Pakistani Musicians Play a Delightful Version of Dave Brubeck’s Jazz Classic, “Take Five”

in Music | April 13th, 2013

How’s this for fusion? Here we have The Sachal Stu­dios Orches­tra, based in Lahore, Pak­istan, play­ing an inno­v­a­tive cov­er of “Take Five,” the jazz stan­dard writ­ten by Paul Desmond and per­formed by The Dave Brubeck Quar­tet in 1959. Before he died in 2012, Brubeck called it the “most inter­est­ing” ver­sion he had ever heard. Once you watch the per­for­mance above, you’ll know why.

Accord­ing to The Guardian, The Sachal Stu­dios Orches­tra was cre­at­ed by Izzat Majeed, a phil­an­thropist based in Lon­don. When Pak­istan fell under the dic­ta­tor­ship of Gen­er­al Zia-ul-Haq dur­ing the 1980s, Pakistan’s clas­si­cal music scene fell on hard times. Many musi­cians were forced into pro­fes­sions they had nev­er imag­ined — sell­ing clothes, elec­tri­cal parts, veg­eta­bles, etc. What­ev­er was nec­es­sary to get by. Today, many of these musi­cians have come togeth­er in a 60-per­son orches­tra that plays in a state-of-the-art stu­dio, designed part­ly by Abbey Road sound engi­neers.

You can pur­chase their album, Sachal Jazz: Inter­pre­ta­tions of Jazz Stan­dards & Bossa Nova, on Ama­zon and iTunes. It includes ver­sions of “Take Five” and “The Girl from Ipane­ma.”

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.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Voodoo Chile’ Per­formed on a Gayageum, a Tra­di­tion­al Kore­an Instru­ment

Talk­ing Heads’ “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)” Per­formed on Tra­di­tion­al Chi­nese Instru­ments

An Uplift­ing Musi­cal Sur­prise for Dave Brubeck in Moscow (1997)

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David Bowie Sings ‘I Got You Babe’ with Marianne Faithfull in His Last Performance As Ziggy Stardust

in Music, Television | April 12th, 2013

Here’s a won­der­ful­ly weird per­for­mance by David Bowie, dressed in drag for his last appear­ance as Zig­gy Star­dust, and Mar­i­anne Faith­full as a way­ward nun, singing the mawk­ish Son­ny & Cher tune, “I Got You Babe.”

The duet was record­ed for Amer­i­can tele­vi­sion on Octo­ber 19, 1973 at the Mar­quee Club in Lon­don. The pro­duc­er Burt Sug­ar­man had approached Bowie about appear­ing on his late-night NBC pro­gram The Mid­night Spe­cial. Accord­ing to the Zig­gy Star­dust Com­pan­ion, Bowie agreed to appear on the show after being grant­ed com­plete artis­tic con­trol for a one-hour spe­cial. He put togeth­er a cabaret-style show fea­tur­ing him­self and a cou­ple of acts from the 1960s, per­form­ing on a futur­is­tic set. Bowie called it “The 1980 Floor Show,” as a pun on the title of his song “1984,” which was played dur­ing the open­ing title sequence.

Film­ing took place over two days. The audi­ences were com­posed of Bowie fan club mem­bers and oth­er spe­cial guests. Due to the cramped quar­ters in the night­club, the cam­era crew was­n’t able to cov­er more than two angles at any moment, so Bowie and the oth­ers had to play the same songs over and over. On the day “I Got You Babe” was filmed, the musi­cians and crew worked for ten straight hours.

Faith­full was invit­ed to appear on the show as one of the back-up acts, along with The Trog­gs and the “fla­men­co rock” group Car­men. At the very end of the evening, Bowie and Faith­full appeared onstage together–he in a red PVC out­fit with black ostrich plumes (he called it his “Angel of Death” cos­tume) and she in a nun’s habit that was, by more than one account, open in the back. “This isn’t any­thing seri­ous,” Bowie report­ed­ly told the audi­ence. “It’s just a bit of fun. We’ve hard­ly even rehearsed it.”

The Mid­night Spe­cial appear­ance marked a momen­tary reunion of Bowie’s band, The Spi­ders from Mars, which had dis­solved three months ear­li­er, after Bowie’s sur­prise announce­ment that he was retir­ing. The line­up includ­ed Mick Ron­son on lead gui­tar, Trevor Bold­er on bass, Mike Gar­son on piano, Mark Carr Pritchard on rhythm gui­tar and Ayns­ley Dun­bar on drums. Back­ing vocals were pro­vid­ed by The Astronettes: Ava Cher­ry, Jason Guess and Geof­frey Mac­Cor­ma­ck. As the final per­for­mance of “The 1980 Floor Show,” Bowie’s duet with Faith­full turned out to be the very last appear­ance of Zig­gy Star­dust.

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.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Bowie Releas­es Vin­tage Videos of His Great­est Hits from the 1970s and 1980s

The Sto­ry of Zig­gy Star­dust: How David Bowie Cre­at­ed the Char­ac­ter that Made Him Famous

How “Space Odd­i­ty” Launched David Bowie to Star­dom: Watch the Orig­i­nal Music Video From 1969

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Tom Lehrer’s Mathematically and Scientifically Inclined Singing and Songwriting, Animated

in Math, Music, Physics | April 12th, 2013

I went through child­hood lis­ten­ing to Tom Lehrer’s “New Math”. The 1965 song, per­formed in part like stan­dard spo­ken-word com­e­dy, made me laugh every time. “In the new approach,” the satirist says of the rev­o­lu­tion­ary math­e­mat­ics he pur­ports to teach us, “the impor­tant thing is to under­stand what you’re doing rather than to get the right answer.” Work­ing aloud through a sub­trac­tion prob­lem at the piano, Lehrer sings the oper­a­tions: “And so you’ve got thir­teen tens and you take away sev­en and that leaves five. Well, six, actu­al­ly, but the idea’s the impor­tant thing.” This struck me at the time as noth­ing more than an amus­ing­ly goofy numer­ic riff, and per­haps one with harsh impli­ca­tions for the flaky edu­ca­tion­al fads of the nineties my peers and I then endured. Only years lat­er did I find out that Cold War Amer­i­ca of the ear­ly six­ties actu­al­ly went through a New Math phase, shak­en hard enough by Sput­nik to des­per­ate­ly foist abstract, set the­o­ry-dri­ven math text­books upon its ele­men­tary school­ers.

Lehrer, who turned 85 on Tues­day, knows the sub­ject well: he holds degrees in math­e­mat­ics from Har­vard, has co-authored such papers as “Ran­dom walks with restrain­ing bar­ri­er as applied to the biased bina­ry counter” and “The dis­tri­b­u­tion of the num­ber of local­ly max­i­mal ele­ments in a ran­dom sam­ple”, and, after retir­ing from music in the ear­ly sev­en­ties, taught math class­es at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, San­ta Cruz. Leg­end has it that he would incor­po­rate rel­e­vant songs from his cat­a­log into lec­tures. But he nev­er sang only about math­e­mat­ics; he also sang about physics, as you can see in the ani­mat­ed ver­sion of his 1959 song “The Ele­ments” above, a trib­ute simul­ta­ne­ous­ly to the peri­od­ic table and The Pirates of Pen­zance. Nobody can deny the impor­tance of learn­ing how to sub­tract or how to tell one ele­ment from anoth­er, but we’d do well to keep Lehrer’s sharp human insights, present implic­it­ly in all his music and explic­it­ly in some of it, in mind. So put one of his records on the next time you have a birth­day of your own, tak­ing a brac­ing shot of his wit before you con­tin­ue, as he put it in “Bright Col­lege Days”, “slid­ing down the razor blade of life.”

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Watch 10-Year-Old Bruce Lee in His First Starring Role (1950)

in Comics/Cartoons, Film, Sports | April 12th, 2013

Bruce Lee has remark­able stay­ing pow­er. Forty years after his untime­ly death, he’s still cel­e­brat­ed as a charis­mat­ic and influ­en­tial lethal weapon. Remem­ber how Pelé ush­ered in Amer­i­ca’s soc­cer craze? Bruce did the same for kung fu. For those of us who came of age in the 70’s, he was Evel Kniev­el, the Fonz, and Sylvester Stal­lone’s Rocky rolled into one.

His star qual­i­ties were in place long before those rock hard mus­cles. Take a look at this clip from The Kid (aka Xi Lu Xiang, Kid Che­ung, and My Son A‑Chang), a 1950 Can­tonese dra­ma based on Kid­dy Che­ung, a pop­u­lar and social­ly con­scious com­ic strip of the 40s. The 10-year-old Lee brings irre­sistable Lit­tle Ras­cals-esque panache to his por­tray­al of a wily, slum-dwelling orphan in the thrall of a gang­ster named Flash Blade Lee. The part pro­vides ample oppor­tu­ni­ty to swag­ger and strut, but just when things are threat­en­ing to turn phys­i­cal, the Lit­tle Drag­on is best­ed by pen­cil-necked char­ac­ter actor Yee Chau-Sui, who shames him for falling in with the local toughs. Lee upholds his rep­u­ta­tion by pulling a knife, but the pose is more than he can main­tain.

As Rosey Gri­er would sing the year after Enter the Drag­on was released, It’s All Right to Cry …

Watch the com­plete film here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bruce Lee Audi­tions for The Green Hor­net (1964)

Bruce Lee: The Lost TV Inter­view

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day had the Dyna­mite mag­a­zine with Bruce Lee on the cov­er. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

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John Bonham’s Isolated Drum Track For Led Zeppelin’s ‘Fool in the Rain’

in Music | April 11th, 2013

His play­ing was as loud as thun­der and as fast as light­ning. John Bon­ham of Led Zep­pelin was arguably the great­est of rock-and-roll drum­mers. When Rolling Stone asked its read­ers in 2011 to name the great­est drum­mer of all time, Bon­ham won by a land­slide. Drum­mer­world says of his play­ing:

Imi­ta­tors are usu­al­ly left frus­trat­ed, since Bon­ham made it look so easy–not only in his play­ing but also in the incred­i­ble drum sound he achieved. His leg­endary right foot (on his bass ped­al) and light­ning-fast triplets were his instant trade­mark. He lat­er refined his style from the hard skin-bash­ing approach to a more del­i­cate wrist-con­trolled one–which pro­duced an even more pow­er­ful and loud­er sound with less effort.

Bon­ham’s lat­er play­ing is on dis­play in this iso­lat­ed drum track (above) from “Fool in the Rain,” a sin­gle from the 1979 album In Through the Out Door, the last album released by Zep­pelin before Bon­ham’s death in 1980. The record­ing above includes about one-third of the entire drum track, end­ing just before the sam­ba-style break­down in the mid­dle.

Bon­ham is play­ing a vari­ant of the half-time Pur­die Shuf­fle, a pat­tern devel­oped by the leg­endary ses­sion drum­mer Bernard Pur­die, who began play­ing it when he was a young­ster try­ing to imi­tate the dynam­ics of a train. “The way a loco­mo­tive kind of push­es and pulls,” Pur­die said in a 2011 Mus­i­cRadar inter­view, “that’s what I was feel­ing.”

Vari­a­tions of the Pur­die Shuf­fle can be heard across pop­u­lar music. Pur­die him­self played it on Steely Dan’s “Home at Last.” More recent­ly, Death Cab for Cutie’s Jason McGerr played it on “Grapevine Fires.” Per­haps the most famous vari­a­tion is the so-called “Rosan­na Shuf­fle” played by the late Jeff Por­caro of Toto on the sin­gle “Rosan­na,” which blend­ed ele­ments of Pur­die’s orig­i­nal shuf­fle, Bon­ham’s “Fool in the Rain” pat­tern and the Bo Did­dley Beat.

For more on Bernard Pur­die and his trade­mark shuf­fle, see the 2009 video below from the New York Times. In the accom­pa­ny­ing arti­cle, David Segal writes: “Cre­at­ed with six bass, high-hat and snare tones, the Pur­die Shuf­fle is a groove that seems to spin in con­cen­tric cir­cles as it lopes for­ward. The result is a Tilt-a-Whirl of sound, and if you can lis­ten with­out shak­ing your hips, you should prob­a­bly see a doc­tor.”

via That Eric Alper

Relat­ed Con­tent:

‘Stair­way to Heav­en’: Watch a Mov­ing Trib­ute to Led Zep­pelin at The Kennedy Cen­ter

Jim­my Page Tells the Sto­ry of Kash­mir

Kei­th Moon, Drum­mer of The Who, Pass­es Out at 1973 Con­cert; 19-Year-Old Fan Takes Over

The “Amen Break”: The Most Famous 6‑Second Drum Loop & How It Spawned a Sam­pling Rev­o­lu­tion

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The Film Before the Film: An Introduction to the History of Title Sequences in 10 Minutes

in Animation, Art, Film | April 11th, 2013

Some watch the Super Bowl for just the com­mer­cials. Oth­ers watch films for the title sequences that book­end a movie. Title sequences can be “engag­ing or wild­ly enter­tain­ing … or sim­ply drop dead beau­ti­ful.” They can “ooze with visu­al poet­ry and sophis­ti­cat­ed imagery,” or they can put the audi­ence in the right mood for the movie, or close it in the right way, writes the web site For­get the Films, Watch the Titles.

But it has­n’t always been this way. Dur­ing the ear­ly days of cin­e­ma, title sequences were often crude and infor­ma­tion­al. That start­ed to change with the advent of sound film, when title sequences took on aes­thet­ic dimen­sions they had­n’t known before. By the 1950s and 1960s, they became a high art form, espe­cial­ly in the hands of the icon­ic graph­ic design­er Saul Bass. The his­to­ry, phi­los­o­phy and aes­thet­ics of the title sequence — espe­cial­ly the open­ing cred­its — all get cov­ered by The Film Before the Film, a short, infor­ma­tive film born out of a research project at the Berlin­er Tech­nis­che Kun­sthochschule. It runs 9 to 11 min­utes, depend­ing on whether you count the clos­ing title sequence!

Fol­low us on Face­book, Twit­ter and Google Plus and share intel­li­gent media with your friends! They’ll thank you for it.

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If Astronauts Cry in Space, Will Their Tears Fall?

in Astronomy, Physics, Science | April 11th, 2013

The astro­nauts aboard the Inter­na­tion­al Space Sta­tion work every day on all kinds of exper­i­ments, from work­ing with robots to prepar­ing for space­walks. But when they get a break, they often field ques­tions from school chil­dren and adults about life in space.

Com­man­der Chris Had­field recent­ly video­taped him­self demon­strat­ing a sim­ple exper­i­ment inspired by a com­mon ques­tion: If an astro­naut cries in space, do their tears fall?

On Earth, of course, it’s grav­i­ty that caus­es tears to roll down the cheek. In a micro­grav­i­ty envi­ron­ment, if an astro­naut is sad or gets some­thing in his/her eye, tears will cer­tain­ly well up, but there will be none of what Smokey Robinson’s tears made on his face.

Had­field, pos­si­bly the most social media-savvy astro­naut ever with more than 500,000 Twit­ter fol­low­ers, game­ly demon­strates that tears do pool under the eye but they make no tracks. Squirt­ing water into his right eye, he rolls his head around, caus­ing the pud­dle of “tears” to shift back and forth and even roll over the bridge of his nose.

Tears don’t fall, he con­cludes, so bring a han­ky.

Had­field is no stranger to demon­strat­ing, or dis­cussing, human bod­i­ly func­tions in space. Speak­ing before the Ontario Space Cen­tre a few years ago, he dis­cussed some­thing that you may have won­dered about: going to the bath­room in space.

Kate Rix writes about dig­i­tal media and edu­ca­tion. Vis­it her web­site: .

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A Shirtless Slavoj Žižek Explains the Purpose of Philosophy from the Comfort of His Bed

in Philosophy | April 11th, 2013

Non-philoso­phers some­times charge philoso­phers with talk­ing and writ­ing volu­mi­nous­ly to no par­tic­u­lar end, get­ting noth­ing done, solv­ing no prob­lems. But Slavoj Žižek, clown prince of aca­d­e­m­ic super­star­dom, has a response: “Phi­los­o­phy does not solve prob­lems,” he claims in the clip above. “The duty of phi­los­o­phy is not to solve prob­lems, but to rede­fine prob­lems, to show how what we expe­ri­ence as a prob­lem is a false prob­lem. If what we expe­ri­ence as a prob­lem is a true prob­lem, then you don’t need phi­los­o­phy.” He uses the hypo­thet­i­cal exam­ples of dead­ly comets and virus­es from space. Against such clear, present, and direct threats, he argues, we have no use for phi­los­o­phy, just “good sci­ence.” Žižek con­tin­ues the argu­ment from his bed: “I don’t think philoso­phers ever pro­vid­ed answers, but I think this was the great­ness of phi­los­o­phy.”

To Žižek’s mind, the pur­suit of phi­los­o­phy involves ask­ing as many ques­tions as pos­si­ble, but not broad ones about absolute truths. “Phi­los­o­phy is not what some peo­ple think,” he says, ges­tic­u­lat­ing while propped up by pil­lows. “It just asks, when we use cer­tain notions, when we do cer­tain acts, and so on, what is the implic­it hori­zon of under­stand­ing? It does­n’t ask these stu­pid ide­al ques­tions: ‘Is there truth?’ The ques­tion is, ‘What do you mean when you say this is true?’ ” He con­ceives of phi­los­o­phy as a mod­est dis­ci­pline, not a grand one. This clip comes by way of the invalu­able Bib­liok­lept.

Relat­ed con­tent:

After a Tour of Slavoj Žižek’s Pad, You’ll Nev­er See Inte­ri­or Design in the Same Way

Philoso­pher Slavoj Zizek Inter­prets Hitchcock’s Ver­ti­go in The Pervert’s Guide to Cin­e­ma (2006)

Bed Peace Revis­its John Lennon & Yoko Ono’s Famous Anti-Viet­nam Protests

Slavoj Žižek Demys­ti­fies the Gang­nam Style Phe­nom­e­non

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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