Houston, Port Arthur, Beaumont – and Some Music

To my mind, one of the most amazing things to come out of Houston and the Harvey disaster is this video of a man playing a partially submerged piano in a flooded room. The sound is downright eerie, the playing as sensitive as any I’ve ever heard:

https://www.buzzfeed.com/tanyachen/texas-piano-man?utm_term=.ev4ZxRykv#.ipjB9vlJ8

Another city in Texas flooded out by Harvey is Port Arthur, the birthplace of Janis Joplin. Here she is, during the halcyon days of the San Francisco Renaissance, with Big Brother and the Holding Company:

The song here, “Summertime“, by George and Ira Gershwin, was originally conceived of as a lullaby. What Big Brother does with it is hardly what you call soothing, rather making one’s hair stand on end, but it totally works. Note the close attention to dynamics in the above live performance – rather than beating the listener over the head, they know when to play really soft and when to crescendo. Also note: in those days, many guitarists wanted to play like John Coltrane and Pharaoh Sanders, but Janis Joplin was somehow able to produce the multiphonics made famous by the latter – with her voice!

Finally, there’s Beaumont, where the whole water supply has been knocked out by the flooding. Many Prosperos from the old days will remember our erstwhile colleague Billy Graham (no, not that Billy Graham, our Billy Graham), as warm and sweet a person as I’ve ever known, who hailed from there originally…

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