Happy Presidents Day
Spectaculum Carnis by Mark Ryden
Happy Birthday Max Beckmann
February 12, 1884 – December 28, 1950
Self-portrait with Champagne Glass, 1919.
From “Glitter and Doom: German Portraits from the 1920s” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, November 14, 2006–February 19, 2007.
Last night the moon came dropping its clothes in the street
The Jon Hassell concert last night was fantastic. Zankel Hall has great acoustics and we had excellent seats. After the show I bought a copy of his new CD and got a chance to get it signed, exchange a few words with him, and shake his hand. Nice.
From the Carnegie Hall press release: On Tuesday, February 10 at 8:30 p.m., composer and trumpeter Jon Hassell presents his latest project with the Maarifa Street band at Zankel Hall. The program features works that showcase Hassell’s characteristic genre-defying “Fourth World” music—a unique, stylistic hybrid he created that fuses ancient with digital, composed with improvised, and Eastern with Western styles of music. This performance, part of Carnegie Hall’s Fast Forward series, features Peter Freemanon bass and laptop computer, Jan Bang and Dino J.A. Deane performing live sampling and electronics, and Kheir-Eddine M’Kachiche on violin. It is one of six performances on Hassell’s first U.S. tour in over 20 years.
Jon Hassell
Last night the moon came dropping its clothes in the street
25 years after his highly influential “Power Spot” album, Jon Hassell returns to ECM with his collective Maarifa Street and some spacious Fourth World dub-montage music, his uniquely vocal trumpet sailing forth into mysterious soundscapes. Jon Hassell describes”‘Last night the moon” as “a continuous piece, almost symphonic, with a cinematic construction” and drifting “clouds made out of many motifs.”
