Louis Armstrong Remembers How He Survived the 1918 Flu Epidemic in New Orleans

in History, Music | April 15th, 2020

Born into pover­ty in New Orleans in 1901, and grow­ing up dur­ing some of the most bru­tal years of seg­re­ga­tion in the South, Louis Arm­strong first lived with his grand­moth­er, next in a “Col­ored Waif’s Home” after drop­ping out of school at age 11, then with his moth­er and sis­ter in a home so small they had to sleep in the same bed. After already liv­ing through the first World War, he would go on to wit­ness the Span­ish Flu epi­dem­ic, the Great Depres­sion, World War II, the Cold War, and the tur­bu­lent 1960s and the Viet­nam con­flict.

That’s a lot for one life­time, though for much of it, Arm­strong was a star and liv­ing leg­end who beat the odds and rose above his ori­gins with will and tal­ent. Even so, he suf­fered some severe ups and downs dur­ing the hard times, tour­ing so much to cov­er his debts in the lean 1930s, for exam­ple, that he injured his lips and fin­gers, and final­ly mov­ing to Europe when the mob came after him.

Armstrong’s descrip­tions of his expe­ri­ence of the 1918 influen­za pandemic—as he remem­bers it in his 1954 mem­oir Satch­mo: My Life in New Orleans—are almost jaun­ty, as you can part­ly see in the type­script page above from the Louis Arm­strong House. But he remem­bered it from the per­spec­tive of a 17-year-old musi­cian in robust health—who seemed to have some kind of resis­tance to the flu.

He devotes no more than two para­graphs to the flu, which hit the city hard in Octo­ber of that year. Accord­ing to the Influen­za Ency­clo­pe­dia, an online project doc­u­ment­ing the flu in the U.S. between 1918–1919, New Orleans city author­i­ties “act­ed imme­di­ate­ly,” once they dis­cov­ered the out­break, arrived by car­go ship the month before.

On Octo­ber 9th, the New Orleans Super­in­ten­dent of Health, “with May­or Mar­tine Behrman’s con­sent and the bless­ing of state author­i­ties… ordered closed all schools (pub­lic, pri­vate, and parochial, as well as com­mer­cial col­leges), church­es, the­aters, movie hous­es, and oth­er places of amuse­ment, and [pro­hib­it­ed] pub­lic gath­er­ings such as sport­ing events and pub­lic funer­als and wed­dings.”

For a strug­gling young musi­cian mak­ing a liv­ing play­ing clubs and river­boats, the clo­sure of “oth­er places of amuse­ment” took a seri­ous toll. The loss of liveli­hood is what seems to have hurt Arm­strong the most when he returned to the city from tour­ing, still unsure if the Great War would end.

When I came back from Houma things were much tougher. The Kaiser’s mon­key busi­ness was get­ting worse, and, what is more, a seri­ous flu epi­dem­ic had hit New Orleans. Every­body was down with it, except me. That was because I was physic-mind­ed. I nev­er missed a week with­out a physic, and that kept all kinds of sick­ness out of me.

What­ev­er “physic” helped Armstrong’s avoid infec­tion, it wasn’t for lack of expo­sure. In lieu of play­ing the trum­pet he began car­ing for the sick, since all of the hos­pi­tals, even those that would take black patients, were com­plete­ly over­crowd­ed.

Just when the gov­ern­ment was about to let crowds of peo­ple con­gre­gate again so that we could play our horns once more the lid was clamped down tighter than ever. That forced me to take any odd jobs I could get. With every­body suf­fer­ing from the flu, I had to work and play the doc­tor to every­one in my fam­i­ly as well as all my friends in the neigh­bor­hood. If I do say so, I did a good job cur­ing them.

We might imag­ine some of those “odd jobs” were what we now call “essential”—i.e. low paid and high risk under the cir­cum­stances. He per­se­vered and final­ly got a gig play­ing a “honky-tonk” that avoid­ed a shut-down because it was “third rate,” and he “could play a lot of blues for cheap pros­ti­tutes and hus­tlers.” Few things could get Satch­mo down, it seemed, not even a flu pan­dem­ic, but he was one of the lucky ones—luckily for the future of jazz. Only, we don’t have to imag­ine how hard this must have been for him. We just have to take a look around.

Learn more about the 1918 influen­za epi­dem­ic in the U.S. at the Influen­za Ency­clo­pe­dia and read the rest of Armstrong’s account of his for­ma­tive years at the Inter­net Archive.

via Ted Gioia

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Only Known Footage of Louis Arm­strong in a Record­ing Stu­dio: Watch the Recent­ly-Dis­cov­ered Film (1959)

Louis Arm­strong Plays His­toric Cold War Con­certs in East Berlin & Budapest (1965)

What Hap­pened to U.S. Cities That Practiced–and Didn’t Practice–Social Dis­tanc­ing Dur­ing 1918’s “Span­ish Flu”

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

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A Playlist of Songs to Get You Through Hard Times: Stream 20 Tracks from the Alan Lomax Collection

in Life, Music | April 15th, 2020

There’s an argu­ment to be made that folk music is always polit­i­cal, in a broad sense. It is music made by ordi­nary peo­ple strug­gling against over­whelm­ing forces: nat­ur­al dis­as­ters, oppres­sive gov­ern­ments, cor­rupt boss­es, job loss, the pains of mar­riage and illic­it rela­tion­ships… and epi­dem­ic infec­tious dis­eases. It’s music of con­so­la­tion and resilience. Folk music helps us navigate—as the title of a 20-song col­lec­tion of Alan Lomax’s record­ings new­ly released on Band­camp puts it—“hard times: up, over and through.”

At least,  the fact that we know of and can hear so much folk music from around the world has a good deal to do with polit­i­cal deci­sions made, for exam­ple, in the U.S., where Lomax began work­ing with his folk­lorist father John, col­lect­ing music and inter­views for the Library of Congress’s Archive of Amer­i­can Folk Song. This work was fund­ed on the premise that con­serv­ing the voice of the peo­ple had val­ue inde­pen­dent of its prof­itabil­i­ty.

But prof­itable it was: first cre­ative­ly, as Lomax’s record­ings inspired the Amer­i­can and British folk revivals of the mid-20th cen­tu­ry: then finan­cial­ly, as folk and folk-rock artists sold mil­lions of records. Giv­en the tenor of those times, it’s no won­der folk became main­ly asso­ci­at­ed with Civ­il Rights, labor, and anti-war move­ments. Yet as folk­lorists like Lomax showed, even after the Con­gres­sion­al fund­ing end­ed, folk songs from around the world have sto­ries to tell that we may nev­er have heard oth­er­wise.

A 20-track selec­tion of those songs, dat­ing between 1936 and 1982, can hard­ly be rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the mas­sive trove of record­ings Lomax col­lect­ed. It does show, a press release notes, “an enor­mous range of geo­graph­i­cal and styl­is­tic diver­si­ty across 50 years,” with artists rang­ing from “leg­ends of Amer­i­can ver­nac­u­lar music—Bessie Jones, Skip James, and Dock Bog­gs among them—to rur­al Ital­ian, Span­ish, and Scot­tish singers.” This music offers, “in these try­ing times, com­fort diver­sion, and his­tor­i­cal per­spec­tive.”

Such per­spec­tive is crit­i­cal when the world seems to be falling apart. The strug­gles of “folk”—wherever they may be in the world—are inter­con­nect­ed and ongo­ing. Hear­ing how peo­ple respond­ed to dis­as­ter, both per­son­al and col­lec­tive, in decades past pro­vides a sense of con­ti­nu­ity. Things have been very bad before, and peo­ple have had rea­son to lament. To declare that “Mon­ey is King,” as a track by The Growl­ing Tiger tells us. To won­der plain­tive­ly, as Har­ry Cox does, “What will become of England/if things go on this way?”

But folk singers have also had rea­sons for joy, in the best and the bleak­est of times, and joy is also a kind of pol­i­tics, a show of strength in the face of what Rev. Pearly Brown plain­ly calls “A Mean Old World.” Stream the col­lec­tion, which includes six pre­vi­ous­ly unre­leased tracks, above, and buy indi­vid­ual tracks or the full dig­i­tal album for $5 at Band­camp.

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

Alan Lomax’s Mas­sive Music Archive Is Online: Fea­tures 17,000 His­toric Blues & Folk Record­ings

Hear 17,000+ Tra­di­tion­al Folk & Blues Songs Curat­ed by the Great Musi­col­o­gist Alan Lomax

Leg­endary Folk­lorist Alan Lomax: ‘The Land Where the Blues Began’

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

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Rare Grooves on Vinyl from Around the World: Hear Curated Playlists of Arabic, Brazilian, Bollywood, Soviet & Turkish Music

in Music | April 14th, 2020

Just as the cat­e­go­ry of “For­eign Lan­guage Film” has seri­ous prob­lems, so too does that of “World Music,” which names so many kinds of music that it names noth­ing at all. World music “might best be described by what it is not,” not­ed a 1994 Music Library Asso­ci­a­tion report. “It is not West­ern art music, nei­ther it is main­stream West­ern folk or pop­u­lar music.” The report adds some vague qual­i­fi­ca­tions about “eth­nic or for­eign ele­ments” then gives away the game: “It is sim­ply not our music, it is their music, music which belongs to some­one else.”

Per­haps one can see why the idea is now regard­ed by some as “out­dat­ed and offen­sive.” As the Uni­ver­si­ty of Minnesota’s Tim­o­thy Bren­nan argues in a his­tor­i­cal analy­sis of the term, “world music does not exist” except “as an idea in the mind of jour­nal­ists, crit­ics, and the buy­ers of records.”

But to whom can music belong? If Japan­ese musi­cians play jazz, are they play­ing Amer­i­can-owned music? Is it “Japan­ese jazz” or just jazz? Must it have Japan­ese instru­ments for it to be “World Music”?

How these ques­tions get answered can deter­mine whether most lis­ten­ers ever encounter the record­ed out­put of jazz musi­cians from Japan, such as that in an excel­lent thir­ty-minute sam­pler from the 1970s that we fea­tured just a few days back. In this mix, DJ Zag Erlat show­cas­es names that “will sound famil­iar,” wrote Open Culture’s Col­in Mar­shall, “to those of us who’ve spent years dig­ging crates around the world for Japan­ese jazz on vinyl.” That’s a select group, indeed, and one you may be inspired to join once you’ve heard Erlat’s mix.

The Turk­ish DJ has fur­ther done his part to dis­am­biguate World Music on his YouTube chan­nel My Ana­log Jour­nal. Here, you’ll find Erlat spin­ning sets of “Brazil­ian Grooves,” “Ara­bic Grooves,” “African Grooves,” “Bol­ly­wood Grooves,” and so much more—including a set of Jazz from the USSR in his tenth episode that is quite a reveal­ing lis­ten. Who knew such music exist­ed in the Sovi­et Union? Well, except for those Sovi­et jazz crate-dig­gers.

Now you know too, and you’ll learn a lot more about what the world’s been up to, music-wise. These are also, obvi­ous­ly, very broad cat­e­gories, and one might rea­son­ably object to them. But it’s a great start for get­ting to know some clas­sic pop sounds from spe­cif­ic regions in the world. Erlat does get more spe­cif­ic in some sets, as in his Japan­ese jazz from the 70s. (I’d espe­cial­ly rec­om­mend his “Turk­ish Female Singers from the 70s” mix.)

This is music of the mod­ern world—not “ours” or “theirs”—its basic ele­ments embed­ded in a glob­al cul­tur­al mar­ket­place. “It is 25 years since the con­cept of world music was cre­at­ed by enthu­si­asts in a north Lon­don pub,” wrote The Guardian’s Ian Bir­rell in 2012. “Per­haps it made sense then, as a mar­ket­ing device to pro­mote the sounds of the world that were lost in record shops and on the radio. But not now. Not in this mixed-up, messy and shrunk­en world.” Per­haps it did­n’t make sense then, when artists like Fela Kuti or Os Mutantes made music that was as much “West­ern” as it was African or South Amer­i­can.

It becomes increas­ing­ly impos­si­ble to seg­re­gate artists from dif­fer­ent coun­tries. Genre mashups rule, and the more furi­ous­ly artists from around the world pick up and put down glob­al styles, the more they attract the pos­i­tive notice of fans and crit­ics in pop music. But per­haps we’ll con­tin­ue to refer to indige­nous folk tra­di­tions as “World Music,” and per­haps that’s what the label has always been meant to describe. In that case, as one writer for the Grammy’s offi­cial blog put it, “some­thing tells me that the rest of the world has a dif­fer­ent def­i­n­i­tion.”

Get famil­iar with sev­er­al oth­er groovy musics from else­where at Erlat’s My Ana­log Jour­nal.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A 30-Minute Intro­duc­tion to Japan­ese Jazz from the 1970s: Like Japan­ese Whisky, It’s Under­rat­ed, But Very High Qual­i­ty

Music Is Tru­ly a Uni­ver­sal Lan­guage: New Research Shows That Music World­wide Has Impor­tant Com­mon­al­i­ties

Stream a 144-Hour Discog­ra­phy of Clas­sic Jazz Record­ings from Blue Note Records: Miles Davis, Art Blakey, John Coltrane, Ornette Cole­man & More

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

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Watch Full Productions of Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Musicals, Streaming Free for 48 Hours Every Weekend

in Music, Theatre | April 13th, 2020

Writer and the­ater­mak­er Nicholas Berger’s recent polemic, “The For­got­ten Art of Assem­bly: Or, Why The­atre Mak­ers Should Stop Mak­ing,” touched a whole plexus of nerves, by posit­ing that the fran­tic rush to approx­i­mate live per­for­mance in iso­la­tion, using non-broad­cast qual­i­ty home equip­ment and a live-stream­ing plat­form, is an imi­ta­tion so poor it should cease and desist.

Acknowl­edg­ing the scary eco­nom­ic real­i­ty that dri­ves many of these hasti­ly assem­bled online read­ings, solo shows, brand new 24-hour plays, mono­logues, and inex­pert­ly shot Off-Off-Broad­way footage did not get Berg­er a pass from the the­ater com­mu­ni­ty.

Nor did attempt­ing to head ‘em off at the pass by fret­ting that his “cyn­i­cism for this emer­gency style of dig­i­tal per­for­mance will be labeled as pes­simism or defeatism” and insist­ing that it’s his “love for the­atre that cringes when (he sees) it inch clos­er and clos­er to becom­ing a Tik­Tok.”

We acknowl­edge the like­li­hood that the gen­er­al pub­lic has as much appetite for this sort of the­ater com­mu­ni­ty infight­ing as it does for the bur­geon­ing Covid-19 era vir­tu­al the­ater scene, espe­cial­ly if the play­ers are unfa­mil­iar from film or TV.

Not so the free Andrew Lloyd Web­ber buf­fet being served up every week­end in the recent­ly hatched The Shows Must Go On YouTube chan­nel.

Here, the excel­lent pro­duc­tion val­ues, famous names, and brand name tunes add up to a gen­uine tele­vi­sion event, espe­cial­ly since each offer­ing sticks around just 48 hours before turn­ing back into a pump­kin.

You’ve already missed come­di­an Tim Minchin’s unfor­get­table street punk turn as Judas in 2012’s Jesus Christ Super­star, expert­ly filmed at London’s cav­ernous con­cert venue The O2. (Have a look at the above clip for a taste of what you missed—in addi­tion to the Victoria’s Secret-style angels and mega church-style light­ing dis­plays, this pro­duc­tion fea­tured pole danc­ing, Anony­mous masks, a for­mer Spice Girl, and a close enough Shep­ard Fairey trib­ute poster for a Jesus who won the cov­et­ed role in a TV tal­ent show.

Regret to inform, you’ve also missed for­mer teen idol Don­ny Osmond as the tit­u­lar char­ac­ter in the 1999 remount of Joseph and the Amaz­ing Tech­ni­col­or Dream­coat. (Or not, if Lloyd-Weber takes mer­cy on hoards of dev­as­tat­ed view­ers flock­ing to the YouTube com­ments sec­tion to beg him to air it again, hav­ing just dis­cov­ered that they missed it the first time.)

What’s next? You’ll have to ask the Mag­ic 8 ball, or wait for an announce­ment, though in the video below, Lloyd Web­ber pledges that his failed adap­ta­tion of author P.G. Wode­house’s beloved series, By Jeeves, will for sure be a fea­ture of the line up. Oth­er titles in his oeu­vre include Cats, Starlight Express, Sun­set Boule­vard, The Phan­tom of the Opera, and Evi­ta (the lat­ter with lyrics by Tim Rice, Lloyd Webber’s col­lab­o­ra­tor on Jesus Christ Super­star, Joseph and the Amaz­ing Tech­ni­col­or Dream­coat, and sev­er­al oth­er shows).

Each week’s fea­ture-length show streams free on YouTube for 48 hours, begin­ning at 2 PM EST.

As with much of the thrown-togeth­er pro­gram­ming Berg­er decries in “The For­got­ten Art of Assem­bly,” view­ers of these not-quite-live per­for­mances are encour­aged to cap things off with a dona­tion to a the­ater char­i­ty, with sug­gest­ed links for giv­ing in the US, the UK, and Aus­tralia.

For those who’ve nev­er caught an episode of Great Per­for­mances and thus find the con­cept of watch­ing taped the­ater “a bit of a head­fuck,” to quote Minchin, the advice he gave to Time Out (tem­porar­i­ly rebrand­ed as Time In) is:

You’ve just got to get through the first ten min­utes, and then it’s an extra­or­di­nary expe­ri­ence – because you’re actu­al­ly watch­ing peo­ple in real time.

Sub­scribe to The Shows Must Go On here.

#WithMe

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Tim Minchin Presents “9 Rules to Live By” in a Fun­ny and Wise Com­mence­ment Speech (2013)

Sooth­ing, Uplift­ing Resources for Par­ents & Care­givers Stressed by the COVID-19 Cri­sis

Live Per­form­ers Now Stream­ing Shows, from their Homes to Yours: Neil Young, Cold­play, Broad­way Stars, Met­ro­pol­i­tan Operas & More

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Her unprompt­ed con­tri­bu­tion to the Off-Off-Broad­way in Iso­la­tion scene is a hasti­ly assem­bled trib­ute to the clas­sic 60s social line dance, The Madi­son. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Radiohead Will Stream Concerts Free Online Until the Pandemic Comes to an End

in Music | April 13th, 2020

Force thou­sands of musi­cians to stay home in their stu­dios and what do you get? There’ll be an album boom for sure, just as there’s been an explo­sion of direct-to-you online live per­for­mances, inter­views, and social media mes­sages. Most recent­ly, Richard D. James, aka elec­tron­ic leg­end Aphex Twin, shared six new songs on Sound­cloud. And Radiohead—a band with an equal­ly loy­al fan­base and as much longevi­ty and exper­i­men­tal nerve—announced they’re “doing their bit,” as Dazed reports, “by upload­ing the best of their con­certs to their YouTube chan­nel.”

“Now that you have no choice whether or not you fan­cy a qui­et night in,” the band wrote on Insta­gram, “we here­by present the first of sev­er­al LIVE SHOWS from the Radio­head Pub­lic Library,” their new­ly-debuted, exten­sive online archive. The first con­cert uploaded, Live From a Tent in Dublin, cap­tures an Octo­ber 2000 per­for­mance just days after the release of Kid A. “The 23-song set includ­ed sev­er­al album tracks includ­ing ‘Opti­mistic,’ ‘Morn­ing Bell,’ ‘The Nation­al Anthem,’ and ‘In Lim­bo,’” notes Con­se­quence of Sound. That’s a piv­otal moment in the band’s his­to­ry, for sure. Maybe the shock of that album is hard to feel 20 years on, but imme­di­ate­ly after its release, Kid A shat­tered ideas of what rock bands were allowed to do.

There are many more clas­sic shows to come—some of them doc­u­ments of events that stand as music his­to­ry at this point and most evi­dence of what an incred­i­ble live band Radio­head has been, their com­mand of atmos­phere and dynam­ics eerie in its seem­ing near-effort­less­ness. Like so much of their out­put from OK Com­put­er on, these songs sound as rel­e­vant as ever, espe­cial­ly Thom Yorke’s anguished vocal in the open­er, above, “The Nation­al Anthem.” “Every­one is so near,” he wails, “Every­one has got the fear/It’s hold­ing on,” a lyric that neat­ly sums up his sense of a dystopi­an post-modernity’s dou­ble edge.

In our iso­la­tion, Yorke con­stant­ly sug­gests, we can feel so uncom­fort­ably, claus­tro­pho­bi­cal­ly shut in with each oth­er. Like the damned in No Exit, there’s nowhere else to go. So, stay home with Radio­head shows. “We will be releas­ing one a week until either the restric­tions result­ing from the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion are eased, or we run out of shows,” the band writes. “Which will be first? No-one knows.” Will there be a new album? Unlike­ly. The band’s embrace of their roles as active, pub­lic cura­tors of their lega­cy seems like a sig­nal of Radio­head­’s emer­i­tus sta­tus.

But they’ve spent the last sev­er­al years giv­ing away exclu­sive new songs, live stream­ing shows, releas­ing their entire stu­dio cat­a­logue on YouTube, and com­mu­ni­cat­ing direct­ly with fans, so nei­ther is their Radio­head Pub­lic Library a depar­ture. At Con­se­quence of Sound you can also hear recent pod­cast inter­views with Radio­head gui­tarist Ed O’Brien (whose first solo album comes out this month) and long­time Radio­head pro­duc­er and per­haps sixth mem­ber of the band, Nigel Godrich.

Check the band’s YouTube chan­nel each week for the lat­est uploaded con­cert and enjoy it while it lasts!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Intro­duc­ing The Radio­head Pub­lic Library: Radio­head Makes Their Full Cat­a­logue Avail­able via a Free Online Web Site

The 10 Most Depress­ing Radio­head Songs Accord­ing to Data Sci­ence: Hear the Songs That Ranked High­est in a Researcher’s “Gloom Index”

Radio­head Puts Every Offi­cial Album on YouTube, Mak­ing Them All Free to Stream

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

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Japanese Buddhist Monk Covers Ramones’ “Teenage Lobotomy,” “Queen’s “We Will Rock You,” Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine” & More

in Music | April 13th, 2020

The music of the Bea­t­les, the most influ­en­tial band of all time, has endured for more than five decades now. It also seems to have crossed all cul­tur­al bound­aries: how many peo­ple around the world can lis­ten to the record­ings made togeth­er by John Lennon, Paul McCart­ney, George Har­ri­son, and Ringo Starr, and claim to be hear­ing some­thing alien? The sheer adapt­abil­i­ty of the Bea­t­les’ songs sure­ly also has some­thing to do with their stay­ing pow­er: they’re rec­og­niz­able when played more or less as the Fab Four played them, and they’re just as rec­og­niz­able when sung by com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent voic­es, played by com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent instru­ments, and set in com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent cul­tur­al con­texts.

Take the cov­er of “Yel­low Sub­ma­rine” at the top of the post, per­formed not by Ringo Starr but by a Japan­ese Bud­dhist monk who calls him­self Kos­san. Accom­pa­ny­ing him­self only with the kinds of drums and gongs one would hear in a tem­ple, Kos­san makes the Bea­t­les’ musi­cal tale of life beneath the waves his own.

Crit­ic Ian Mac­Don­ald calls the orig­i­nal “Yel­low Sub­ma­rine” a “sparkling nov­el­ty song impos­si­ble to dis­like,” and view­ers on Youtube have found this more monk­ish ver­sion equal­ly irre­sistible. Kos­san’s cov­er of the Ramones’ “Teenage Lobot­o­my” just above, whose dis­tort­ed gui­tars sound both incon­gru­ous and very con­gru­ous indeed, has also begun to attract atten­tion.

The orig­i­nal New York punk rock­ers may seem an even odd­er choice than the Bea­t­les for a Bud­dhist monk, but not for this Bud­dhist monk, who’s put in his own time on the streets of the Big Apple. “Every week­end, Kazu­ta­ka Yama­da straps on his blue Rollerblades and heads from his Chelsea apart­ment to the Upper East Side,” writes Corey Kil­gan­non in a 2007 post at The New York Times, refer­ring to Kos­san monk by his real name. “After nav­i­gat­ing the city’s streets and glid­ing through Cen­tral Park, he stops in front of the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art,” where he “puts on black shoes and a large, cone-shaped straw hat, then holds out a wood­en bowl and for hours on end, chants in Japan­ese the same four lines of a Bud­dhist prayer.” The Times also pro­duced a video of Kos­san’s pub­lic chant­i­ng, which includes a brief inter­view with the man him­self.

More in-depth is this Eng­lish-trans­lat­ed con­ver­sa­tion at My Eyes Tokyo, in which Kos­san tells of how his musi­cal career began in Cen­tral Park: “When I was play­ing the san­shin on a bench, a guy gave me a dol­lar. I was sur­prised because I did­n’t expect that at all. I was play­ing it there only because it was a nice day.” Thir­teen years lat­er he plays from his home­land to inter­net audi­ences around the world, per­form­ing not just hit songs from the West (and it would be hard to get more west­ern than “We Will Rock You”), but East­ern rock as well, like “Lin­da Lin­da Lin­da” by Japan­ese punk icons The Blue Hearts. Even in this way, Kos­san remains in a New York of the mind: “I’m total­ly Japan­ese and came from Japan so I stick to being a ‘100% pure Japan­ese’ here in New York,” as he told My Eyes Tokyo. “I believe that is a real New York­er.”

via Boing Boing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Punk Dul­cimer: The Ramones’ “I Wan­na Be Sedat­ed” Played on the Dul­cimer

Hear 100 Amaz­ing Cov­er Ver­sions of Bea­t­les Songs

The 15 Worst Cov­ers of Bea­t­les Songs: William Shat­ner, Bill Cos­by, Tiny Tim, Sean Con­nery & Your Excel­lent Picks

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

Watch the Bud­dhism-Inspired Video for Leonard Cohen’s New­ly-Released Song, “Hap­pens to the Heart”

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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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Stream Andrea Bocelli’s Easter Concert from Milan

in Music | April 12th, 2020

“On East­er Sun­day (April 12, 2020), by invi­ta­tion of the City and of the Duo­mo cathe­dral of Milan, Ital­ian glob­al music icon Andrea Bocel­li gave a solo per­for­mance rep­re­sent­ing a mes­sage of love, heal­ing and hope to Italy and the world. Down­load the hymn sheet and sing along here.” And watch the con­cert above.

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A 30-Minute Introduction to Japanese Jazz from the 1970s: Like Japanese Whisky, It’s Underrated, But Very High Quality

in Music | April 10th, 2020

“Jazz and Japan shouldn’t mix,” says All-Japan: The Cat­a­logue of Every­thing Japan­ese. “After all, the essence of jazz lies in impro­vi­sa­tion — a con­cept large­ly absent from both tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese music and Japan­ese soci­ety as a whole. Japan may adapt, but it does not impro­vise.” And yet, as the book goes on to tell, jazz and Japan do indeed mix, and they began doing so even before the Sec­ond World War. Japan­ese jazz dates back to the 1920s, when it drew inspi­ra­tion from vis­it­ing Fil­ipino bands who had picked the music up from their Amer­i­can occu­piers. In the cen­tu­ry since then, devot­ed Japan­ese play­ers (and their even more devot­ed Japan­ese lis­ten­ers) have devel­oped per­haps the most robust jazz cul­ture in the world.

But please, don’t believe me: have a lis­ten to the mix of 1970s Japan­ese jazz on vinyl above. Spun by Turk­ish DJ Zag Erlat on his Youtube chan­nel My Ana­log Jour­nal, it show­cas­es such musi­cians as trom­bon­ist Hiroshi Suzu­ki, sax­o­phon­ist Mabu­mi Yam­aguchi, and gui­tarist Kiyoshi Sug­i­mo­to. These names will sound famil­iar — though not over-famil­iar — to those of us who’ve spent years dig­ging crates around the world for Japan­ese jazz on vinyl.

Thanks to Youtube, they’re now becom­ing bet­ter-known among jazz fans of all stripes: just like the 1980s Japan­ese high-tech dis­co-funk now known as city pop, Japan­ese jazz owes much of its mod­ern recog­ni­tion to the algo­rithm. As a result, actu­al Japan­ese jazz albums like the ones non­cha­lant­ly dis­played by Erlat in the video have become a hot­ter com­mod­i­ty than they used to be.

Like all of Erlat’s “cof­fee break ses­sions” (oth­ers of which focus on Japan­ese dra­ma funk, Turk­ish female singers from the 70s, and “USSR grooves”), this mix runs a brisk 33 min­utes. If you enjoy the taste enough to go back for more, allow me to sug­gest the work of such Japan­ese jazzmen as Teruo Naka­mu­ra, Masayoshi Takana­ka, and Teru­masa Hino — much of which comes from the 1970s, an era that enthu­si­asts across the world now see as some­thing of a gold­en age. You’ll still only have skimmed the sur­face of Japan­ese jazz, one of the many West­ern inven­tions tak­en to anoth­er lev­el of mas­tery, and exhil­a­rat­ing new direc­tions, in the Land of the Ris­ing Sun. As one com­menter on Youtube puts it, “Japan­ese Jazz is like Japan­ese whisky: under­rat­ed, but very high qual­i­ty.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Acclaimed Japan­ese Jazz Pianist Yōsuke Yamashita Plays a Burn­ing Piano on the Beach

Haru­ki Murakami’s Pas­sion for Jazz: Dis­cov­er the Novelist’s Jazz Playlist, Jazz Essay & Jazz Bar

Stream a 144-Hour Discog­ra­phy of Clas­sic Jazz Record­ings from Blue Note Records: Miles Davis, Art Blakey, John Coltrane, Ornette Cole­man & More

Hear 2,000 Record­ings of the Most Essen­tial Jazz Songs: A Huge Playlist for Your Jazz Edu­ca­tion

Stream Loads of “City Pop,” the Elec­tron­ic-Dis­co-Funk Music That Pro­vid­ed the Sound­track for Japan Dur­ing the Roar­ing 1980s

How Youtube’s Algo­rithm Turned an Obscure 1980s Japan­ese Song Into an Enor­mous­ly Pop­u­lar Hit: Dis­cov­er Mariya Takeuchi’s “Plas­tic Love”

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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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