Today we celebrate the birthday of Richie Havens who was born on January 21, 1941. Havens is one of my favorite singer/songwriter’s of all time: his growling vocals were immediately recognizable, his unique open-tuning guitar style emphasized the rhythmic expression of his right hand, and Havens is one of the only artists who consistently made other writer’s songs his own. We lost Havens in 2013. Here he is in concert in 1974…

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My first instrument was the saxophone. That instrument introduced me to performing music and if I hadn’t started playing my horn at the age of 11 I probably would have never started writing my own songs. I still love my saxophone. Even though my singer/songwriter output is balanced on my lyrics, playing the saxophone offers a respite from words in music — more than any other instrument the sax replicates the tonality and intricacy of the human voice, unencumbered by the ballast of language. Playing the saxophone is pure singing in a way that song-singing can never be.

Ornette Coleman died yesterday, but his legacy of pure musicality continues to affect me and any musician concerned with personal expression. Coleman’s radical improvisational experiments created a bridge that took Be Bop to its logical conclusion, and his pioneering music is the aural equivalent of Jackson Pollock’s revolutionary canvases. Like Pollock, Coleman’s music has been hailed and reviled, lauded and laughed at, but his indelible influences at jazz’s most daring edges will forever define his legacy as one of the most important of American music-makers.

Here’s Coleman and his trio in 1966…

“Ornette Coleman Trio,” presents Ornette Coleman’s famous trio during their visit to Paris in 1966 in order to record the soundtrack of a very nutty-looking Belgium film called “Who’s Crazy?”.

Realized by Richard “Dick” Fontaine–who is considered to be one of the founding fathers of erotic gay cinema (with such famous titles as “The Days of Greek Gods”) and that years later realized the full length film “Art Blakey: The Jazz Messenger”-. the film was made in three days and offers a portrait of the trio that becomes an “ironic essay in dignity in the face of insanity”. Ornette, who in this era was one of the leaders of the Jazz Avant-garde movement, faced the challenge with his two fellow musicians by responding with passionate improvisations to the stimuli that reached him from the screen where the images are projected. A priceless testimony to the innovations which revolutionized the world of jazz in the sixties.

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Bob Dylan brought poetry to rock ‘n’ roll, but Leonard Cohen brought rock ‘n’ roll to poetry, recording a remarkable string of records — beginning with his 1967 debut, Songs of Leonard Cohen — which married the studio sounds of the day to his already-established voice as a nationally celebrated poet in his native country of Canada.

This year we celebrate Cohen’s 80th birthday, his five decades of music, and his brand new release, Popular Problems.

Here’s a great documentary that captures Cohen as a young poet and as a breakthrough recording artist, establishing his unique voice as one of the most important singer/songwriters of all time. Featuring lots of great images and footage from throughout the first decade of Cohen’s career this film also includes lots of input from critics, putting the importance of Cohen’s music in context and creating a wonderful retrospective for long-time fans and newbie listeners alike.

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Here at Insomnia, we love the strange crossroads of hardscrabble blues and high weirdness that come together in the life of legendary singer/songwriter/guitarist Robert Johnson. The story of the blues pioneer finds the gifted musician rejected by his family, living the reckless, itinerant life of a musician, drinking heavily, womanizing, dying mysteriously and infamously associating himself with Southern blues mythology and creating the legend that he’d sold his soul to the Devil himself in order to become one of the greatest guitar players of all time.

It’s all here, sex, intoxication, knife sharp music, dangerous living, murder and more than a whiff of pitch black occultism, all culminating in some of the best music and one of the most-storied lives in the many-storied lives that populate the history of the blues.

In this BBC film, John Hammond Jr. goes to Mississippi in an effort to get to the man behind the legend. Here is The Search for Robert Johnson.

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