Vernard Johnson belongs to the Church of God in Christ (COGIC), a denomination that, as Robert Palmer put it, “has never believed in letting the devil have all the good tunes, or the good instruments.”
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The saxophone is a resolutely secular icon in our culture, its gleaming curves and often voice-like sound firmly associated with both sultry, sophisticated jazz and bumptious rock-and-roll, with high-flying fancies and the red-dirt realities of the blues. But the saxophone has also been a vehicle of imagination and spirit. And although it isn’t widely known, the spirituality of storefront churches and ecstatic religion has shaped the work of some of American music’s most indelible saxophone stylists, including King Curtis, Ornette Coleman and Albert Ayler.
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King Curtis, whose solos on 50’s hits like the Coasters’ ‘Charlie Brown’ and ‘Baby That Is Rock-and-Roll’ virtually defined rock-and-roll saxophone as a distinct idiom, grew up playing the saxophone in Texas churches. Ornette Coleman, who played rocking Southern rhythm-and-blues saxophone before he revolutionized jazz in the 60’s, considers playing in Deacon Frank Lastie’s ”spirit church” in New Orleans in the 1940’s a key experience in terms of his later evolution. There was a great deal of the black church in the burning, visionary saxophone stylings of 60’s iconoclasts such as Albert Ayler and Pharoah Sanders.—Robert Palmer, The New York Times (3/6/87)
