Furthermore, João’s biggest and most impactful innovation was on the vocal realm. In clear defiance against the paradigm of the operatic style from the radios and casinos, João started to sing with a rather dry voice: clear, no vibrato, no sense of humor, with quiet volume and uniform tone. One more time we can notice the influence and similarity between João and American Jazz singers such as Chet Baker, as one can notice in the following video of a performance of the charming American singer after a street fight that cost him his central incisor (https://youtu.be/0ybMVHeJZ7w). The difference is that João became a master in displacing the melodies, delaying and anticipating it in relation to the original format, making his interpretations unique, surprising, fresh and elegant. Despite his emotional dryness, the friction between vocal melodic displacement and constant guitar syncopation opened a universe of expression and improvisation possibilities. This became the new “school” of Brazilian vocal and songwriting style, influencing generations of musicians such as Chico Buarque, Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso, Edu Lobo, Paulinho da Viola, Roberto Carlos, Milton Nascimento, Geraldo Vandré and many others.
Yesterday I read the news on the internet, on a Ted Goia email, that Jessica Williams, the extremely talented jazz pianist, had passed away. The news has been slow coming but I'll link to several sites that have examples of her work or interviews with her. We are fortunate in that she is very well represented via her broad discography. Years ago when I attempted to learn about her talents I read that she actually grew up in Baltimore and attended Peabody Prep which stunned me as I had never heard her name mentioned here in Baltimore. Part of that reason is that she left for Philadelphia nd then San Francisco in the mid-70's. That still meant I could have run into her when I was an undergraduate at Hopkins and going to the Ballroom. From the an announcement at KNKX:
Two-time Grammy nominee Jessica Williams was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and classically trained at the Peabody Conservatory of Music. In her teens, Williams moved to Philadelphia and began playing with drummer Philly Joe Jones.
Relocating to San Francisco in 1977, Williams became the house pianist at the famous Keystone Korner jazz club. She also worked with Eddie Harris, Dexter Gordon, Tony Williams, Stan Getz, Airto Moreira and Flora Purim, Charlie Rouse, John Abercrombie, Charlie Haden, Leroy Vinnegar, and others.
Williams received two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Rockefeller Grant for composing, the Alice B. Toklas Grant for Women Composers, and the prestigious John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. She was an honored guest on NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross, and on Marian McPartland's Piano Jazz. She also wrote musical scores for PBS and HBO programs.
Williams recorded more than 40 albums over her career, eight of them on the Seattle-based Origin Records label.
Celebrated for her absolute control of the keyboard, her wit, and her solid sense of swing, the influence of Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane was evident in many of Williams' performances and recordings.
Williams settled in Portland, Oregon in 1993, and then later in Yakima, Washington. She created a her own record label and music publishing company in an effort to retain control of her creative output.
Severe spinal problems sent Williams through major surgery in 2012. The medical procedures and recovery were lengthy, complicated and expensive; she ended up having to sell her beloved Yamaha piano.
A cancer diagnosis came in 2017. Williams tried to stay positive and active, posting on her website, "I have decided that the best thing I can do for myself is to do what I do, and be who I am. I love my music, and I will soon release new music and begin performing again. There are many things to do, and I will start slow, but speed alone is not music — soul and passion are. I am not done."
Jessica Williams' music will be featured on Jim Wilke's Jazz Northwest program on KNKX this Sunday, March 20, at 2 p.m.
She had recently moved to the Bay Area, and was all but unknown even among jazz insiders—but not for long. She would occasionally play piano at the Keystone Korner during the break between the headline acts, and her powerful command of the keyboard was immediately apparent to listeners. This wasn’t tinkly intermission piano, but something quite extraordinary.
You could hear the magic in her playing. Her tone control and ease of execution were the first things that hit you. But Williams also had a remarkable ability to enter into what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls the ‘flow state’—a openness to the possibilities of the immediate moment that is the ideal mindset for jazz improvisation.
I’d always believed that music was an ecstatic vocation, and here was someone demonstrating it right before my eyes. It might just be an intermission between sets, but Jessica had blocked out all the noise and conversation, and was flying off into some higher sphere of music-driven nirvana.
I became an ardent fan, and bought copies of the few indie albums featuring Williams that were now showing up in record stores. I had heard of her quirks and eccentricities—and even just seeing her in live performance I could tell that Jessica Williams would not be a typical teacher. But that didn’t deter me. Her approach to the keyboard—with that singing tone, harmonic richness, and melodic freedom—was very closely aligned with what I was pursuing in my own music.
I tracked her down at gigs, and we eventually had several conversations. Her first reaction was that she had no idea how to teach what she did. Her music just happened. She didn’t have a method to share.
My glib response was: “No worries. We will do stop-and-cop.”
“What’s that?” she asked.
“I’ll watch you play the piano. And at certain junctures, I will ask you to stop. And I’ll cop what you just did. That’s the stop-and-cop method—and it always works.”
Jessica eventually agreed to be my teacher—but now things really got strange. She set certain conditions: (1) I had to provide the piano and a place for the lesson, (2) I had to drive her to and from the lesson, and (3) the lesson had to be in the middle of the night. 3 AM was the best time for her.
Yes, jazz education was a little different back then. The students at Berklee have no idea.
I’m married to a great guy named Atherton and I finally quit playing jazz and married him after knowing him for 34 years. I did not take my site down- it was stolen from me 5 years ago during the cyber war between Trump and Truth began.I lost $200,000 and I had a nervous breakdown.But I’m fine now.I’m a good cook and my husband is a health care provider.He watches over me. He’s my fourth and final marriage!As for jazz, I made some really beautiful music with the best musicians in the world and I got to live in Italy and France and Denmark. I’ve been to Tokyo and I played in South Korea. I quit smoking and drinking 27 years ago.I’m not a jazz musician anymore but I love good music.Now is my time to enjoy myself!All light and love to you !Jessica Jennifer Williams pianist and composer.
But I really use Jessica Jennifer Williams as a work and medical name but everyone else calls me Angie or Angela Emily Atherton because that’s my chosen aka and my husband is named Atherton and so after all these years my life is safe and good. I went through a lot of operations and then I was attacked viciously by jazz musicians and critics. The audience was cool but a lot of people hated on me with their prejudices. A white trans girl playing with Hutch or Getz or Dexter Gordon or Philly Joe Jones or Pharoah. And many more. It’s hell for trans people and for women. Enjoy the music and know that you are still just one person among billions who loved me and it’s still me. I’m changing every day and its been my entire life and I love it.
Recently, I receive photgraphs that my cousin Rafael scanned from the collection of my aunt Margarita. These include photos from Lima and my grandfather and grandmother. It was a large and varied family.
Last Monday night's Terra Session hosted by Clarence Ward III in Baltimore was hit with a hard storm that ended up changing the direction of the evening. In a good and magical ways.
Long, long ago, before I was a tormented artist, afflicted with longing yet incapable of forming durable attachments, long before this, I was a glorious ruler uniting all of a divided country—so I was told by the fortune-teller who examined my palm. Great things, she said, are ahead of you, or perhaps behind you; it is difficult to be sure. And yet, she added, what is the difference? Right now you are a child holding hands with a fortune-teller. All the rest is hypothesis and dream.
Machaut's music which is categorized as Early Music or Medieval Music is incredible poetry and music. Listening to his Ballads you are convinced that people in the 1300's understood more about emotions and psychology than modern man today. Here is a lovely ballad with its translation. The musical rendition is by one of the foremost interpreters of his music Ensemble Musica Nova and comes from their Machaut: Ballades CD which came out in 2009.
Guillaume de Machaut ( c. 1300 – April 1377) was a medieval French poet and composer. He is one of the earliest composers on whom significant biographical information is available. According to Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, Machaut was "the last great poet who was also a composer". Well into the 15th century, Machaut's poetry was greatly admired and imitated by other poets.
Whether he can be classified as a true troubador or not is in some doubt, but there are aspects of his life that rather indicate he was one.
Guillaume de Machaut was employed as secretary to John I, Count of Luxembourg and King of Bohemia from 1323 to 1346, and also became a canon (1337). By 1340, Machaut was living in Reims, having relinquished his other canonic posts at the request of Pope Benedict XII. In 1346, King John was killed fighting at the Battle of Crécy, and Machaut, who was famous and much in demand, entered the service of various other aristocrats and rulers, including King John's daughter Bonne (who died of the Black Death in 1349).
Machaut survived the Black Death that devastated Europe, and spent his later years living in Reims composing and supervising the creation of his complete-works manuscripts. His poem Le voir dit (probably 1361–1365) purports to recount a late love affair with a 19-year-old girl, Péronne d'Armentières, "although the accuracy of the work as autobiography is contested".
When he died in 1377, other composers such as François Andrieu wrote elegies lamenting his death.
Guillaume de Machaut, De Fortune Me Doi Plaindre Et Loer
Ensemble Musica Nova
[Jean Pichore, Arachne]
*
I must complain of Fortune and praise her. I believe, more than any other creature. For when I first began to love him. My heart, my love, my thoughts and my care. I set so much on my pleasure That in wishing I wished in vain. Nor would there have been found in this world A Lady who had been so well endowed.
For I cannot think or imagine Nor find within myself that Nature ever Among all that one may call fair and good Could have made a more perfect figure Than him, on whom my desires Are and will be always without end; And therefore I think that never was born A lady who had been so well endowed.
Alas! now I cannot remain at this point. For Fortune who is never sure Will turn her wheel against me To distress my sad heart. But in faith, until I die. I wish to love and cherish my dear friend. For never should she have false thoughts. A lady who had been so well endowed.
I just finished the first book of Knausgaard's My Struggle and I'm impressed. This is a book for today's readers and artists. It details daily tribulations some what of mundane quality but with a Proustian lens so apparently minor details expand and envelop personal experience that meaningfully echo in the reader. It's an authentic voice and authentic book. It's quite an accomplishment and I'm only on the first book. Looking forward to the rest.
Your six volumes have been received as an extraordinary example of literary courage—the courage to confess and the courage to take risks with form. Sometimes you take the stakes so low that fiction or drama, conflict, plot might disappear altogether. You’re also, of course, willing to look at things. In Book Three, you’ve got a bit about you and a friend shitting in a forest. Like everyone here tonight, I read it thinking, He’s going to describe the shit. Not just the act. I think, knowing Knausgaard, he’s actually going to describe what the piece of crap looks like. And you did. Then there is small stuff, like your willingness to use exclamations like “yuck,” “phew,” “oh oh oh,” “ha ha ha”—the kind of exclamation that one sees in children’s fiction or genre fiction but which is snobbishly disdained in contemporary high fiction, so to speak. Were you aware at the time that these were risks, that they were acts of daring?
KNAUSGAARD
That was the torture of writing this thing, especially Book Three, because it’s seen from the perspective of a kid between seven and ten years old, and that is the perspective of an idiot. The whole time I was writing these six books I felt, This is not good writing. What’s good, I think, is the opening five pages of Book One, the reflection on death. When we were publishing that first book, my editor asked me to remove those pages because they are so different from the rest, and he was right—he is right—it would have been better, but I needed one place in the book where the writing was good. I spent weeks and weeks on that passage, and I think it’s modernist, high-quality prose. The rest of the book is not to my standard. [Laughter from audience] I’m not saying this as a joke. This is true.
WOOD
But to know that, at the time of writing, is to be making an experiment, no?
KNAUSGAARD
Yes, it is.
WOOD
It’s to be courageous in some way, wouldn’t you say?
KNAUSGAARD
No, it hasn’t anything to do with courage. It’s more that I was so desperate and so frustrated. The only way I could trick myself into writing was by doing it like this. By setting myself the premise that I would write very quickly and not edit, that everything should be in it. Without that, I wouldn’t have been able to do it. I’m too self-critical to be a writer, really, and I was very critical of this project. It was torture. I had a friend, I read everything to him on the phone, all thirty-six hundred pages as I wrote them, and he had to say, This is good, you must go on.
The part you describe about shitting in the wood, though—that was a joy to write. That’s the other side of it, you know, because it’s unheard of to go into such detail, but for a kid it’s very important how the shit looks, how it smells, all the differences between one shit and another. That’s a child’s world, and I felt connected to it through the character of the child. I remembered, all of a sudden, how it was. The small things mattered, like shitting. It’s easy to understand why. You don’t yet have many experiences, and it’s your body, and here is the world going into it and then leaving it, and although it’s not the first time that this has happened, still it is kind of a new thing.
WOOD
And of course that’s the great theme of your work—meaning and the loss of meaning. It’s obvious enough that in your work the insane attention to objects is an attempt to rescue them from loss, from the loss of meaning. It’s a tragedy of getting older. We can’t ever recover that extraordinary novelty, that newness, that we experienced as children, and so you try to bring those meanings and memories back. There’s a lovely thing in Adorno’s Negative Dialectics that reminds me of your work. Adorno writes, “If the thought really yielded to the object, if its attention were on the object, not on its category, the very objects would start talking under the lingering eye.” Does that sound like a reasonable description of what you are trying to do?
KNAUSGAARD
Very much so. Before I wrote My Struggle, I had a feeling that novels tend to obscure the world instead of showing it, because their form is so much alike from novel to novel. It’s the same with films, with their attention to narrative structure. Most films, anyway. One thing I did while I was at work on the project was to watch the film Shoah, about the Holocaust. In the end, after you’ve seen these nine and a half hours, there is no form. Or it’s a kind of extreme form, which brings it closer to a real experience. I’d been thinking about that and about the world as it ordinarily comes to us filtered through news, through media. The same form, the same language, makes everything the same. That was a problem I had before I started My Struggle. The traditional form of the novel wasn’t eloquent. I didn’t believe in it, for the reasons I’ve said. Now, I don’t really pay much attention to the world. I’m not very present. I’m detached from almost everything. I’m very occupied with myself and my own mind. I’m not in connection with the world—but in writing, I can be. That’s a way for me to open a world up.
But this is a personal problem, not a general problem.