passings
Lonnie Mack, guitarist, singer, songwriter, July 18, 1941-April 21, 2016
“Memphis” (C. Berry), 1963
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“She Don’t Come Here Anymore,” 1966
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“Farther on Down the Road,” live (with Albert Collins, Roy Buchanan), New York (Carnegie Hall), 1985
passings
Prince, singer, songwriter, master of all (musical) trades, June 7, 1958-April 21, 2016
Today, remembering him, we revisit a post from last year.
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With all he does, this can get lost: on guitar, he’s a killer.
Cee Lo Green, “Crazy,” live (with Prince, guitar), New York, 2011
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Stevie Wonder, “Superstition,” live (with Prince, guitar), Paris, 2010
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lagniappe
reading table
I am alive—I guess—
—Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), #605 (Franklin), first line
MCOTD Hall of Famer—and, as of yesterday, Pulitzer Prize Winner.
Henry Threadgill’s Zooid
Live, Poland (Warsaw), 2011
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Live, New York, 2013
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Live, Washington, D.C., 2013
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
All music is classical music, you know. I don’t put up boundaries on music.
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Of course I started out in an ethnic community, with the blues and church music and jazz. But that was just one place to start. You read fiction then you start reading nonfiction! You start reading biographies and scientific accounts. It doesn’t change where you came from. It just broadens it. That’s what we do, we keep building on the foundation where we come from. You don’t lose it, you just keep building on it.
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I think we’ve gotten used to the dissonant, so it’s not even dissonant any more.
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[W]e have no control over anything but what we do. I just try to stay hopeful: I don’t want to get too pessimistic about anything.
—Henry Threadgill, The Guardian, 4/18/16
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the beat goes on
2,300 posts—and counting.
Feel like floating?
Music for Airports, “1/1” (B. Eno, R. Davies, R. Wyatt), 1978; Bang on a Can All-Stars, live (arr. Michael Gordon), San Diego Airport, 2015
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lagniappe
reading table
To a Snail
By Marianne Moore (1887-1972)If “compression is the first grace of style,”
you have it. Contractility is a virtue
as modesty is a virtue.
It is not the acquisition of any one thing
that is able to adorn,
or the incidental quality that occurs
as a concomitant of something well said,
that we value in style,
but the principle that is hid:
in the absence of feet, “a method of conclusions”;
“a knowledge of principles,”
in the curious phenomenon of your occipital horn.