Watch the Earliest Known Footage of the Jimi Hendrix Experience (February, 1967)

in Music | July 27th, 2017

Note: If the video plays and you don’t hear sound, look for the volume control in the lower right hand corner of the video.

Within months of moving to London in autumn of 1966, Jimi Hendrix found himself a band, recorded a single, got himself a longterm girlfriend, and proceeded to take the UK by storm. His gigs were essential viewing by rock’s then-royalty–the Who, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Cream, all made sure they caught the American wonder. By the end of the year his first single “Hey Joe” landed him on British television and in the Top 10.

The above video is the first known footage of a live Jimi Hendrix Experience, though the band had been gigging for months. It takes place at the Chelmsford Corn Exchange, in the City of Chelmsford, about 50 miles north-east of London. The date is February 25, 1967, and the gig had only been advertised in the paper two days before (where he was listed as “Jimi Hendric”). As you can see, that’s all it took to fill this old traders building-turned-rock venue to the rafters.

The footage was shot for “Telixer: A Thing of Beat Is a Joy Forever,” a documentary on the current British music scene made for KRO, The Netherlands.

Hendrix and the band launch into Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” with a few ordinary opening bars setting up the guitar magic to follow. He then plays “Stone Free,” the b‑side of “Hey Joe.” You can see Pete Townshend and John Entwistle to the side of the stage, very briefly. The footage is intercut with shots of Swinging London and fashion hub Portobello Road, where it is said Hendrix bought his Hussars military jacket.

The website Chelmsford Rocks features a remembrance of that night from Shaun Everett, who was a Mod at the time and knew he had to make his way up on the train after work to catch Hendrix at the “Corn’ole,” as the youth called it.

Everett fills in the rest of the evening:

Hendrix gave two sets. That was the normal arrangement for the Corn’ole. Both sets usually 45 minutes to one hour each and there was absolutely no music to be had after 11.30pm…I have spent a long time looking for myself on that film clip but to no avail. I was probably still at the rear of the venue or even more likely in the local pub for the break!…Hendrix, at the end of the performance, walked straight up to a few of us standing just there and one of my mates lit his joint for him. They were so knocked out by that I recall. My recollection was more nasal. Rock musicians have this uncanny ability to harbour their own post-set aromas about themselves: in this case that unmistakeable aroma of cannabis…I will always remember that part even if my music recollections are a bit sparse. I have also ‘dined out’ on that anecdote for many years since. I had passed close by the ‘God’.

The Corn Exchange hosted many acts over its time as a music venue, including David Bowie and Pink Floyd. But in 1969, the city tore down the 19th century building, assuming something more accommodating for live music would be built in its place. That didn’t happen. On this page you can see the aftermath of the bulldozers, and a modern shot of the city street corner that added so much to rock history.

via Guitar World

Jimi Hendrix Plays “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” for The Beatles, Just Three Days After the Album’s Release (1967)

Hear a Great 4‑Hour Radio Documentary on the Life & Music of Jimi Hendrix: Features Rare Recordings & Interviews

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.

by Ted Mills | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Hear the 150 Greatest Albums by Women: NPR Creates a New Canon of Albums That Puts Women at the Center of Music History

in Gender, Music | July 25th, 2017

What is it with all the trendpieces on great women artists, writers, directors, singers, etc.? What, indeed. To ask the question is to acknowledge the premise of such pieces. Why should they need to be written at all if women in these fields received fair representation elsewhere? That lists and articles can be written in the hundreds puts the lie to phony claims that “great” women do not exist in every field in numbers. This is especially true in the 20th century, when hard-won political gains opened cultural doors unimaginable to many previous generations. But those gains did not fundamentally alter how cultural histories have been written.

Music critic Anne Powers and Lincoln Center program director Jill Sternheimer recently considered this problem, one which, Powers writes at NPR, persists even in the ways “music history’s being recorded and revised in the digital age.”

They wondered, “why… was the importance of women so often recognized as a trend instead of a source of lasting impact? We came to a conclusion that, in 2017, will likely strike no one as a surprise: that the general history of popular music is told through the great works of men, and that without a serious revision of the canon, women will always remain on the margins.”

This is a truth reinforced in many different ways: by the shelves weighed down with books about Jimi Hendrix and Nirvana, while only one or two about Aretha Franklin or Patti Smith sit nearby; by the radio playlists that still only feature women once or twice every hour.

This isn’t a problem of “representation”—the term we so often hear applied to casting decisions and awards shows. Powers isn’t making a case for diversity in hiring, but for accuracy in writing the historical record. To that end, Powers and Lincoln Center, together with “nearly 50 women who play a role in NPR… compiled and voted” on a list: “Turning the Tables: The 150 Greatest Albums by Women.” You can hear nearly all of those albums in our Spotify playlist below. Calling the list “an intervention, a remedy, a correction,” Powers writes, “These albums were released between 1964, the year The Beatles invaded America… and 2016, when Beyoncé arguably ushered in a new period with her ‘visual album’ Lemonade.”

The point is to offer a view of popular music history with women’s work at the center. The list does not represent an “alternate history.” It stands for music history, touching upon every significant trend, social issue, set of sonic innovations, and new avenue for self-expression that popular music has intersected in the past fifty years.

Against the argument for “affirmative action”—or simply rewriting old “great album” lists to include more women—Powers argues, “once a canon is formed, it gains an aura of immutability.” Plenty of lists include female artists. Almost none of them include women in the top spots, suggesting that “the paradigms that define greatness remain masculine at their core.” Tokenism, no matter how well-intentioned, does not make for “a shift in perspective beyond the simple mandate to adjust the numbers.”

Ava Duvernay has made a similar argument against mandated “diversity” in Hollywood as a mollifying tactic that maintains status quo power relationships. “The fact that the mainstream starts to gaze at this space doesn’t make it a moment,” she tells Hollywood Reporter, “it makes it a moment for them.” As Powers writes of the way Joni Mitchell was often treated by the rock establishment, “the female musician is a dream, a surprise and a disruptor. She can claim the center of attention, but her rightful point of origin, and the place to which she returns, is a margin.”

Instead of marginal inclusion in existing cliques, Powers argues for a cultural shift, a “new canon,” that isn’t hedged with the usual standards that often exclude women on arbitrary purist grounds. Keeping “wide parameters,” the contributors “left room for acknowledged rock-era classics as well as pop hits dismissed by others as fluff.” That disclaimer aside, there’s precious little “fluff” on this list—meaning it’s hard to find albums here that wouldn’t qualify for “greatest” status on more narrowly-defined genre lists. It is a list, that is to say, of 150 great albums, written, recorded, and released over the course of fifty plus years, by some of the most talented writers, players, and musicians in modern music history.

“Lists have their limitations,” Powers admits, “They reflect biases and whispered compromises.” She and her contributors offer this one “as the beginning of a new conversation” rather than an authoritative statement. At such depth and breadth, however, “Turning the Tables” makes room for nearly every possible genre, from all over the world. Read the full list of 150 albums, with commentary, here. A few of the 150 albums, including Lemonade, Bikini Kill’s Yeah Yeah Yeah, Joan Jett’s I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll, Joanna Newsome’s Ys, and Laurie Anderson’s Big Science aren’t on Spotify, so didn’t make our playlist above. The top ten albums on the list are:

Joni Mitchell, Blue (Reprise, 1971)
Lauryn Hill, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (Ruffhouse/Columbia, 1998)
Nina Simone, I Put a Spell on You (Philips, 1956)
Aretha Franklin, I Never Loved a Man the Way I Loved You (Atlantic, 1967)
Missy Eliot, Supa Dupa Fly (The Goldmine/Elekra, 1997)
Beyoncé, Lemonade (Parkwood/Columbia 2016)
Patti Smith, Horses (Arista, 1975)
Janis Joplin, Pearl (Columbia, 1971)
Amy Winehouse, Back to Black (Island, 2006)
Carole King, Tapestry (Ode, 1971)

1200 Years of Women Composers: A Free 78-Hour Music Playlist That Takes You From Medieval Times to Now

Women of Jazz: Stream a Playlist of 91 Recordings by Great Female Jazz Musicians

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 22 ) |

Watch Iggy Pop & Debbie Harry Sing a Swelligant Version of Cole Porter’s “Did You Evah,” All to Raise Money for AIDS Research (1990)

in Life, Music, Politics | July 24th, 2017

Quick survey: Who’s best fit to get at the heart of Cole Porter? The suave sophisticate who was born in a tux, martini glass clutched in his infant fist? Or punk royalty? “Well, Did You Evah!” from the 1939 Broadway musical DuBarry Was a Lady, is the brattier cousin of such Porter hits as “You’re the Top” and “Let’s Do It.” Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby performed a boozy cover of it for the 1956 film High Society, but for my money, the definitive version is one Iggy Pop and Debbie Harry recorded for a Cole Porter themed AIDS benefit album, Red Hot + Blue.

Some Porter classics–“Every Time We Say Goodbye,” “So In Love”–demand sincerity. This one calls for a strong dose of the opposite, which Pop and Harry deliver, both vocally and in the barnstorming music video above. They’re dangerous, funny, and anything but canned, weaving through rat-glammy 1980s New York in thrift store finery, with side trips to a cemetery and a farm where Pop smooches a goat.

As Alex Cox, who brought further punk pedigree to the project as the director of Sid and Nancy and Repo Man told Spin: “Iggy had always wanted to make a video with animals and Debbie had always wanted to publicly burn lingerie so I let them.”

They also filled Pop’s palms with stigmata and ants, and swapped Porter’s champagne for a case of generic dog food.

There are a few minor tweaks to the lyrics (“What cocks!”) and the stars inject the patter with a gleefully louche downtown sensibility. Mars rises behind the Twin Towers, for a swelligantly off-beat package that raised a lot of money for AIDS research and awareness. Other gems from the project:

“It’s All Right with Me” performed by Tom Waits, directed by Jim Jarmusch

“Night and Day” performed by U2, directed by Wim Wenders

“Don’t Fence Me In” performed and directed by David Byrne

Tom Waits For No One: Watch the Pioneering Animated Tom Waits Music Video from 1979

Talking Heads Featured on The South Bank Show in 1979: How the Groundbreaking New Wave Band Made Normality Strange Again

Bill Murray Reads Great Poetry by Billy Collins, Cole Porter, and Sarah Manguso

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

An Archive of Iconic Photos from the Golden Age of Jazz: William Gottlieb’s Portraits of Dizzy, Thelonious, Billie, Satchmo & More

in Music, Photography | July 18th, 2017

If you’ve seen the most famous photographs of Billie Holiday, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Frank Sinatra, Django Reinhardt, or nearly any other jazz legend from the mid-20th century, you’ve seen the work of William P. Gottlieb. His photos have graced many a classic album cover, magazine spread, and poster. “Between 1938 and 1948,” writes Maria Popova, Gottlieb “documented the jazz scene in New York City and Washington, D.C., and created what eventually became some of history’s most iconic portraits of jazz greats.” He initially did so as a self-taught amateur, a jazz columnist whose photography was “an afterthought,” notes Gottlieb’s 2006 Washington Post obituary,” mere visual accompaniment to his regular work.”

As Gottlieb once told The New York Times, “I got into photography because The Post was stingy and wouldn’t pay photographers to cover my 11 o’clock concerts.” But he developed an undeniably keen eye for performance.

What’s more, his work is deeply informed by affection and empathy. Gottlieb was an artist who had warm relationships with his subjects. He took the photo at the top, perhaps the most famous image of Billie Holiday, in 1947, when the singer “was at her peak,” he wrote, “musically and physically”—two years clean and sober after her time in a federal prison.

“Regrettably,” he writes, “Billie regressed.” Gottlieb tells the heartbreaking story of the last time he went to see her. The “audience waited… and waited.” The photographer, “playing a hunch,” went backstage to find her “pretty much ‘out of it.’”

I helped her finish dressing, then led her to the microphone. She looked horrible. She sounded worse. I replaced my notebook in my pocket, put a lens cap on my camera, and walked away, choosing to remember this remarkable woman as she once was.

Most of Gottlieb’s stories are not nearly so tragic. Take his last run-in with Louis Armstrong, at their dentist office’s waiting room. “After small talk,” he wrote, “Satchmo looked me over, deciding I, too, had been gaining weight. He reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out a printed diet (that he kept for friends-in-need), and handed me a copy. ‘Pops,’ he said, ‘try this.’ I quickly noted that it featured Pluto Water [a laxative]. But I thanked him, anyway.”

Gottlieb retired from photography and jazz writing in the fifties and made a career as a children’s book author and educational film producer. In 1979, he published 219 of his best photographs in a book called The Golden Age of Jazz, and in 2010, much of Gottlieb’s work entered the public domain, according to The Library of Congress (LOC). You can see hundreds of his photographs—famous images like those of Sarah Vaughan, further up, Thelonious Monk, above, Buddy Rich, below, and so many more—at the Library of Congress’s online William P. Gottlieb Collection. The LOC describes the collection thus:

The online collection provides access to digital images of all sixteen hundred negatives and transparencies, approximately one hundred annotated contact prints, and over two hundred selected photographic prints that show Gottlieb’s cropping, burning, and dodging preferences. One can follow the artist’s work process by examining first a raw negative, then an annotated contact print, and finally a finished, published product. The Web site also includes digital images of Down Beat magazine articles in which Gottlieb’s photographs were first published. Other special features of the online presentation are audio clips of Gottlieb discussing specific photographs, articles about the collection from Civilization magazine and the Library of Congress Information Bulletin, an essay describing Gottlieb’s life and work, and a “Gottlieb on Assignment” section that showcases Down Beat articles about Thelonious Monk, Dardanelle, Willie “the Lion” Smith, and Buddy Rich.

You can also download high resolution versions of nearly every image in the archive. (To purchase prints, see Gottlieb’s online gallery, Jazz Photos.) There may be no better way, short of actually being there and meeting the stars, to witness the golden age of jazz than through the eyes and ears of such a sympathetic observer as William P. Gottlieb. Enter the collection here.

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How “America’s First Drug Czar” Waged War Against Billie Holiday and Other Jazz Legends

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Mark Knopfler Gives a Short Masterclass on His Favorite Guitars & Guitar Sounds

in Music | July 14th, 2017

American guitar came of age in the fifties, with the blues, folk, country, and jazz playing of Mississippi John Hurt, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Merle Travis, Chet Atkins, Wes Montgomery, Les Paul, and so many other incredible players who perfected the sound of Americana before it became inseparable from nostalgia and revivalism. Though it has usually been Chuck Berry who gets—or who took—most of the credit for rock and roll, and who is often enough named as a favorite influence of so many UK guitar heroes, one star British player who made his name a few years later always stuck fast to rock and roll’s deepest roots. We can hear all of those golden age players—Hurt, Tharpe, Travis, Atkins, Montgomery, Paul—in Mark Knopfler’s fingers, in some of the unlikeliest hits of the 80s, songs long on style and flashy solos, but also unquestionably rooted in roots music.

We may not have realized until we heard Knopfler’s country records just how much his Dire Straits sound grew out of acoustic music. (“Sultans of Swing” was first written on a National guitar in open tuning.) But he is, and has always been, a brilliant country and country blues player—recording with George Jones, Emmylou Harris, and Mary Chapin Carpenter and collaborating with Chet Atkins on record and on stage.

For Knopfler fans, the joy of slowly discovering the many angles in his playing, the many layers of influence and blends of tradition, constitutes much of the fun in watching him over the decades. You get an accelerated sense of the experience in the short video above, in which he discusses his favorite guitars—including the famous red Stratocaster (“my lust object as a child”) that carried him, with matching headbands, through those MTV years.

Hearing any beloved player talk about his or her guitars can be a treat in itself, but with Knopfler, each instrument offers an occasion to reveal, and effortlessly demonstrate, all of the ways his playing style developed and incorporated new techniques. As much as he learned from endless practice and from emulating his favorite players, he learned from the guitars; the tonality of the Strat “made me want to write another way.” He learned from a 1958 Les Paul that one might “get to the end of a song and have nothing left to say… but the guitar has.” Knopfler never deploys his impeccable vibrato, unique fingerpicking style, or gorgeous single notes wails just to show off—they arrive in service to the emotions of the song, and come out of the distinctive properties of each guitar. He may be the most tasteful, even restrained, of superstar rock guitarists.

Not every guitarist is as thoughtful about their instruments as Knopfler, and few are simultaneously as eloquent and genially demonstrative of their mastery of form and function. The clip at the top comes from the PBS documentary series Soundbreaking. In the 45-minute documentary, Guitar Stories, above, which we’ve featured here before, Knopfler tells the story of the six guitars that shaped his career. The host and interviewer is none other than bassist and Dire Straits co-founder John Illsley, who is as awestruck by Knopfler as any other fan—meaning not that he thinks Knopfler is superhuman or godlike, but that the guitarist is simply, unpretentiously, and unquestionably, “one of the truly great players,” a designation that both Illsley and his former bandmate realize cannot be divorced from the truly great instruments Knopfler has played.

Stevie Ray Vaughan Plays the Acoustic Guitar in Rare Footage, Letting Us See His Guitar Virtuosity in Its Purest Form

Hear Jimi Hendrix’s Virtuoso Guitar Performances in Isolated Tracks: “Fire,” “Purple Haze,” “Third Stone from the Sun” & More

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 5 ) |

Watch the World’s Oldest Violin in Action: Marco Rizzi Performs Schumann’s Sonata No. 2 on a 1566 Amati Violin

in Design, History, Music | July 14th, 2017

Most of us are acquainted with the sorrowful sound of the world’s smallest violin, but what of the world’s oldest?

The instrument in the video above dates back to 1566.

Meaning, if it were the patriarch of a human family, siring musical sons every 20 to 25 years, it would take more than 10 generations to get to composer Robert Schumann, born in 1810.

And then another 31 years for Schumann to compose Sonata No. 2 for Violin and Piano in D minor, Op . 121, the piece violinist Marco Rizzi–age unknown–coaxes from this lovely piece of wood.

Were you to peek at the back, you’d see traces of King Charles IX of France’s coat of arms. The Latin motto Pietate et Justitia–piety and justice–still lingers on its rib.

It was constructed by the master creator, Andrea Amati, as part of a large set of stringed instruments, of which it is one of four survivors of its size and class.

After leaving Charles’ court, the violin spent time in the Henry Hottinger collection, which was eventually acquired by the Wurlitzer Company in New York. In 1966, it was donated to Cremona, Italy, Amati’s birthplace and home to an international school of violin making.

Venerable unto the point of pricelessness, from time to time it is taken out and played–to wondrous effect–by world class violinists. It’s tempting to keep anthropomorphizing, so as to wonder if it might not prefer a forever home with a gifted young musician who would take it out and play it every day. I know what a children’s author would say on that subject.

You can view Amati’s Charles IX violin in more detail here, but why stop there, when you can also like it on Facebook!

Why Violins Have F‑Holes: The Science & History of a Remarkable Renaissance Design

Watch the Making of a Hand-Crafted Violin, from Start to Finish, in a Beautifully-Shot Documentary

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine — issue 58 is hot off the press. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Renaissance Knives Had Music Engraved on the Blades; Now Hear the Songs Performed by Modern Singers

in History, Music | July 13th, 2017

Image courtesy of The Victoria and Albert Museum

On any given weekend, in any part of the state where I live, you can find yourself standing in a hall full of knives, if that’s the kind of thing you like to do. It is a very niche kind of experience. Not so in some other weapons expos—like the Arms and Armor galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where everyone, from the most warlike to the staunchest of pacifists, stands in awe at the intricate ornamentation and incredibly deft craftsmanship on display in the suits of armor, lances, shields, and lots and lots of knives.

We must acknowledge in such a space that the worlds of art and of killing for fame and profit were never very far apart during Europe’s late Medieval and Renaissance periods. Yet we encounter many similar artisanal instruments from the time, just as finely tuned, but made for far less belligerent purposes.

As Maya Corry of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge—an institution with its own impressive arms and armor collection—comments in the video above (at 2:30), one unusual kind of 16th century knife meant for the table, not the battlefield, offers “insight into that harmonious, audible aspect of family devotions,” prayer and song.

From the collection of the Fitzwilliam Museum, in Cambridge. (Johan Oosterman )

These knives, which have musical scores engraved in their blades, brought a table together in singing their prayers, and may have been used to carve the lamb or beef in their “striking balance of decorative and utilitarian function.” At least historians think such “notation knives,” which date from the early 1500s, were used at banquets. “The sharp, wide steel would have been ideal for cutting and serving meat,” writes Eliza Grace Martin at the WQXR blog, “and the accentuated tip would have made for a perfect skewer.” But as Kristen Kalber, curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum, which houses the knives at the top of the post, tells us “diners in very grand feasts didn’t cut their own meat.” It’s unlikely they would have sung from the bloody knives held by their servants.

The knives’ true purpose “remains a mystery,” Martin remarks, like many “rituals of the Renaissance table.” Victoria and Albert Museum curator Kirstin Kennedy admits in the video above that “we are not entirely sure” what the “splendid knife” she holds was used for. But we do know that each knife had a different piece of music on each side, and that a set of them together contained different harmony parts in order to turn a roomful of diners into a chorus. One set of blades had the grace on one side, with the inscription, “the blessing of the table. May the three-in-one bless that which we are about to eat.” The other side holds the benediction, to be sung after the dinner: “The saying of grace. We give thanks to you God for your generosity.”

Common enough verbiage for any household in Renaissance Europe, but when sung, at least by a chorus from the Royal College of Music, who recreated the music and made the recordings here, the prayers are superbly graceful. Above, hear one version of the Grace and Benediction from the Victoria and Albert Museum knives; below, hear a second version. You can hear a captivating set of choral prayers from the Fitzwilliam Museum knives at WQXR’s site, recorded for the Fitzwilliam’s “Madonnas & Miracles” exhibit. We are as unlikely now to encounter singing kitchen knives as we are to run into a horse and rider bearing 100 pounds of finely-wrought wearable steel sculpture. Such strange artifacts seem to speak of a strange people who valued beauty whether carving up the main course or cutting down their enemies.

via WQXR/@tedgioia

See The Guidonian Hand, the Medieval System for Reading Music, Get Brought Back to Life

Hear the Earliest Known Piece of Polyphonic Music: This Composition, Dating Back to 900 AD, Changed Western Music

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 10 ) |

Syd Barrett’s “Effervescing Elephant” Comes to Life in a New Retro-Style Animation

in Animation, Music | July 13th, 2017

The story is well known. Syd Barrett, spiralling into depression, “hallucinations, disorganized speech, memory lapses, intense mood swings, and periods of catatonia,” left Pink Floyd in April, 1968, before recording two solo albums (The Madcap Laughs and Barrett) and then fading into obscurity. Above you can watch a delightful, new animation of “Effervescing Elephant,” a song Barrett first wrote during his teenage years and recorded in 1970. The new “retro-style” animation comes from Yoann Hervo. Below, find another animated take on “Effervescing Elephant,” this one from Steve Bobinksi.

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Short Film Syd Barrett’s First Trip Reveals the Pink Floyd Founder’s Psychedelic Experimentation (1967)

Pink Floyd Performs on US Television for the First Time: American Bandstand, 1967

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Watch the Earliest Known Footage of the Jimi Hendrix Experience (February, 1967)

Hear the 150 Greatest Albums by Women: NPR Creates a New Canon of Albums That Puts Women at the Center of Music History

Watch Iggy Pop & Debbie Harry Sing a Swelligant Version of Cole Porter’s “Did You Evah,” All to Raise Money for AIDS Research (1990)

An Archive of Iconic Photos from the Golden Age of Jazz: William Gottlieb’s Portraits of Dizzy, Thelonious, Billie, Satchmo & More

Mark Knopfler Gives a Short Masterclass on His Favorite Guitars & Guitar Sounds

Watch the World’s Oldest Violin in Action: Marco Rizzi Performs Schumann’s Sonata No. 2 on a 1566 Amati Violin

Renaissance Knives Had Music Engraved on the Blades; Now Hear the Songs Performed by Modern Singers

Syd Barrett’s “Effervescing Elephant” Comes to Life in a New Retro-Style Animation

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