Sonny Rollins’ Enduring Musical Power: A Vintage 1965 Performance and Beyond

in Music | August 20th, 2012

“No one knows why exact­ly Son­ny Rollins, the tenor sax­o­phone colos­sus, hasn’t record­ed a good stu­dio album since the 1960s,” writes New York Review of Books blog­ger Christo­pher Car­roll. “Yet any­one who has seen Rollins per­form on a good night knows that, even at eighty-one, he is still capa­ble of play­ing with the same bril­liance that first made giants like Char­lie Park­er, Miles Davis, and Thelo­nious Monk take an inter­est in him in the 1950s.” “I haven’t heard every note that Rollins has ever record­ed, but I’ve heard lots of them,” writes New York­er film blog­ger Richard Brody, “and if I had to car­ry just one record­ed per­for­mance of his to the here­after, it would be one from Copen­hagen, from 1965.” You’ll find a clip of this very show above, 45 min­utes that might give you a sense of just what Rollins enthu­si­asts like Car­roll and Brody are enthus­ing about.

As Brody describes the full show, “Rollins plays almost unin­ter­rupt­ed­ly for near­ly an hour, pick­ing up heat and whim­sy as he goes along. His full, hearty sound is excep­tion­al­ly sculp­tured, bluff, and pli­able; the notes of the ris­ing phrase in the open­ing num­ber, ‘There Will Nev­er Be Anoth­er You,’ seem to hang in the air like bal­loons. Daw­son sets a brisk, light tem­po, Rollins makes room for [bassist Niels-Hen­ning Ørst­ed] Pedersen’s solo, and then sidles over into the har­mon­ic wilds and lets fly cas­cades of notes and bro­ken, mod­ernistic tones while trad­ing fours with the drum­mer, before end­ing with a suave solo caden­za.” For a more recent show­case of Rollins’ musi­cal pow­ers at work, see also the video just above, a 1992 per­for­mance from his sex­tet in München, Ger­many. Some­times well-respect­ed jazz play­ers spend long stretch­es in the artis­tic wilder­ness — Rollins in par­tic­u­lar hav­ing been “irrepara­bly dam­aged by years spent exper­i­ment­ing with funk, dis­co, and fusion in the sev­en­ties and eight­ies,” in Car­rol­l’s words — but you can nev­er real­ly take your ears off them.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Son­ny Rollins’ New York City Bridge Sab­bat­i­cal Recre­at­ed in 1977 Pio­neer Elec­tron­ics Ad

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Leonard Bernstein Explains Modern Music, From Stravinsky to Cage, with Baseball Analogies (1957)

in Music | August 20th, 2012

We’ve blogged before about Leonard Bernstein’s appear­ances on a 1950s tele­vi­sion pro­gram called Omnibus, “the most suc­cess­ful cul­tur­al mag­a­zine series in the his­to­ry of U.S. com­mer­cial tele­vi­sion,” which fea­tured sci­en­tists and artists pre­sent­ing orig­i­nal ideas and com­po­si­tions. In this doc­u­men­tary, Bern­stein intro­duces his audi­ence to “mod­ern music,” includ­ing such a more or less clas­si­cal com­pos­er as Stravin­sky to the avant-garde instru­men­ta­tion of John Cage’s pre­pared piano and ear­ly elec­tron­ics of Pierre Hen­ry’s musique con­crete. After watch­ing a sex­tet of “musi­cians” “play­ing” tran­sis­tor radios, Bern­stein admits, “Now com­pared with all these wildest out­posts of exper­i­men­ta­tion… Stravin­sky prob­a­bly sounds tame or more like, well… music.” Bern­stein then goes on to make a case for mod­ern, exper­i­men­tal music, hop­ing to per­suade his audi­ence to “hate it less, or hate it more intel­li­gent­ly, or even grow to like it.” He’s a very patient teacher, and he antic­i­pates his stu­dents’ first objec­tion to the mod­ernism of his time: “What has hap­pened to beau­ty?” The beau­ty of Mozart, say, or Tchaikovsky?

In order to answer this ques­tion, Bern­stein uses eas­i­ly visu­al­ized analo­gies to base­ball and numer­ous more or less famil­iar sym­phon­ic pas­sages to explain basic music theory—tonality, har­mon­ics, chord struc­ture, scale pat­terns, melody, dis­so­nance. By the time he comes to describe the con­flict, post-Wag­n­er, between aton­al com­posers and more con­ser­v­a­tive “tonal­ists” around the twen­ty minute mark, you’ve got a pret­ty good idea of what he’s talk­ing about, even if this debate is entire­ly new to you. It’s a cap­ti­vat­ing lec­ture trac­ing the his­to­ry and log­ic of musi­cal com­po­si­tion, and despite Bernstein’s range of ref­er­ences, he’s nev­er eso­teric. He had the patience of a Fred Rogers and media per­son­al­i­ty of a musi­cal Carl Sagan (and, odd­ly, some of the man­ner­isms of Rod Ser­ling). Like Rogers and Sagan, he was part of an age when tele­vi­sion pre­sen­ters could be edu­ca­tors first, enter­tain­ers sec­ond, and solip­sists not at all. Luck­i­ly for us, we’ve got him on Youtube.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

Leonard Bernstein’s Mas­ter­ful Lec­tures on Music (11+ Hours of Video Record­ed in 1973)

Glenn Gould and Leonard Bern­stein Play Bach

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

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Bill Murray Reads Wallace Stevens Poems — “The Planet on The Table” and “A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts”

in Film, Poetry | August 20th, 2012

On June 11th, Poets House host­ed The 17th Annu­al Poet­ry Walk Across the Brook­lyn Bridge. The event fea­tures “read­ings of the poet­ry of Walt Whit­man, Mar­i­anne Moore, Langston Hugh­es and oth­er greats,” all in order to raise funds for the New York City non-prof­it ded­i­cat­ed to cul­ti­vat­ing a wider audi­ence for poet­ry. And the event is reg­u­lar­ly attend­ed by the great­est cin­e­mat­ic sup­port­er of Poets House — the actor Bill Mur­ray.

In 2001, Mur­ray took part in the fes­tiv­i­ties and read three poems: Sarah Man­gu­so’s “What We Miss,” Cole Porter’s “Brush Up,” and Bil­ly Collins’ “For­get­ful­ness.” (Click links to see the read­ings.)  This year, he returned and delight­ed the audi­ence with a read­ing of two poems by Wal­lace Stevens: “The Plan­et on The Table” and “A Rab­bit as King of the Ghosts.”

But if you’re look­ing for my favorite read­ing, then I’ll steer you back to 2009, when Mur­ray read poems by Bil­ly Collins, Lorine Niedeck­er and Emi­ly Dick­in­son to con­struc­tion work­ers build­ing the new home for Poets House. It’s a charm­ing, very Bill Mur­ray moment.

Find more poet­ry in our col­lec­tion of Free Audio Books.

h/t @webacion

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Russian Punk Band, Sentenced to Two Years in Prison for Deriding Putin, Releases New Single

in Current Affairs, Music, Politics | August 18th, 2012

Yes­ter­day was­n’t par­tic­u­lar­ly a good day for the free­dom of expres­sion in Rus­sia. On the same day that a top court banned gay pride march­es in Moscow for the next 100 years, three young mem­bers of the punk band Pussy Riot were sen­tenced to two years in a penal colony. Their crime?  Stag­ing an anti Putin protest on the altar of the Cathe­dral of Christ the Sav­ior in Moscow. Protests sup­port­ing Pussy Riot were held in 60 cities world­wide (includ­ing one in the cap­i­tal where chess cham­pi­on Gar­ry Kas­parov was beat­en by police); West­ern gov­ern­ments called the sen­tence dis­pro­por­tion­ate; and already the band has released a new sin­gle called “Putin Lights Up the Fires.” The Guardian has cre­at­ed an accom­pa­ny­ing video. Watch it above.…

via Boing­Bo­ing

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One Trillion Frames Per Second: The Science of Capturing Light in Motion

in Photography, Technology, TED Talks | August 17th, 2012

Ramesh Raskar joined the MIT Media Lab in 2008, where he heads up the Lab’s Cam­era Cul­ture research group. For some time, the researcher has drawn inspi­ra­tion from anoth­er MIT pro­fes­sor, Harold Edger­ton, a pio­neer of stop-action pho­tog­ra­phy, who famous­ly pho­tographed a bul­let mov­ing through an apple in 1964. Decades lat­er, Raskar and his MIT crew have tak­en pho­tog­ra­phy to a new lev­el, cre­at­ing imag­ing hard­ware and soft­ware that can cap­ture light as it moves. They can visu­al­ize pic­tures as if they were record­ed at a rate of one tril­lion frames per sec­ond. His cut­ting edge work in fem­to-pho­tog­ra­phy is all on dis­play above.

If you want to get deep­er into Raskar’s world, you can check out his free MIT course, Com­pu­ta­tion­al Cam­era and Pho­tog­ra­phy, which is locat­ed in the Com­put­er Science/Artificial Intel­li­gence sec­tion of our col­lec­tion of Free Online Cours­es.

via Roger Ebert

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Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg Visit the Grave of Jack Kerouac (1975)

in Music, Poetry | August 17th, 2012

Above you can watch a rare 1975 meet­ing, of sorts, of three huge­ly influ­en­tial twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry cul­tur­al minds: Bob Dylan, Allen Gins­berg, and — in spir­it, any­way — Jack Ker­ouac, who died six years before. This clip, though brief, would be fas­ci­nat­ing enough by itself, but Sean Wilentz pro­vides exten­sive back­sto­ry in “Pen­e­trat­ing Aether: The Beat Gen­er­a­tion and Allen Ginsberg’s Amer­i­ca,” an essay fron the New York­er. “On a crisp scar­let-ocher Novem­ber after­noon at Edson Ceme­tery in Low­ell,” as he describes it, “Bob Dylan and Allen Gins­berg vis­it­ed Kerouac’s grave, trailed by a reporter, a pho­tog­ra­ph­er, a film crew, and var­i­ous oth­ers (includ­ing the young play­wright Sam Shep­ard).” There “Gins­berg recit­ed not from Kerouac’s prose but from poet­ry out of Mex­i­co City Blues [ … ] invok­ing specters, fatigue, mor­tal­i­ty, Mex­i­co, and John Steinbeck’s box­car Amer­i­ca, while he and Dylan con­tem­plat­ed Kerouac’s head­stone.” Why that par­tic­u­lar col­lec­tion? “Some­one hand­ed me Mex­i­co City Blues in St. Paul in 1959,” Wilentz quotes Dylan as hav­ing told Gins­berg. “It blew my mind.”

In the piece, which comes adapt­ed from his book Bob Dylan in Amer­i­ca, Wilentz goes into great detail describ­ing Dylan as a link between two some­times com­pat­i­ble and some­times antag­o­nis­tic sub­cul­tures in mid­cen­tu­ry Amer­i­ca: the folk music move­ment and the Beat gen­er­a­tion.  “I came out of the wilder­ness and just nat­u­ral­ly fell in with the Beat scene, the bohemi­an, Be Bop crowd, it was all pret­ty much con­nect­ed,” Wilentz quotes Dylan as say­ing in 1985. “It was Jack Ker­ouac, Gins­berg, Cor­so, Fer­linghet­ti … I got in at the tail end of that and it was mag­ic … it had just as big an impact on me as Elvis Pres­ley.” Wilentz describes Dylan relat­ing to Ker­ouac as “a young man from a small declin­ing indus­tri­al town who had come to New York as a cul­tur­al out­sider more than twen­ty years earlier—an unknown burst­ing with ideas and whom the insid­ers pro­ceed­ed either to lion­ize or to con­demn, and, in any case, bad­ly mis­con­strue.” The Beats showed Dylan a path to main­tain­ing his cul­tur­al rel­e­vance, a trick he’s man­aged over and over again in the decades since. “Even though Dylan invent­ed him­self with­in one cur­rent of musi­cal pop­ulism that came out of the 1930s and 1940s,” Wilentz writes, “he escaped that cur­rent in the 1960s—without ever com­plete­ly reject­ing it—by embrac­ing anew some of the spir­it and imagery of the Beat generation’s entire­ly dif­fer­ent rebel­lious dis­af­fil­i­a­tion and poet­ic tran­scen­dence.”

Note: Do you want to hear Sean Wilentz read Bob Dylan in Amer­i­ca for free? (Find an audio sam­ple here.) Just head over to Audible.com and reg­is­ter for a 30-day free tri­al. You can down­load any audio­book for free. Then, when the tri­al is over, you can con­tin­ue your Audi­ble sub­scrip­tion, or can­cel it, and still keep the audio book. The choice is entire­ly yours. And, in full dis­clo­sure, let me tell you that we have a nice arrange­ment with Audi­ble. When­ev­er some­one signs up for a free tri­al, it helps sup­port Open Cul­ture.

Relat­ed con­tent:

‘The Bal­lad of the Skele­tons’: Allen Ginsberg’s 1996 Col­lab­o­ra­tion with Philip Glass and Paul McCart­ney

Allen Gins­berg Reads His Clas­sic Beat Poem, Howl

Bob Dylan and Van Mor­ri­son Sing Togeth­er in Athens, on His­toric Hill Over­look­ing the Acrop­o­lis

Two Leg­ends Togeth­er: A Young Bob Dylan Talks and Plays on The Studs Terkel Pro­gram, 1963

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Mnozil Brass: Europe’s Most Imaginative Brass Band

in Comedy, Music | August 17th, 2012

Here’s some­thing fun. And a bit weird. Mnozil Brass is an Aus­tri­an septet that com­bines musi­cal vir­tu­os­i­ty with absur­dist the­atre. The group’s name means “noz­zle,” and refers to the Mnozil Pub, a lit­tle place near the Vien­na Col­lege of Music where the found­ing mem­bers used to get togeth­er to drink and play music. Since form­ing in 1992, and the group’s enter­tain­ing mix­ture of music and clown­ing has grown steadi­ly in pop­u­lar­i­ty. Above is a skit called “Slow Motion” from Mnozil Brass’s new DVD, Mag­ic Moments. Think of it as a sort of “spaghet­ti west­ern music recital.” There are sev­er­al more sam­ples below, to give you a sense of the luna­cy:

The William Tell Over­ture:

Lone­ly Boy:

Bohemi­an Rhap­sody:

 

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Kids (and Less Savvy Marketers) Imagine the Internet in 1995

in Business, Technology | August 17th, 2012

In 1995, a group of 5th grade kids in Hele­na, Mon­tana got togeth­er and made a PSA for the Inter­net (above). And, man, were they hip, with their tech­no music and their “by the time I’m in col­lege, the inter­net will be your tele­phone, tele­vi­sion, and work­place.” In the annals of overblown pre­dic­tions and tech­no­log­i­cal hubris, mid-nineties inter­net-fever will go down as the ulti­mate excep­tion. These kids even antic­i­pat­ed the cute cat mania that would infect the inter­net for­ev­er. Of course, none of them could have fore­seen the Twit­ter rev­o­lu­tion, the Face­book decline, rub­bable gifs, or spher­i­cal panoram­ic views of Mars, but that’s just quib­bling.

It real­ly is aston­ish­ing to look back a mere sev­en­teen years at what a prim­i­tive tech­nol­o­gy the inter­net was. Of course it wasn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly evi­dent at the time that the online world would indeed become our “tele­phone, tele­vi­sion, and work­place,” and some naysay­ers, like astronomer and hack­er-catch­er Clif­ford Stoll, called BS on the hype. In a 1995 Newsweek arti­cle titled “The Inter­net? Bah!,” Stoll wrote:

The truth is no online data­base will replace your dai­ly news­pa­per, no CD-ROM can take the place of a com­pe­tent teacher and no com­put­er net­work will change the way gov­ern­ment works.

In 2010, Stoll was forced to retract, com­ment­ing on Boing Boing cov­er­age of his sour­puss skep­ti­cism with:

“Of my many mis­takes, flubs, and howlers, few have been as pub­lic as my 1995 howler.

But who could blame him? This was the age of such clunky Web ser­vices as AOL, which promis­es much in a 95 ad below, but ulti­mate­ly deliv­ered lit­tle.

Not all web adver­tis­ing in 1995 looks so dat­ed and sil­ly. AOL’s com­peti­tor Prodi­gy, which fared even worse, cer­tain­ly had a bet­ter ad agency. Their 95 ad below, fea­tur­ing Bar­ry White, is a romp.

All of this reflec­tion war­rants more wis­dom from a chas­tened Clif­ford Stoll, who in a 2006 TED talk says: “If you real­ly want to know about the future, don’t ask a tech­nol­o­gist, a sci­en­tist, a physi­cist. No! Don’t ask some­body who’s writ­ing code. No, if you want to know what society’s going to be like in 20 years, ask a kinder­garten teacher.”

via Pre­fix

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

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