Blog: Locust St.

NYC: Goodbye east side, west side, all around the town Uri Caine, The Sidewalks of New York. Luna, Going Home. Lou Reed, NYC Man. Harry Nilsson, I Guess the Lord Must Be in New York City. So, it's over--my time here. In an hour or two, the computer goes down and gets packed up, the server will close its doors (hence YouSendit's pinch hitting), and then I prepare for the utter misery of moving

NYC: East Side/Downtown the gruesome winter of 1996, First Ave and 83rd. The Ramones, 53rd and 3rd. East River Pipe, Down 42nd Street to the Light. Rufus Wainwright, 14th Street. Jake Holmes, Houston Street. Duke Ellington, Wall Street Wail. "But at this remove what I think of as strange and wonderful, strolling the side streets of Manhattan on an April afternoon, seeing hybrid pear trees in

NYC: West Side/Uptown that a mugger and a child should share the same paradise Bruce Springsteen, Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out. Nellie McKay, Manhattan Avenue. Bobby Womack, Across 110th St. John Coltrane, Central Park West. The Clash, Broadway. Charlie Parker Quintet, 52nd Street Theme. "I could take the Harlem night and wrap around you, Take the neon lights and make a crown, Take the Lenox Avenue

NYC: Solitude, Despair, Anomie I can't give it away on Seventh Avenue Bill Hicks, New York Apartment. Bob Dylan, Hard Times in New York Town. George Gaynes, et al, What a Waste. The Trade Winds, New York's a Lonely Town. Grandmaster Flash it will provide vistas into far deeper trenches of misery. One day I was walking down Broadway feeling quite low, until I saw a man kneeling on the sidewalk,

NYC: Circulation the people ride in a hole in the ground Duke Ellington, Take the "A" Train. Le Tigre, My My Metrocard. The Last Poets, On the Subway. New York Dolls, Subway Train. Tom Waits, Downtown Train. "We were very tired, we were very merry--- We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry. We hailed, "Good morrow, mother!" to a shawl-covered head, And bought a morning paper, which

NYC: Attitude Ace Frehley, New York Groove. Leadbelly, New York City. Betty Comden the studio version is on Sometime in New York City, a fascinating mess of an album. Bobby Short just died this March. His ebullient version of Rodgers and Hart's "Manhattan" is found on this great (and sadly out of print) collection. A live version can be found here.

1950 Yma Sumac, Xtabay (Lure of the Unknown Love). Neither the Incan princess she was marketed as, nor the Brooklyn housewife Amy Camus she was rumored to be, Yma Sumac was, for a brief moment in the early 1950s, the strangest popular singer in the U.S. She was born Zoila Augusta Emperatriz Chavarri del Castillo in Ichocan, Peru in 1927. In the early 1940s she joined the Compania Peruana de

1950 Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, Johnny Come Lately. Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, Tonk. If you had been lucky to attend a party to which Duke Ellington and his songwriting partner, Billy Strayhorn, had been invited, you might have heard something like these tracks. After a few cocktails, when the party had slowed down, Ellington and Strayhorn would sit together at the piano (if

1950 mix your own sugar Ruth Brown, Teardrops From My Eyes. Roy Milton, Information Blues. Smiley Lewis, Dirty People. A trio of R a decade later, he played in blues trios around New Orleans. When Dave Bartholomew was charged with finding more New Orleans talent for Imperial Records to record, he remembered Lewis--the two had grown up in the same neighborhood, and Bartholomew recalled Lewis

1948 "the girls would turn the color of an avocado" Coleman Hawkins, Picasso. "Picasso" is one of the first unaccompanied saxophone pieces ever recorded, perfection in solitude, and a challenge for succeeding generations of sax players to take up, from Sonny Rollins, who recorded a number of solo performances in the '50s, to Anthony Braxton's For Alto and Julius Hemphill's Blue Boye, massive

Artie Shaw, 1910-2004. The last of the swingers. With his passing, an era is utterly over. Ave et vale, Artie.

1947 Mumbles played bass Dinah Washington and Lionel Hampton, Blow Top Blues. "With me, it is 'Blow Top Blues' every day," Dinah Washington. A girl you can't excuse, who wakes up in Bellevue stinking of the whiskey she had poured on her head in the subway. Dinah Washington can make a nervous breakdown sexy and endearing. When "Blow Top Blues" became a hit in 1947 it was already a piece of

1947 Raise the flag Harry Choates, Harry Choates Special. Harry Choates, Devil in the Bayou. A great dose of cultural miscegenation for the weekend. When the Cajun fiddler Harry Choates was a child, the populist governor of Louisiana, Huey Long, began building thousands of miles of highways--13,000 in all before Long was assassinated in 1935--linking every last corner of the state. So by the

1946 Now be thankful Louis Jordan, Ain't That Just Like a Woman. Louis Jordan, who essentially created rhythm & blues and served as grandfather to rock and roll a decade later, had become of the most popular entertainers in the country by the mid-'40s. James Brown: "Louis was everything." Jordan even had music videos--short films of him singing his current hit that would play before main

1946 William Baziotes, Green Form, (Whitney Museum, NY) John Cage, Sonata V, Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano. Cage is best known for silence, the infamous 4' 33'', but between February 1946 and March 1948 he composed his sonatas and interludes for prepared piano. "Prepared" is a quiet word for a radical act. Cage called for sticking various objects between the strings of a piano:

1945 The mighty KoKo, 1:50-1:57 The new music was made in the shadows during the war, in hotel rooms, or after hours in clubs like Minton's in Harlem. Only when the recording bans and rationings were over was bebop finally immortalized. Dizzy Gillespie was first--in February and May '45, he, Charlie Parker and other conspirators recorded bop's cornerstones. Hot House. Dizzy Atmosphere. Salt