The recent passing of David Sanborn (it happened back in May) recently got me thinking about the TV show he cohosted with Jools Holland back when I was a teenager. It was called Night Music. Well, apparently, the show was originally titled Sunday Night, and I’m not sure when the name changed, or whether I caught any episodes of it back when it was called that. I do vividly remember tuning in to watch Night Music, though.
Tag: jazz
Bill Evans: How My Heart Sings by Peter Pettinger
Like all the posts in my 2023 reads list, this comes at a lag. Quite a lag, as it’s 2024, but hey, that’s how it is. Here’s some listening for the post. It seems only appropriate, given the topic. I haven’t actually finished this book, but I read the vast majority of it in 2023, so I’m counting it as one of my 2023 reads. So far, I’ve really enjoyed it, which surprised me since I’ve never really dug into Bill Evans’ work before (aside from on Kind of Blue). I was surprised, in fact, when I saw a review …
On Listening
A little over a year ago, someone posted this question on Quora: Why does John Coltrane’s music sound like someone just erratically blowing on a sax sometimes? The short version of my answer, I suppose, could be this: Except with the word “LISTEN” underlined and circled in red pen. But here’s the longer answer that I actually posted:
Thoughts on Whiplash
Mrs. Jiwaku and I saw Whiplash a week or so ago (it’s in theaters here in Jochiwon right now), and I’ve been ruminating. Some thoughts, in no particular order, in a suitably pretentious (and very long) list.
What do the Starfish Think?
I haven’t made an update here for the last few weeks, and a lot of long-promised (albeit probably not long-expected) posts languish unfinished. People are probably wondering if I went for a swim in the ocean and didn’t come back. Rest assured: I fear the ocean as much as I ever did, and am safe and (mostly) dry… just busy. That’s the nature of job-hunting, and it’s a bit like writing: lots of sitting at a computer fiddling with details, hoping your intended meaning comes across, sending things off into the void and then waiting for responses… so you send out more things …
Baude Cordier, Pando, and The Lifecycle of Radical Music
The composition on the left is “Belle, bonne, sage,” composed by Baude Cordier, a musician who fell into the “Ars subtilior” school — that is, the “more subtle” school of music, which flourished briefly right around the end of the 14th century, in southern France and Northern Spain: you’ll see some sources call that “late medieval” and others “early Renaissance,” though I think of it as the former in most terms… but in music, it’s kind of a toss-up, or rather, at that time and place, music straddles the divide between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The comparative (“more subtle”) refers to the Ars …
Monk, Amblyopia & All
Wanting to check one detail about Monk’s life, I picked up my copy of Straight, No Chaser: The Life and Genius of Thelonious Monk by Leslie Gourse, and searched… and an hour later, I discovered I’d happily read a big chunk of the book. So far it’s a very balanced treatment, from what I can tell: Gourse doesn’t shy away from the few unpleasant things that come up, but doesn’t dwell on the either. It’s not a particularly musical biography, so far: no analysis of Monk’s music. (There’s more of that in Gabriel Solis’ Monk’s Music, which I’d dive into next if it weren’t …
Newport Jazz Festival, 1960:The Year They Called the National Guard
You won’t catch me hating on the Newport Jazz Festival, of course! When I was a teenager, the festival on Rhode Island had a kind of magical aura of importance: on PBS I’d seen footage of Gil Evans playing there with Art Farmer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlgKLwhoVgI … and listened time and again to John Coltrane and Archie Shepp’s New Thing at Newport: … and Dizzy Gillespie’s big band recording At Newport: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJF7075fvg4 … dozens and dozens of times. (Seriously, in high school, I was baffled by how everyone was into music we all knew nobody would be listening to by 2002. My jam …
Monk Suite, One Page at a Time
I’m no sure how many people out there are really tracking my notation projects, but this is an update about my current one, notating “Monk Suite”–an arrangement of tunes by Thelonious Monk for jazz quintet and orchestra that I put together as an undergrad student.
All Blues
Another week, another tune. This one’s a classic, and strictly speaking, it’s actually just a blues in concert G. But I was trying to capture some of the original Miles Davis version. (On which all the solos kill me, though I used to focus on the Coltrane; lately, I’ve reached a new appreciation of just how badass Cannonball Adderley was–that’s the first sax solo, for those who are curious.) These days, I’m trying to get better at walking the line between “inside” and “outside”: the more traditional, “tonal” sounding playing that I’ve been working on since picking up the horn …