Sunday, June 26th
two takes
“Never Grow Old,” AKA “Where We’ll Never Grow Old” (James C. Moore)
Aretha Franklin, live, Detroit, 1996
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Vernard Johnson, live, 1973
music clip of the day
jazz/blues/rock/classical/gospel/more
Tag: Vernard Johnson
2016
2015
Sunday, April 26th
More of Vernard Johnson.
Live, Roanoke, Tx.
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“What Is This,” live (Something’s Got a Hold on Me), Little Rock, Ark., 1981
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“I’ve Decided To Make Jesus My Choice,” The Gospel Saxophone of Vernard Johnson, 1974
2015
Sunday, April 19th
In forty years this guy has let me down not once.
Vernard Johnson, “Only What You Do for Christ Will Last,” live
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lagniappe
random thoughts
Blessed to be awakened, again, by birds.
2012
Sunday, 10/28/12
Nearly forty years have passed since I first heard him; still I can’t get enough.
Vernard Johnson, “Amazing Grace,” live, Memphis, 1988
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lagniappe
reading table
Life tears us apart, but through those wounds, if we have tended them, love may enter us.
—Christian Wiman, “Mortify Our Wolves,” The American Scholar, Autumn, 2012
2011
Sunday, 7/3/11
This guy I can’t get enough of.
Vernard Johnson, “Don’t Wait ’Til The Battle Is Over, Shout Now!”; live, TV broadcast (Bobby Jones Gospel)
Vodpod videos no longer available.Time for just one note? 6:23.
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lagniappe
art beat
Lee Friedlander, Cherry Blossom Time in Japan (2006)
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reading table
Yesterday, opening my Emily Dickinson collection (The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by R. W. Franklin) at random, I came upon this.
We do not play on Graves —
Because there isn’t Room —
Besides — it isn’t even — it slants
And People come —And put a Flower on it —
And hang their faces so —
We’re fearing that their Hearts will drop —
And crush our pretty play —And so we move as far
As Enemies — away —
Just looking round to see how far
It is — Occasionally ——Emily Dickinson (#599)
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listening room: what’s playing
• Echocord Jubilee Comp. (Echocord)
• Art Ensemble of Chicago, Full Force (ECM)
• Art Ensemble of Chicago, Urban Bushmen (ECM)
• Paul Motian (with Lee Konitz, soprano & alto saxophones; Joe Lovano, tenor saxophone; Bill Frisell, guitar; Charlie Haden, bass), On Broadway Vol. 3 (Winter & Winter)
• Rebirth Brass Band, Feel Like Funkin’ It Up (Rounder)
• Marc Ribot, Silent Movies (Pi Recordings)
• Wadada Leo Smith, Kabell Years: 1971-1979 (Tzadik)
• Charles “Baron” Mingus, West Coast, 1945-49 (Uptown Jazz)
• John Alexander’s Sterling Jubilee Singers, Jesus Hits Like The Atom Bomb (New World Records)
• Rev. Johnny L. Jones, The Hurricane That Hit Atlanta (Dust-to-Digital)
• Elliott Carter, composer; Ursula Oppens, piano; Oppens Plays Carter (Cedille)
• Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, composers; Maurizio Pollini, piano, piano works (Schoenberg), Variations Op. 27 (Webern) (Deutsche Grammophon)
• Morton Feldman, For Bunita Marcus, Stephane Ginsburgh, piano (Sub Rosa)
• WKCR-FM (broadcasting from Columbia University)
—Bird Flight (Phil Schaap, jazz [Charlie Parker])
—Traditions in Swing (Phil Schaap, jazz)
—Daybreak Express (Various, jazz)
—Out to Lunch (Various, jazz)
—Jazz Profiles (Various, jazz)
—Jazz Alternatives (Various, jazz)
—Morning Classical (Various, classical)
—Afternoon New Music (Various, classical and hard-to-peg)
—Eastern Standard Time (Carter Van Pelt, Jamaican music)
• WFMU-FM
—Mudd Up! (DJ/Rupture, “new bass and beats”)
—Sinner’s Crossroads (Kevin Nutt, gospel)
—Give The Drummer Some (Doug Schulkind, sui generis)
—Downtown Soulville with Mr. Fine Wine (soul)
2011
Sunday, 3/6/11
I wouldn’t mind dying if I knew my funeral would sound like this.
Vernard Johnson (alto saxophone), “Goin’ Up Yonder,” “Amazing Grace,” live (service for alto saxophonist Philip Slack [begins at 2:50]), 1/09 (from the forthcoming documentary Walk With Me)
Vodpod videos no longer available.More? Here.
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lagniappe
radio
Greatest radio station on the planet? WFMU-FM, home of the wonderful Sinner’s Crossroads (“[s]cratchy vanity 45s, pilfered field recordings, muddy off-the-radio sounds, homemade congregational tapes and vintage commercial gospel throw-downs; a little preachin’, a little salvation, a little audio tomfoolery”), is a contender. They’re currently in the midst of their annual fundraiser, offering great DJ-crafted premiums. What better way to get rid of that extra dough that’s just taking up space?
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art beat
American Modern: Abbott, Evans, Bourke-White
Art Institute of Chicago (through 5/15/11)
Berenice Abbott, Church of God, New York (Harlem), 1936
2010
Tuesday, 3/23/10
looking back
Today, celebrating our 200th post, we revisit a few favorites.
If I didn’t have kids, would my ears be stuck, forever, on “repeat”?
Here’s something my younger son Luke, who just started college, played for me recently, after first pronouncing it, with quiet but absolute authority, the best thing this guy has done (already Luke’s learned that what’s important isn’t to be right; it’s to seem right).
Lupe Fiasco, “Hip Hop Saved My Life,” live, Los Angeles, 2008
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And here’s a track my older son Alex played for me a couple weeks ago, before heading back to school.
Dirty Projectors, “Stillness Is The Move”
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Koan for aging parents: What is the sound of a childless house?
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How to be both solid and fluid, both fat and delicate. How to make the beat breathe. These are things that, as a child, Philly Joe Jones began to learn while dancing—tap-dancing. Just watch the way Thelonious Monk, listening to this solo, rocks back and forth (1:25-1:50), as if he’s about to break into a little dance himself.
Philly Joe Jones, live (with Thelonious Monk), 1959
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lagniappe
He breathed our history as/his walking beat . . . The Man/So Hip/A City/Took/His/Name.—Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones, in Eulogies [1996])
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The first time I stood before a judge at Chicago’s Criminal Courts Building at 26th and California—this was back in the ’70s (when I was working at Alligator Records)—it was to speak on behalf of this man, Hound Dog Taylor. The day before, during a drunken argument at his apartment, he’d shot his longtime guitarist Brewer Phillips (who survived). In his own way, Hound Dog was a pretty canny guy. When he told me about this incident over the phone, shortly after it happened, he put it this way: “Richard, they say I shot Phillip.”
(No, don’t touch that dial; these stills are way out of focus—which, for Hound Dog, seems just right.)
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Hound Dog Taylor and the Houserockers, live, Ann Arbor Blues Festival, 1973
“Wild About You Baby”
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“Taylor’s Rock”
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“I Held My Baby”
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Here’s Arthur Russell, the “seminal avant-garde composer, singer-songer-writer, cellist, and disco producer” who died in 1992 at the age of 40 (of AIDS-related complications) and is the subject of both a recent documentary, Wild Combination, and a new book, Hold On To Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-1992.
Arthur Russell
“Get Around To It”
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“You And Me Both”
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“This Is How We Walk on the Moon”
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“That’s Us/Wild Combination”
(Yeah, the fact that I’m posting four tracks by this guy shows how much his music, which I just encountered recently, has been getting under my skin.)
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Here one of the greatest American artists of the 20th century (composer Morton Feldman [1926-1980]) pays homage to another (painter Mark Rothko [1903-1970]).
Morton Feldman, “Rothko Chapel” (composed in 1971; first performed, at Houston’s Rothko Chapel, in 1972)
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
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I first heard this guy back in the mid-1970s, after reading a review in the New York Times, by the late Robert Palmer, of his first album, The Gospel Saxophone of Vernard Johnson—and I’ve been listening to him ever since.
Vernard Johnson, saxophone
Live, Texas (Roanoke)
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lagniappe
reading table
Music . . . helped me to go deeper inside myself, to find new things there: the variety which I had vainly sought in life and in travel, yet the longing for which was stirred in me by the surge of sound whose sunlit wavelets came to break at my feet.
—Marcel Proust, The Prisoner (Trans. Carol Clark)
2009
Sunday, 12/6/09
I first heard this guy back in the mid-1970s, after reading a review in the New York Times, by the late Robert Palmer, of his first album, The Gospel Saxophone of Vernard Johnson—and I’ve been listening to him ever since.
*****
Vernard Johnson
Live, Texas (Roanoke)
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“What Is This?”
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“I’ve Decided To Make Jesus My Choice” (The Gospel Saxophone of Vernard Johnson [Glori, 1974])
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lagniappe
Like Rev. Utah Smith and many other gospel greats (Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Arizona Dranes, et al.), Vernard Johnson belongs to the Church of God in Christ (COGIC), a denomination that, as Robert Palmer put it, “has never believed in letting the devil have all the good tunes, or the good instruments.”
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The saxophone is a resolutely secular icon in our culture, its gleaming curves and often voice-like sound firmly associated with both sultry, sophisticated jazz and bumptious rock-and-roll, with high-flying fancies and the red-dirt realities of the blues. But the saxophone has also been a vehicle of imagination and spirit. And although it isn’t widely known, the spirituality of storefront churches and ecstatic religion has shaped the work of some of American music’s most indelible saxophone stylists, including King Curtis, Ornette Coleman and Albert Ayler.
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King Curtis, whose solos on 50’s hits like the Coasters’ ‘Charlie Brown’ and ‘Baby That Is Rock-and-Roll’ virtually defined rock-and-roll saxophone as a distinct idiom, grew up playing the saxophone in Texas churches. Ornette Coleman, who played rocking Southern rhythm-and-blues saxophone before he revolutionized jazz in the 60’s, considers playing in Deacon Frank Lastie’s ”spirit church” in New Orleans in the 1940’s a key experience in terms of his later evolution. There was a great deal of the black church in the burning, visionary saxophone stylings of 60’s iconoclasts such as Albert Ayler and Pharoah Sanders.—Robert Palmer, The New York Times (3/6/87)
music clip of the day 