Sunday, 12/25/11
Let’s go to church.
Solomon Burke, “Silent Night” (Savoy, 1982)
music clip of the day
jazz/blues/rock/classical/gospel/more
Tag: music clip of the day
2011
Saturday, 12/24/11
When I was little, I would go into Chicago to hear live music—Peter, Paul & Mary, Kingston Trio, Beach Boys—with my father. Then, as a teenager, I’d go into the city with my brother Don to hear the Velvet Underground and the MC5, the Who, Tim Hardin and Tim Buckley, Muddy Waters. Now I make these trips with my sons. The other night, for instance, my older son Alex (now 24 and home for the holidays) and I went to the Hideout, a small club on Chicago’s north side, not far from where I once went with my father (now gone) and my brother (now hundreds of miles away), to hear this guy.
Jason Adasiewicz’s Rolldown (JA, vibraphone; Josh Berman, cornet; Aram Shelton, alto saxophone; Jason Roebke, bass; Frank Rosaly, drums), “Hide,” live, c. 2008
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lagniappe
reading table
No, the human heart
Is unknowable.
But in my birthplace
The flowers still smell
The same as always.—Ki no Tsurayuki (872-945; trans. Kenneth Rexroth)
2011
Friday, 12/23/11
where I’d like to be tonight
Po’ Monkey’s, Merigold, Mississippi, 2010
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lagniappe
reading table
Charles Simic, “1938”
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random thoughts
Life’s often said to be too short.
Too short for what?
2011
Thursday, 12/22/11
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
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3: Courante
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4: Aria
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5: Sarabande
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6: Menuet
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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.
2011
Wednesday, 12/21/11
La Monte Young, The Well-Tuned Piano
Part 1
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Part 2
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Part 3
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Part 4
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Part 5
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lagniappe
Minimalism proper begins with La Monte Young, the master of the drone. He was born in 1935 in a tiny dairy community in Idaho, and spent his childhood listening to the secret music of the wide-open landscape—the microtonal chords of power lines, the harsh tones of drills and lathes, the wailing of far-off trains, the buzzing songs of grasshoppers, the sound of the wind moving over Utah Lake and whistling through the cracks of his parents’ log cabin. In 1940 he moved to Los Angeles with his family. As he later said, he fell in love with California’s ‘sense of space, sense of time, sense of reverie, sense that things could take a long time, that there was always time.’
—Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (2007)
2011
Tuesday, 12/20/11
kaleidoscopic, adj. 1. changing form, pattern, color, etc., in a manner suggesting a kaleidoscope. 2. continually shifting from one set of relations to another. E.g., Azealia Banks’ “212” (2011).
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lagniappe
reading table
In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing, and running the risk of flattening all communication into a single, homogeneous surface, the function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of written language.
—Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium (1988 [trans. Patrick Creagh])
2011
Sunday, 12/18/11
It’s our lucky day. Down on the corner there’s a guy with a little guitar amp who just finished setting up. Let’s listen.
Rev. Billy H. Grady, “Holy Rock” (1965)
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lagniappe
reading table
Going too fast for myself I missed
more than I think I can rememberalmost everything it seems sometimes
and yet there are chances that come backthat I did not notice when they stood
where I could have reached out and touched themthis morning the black shepherd dog
still young looking up and sayingAre you ready this time
—W. S. Merwin, “Turning”
2011
Saturday, 12/17/11
Happy (Belated) 103rd Birthday, Elliott!
Elliott Carter, composer, December 11, 1908-
The other night I put this on, thinking I’d do something else while it played; but, as it turned out, “something else” had to wait.
String Quartet No. 2 (1959), Composers Quartet
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lagniappe
Juilliard String Quartet with Elliott Carter, 2008
Rehearsing String Quartet No. 5
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musical thoughts
Mr. Carter has written 15 new works since his 100th birthday.
—Allan Kozinn, New York Times, 12/13/11
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Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, Webern, Bartok, Shostakovich, Carter, et al.: you could spend the rest of your life listening to nothing but string quartets without ever feeling deprived.
2011
Friday, 12/16/11
only rock ’n roll
Happy Refugees, “What’s Your Appeal”
Live, New York (Cake Shop), 12/10/11
More? These guys recently did a live studio performance at WFMU-FM (The Cherry Blossom Clinic with Terre T), which can be heard here.
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lagniappe
art beat: Tuesday at the Art Institute of Chicago (after a hearing at the nearby federal court building)
George Inness (1825-1894), Early Morning, Tarpon Springs (1892)
music clip of the day 