It seems impos­si­ble to talk about key­boardist Chick Corea, who passed away from can­cer on Feb­ru­ary 11 at age 79, with­out also talk­ing about Miles Davis. Davis hand picked him for the ground­break­ing albums In a Silent Way and Bitch­es Brew, and as a mem­ber of those ensem­bles, Corea helped shape the future of music and helped divide the jazz com­mu­ni­ty into those who embraced the psy­che­del­ic “fusion” of jazz, rock, and oth­er world musics and those who were fierce­ly pro­tec­tive of tra­di­tion.

Corea, how­ev­er, “had already gone through ear­ly explo­rative phas­es of his career,” writes Jim Bur­long at Jazz Views, before his “brief but not always hap­py” stint with Davis. He was on his way to the avant-garde direc­tion he would take with his lat­er group, Return to For­ev­er. Yet no mat­ter how far out there he went with Davis or the ridicu­lous­ly accom­plished RTF and hun­dreds of oth­er musi­cians he played with, Corea always stayed con­nect­ed to the music’s roots.

“Through­out his career,” Gio­van­ni Rus­sonel­lo writes at The New York Times, Corea “nev­er aban­doned his first love, the acoustic piano, on which his punc­til­ious touch and crisp sense of har­mo­ny made his play­ing imme­di­ate­ly dis­tinc­tive.” We hear it in com­po­si­tions like “Spain” (at the top in a beau­ti­ful­ly spare ver­sion with Bob­by McFer­rin), “500 Miles High,” and “Tones for Joan’s Bones,” all of which have “become jazz stan­dards, marked by his dreamy but bright­ly illu­mi­nat­ed har­monies and ear-grab­bing melodies.”

We hear Corea’s “dreamy” acoustic piano through­out Return to Forever’s 1976 Roman­tic War­rior, an album that fea­tures 29 or so addi­tion­al instru­ments among its four musi­cians, includ­ing a Min­i­Moog, Micro­moog, Poly­moog, Moog 15, ARP Odyssey, and an alarm clock and slide whis­tle on the quirky, medieval “The Magi­cian.” This descrip­tion alone might make purists cringe, but charges that jazz fusion albums are over­stuffed and over­ly busy don’t tend to stick to Corea’s best record­ings.

The sound of Return to For­ev­er on Roman­tic War­rior, an album that influ­enced “bands to come on both sides of the Atlantic,” is “nev­er crowd­ed,” Bur­long writes, “and the over­all ambiance from all com­bi­na­tions of the thir­ty some­thing instru­ments used is most­ly one of con­trolled urgency.” Graced with a finesse that shines equal­ly in weird, Sci­en­tol­ogy-inspired elec­tric albums and tra­di­tion­al acoustic trios, Corea’s “ver­sa­til­i­ty is sec­ond to none when it comes to the jazz world,” says his long­time friend and col­lab­o­ra­tor, vibra­phon­ist Gary Bur­ton.

Corea resist­ed the idea that funk and rock instru­men­ta­tion in pro­gres­sive jazz meant the inven­tion of a new sub-genre. “It’s the media that are so inter­est­ed in cat­e­go­riz­ing music,” he said in 1983, “the media and the busi­ness­men, who, after all, have a vest­ed inter­est in keep­ing mar­ket­ing clear cut and sep­a­rate. If crit­ics would ask musi­cians their views about what is hap­pen­ing, you would find that there is always a fusion of sorts tak­ing place… a con­tin­u­al merg­ing of dif­fer­ent streams.”

His advice to fel­low musi­cians who might feel con­strained by tra­di­tion or the stric­tures of the mar­ket is price­less (or “cheap but good,” he wrote), includ­ing the advice he gave a grad­u­at­ing class at Berklee Col­lege of Music in his home state of Mass­a­chu­setts in 1997: “It’s all right to be your­self. In fact, the more your­self you are, the more mon­ey you make.” As a musi­cian, Corea was nev­er any­thing less than him­self, though he didn’t seem in it for the mon­ey, shar­ing com­po­si­tion cred­it equal­ly among the musi­cians on many of his ensem­ble albums.

Corea’s ver­sa­tile musi­cal approach won him 23 Gram­mys (“more than almost any oth­er musi­cian,” writes Rus­sonel­lo), three Latin Gram­mys, and the endur­ing respect and admi­ra­tion of fans and fel­low musi­cians. See more of his flaw­less chops in the inti­mate live per­for­mances above, includ­ing a Tiny Desk Con­cert with Bur­ton, a full con­cert in Spain from 2018 with his acoustic trio, and a duel­ing piano per­for­mance of “Spain” live in Tokyo with pianist Hiro­mi Uehara, just above.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Chick Corea (RIP) Offers 16 Pieces of “Cheap But Good Advice for Play­ing Music in a Group” (1985)

The Uni­ver­sal Mind of Bill Evans: Advice on Learn­ing to Play Jazz & The Cre­ative Process

Miles Davis’ Bitch­es Brew Turns 50: Cel­e­brate the Funk-Jazz-Psych-Rock Mas­ter­piece

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

Wis­dom, humour, com­pas­sion, under­stand­ing, bril­lian­cy of intel­lect, unselfish­ness, mod­esty, courage—he had all these attrib­ut­es… The gov­ern­ment quite clear­ly nev­er under­stood the extent to which Steve Biko was a man of peace. He was mil­i­tant in stand­ing up for his prin­ci­ples, yes, but his abid­ing goal was a peace­ful rec­on­cil­i­a­tion of all South Africans.

—Don­ald Woods

When South African police mur­dered Steve Biko in deten­tion on August 18, 1977, they thought they were rid­ding them­selves of a thorn in their side, that in killing him, they could for­get about him. Senior TIME edi­tor Tony Karon, who grew up in white South Africa, record­ed what the Min­is­ter of Police said when announc­ing Biko’s death to “a con­fer­ence of the rul­ing par­ty”: “I am not glad and I am not sor­ry about Mr. Biko. It leaves me cold. I can say noth­ing to you. Any per­son who dies… I shall also be sor­ry if I die.” Then, writes Karon, “they laughed. Like B‑movie Nazis.”

Despite the apartheid state’s best efforts to destroy him, Biko’s death made him a mar­tyr. “I didn’t know Steve Biko,” writes Karon, “but his death made clear to me, and hun­dreds of young white peo­ple like me, what mil­lions of black South Africans knew from expe­ri­ence…. The fight to end apartheid had claimed many thou­sands of lives before his, and many thou­sands more would be killed after Biko’s mur­der. But no death shook my world, and the coun­try all around me, more than Steve Biko’s.”

Biko helped found the South African Student’s Orga­ni­za­tion (SASO) while study­ing med­i­cine at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Natal, and he found­ed the Black Con­scious­ness Move­ment to advo­cate “self-aware­ness and self-reliance for Black peo­ple,” writes Mohammed Elnaiem at JSTOR Dai­ly. It was a move­ment to cen­ter the expe­ri­ences of Black South Africans. Yet as Biko under­stood the term, “Black” was a polit­i­cal class: his was “a move­ment for peo­ple who are oppressed,” he said, includ­ing so-called “col­ored” and Indi­an South Africans. “We believe,” says Biko in the inter­view above, “in a non-racial soci­ety.”

The gov­ern­ment “soon real­ized,” Karon writes, “the rad­i­cal move­ment was a threat to racial hier­ar­chy in the coun­try,” with its legal divi­sions of caste and class. They could not stop Biko’s mes­sage from res­onat­ing around the world. News of his arrest and death spread quick­ly and remained a pow­er­ful sym­bol of the regime’s bru­tal­i­ty. In the music world, the news took the form of Peter Gabriel’s “Biko.” Released in 1980, the song became a major hit. It was, wrote crit­ic Phil Sut­cliffe, “so hon­est you might even risk call­ing it truth.” Gabriel him­self, on the 40th anniver­sary of Biko’s death, wrote that “both music and lyric are sim­ple but writ­ten to be direct and emo­tion­al.”

He did not need to embell­ish, espe­cial­ly in the song’s final line: “the eyes of the world are watch­ing now, watch­ing now.” Indeed, they were, as they are now, even in our states of pan­dem­ic iso­la­tion, watch­ing the con­tin­ued police bru­tal­i­ty of gov­ern­ments built on racism, colo­nial­ism, slav­ery, apartheid, and exclu­sion. It’s an ide­al time for Gabriel to re-release “Biko,” and re-record it with Play­ing for Change, the orga­ni­za­tion gath­er­ing famous and non-famous musi­cians around the world in remote col­lab­o­ra­tive cov­ers of famous songs with uni­ver­sal res­o­nance. “Biko” belongs in their com­pa­ny.

At the top, you can see the per­for­mance, which opens with the stun­ning voic­es of The Cape Town Ensem­ble choral group. Then bassist Meshell Nde­geo­ce­lo, Beni­nese singer Angélique Kid­jo, and cel­list Yo-Yo Ma join in with a Japan­ese per­cus­sion group and oth­er musi­cians as Gabriel deliv­ers the lyrics with as much con­vic­tion as he did over forty years ago. Just above, see a mov­ing live per­for­mance of “Biko” from 1987, in a video direct­ed by Lol Creme. Intro­duc­ing the song, Gabriel calls the activist “a man who preached non­vi­o­lence in a state that has racism enshrined in its con­sti­tu­tion.” Or as the lyrics put it in their dev­as­tat­ing­ly direct way: “It was busi­ness as usu­al / in police room 619.”

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Grate­ful Dead’s “Rip­ple” Played By Musi­cians Around the World (with Cameos by David Cros­by, Jim­my Buf­fett & Bill Kreutz­mann)

Musi­cians Around the World Play The Band’s Clas­sic Song, “The Weight,” with Help from Rob­bie Robert­son and Ringo Starr

Musi­cians Around the World Play “Lean on Me,” the Uplift­ing Song by Bill With­ers (RIP)

We all reach an age when the music of our youth becomes “the oldies.” When it comes to music as dynam­ic, inno­v­a­tive, and far-reach­ing as hip-hop, that age can feel sur­pris­ing­ly young. Or so it seemed to me, a child of the 90s, when the 21st cen­tu­ry dawned. Now, sep­a­rat­ed from the artists I grew up lis­ten­ing to by a gulf of almost thir­ty years, I can say they are all cer­ti­fi­ably old school, which I sup­pose makes me cer­ti­fi­ably old.

But con­sid­er this—in 1993, a year I once con­sid­ered some­thing of a gold­en age of hip-hop—the music had already trav­eled twen­ty years and thou­sands of miles from its Bronx ori­gins to become a world­wide phe­nom­e­non. Its great­est inno­va­tors, the men and women who invent­ed the sound, were by then very much old school.

In fact, every­one who wasn’t get­ting down to the sound sys­tem of DJ Kool Herc in the New York of the ear­ly sev­en­ties is a late­com­er to the scene, includ­ing punks like Blondie who imme­di­ate­ly seized on its rev­o­lu­tion­ary poten­tial.

“In 1973,” Hen­ry Louis Gates informs us in the video at the top from the Black His­to­ry in Two Min­utes series, the Jamaican-born Herc “set up his turnta­bles and intro­duced a tech­nique at a South Bronx house par­ty that would change music as many peo­ple knew it. His abil­i­ty to switch from record to record—as well as iso­late and repeat music breaks—led to the dis­cov­ery of the hip hop genre.”

It was the sound of a thou­sand radios play­ing, all over the city, with the noise fil­tered out, beats made from the breaks, and the chaos cut into pieces and stitched togeth­er into music again; the sound of turntab­lism, a series of tech­niques, from Herc’s break-beats to the “Trans­former scratch” to jug­gling beats: switch­ing between “two iden­ti­cal records at light­ning fast speed,” as a PBS guide explains, “loop­ing or re-com­bin­ing indi­vid­ual sounds to pro­duce an entire­ly new beat.”

These new means of using play­back devices as instru­ments led “from rework­ing exist­ing tracks to com­pos­ing music” from the com­po­nents, a mad sci­en­tist approach that pre­ced­ed the age of the MC, whose pri­ma­ry pur­pose was to hype the crowd in the music’s ear­ly days, instead of deliv­er­ing the news of the streets in ever more-com­plex rhyme schemes. In the short videos above, you can learn more about Herc’s rev­o­lu­tion. Just above, hear from the man him­self and his for­mer neigh­bors, who went to his first par­ties in the com­mu­ni­ty room of his South Bronx apart­ment build­ing.

Herc took the dis­co DJ’s tech­nique of using two turnta­bles, but played punk and funk records instead, seiz­ing on the obser­va­tion that the crowd went wild dur­ing instru­men­tal breaks. “How would it be,” he thought, “if I put them all togeth­er?” Call­ing it “mer­ry-go-round,” Herc showed off his new idea, after first announc­ing it to the crowd, and got just the reac­tion he’d hoped for. The rest is a his­to­ry we should know. But if we leave out the turntab­lists, the DJs who built the beats that made the music what it is, no mat­ter how old school they sound to us now, we’re miss­ing some­thing crit­i­cal, an exper­i­men­tal rev­o­lu­tion that changed the world.

via The Kids Should See This

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

How Jazz Became the “Moth­er of Hip Hop”

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

All Hail the Beat: How the 1980 Roland TR-808 Drum Machine Changed Pop Music

The His­to­ry of Hip Hop Music Visu­al­ized on a Turntable Cir­cuit Dia­gram: Fea­tures 700 Artists, from DJ Kool Herc to Kanye West

Found­ing Fathers, A Doc­u­men­tary Nar­rat­ed By Pub­lic Enemy’s Chuck D, Presents the True His­to­ry of Hip Hop

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

It takes a cer­tain amount of hubris to write a song like “Bridge Over Trou­bled Water”—to write, that is, a sec­u­lar hymn, a non-reli­gious gospel hit for burned-out six­ties’ folkies. Maybe only a trag­ic flaw could inspire a com­pos­er “com­ing off the back of four hit albums and two num­ber one sin­gles in four years” to soothe the dis­af­fec­tion of down-and-out Amer­i­cans who could see the bot­tom from where they stood in 1969, a year noto­ri­ous for its cul­tur­al dis­af­fec­tion and polit­i­cal gloom.

Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel’s sta­tus as super­star hit­mak­ers at the end of the decade per­haps made it hard­er for view­ers of Songs of Amer­i­ca—the tele­vi­sion film in which “Bridge Over Trou­bled Water” debuted—to take them seri­ous­ly.

When the duo first appears on screen in the musi­cal doc­u­men­tary, of sorts, Gar­funkel “brings up the sub­ject of America’s immi­nent bicen­ten­ni­al,” writes Dori­an Lynskey for the BBC, and “a cam­era-con­scious Simon gazes into the dis­tance and asks solemn­ly: ‘Think it’s gonna make it?’”

Direct­ed by Charles Grodin with over half a mil­lion in CBS mon­ey, the film’s “mood of pen­sive pom­pos­i­ty comes to dom­i­nate.” It won few con­verts, despite the show­stop­per of a song. “The aver­age CBS view­er didn’t want to see the world crum­bling,” again, in Songs of Amer­i­ca.

The heav­i­est sequence was a dark twist on the film’s trav­el­ogue theme, jux­ta­pos­ing clips of the Kennedys and Mar­tin Luther King on the cam­paign trail with footage of mourn­ers watch­ing Bob­by Kennedy’s funer­al train go by. The musi­cal accom­pa­ni­ment was unfa­mil­iar: a kind of white gospel song, state­ly and hymn-like, build­ing to a shat­ter­ing cli­max as the long black train sped through America’s bro­ken heart. One mil­lion view­ers respond­ed by turn­ing the dial and watch­ing the fig­ure skat­ing on NBC instead. Some sent hate mail. Songs of Amer­i­ca wouldn’t be seen again for over 40 years. 

While the movie failed, the song, and album, became instant­ly clas­sic and rose to No. 1. “Bridge Over Trou­bled Water” also entered the cul­tur­al lex­i­con as though it had emerged from the misty pre-record­ing his­to­ry of the 19th cen­tu­ry, when songs were writ­ten and rewrit­ten by anony­mous folk claim­ing divine inspi­ra­tion. “The cel­e­brat­ed New Orleans musi­cian Allen Tou­s­saint liked to say: ‘That song had two writ­ers: Paul Simon and God.’ ”

The real sto­ry involves no super­nat­ur­al intervention—it does involve a kind of “love and theft” (as Bob Dylan admit­ted, allud­ing to a book on black­face min­strel­sy), through the influ­ence of the Swan Sil­ver­tones’ record­ing of the 19th-cen­tu­ry spir­i­tu­al, “Oh Mary Don’t You Weep.” Simon lis­tened to the record “over and over again in his Upper East Side apart­ment… thun­der­struck by a line impro­vised by lead singer Claude Jeter: ‘I’ll be your bridge over deep water if you trust in my name.’” (When Simon met Jeter two years lat­er, he appar­ent­ly “wrote him a cheque on the spot.”)

Inspi­ra­tion flowed through him. “I have no idea where it came from… It just came, all of a sud­den,” he remem­bers in the clip fur­ther up from the 2011 doc­u­men­tary The Har­mo­ny Game. “I remem­ber think­ing this is con­sid­er­ably bet­ter than I usu­al­ly write.” He rec­og­nized right away that he had penned what he would call “my great­est song”… “my ‘Yes­ter­day.’” The com­par­i­son is notable for its con­trast of atti­tudes.

Paul McCartney’s mega-bal­lad extols the virtues of nos­tal­gia and pines for sim­pler times; Simon’s chan­nels Black Amer­i­can gospel, look­ing beyond per­son­al pain to the plight of oth­ers. It also takes its chord pro­gres­sion from a Bach chorale adapt­ed by 19th-cen­tu­ry hymn writ­ers. That’s not to say “Bridge Over Trou­bled Water,” doesn’t evoke the per­son­al. The lyrics “Sail on sil­ver girl” speak direct­ly to his soon-to-be wife Peg­gy Harp­er, “who had recent­ly fret­ted about find­ing her first grey hairs.” The rest came from tra­di­tions of reli­gious music.

Simon gave the vocal to Gar­funkel because he thought “only Artie’s choir­boy voice could do jus­tice to the song,” Lynskey writes. Gar­funkel felt intim­i­dat­ed by the song and “liked the sound of Paul’s falset­to.” Simon took his hes­i­ta­tion as an affront. “Such was the state of their part­ner­ship in 1969.” It’s clear in the open­ing min­utes of Simon’s solo 1970 inter­view with Dick Cavett at the top that the icon­ic folk team would soon be part­ing ways, for a time at least. Cavett has some fun with Simon about the authen­tic­i­ty of his song­writ­ing. “Maybe I lied… a cou­ple of times,” he answers, some good-natured Queens defi­ance aris­ing in his voice. “I was pre­tend­ing to be some­one else.”

Cavett then (at 5:25) asks the “impos­si­ble question”—how does one write a song like “Bridge Over Trou­bled Water”? Simon pulls out his gui­tar and oblig­es, show­ing how the chords first came from Bach. He gets big laughs and applause for his def­i­n­i­tion of feel­ing “stuck” before he dis­cov­ered the Swan Sil­ver­tones. “Every­where I went led me to where I didn’t want to go.” It’s maybe as uni­ver­sal a feel­ing as has ever been put in song.

“Bridge Over Trou­bled Water” turned 50 in Jan­u­ary of 2020, a month or so before so the nation Simon eulo­gized pre­ma­ture­ly in Songs of Amer­i­ca fell into seri­ous­ly trou­bled waters. In our stuck­ness, maybe his clas­sic bal­lad, and espe­cial­ly its call to reach beyond our­selves, can help get us over like noth­ing else. See Simon and Gar­funkel play it live just above in their first Cen­tral Park reunion con­cert in 1981.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Watch Simon & Gar­funkel Sing “The Sound of Silence” 45 Years After Its Release, and Just Get Haunt­ing­ly Bet­ter with Time

Art Gar­funkel Lists 1195 Books He Read Over 45 Years, Plus His 157 Favorites (Many Free)

Tom Pet­ty Takes You Inside His Song­writ­ing Craft

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