never enough
Two days ago I’d never heard of him; last night he took my breath away.
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), Partita No. 2 in D minor for Solo Violin, excerpt (Sarabande); Leonidas Kavakos, live, France (Annecy), 2015
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lagniappe
reading table
The Poets light but Lamps –
Themselves – go out –—Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), 930 (Franklin), fragment
sounds of New York
Lea Bertucci, “The Cepheid Variations,” live, New York, 2015
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
New sounds are heard in the dark.
like nobody else
Leroy Jenkins Gut Band (LJ [1932-2007] violin, compositions; Brandon Ross, guitar; David Wong, bass; Newman Taylor Baker, drums), live, New York, 2000
yesterday in Chicago
At the Art Institute—next to Millennium Park, site of Saturday’s Gospel Fest—I heard this piece for the first time, played by three Chicago-based musicians (violinist Yuan-Qing Yu, clarinetist J. Lawrie Bloom, pianist Adam Nieman). It, too, sang.
Charles Ives (1874-1954), Largo for Violin, Clarinet, Piano (1901-02); Lucy Chapman-Stoltzman (violin), Richard Stoltzman (clarinet), Richard Goode (piano), 1990
yesterday in Chicago
I heard these folks in Millennium Park, at the thirty-first annual Gospel Fest. Rain had been falling, but it stopped. Slowly, dark skies gave way to sunshine.
Brian Courtney Wilson, “Just Love,” live, Windsor Village United Methodist Church, Houston, Tx.
***
William Murphy, “It’s Working,” live, Newbirth Missionary Baptist Church, Lithonia, Ga.
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Shirley Caesar, “No Charge,” live
what’s new
Beck, “Wow,” 6/2/16
Mozart one day, another day this—how lucky to live in a world so various.
Konono No. 1, “Yaya Mikolo,” live, France (Saint-Nazaire), 2009
sounds of Chicago and Oslo
Ken Vandermark (tenor saxophone), Paal Nilssen-Love (percussion), “Song for Terrie,” live, Netherlands (Amsterdam), 5/26/16
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lagniappe
random sights
this morning, Oak Park, Ill.
*****
A big birthday shout-out to my brother Don, my first listening companion. All these years later, the basement jukebox still plays: “Wake Up Little Susie” (Everly Brothers) . . .”North to Alaska” (Johnny Horton) . . .”(The Man Who Shot) Liberty Valance” (Gene Pitney) . . . Hear it?
sounds of New York
Sandbox Percussion, live (excerpts from S. Reich, “Drumming”; A. Weiser, “Anatomy of a Drum Roll”; S. Reich, “Music for Pieces of Wood”), New York (Washington Square Park), 2014
Vancouver folkie + iconic Memphis rhythm section.
This should never have worked.
But it does, wonderfully.
Frazey Ford, “September Fields” (Indian Ocean), 2014
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lagniappe
reading table
The climate is pretty.
I wrote everything on it.
That’s the activity where it
gets relatively inauspicious.***
And you were sitting there
in the night of life. It sure was good.
My favorite desserts were there.
And when they invite you, it’s like an important document
goes missing. I’ll give you an example:
a twelve-year struggle upstate, in
the slick atmosphere of the breakfast room.
It might have gotten stuck in her farthingale.Otherwise no reply.
—John Ashbery (1927-), “As Someone Who Likes Travel,” fragments (New Yorker, 5/30/16)
To read Ashbery is to read English as a foreign language—which I mean as a compliment.
music clip of the day 