Johann Sebastian Bach, Air on the G String (adapted from Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D major, 2nd Mvt.), Friedrich Gulda, piano, 1980s (?)
(Yeah, that’s Chick Corea at 2:57.)
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
This would make a helluva blurb:
Bach’s music is the only argument proving the creation of the Universe cannot be regarded a complete failure.
three takes
“Trials, Troubles, Tribulations” (E.C. Ball)
(AKA “Tribulations”)
Andrew Bird
Live, Nashville (Grimey’s New & Preloved Music), 2009
***
Wayne Henderson, Martha Spencer & Jackson Cunningham
Live, Maryland (Rockville), 2010
***
E.C. Ball & Lacey Richardson
Recording (Alan Lomax), 1959-60
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lagniappe
listening room: (some of) what’s playing
• Face A Frowning World: An E.C. Ball Memorial Album (Tompkins Square)
• Merle Haggard, If I Could Only Fly (Anti- Records)
• The Canton Spirituals, The Live Experience 1999 (Verity Records)
• Getatchew Mekuria & The Ex & Guests, Moa Anbessa (Terp Records)
• Derek Bailey, Bill Laswell, Tony Williams, Arcana (DIW Records)
• Peter Brotzmann Octet, Machine Gun (FMP)
• Peter Brotzmann Sextet & Quartet, Nipples (Atavistic Records/Unheard Music Series)
• Miles Davis Quintet, Live in Europe 1967 (Columbia)
• Cecil Taylor European Orchestra, Alms/Tiergarten (Spree) (FMP)
• Alfred Cortot, piano, The Master Pianist (EMI, Icon Series)
• Nathan Milstein, violin, J.S. Bach: Sonatas & Partitas (Deutsche Grammaphon)
• Arnold Schoenberg, Das Klavierwerk, Peter Serkin, piano (Arcana)
• WKCR-FM (broadcasting from Columbia University)
—Bird Flight (Phil Schaap, jazz [Charlie Parker])
—Eastern Standard Time (Carter Van Pelt, Jamaican music)
• WFMU-FM
—Mudd Up! (DJ/Rupture, “new bass and beats”)
—Sinner’s Crossroads (Kevin Nutt, gospel)
—Cherry Blossom Clinic (Terre T, rock, etc.)
—Fool’s Paradise (Rex; “Vintage rockabilly, R & B, blues, vocal groups, garage, instrumentals, hillbilly, soul and surf”)
—Downtown Soulville (Mr. Fine Wine, soul, etc.)
• WHPK-FM (broadcasting from University of Chicago)
—The Blues Excursion (Arkansas Red)
If I knew I had a week to live (as someday I will, whether I know it or not), this is one of the things I’d want to hear.
Johann Sebastian Bach, Chaconne in D minor for solo violin (Partita for Violin No. 2 [BWV 1004]); Isaac Stern (violin), live
Another take?
Here (Nathan Milstein).
And here (Gidon Kremer).
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
On one stave, for a small instrument, the man writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings. If I imagined that I could have created, even conceived the piece, I am quite certain that the excess of excitement and earth-shattering experience would have driven me out of my mind.
—Johannes Brahms, in a letter to Clara Schumann (translated from German)
He plays Bach as if, at that moment, nothing in the world is more crucial.
Johann Sebastian Bach, Glenn Gould, piano*
TV performance, 1981
*****
*Here, courtesy of YouTube, is the program:
00:21 Die Kunst der Fuge BWV 1080: Contrapunctus I
Partita n.4 in D-dur BWV 828
05:11 I Ouverture
10:06 II Allemande
15:45 III Courante
18:52 IV Aria
20:07 V Sarabande
25:21 VI Menuett
26:41 VII Gigue
From “Wohltemperierten Klavier”:
28:10 Fuge in E-dur (II)
33:17 Fuge in Es-moll (II)
36:16 Praeludium & Fuge in A-dur (II)
38:52 Die Kunst der Fuge BVW 1080: Contrapunctus IV
(Some of this has been posted before, but not all of it and not in one continuous clip.)
the first voice Whitney heard
Emily “Cissy” Houston (born Emily Drinkard), singer, 1933-
The Drinkard Singers (Cissy Houston, lead vocals), “Lift Him Up,” live (TV broadcast), c. early 1960s
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lagniappe
Live (TV broadcast), 1970
“Be My Baby” (P. Spector, J. Barry & E. Greenwich)
***
“I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself” (B. Bacharach & H. David)
*****
listening room: (some of) what’s playing
• Ambrose Akinmusire, When the Heart Emerges Glistening (Blue Note)
• Johann Sebastian Bach, Suites for Unaccompanied Cello, Pierre Fournier, cello (Archiv Production)
• Johann Sebastian Bach, Well-Tempered Clavier, Glenn Gould, piano (Sony)
• Johann Sebastian Bach, Partitas Nos. 3, 4, 6, Jeremy Denk, piano (Azica)
• Ludwig van Beethoven, Piano Sonatas Nos. 14 (“Moonlight”), 8 (“Pathetique”), 23 (“Appassionata”), Rudolf Serkin, piano (CBS)
• Alfred Cortot, The Master Pianist (EMI)
• Claude Debussy, Pour Le Piano, Etudes Books 1 & 2, Gordon Fergus-Thompson, piano (Musical Heritage Society)
• The Dirtbombs, Ultraglide In Black (In the Red Records)
• Morton Feldman, For Bunita Marcus, John Tilbury, piano (London Hall)
• Morton Feldman, Piano and String Quartet, Aki Takahashi (piano), Kronos Quartet (Nonesuch)
• Mary Halvorson Quintet, Saturn Sings (Firehouse)
• Slim Harpo, The Best of Slim Harpo (Hip-O)
• Paul Hindemith, Benjamin Britten, Krzysztof Penderecki; Kim Kashkashian (viola), Stuttgarter Kammerorchester (Dennis Russell Davies, cond.), Lachrymae (ECM)
• Steve Lehman Octet, Travail, Transformation, and Flow (Pi Recordings)
• Jimmie Lunceford, The Complete Jimmie Lunceford Decca Sessions (Mosaic)
• Guilliaume de Michaut, Motets, The Hilliard Ensemble (ECM)
• Paul Motian Trio (with Joe Lovano, Bill Frisell), Sound of Love (Winter & Winter)
• Mudd Up!, WFMU-FM (DJ/Rupture, “new bass and beats”)
• Pee Wee Russell, Swingin’ with Pee Wee (Prestige)
• Pharoah Sanders, Karma (GRP)
• Pharoah Sanders, Live (Evidence)
• Giacinto Scelsi, Natura Renovatur (ECM)
• Arnold Schoenberg, Piano Works, Peter Serkin, piano (Arcana)
• Sinner’s Crossroads, WFMU-FM (Kevin Nutt, gospel)
• Craig Taborn, Avenging Angel (ECM)
• Toru Takemitsu, Peter Serkin Plays the Music of Toru Takemitsu, Peter Serkin, piano (RCA/BMG)
• Anton Webern, Complete Music for String Quartet, Quartetto Italiano (Philips)
• Anton Webern, Works for String Quartet, Emerson Quartet (Deutsche Grammaphon)
• Wild Flag, Wild Flag (Merge)
lighter than air, funkier than dirt
Otha Turner (1907-2003) and the Rising Star Fife and Drum Band (with guest Luther Dickinson, guitar), “My Babe,” live, Memphis, 1990s
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lagniappe
art beat: more from Wednesday’s stop at the Art Institute of Chicago
Vincent van Gogh, The Poet’s Garden (1888)
*****
musical thoughts
Last night, at the University of Chicago’s Mandel Hall, I heard what may be the finest encore I’ve ever heard. After devoting the second half of his concert to Beethoven’s mammoth Diabelli Variations, pianist Peter Serkin, following several trips offstage to rapturous applause, sat down and played, slowly, meditatively, the Aria from Bach’s Goldberg Variations. As the last note was fading, if someone had turned to me and said, with the kind of confidence one often encounters in Hyde Park, that the greatest achievements in the history of humanity can be heard at the piano, I couldn’t have done anything other than agree.
Ever feel like you’re drowning in dreck?
Me, too.
When that happens, this is one of the things I turn to—it never fails.
Johann Sebastian Bach, Suite No. 3 in C major for Unaccompanied Cello, 4th Mvt. (Sarabande); Pierre Fournier (1906-1986), cello
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lagniappe
reading table
[O]ld age is a ceremony of losses, which is on the whole preferable to dying at forty-seven or fifty-two.
***
After a life of loving the old, by natural law I turned old myself. Decades followed each other—thirty was terrifying, forty I never noticed because I was drunk, fifty was best with a total change of life, sixty extended the bliss of fifty—and then came my cancers, Jane’s death, and over the years I travelled to another universe. However alert we are, however much we think we know what will happen, antiquity remains an unknown, unanticipated galaxy. It is alien, and old people are a separate form of life. They have green skin, with two heads that sprout antennae. They can be pleasant, they can be annoying—in the supermarket, these old old ladies won’t get out of my way—but most important they are permanently other. When we turn eighty, we understand that we are extraterrestrial. If we forget for a moment that we are old, we are reminded when we try to stand up, or when we encounter someone young, who appears to observe green skin, extra heads, and protuberances.
***
Whatever the season, I watch the barn. I see it through this snow in January, and in August I will gaze at trailing vines of roses on a trellis against the vertical boards. I watch at the height of summer and when darkness comes early in November. From my chair I look at the west side, a gorgeous amber laved by the setting sun, as rich to the eyes as the darkening sweet of bees’ honey. . . . Out the window, I watch a white landscape that turns pale green, dark green, yellow and red, brown again under bare branches, until snow falls again.
—Donald Hall, “Out the Window,” New Yorker, 1/23/12
John Coltrane, Dorothy Love Coates, this guy: the genre makes no difference; some folks play like (as Buddhists put it) their hair is on fire.
Bach, Partita No. 4 in D Major, BMV 828
Glenn Gould, live, Canada, 1981
1: Ouverture
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2: Allemande
***
3: Courante
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4: Aria
***
5: Sarabande
***
6: Menuet
***
7: Gigue
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lagniappe
heaven, n. a condition or place of great happiness, delight, or pleasure. E.g., WKCR-FM’s annual Bach Festival, which begins today, at 3 p.m., and runs until midnight New Year’s Eve.
how to improve your life (guaranteed!)
Listen, each day, to one of Bach’s six suites for unaccompanied cello. I’ve been listening to them for 40 years. If I hadn’t, I assure you, my life would be even more of a shambles.
Bach, Suite No. 3 in C major for Unaccompanied Cello
Jean-Guihen Queyras, cello
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lagniappe
reading table
I am who I am.
A coincidence no less unthinkable
than any other.I could have different
ancestors, after all.
I could have fluttered
from another nest
or crawled bescaled
from another tree.Nature’s wardrobe
holds a fair supply of costumes:
spider, seagull, fieldmouse.
Each fits perfectly right off
and is dutifully worn
into shreds.I didn’t get a choice either,
but I can’t complain.
I could have been someone
much less separate.
Someone from an anthill, shoal, or buzzing swarm,
an inch of landscape ruffled by the wind.Someone much less fortunate,
bred for my fur
or Christmas dinner,
something swimming under a square of glass.A tree rooted to the ground
as the fire draws near.A grass blade trampled by a stampede
of incomprehensible events.A shady type whose darkness
dazzled some.What if I’d prompted only fear,
loathing,
or pity?If I’d been born
in the wrong tribe
with all roads closed before me?Fate has been kind
to me thus far.I might never have been given
the memory of happy moments.My yen for comparison
might have been taken away.I might have been myself minus amazement,
that is,
someone completely different.—Wislawa Szymborska, “Among the Multitudes” (trans. Clare Cavanagh & Stanislaw Baranczak)
music clip of the day 