Cecil Taylor with the Art Ensemble of Chicago

Roscoe Mitchell, Muhal Richard Abrams, and George Lewis

Huddling.... with Simone Forti

At Los Angeles MOCA in 2004:

...and in L.A.'s Chinatown in 2009:

Here's a talk Simone Forti gave in 2010:

...and here's a recent interview.

Milt Hinton... and the Jumpin' Jive

Now, Fred Astaire supposedly said the Nicholas Brothers' tap dance routine from the end of the 1943 movie Stormy Weather was the greatest dance sequence ever to be filmed, and it's hard to argue with him after seeing it.  It's also a great opportunity to see Cab Calloway with his band, which included musicians such as Foots Thomas and Keg Johnson:

Just after Calloway brings out Harold and Fayard Nicholas, at about 1:30, you can see the great bassist Milt Hinton playing right behind them at the back of the room.  Here's Hinton giving a bass lesson, several decades later:

Dave McKenna

This, on the other hand, is worth a listen:

Check out how Dave McKenna sometimes plays a bass line and middle-register chords at the same time with only his left hand (e.g. at 1:58).

Jazz these days

Jazz musicians these days can all play very fast, very loud, lots of different time signatures, lots of interaction, lots of notes... and most of their music is really quite boring.

Unfinished Music

After my comments expressing disappointment that Yoko Ono spent so much time diverting her attention away from creative avant-garde art once she married John Lennon, I thought it would be worth going back and listening again to the experimental "Unfinished Music" albums the two of them released in the late 1960s.  Here's the beginning of Two Virgins.  I have to say, I still don't get this.  I listen to a lot of far-out experimental music and enjoy and respect a lot of it.  But Two Virgins, as far as I can tell, is basically just Lennon and Ono faffing around.  I do appreciate, though, the notion of ridiculing the culture industry (and perhaps, even the public, a la P.T. Barnum).  Perhaps it's more than a coincidence that this album was released in the same year that Stanley Cavell published his essay "Music Discomposed," in which he postulated that "the possibility of fraudulence, and the experience of fraudulence, is endemic in the experience of contemporary music"...

Vernon and Irene Castle

...and here's an interesting experiment in animating some series of still photos of the husband-and-wife dance team in action.  You can download the Castles' 1914 book Modern Dancing here.

The Night Watch

You can learn lots about Rembrant's 1642 painting "The Night Watch" on the website of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and you can zoom in up close on Google's new "GoogleArtProject" website.  Beyond all the historical details about who's in the painting and how Rembrandt structured the group portrait, I'm always amazed by how much of this huge painting is very dark.  It's about four yards high and almost five wide, and you can imagine the amount of time the artist spent applying very dark black, brown, and grey paint to large areas of the canvas...

Canaletto's Venice

From the eighteenth century:

Ustad Alla Rakha

Tabla virtuoso Ustad Alla Rakha in an Indian television documentary:

....demonstrating tabla concepts with Ravi Shankar:

...and performing on British television with his son Zakir Hussain:

Charlotte Moorman

From Fred Stern's documentary film, cellist Charlotte Moorman talks about peforming Karlheinz Stockhausen's Originale:

...and Nam June Paik's Opera Sextronic:

"Jivin' with Jarvis"

Vibraphonist Lionel Hampton made some great records during the late 1930s and 1940s, and this is an especially good one featuring the Nat King Cole Trio.  Listen to those low-register A-flats that Cole plays on the piano right near the start as the rhythm section enters.  And hear Cole's graceful 16-bar solo at 1:27!  You can learn a lot from listening closely to the different rhythm section riffs, backgrounds, and exchanges behind the solos.  Here's Cole's trio with Ida James:

...and here's Hampton from about 14 years later, playing his composition "Midnight Sun."

Al Jarvis was a radio DJ (and, later, TV host) in Los Angeles.

Hans Richter

Here's his 1926 short film, Filmstudie:

You can download it here.  The music was composed by Darius Milhaud.

Trisha Brown

Accumulation:

Horace Silver

The great jazz pianist and composer Horace Silver is in his 80s now, no longer playing and reportedly in poor health, but his music lives on in his many recordings and compositions.

Here he is in the late 1950s with his quintet, featuring saxophonist Junior Cook and trumpeter Blue Mitchell, playing "Senor Blues":

...and "Cool Eyes":

You can hear an NPR Jazz Profiles broadcast on Silver here.

Ignacy Jan Paderewski

Here's Paderewski playing Chopin's Ab-major Polonaise:

And here, you can download a book about him by Edward Algernon Baughan.  The book was published in 1908, when Paderewski was forty-eight years old—ten years before he became prime minister of Poland...

Monet's Water Lilies

Chekhov's Cherry Orchard with Judi Dench, Peggy Ashcroft, John Gielgud...

Part 2.

Part 3.

Train Music

Arthur Honegger's Pacific 231:

Meade Lux Lewis's "Honky Tonk Train Blues":

Glenn Miller's "Chattanooga Choo Choo," from the 1941 film Sun Valley Serenade, featuring Dorothy Dandridge and the Nicholas Brothers:

Judy Garland sings Harry Warren's "The Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe," from the 1946 film The Harvey Girls:

...and from the same year as The Harvey Girls, Duke Ellington's "Happy Go Lucky Local," from The Deep South Suite:

Saxophonist Jimmy Forrest, who was briefly in Ellington's band during the late '40s, ripped this tune off and had a hit with "Night Train."  Here's James Brown's famous version:

And here's Pierre Schaeffer's early musique concrète piece, "Etude aux chemins de fer":

Different Trains:

Fela Kuti's "Expensive Shit"

Groovin!

...but I think my all-time favorite of Fela's studio tracks is "Opposite People."

Black and White Paintings

Toward the end of his life, Francisco Goya (1746-1828) painted a series of works that became known as the "black paintings":

A century-and-a-half later, the abstract expressionist Ad Reinhardt did some "black paintings" that were even blacker than Goya's, although they weren't quite as black as they seemed at first glance.

On the other hand, several artists have become well-known for doing white paintings.  One of the first was Kasimir Malevich.  Here's his "Suprematist Composition" from 1917:

Another was Robert Rauschenberg, whose white paintings from 1951 influenced the composer John Cage, who wrote "4'33''" the following year.  Rauschenberg was also notorious for his "Erased De Kooning":

Robert Ryman, who's also painted a lot of white paintings, had an exhibit at the Phillips Collection last year:

The Phillips Collection also recently had an exhibit of "predominantly white paintings" by Richard Pousette-Dart.

I'd like to see a museum exhibit comprised of black and white paintings by various artists... maybe they could hang them in alternation, black then white, along the walls.