Lee Morgan (trumpet) with Wayne Shorter (tenor saxophone), Harold Mabern (piano), Bob Cranshaw (bass), Billy Higgins (drums), “Yes I Can, No You Can’t,” 1966
***
S. Mos, mash-up (Tupac Shakur, “Holler If Ya Hear Me” [1993]), 2011
**********
lagniappe
reading table
And everything turns and turns
and the unknown turns into the song
that is the known, but what in turn
becomes of the song is not for us to say
—Mark Strand (1934-2014), “The Webern Variations,” excerpt
If I wanted to listen in on a conversation in a language I already know, I could go to Starbucks.
Christian Wolff (1934-), Pulse (1998); Jens Bracher (trumpet) & Julian Belli (percussion), live, Germany (Mannheim), 2011
**********
lagniappe
reading table
The Idea
by Mark Strand (April 11, 1934-November 29, 2014)
For us, too, there was a wish to possess
Something beyond the world we knew, beyond ourselves,
Beyond our power to imagine, something nevertheless
In which we might see ourselves; and this desire
Came always in passing, in waning light, and in such cold
That ice on the valley’s lakes cracked and rolled,
And blowing snow covered what earth we saw,
And scenes from the past, when they surfaced again,
Looked not as they had, but ghostly and white
Among false curves and hidden erasures;
And never once did we feel we were close
Until the night wind said, “Why do this,
Especially now? Go back to the place you belong;”
And there appeared , with its windows glowing, small,
In the distance, in the frozen reaches, a cabin;
And we stood before it, amazed at its being there,
And would have gone forward and opened the door,
And stepped into the glow and warmed ourselves there,
But that it was ours by not being ours,
And should remain empty. That was the idea.
The tree of country music has lots of eccentric branches.
The Handsome Family, “My Friend” (2009)
**********
lagniappe
reading table
The Everyday Enchantment of Music
by Mark Strand
(Almost Invisible [2012])
A rough sound was polished until it became a smoother sound, which was polished until it became music. Then the music was polished until it became the memory of a night in Venice when tears of the sea fell from the Bridge of Sighs, which in turn was polished until it ceased to be and in its place stood the empty home of a heart in trouble. Then suddenly there was sun and the music came back and traffic was moving and off in the distance, at the edge of the city, a long line of clouds appeared, and there was thunder, which, however menacing, would become music, and the memory of what happened after Venice would begin, and what happened after the home of the troubled heart broke in two would also begin.
music clip of the day 