Alex Ross on Boulez

 

I pledged to write something on Pierre Boulez, but alas the muse and the energy have eluded me.

As would be expected, Alex Ross has posted an excellent memorial piece on the New Yorker's website.

However, I do have one quibble. Boulez was a notoriously slow composer, especially in his later years. Promised new works never appeared, or often ended up being reworkings of older works (not that they weren't often brilliant in themselves), so I always took the talk that Boulez was composing an opera based on Waiting for Godot to be a joke. Finding out that the keen-witted Daniel Barenboim, who waited for decades by a tree on a country road for his commission of an orchestrated version of Notations to be completed, was the source of the this rumor only made it more so.

Webcast info for January 16, 2016

The SCATV building is closed for the Martin Luther King Day weekend, so there will be yet another attempt to rebroadcast the December 6, 2014 episode. But I'm not optimistic.

At 9:15 the station is currently broadcasting silence, which sometimes results in the playlist of the October 24th 2015 getting played, sometimes it's a playlist designed for that purpose. We'll see.

RIP Paul Bley

 

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 I woke up January 5th to discover that two of my musical heroes have died. I'll post something about Pierre Boulez later (and David Bowie, too), but here are some thoughts about Paul Bley

Paul Bley was a pianist I easily admired. A probing mind and a creative restlessness. I don't remember what of his I first heard. Possibly the album he did with the really young Pat Metheny and Jaco Pastorius. The introduction was complete seeing the reunion concert in 1991 of the classic Jimmy Giuffre Three (Giuffre, Bley, and Steve Swallow) playing their chamber-jazz concept at MIT's Killean Hall, music largely off the radar at Famous Music College. This was jazz which added a European flavor to the liberation Ornette Coleman brought to jazz harmony/rhythm/form etc. I think I've not really dug into Bley enough, other pieces I've read mention records I've not heard of. Besides the Giuffre records I also love the studio album Memoirs and the live Montreal Tapes that Bley recorded in a trio with Charlie Haden and Paul Motian.

Here's a tribute program from WFMU's John Allen.

Webcast info for January 9, 2016

 

Due to poor planning, I'm tapping this out from the fabulous Brooklyn Museum, a museum after my own heart, as the art is often grouped by its subject matter, rather than by time period or style. For example, this room has an abstract painting resembling sheets of rain, while on the wall to the left is a very naturalistic painting of a mountain scene with rain in the distance painted in something like the "Hudson River School" style, despite its depiction of Colorado.

Today's program was supposed to be the rebroadcast from December 2014, which was supposed to have run last week, but alas once again did not play.

Hopefully something will be broadcast next week.

Webcast info for January 2, 2016

 

Today we'll be featuring a rebroadcast of the December 6, 2014 episode. I described it at the time as "jazzy" but not "ambitious". Looking over the playlist, the former is certainly true, but I don't think your enjoyment will be influenced by the latter.

No webcast today.