Deep, dark, deliberate: here’s a bass player who, like Sirone (yesterday) and Malachi Favors (9/8/09), doesn’t run away from his instrument’s distinctive qualities. He revels in them.
William Parker, live, New York, 2009
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Want more? Here.
Here’s bassist/composer Sirone (AKA Norris Jones), who passed away last month (10/22) at the age of 69. The list of musicians he played with is long and deep—John Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, Dewey Redman, Cecil Taylor, et al. He was a member of the Revolutionary Ensemble, the critically acclaimed trio that also included violinist Leroy Jenkins.
This quartet performance, from last year, features an unusual mix of instruments: tenor saxophone, drums, bass, cello. How deeply felt is this music? Look at the smiles Sirone and cellist Nioka Workman exchange toward the end (8:35 and following).
Project L’Afrique Garde (with Sirone [bass], Nioka Workman [cello], Michael Wimberly [drums and percussion], Abdoulaye N’Diaye [tenor saxophone]), live, New York, 2008
This guy’s music opened up for me once I started to think of him as a percussionist whose instrument happens to be his voice.
MC Busdriver with Kneebody, “Gun Control,” live, Los Angeles, 2008
(Here’s a shout-out to Rachael Zalutsky—the 20-something woman who cuts my hair [while we talk about music, among other things]—who first told me about MCB.)
My 18-year-old son Luke, who was home from college over the weekend, played me this track yesterday—something by another college guy, 21 years old and a senior at Duke, who leaves campus every weekend to do shows all over the country. We were driving into the city and Luke, who’d burned this on a CD, slid the disc into the dashboard player. “I love this song,” he said. “It makes me feel good inside. It’s the beat. And his voice is so good.”
Mike Posner (with Big Sean), “Speed of Sound” (2009)
Want more? Here.
lagniappe
The most difficult part of the [music] business today is deciding whether I should commit the dollars to signing an unknown or wait until the artist has a hit. Then there are guys like Mike Posner. I would bet on him for the future and today.—Marty Bandier, the 68-year-old chief executive of Sony/ATV Music Publishing
After three Sundays of Aretha, let’s listen to her father.
Reverend C. L. Franklin (1915-1984; Pastor, New Bethel Baptist Church, Detroit, Michigan, 1946-1979), “The Old Ship Of Zion”
Want more? Here.
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lagniappe
[Growing up in the Mississippi Delta, C. L. Franklin] listened to all sorts of music. Even though his family was very poor, they owned a stand up Victrola. He loved listening to Roosevelt Sykes, and he listened to other blues singers. He also listened to a preacher out of Atlanta, J. M. Gates, who ultimately recorded an enormous number of three minute sermons in the twenties and thirties. . . .
The social pattern surrounding the use of the Victrola was very interesting. It was not unusual for the people who didn’t own a Victrola to buy the records and bring them to the home of a friend who did. It became another way of socializing. Even in very strict religious households, children were allowed to listen to music as long as they didn’t dance or cross their legs. They listened to the blues as well as recorded hymns and sermons. B.B. King tells the story about how, as a child, there was no distinction between Saturday night and Sunday morning—that the same people who were at the juke joints were in church pews on Sunday morning. . . .
King said that whenever he was in Detroit, no matter how late he was up on Saturday night playing a gig, he was in the first row at New Bethel Baptist—C. L. Franklin’s church—at 10:45 Sunday morning. He called Reverend Franklin ‘my main preacher.’—Nick Salvatore (author of Singing in a Strange Land: C. L. Franklin, the Black Church, and the Transformation of America [2005])
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reading table
The “Chicago” issue of Granta arrived in the mail this week, and it looks awfully promising. Let’s see: Don DeLillo (on Nelson Algren), Aleksander Hemon (on [I think] playing soccer in the city’s parks), Thom Jones (on working at a General Mills factory in West Chicago), Richard Powers (on the Great Flood of 1992), etc. Oh, and there are some stunning photos, too—not of the city’s grand historic architecture, but of Cabrini Green and the Robert Taylor Homes and the Henry Horner Homes. (A shout-out to my brother Don for tipping me off to this issue.)
Want a break from music that’s busy, busy, busy, busy, busy?
Try this.
Here, it seems, almost nothing happens at all.
Morton Feldman (1926-1987), Intermission 6 (1953)/Clint Davis, piano, live, Lexington, Kentucky, 2009
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lagniappe
To almost everyone’s surprise but his own, he [Morton Feldman] turned out to be one of the major composers of the twentieth century, a sovereign artist who opened up vast, quiet, agonizingly beautiful worlds of sound . . . . In the noisiest century in history, Feldman chose to be glacially slow and snowily soft.—Alex Ross
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Earlier in my life there seemed to be unlimited possibilities, but my mind was closed. Now, years later and with an open mind, possibilities no longer interest me. I seem content to be continually rearranging the same furniture in the same room.—Morton Feldman
Some performances are so intimate and so strange that part of you feels as though you should avert your eyes. But another part knows that you can’t.
Nina Simone, “Feelings,” live, Switzerland (Montreux Jazz Festival), 1976
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lagniappe
reading table
Here Robert Creeley reads his poem “Please.”
I think my overall mood might be brighter if every time the phone rang I got to say:
“Hello, Sleepy LaBeef speaking . . .”
Sleepy LaBeef, “Little Bit More” (1957)
Want more? Here.
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Speaking of mood-brightening, how nice to hear this week, via email, from a couple regular reader/listeners:
—“ever since J turned me on to your blog . . . I have been in love with it. . . . It is a fantastic way to start the day.”
—“I just wanted to let you know how much I enjoyed the clips of Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk—two of my absolute favorite musicians of all time. Keep up the great work, I’m amazed that you can keep to the daily regimen of posting. Your readers are the beneficiaries. Keep it up and a big thank you.”
For much of his life he wrestled with inner demons. Hospitalized repeatedly, he was treated with ECT (electroshock). But when he was seated at the piano, his fingers moved across the keyboard with the grace and elegance of a ballet dancer.
Bud Powell, “Anthropology,” live, Denmark (Copenhagen), 1962
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lagniappe
Bill Evans on Bud Powell
He was so expressive, such emotion flowed out of him! There are different kinds of emotion: there is the easy, superficial kind, and there is another kind, that doesn’t make you laugh or cry, that doesn’t make you feel anything but a sense of sheer perfection. It’s a feeling we sometimes get with Beethoven. . . . It’s not that it’s beautiful in the sense of pretty or brilliant, it’s something else, something much deeper. . . . If I had to choose one single musician for his artistic integrity, for the grandeur of his work, it would be Bud Powell. He was in a class by himself.—Bill Evans (in Francis Paudras, Dance of the Infidels: A Portrait of Bud Powell [1986])
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Sonny Rollins on Bud Powell
(The way Sonny, trying to describe Bud’s playing, shakes his head—first at around 1:35, then again at around 3:30—says more than any words could.)
If you were a musician, could anything be worse than to find, one day, that unlike the day before, and the day before that, and all the other days you could remember, you were no longer able to play your instrument? That’s what happened, in 1958, to this man, the great British classical pianist Solomon Cutner (known professionally simply as Solomon). Then 56 years old and at the height of his career, he suffered a stroke. It left his right arm paralyzed, silencing him for the rest of his life, which lasted another 32 years.
Beethoven, Piano Sonata No. 23 in F minor (“Appassionata” [1804])/Solomon, piano
1st Movement
2nd Movement
3rd Movement
lagniappe
Andras Schiff on Beethoven’s piano sonatas
In London a couple years ago, pianist Andras Schiff explored Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas in a series of much-acclaimed lecture-recitals, which can be heard here.
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Thelonious Monk and Beethoven, Bach, Chopin, et al.
Thelonious Monk possessed an impressive knowledge of, and appreciation for, Western classical music, not to mention an encyclopedic knowledge of hymns and gospel music, American popular songs, and a variety of obscure art songs that defy easy categorization. For him, it was all music. Once in 1966, a phalanx of reporters in Helsinki pressed Monk about his thoughts on classical music and whether or not jazz and classical can come together. His drummer, Ben Riley, watched the conversation unfold: ‘Everyone wanted him to answer, give some type of definition between classical music and jazz . . . So he says, ‘Two is one,’ and that stopped the whole room. No one else said anything else.’ Two is one, indeed. Monk loved Frédéric Chopin, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Beethoven, and Bach, and like many of his peers of the bebop generation, he took an interest in Igor Stravinsky.—Robin D. G. Kelley, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (2009)
