Horner's Corner

Louis Armstrong was one of the greatest figures in 20th century music. His music is unsurpassed, its influence is immense. The smiling entertainer is only part of it: the man’s artistry was -is- awesome (CH)

Terry Teachout’s Pops: Culture-Changing Genius

Terry Teachout’s fine reconsideration of the man called “Pops” solidifies Louis Armstrong’s standing as not just the greatest horn player since the angel Gabriel, but an all-transforming artist at the level of James Joyce or even Shakespeare, and a black American freedom fighter of character and conscience, too.

Louis Armstrong’s power to astonish was never in doubt. Hoagy Carmichael, the songwriter of “Stardust” and “Georgia,” dropped his cigarette and gulped his drink the first time he heard Louis, barely out of his teens, in 1921. “Why,” Hoagy moaned, “isn’t everybody in the world listening to that?” Over the next 50 years the whole world heard Louis, and marveled, but there were always questions, too: Could honky-tonk music from red-light New Orleans get standing, really, with Schubert and Bach? Was Louis in artistic decline after the Twenties? Was he an Uncle Tom in all that Satchelmouth clowning?

All the modern answers as Terry Teachout documents them are over the top now in favor of Louis Armstrong. Listen to the testimonies his fellow horn players Ruby Braff and Wynton Marsalis gave me on Louis’s legendary centennial, July 4, 1900: that if Louis wasn’t actually God, he was at least proof of God. His grandeur, complexity and consistency as man and artist seem now beyond question. Harold Bloom, keeper of the cultural canon and an astute jazz listener, too, pairs Armstrong with Walt Whitman as the greatest American contributor to the world’s art, the genius of this nation at its best. It turns out we could believe our ears after all.

Read ( and listen) to more via Radio Open Source » Blog Archive » Terry Teachout’s Pops: Culture-Changing Genius.

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Fast Tube by Casper">Strange fruit

On the face of it, the struggle over the Christmas number one this year sums up capitalist realism’s stranglehold over culture. From one perspective, what we have here is a simulation of disputation, one Sony BMG act versus another, where capital wins every way up – abetted by a grassroots Facebook campaign that has fed the marketing machine while ostensibly raging against it (retailers and Sony BMG must be delighted that members of the public have off their own back come up with a way of re marketing ye olde commodified rebel rock). Yet it’s worth also attending to the utopian dimension at work in both the campaign for the Rage Against The Machine to be number one and (submerged) in the X Factor phenomenon itself.

The problem is that no response to the X Factor phenonemon is adequate: whether it be the standard bourgeois “I don’t watch it, I don’t have a TV, although I occasionally watch serious documentaries on the IPlayer”, the PoMo “I watch it to exult in how awful it is”, or some version of apparently ingenuous engagement – any response seems useless. The X Factor has seemed as impregnable as capitalism. In one of the best pieces he has written for some time, Paul Morley captured very well the quandary that the X Factor presents. “What’s the point of watching the show,” Morley asked, “and feeling that I must be losing my mind, because I seem to be seeing and hearing bad, unsavoury, deeply uncomfortable things, while everyone else is enjoying a cheery, light-hearted party, fun for all the family, a Saturday night television show that is merely an ingeniously produced newfangled way of keeping alive certain old-fashioned light entertainment values?” Complaint seems both churlish and impotent; or else irrelevant – why be concerned about the X Factor at all? Aren’t there more important things than this high-gloss trivia?

more via k-punk.

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Fast Tube by Casper">Hey -they\’re not miming, are they?

Why do I hate the music of Celine Dion? I enjoyed the book reviewed below, so I thought I’d share this with you -it may shed some light, but then again..

Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste by Carl Wilson

I must admit some surprise that the best book I’ve read about judgement, taste, and aesthetics is a book about Céline Dion. Carl Wilson’s Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste is not only thoughtful and well-informed, it is also compelling in every sense of the word. (It’s part of the ever-surprising and wonderfully odd 33 1/3 series from Continuum Books.)

I don’t know where I first heard about Wilson’s book — probably via Bookforum — but it’s gotten plenty of press, including a mention by James Franco at the Oscars and an interview of Wilson by Stephen Colbert. The concept of the book is seductive: Wilson, a Canadian music critic and avowed Céline-hater, spends a year trying to figure out why she is so popular and what his hatred of her says about himself. I kept away from the book for a little while because I thought it couldn’t possibly live up to its premise, and that in all likelihood it was more stunt than analysis. Nonetheless, the premise kept attracting me, because I am fascinated by the concept of taste and I, too, find Dion’s music to be the sonic equivalent of a Thomas Kinkade painting.

What makes Wilson’s approach so effective and insightful is that it avoids the fanboy defensiveness marring everything from internet discussions to scholarly studies such as Peter Swirski’s From Lowbrow to Nobrow. Wilson isn’t grinding axes or settling scores; he’s more interested in exploration than proclamation, more inclined toward maps than manifestos. The result is one of the few books I know that is as likely to expand its readers’ view of the world as it is to provide the choir with an appealing sermon.

via The Mumpsimus.

Please Please Please
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Two great conductors in rehearsal, working on Brahms and Schubert.

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Fast Tube by Casper">two weeks

Fast Tube by Casper">September

September

The garden is in mourning.
Cool falls the rain upon the
flowers.
Summer shudders, quietly
to its end.

Leaf after golden leaf drops
down from the high acacia tree.
Summer smiles, surprised and weary
upon the dying dream of this garden.

Yet still it lingers by the roses,
longing for rest.
Then slowly closes its great
weary eyes.

(Hesse)

By Ben Zimmer

Celebrating the Beatles: Goo Goo Goo Joob! : Word Routes : Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus.

From the original theatrical trailer: Subterranean Homesick Blues (n.b. Allen Ginsberg makes guest appearance):
Fast Tube by Casper">Don\’t Look Back

To become mature is to recover that sense of seriousness one had as a child at play  (Nietzsche)

Mahler’s 4th Symphony is  a piece of music I’ve long associated with the longing for a better world. That world is usually thought of the happy unalienated one of the child, as imagined by the adult (“childhood” is a state for the adult, not the child). A happy world. A longing that the past – the happy absorption of  oneself at play, for instance – should come again. But it cannot really come again: it only returns in dreams, in illusions  and in art. But art – this art, anyway, does more than that. I think it challenges our present by giving us a glimpse of something different and better, reminding of something we already know. This  world could be a happy one, and not just in dreams.

So much of this music could be taken as a mere escape into  a false innocence. The symphony’s last movement for instance, is supposed to be a child’s vision of heaven – with ‘naive’ lyrics that are awkward, even embarrassing for the ‘sophisticated’ adult. But the  listener is supposed to abandon irony and knowingness, and as in a dream, experience a kind of release into that simple sensibility. But of course we wake from dreams; what kind of world do we wake into?

A radically unjust one, of course. For all we know this we need to keep recalling it: it’s a place in which most people are denied the fullest life they could have, where a minority live in material comfort – one in which, to take just one example among so many that one could cite – half the world live on $2.50 per day. Even the globally rich minority (chances are, if you can read this, you are one of them) are divided into radically unequal classes, possessive, competitive consumer-workers.This is what we grow up as adults into, what we get used to, and accept as the only world that is possible.

To dream one’s life away amid such conditions would be intolerable: it would signal a willingness that one’s return to childhood can be bought at the price of the broken lives of real children. This is the case against art-as-escape: the lotus leaf, the drug or substitute religion: an opium of the people.

But if art can release imaginative energies that are potentially uncontainable by the commodified, administered world of capitalist “realism”,then perhaps all art , even the most commercial and ephemeral,  has in it the promise of something better and different. If that is so, it is surely even more true of Mahler’s supreme art. Ernst Bloch, whose ideas about art and utopia ran along these lines, proposed a thing he called vor-schein, ‘anticipatory illumination’ – the gleam of hope in the dark present. By all means enjoy that gleam, but don’t fail to notice the contrast with the surrounding darkness. The experience of  happiness in art can maybe make us less accomodating to the false promises of the commodity world of waking life. If art does this, then it is a nobler thing than an opiate. It’s become a sign.

Mahler’s art here, in delivering us to the ‘simple’ is actually very complex, and if we listen with any attentiveness, we shall surely sense that even happiness, even joy, can be complex. More: there is a kind satisfaction open to the adult and denied to the child. Do I really want to be a child again? no: I want this evocation by the adult Mahler, an experience possible in music (the art that moves in time). It’s an art that has the power to help us face our lives as adults, in a world of injustice  that must be changed, by us, now.

The Great Natacha Atlas

Fast Tube by Casper">Bistenek is possibly the correct title of this musicvid set in London in the late 90s

Fast Tube by Casper">Bonkers video but one of my favourite songs by NA