Visualizing the Bass Playing Style of Motown’s Iconic Bassist James Jamerson: “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” “For Once in My Life” & More

in Music | January 24th, 2019

As part of Motown’s Funk Broth­ers house band, James Jamer­son was the bub­bling bass play­er behind hun­dreds of hit records from Ste­vie Won­der, Mar­vin Gaye, The Supremes, Martha and the Van­del­las, and plen­ty more. His licks duck and dive and weave like Ali but nev­er get in the way of the melody or the rest of the band.

Paul McCart­ney was an ear­ly fan, but for the gen­er­al pub­lic, Jamer­son was not a house­hold name for decades–Motown nev­er list­ed the Wreck­ing Crew in its credits–until much lat­er when music jour­nal­ists and film­mak­ers pushed him into the spot­light.

But his style is so iden­ti­fi­able that YouTube chan­nel Scott’s Bass Lessons has sev­er­al videos about the man, explain­ing in detail how Jamer­son pro­duced that sound.

Jamer­son used a Pre­ci­sion Bass made by Fend­er, heavy flat wound strings that gave it those thick tones, and a very high action (i.e. how tight the strings are). So high in fact, that many con­tem­po­raries said his bass was impos­si­ble to play. (The tight­ness had warped the neck of the instru­ment.) He also placed foam under the bridge, and played high on the body with only his index fin­ger, “the hook” as they used to call it.

The oth­er pecu­liar­i­ty of Jamerson’s record­ings it that he plugged straight into the record­ing deck, instead of record­ing his amp. (McCart­ney start­ed doing this in the mid­dle of the Bea­t­les’ career as well.) This led to a very com­pressed sound that helped his play­ing stand out in the mix.
These tech­niques are all easy to adopt, but one then has to add the tal­ent, and that’s the hard part.

As you can see from these visu­al­iza­tions, Jamer­son nev­er stays still. If he could play a note on an open string he would (instead of mov­ing over a fret), and that led to a flu­id jour­ney over the neck. On some­thing like “I Was Made to Love Her,” Jamer­son always makes sure to head up to dou­ble the sitar-like riff at the end of the verse:

While on “For Once In My Life,” he uses the steady groove of the band (not heard on the video, but lis­ten here) as a jump­ing off point of some very tricky rhythms. And though it’s com­plex, it nev­er gets in the way, nor does it feel flashy or indul­gent.

Jamer­son rarely changed strings, only if they broke, and he didn’t real­ly look after his “black beau­ty” bass.

Asked why, he said, “The dirt keeps the funk.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Car­ol Kaye Became the Most Pro­lif­ic Ses­sion Musi­cian in His­to­ry

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

Every Appear­ance James Brown Ever Made On Soul Train. So Nice, So Nice!

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

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Watch 110 Lectures by Donald Knuth, “the Yoda of Silicon Valley,” on Programming, Mathematical Writing, and More

in Computer Science, Stanford | January 24th, 2019

Many see the realms of lit­er­a­ture and com­put­ers as not just com­plete­ly sep­a­rate, but grow­ing more dis­tant from one anoth­er all the time. Don­ald Knuth, one of the most respect­ed fig­ures of all the most deeply com­put­er-savvy in Sil­i­con Val­ley, sees it dif­fer­ent­ly. His claims to fame include The Art of Com­put­er Pro­gram­ming, an ongo­ing mul­ti-vol­ume series of books whose pub­li­ca­tion began more than fifty years ago, and the dig­i­tal type­set­ting sys­tem TeX, which, in a recent pro­file of Knuth, the New York Times’ Siob­han Roberts describes as “the gold stan­dard for all forms of sci­en­tif­ic com­mu­ni­ca­tion and pub­li­ca­tion.”

Some, Roberts writes, con­sid­er TeX “Dr. Knuth’s great­est con­tri­bu­tion to the world, and the great­est con­tri­bu­tion to typog­ra­phy since Guten­berg.” At the core of his life­long work is an idea called “lit­er­ate pro­gram­ming,” which empha­sizes “the impor­tance of writ­ing code that is read­able by humans as well as com­put­ers — a notion that nowa­days seems almost twee.

Dr. Knuth has gone so far as to argue that some com­put­er pro­grams are, like Eliz­a­beth Bishop’s poems and Philip Roth’s Amer­i­can Pas­toral, works of lit­er­a­ture wor­thy of a Pulitzer.” Knuth’s mind, tech­ni­cal achieve­ments, and style of com­mu­ni­ca­tion have earned him the infor­mal title of “the Yoda of Sil­i­con Val­ley.”

That appel­la­tion also reflects a depth of tech­ni­cal wis­dom only attain­able by get­ting to the very bot­tom of things, which in Knuth’s case means ful­ly under­stand­ing how com­put­er pro­gram­ming works all the way down to the most basic lev­el. (This in con­trast to the aver­age pro­gram­mer, writes Roberts, who “no longer has time to manip­u­late the bina­ry muck, and works instead with hier­ar­chies of abstrac­tion, lay­ers upon lay­ers of code — and often with chains of code bor­rowed from code libraries.) Now every­one can get more than a taste of Knuth’s per­spec­tive and thoughts on com­put­ers, pro­gram­ming, and a host of relat­ed sub­jects on the Youtube chan­nel of Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty, where Knuth is now pro­fes­sor emer­i­tus (and where he still gives infor­mal lec­tures under the ban­ner “Com­put­er Mus­ings”).

Stan­ford’s online archive of Don­ald Knuth Lec­tures now num­bers 110, rang­ing across the decades and cov­er­ing such sub­jects as the usage and mechan­ics of TeX, the analy­sis of algo­rithms, and the nature of math­e­mat­i­cal writ­ing. “I am wor­ried that algo­rithms are get­ting too promi­nent in the world,” he tells Roberts in the New York Times pro­file. “It start­ed out that com­put­er sci­en­tists were wor­ried nobody was lis­ten­ing to us. Now I’m wor­ried that too many peo­ple are lis­ten­ing.” But hav­ing become a com­put­er sci­en­tist before the field of com­put­er sci­ence even had a name, the now-octo­ge­nar­i­an Knuth pos­sess­es a rare per­spec­tive to which any­one in 21st-cen­tu­ry tech­nol­o­gy could cer­tain­ly ben­e­fit from expo­sure.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Com­put­er Sci­ence Cours­es

50 Famous Aca­d­e­mics & Sci­en­tists Talk About God

The Secret His­to­ry of Sil­i­con Val­ley

When J.M. Coet­zee Secret­ly Pro­grammed Com­put­ers to Write Poet­ry in the 1960s

Intro­duc­tion to Com­put­er Sci­ence and Pro­gram­ming: A Free Course from MIT

Peter Thiel’s Stan­ford Course on Star­tups: Read the Lec­ture Notes Free Online

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Moebius Draws Adventurous Ads for Maxwell House Coffee (1989)

in Art, Comics/Cartoons | January 24th, 2019

What do you do after you’ve helped cre­ate one of the “first anti-heroes in West­ern comics”; pio­neered the under­ground comics indus­try and heavy met­al album cov­ers; won the endur­ing admi­ra­tion of Fed­eri­co Felli­ni, Stan Lee, and Hayao Miyaza­ki; and brought your dis­tinc­tive cre­ative style to the look of sci-fi clas­sics like Blade Run­ner, Alien, Tron, and The Abyss?

Sit back, have a cof­fee, and design a series of ads for Maxwell House. Why not? You’re Moe­bius. You can draw what­ev­er you want. No one’s going to accuse Ale­jan­dro Jodorowsky’s part­ner in the leg­endary nev­er-made Dune film and The Incal comics of sell­ing out—not when con­tem­po­rary com­ic art, sci­ence fic­tion, and fan­ta­sy could hard­ly have exist­ed with­out him.

“Prob­a­bly the most impor­tant fan­ta­sy com­ic artist of all time,” as Art Futu­ra dubs him, the man orig­i­nal­ly known by his birth name Jean Giraud began his career as an illus­tra­tor for the youth press Fleu­rus, who were the first in France to pub­lish fel­low bande dess­inées artist Herge’s Adven­tures of Tintin. The Maxwell House ads here, drawn in 1989, recall those ear­ly days of Fran­co-Bel­gian com­ic art, when adven­tur­ers raced around the colonies, brav­ing wild ani­mals and surly natives.

Moe­bius’ con­fi­dent hand leaves a sig­na­ture in the dense pat­terns of the foliage and slen­der jaw­line of the ele­gant, cof­fee-sip­ping damsel, who does not seem remote­ly in dis­tress, downed plane and curi­ous goril­las notwith­stand­ing. But the set­tings are just as rem­i­nis­cent of Tintin’s juve­nile con­cep­tions of the Ama­zon and “dark­est Africa,” though Moe­bius leaves out the swash­buck­lers and ugly native car­i­ca­tures.

Giraud’s own trav­els took him through Mexico—where he joined his moth­er as a teenag­er and saw for the first time the mag­nif­i­cent West­ern land­scapes he had always dreamed of—and through Alge­ria, where he worked as an illus­tra­tor for the French army mag­a­zine while fin­ish­ing his mil­i­tary ser­vice. Unlike many of his con­tem­po­raries, he por­trayed non-Euro­pean nations and peo­ple with sym­pa­thy and respect.

Though he first took the name Moe­bius in 1974 in order to pur­sue more fan­ta­sy-ori­ent­ed work after draw­ing the West­ern Blue­ber­ry for over a decade, some of Giraud’s ‘70s com­ic sto­ries under the name drew upon real events, like the mur­der of a North African immi­grant, Wound­ed Knee, and the famous speech of Chief Seat­tle.

The Maxwell House pan­els keep things light and sweet, so to speak, though where the cream and sug­ar might be hid­ing is anyone’s guess. The hero­ine of the series, named Tatiana, is “a self-pos­sessed and fash­ion­able young woman who hap­pens to find her­self alone on a desert jun­gle island or the like,” as Mar­tin Schnei­der writes at Dan­ger­ous Minds. Unper­turbed, she takes more inter­est in her cof­fee than the wild­ness around her.

At Dan­ger­ous Minds you’ll find alter­nate unused images and the ad campaign’s droll cap­tions describ­ing Tatiana tak­ing cof­fee breaks from some mun­dane errand or chore. The com­men­tary, though amus­ing, is hard­ly nec­es­sary. We can imag­ine dozens of sto­ries embed­ded in each pan­el. The abil­i­ty to cre­ate such com­plex and evoca­tive illus­tra­tions, every one a world with­in a world, has always set Moe­bius ahead of his peers and many imi­ta­tors.

via Trip­Wire/Dan­ger­ous Minds

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Ground­break­ing Com­ic Artist Mœbius Draw His Char­ac­ters in Real Time

Mœbius & Jodorowsky’s Sci-Fi Mas­ter­piece, The Incal, Brought to Life in a Tan­ta­liz­ing Ani­ma­tion

Métal hurlant: The Huge­ly Influ­en­tial French Com­ic Mag­a­zine That Put Moe­bius on the Map & Changed Sci-Fi For­ev­er

Behold Moe­bius’ Many Psy­che­del­ic Illus­tra­tions of Jimi Hen­drix

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Watch Dziga Vertov’s A Man with a Movie Camera: The 8th Best Film Ever Made

in Film | January 24th, 2019

Of all the cin­e­mat­ic trail­blaz­ers to emerge dur­ing the ear­ly years of the Sovi­et Union – Sergei Eisen­stein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, Lev Kuleshov – Dzi­ga Ver­tov (né Denis Arkadievitch Kauf­man, 1896–1954) was the most rad­i­cal.

Where­as Eisen­stein – as seen in that film school stan­dard Bat­tle­ship Potemkin – used mon­tage edit­ing to cre­ate new ways of telling a sto­ry, Ver­tov dis­pensed with sto­ry alto­geth­er. He loathed fic­tion films. “The film dra­ma is the Opi­um of the peo­ple,” he wrote. “Down with Bour­geois fairy-tale scenarios…long live life as it is!”  He called for the cre­ation of a new kind of cin­e­ma free of the counter-rev­o­lu­tion­ary bag­gage of West­ern movies. A cin­e­ma that cap­tured real life.

At the begin­ning of his mas­ter­piece, A Man with a Movie Cam­era (1929) – which was named in 2012 by Sight and Sound mag­a­zine as the 8th best movie ever made – Ver­tov announced exact­ly what that kind of cin­e­ma would look like:

This film is an exper­i­ment in cin­e­mat­ic com­mu­ni­ca­tion of real events with­out the help of inter­ti­tles, with­out the help of a sto­ry, with­out the help of the­atre. This exper­i­men­tal work aims at cre­at­ing a tru­ly inter­na­tion­al lan­guage of cin­e­ma based on its absolute sep­a­ra­tion from the lan­guage of the­atre and lit­er­a­ture.

Glee­ful­ly using jump cuts, super­im­po­si­tions, split screens and every oth­er trick in a filmmaker’s arse­nal, Ver­tov, along with his edi­tor (and wife) Eliza­ve­ta Svilo­va, crafts a dizzy­ing, impres­sion­is­tic, propul­sive por­trait of the new­ly indus­tri­al­iz­ing Sovi­et Union. The lengths to which Ver­tov goes to cap­ture this “cin­e­mat­ic com­mu­ni­ca­tion of real events” is star­tling: His cam­era soars over cities and gazes up at street­cars; it films machines chug­ging away and even records a woman giv­ing birth. “I am eye. I am a mechan­i­cal eye,” Ver­tov once famous­ly wrote. “I, a machine, am show­ing you a world, the likes of which only I can see.”

Yet Vertov’s stroke of genius was to expose the entire arti­fice of film­mak­ing with­in the movie itself. In A Man with a Movie Cam­era, Ver­tov shoots footage of his cam­era­men shoot­ing footage. There’s a reoc­cur­ring shot of an eye star­ing through a lens. We see images from ear­li­er in the movie get­ting edit­ed into the film. This sort of cin­e­mat­ic self-reflex­iv­i­ty was decades ahead of its time, influ­enc­ing such future exper­i­men­tal film­mak­ers as Chris Mark­er, Stan Brakhage and espe­cial­ly Jean-Luc Godard who in 1968 formed a rad­i­cal film­mak­ing col­lec­tive called The Dzi­ga Ver­tov Group.

A Man with a Movie Cam­era, espe­cial­ly with Alloy Orchestra’s accom­pa­ni­ment, is noth­ing short of exhil­a­rat­ing. Check it out above. Also find the clas­sic on our list of Great Silent Films, part of our larg­er col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in Novem­ber 2014.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Eight Free Films by Dzi­ga Ver­tov, Cre­ator of Sovi­et Avant-Garde Doc­u­men­taries

101 Free Silent Films: The Great Clas­sics 

Hear Dzi­ga Vertov’s Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Exper­i­ments in Sound: From His Radio Broad­casts to His First Sound Film

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow.

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Nutritional Psychiatry: Why Diet May Play an Essential Role in Treating Mental Health Conditions, Including Depression, Anxiety & Beyond

in Food & Drink, Harvard, Health | January 23rd, 2019

For years neu­ro­sci­en­tists have been try­ing to cor­rect the old assump­tion that our minds are reducible to our brains. Research into what is known as the gut micro­bio­me, for exam­ple, has shown that mood and men­tal health are inti­mate­ly linked to the func­tion­ing of an ecosys­tem of microor­gan­isms with­in the diges­tive sys­tem. As researchers write in the Jour­nal of Neu­ro­science, “exper­i­men­tal changes to the gut micro­bio­me can affect emo­tion­al behav­ior and relat­ed brain sys­tems [and] may play a patho­phys­i­o­log­i­cal role in human brain dis­eases, includ­ing autism spec­trum dis­or­der, anx­i­ety, depres­sion, and chron­ic pain.”

Even Parkinson’s Dis­ease has been linked to gut bac­te­ria in stud­ies per­formed by micro­bi­ol­o­gist Sarkis Maz­man­ian, who points out that “70 per­cent of all neu­rons in the periph­er­al ner­vous system—that is, not the brain or spinal cord—are in the intestines, and the gut’s ner­vous sys­tem is direct­ly con­nect­ed to the cen­tral ner­vous sys­tem through the vagus nerve.” Our guts also sup­ply the brain with fuel, and it requires a “con­stant sup­ply,” notes Dr. Eva Sel­hub at the Har­vard Health Blog. “That ‘fuel’ comes from the foods you eat—and what’s in that fuel makes all the dif­fer­ence. Put sim­ply, what you eat direct­ly affects the struc­ture and func­tion of your brain and, ulti­mate­ly, your mood.”

Such find­ings have giv­en rise to the emerg­ing field of Nutri­tion­al Psy­chi­a­try, which you can hear described in the TEDx talk above by clin­i­cal psy­chol­o­gist Julia Ruck­lidge. Ini­tial­ly taught that “nutri­tion and diet were of triv­ial sig­nif­i­cance for men­tal health,” Ruck­lidge, like most of her col­leagues, believed that “only drugs and psy­chother­a­py could treat these seri­ous con­di­tions.” But after encoun­ter­ing evi­dence to the con­trary, she decid­ed to do her own stud­ies. Begin­ning at around 5:30, she presents com­pelling evi­dence for a dra­mat­ic reduc­tion in rates of ADHD, PTSD, depres­sion, and psy­chosis after dietary treat­ments.

That’s not to say that drugs and psy­chother­a­py do not play impor­tant roles in treat­ment, nor that they should be sup­plant­ed by a nutri­tion-only approach. But it does mean that nutri­tion­al treat­ments are shown by many fields of study to be effec­tive and per­haps essen­tial, for rea­sons con­sis­tent with wide­spread knowl­edge about the body and brain. “It is now known,” for exam­ple, as Joyce Cavaye reports at the Inde­pen­dent, “that many men­tal health con­di­tions are caused by inflam­ma­tion in the brain which ulti­mate­ly caus­es our brain cells to die.” Inflam­ma­tion is, in part, caused by “a lack of nutri­ents such as mag­ne­sium, omega‑3 fat­ty acids, pro­bi­otics, vit­a­mins and min­er­als… all essen­tial for the opti­mum func­tion­ing of our bod­ies.”

Diets con­sist­ing pri­mar­i­ly of high­ly processed foods and sug­ars are also a cause of inflam­ma­tion. “Mul­ti­ple stud­ies have found a cor­re­la­tion between a diet high in refined sug­ars and impaired brain func­tion,” Dr. Sel­hub writes. These diets pro­mote a “wors­en­ing of symp­toms of mood dis­or­ders, such as depres­sion.” Processed foods with high car­bo­hy­drate con­tent and few nutri­ents have cre­at­ed an epi­dem­ic of mal­nu­tri­tion among a sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of the pop­u­la­tion who oth­er­wise seem to have plen­ty to eat. The sit­u­a­tion seems to have major­ly con­tributed to the cor­re­spond­ing epi­demics of depres­sion and oth­er men­tal health con­di­tions.

Nutri­tion­al psy­chi­a­try is not a fad or a pro­gram claim­ing to recre­ate the diet of ear­ly humans. While “a poten­tial evo­lu­tion­ary mis­match between our ances­tral past (Pale­olith­ic, Neolith­ic) and the con­tem­po­rary nutri­tion­al envi­ron­ment” mer­its explo­ration, as researchers write in an arti­cle pub­lished at the Jour­nal of Phys­i­o­log­i­cal Anthro­pol­o­gy, many more con­tem­po­rary factors—such as eco­nom­ic devel­op­ment and the rise of sci­en­tif­ic medicine—play a role in how we under­stand diet and men­tal health.

Rather than look to pre­his­to­ry, sci­en­tists have stud­ied the diets of “tra­di­tion­al” soci­eties (those not reliant on mass-pro­duced processed foods) in the Mediter­ranean and Japan. They have found a 25–35% low­er rate of depres­sion, for exam­ple, in those who eat diets “high in veg­eta­bles, fruits, unprocessed grains, and fish and seafood,” writes Sel­hub, with “only mod­est amounts of lean meats and dairy.” There is no per­fect dietary for­mu­la, how­ev­er. Everyone’s gut process­es things dif­fer­ent­ly. Dr. Sel­hub rec­om­mends cut­ting out processed foods and sug­ar and exper­i­ment­ing with adding and sub­tract­ing foods to see how you feel. (Nutri­tion­al exper­i­ments like these are prob­a­bly best car­ried out after con­sult­ing with your doc­tor.)

Just as we will need to change the way we eat if we want to pre­serve our out­er envi­ron­ment, the health of that rich, and no less nec­es­sary, inner world known as the micro­bio­me will require what for many is a dra­mat­ic change in eat­ing habits. Sad­ly, it is not a change every­one can afford to make. But for mil­lions suf­fer­ing from men­tal ill­ness­es, nutri­tion­al psy­chi­a­try may rep­re­sent a life-alter­ing course of treat­ment.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stanford’s Robert Sapol­sky Demys­ti­fies Depres­sion, Which, Like Dia­betes, Is Root­ed in Biol­o­gy

Psilo­cy­bin Could Soon Be a Legal Treat­ment for Depres­sion: Johns Hop­kins Pro­fes­sor, Roland Grif­fiths, Explains How Psilo­cy­bin Can Relieve Suf­fer­ing

How Bak­ing, Cook­ing & Oth­er Dai­ly Activ­i­ties Help Pro­mote Hap­pi­ness and Alle­vi­ate Depres­sion and Anx­i­ety

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Mountain Monks: A Vivid Short Documentary on the Monks Who Practice an Ancient, Once-Forbidden Religion in Japan

in Film, Religion | January 23rd, 2019

If you need to get some seri­ous think­ing done, go to the moun­tains. That notion holds across a wide range of cul­tures, but it has a par­tic­u­lar force in Japan, where solo hik­ing, some­times great­ly extend­ed solo hik­ing, has long been a pop­u­lar treat­ment for a wide vari­ety of trou­bles both per­son­al and pro­fes­sion­al. But no group has tak­en it to quite the extreme as have the Yam­abushi, ascetic moun­tain her­mits who have prac­ticed Shugendō, a hybridiza­tion of ver­sions of eso­teric Bud­dhism, Tao­ism, and Shin­to that goes back to the eighth cen­tu­ry. What sort of lifestyle, one won­ders, would such seri­ous reli­gious ded­i­ca­tion in such a harsh, remote loca­tion pro­duce?

Visu­al jour­nal­ist Fritz Schu­mann, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture for his doc­u­men­taries on a 1300-year-old Japan­ese hotel and a near­ly extinct Japan­ese print­ing tech­nique, gives us a sense of that in his new short Moun­tain Monks. “Walk­ing bare­foot through rivers, med­i­tat­ing under water­falls and spend­ing the nights on moun­tain­tops — that is the way of the Yam­abushi,” he writes.

“They walk into the for­est to die and be born again.” Their Shugendō teach­ings “peaked in pop­u­lar­i­ty dur­ing the 17th cen­tu­ry, when Yam­abushi vis­it­ed around 90 per­cent of all vil­lages in north­ern Japan,” and when its monks “were said to have mag­i­cal pow­ers and served as advi­sors to samu­rai and war­lords.” But then, “in the late 19th cen­tu­ry, when Japan opened itself to the west and moved from a feu­dal state towards indus­tri­al­iza­tion, their reli­gion was for­bid­den.”

Though the pro­scrip­tion on Yam­abushi has long since been lift­ed, as a reli­gion it no longer pos­sess­es quite the fol­low­ing it once did. A group of monks has kept its flame alive in secret in iso­la­tion, up in north­ern Japan’s Yam­a­ga­ta pre­fec­ture, and now any­one can sign up for pri­vate cours­es through the offi­cial Yam­abushi­do web site, even for­eign­ers. The sim­ple rig­ors of their dai­ly life may sound appeal­ing indeed to those fed up with whichev­er mod­ern, tech­nol­o­gy-sat­u­rat­ed soci­ety they’ve come from, and Schu­man­n’s film may well con­vince a fair few to look into the expe­ri­ence them­selves. Not to say that he sug­ar-coats it: “The idea,” declares one Yam­abushi mem­ber right at the begin­ning, “is to expe­ri­ence the tor­tures of hell.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hōshi: A Short Doc­u­men­tary on the 1300-Year-Old Hotel Run by the Same Japan­ese Fam­i­ly for 46 Gen­er­a­tions

The Art of Col­lo­type: See a Near Extinct Print­ing Tech­nique, as Lov­ing­ly Prac­ticed by a Japan­ese Mas­ter Crafts­man

Japan­ese Priest Tries to Revive Bud­dhism by Bring­ing Tech­no Music into the Tem­ple: Attend a Psy­che­del­ic 23-Minute Ser­vice

A Hyp­not­ic Look at How Japan­ese Samu­rai Swords Are Made

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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The 1959 Project: A New Photoblog Takes a Day-By-Day Look at 1959, the Great Watershed Year in Jazz

in Jazz, Music | January 23rd, 2019

If you’ve hung around Open Cul­ture long enough, you’ve heard said that 1959 was a water­shed year for jazz—the year of modal clas­sics Giant Steps and Kind of Blue, “har­molod­ic” mas­ter­piece The Shape of Jazz to Come, and the for­ev­er cool Time Out and Min­gus Ah Um. Six­ty years lat­er in 2019, these exper­i­ments and con­fi­dent leaps for­ward con­tin­ue to mark piv­otal moments in mod­ern music—moments doc­u­ment­ed heav­i­ly by the pho­tog­ra­phers who gave the albums their inim­itable look.

To cel­e­brate that year in musi­cal break­throughs and pho­to­graph­ic near-per­fec­tion, sports­writer and jazz his­to­ry “super­fan” Natal­ie Wein­er has launched a blog called The 1959 Project. “The premise is sim­ple,” writes Tim Car­mody at Kot­tke, “every day, a snap­shot of the world of jazz six­ty years ago.” Sim­ple it may be, but its dive into jazz his­to­ry is deep and sat­is­fy­ing. The project has already occa­sion­al­ly strayed out­side the lines, post­ing mate­ri­als from 1958 and 1960. But great moments in music his­to­ry can­not be forced to fit tidi­ly inside cal­en­dar years.

In addi­tion to icon­ic pho­tos, Wein­er posts short sum­maries, news clip­pings, film and tele­vi­sion clips, and record­ings from albums like Milt Jack­son and John Coltrane’s Bags & Trane (1960). Yesterday’s post focused on Max Roach’s 1959 The Many Sides of Max (see him in the stu­dio with Book­er Lit­tle at the top). Jan­u­ary 18th brought us Jack­ie McLean’s Jackie’s Bag, record­ed 1959, released 1960, fea­tur­ing Don­ald Byrd, Son­ny Clark, Paul Cham­bers, and Philly Jones, and made for Blue Note by the great Rudy Van Gelder.

Only twen­ty-three days into the year and The 1959 Project has already cov­ered Ken­ny Dorham and Can­non­ball Adder­ley, Bill Evans, Charles Min­gus (for 1958’s live Jazz Por­traits), and singer Ani­ta O’Day, rid­ing “a wave of crit­i­cal and com­mer­cial suc­cess” after her 1958 album Ani­ta O’Day at Mis­ter Kelly’s. That’s only to men­tion a hand­ful of the entries so far. “It only promis­es to get bet­ter as the year goes on,” Car­mody writes—and so does the depth of your jazz knowl­edge and appre­ci­a­tion if you check in with this ded­i­cat­ed project even once or twice a week.

via Ted Gioia/Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1959: The Year That Changed Jazz

The Cry of Jazz: 1958’s High­ly Con­tro­ver­sial Film on Jazz & Race in Amer­i­ca (With Music by Sun Ra)

The Impos­si­bly Cool Album Cov­ers of Blue Note Records: Meet the Cre­ative Team Behind These Icon­ic Designs

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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A Virtual Tour of Every Place Referenced in The Beatles’ Lyrics: In 12 Minutes, Travel 25,000 Miles Across England, France, Russia, India & the US

in Music | January 22nd, 2019

Ach, the won­ders and the blun­ders of the Inter­net. The won­der: Van­i­ty Fair–lovely mag­a­zine, a bit too many sto­ries about the roy­als and bil­lion­aires though–has the bud­get and the where­with­al to com­mis­sion this video. It’s a 12 minute ride around the world using Google Maps, touch­ing down to show loca­tions men­tioned in the Bea­t­les lyrics, from Liv­er­pool to the Black Moun­tain Hills of Dako­ta to Moscow, where the bal­alaikas are always ring­ing out. The blun­der: it’s laced with inac­cu­ra­cies and guess­es about the most over­doc­u­ment­ed group of all time.

Is it worth your time? For the Bea­t­les know-it-all or the casu­al lis­ten­er, the answer is yes.
The video begins unsur­pris­ing­ly in Liv­er­pool with a tour of Pen­ny Lane, Straw­ber­ry Field, and the child­hood homes of John Lennon and Paul McCart­ney. There’s a brief vis­it to the Cav­ern night­club where they grew their local fan­base, and down the Mersey to sug­gest that the “cast iron shore” in “Glass Onion” is refer­ring to this iron ore clogged water­way. (Per­haps, but not def­i­nite that one.)

We go up to Scot­land (the Kirkaldy men­tioned in “Cry Baby Cry”) down to Lon­don for all kinds of loca­tions, num­ber one being Abbey Road stu­dios, and south to the “Dock at Southamp­ton” although the video points out that you can’t get to “Hol­land or France” as in “The Bal­lad of John & Yoko.” (That would be Dover.)

There are stops in India, where we get to tour the remains of the ashram in Rishikesh, now lov­ing­ly adorned with all sorts of Bea­t­les fan art, and over to Amer­i­ca to the Bel Air home at the top of “Blue Jay Way.”

All in all, the total miles on this Mag­i­cal Mys­tery Tour add up to 25,510, and all using Google tech. Not bad.

But a scroll through the YouTube com­ments reveals how much the video gets wrong. The bar­ber­shop men­tioned in “Pen­ny Lane” is the wrong one, and Paul just recent­ly vis­it­ed it in his endear­ing “Car Pool Karaoke” seg­ment with James Cor­den. And while there is indeed a Bish­ops­gate in Lon­don, that isn’t the one men­tioned in “Being for the Ben­e­fit of Mr. Kite.” That one lies to the north of Liv­er­pool. The rooftop where the Bea­t­les played their last gig is wrong (the map shows the cur­rent loca­tion of Apple Records, not the build­ing at 3 Sav­ille Row, where it hap­pened). And what, no tour of George Har­ri­son or Ringo Starr’s child­hood home? I mean, you guys were in the neigh­bor­hood, you could have popped ‘round.

Ah well, as we said, it’s a bit of both good and bad this video. If any­thing, it’ll make you want to give those clas­sic songs yet anoth­er spin.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Did Lennon or McCart­ney Write the Bea­t­les 1965 Song “In My Life”? A Math Pro­fes­sor, Using Sta­tis­tics, Solves the Decades-Old Mys­tery

The Bea­t­les as Teens (1957)

Watch HD Ver­sions of The Bea­t­les’ Pio­neer­ing Music Videos: “Hey Jude,” “Pen­ny Lane,” “Rev­o­lu­tion” & More

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

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