two takes
“Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” aka “Motherless Child” (trad.)
Bessie Griffin, live, Holland, 1972
***
Prince, live
two takes
“Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen”
Bessie Griffin (with Charles Barnett, piano), live, Switzerland (Montreux Jazz Festival), 1981
*****
Albert Ayler (AA, saxophone; Call Cobbs, piano; Henry Grimes, bass; Sunny Murray, drums), recording, 1964
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lagniappe
reading table
To live is to lose ground.
—E. M. Cioran (1911-1995; translated from French by Richard Howard)
two takes
I’m too close to heaven, I just can’t turn around . . .
“Too Close To Heaven”
Brooklyn All-Stars (featuring Hardie Clifton), live, 1989
***
Bessie Griffin, live
**********
lagniappe
radio gems: gospel
Sinner’s Crossroads
WFMU-FM
Jersey City, New Jersey; Mt. Hope, New York
Thursday, 8-9 p.m. (EST) (archived shows)
One of my all-time favorite radio shows.
*****
reading table
Shelby had been fooled about Florida, but that was okay. She wasn’t the first. She’d imagined a place that was warm and inviting and she’d gotten a place that was without seasons and sickeningly hot. She’d wanted palm trees and she’d gotten grizzly, low oaks. She’d wanted surfers instead of rednecks. She’d thought Florida would make her feel glamorous or something, and there was a region of Florida that might’ve done just that, but it wasn’t this part. It was okay, though. It was something different. It wasn’t the Midwest. It wasn’t a place where you could look around and plainly see, for miles, that nothing worthwhile was going on.
***
“Everybody calls this the real Florida . . . . I don’t understand an expression like that. Is part of the state imaginary?”
—John Brandon, Citrus County (2010)
music clip of the day 