The great Blue Note jazz catalogue is shrinking further with the announcement of a second wave of deletions at year’s end. The casualties will include such essentials as the three-disk set of the great post-bop pianist-composer Herbie Nichols’s trios from 1955-56; three of the four dates led by the modestly brilliant, short-lived, subtle and bluesy tenor saxophonist Tina Brooks; Charles Mingus’s chaotic but inspired 1962 Town Hall concert; and the alto saxophonist Jackie McLean’s 1961 date, “A Fickle Sonance,” which is featured in the New Yorker-editor David Remnick’s list of a hundred essential jazz albums. On the bright side, these recordings will remain available in digital format through Amazon, iTunes, or wherever else MP3s are sold.
This documentary about Mingus offers wondrous clips from that terrific concert, as well as from others.
The guitarist Davy Graham died earlier this week of lung cancer, at the age of 68. Graham was a true virtuoso whose work incorporated jazz, blues, and folk music, and whose influence can be heard in everyone from Paul Simon (who covered Graham’s instrumental “Anji” on the first Simon and Garfunkel album) to Led Zeppelin (Graham’s style is audible in much of Jimmy Page’s acoustic work). Graham’s mid-sixties record “Folk, Blues, and Beyond” is a good place to start: it includes superb versions of everything from Dylan (“Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right”) to Mingus (“Better Get Hit In Yo’ Soul”). Here is Graham, all the way back in 1959, playing “Cry Me a River.”
As you prepare for holiday travel, take the time today to celebrate Wright Brothers Day, which was declared in 1963 to commemorate the pioneers of flight, and which has been observed, quietly, every year since. Below, Morris Day and the Time, live with Prince, pay their respects to nature’s Wright Brothers.
Smoking in Theatres: Production is soon to begin on a big-screen cartoon, “Cheech and Chong’s Smokin’ Animated Movie.” Tommy Chong is already in the spirit: “It’s great to be doing a movie where Cheech and I never have to get out of bed or be on camera.”
Compared with China or Japan, India doesn’t have much of a Western classical-music infrastructure; it has its own classical music, thank you, which is plenty distinguished on its own. But when India and Western classical music are discussed, somehow the name of Mehta is always present.
Mehli Mehta, an admired violinist who was the father of both Zubin and Zarin Mehta (one used to work at the Philharmonic; the other still does), is the honoree of the Mehli Mehta Foundation, which works hard to bring classical concerts and educational events to Mumbai. In the wake of this month’s terrorist attacks, holding the foundation’s annual Sangat Chamber Music Festival, scheduled for this week in Mumbai, was impossible. But Alan Gilbert (pictured), the Philharmonic’s music director-designate and the outgoing principal conductor of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, had the fine idea of moving the festival to the Konserthuset, where the R.S.P.O. holds its concerts. The concerts move ahead this week, with all of the artists donating their services.
The singer-songwriter Neko Case has been a drummer in a punk band, a key part of the acclaimed indie-rock collective the New Pornographers, and a country crooner. Now, it seems, one can add the disparate endeavors of farmer and piano collector to her resume. She recorded her forthcoming album, “Middle Cyclone,” on a ramshackle New England farm, where the wind whips through broken siding. She gathered up a bunch of old pianos, too. She talks all about it on this new video. The record is due out March 3, 2009.
The R. & B. superstar R. Kelly has two modes, at least: sex-obsessed superfreak and gospel-inflected inspirational messenger. This week, the latter of these two personalities takes control for the new single “I Believe,” a ballad that begins with excerpts from Barack Obama’s acceptance speech and then covers predictable territory (you can make it if you try, just keep your faith, etc.). Kelly may be the last celebrity endorsement that a politician wants—he spent much of this year in court fighting child-pornography charges, and was eventually acquitted—but at least he’s not Rod Blagojevich. Below, Kelly performs his tribute to another great Chicagoan, Michael Jordan.
JoeDoe, reviewed in this week’s Tables for Two, is a great neighborhood spot in its own right, but with the misfortune of taking up space on a block that is better known as Prune’s place of business. Prune has almost absurdly long waits for brunch on the weekends (bring coffee) and a devoted following for its earthy menu and its chef and owner, Gabrielle Hamilton. Of course, all great chefs go through a period of apprenticeship, and in the 2004 Food Issue, Hamilton described her own first steps into animal slaughter, with a chicken. She begins, under her father’s instructions, by spinning the birds around several times:
He said this would disorient the bird—make it so dizzy that it couldn’t move—and that’s when I should lay it down on the block and chop its head off, with one machinelike whack. In my own way, not like a machine at all, I laid it down on a tree stump, and while it was trying to recover I clutched the hatchet and came down on its neck. This first blow made a vague dent, barely breaking the skin. I hurried to strike it again, but lost a few seconds in my grief and horror. The second blow hit the neck like a boat oar on a hay bale. I was still holding its feet in one hand and trying to cut its head off with the dull hatchet in my other when both the chicken and my father became quite lucid, and not a little agitated. The chicken began to thrash, its eyes open, as if chastising me for my false promises of a merciful death. My dad yelled, “Kill it! Kill it! Aw, Gabs, kill the fucking thing!” from his bloodless perch.
Everyone has a private list of old entertainment franchises that deserve to be revived. I’m not sure how many people would put the “Witch Mountain” movies at the top of their list, but those people are about to be either very happy or very miserable, as Disney has remade the 1975 science fiction/fantasy film about a pair of siblings with telekinetic powers and, as it turns out, alien origins. The original wasn’t exactly a classic, but it was on the leading edge of the alien films of the seventies (it preceded “Close Encounters” by two years) and it spawned an equally popular sequel. The remake stars Dwayne Johnson (a.k.a. The Rock) and Carla Gugino, and the children who starred in the original, Kim Richards and Ike Eisenmann, will make cameo appearances.
“Waiting for Godot” is back on Broadway, with John Goodman and David Strathairn.
Shortly after apologizing to Matt Lauer for being too passionate about the detrimental effects of anti-depressants, Tom Cruise is too passionate about his young daughter’s vocabulary.
“American Idol” announces changes: fewer bad singers, more mediocre ones.
Nude Awakening: In Paris yesterday, naked demonstrators rallied outside city hall to protest the recent ban on tipping models who pose for government-sponsored life-drawing classes. The tradition of the “cornet”—a piece of art paper rolled into a cone and passed from student to student as a model gets dressed after class—dates back to the days of Rodin and Degas.
