Bolívarian musicians

On new book cart. Dudamel is a shining star in orchestral music.
Tunstall, Tricia. (2012). Changing lives: Gustavo Dudamel, El Sistema, and the transformative power of music.
New York: Norton.

78s, Photos, Even Sweat

Another fragment of Louis Armstrong’s legacy is back where it belongs. The Armstrong museum and archive in Queens has received a treasure-trove of rare 78-r.p.m. records, bootleg tapes, five personal letters, candid photographs, European posters, news clippings, discographies, even weight-loss tips — 192 cubic feet in all — from the estate of a Swedish man known as the world’s second-largest private collector of Satchmoiana.

Satchmoiana, now there is a word.


There is also a sweat-stained handkerchief that belonged to Armstrong, who was famous for theatrically wiping his brow between the trumpet solos he blew better than almost anyone else. “We’re excited about it because there might be some valuable DNA in it, what with cloning and all,” joked Michael Cogswell, director of the Louis Armstrong House Museum in Corona.

One never knows.

The Armstrong Museum's archivist is named Ricky Riccardi; what a hoot.

[Library director] Mr. Cogswell, 58, is a Virginian who played saxophone gigs for a time, did graduate work in both jazz history and library science, and considers his current position his dream job. He shepherded visitors through Armstrong’s house last week, telling them how Armstrong, while on tour, asked his wife to buy them a home, which she did, picking one out in a working-class quarter and paying about $3,500. When Armstrong showed up by taxi from the airport at 3 a.m., he was dazzled by what he thought of as its grandeur, given the stark poverty he had been raised in. “Quit kidding me,” he told the cabdriver. “Take me to the address I gave you.”

Early Chet

One day I decided to look for renditions of "This time the dream's on me" and it was on this compilation. There are 4 CDs to the collection. The first one starts with live pieces, including a couple where Chet played with Bird: the fidelity is poor, but the talent shines through. Discs 2 and 3 have studio pieces. Disc 4 contains a few studio pieces, and a number of live pieces (in which Chet plays with both Stan Getz and Gerry Mulligan.

This box set is available for purchase, and is annotated online. For a public library to own it is a gift that, alas, too few will appreciate. Yet it is proof of a wonderful music collection, and the Port Washington Library has that.

A Hearing Aid That Cuts Out All the Clatter

Stradivarius violin raises £9.8m

Les Paul

Today's Google doodle honors the guitar pioneer.

Keeping Billie Holiday Alive

Today's concert at HWPL is by the Long Island Brass Guild.

The Long Island Brass Guild began in the 1970s, adding members and instruments along the way - In the 1990s, a tuba was added and a final trumpet was added in 2005 - today the group boasts 7 members: 3 trumpets, French horn, tenor trombone, bass trombone, and tuba - Their repertoire includes classical brass compositions - from Renaissance to Ragtime - and compositions written for the group.

Tenor trombone? Never heard of it (only of the 'regular' and the valve trombones). So I looked it up. The trombone itself derives from Italian tromba (trumpet) and -one (a suffix meaning "large"), so the name literally means "large trumpet". Trombones and trumpets share the important characteristic of having predominantly cylindrical bores. Therefore, the most frequently encountered trombones—the tenor and bass trombone—are the tenor and bass counterparts of the trumpet.

Instruments related to the trombone include:

• Sackbut -  medieval precursors to trombones

• Buccin - a visually distinctive trombone popularized in military bands in France between 1810–1845 which subsequently faded into obscurity.

• Trumpet - has the highest register in the brass family. Trumpets are among the oldest musical instruments, dating back to at least 1500 BCE.

• Bass Trumpet - a type of low trumpet which was first developed during the 1820s in Germany.

• Euphonium - tenor-voiced

• Tuba - largest and lowest pitched brass
• 
  

33 Revolutions Per Minute

 Lynskey, Dorian. (2011). 33 revolutions per minute: a history of protest songs, from Billie Holiday to Green Day. New York : Ecco.

The lively British rock critic Dorian Lynskey — he writes for The Guardian, among other publications — spends some time in his new book, “33 Revolutions Per Minute,” chewing over why most protest songs are heaped with scorn. They can be “didactic, crass or plain boring,” he writes. Those who warble them onstage can seem “shrill or annoying or egotistical.” Lester Bangs didn’t single out James Taylor’s politics in his hilarious 1971 essay “James Taylor Marked for Death.” (That essay is barely about Mr. Taylor.) But bad protest songs really do make you want to throttle someone.

Afro-Cuban Jazz

IF there is such a thing as a first family of Afro-Cuban jazz, the O’Farrill clan has a right to claim that distinction. Its members helped invent the hybrid genre back in the 1940s, when Chico O’Farrill came to New York from Havana, and in recent years they have worked to reinvigorate the music despite barriers in both Cuba and the United States. “We’re kind of people caught between two worlds,” said the pianist Arturo O’Farrill, Chico’s 50-year-old son. As such, he added, it’s his obligation to encourage “an evolving relationship between two countries that should never have been separated culturally” and to “pay a debt forward” in his father’s name.

I've long wondered about the name itself: Irish? 

The musical story of the family, which immigrated to Cuba from the British Caribbean colony of Montserrat in the 1700s, begins with Chico, who was studying at a military academy in Georgia in the mid-1930s when he fell in love with jazz. A decade later, after playing trumpet in Cuban orchestras, he moved to New York, where he quickly became an A-list composer and arranger, working with Benny Goodman, Dizzy Gillespie, Stan Kenton, Charlie Parker, Stan Getz, Count Basie and Machito, among others.

The Afro-Cuban Jazz Suite is one of the greatest musical compositions I have ever heard, especially when it features Bird.

“Simply put, Chico O’Farrill is the greatest Afro-Cuban jazz figure of all time,” Leonardo Acosta, the author of “Cubano Be Cubano Bop: One Hundred Years of Jazz in Cuba,” said in a telephone interview from Havana. “His way of using the orchestra as an instrument, his ability as an arranger and composer and his skill in converting Cuban music into jazz and vice versa gives his work a kind of chemistry that no one else, neither Cuban nor American, has. He achieves another dimension.”

Arturo  on YouTube.

Who will remember Paul Simon?

At first I thought he might have died, with that headline, but it is an analysis of his person and music, musical criticism.

There may be legitimate reasons for the chasm between Mr. Simon and younger audiences. Some of his lyrics portray him as an upscale urban intellectual who shields his emotions behind a well-considered phrase; when he writes at street level, there can be a sense that he's revealing research rather than experience. For all his musical explorations—gospel, reggae, Mexican folk, South African mbaqanga, Afro-Brazilian batucada and electronic soundscapes, among them—Mr. Simon's recordings often polish away needed bite and edge.

His popularity does not equal that of Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen, is a criticism.

His métier, it turns out, is life's often-baffling twists and triumphs, joys and jolts, and though some Simon compositions may be cryptic, they are easily deciphered. Mr. Simon has been hiding in plain sight since Simon & Garfunkel's debut disc was released some 47 years ago.

In performance, Mr. Simon was, as he's been for most of his career, a man who spends little time with image, preferring to lead with his songs, voice and guitar to transmit a knotty, deeply felt worldview. His place in the pantheon of American song long ago secured, Mr. Simon said as he left the stage, "I had a good time." So did we all, as anyone would have who has an abiding interest in musical adventure and lyrical excellence.

317 East 32nd

Listening to WKCR on Sunday 20 March, a Jazz Profile of Lennie Tristano. One of the selections played was 317 East 32nd Street, which was Tristano address in NYC.

Deep in a dream

In the DVD Anita O'Day the life of a jazz singer, James Gavin was a commentator about Ms. O'Day's life and art. He was identified as author of two books: this one on Chet Baker, and Intimate nights: the golden age of New York cabaret.

Happy St. Patrick's Day

This is quite a twist on an old tale. Listening to The Essential Chieftains, a greatest hits CD of the Celtic group, I saw this video clip: Expedition 27 Flight Engineer Catherine Coleman delivers a St. Patrick's Day message from the International Space Station.

Prendergast in Italy

Matthews, N., & Kennedy, E. (2009). Prendergast in Italy. City: Merrell.

Came across this book whilst working on RFID in the the 709 oversize section. Immediately something clicked; perhaps I'd seen this before? Turns out that a year and a half back I read an article (and posted a blog entry) about Prendergast.

Clapton’s Magic, for Sale

Justin Lane/European Pressphoto Agency - Some of the guitars owned by musician Eric Clapton that are part of an auction to be held at Bonham’s in New York


Why would someone create a replica of Eric Clapton's beloved Fender Stratocaster, named Blackie, complete with every single nick and scratch, including the wear pattern from Mr. Clapton's belt buckle and the burn mark from his cigarettes? And why is that replica expected to fetch at least $20,000 at auction, probably much more?

Coz they got no life? And money to burn?

Fortunately, social scientists have been hard at work on the answers. After conducting experiments and interviewing guitar players and collectors, they have just published papers analyzing “celebrity contagion” and “imitative magic,” not to mention “a dynamic cyclical model of fetishization appropriate to an age of mass-production.” 

If Clapton touched it, the guitar has magic. If it resembles what Clapton touched, it also has a certain sort of magic.

Some bidders might rationalize their purchases as good investments, or as objects that are worth having just because they provide pleasant memories and mental associations of someone they admire. But those do not seem to be the chief reasons for buying celebrity memorabilia, according to a team of psychologists at Yale.

Slim museum

The world's richest man Carlos Slim inaugurated a massive museum in Mexico City on Tuesday to house his eclectic collection of art ranging from pre-Hispanic pieces to sculptures by French masters. Located in the heart of one of the capital's poshest residential areas, the Soumaya museum -- named after Slim's late wife -- will host some 60,000 pieces in six exhibit rooms, making it one of the biggest in Latin America. The museum will be home to one of the world's most important collections of Auguste Rodin's sculptures and also prominently displays works by Mexican muralists Rufino Tamayo and Diego Rivera. Slim plans to build a huge development anchored by the museum that will include offices, apartments and shops with a price tag of $750 million for the first phase of construction.

Quite a fascinating story. Carlos Slim is reported to have a greater wealth than Bill Gates or Warren Buffett, though of course that is all dependent on market value, which is volatile. Nonetheless, he's rich, very rich. And this is a development that surprises me: I did not see him having this interest. I recall reading a story several years ago, in which he complained of his children running up a $500 monthly phone bill, which struck as a bunch of mierda. He is a ruthless businessman who has magnificent connections, and has exploited such to gain a foothold in key industries; he bought Telmex for centavos on the peso, and rode that wave to fabulous wealth.


Nonetheless, for him to open up this museum is impressive. Sure, it's a public relations stunt. Still, his museum will not be charging admission. Two weekends ago we went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where the admission charge was $20 a person.

Django 'n Duke

Listened to WKCR's Jazz Profiles last evening, featuring Django Reinhardt. As I got home, before 6, the host began talking about Django playing with Duke Ellington and his Orchestra. It was not a happy relationship for either, it seems. I was amazed that I had never heard of the collaboration, considering how often I listen to KCR, to jazz, and to Ellington.

One website I found discusses the collaboration, has a narrative, numerous pictures, and links. This picture is from 1939. There are numerous links online, including discographies (included are, amazingly, two computer software companies).

Uncertain coda for mansion with a musical heritage

Karly Domb Sadof for The New York Times - The Steinway mansion in Astoria, Queens, is up for sale after the death of its owner, Michael Halberian

Not exactly

Robert Moses, the musical?

Sonata

a musical composition of 3 or 4 movements of contrasting forms. Beethovern wrote many. Andras Schiff has recorded them.