Vitro Nasu

(Visiting Rubin Hurricane Carter)

Dylan and Levon Helm

Bob Dylan and Levon playing Ping Pong here.

Via Ray Grasse –

Bob Dylan wins the Nobel Prize for literature – the award will be formally handed out on Dec. 10th, just as Jupiter crosses over the top of his horoscope (which pretty much confirms that birth time.)

Cohen – Dylan Interface –

It wasn’t [Bob Dylan’s] originality which first impressed me, but his familiarity. He was a person out of my books, singing to the real guitar. Dylan was what I’d always meant by the poet. – Leonard Cohen

If Nor For you – (photo by Willie Simpson)

Happy birthday Ben Whishaw

See Bob Dylan – photo by Danny Lyon..

Glenn Gould died of a stroke on October 4, 1982, and was laid to rest in Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Happy birthday Woody Guthrie!

Robert Crumb (previous post Birthday bean effect)

Woody Guthrie~ All You Fascists Bound To Lose (Youtube)

Bound for Glory

July 14 (also a birthday of Ingmar Bergman.. who cast David Carradine in Serpent’s Egg .. Carradine and Elliot Gould were the only 2 Americans to appear as lead actor in Bergman films)

Bound for Glory was directed by Hal Ashby

Tony Conrad (Boingboing)

Tony Conrad, drone and minimalist music pioneer, RIP

Wish You Were (Buffalo Avant Garde)

Tony Conrad (American, born 1940). Examinations, 1979. Pencil on paper with Lucite, strap, and bed, drawing:

For a generation of musicians and filmmakers in Buffalo and around the world, Tony Conrad was the walking embodiment of the avant garde.

Mr. Conrad, who died Saturday morning in Hospice Buffalo, Cheektowaga, at 76 after fighting prostate cancer, began his career as an underground musician and filmmaker and ended it as an internationally idolized composer, performer, professor and thinker.

He served as a widely admired faculty member of the University at Buffalo’s media study department from 1976 until his death, during which time he was instrumental in the formation of Squeaky Wheel Media Arts Center, the growth of Buffalo’s cable access network and countless exhibitions, collectives and collaborations on city streets, cable channels and in institutions across the region.

Despite a diverse career that significantly impacted the lives of thousands of students, as well as the trajectory of visual art and music in the United States and far beyond, Mr. Conrad is perhaps best-known for inspiring the name of influential rock band The Velvet Underground when he was getting his start as an artist in New York City.

Anthony S. Conrad was born March 7, 1940, in Concord, N.H. He earned a degree in mathematics from Harvard University in 1962 before moving to New York City and beginning his career as an experimental musician, composer and filmmaker. During his time in New York, he collaborated with musicians John Cale, LaMonte Young and others in a loose collective known as the Theatre of Eternal Music and later as the Dream Syndicate, whose work would spawn and influence several new genres of music, including drone, minimalism, punk and electronica.http://buffalo.com/2016/04/09/news/art/tony-conrad-avant-garde-pioneer-ub-professor-dies-76

BLUE Mitchell
March 13, 1930 — May 21, 1979

“I think Blue Mitchell was one of the most melodic players of his generation”

–Jimmy Heath

Blue Mitchell played with Horace Silver for seven years.

Bowie at Berlin Wall – 1987

The Next Day – Marion Cortillard played a sexworker for priests – read more here.

Bowie with Nicolas Roeg and Duncan Jones here (photo via Duncan Jones)

Roeg directing David Bowie

Interview (Bowie’s in space: Nic Roeg on film)

David Bowie as Warhol in Basquiat (youtube)

<> <> <>
Ryuichi Sakamoto and David Bowie

David Bowie and Nagisa

See an excerpt from Merry Xmas Mr. Lawrence (Sakamoto receiving kiss -youtube)

Bowie’s responses to Proust Questionnaire – Vanity Fair

Q: Which living person do you most admire?
Bowie: Elvis.

David Bowie shared a birthday with Elvis, Anthony Newley was his early inspiration.

Previous post Bowie with birthday buddies Elvis and Stephen Hawking. (link to a documentary of David Bowie.)

David Bowie as an African

Wild is the Wind..his tribute to Nina Simone.. (How David Bowie helped Nina out of a slump)..

David with Klaus Nomi

Revolutionary by nature (Obit from Philly)

“I write what I think is for me necessary to write,” Pierre Boulez said in 2008. The conductor and composer died at his home in Germany on Tuesday at 90.

LA Times. (Obit)

Pierre Boulez, a radical titan of contemporary music, dies at 90

Pierre Boulez (wik)

In his early career, Boulez played a key role in the development of integral serialism, controlled chance and electronic music. This, coupled with his highly polemical views on the evolution of music, gained him the reputation as an enfant terrible

Previous post (see Boulez as Mona Lisa)
Last March Pierre Boulez celebrated his 90th birthday.

Francis Poulenc..Born on 7 January 1899, half monk half delinquent..
The composer is largely self-taught and eccentric. Francis Poulenc –“(Previous post)

Jean Pierre Rampal also was born on Jan 7. (Bach – youtube)

Disney and Dimitri Shostakoch

Fantasia wiki

Piano Concerto No. 2, Allegro, Opus 102 by Dmitri Shostakovich. Based on the fairy tale “The Steadfast Tin Soldier” by Hans Christian Andersen, a broken toy soldier with one leg falls in love with a toy ballerina and protects her from an evil jack-in-the-box.[4] Unlike the original story, this version has a happy ending. Introduced by Bette Midler featuring (youtube) pianist Yefim Bronfman.

Fact-Checking the Age-Old Rumors of Walt Disney’s Dark Side

Damnation by Bela Tarr

Leonard and Igor Stravinsky

The Madness of Genius Glenn Gould (part I)

Glenn Gould and Natsume Soseki

Soseki’s novel was not only to become Gould’s favorite book (previously it had been Thomas Mann’s 1924 novel “The Magic Mountain”), but one that would obsess him for the last 15 years of his life. Despite having no particular interest in Japan, nor having ever visited, Gould ended up owning four copies of the book, two in English and, unexpectedly, two in Japanese. He owned the English translations of Soseki’s other novels and had more of the Japanese novelist’s books in his library than those of any other writer.

To his cousin, Jessie Greig — the person closest to him throughout his life — he expressed his love for “The Three-Cornered World” by reading the entire novel out to her over the telephone over the course of two evenings.

Gould was telephone friends with Bill Evans

G.G plays Paul Hindemith (youtube)

Leonard conducting Glenn Gould performing Bach (youtube)

ON the record (Youtube)

Off the record (Youtube)

Glenn Gould Archive (Orlando Gibbons was his favorite composer, check his Russian Journey or see him as Umeboshi)

Thanks to David Ehrenstein (who called Glenn as the gayest straight man who ever breathed) ..

(via)

John Cage met Marcel Duchamp in the 1940’s
(Only when Duchamp’s health was failing, Cage decided to seek Marcel out with the pretext of taking chess lessons. So Duchamp, his wife and Cage met and played chess.)

Silence (repost) Time Lapse

Stones by John Cage
(image source)

satieE

goes in seaRch

of sunlIght he comes across haydn

bill anastasi is looKing at haydn through a lorgnetter

Vexations – Satie and John Cage

Kronos Q.

Ravi Shankar and Terry Riley

At 80, Terry Riley is a happy man

By Joshua Kosman Updated 12:54 pm, Monday, June 22, 2015

1

The prolific and influential composer-performer turns 80 on Wednesday, a milestone that will be celebrated this weekend with a three-concert series by his longtime collaborators, the Kronos Quartet. And in addition to his artistic legacy — a long and varied creative record that includes some of the most notable works in the history of minimalism and post-minimalism — Riley must hold some kind of record as the happiest and least stress-afflicted musician now working.

He began as a neo-classicist, writing short pieces in imitation of Milhaud and Poulenc, as well as a jazz pianist. Then Young, whom he met at UC Berkeley in the ’50s, drew him into the world of experimentalism — a chapter that led to the 1964 creation of “In C,” the masterpiece of structured freedom that remains his best-known work. Throughout the late 1960s and ’70s, Riley immersed himself in musical improvisation, producing such groundbreaking albums as “Rainbow in Curved Air” but not writing anything down. (“During that decade, you won’t find any notes from me,” he says, “but a lot of music.”) He also became an adept at Indian music, studying with the Indian singer Pandit Pran Nath.

Kronos and Terry Riley

Perhaps his most long-standing commitment has been to his collaboration with Kronos, for which he has written more than a dozen quartets. It was the group’s founder and artistic director, David Harrington, who put Riley back on the path of notating music.

Photos of Terry Riley

Terry Riley and Harry Partch both were born on June 24.

Harry Partch (Previous post)

NYtimes obit

Derrida and Ornette

Derrida Interviews Ornette – The Others Langauge (Three of Being)

Philosopher Jacques Derrida Interviews Jazz Legend Ornette Coleman: Talk Improvisation, Language & Racism (1997)

One more lengthy article on Ornette Coleman and Derrida

previous post (see videos – Chappaqua suite & Naked Lunch)

John Lurie – June 11 2015 via FB

When I first started playing saxophone and discovered Ornette Coleman he freed me up. He put me on a path that made sense for me to follow.
I would search the Worcester Public Library for anything about jazz and found a book about him and Cecil Taylor. For some reason the line that stayed with me that Ornette said was, “I knew I was on to something when I found I could make mistakes.” That hit me so profoundly. Yeah, that is exactly right, even if no one but you knows, you are on to something if you can make mistakes.
I managed to see him play often. When he took his solo at the end of Skies in America at Carnegie Hall, Bill Noel turned to me and said, “he just stopped time.”
Which was also exactly right.
Later, when the Lounge Lizards started he was remarkably supportive and helpful to the young band leader following in his footsteps.
And much much later, when I had found my musical voice, I had some of the guys in my band that he used to hire, but was having a really rough time with them.
So I called Ornette and we had an amazing two hour conversation
about running a band.
Ornette’s passing hit me really hard. He meant something to me and not because of all the musical innovations that he made, which are many but because of the sweetness in him. Almost like an angel.