Charles Mingus | music clip of the day

Sunday, 10/2/11

Here, at Luther Vandross’s funeral, Stevie testifies.

Stevie Wonder, “I Won’t Complain”
Live, New York (The Riverside Church), 2005

**********

lagniappe

For as long as you’ve got a harp in your heart, God’s got a hymn for your hurt. And as long as you’ve got a hymn, then you’ve got hope.

—Maurice O. Wallace (funeral sermon, quoted in Karla FC Holloway, Passed On: African American Mourning Stories [2002])

(Originally posted 10/11/09.)

*****

listening room: (some of) what’s playing

• Coldcut, 70 Minutes of Madness (Journeys by DJ)

• Mahmoud Ahmed, Ethiopiques, Vol. 6: Almaz (Buda Musique [import])

• Staff Benda Bilili, Tres Tres Fort (Crammed Discs)

• Louis Armstrong, Hot Fives & Sevens (JSP [import])

• Jaki Byard, Solo/Strings (Prestige)

• John Carter & Bobby Bradford’s New Art Jazz Ensemble, Seeking (hat Art)

• Eric Dolphy, Out to Lunch (Blue Note)

• Bill Evans Trio, Sunday at the Village Vanguard (Riverside)

• The Great Concert of Charles Mingus (Verve)

• The Complete Dean Benedetti Recordings Of Charlie Parker (Mosaic)

• Sun Ra, Sleeping Beauty (Phantom Sound & Vision [import])

• The Complete Novus & Columbia Recordings of Henry Threadgill & Air (Mosaic)

• Wadada Leo Smith’s Golden Quartet (Tzadik)

• Bela Bartok, String Quartets Nos. 5 & 6, Takacs Quartet (Hungaroton [import])

• David Behrman, On the Other Ocean (Lovely Music)

• Morton Feldman, Crippled Symmetry, Eberhard Blum, flute; Nils Vigland, piano, celesta; Jan Williams, glockenspiel, vibraphone (hat Art)

Morton Feldman, For Christian Wolff, Eberhard Blum, flute; Nils Vigland, piano, celesta (hat Art)

• Morton Feldman, For Bunita Marcus, Stephane Ginsburgh, piano (Sub Rosa) (available as a download from Amazon for 89¢)

• Morton Feldman, For Samuel Beckett, San Francisco Contemporary Players (Newport Classic)

• Morton Feldman, Triadic Memories, Markus Hinterhauser, piano (Col Legno [import])

• Morton Feldman, Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello, Members of the Ives Ensemble (hat Art)

• Ingram Marshall, Kingdom Come (Nonesuch)

• Maurizio Pollini, piano, Arnold Schoenberg (The Solo Piano Music, Piano Concerto), Anton Webern (Variations, op. 27) (Deutsche Grammaphon)

• Dimitri Shostakovich, String Quartets Nos. 5, 6, & 7, Borodin Quartet (Melodiya)

• WKCR-FM (broadcasting from Columbia University)
—Lester Young/Charlie Parker birthday marathon
—John Coltrane birthday broadcast
—Bird Flight (Phil Schaap, jazz [Charlie Parker])
—Traditions in Swing (Phil Schaap, jazz)
—Eastern Standard Time (Carter Van Pelt, Jamaican music)

• WFMU-FM
—Mudd Up! (DJ/Rupture, “new bass and beats”)
—Sinner’s Crossroads (Kevin Nutt, gospel)
—Airborne Event (Dan Bodah, “electronic noise to free jazz, drone rock to a capella African song”)
—Give the Drummer Some (Doug Schulkind, sui generis, web only)
—Transpacific Sound Paradise (Rob Weisberg, “popular and unpopular music from around the world”)

• WHPK-FM (broadcasting from University of Chicago)
—The Blues Excursion (Arkansas Red)

Leave a comment

2011

Sunday, 7/3/11

This guy I can’t get enough of.

Vernard Johnson, “Don’t Wait ’Til The Battle Is Over, Shout Now!”; live, TV broadcast (Bobby Jones Gospel)

Vodpod videos no longer available.

Time for just one note? 6:23.

More? Here. And here.

**********

lagniappe

art beat

Lee Friedlander, Cherry Blossom Time in Japan (2006)

*****

reading table

Yesterday, opening my Emily Dickinson collection (The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by R. W. Franklin) at random, I came upon this.

We do not play on Graves —
Because there isn’t Room —
Besides — it isn’t even — it slants
And People come —

And put a Flower on it —
And hang their faces so —
We’re fearing that their Hearts will drop —
And crush our pretty play —

And so we move as far
As Enemies — away —
Just looking round to see how far
It is — Occasionally —

—Emily Dickinson (#599)

***

*****

listening room: what’s playing

• Echocord Jubilee Comp. (Echocord)

• Art Ensemble of Chicago, Full Force (ECM)

• Art Ensemble of Chicago, Urban Bushmen (ECM)

• Paul Motian (with Lee Konitz, soprano & alto saxophones; Joe Lovano, tenor saxophone; Bill Frisell, guitar; Charlie Haden, bass), On Broadway Vol. 3 (Winter & Winter)

• Rebirth Brass Band, Feel Like Funkin’ It Up (Rounder)

• Marc Ribot, Silent Movies (Pi Recordings)

• Wadada Leo Smith, Kabell Years: 1971-1979 (Tzadik)

• Charles “Baron” Mingus, West Coast, 1945-49 (Uptown Jazz)

• John Alexander’s Sterling Jubilee Singers, Jesus Hits Like The Atom Bomb (New World Records)

• Rev. Johnny L. Jones, The Hurricane That Hit Atlanta (Dust-to-Digital)

• Elliott Carter, composer; Ursula Oppens, piano; Oppens Plays Carter (Cedille)

• Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, composers; Maurizio Pollini, piano, piano works (Schoenberg), Variations Op. 27 (Webern) (Deutsche Grammophon)

• Morton Feldman, For Bunita Marcus, Stephane Ginsburgh, piano (Sub Rosa)

• WKCR-FM (broadcasting from Columbia University)
—Bird Flight (Phil Schaap, jazz [Charlie Parker])
—Traditions in Swing (Phil Schaap, jazz)
—Daybreak Express (Various, jazz)
—Out to Lunch (Various, jazz)
—Jazz Profiles (Various, jazz)
—Jazz Alternatives (Various, jazz)
—Morning Classical (Various, classical)
—Afternoon New Music (Various, classical and hard-to-peg)
—Eastern Standard Time (Carter Van Pelt, Jamaican music)

• WFMU-FM
—Mudd Up! (DJ/Rupture, “new bass and beats”)
—Sinner’s Crossroads (Kevin Nutt, gospel)
—Give The Drummer Some (Doug Schulkind, sui generis)
—Downtown Soulville with Mr. Fine Wine (soul)

Leave a comment

2011

Saturday, 6/25/11

nadir, n. the lowest point.

On July 29, 1946, Charlie Parker was arrested in Los Angeles, after starting a fire in his hotel room. Earlier that day, unable to score heroin, scratchy, drunk on whiskey, he recorded this track, which, depending on your point of view, is either one of the worst records he ever made (Parker’s view) or, despite (because of?) its raggedyness, among the greatest (Charles Mingus’s opinion). After his arrest he was confined, for six months, at Camarillo State Mental Hospital.

Charlie Parker, “Lover Man” (CP, alto saxophone; Howard McGhee, trumpet; Jimmy Bunn, piano; Bob Kesterson, bass; Roy Porter, drums), rec. 7/29/46

http://youtu.be/nX4Kb-pSZUk

More? Here.

**********

lagniappe

rewarding the deserving

So often, it seems, when arts awards are announced, my initial reaction is: “Huh?” Not this time. The National Endowment of the Arts just announced their 2012 Jazz Masters Awards, which recognize, with Lifetime Honors, “living musicians for career-long achievement.” And the winners are Jack DeJohnette, Jimmy Owens, Charlie Haden, Sheila Jordan, and Von Freeman.

*****

reading table

The cafeteria in the hospital’s basement was the saddest place in the world, with its grim neon lights and gray tabletops and the diffuse forboding of those who had stepped away from suffering children to have a grilled cheese sandwich.

***

The next day, I set up an iPod dock and played music, not only in the willfully delusional belief that music would be good for a painful, recovering brain but also to counter the soul-crushing hospital noise: the beeping of monitors, the wheezing of respirators, the indifferent chatter of nurses in the hallway, the alarm that went off whenever a patient’s condition abruptly worsened.

***

One early morning, driving to the hospital, I saw a number of able-bodied, energetic runners progressing along Fullerton Avenue toward the sunny lakefront, and I had a strong physical sensation of being in an aquarium: I could see out, the people outside could see me (if they chose to pay attention), but we were living and breathing in entirely different environments.

—Aleksandar Hemon, “The Aquarium: A Child’s Isolating Illness” (behind a paywall), New Yorker, 6/13 & 20/2011

Leave a comment

2011

Sunday, 4/24/11

Take me to the water . . .

Take Me To The Water:
Immersion Baptism in Vintage Music and Photography 1890-1950
(Dust-to-Digital 2009)

Vodpod videos no longer available.

**********

lagniappe

reading table

Three Lilies

“Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in
the morning.” Psalm 30

Before dawn, under a thin moon disappearing
east, the planet Mercury, the messenger
and healer, came up vanishingly
into the blue beyond the garden where
three lilies at the bottom of the yard
arrayed white trumpets on iron stalks
under a slow, slow lightning from the sun.
I stood on a rotten step myself,
and smelled them from a hundred feet away.

—Brooks Haxton (Uproar: Antiphonies to Psalms)

*****

listening room: what’s playing

• Billy Bang Quintet, Above and Beyond (Justin Time)

• The Complete Atlantic Recordings of Lennie Tristano, Lee Konitz & Warne Marsh (Mosaic)

• Bunky Green, The Salzau Quartet Live at Jazz Baltica (Traumton)

• Bombino, Agadez (Cumbancha)

• Friedrich Gulda, The Complete Gulda Mozart Tapes (Deutsche Grammaphon)

• Maryanne Amacher, Sound Characters (Tzadik)

• The Original Gospel Harmonettes (featuring Dorothy Love Coates), Love Lifted Me (Charly)

• Rev. Johnny L. Jones, The Hurricane That Hit Atlanta (Dust-to-Digital)

• Sinner’s Crossroads, Kevin Nutt, WFMU-FM (Thursday, 8-9 p.m. [EST])

• Gospel Memories, Bob Marovich, WLUW-FM (Saturday 10-11 a.m. [CST])

• Bird Flight, Phil Schaap, WKCR-FM (M-F, 8:20-9:30 a.m. [EST])

• Charles Mingus Birthday Broadcast, WKCR-FM, 4/22/11

Leave a comment

2011

Friday, 4/22/11

Happy (89th) Birthday, Mingus!

Charles Mingus, bassist, bandleader, composer
April 22, 1922-January 5, 1979

In celebration of Mingus’s birthday, WKCR-FM (broadcasting from Columbia University) is playing his music all day. We’re celebrating by revisiting some favorite clips.

**********

Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Miles Davis: so many of the greatest figures in jazz weren’t just great musicians, or composers, or arrangers. They were great bandleaders. As important to their artistic success as anything else was their ability to find, and showcase, players who could make the music come alive—people like Johnny Hodges and Ben Webster and Jimmy Blanton and Lester Young and Freddie Green and Jo Jones and John Coltrane and Bill Evans and Tony Williams.

That small circle of elite bandleaders includes this man. He hired musicians who played their instruments like no one else (Eric Dolphy, Jaki Byard, et al.). He gave them a musical setting in which structure and freedom were exquisitely balanced. And together they made music that sounds (even on something familiar) like nothing else.

Charles Mingus Sextet (with Johnny Coles, trumpet; Jaki Byard, piano; Eric Dolphy, alto saxophone and bass clarinet; Clifford Jordan, tenor saxophone; Dannie Richmond, drums), “Take the A Train,” live, Norway (Oslo), 1964

**********

lagniappe

I nominate Charles Mingus one of America’s greatest composers—Ran Blake (in the liner notes to his recent album Driftwoods)

(Originally posted 12/1/09.)

**********

No jazz composer since Thelonious Monk has a stronger voice.

Lyrical beauty, inexhaustible drive, deep feeling: what more could you ask for?

Enormously influential, his music served as a bridge between the compositional elegance of Duke Ellington and the freewheeling rambunctiousness of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Henry Threadgill, David Murray, et al.

Charles Mingus Quintet (CM, bass; Dannie Richmond, drums; Eric Dolphy, alto saxophone, bass clarinet; Clifford Jordan, tenor saxophone; Jaki Byard, piano), live (TV broadcast), Belgium, 1964

“So Long, Eric”

*****

“Peggy’s Blue Skylight”

*****

“Meditations on Integration” (excerpt)

**********

lagniappe

. . . [Mingus’s] music was pledged to the abolition of all distinctions: between the composed and the improvised, the primitive and the sophisticated, the rough and the tender, the belligerent and the lyrical.—Geoff Dyer, But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz (1996)

*****

Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.

***

I, myself, came to enjoy the players who didn’t only just swing but who invented new rhythmic patterns, along with new melodic concepts. And those people are: Art Tatum, Bud Powell, Max Roach, Sonny Rollins, Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Parker, who is the greatest genius of all to me because he changed the whole era around.

***

In my music, I’m trying to play the truth of what I am. The reason it’s difficult is because I’m changing all the time.

—Charles Mingus

(Originally posted 4/22/10.)

Leave a comment

2011

Monday, 1/10/11

Happy Birthday, Max!

No drummer is more clear, more precise, more melodic.

Max Roach, January 10, 1924-August 16, 2007

“The Third Eye,” live

Vodpod videos no longer available.

***

“The Drum Also Waltzes” (Drums Unlimited), 1966

Vodpod videos no longer available.

***

With Sonny Rollins (saxophone), “St. Thomas” (Saxophone Colossus), 1956

Vodpod videos no longer available.

***

With Clifford Brown (trumpet), “Sweet Clifford” (Brown and Roach Incorporated), 1955

Vodpod videos no longer available.

***

With Dizzy Gillespie (trumpet), Charlie Parker (saxophone), Bud Powell (piano), Charles Mingus (bass), “Salt Peanuts,” live, 1953

Vodpod videos no longer available.

**********

lagniappe

musical thoughts

In this music, you have to find out who you are, what you feel, what you want to say. That’s one of the reasons that it’s so American. You have to be yourself.

That’s also one way jazz is different from classical music. In classical music, you learn to study and come up with the finest interpretation of a work that you can. That’s a different way of expressing your personality. You have to learn to use what’s written already to express yourself. In jazz, you have to learn to be who you are, and create the music from that.

—Max Roach (in Gene Santoro, Highway 61 Revisited [2004])

*****

radio

Today it’s all Max all day at WKCR-FM (broadcasting from Columbia University).

Leave a comment

2010

Saturday, 11/6/10

replay: clips too good for just one day

No jazz composer since Thelonious Monk has a stronger voice.

Lyrical beauty, inexhaustible drive, deep feeling: what more could you ask for?

Charles Mingus Quintet (CM, bass; Dannie Richmond, drums; Eric Dolphy, alto saxophone, bass clarinet; Clifford Jordan, tenor saxophone; Jaki Byard, piano), live (TV broadcast), Belgium, 1964

“So Long, Eric”

*****

“Peggy’s Blue Skylight”

*****

“Meditations on Integration” (excerpt)

**********

lagniappe

. . . [Mingus’s] music was pledged to the abolition of all distinctions: between the composed and the improvised, the primitive and the sophisticated, the rough and the tender, the belligerent and the lyrical.—Geoff Dyer, But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz (1996)

*****

Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.

***

I, myself, came to enjoy the players who didn’t only just swing but who invented new rhythmic patterns, along with new melodic concepts. And those people are: Art Tatum, Bud Powell, Max Roach, Sonny Rollins, Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Parker, who is the greatest genius of all to me because he changed the whole era around.

***

In my music, I’m trying to play the truth of what I am. The reason it’s difficult is because I’m changing all the time.

—Charles Mingus

(Originally posted on 4/22/10.)

**********

lagniappe

I nominate Charles Mingus one of America’s greatest composers—Ran Blake (in the liner notes to his recent album Driftwoods)

(Originally posted on 12/1/09.)

Leave a comment

2010

Sunday, 10/31/10

At the recording session for the new Elton John/Leon Russell album, how did producer T Bone Burnett break the ice in the studio?

He played this clip (“Didn’t It Rain,” 2:20).

Mahalia Jackson, “Everybody Talkin’ ‘Bout Heaven,” “Didn’t It Rain,” “The Lord’s Prayer,” live, Newport Jazz Festival (Newport, Rhode Island), 1958

Want more? Here.

**********

lagniappe

I think that this is what everybody needs a whole lot of—not only in their playing, but in their way of living.

As far as rating this—maybe you should use a different kind of star for rating this from the stars you use rating jazz records. A moving star. Make it five moving stars.

—Charles Mingus, listening to a record by Mahalia Jackson during a Downbeat “Blindfold Test” (1960)

*****

art beat

Lee Friedlander, “Mahalia Jackson” (1956)

***

[I]t almost looks like if you could see the next second after this picture was taken that she would start to ascend.

—Joel Dorn

*****

live on the ’net: tonight, 8 p.m. (EDT)

Todd Rundgren, “the Class of 1963 Wells Scholars Professor at Indiana University Bloomington for this fall,” will talk about—and perform—his music in an “autobiographical concert” that’ll be video-streamed live.

Leave a comment

2010

Thursday, 4/22/10

Happy Birthday, Mingus!

No jazz composer since Thelonious Monk has a stronger voice.

Lyrical beauty, inexhaustible drive, deep feeling: what more could you ask for?

Charles Mingus Quintet (CM, bass; Dannie Richmond, drums; Eric Dolphy, alto saxophone, bass clarinet; Clifford Jordan, tenor saxophone; Jaki Byard, piano), live (TV broadcast), Belgium, 1964

“So Long, Eric”

*****

“Peggy’s Blue Skylight”

*****

“Meditations on Integration” (excerpt)

Want more? Here.

**********

lagniappe

. . . [Mingus’s] music was pledged to the abolition of all distinctions: between the composed and the improvised, the primitive and the sophisticated, the rough and the tender, the belligerent and the lyrical.—Geoff Dyer, But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz (1996)

*****

Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.

***

I, myself, came to enjoy the players who didn’t only just swing but who invented new rhythmic patterns, along with new melodic concepts. And those people are: Art Tatum, Bud Powell, Max Roach, Sonny Rollins, Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Parker, who is the greatest genius of all to me because he changed the whole era around.

***

In my music, I’m trying to play the truth of what I am. The reason it’s difficult is because I’m changing all the time.

—Charles Mingus

*****

Radio Mingus: all Mingus, all the time

In celebration of Mingus’s birthday, WKCR-FM (broadcasting from Columbia University) is playing his music all day.