Tuesday, 7/3/12
What more could you ask for, when you’re old, than to be able, still, to dance?
Drummers Roy Haynes (87, facing the camera) & Jack DeJohnette (69, back to the camera), tap dancing, New York (NEA Jazz Masters Luncheon), 2012
music clip of the day
jazz/blues/rock/classical/gospel/more
Tag: Jack DeJohnette
2012
Monday, 7/2/12
joy, n. looking for something else and happening upon this.
Jack DeJohnette’s Special Edition (JD, drums; Rufus Reid, bass; Marty Erlich, bass clarinet; John Purcell, alto saxophone; Howard Johnson, tuba, baritone saxophone), live, Poland (Warsaw), 1983
Part 1
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Part 2
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Part 3
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Part 4
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lagniappe
reading table
First, I’ll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later. The robbery is the more important part, since it served to set my and my sister’s lives on the courses they eventually followed. Nothing would make complete sense without that being told first.
Our parents were the least likely two people in the world to rob a bank. They weren’t strange people, not obviously criminals. No one would’ve thought they were destined to end up the way they did. They were just regular—although, of course, that kind of thinking became null and void the moment they did rob a bank.
—Richard Ford, Canada (2012)
2012
Monday, 4/2/12
When we last saw Miles, playing in Germany in 1967, he was wearing a suit and tie. Here, two years later, his wardrobe is headed in a new direction. So is his music.
Miles Davis Quintet,* live, France (Antibes), 1969
“Milestones,” “Footprints,” “’Round Midnight”
*MD, trumpet; Wayne Shorter, tenor and soprano saxophones; Chick Corea, electric piano; Dave Holland, bass; Jack DeJohnette, drums.
2012
Monday, 1/23/12
Yesterday we left off in 1977; let’s fast-forward 33 years.
Von Freeman (tenor saxophone), with Mike Allemana (guitar), Matt Ferguson (bass), Michael Raynor (drums); “Lester Leaps In,” live, Chicago (New Apartment Lounge, 75th St.), 2010
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lagniappe
This year, as I’ve mentioned before, Von was awarded, along with bassist Charlie Haden, singer Sheila Jordan, trumpeter Jimmy Owens, and drummer Jack DeJohnette, an NEA (National Endowment of the Arts) Jazz Masters Fellowship—“the highest honor that our nation bestows on jazz artists.” Here’s the NEA’s video tribute.
2011
Sunday, 8/21/11
Ever feel like, each day, you understand less and less?
Davis Sisters (with Jackie Verdell), “We’ll Understand It Better By and By,” live (TV broadcast), early 1960s
Vodpod videos no longer available.**********
lagniappe
reading table
So long as that woman from the Rijksmuseum
in painted quiet and concentration
keeps pouring milk day after day
from the pitcher to the bowl
the World hasn’t earned
the world’s end.—Wislawa Szymborska, “Vermeer” (trans. Clare Cavanagh & Stanislaw Baranczak, Here [2010])
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Johannes Vermeer, The Milkmaid (c. 1658)
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Speaking of Szymborska, a charter member, like Von Freeman, of the recently announced MCOTD Hall of Fame (coincidentally, they were both born in 1923), here’s something I just came across:
I am a big admirer of her [Szymborska’s] work. I have read everything she has written, and I keep coming back to it. She is a very witty poet and she has greatly helped me to enjoy life. She exactly fits my definition of an artist. Who shouldn’t only have profound insight and a sharp mind but also remember that his obligation is to entertain the reader. And this is exactly what she does.
—Woody Allen, in the documentary Sometimes Life Is Bearable (2010)
*****
listening room: (some of) what’s playing
• Paul Simon, So Beautiful or So What (Hear Music)
• Shane MacGowan and the Popes, The Snake (ZTT [import])
• Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band, Trout Mask Replica (Reprise/Ada)
• The Best of Charlie Patton (Yazoo)
• Charley Patton, The Voice of the Delta (Indigo)
• The Detroiters/The Golden Echoes, Old Time Religion (Specialty)
• The Spiritualaires of Hurtsboro, Alabama, Singing Songs of Praise (CaseQuarter)
• Archie Shepp/Kahil El’Zabar’s Ritual Trio, Conversations (Delmark)
• Benny Goodman, The Complete Trios (Capitol)
• Charlie Parker, The Complete Royal Roost Live Recordings on Savoy, Vol. 3 (Savoy/Columbia [import])
• Charles Gayle, Repent (Knitting Factory)
• Steve Lacy-Roswell Rudd Quartet, School Days (hat Art)
• Wadada Leo Smith & Jack DeJohnette, America (Tzadik)
• Kenny Werner, No Beginning, No End (Half Note)
• Bach, Suites for Unaccompanied Cello/Jean-Guihen Queyras (Harmonia Mundi [import])
• Alfred Schnittke, String Quartet No. 3, Piano Quintet, Piano Quartet/
Borodin String Quartet with Ludmilla Berlinsky (Virgin Classics)
• Morton Feldman, Piano and String Quartet/Kronos Quartet with Aki Takahashi (Nonesuch)
• Morton Feldman, For Bunita Marcus, Stephane Ginsburgh, piano (Sub Rosa) (available as a download from Amazon for 89¢)
• WKCR-FM (broadcasting from Columbia University)
—Bird Flight (Phil Schaap, jazz [Charlie Parker])
—Traditions in Swing (Phil Schaap, jazz)
—Eastern Standard Time (Carter Van Pelt, Jamaican music)
—Raag Aur Taal (Various, Indian music)
• WFMU-FM
—Mudd Up! (DJ/Rupture, “new bass and beats”)
—Sinner’s Crossroads (Kevin Nutt, gospel)
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
More? Here.
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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.
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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.
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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
2011
Wednesday, 2/9/11
clear, adj. bright, luminous; transparent; free from obscurity. E.g., alto saxophonists Rudresh Mahanthappa and Bunky Green.
Rudresh and Bunky, talking and playing (with Jason Moran, piano; Francois Moutin, bass; Jack DeJohnette and Damion Reid, drums)
Vodpod videos no longer available.Listening to these guys, who’d ever guess that one is nearly twice as old as the other? (Rudresh is 39, Bunky 75.)
*****
Here’s a track from their recent album (Apex, 2010), “Playing with Stones,” featuring Rudresh (Bunky sits out).
Vodpod videos no longer available.*****
My favorite moment in this next clip comes at 2:24, when alto saxophonist Greg Osby, listening to Bunky, tilts his head, as if to say, “Did you hear that?!”
Bunky Green (with alto saxophonists Greg Osby and Steffano di Battista), “Body and Soul,” live, Germany, 2008
Vodpod videos no longer available.**********
lagniappe
reading table
In the is-this-a-great-country-or-what department, how delicious to learn
that two great American artists—trumpeter Roy Eldridge and poet Elizabeth Bishop—were born, one hundred years ago, within days of each other. (Eldridge was born on January 30, 1911, Bishop on February 8th.)
Sandpiper
The roaring alongside he takes for granted,
and that every so often the world is bound to shake.
He runs, he runs to the south, finical, awkward,
in a state of controlled panic, a student of Blake.The beach hisses like fat. On his left, a sheet
of interrupting water comes and goes
and glazes over his dark and brittle feet.
He runs, he runs straight through it, watching his toes.—Watching, rather, the spaces of sand between them
where (no detail too small) the Atlantic drains
rapidly backwards and downwards. As he runs,
he stares at the dragging grains.The world is a mist. And then the world is
minute and vast and clear. The tide
is higher or lower. He couldn’t tell you which.
His beak is focussed; he is preoccupied,looking for something, something, something.
Poor bird, he is obsessed!
The millions of grains are black, white, tan, and gray
mixed with quartz grains, rose and amethyst.—Elizabeth Bishop
music clip of the day 