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The Daily

 

  • On Music

    Elegy for Lee

    By

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    In 1965, celebrated jazz trumpeter Lee Morgan released the song “Speedball” on his album The Gigolo. A year earlier, the title track from his album The Sidewinder had become the biggest hit in Blue Note Records’s history, reaching number twenty-five on the Billboard LP charts, even appearing on a Chrysler TV commercial during the World Series. Although “Speedball” never attained the commercial success of “The Sidewinder,” it endures as one of Morgan’s best-known originals, and, with the possible exception of Art Pepper’s album Smack Up, its title serves as the most barefaced allusion to the monkey on midcentury jazz’s back.

    Drugs, risk, rebellion—this unholy trinity seems more evocative of rock-and-roll longhairs than clean cut men in suits, yet these dark elements remain central to the jazzman archetype established by Charlie Parker. Between the midforties and early sixties, tons of talented players were strung out: Art Blakey, Hank Mobley, Sonny Rollins, Miles Davis, Grant Green, Dexter Gordon, Jackie McLean, John Coltrane. If Coltrane later provided a countervailing archetype—the sober, spiritually aware, gentle genius—then Parker embodied creativity’s menacing, consumptive side. Morgan got lost between these poles. A promising, prodigy it-kid, he received his first trumpet at age thirteen. Five years later, he joined the Dizzy Gillespie Big Band. That same year, in 1956, he recorded his first Blue Note album as a leader, and soon after played on now legendary recordings such as Coltrane’s Blue Train, at age nineteen, and Arty Blakey’s Moanin’, at twenty. His own early output ranks as nothing short of astonishing—eleven albums as a leader by age twenty-two—which is why his 1961 departure from Blakey’s Jazz Messengers takes on the sinister weight of an omen. Read More

  • On the Shelf

    The History of Letters of Note, and Other News

    By

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    • “An assignment from a stationery retailer didn’t, at first, appear much better: they wanted an article related to writing paraphernalia for their website. But then I had an idea: what if I put something together about famous letters from history?” The story behind the wonderful Letters of Note.
    • Courtney Love’s memoir is set for an early 2014 release. Talking about her influences to Rolling Stone in June, Love said, “I’m reading Just Kids again because I know [Patti Smith] wrote that by herself, and My Booky Wook by Russell Brand, which I think is a great book in terms of just his voice. And then I found an old Tallulah Bankhead book where she is very fabulous. So it’s a combination of those three books. [Keith Richards’] Life was just so bloody long, I didn’t even finish it.”
    • Speaking of musician tell-alls! Morrissey’s Autobiography is number one in the UK.
    • “Cole and Sarah stayed to see the two grooms off. Waiting until the last guest was out the door, he walked up to her. Even though they’d gone on with the reception as planned, he knew the paparazzi raid was uppermost in both their minds.” Speaking of coauthoring books! A (tame) excerpt from Jenna Jameson’s erotic novel, Sugar. 

     

  • On Music

    See No Evil

    By

    Marquee-Moon-Paris-Review

    I stood up when they called my name, and began to read from the piece of notebook paper in my hands:

    Well, I’ve got something to say
    I killed your baby today
    And it doesn’t matter much to me
    As long as it’s dead

    Sweet lovely death
    I am waiting for your breath
    Come sweet death
    One last caress

    They ate it up; I awed the basement audience in that coffee shop, with its beat-to-hell couches and chairs acquired from the local Salvation Army. My friends and I had driven there that night so we could all participate in the open mic poetry session, because when you’re fifteen or sixteen, you want to be something, and nothing at all, you want to define yourself, but you don’t want to get stuck doing one thing or another. That was the period when we collectively chose poetry, and even though I didn’t deserve it, there was a lot of buzz about my work on that night; for a few hours I was a phenom among the suburban poets. One person told me he heard the pain behind my beautiful words, and that I really had something special; he said I was a natural poet, that I should never stop writing, and that I should close the night out with one more.

    I obliged, not telling him, of course, that last poem was actually just Misfits lyrics, and that the one before that, about living in my van, was a Descendents song. I just let them all believe that, at sixteen, I was special, and that my reading, of what inadvertently became the last poem ever read at the Buzz Spot (the place closed a few days later), was a God-given gift. Had I actually read from the spiral notebook filled with my own writings, they’d hardly have been impressed. Read More

  • Quote Unquote

    Clairvoyance

    By

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    LESSING

    I know people say things like, “I regard you as rather a prophet.” But there’s nothing I’ve said that hasn’t been, for example, in the New Scientist for the last twenty years. Nothing! So why am I called a prophet, and they are not?

    INTERVIEWER

    You write better.

    LESSING

    Well, I was going to say, I present it in a more interesting way. I do think that sometimes I hit a kind of wavelength—though I think a lot of writers do this—where I anticipate events. But I don’t think it’s very much, really. I think a writer’s job is to provoke questions. I like to think that if someone’s read a book of mine, they’ve had—I don’t know what—the literary equivalent of a shower. Something that would start them thinking in a slightly different way perhaps. That’s what I think writers are for. This is what our function is. We spend all our time thinking about how things work, why things happen, which means that we are more sensitive to what’s going on.

    —Doris Lessing, the Art of Fiction No. 102