Anyone who has heard of the talented, improvising trumpeter Kermit Ruffins, a friendly sensualist, and one of the founders of the Rebirth Brass Band, as well as a respected barbecue grill man, knows that those who love the trumpeter’s work consider him an embodiment of the spirit of New Orleans.
Tag: music
Loss and Sorrow in the Words of Soldiers: David T. Little, Soldier Songs
Soldier Songs begins and ends with gong-like sounds, which could be large mortar explosions. There are quotes from soldiers about the life-or-death circumstances of war as killing; and making oneself available to die upon orders; and the (usually forbidden) permission to kill. An experimental classical sound supports the ordinary conversation of the soldiers’ testimonies: piano, drone, and pulsing rhythm accompany the voices.
A Complex Figure, a Tragic End: The Julius Eastman Memory Depot by Jace Clayton
as Eastman too radical for the avant-garde? Was the Cage-Eastman argument the inevitable clash of a privileged self-erasing artist and an ambitious but rebellious self-asserting artist? Did Eastman betray himself by adopting the destructive and distracting, false, hateful, and self-indulgent racial and sexual identity politics of the time?
The Status Report of an Independent Woman: Alicia Keys, Girl on Fire
She is an artist I like and respect, but I find her consistent concern with independence worrying, and not because I do not understand or respect that mission, but because, despite her affirmations, some aspect of that desired state seems to elude her.
Inspiration for Independent Rock found in New Orleans: the album Algiers by the band Calexico
In working in New Orleans the band members were finding a home in a town that has long been known for the interactions of different cultures, African, European, Native American—and a place some people think of as Caribbean. New Orleans is a city and a village, a place of family, work, religion, food, music, sex, and violence; a place of piety and pleasure—of private passions that become public. The members of Calexico were able to see the past and the future in New Orleans, the rich and the poor, the familiar and the strange—the complexities.
Crossing that Line to Freedom: Heart on the Wall, African American Art Songs, by Louise Toppin and the Dvorak Symphony Orchestra; and the anthology Sence You Went Away
What poetry means is open to interpretation, but those lines suggest to me that memory possesses what the hand does not hold, and that there are different ways of gaining the world, a spiritual way beyond the material. That is also the realm of art, a form of beauty, craft, emotion, idea, memory, spirit, and thought.
Nature, Spirit, Love, and Protest: Wild Songs, classical soprano Polly Butler Cornelius’s performance of songs by Steve Heitzeg and Lori Laitman
On Polly Butler Cornelius’s album Wild Songs, the use by composer Lori Laitman of Emily Dickinson’s “Will there really be a morning?” becomes an expression of more than spiritual doubt, but a recognition of the possibility of real world cataclysm. The high long notes can be beautiful but nearly blur the sense of the words.
The Dreams and Rage of Manhood: Bruce Springsteen, Darkness on the Edge of Town
Bruce Springsteen’s focus and intensity remain connected to recognizable characters and situations; and that is what makes his work more than self-indulgent feeling and mythmaking.
A Musician’s Musician and a Pervert’s Pervert: Here’s Little Richard
A man who wears glass suits would not throw stones, but he sure can throw light and plenty of shade. Little Richard has been a legend for decades; and there is no one who speaks or sings like him. Little Richard had to be a force of nature: he had a lot of terrain to conquer and there was no established social infrastructure to help him; and he had only his charisma, energy, talent, and will.
After Sade’s Soldier of Love comes Lianne La Havas’s Is Your Love Big Enough?
Lianne La Havas, with her song collection Is Your Love Big Enough?, presents a sensibility that is feminine, thoughtful, jazzily soulful, independent and individual. La Havas, a singer and a guitarist, with the participation of multi-instrumentalist Matt Hales, creates a bohemian atmosphere in which the personally sincere and the cosmopolitan are both at home.