Monday, 12/5/11
recipe
1 river
1 bridge
1 brass band
Mix lightly.
Raya Brass Band, live, Poughkeepsie, New York
Walkway Over The Hudson Grand Opening, 10/3/09
#1
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#2
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#3
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#4
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#5
music clip of the day
jazz/blues/rock/classical/gospel/more
Tag: music clip of the day
2011
2011
Sunday, 12/4/11
funeral service and second line for Snooks Eaglin
9/27/09, New Orleans
Irma Thomas, “Singin’ Hallelujah”
*****
Charmaine Neville, Clarence “Frogman” Henry, Allen Toussaint, et al.
“Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”
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“Hush, Somebody’s Calling My Name”
2011
Saturday, 12/3/11
three takes
“N’teri”
Habib Koité, live, c. 2007
*****
Regina Carter (violin), Yacouba Sissoko (kora), Will Holshouser (accordion)
Live, radio broadcast (KPLU-FM), 2011
Kora, violin, accordion—even the names of these instruments sound good together. You have, in succession, words of two, three, and four syllables. Consonants repeat (k/c, r, n), as do vowels (o, a). The last word (“accordion”) echoes both syllables of the first (“kora”), reversing them, as well as the end of the second (“violin”). What does any of this mean? Nothing—it’s simply, for me, a small source of additional pleasure.
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Habib Koité, recording, 2007
2011
Friday, 12/2/11
what’s new
Black Star (Talib Kweli, Yasiin Bey [formerly known as Mos Def])
TV broadcast (The Colbert Report), 2011
“Fix Up”
Vodpod videos no longer available.***
“Astronomy (8th Light)”
Vodpod videos no longer available.More? Here.
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lagniappe
reading table
I’m on a crowded ship
and I’ve been served the wrong breakfast.This small mound
of soggy dough
is not what I ordered.“Why don’t you just say
what you mean?”Why don’t I?
*****
To be awake
is to discriminateamong birdcalls,
fruits, seeds,
“to work one’s way,”
as they say,“through.”
*****
Apes can mind-read.
Studies showwhat makes us human
is our tendency to point.*****
I am not alone in this
sentence.—Rae Armantrout, Money Shot (2011), misc. fragments
2011
Thursday, 12/1/11
No matter how often I hear it, this piece—Beethoven’s final piano sonata—never fails to astonish.
Beethoven, Piano Sonata No. 32
Rudolf Serkin (piano), live, Austria (Vienna), 1987
#1: 1st movement
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#2: 2nd movement, part 1
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#3: 2nd movement, part 2
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If I knew I had a week to live, this is one of the things I’d want to listen to—more than once.
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Another take on this sonata? Here (Claudio Arrau).
More of Serkin playing Beethoven? Here.
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lagniappe
100
200
300
400
500
600
700
Today marks our 800th post.
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reading table
A Day! Help! Help!
Another Day!
Your prayers – Oh Passer by!—Emily Dickinson, c. 1858 (58 [Franklin], excerpt)
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musical thoughts
If it wasn’t for the music, I don’t know what I’d do.
2011
Wednesday, 11/30/11
lunch yesterday
Could Van Morrison ever have imagined, in 1969, while recording Moondance, that “Into the Mystic” would serve, in 2011, as aural accompaniment for Wendy’s Natural-Cut Fries with Sea Salt?
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lagniappe
reading table
John Berryman, “Dream Song 14,” Ireland (Dublin), 1967
Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have noInner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as achilles,who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.
2011
Tuesday, 11/29/11
old stuff
Best two minutes of the whole day?
Jimmie Lunceford and his Orchestra (with Jimmy Crawford, drums)
“White Heat,” 1939
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
It’s difficult to name one favorite drummer, because . . . I’ve got a lot of favorites. But Jimmy Crawford—they called him “Craw”—with the Jimmie Lunceford band? He was a motherfucker.
*****
reading table
How should I not be glad to contemplate
The clouds clearing beyond the dormer window
And a high tide reflected on the ceiling?
There will be dying, there will be dying,
But there is no need to go into that.
The lines flow from the hand unbidden
And the hidden source is the watchful heart.
The sun rises in spite of everything
And the far cities are beautiful and bright.
I lie here in a riot of sunlight
Watching the day break and the clouds flying.
Everything is going to be all right.—Derek Mahon, “Everything Is Going to Be All Right”
2011
Monday, 11/28/11
Has Monday ever sounded better?
Snooks Eaglin (with George Porter, Jr., bass; Kenneth Blevins, drums)
Live, New York (Lone Star Roadhouse), early ’90s
“I Just Cried Oh”
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“Baby Please”
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“Lipstick Traces”
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“You Don’t Have To Go”
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“Young Girl”
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“Red Beans” (with Jon Cleary, piano)
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Great guitar players don’t play notes—they play sounds.
2011
Sunday, 11/27/11
Al Green, “None But the Righteous,” live, Tokyo, 1987
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I’ve got that Holy Ghost religion . . .
—Al Green
More? Here. And here. And here. And here.
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lagniappe
reading table
How much more sharply suffering probes the psyche than does psychology!
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When we see ourselves on the brink of the precipice and it seems that God has abandoned us, we no longer hesitate to ask him for a miracle.
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The kind of plagiarism which it is most difficult for any human individual to avoid (and even for whole nations, who persist in reproducing their faults and aggravate them in so doing) is self-plagiarism.
—Marcel Proust, The Fugitive (In Search of Lost Time,
v. 6; trans. Peter Collier)
2011
Saturday, 11/26/11
Some musicians come straight at you—others sideways.
Andrew Hill (1931-2007), live, 2004, New York
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lagniappe
reading table
The pebble
is a perfect creatureequal to itself
mindful of its limitsfilled exactly
with a pebbly meaningwith a scent that does not remind one of anything
does not frighten anything away does not arouse desireits ardour and coldness
are just and full of dignityI feel a heavy remorse
when I hold it in my hand
and its noble body
is permeated by false warmth—Pebbles cannot be tamed
to the end they will look at us
with a calm and very clear eye—Zbigniew Herbert, “Pebble” (trans. Czeslaw Milosz & Peter Dale Scott)
music clip of the day 