In terms of brand recog­ni­tion, one has to admit it is remark­able that the name Zildjian—stamped on mil­lions of cym­bals worldwide—has such wide cul­tur­al cur­ren­cy. The prod­uct this com­pa­ny makes is not one most peo­ple get very close to out­side of a drum kit in a grade school music room. You nev­er see Zild­jian adver­tise­ments, unless you are a musi­cian, and you won’t encounter a Zild­jian cym­bal at your local all-in-one big box store. Yet Zild­jian cym­bals might even be more famous than icon­ic brands of elec­tric gui­tars like Fend­er and Gib­son or amps like Mar­shall and Vox.

Why is that? It’s easy, the com­pa­ny was found­ed 400 years ago in Con­stan­tino­ple and has remained in the Zild­jian fam­i­ly since an alchemist named Avedis was giv­en the sur­name by Sul­tan Osman II in the ear­ly 17th cen­tu­ry. In all that time, Mozart praised Zild­jians (then just called “Turk­ish cym­bals”), they appeared at London’s Great Exhi­bi­tion, and they have been essen­tial to the kits of jazz and rock drum­mers for as long as both gen­res have exist­ed. It will nev­er be pos­si­ble to buy this kind of pub­lic­i­ty.

How has Zild­jian, who incor­po­rat­ed in the U.S. in 1929, stayed in busi­ness so long and con­tin­ued to main­tain such a rep­u­ta­tion for qual­i­ty? It’s all down, they say, to a secret recipe, passed down from gen­er­a­tion to gen­er­a­tion, descend­ed from Avedis him­self, whose name graces the Avedis Vartere­sian Melt­ing Room, where Zild­jian cast­ings are made. You can watch what hap­pens to those cast­ings in the fas­ci­nat­ing 10-minute video above. “Only 4 fac­to­ry employ­ees and the own­ers of the com­pa­ny are allowed inside” the Melt­ing Room, notes the video’s YouTube page, “due to their knowl­edge of the ‘Zild­jian Secret.’”

We do not learn the secret recipe, nor do we learn how a trade secret can be kept for 400 years, but we do see Zild­jians heat­ed, rolled out, shaped, cut, ham­mered, lath­ed, fin­ished, and, final­ly, “stamped with the Zild­jian Logo as well as the model/size of the cym­bal.” It’s gen­er­al­ly pret­ty cool to watch unre­mark­able, every­day prod­ucts go through the many stages of a fac­to­ry pro­duc­tion process. Watch­ing the Zild­jian process adds a lay­er of his­tor­i­cal leg­end and intrigue, and the allure of see­ing raw mate­ri­als trans­formed into objects of visu­al and aur­al beau­ty.

See Zildjian’s YouTube page for a time­stamped com­men­tary on each step in the pro­duc­tion.

via Laugh­ing Squid

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Zild­jian Cym­bals Were Cre­at­ed by an Alchemist in the Ottoman Empire, Cir­ca 1618

Vis­it an Online Col­lec­tion of 61,761 Musi­cal Instru­ments from Across the World

The Neu­ro­science of Drum­ming: Researchers Dis­cov­er the Secrets of Drum­ming & The Human Brain

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

As Josh Jones observed yes­ter­day, Miles Davis’ leg­endary jazz album Kind of Blue turns 60 this week. Today, we want to keep the par­ty going a lit­tle longer and fea­ture this video essay from Sweet­wa­ter. They write:

In 1959, Miles Davis went to Colum­bia Records in Man­hat­tan to forge a new style of music impro­vi­sa­tion. With the com­pa­ny of oth­er leg­endary musi­cians, like John Coltrane and Bill Evans, Kind of Blue was record­ed; the great­est sell­ing jazz album of all time. Miles chose to take an inter­pre­tive dance approach to impro­vi­sa­tion, devel­op­ing ideas and using space to cre­ate his unique style. This new style of modal jazz pushed musi­cians to express them­selves through melod­ic cre­ativ­i­ty. Take a look into the his­to­ry and music the­o­ry of Kind of Blue with Sweet­wa­ter’s Jacob Dupre (piano/trumpet), accom­pa­nied by Michael Pat­ter­son (bass) and Sean Parr (drums). Karl Stab­nau (alto sax) per­forms the solo on “Blues For Alice,” as played by Char­lie Park­er.

For a more in-depth study of the time­less album, read Ash­ley Kah­n’s well-reviewed book, Kind of Blue: The Mak­ing of the Miles Davis Mas­ter­piece.

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 and BlueSky.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

Miles Davis Icon­ic 1959 Album Kind of Blue Turns 60: Revis­it the Album That Changed Amer­i­can Music

1959: The Year That Changed Jazz

Kind of Blue: How Miles Davis Changed Jazz

Her­bie Han­cock Explains the Big Les­son He Learned From Miles Davis: Every Mis­take in Music, as in Life, Is an Oppor­tu­ni­ty

The Influ­ence of Miles Davis Revealed with Data Visu­al­iza­tion: For His 90th Birth­day Today

In a very short span of time, the descrip­tor “elec­tron­ic music” has come to sound as over­ly broad as “clas­si­cal.” But where what we (often incor­rect­ly) call clas­si­cal devel­oped over hun­dreds of years, elec­tron­ic music pro­lif­er­at­ed into hun­dreds of frac­tal forms in only decades. A far steep­er qual­i­ty curve may have to do with the ease of its cre­ation, but it’s also a fac­tor of this accel­er­at­ed evo­lu­tion.

Music made by machines has trans­formed since its ear­ly 20th-cen­tu­ry begin­nings from obscure avant-garde exper­i­ments to mas­sive­ly pop­u­lar gen­res of glob­al dance and pop. This pro­lif­er­a­tion, notes Ishkur—designer of Ishkur’s Guide to Elec­tron­ic Music—has­n’t always been to the good. Take what he calls “trend­whor­ing,” a phe­nom­e­non that spawns dozens of new works and sub­gen­era in short order, though it’s arguable whether many of them should exist.

Ishkur, describes this process below in an excerpt from his eru­dite, sar­don­ic “Fre­quent­ly Unasked Ques­tions”:

If fart nois­es were sud­den­ly pop­u­lar, each scene would trend­whore it with fart­step, fart­core, tech­fart, far­t­house, fart trance, etc. It is espe­cial­ly notice­able in clas­sic tracks that are remixed into mod­ern gen­res, which some might con­sid­er sacre­li­gious. A good exam­ple is the Dream Trance hit Robert Miles — Chil­dren, in which there is now a Hard­style ver­sion, a Dutch House ver­sion, a McProg ver­sion, a Euro­trance ver­sion, a Goa Trance ver­sion, and even a Snap ver­sion and a shit­ty Brostep ver­sion. None of these gen­res exist­ed when the orig­i­nal song came out in 1995.

Vicious­ly irrev­er­ent tone and com­pletist atten­tion to detail are typ­i­cal through­out this ency­clo­pe­dia, an inter­ac­tive Flash flow­chart that chron­i­cles the devel­op­ment of 100s of gen­res, sub­gen­res, micro­gen­res, etc., with stream­ing musi­cal exam­ples of every one. It’s a deeply researched, and con­tin­u­al­ly expand­ing project first cre­at­ed by Ishkur, aka Ken­neth John Tay­lor, in 1999. In 2003, Tay­lor updat­ed and expand­ed the project and moved it to its cur­rent loca­tion. He has con­tin­u­ous­ly updat­ed it since then.

The record­ed exam­ples on Taylor’s time­line cur­rent­ly span around 80 years, from 1937 to 2019—a tiny drop in the great ocean of musi­cal his­to­ry. Nonethe­less, the music shows how rich and com­plex elec­tron­ic music his­to­ry tru­ly is, despite its potential—as its devel­op­men­tal speed (and tem­pos) increased—to pro­duce dis­pos­able, deriv­a­tive com­po­si­tions as much as chart-burn­ing clas­sics and inno­v­a­tive, mind-expand­ing cre­ative work.

As you zoom into the chart and click on the dots next to each genre, you’ll have the option to pull up Taylor’s wit­ty guides, as infor­ma­tive as they are unspar­ing­ly crit­i­cal. He explains “Chill Out,” for exam­ple, as a grab-bag term for elec­tron­ic easy lis­ten­ing that “goes down easy like a fresh glass of cool lemon­ade or light­ly sprin­kled vanil­la sun­dae…. Not only did it appeal to post-come­down par­ty kids but their moms too, as heard in movie sound­tracks, adver­tise­ment jin­gles, or played over the radio while shop­ping at the mar­ket.”

Does he approve of any forms of elec­tron­ic music? Obvi­ous­ly. No one would spend this much time and effort and amass “30 years of back issues of Elec­tron­ic Music and Key­board mag­a­zine” and “an ungod­ly num­ber of books” on a sub­ject they despised. It’s just that he’s… well, a purist, you might say. Any media, for exam­ple, of any kind, that “uses the acronym ‘EDM,’” he writes “is com­plete don­key balls and should not be relied on as a source for any­thing.” He’s also ambi­tious­ly com­pre­hen­sive, includ­ing Hip Hop and all of its vari­ants in the mix, a move most his­to­ri­ans of elec­tron­ic music do not make, for fear of get­ting it wrong, per­haps, or because of cul­tur­al bias­es and nar­row ideas about what elec­tron­ic music is.

The data visu­al­iza­tion crossed with exten­sive pop musi­col­o­gy crossed with an almost quaint kind of ultra-nerdy online snark has some­thing for every­one. But don’t call it art, as one inter­view­er did. “I feel uneasy about this,” Ishkur answered. “It’s a joke more than any­thing. Very fun­ny. Very sil­ly. I poke fun at a lot of gen­res. It’s meant to be enter­tain­ment.” This is the stan­dard inter­net dis­claimer, but if you fol­low the guide’s branch­ing streams through hun­dreds of expand­ing gen­res and scenes, you might just find you’ve become a seri­ous stu­dent of elec­tron­ic music your­self, while learn­ing not to take any of it too seri­ous­ly.

Ishkur’s guide has recent­ly been updat­ed for 2019. He’s also released a “15 hour DJ set of elec­tron­ic music,” he announced on Twit­ter, “span­ning sev­er­al eras and a wide range of gen­res, all mixed in that inim­itable Ishkur style.” Get the mix here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The His­to­ry of Elec­tron­ic Music in 476 Tracks (1937–2001)

Hear Sev­en Hours of Women Mak­ing Elec­tron­ic Music (1938–2014)

Pio­neer­ing Elec­tron­ic Com­pos­er Karl­heinz Stock­hausen Presents “Four Cri­te­ria of Elec­tron­ic Music” & Oth­er Lec­tures in Eng­lish (1972)

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

No amount of con­tin­u­ous repeats in cof­feeshops around the world can dull the crys­talline bril­liance of Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue one bit. The album turned 60 three days ago, and it still stands as one of the most influ­en­tial albums, jazz or oth­er­wise, of all time… indeed, as “one of the sin­gle great­est achieve­ments in Amer­i­can music.”

So says one of sev­er­al crit­ics prais­ing the album in the intro­duc­tion to an inter­view with Ash­ley Kahn, author of Kind of Blue: The Mak­ing of the Miles Davis Mas­ter­piece. Kind of Blue is a “cor­ner­stone record, not only for jazz. It’s a cor­ner­stone record for music,” anoth­er voice com­ments. It “cap­tures the essence of jazz.” It’s “sort of like the Bible, in a way. You know, you just have one in your house.”

This would make Davis not only the com­pos­er of a new jazz Bible, but also a Bible sales­man. He had no doubt his prod­uct would sell. “Davis was a can­ny mon­ey man and pro­mot­er of his own image,” wrote David Years­ley on the album’s anniver­sary. One 1960 record com­pa­ny memo stat­ed he “’was pri­mar­i­ly con­cerned with the amount of jazz now on juke­box­es in many areas of the coun­try while he is not rep­re­sent­ed.’”

Colum­bia respond­ed, and as a result, many peo­ple around the U.S. “first heard this music in din­ers and bars over the juke­box.” The cre­ative ten­sions in the Birth of the Cool record­ings, made ten years ear­li­er, announced a new kind of jazz with their full release in 1957. The cool had matured in Kind of Blue’s ful­ly modal turn. “Its icy hau­teur sets the stan­dard for art that draws you in by pre­tend­ing it doesn’t need any­one or any­thing but itself.” It’s quite a con­fi­dent appeal.

Sales are nei­ther nec­es­sary nor suf­fi­cient to make a clas­sic album, but in the case of Kind of Blue, all of the stars aligned: crit­ics uni­ver­sal­ly praise it, musi­cians uni­ver­sal­ly love it, and record buy­ers uni­ver­sal­ly buy it. “The thing about this album,” says Kahn, “that’s dif­fer­ent from what hap­pened with some oth­er well-cel­e­brat­ed albums… is that it became an icon­ic album not when it came out but long after because peo­ple kept buy­ing it. Peo­ple would not let it go out of print.”

Davis knew how to get his work before the pub­lic, but he also knew it deserved to be heard by mil­lions both inside and out­side jazz. Beloved in the jazz world right away, it was the “vox pop­uli” that spread the album’s fame every­where else. Drum­mer Jim­my Cobb talks in the clip at the top about how Davis “fell a lit­tle bit into [the] con­cept” of Bill Evans, the pianist who played a sig­nif­i­cant role in the music’s con­struc­tion. “To me,” says Cobb, the gig was “just anoth­er Miles Davis ses­sion,” with an Evans twist.

None of the musi­cians in the sex­tet had any idea the record would get as big as it did. Yet as Davis him­self said, in a clas­sic line from an ear­li­er record­ing ses­sion, “I’m gonna play it first, and tell you what it is lat­er.” We look back on 1959 as a water­shed year in jazz, thanks in large part to the impact of Kind of Blue. Maybe we still haven’t fig­ured out, 60 years lat­er, what it is. Learn more about the crit­i­cal, musi­cal, and com­mer­cial impor­tance of Kind of Blue in the Poly­phon­ic video explain­er above, “How Miles Davis Changed Jazz.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1959: The Year That Changed Jazz

Kind of Blue: How Miles Davis Changed Jazz

Her­bie Han­cock Explains the Big Les­son He Learned From Miles Davis: Every Mis­take in Music, as in Life, Is an Oppor­tu­ni­ty

The Influ­ence of Miles Davis Revealed with Data Visu­al­iza­tion: For His 90th Birth­day Today

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

At her site Ari’s Bass Blog, bass play­er and teacher Ari­ane Cap shoots down many of the argu­ments against solo bass music—that is, music played sole­ly on bass gui­tar. To the objec­tion that “bass­es have a job to do in a band con­text,” she writes, “what this ‘job’ is can vary great­ly!” To anoth­er com­plaint, she responds, “even when imi­tat­ing gui­tar tech­niques on the bass, it is still bass play­ing.” Her defens­es of solo bass (and her fine instruc­tions on how to play it well) work equal­ly for the bass solo, when the often least-noticed mem­ber of the band steps out and takes the lead for a few moments.

The idea that bass play­ers are all wall­flow­ers or invis­i­ble, less-tal­ent­ed mem­bers of the band is, of course, a bad rock and roll stereo­type. Nat­u­ral­ly, the best bass soloists in rock are some of the play­ers who have drawn the most atten­tion to the instru­ment and shown how crit­i­cal it is.

But not all great bass play­ers are great soloists. The solo requires a par­tic­u­lar com­bi­na­tion of pow­er and agili­ty. The bass soloist is some­thing of a musi­cal ath­lete.

A gui­tar solo can coast, so to speak, on tone, on per­fect­ly-cho­sen notes played with just the right vibra­to and sus­tain. A bass solo is anoth­er mon­ster. Whether plucked, picked, or slapped, bass solos usu­al­ly involve a lot of notes attacked very hard and very fast, up and down the neck—a feat any­one who’s held a bass gui­tar will know requires a lot of dex­ter­i­ty and strength.

Mar­vel as you watch the shoul­ders, arms, and fin­gers on left and right hands of these play­ers move with uncan­ny pre­ci­sion, in clips from some of the all-time bass solo greats here. At the top, John Entwistle wins top prize for suc­cinct­ness. His bored expres­sion may seem to give away the pre-record­ed TV game, but even live onstage he nev­er seemed to raise an eye­brow when pulling off licks like these.

Below him, Ged­dy Lee stretch­es out, and makes your arms tired from watch­ing him move all over the fret­board, build­ing from one fig­ure to anoth­er before a final explo­sive shred. Fur­ther up, Stu­art Hamm, onstage with Joe Satri­ani in 1988, gives a solo bass per­for­mance at the Mon­treux Jazz Fes­ti­val, mov­ing effort­less­ly from Beethoven’s “Moon­light Sonata” to a series of gor­geous arpeg­gios to some genre-hop­ping the­atrics the crowd devours.

Though he made his bones as one of the fastest bass soloists on the block, Fleas’s solo bass per­for­mance uses delay and echo effects to slow things down sig­nif­i­cant­ly and expand the pos­si­bil­i­ties of solo bass, bring­ing it into the tonal realm of the gui­tar while still demon­strat­ing the tremen­dous phys­i­cal­i­ty bass play­ing requires. Just above, see Boot­sy Collins pull off a sim­i­lar feat in a full band con­text, prov­ing that bass solos can be made of slow, soul­ful melod­i­cism and heavy, fuzzed-out licks.

Collin’s tour-de-force per­for­mance is hard to top, but for con­trast, and to reem­pha­size the ver­sa­til­i­ty of the bass as a solo instru­ment, whether play­ing all alone or tak­ing a brief turn in the spot­light, see Queen’s John Dea­con pull out a flaw­less, short and seri­ous­ly sweet bass solo live on “Liar,” just above, looped for ten min­utes straight so you can mem­o­rize every note.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Sto­ry of the Bass: New Video Gives Us 500 Years of Music His­to­ry in 8 Min­utes

What Makes Flea Such an Amaz­ing Bass Play­er? A Video Essay Breaks Down His Style

Who Are the Best Drum Soloists in Rock? See Leg­endary Per­for­mances by John Bon­ham, Kei­th Moon, Neil Peart, Ter­ry Bozzio & More

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

Among the slew of icon­ic late-60s acts who played Wood­stock 50 years ago, one name stands out con­spic­u­ous­ly for her absence: Joni Mitchell. Was she not invit­ed? Did she decline? Was she dou­ble-booked? Mitchell was, of course, invit­ed, and eager­ly want­ed to be there. The sto­ry of her non-appear­ance involves alarm­ing head­lines in The New York Times and an appear­ance on The Dick Cavett Show the day after the fes­ti­val that her man­ag­er, Elliot Roberts and label head David Gef­fen, decid­ed she sim­ply couldn’t miss.

Her sig­nif­i­cant oth­er at the time, Gra­ham Nash, reached the upstate New York fes­ti­val with CSNY, “by heli­copter and a stolen truck hot-wired by Neil Young,” reports the site Night­flight. But Gef­fen and Mitchell, see­ing the head­line “400,000 Peo­ple Sit­ting in Mud,” and a descrip­tion of the roads as “so clogged with cars that con­cert­go­ers were aban­don­ing them and walk­ing,” decid­ed they shouldn’t take the risk. (She described the scene as a “nation­al dis­as­ter area.”) Instead, they watched news about the mud-splat­tered event from Geffen’s New York City apart­ment (oth­er accounts say they holed up in the Plaza Hotel).

So how is it Mitchell came to write the defin­i­tive Wood­stock anthem, with its era-defin­ing lyric “we’ve got to get our­selves back to the gar­den”? In the way of all artists—she watched, lis­tened, and used her imag­i­na­tion to con­jure a scene she only knew of sec­ond­hand. CSNY’s ver­sion of “Wood­stock” (live, below, at Madi­son Square Gar­den in 2009) is the one we tend to hear most and remem­ber, but Mitchell’s—her voice soar­ing high above her piano—best con­veys the song’s sense of youth­ful hip­pie ide­al­ism, mys­ti­cal won­der, and just a touch of des­per­a­tion. (At the top, she plays the song live in Big Sur in 1969.) David Yaffe, author of Reck­less Daugh­ter: A Por­trait of Joni Mitchell describes the song as “pur­ga­tion. It is an omen that some­thing very, very bad will hap­pen with the mud dries and the hip­pies go home.”

Mitchell did make the Cavett Show gig, along­side Stephen Stills, David Cros­by, and Jef­fer­son Air­plane, all just return­ing from the fes­ti­val. But she didn’t have much to say. Instead, the gre­gar­i­ous Cros­by does most of the talk­ing, describ­ing Wood­stock as “incred­i­ble, prob­a­bly the strangest thing that’s ever hap­pened in the world.” Sur­vey­ing the scene from a heli­copter, he says, was like see­ing “an encamp­ment of a Mace­don­ian army on a Greek hill crossed with the biggest batch of gyp­sies you ever saw.” Lat­er on the show, Mitchell played “Chelsea Morn­ing” and oth­er songs, after per­for­mances by Jef­fer­son Air­plane.

“The depri­va­tion of not being able to go,” she remem­bered, “pro­vid­ed me with an intense angle” on the fes­ti­val. “Wood­stock, for some rea­son, impressed me as being a mod­ern mir­a­cle, like a mod­ern-day fish­es-and-loaves sto­ry. For a herd of peo­ple that large to coop­er­ate so well, it was pret­ty remark­able and there was tremen­dous opti­mism. So I wrote the song ‘Wood­stock’ out of these feel­ings, and the first three times I per­formed it in pub­lic, I burst into tears, because it brought back the inten­si­ty of the expe­ri­ence and was so mov­ing.”

She did final­ly get the chance to play “Wood­stock” at Wood­stock, in 1998 (above, on elec­tric gui­tar), for an appre­cia­tive long-haired, tie-dyed audience—many of them nos­tal­gic for a moment they missed or were too young to have expe­ri­enced. The per­for­mance high­lights the “sense of long­ing that became essen­tial to the song’s impact,” as Leah Rosen­zweig writes at Vinyl Me, Please. “Sure, it was the irony of the cen­tu­ry”: the song that best cap­tured Wood­stock for the peo­ple who weren’t there was writ­ten by some­one who wasn’t there. “But it was also a per­fect recipe for Mitchell to do what she did best: draw humans togeth­er while remain­ing com­plete­ly on the side­lines.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Joni Mitchell’s Clas­sic Per­for­mances of “Both Sides Now” & “The Cir­cle Game” (1968)

See Clas­sic Per­for­mances of Joni Mitchell from the Very Ear­ly Years–Before She Was Even Named Joni Mitchell (1965/66)

Young Joni Mitchell Per­forms a Hit-Filled Con­cert in Lon­don (1970)

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