Al testifies
Al Green, “Jesus Is Waiting,” live (TV show), 1974
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lagniappe
radio
Today, in celebration of his 84th birthday, it’s all Ornette all day on WKCR (Columbia University).
Ornette Coleman Quartet (OC, alto saxophone; Don Cherry, trumpet; Charlie Haden, bass; Ed Blackwell, drums), “Blues Connotation” (1961)
Happy (83rd) Birthday, Ornette!
Ornette Coleman Quartet (OC, alto saxophone; Don Cherry, pocket trumpet; Charlie Haden, bass; Billy Higgins, drums), live, Spain (Barcelona), 1987
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
How can I turn emotion into knowledge? That’s what I try to do with my horn.
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It’s not that I reject categories. It’s that I don’t really know what categories are.
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You take the alphabet of the English language. A to Z. A symbol attached to a sound. In music you have what are called notes and the key. In life you’ve got an idea and an emotion. We think of them as different concepts. To me, there is no difference.
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The violin, the saxophone, the trumpet: Each makes a very different sound but the very same notes. That’s pretty heavy, you know? Imagine how many different races make up the human race. I’m called colored, you’re called white, he’s called something else. We still got an asshole and a mouth. Pardon me.
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I don’t try to please when I play. I try to cure.
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radio
All Ornette, all day: WKCR-FM (Columbia University).
Happy (109th) Birthday, Bix!
How many sonic experiences are as dizzying as the one offered this time each year by WKCR-FM (Columbia University)? First there’s 24 hours, straight, of Ornette. The next 24? Bix, Bix, Bix.
Frankie Trumbauer and His Orchestra (feat. Bix Beiderbecke, cornet), “There’ll Come A Time (Wait and See),” 1928
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lagniappe
found words
A distinctive psychiatric hospital
—advertisement, New Yorker, 3/5/12
Happy (82nd) Birthday, Ornette!
Ornette Coleman Quartet with guests Joshua Redman (tenor saxophone), James Blood Ulmer (guitar), Charlie Haden (bass), live, Netherlands (North Sea Jazz Festival, Rotterdam), 2010
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
radio
WKCR-FM (Columbia University): all Ornette, all day.
The notes are easy enough to replicate—the touch impossible.
Pinetop Perkins (piano, vocals), July 7, 1913-March 21, 2011
“Grindin’ Man” (with Willie “Big Eyes” Smith, harmonica), live, New Jersey (New Brunswick), 2008
Vodpod videos no longer available.*****
“How Long Blues,” live
Vodpod videos no longer available.**********
lagniappe
He was one of the last great Mississippi Bluesmen. He had such a distinctive voice, and he sure could play the piano. He will be missed not only by me, but by lovers of music all over the world.
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If you don’t want to die, don’t be born.
—Red Paden, owner of Red’s Blues Club, Clarksdale, Mississippi
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my back pages
Many years ago I had the pleasure of working with him, co-producing his tracks on Living Chicago Blues, Vol. 2 (Alligator 1978). Warm, amiable, unassuming—he was easy to like.
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listening room: what’s playing
• Ornette Coleman, Town Hall 1962
• Mos Def, The Ecstatic
• Lupe Fiasco, Lasers
• Steve Reich, Double Sextet, 2×5
• Rudresh Mahanthappa & Bunky Green, Apex
• Nneka, Concrete Jungle
• Theo Parrish, Sound Sculptures, Vol. 1
• Powerhouse Gospel On Independent Labels, 1946-1959
• WFMU-FM: Sinner’s Crossroads (Kevin Nutt), Mudd Up! (DJ/rupture)
• WKCR-FM: Bird Flight (Phil Schapp), Jazz Alternatives (various), Out To Lunch (various), Western Swing Festival (various)
Don’t try to tell me there’s anything incongruous—anything at all—in loving Beethoven and loving Chopin and loving Del Shannon.
Del Shannon, December 30, 1934-February 8, 1990
“Runaway” (with Burton Cummings [Guess Who], piano), 1982
Vodpod videos no longer available.***
“I Go To Pieces,” 1988 (?)
Vodpod videos no longer available.***
“Sea of Love,” 1982
Vodpod videos no longer available.**********
lagniappe
One of the best ever [Ornette Coleman, 3/9/11].
I am so glad I am on this list!!
Happy (108th) Birthday, Bix!
God the poet, the master of metaphor, wanting to comment on what a big, open, unruly country this is, put the birthdays of Ornette Coleman, born in 1930 in Fort Worth, Texas, and Bix Beiderbecke, born in 1903 in Davenport, Iowa, back to back.
Bix Beiderbecke, cornet, with Frankie Trumbauer and His Orchestra
“I’m Coming, Virginia,” “Way Down Yonder In New Orleans,” 1927
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Speaking of Bix’s playing, Louis Armstrong said:
Those pretty notes went right through me.
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. . . “I’m Coming, Virginia” became the most beautiful thing in my life . . . The coherence of its long Bix solo still provides me with a measure of what popular art should be like: a generosity of effects on a simple frame. The melodic line is particularly ravishing at its points of transition: there are moments when even a silent pause is a perfect note, and always there is a piercing sadness to it, as if the natural tone of the cornet, the instrument of reveille, were the first sob before weeping.
—Clive James, London Times, 5/16/07
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radio
Yesterday, at WKCR-FM (broadcasting from Columbia University), it was all Ornette all day; today it’s Bix. (Listening to so much Ornette seems to have rearranged my brain cells—permanently, I hope.)
(Some of this was previously posted on Bix’s last birthday.)
Happy (81st) Birthday, Ornette!
His sound—his whole approach (simple melodies, vocal phrasing, off-center intonation)—is drenched in the blues.
Ornette Coleman (alto saxophone) with The Roots
Live, London (Meltdown Festival), 2009
#1
Vodpod videos no longer available.***
#2
Vodpod videos no longer available.The tenor player at the end—that’s David Murray.
More Ornette? Here.
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lagniappe
radio
What am I listening to today?
That’s easy—WKCR-FM (broadcasting from Columbia University), where it’s all Ornette all day.
Few musicians, on any instrument, give me so much joy.
Ed Blackwell, October 10, 1929-October 7, 1992
Mal Waldron Quintet (Mal Waldron, piano, with Ed Blackwell, drums; Reggie Workman, bass; Charlie Rouse, saxophone; Woody Shaw, flugelhorn), “The Git-Go,” live, New York (Village Vanguard), 1986
Part 1
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Part 2
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Part 3
Want more of Ed Blackwell? Here.
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lagniappe
I’ve been playing with Blackwell over 20 years. We used to play when I first went to Los Angeles. Blackwell plays the drums as if he’s playing a wind instrument. Actually, he sounds more like a talking drum. He’s speaking a certain language that I find is very valid in rhythm instruments.
Very seldom in rhythm instruments do you hear rhythm sounding like a language. I think that’s a very old tradition, because the drums, in the beginning, used to be like the telephone—to carry the message.
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In one of my clearest memories of the drummer Ed Blackwell, he sat in an Indian restaurant drawing percussion notation on the tablecloth with a felt-tipped pen. The waiters looked on, aghast, as the splodgy black figures spread across their white linen, but Blackwell, rapt in concentration behind his dark glasses, remained oblivious. Music was all that mattered to him, the drums in particular, and there was a particular point he needed to make.
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Blackwell was a deeply serious artist who, whatever his circumstances, put the music first and insisted his associates did likewise. In New York percussion circles he was seen as a teacher. He often quoted the Chinese adage, ‘Neglect your art for a day, and it will neglect you for two’, and would actively pursue other drummers whom he respected, should he feel they reneged on commitment.
I never saw him without a pair of drumsticks or homemade mallets in his hand; these he would employ constantly as much to accentuate a point as to strengthen his wrists. Some percussionists have made a cabaret act from beating out rhythms on any available surface; Blackwell would do it to fill in gaps in conversation. He played drums like that, too: the perfect listener, who could equally stimulate and inspire with his enviable grasp of polyrhythmic possibilities.
No jazz musician can claim greater authenticity than a New Orleans birth. It is the most African of US cities, where Yoruba religious practice continues and the Second Line that accompanies street-parades moves with an African strut. From the moment he could walk, Blackwell was part of that Second Line and as a child he danced in the street for pennies. That characteristic dancestep and the ‘double-clutching’ two-beat of the parade bass drum remained features of his playing, securely anchoring his adventurousness in an earlier memory.
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More from the Albertina Walker Musical Tribute
Michael McKay (voice), Delores Washington (voice), Juli Wood (alto saxophone), “I’m Still Here,” live, Chicago, 10/14/10
Happy 80th Birthday, Ornette!
Ornette Coleman Quartet (with Don Cherry, trumpet; Charlie Haden, bass; Billy Higgins, drums), live, Spain (Barcelona), 1987
Part 1
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Part 2
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Part 3
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Part 4
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The sounds you don’t hear can mean as much as the ones you do. Here, for instance, it’s hard to overstate the importance of what isn’t onstage—a harmony instrument (piano, guitar). Without it, the drums move forward in the mix. The bass has more space to fill. The sound of each instrument becomes clearer, more distinct. The group sound becomes lighter, more open.
lagniappe
When we were on relief during the Depression, they’d give us dried-up old cheese and dried milk and we’d get ourselves all filled up and we’d kept this thing going, singing and dancing. I remember that when I play. You have to stick to your roots. Sometimes I play happy. Sometimes I play sad. But the condition of being alive is what I play all the time.
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You know what I realize? That all sound has a need. Otherwise it wouldn’t have a use. Sound has a use. . . . You use it to establish something—an invisible presence or some belief. . . . But isn’t it amazing that sound causes the idea to sound the way it is, more than the idea?
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Music has no face. Whatever gives oxygen its power, music is cut from the same cloth.
—Ornette Coleman
(The first and last quotes are from Ornette’s website. The second is from Ben Ratliff, The Jazz Ear: Conversations over Music [2008].)
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It is not enough to say that Ornette Coleman’s music will affect jazz profoundly, for it already has so affected it, and not only the jazz of younger men but that of some of his elders as well. His music represents the first fundamental reevaluation of basic materials and basic procedures for jazz since the innovations of Charlie Parker. ‘Let’s play the music and not the background,’ Coleman has said. And when someone does something with the passion and deep conviction of an Ornette Coleman, I doubt if there could be any turning back; it seems mandatory somehow for others somehow to respond to his work.—Martin Williams, The Jazz Tradition (2d rev. ed. 1993)
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Radio Ornette: all Ornette, all the time
Want more? In celebration of Ornette’s birthday, one of my favorite radio stations, WKCR-FM (at Columbia University), is playing his music all day.
music clip of the day 