by Paul Elie
from Georgetown University

Thanksgiving in Nashville, With Ry Cooder and Friends

       This time every year I listen to the Last Waltz concert, which took place on Thanksgiving Day 1976 in San Francisco: the Band and friends – Joni, Neil, Bob, Muddy, Eric, Van, and the rest – celebrating the band’s history and saying a weird and needless farewell.  

Concert Vault has audio of the full four-hour-plus concert, including a bit of the “Canterbury Tales” read in Middle English and the Lord’s Prayer recited by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, of all people.   Lately, it has added full video: a simple black and white feed probably used by the sound and light technicians to keep track of things.  (It’s available on YouTube, too.)   To see The Last Waltz in B&W is a strange, reverse effect; this concert, known first through a movie expertly filmed and edited in 70mm by Martin Scorsese and put out in wide release, is now a video bootleg, a concert seen through the keyhole.

That’s the effect of seeing so  many of the full-length concerts now posted on YouTube.   Once a home for short videos, the site now hosts dozens of shows that are seen as too long to support a commercial release.  The Tedeschi- Trucks Band’s full-concert reworking of Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs & Englishmen is one.  

The Americana Music Association’s concert honoring Ry Cooder is another. It took place in September a year ago, but I wouldn’t have known about it except for YouTube.   I graze there for old slide guitar videos from time to time, and one night, there it was: a Last Waltz-style gathering of Cooder and his friends and associates from over the years – Flaco Jimenez, Loretta Lynn, Rosanne Cash and Rodney Crowell, Jason Isbell, Taj Mahal (doing a stage-shaking Statesboro Blues) and Jackson Browne (doing “Fountain of Sorrow”).  Through it all, there is Ry sitting on a chair stage left and working his rack of customized guitars: the sideman as star.  

Meant as an ending, The Last Waltz was the beginning of something: it was the concert that carried the old-time musical revue (perfected at the Grande Ole Opry) into the age of the multiplex, whence it has migrated to YouTube.

The Americana concert is here.   Happy Thanksgiving from Ry Cooder and company.

Eric, Call Yo-Yo; Tell Him Robert Johnson Sent You

     Yo-Yo Ma and Eric Clapton are destined to play a concert together.

Why those two?  Because they are, as artists, fundamentally alike: virtuosic, personally expressive, musically curious, willing to place their musical core (the classical cello for Ma, the blues guitar for Clapton) at the center of all manner of musical surroundings; prodigies who were all grown up from the beginning and who have aged gracefully over long careers.    

Why destined?   Because there’s a breathtaking precedent for it: the span of time seventy-nine years ago (November 23, 1936) when Pablo Casals and Robert Johnson commenced their most famous recordings on the same day – Casals’s recordings of Bach’s cello suites at Abbey Road Studios in London, and Johnson’s recordings of his blues at the Gunter Hotel in San Antonio.  

It’s as amazing a synchronicity as any in the history of recorded music.  On the same day, in Europe and in America, two extraordinary musicians, each a man in a room playing a wooden instrument without accompaniment, made sounds that are still present to us, undiminished and unsurpassed, most of a century later.  

I figured out the coincidence while reading liner notes as I wrote Reinventing Bach, and I tell the story there.   When he heard about it, my friend Joe Richman, creator and producer of NPR’s Radio Diaries, pricked up his ears – and then made an extraordinary program telling the story with commentary by everyone from Pablo Casals’s last student to Robert Johnson’s last surviving rival to Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top.  The program is up now as a podcast on the Radio Diaries site.

Casals’s cello suites and Johnson’s blues recordings are arguably the two greatest and most consequential solo recordings ever made.  Together, they sit in apt counterpoint: Europe and America, classical and “folk,” white and black, the one an interpretation of a great composer and the other a performance of songs composed by the performer himself.  

A joint performance of the two works by Yo-Yo Ma and Eric Clapton would be epochal: a musical conversation between two great artists, pointing Bach’s cello suites and Robert Johnson’s blues forward for the next seventy-nine years.    

If you happen to know Yo-Yo or Eric, will you pass this on?