a blind flaneur

After listening to an Open Source interview with biographer Harvey Cohen, I wanted to hear Duke Ellington’s Black, Brown and Beige Suite. It’s one of Ellington’s longest and most ambitious compositions. It’s had a complicated and incomplete recording history since its premiere at Ellington’s first Carnegie Hall concert in 1943. I believe I have a vinyl record of that legendary performance, first released in 1977, somewhere in my house. But even if I dug it out of storage, I no longer have a stereo turntable to play it.

Andy sent me a link to this clip of La flambée montalbanaise, sung by Christiane Raby (see her on Myspace). He’s learning this tune on an accordion, which must be formidable!

This tribute to John Hartford could have been the soundtrack for our run down the Little Miami this morning. All that’s missing is the squawk of the great blue herons and splash of the snapping turtle sliding off its sunny log. As John Hartford said, “There’s nothing like a crooked old river to straighten your head right out!”

It’s become a tradition for the flaneur to ask European friends for favorite choices in the Eurovision Song Contest, which wraps up tonight in Oslo. According to the BBC, the Eurovision finale is the most-watched non-sports TV show in the world – and of course, Americans like me know next to nothing about it.

How many French pop singers named Yannick could there be. I came across Ces soirées là, his hit from 2001, and now I can’t get it out of my head. If you can’t stay in your seat for this one, we have a place for you in the Café Mouffe chorus line. When I went looking for more information, I found Yannick Noah, pop singer and pro tennis champ in a previous life. Here’s his official site. Maybe someone with better sight than me can tell me if they are one and the same. Wish I’d been on the street in Paris when the video for Vous was shot… I would have tried to dance and lip-sync, too.

Maria Bartiromo used to get emails from a guy who claimed to be Joey Ramone. He said he was a big investor, and an even bigger fan of hers. She didn’t believe him. Plenty of derelicts outside CBGB’s imagined they were punk rock stars like Joey Ramone. So he wrote this song for her before he died, and she finally believed.

Jazz composer and pianist Mary Lou Williams was born 100 years ago today NPR had an excellent story about her pioneering influence – and not just on women in jazz. Maybe this year the annual festival held in her honor at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., will change its name to the Mary Lou Williams Women in Jazz Festival.

Anita Tijoux has a French mother and Chilean father. She speaks French but chooses to rap mostly in Spanish. Global Hit has an interview with her this week coinciding with her first U.S. release, 1977. The title alludes to the year she was born. She says Dada and Surrealist poetry were big influences.

Even though Angelique Kidjo is working out of New York now, I can’t help but think of the world music scene in Paris when I hear her. I am astonished by the ringing clarity of her voice on Zelie, the opening track of her new album, Oyo. The album has all the energy of this 2005 live performance of Africa, when Angelique was joined onstage by Annie Lennox.

James Boyle says in an On the Media interview that if 50-somethings were talking about the golden age of digital sampling, U.S. judges would be more likely to accept it as a significant cultural production worthy of protection under the fair use doctrine. So I am here to testify, Your Honor, as a card-carrying member of the ACLU and the AARP: The Grey Album by DJ Danger Mouse, a 2004 remix of Jay-Z’s Black Album and the Beatles’ White Album, is a brilliant and transformative work of art in its own right. We need the freedom to make more art like it.