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: