Five Things I Saw & Heard This Week
Transcripts from the everyday world of music by Martin Colyer
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Norah Jones has always had a left-field ear for cover versions and a few weeks ago I caught her Live at Ronnie Scott’s DVD on Sky Arts. It’s a trio show from 2018 with drummer Brian Blade and bassist Christopher Thomas. The bond between them is fantastic — a limitless number of smiles pass as they dig into a great selection of songs with lightly-worn virtuosity. It kicks off with a brilliant cover of Neil Young’s heavily autobiographical song, “Don’t Be Denied”, which I’d assumed was un-coverable (if such a word exists). Catch it if you can…
a fascinating post. you’ve been busy this week.
Thanks, Alex! What I need is a good editor, just to keep 5 Things weekly and not this jumbled ”every three weeks thing” that it’s become!
Thanks for another great post – about Bob’s troubled relationship with graphic design and Magnum. There’s another connection. When Bob exhibited The Asia Series at the Gagosian Gallery in 2011, fans quickly noticed that three paintings bore a strong resemblance to works by Magnum photographers Henri Cartier-Bresson, Dmitri Kessel and Jacob Aue Sobol. As the controversy heated up, Magnum declared that Dylan had paid to license these images for his paintings. [https://web.archive.org/web/20111007073205/http://blogs.artinfo.com/artintheair/2011/10/01/bob-dylan-paid-to-license-asia-series-photos-magnum-says/]
Like everyone else, I’ve been listening to Bob’s last three releases and trying to make sense of my response. I read something last night that illuminated me. New Yorker journalist Hua Hsu, in a profile of Maxine Hong Kingston, wrote: “When the scholar Edward Said was nearing the end of his life, he explored the idea of ‘late style,’ how artists’ work accommodates the awareness that their days are numbered. He describes them engaging in works full of formal complexity, experimentation, and contradiction, all of it meant as some kind of final statement of what art can be.” That’s it! I thought. Though I must say False Prophet is by far my favourite. I just love that blues-driven voice-of-doom sound.
Your comments are always so thoughtful, Mick, you need a blog of your own…!
I still have all my Hot House memorabilia, including the posters that have always moved with me, well kept and I still treasure it with the same passion I felt the first time I listened to Don’t Come to Stay. I often listen to the records and I still think they shouldn’t be overlooked and let me assure you it has nothing to do with personal nostalgia or how attached I feel to those records because of what they mean to me.
For reasons I cannot fathom, I can’t ‘like’ this. WordPress just doesn’t let me do that anymore. But I can submit a comment and my comment is: ‘Like’.