If you were to ask me “What is jazz?” I wouldn’t pre­sume to know the answer, and I’m not sure any sin­gle com­po­si­tion exists to which one could point to as an ide­al type. Maybe the only thing I’m cer­tain of when it comes to jazz is—to quote Wal­lace Stevens—“it must change.”

Of course, there’s an incred­i­bly rich his­to­ry of jazz, broad­ly known, espe­cial­ly to those who have seen Ken Burns’ expan­sive doc­u­men­tary. I’d also rec­om­mend the excel­lent jazz writ­ing of Amiri Bara­ka, Stan­ley Crouch, or Philip Larkin. For the young, we might con­sult Langston Hugh­es’ illus­trat­ed jazz his­to­ry. And maybe every­one should read Charles Min­gus’ Gram­my-nom­i­nat­ed essay “What is a Jazz Com­pos­er?” in which the con­trar­i­an genius writes, “each jazz musi­cian is sup­posed to be a com­pos­er. Whether he is or not, I don’t know.”

Min­gus the icon­o­clast argued for tear­ing up the text even as he sought a clas­si­cal pedi­gree for jazz. His wish was part­ly grant­ed by the influ­ence of jazz on com­posers like Leonard Bern­stein, who sought to answer the ques­tion “What is Jazz?” in a 1956 spo­ken-word LP. The ten­sion between jazz as a com­po­si­tion­al or whol­ly impro­vi­sa­tion­al art seems to resound through­out the form, in all of its many guis­es and vari­a­tions. But one thing I think every jazz musi­cian knows is this: Stan­dards, a com­mon com­pendi­um of songs in the tra­di­tion.

You’ve got to know the rule­book (or the fake­book, at the least), before you can throw it out the win­dow. Even some of the most inno­v­a­tive jazz artists who more or less invent­ed their own scales, modes, and harmonies—like Cecil Tay­lor and Ornette Cole­man—either stud­ied at con­ser­va­to­ry or paid their dues as side­men play­ing oth­er people’s songs. Jazz—Coleman once told Jacques Der­ri­da—is “a con­ver­sa­tion with sounds.” Its under­ly­ing gram­mar comes from the Stan­dards.

Until fair­ly recent­ly, the only way one could get a prop­er edu­ca­tion in the stan­dards was on the job. Crit­ic, jazz his­to­ri­an, and pianist Ted Gioia writes as much in his com­pre­hen­sive 2012 ref­er­ence, The Jazz Stan­dards: A Guide to the Reper­toire. Gioia’s “edu­ca­tion in this music was hap­pen­stance and hard earned.” He writes, “aspir­ing musi­cians today can hard­ly imag­ine how opaque the art form was just a few decades ago—no school I attend­ed had a jazz pro­gram or even offered a sin­gle course on jazz.”

How times have changed. These days, if you can get in, you can take grad­u­ate-lev­el class­es taught by the greats, such as Her­bie Han­cock and Wayne Short­er at UCLA. Hun­dreds more less-famous jazz musi­cian pro­fes­sors stand at the ready in music depart­ments world­wide or at the renowned Berklee Col­lege of Music.

But for those auto­di­dacts out there, Gioia—who has served on the fac­ul­ty at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty and been called “one of the out­stand­ing music his­to­ri­ans in America”—offers an excep­tion­al guide to the Stan­dards, one we can not only read, but also, thanks to Jim Hig­gins of the Jour­nal Sen­tinel, lis­ten to, in the Spo­ti­fy playlist above. (If you need Spo­ti­fy’s free soft­ware, down­load it here.) In a com­pan­ion essay, Hig­gins describes the process of com­pil­ing “as many of the per­for­mances [Gioia] rec­om­mend­ed” in his com­men­tary on 250 jazz stan­dards.

Gioia names over 2,000 dif­fer­ent per­for­mances of those 250 stan­dards, and the playlist con­tains near­ly all of them. You’ll find, for exam­ple, “sev­er­al dif­fer­ent record­ings of ‘In a Sen­ti­men­tal Mood’ by the com­pos­er (includ­ing one with John Coltrane), as well as ver­sions by Son­ny Rollins, Art Tatum, McCoy Tyn­er, Abdul­lah Ibrahim and Bud­dy Tate, and Chris Pot­ter.” While the playlist is “not a com­plete reflec­tion of Gioia’s rec­om­men­da­tions,” giv­en that cer­tain artists’ work can­not be streamed, “there’s a lot of music here”—a whole lot—“spanning a cen­tu­ry.”

The expe­ri­ence of lis­ten­ing to this incred­i­ble library will not be com­plete with­out some con­text. Gioia’s book con­tains a “short his­tor­i­cal and musi­cal essay” on each of the 250 songs and he isn’t shy about offer­ing inci­sive crit­i­cal com­men­tary. Oth­er than going to music school or join­ing a tour­ing band, I can’t think of a bet­ter way to learn the Stan­dards.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear What is Jazz?: Leonard Bernstein’s Intro­duc­tion to the Great Amer­i­can Art Form (1956)

Philoso­pher Jacques Der­ri­da Inter­views Jazz Leg­end Ornette Cole­man: Talk Impro­vi­sa­tion, Lan­guage & Racism (1997)

Langston Hugh­es Presents the His­to­ry of Jazz in an Illus­trat­ed Children’s Book (1955)

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

Image  via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Hunter S. Thomp­son, the writer who gave vivid, inim­itable form to “gonzo jour­nal­ism,” honed his lit­er­ary chops the hard way, using rig­or­ous tech­niques includ­ing but not lim­it­ed to retyp­ing the entire texts of The Great Gats­by and A Farewell to Arms him­self. But he would let no one claim that his artis­tic appre­ci­a­tion extend­ed only to the print­ed word: “I resent your assump­tion that Music is Not My Bag,” he wrote in late 1970 to Rolling Stone edi­tor John Lom­bar­do, “because I’ve been argu­ing for the past few years that music is the New Lit­er­a­ture, that Dylan is the 1960s’ answer to Hem­ing­way, and that the main voice of the ’70s will be on records & video­tape instead of books.”

In this same let­ter, col­lect­ed in his sec­ond vol­ume of cor­re­spon­dence Fear and Loathing in Amer­i­ca, Thomp­son includ­ed a list of the best albums of the “rock age” of the 1960s, “because the ’60s are going to go down like a repeat, some­how, of the 1920s; the par­al­lels are too gross for even his­to­ri­ans to ignore.”

The list did­n’t come from Thomp­son, strict­ly speak­ing, but “from Raoul Duke,” the hard-liv­ing alter-ego who would star in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, pub­lished the fol­low­ing year. You can find a slight­ly cleaned-up ver­sion of the list in this Beat­dom post by David S. Willis:

1. Her­bie Mann’s 1969 Mem­phis Under­ground (“which may be the best album ever cut by any­body”)
2. Bob Dylan’s 1965 Bring­ing It All Back Home
3. Dylan’s 1965 High­way 61 Revis­it­ed
4. The Grate­ful Dead’s 1970 Workingman’s Dead (“the heav­i­est thing since High­way 61 and ‘Mr. Tam­bourine Man‘”)
5. The Rolling Stones’ 1969 Let it Bleed
6. Buf­fa­lo Springfield’s 1967 Buf­fa­lo Spring­field
7. Jef­fer­son Airplane’s 1967 Sur­re­al­is­tic Pil­low
8. Roland Kirk’s “var­i­ous albums”
9. Miles Davis’s 1959 Sketch­es of Spain
10. Sandy Bull’s 1965 Inven­tions

You can also hear most of Thompson/Duke’s Best Albums of the 1960s selec­tions gath­ered in the Spo­ti­fy playlist embed­ded above. (If you don’t have Spo­ti­fy’s free soft­ware, you can down­load it here.) Unfor­tu­nate­ly, Spo­ti­fy has­n’t yet incor­po­rat­ed into its col­lec­tion the work of exper­i­men­tal solo folk gui­tarist Sandy Bull, whose 1965 Inven­tions takes tenth place. (You can hear it on YouTube, how­ev­er.) Bull, whose life was as abun­dant with cre­ativ­i­ty as it was with sub­stances, cut some­thing of a Thomp­son­ian — or Dukean? — fig­ure him­self. His long-form com­po­si­tions “Blend” and “Blend II,” the lat­ter of which opens Inven­tions, will give you a sense of how far he pushed the bound­aries of his tra­di­tion.

“Jesus, what a has­sle to even think quick­ly about a list like that,” wrote Thomp­son, bring­ing the char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly expan­sive let­ter to a close, still try­ing to con­vince Lom­bar­di that such a then-untest­ed con­cept as a 1960s top-ten-albums list could work. “Even now I can think of 10 more I might have added… but what the fuck, it’s only a rude idea. But a good one, I think.”

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hunter S. Thomp­son Inter­views Kei­th Richards, and Very Lit­tle Makes Sense

Hunter S. Thompson’s Har­row­ing, Chem­i­cal-Filled Dai­ly Rou­tine

Hunter S. Thompson’s Ball­sy & Hilar­i­ous Job Appli­ca­tion Let­ter (1958)

Hunter S. Thomp­son, Exis­ten­tial­ist Life Coach, Gives Tips for Find­ing Mean­ing in Life

Read 10 Free Arti­cles by Hunter S. Thomp­son That Span His Gonzo Jour­nal­ist Career (1965–2005)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Last year, Josh Baines at dance music site Thump revis­it­ed the 2004 video for “Call on Me,” a dance­floor anthem built around a high­ly rec­og­niz­able loop from Steve Winwood’s 1987 hit, “Valerie.” Draw­ing on the song’s inher­ent nos­tal­gia fac­tor, the video—which Baines calls, with­out exag­ger­a­tion, “the sex­i­est video of all time”—stages a ridicu­lous­ly lewd, sweaty aer­o­bics class, recall­ing the close asso­ci­a­tion dur­ing the 1980s fit­ness craze between sexy aer­o­bics videos and dance music, in adver­tise­ments, TV shows, MTV, movies like Hard­bod­ies and its even more ludi­crous sequel—and, of course, John Tra­vol­ta and Jamie Lee Curtis’s hilar­i­ous Per­fect, which direct­ly inspired “Call on Me.”

The “Call on Me” video is so sala­cious, in fact, that it near­ly caused then British Prime Min­is­ter Tony Blair to fall off his row­ing machine while watch­ing it, a scene that would fit right in to any 80s work­out sex com­e­dy. Might we imag­ine sim­i­lar scenes of mid­dle-aged Sovi­et min­is­ters and appa­ratchiks los­ing their cool while sweat­ing to Russ­ian elec­tro and watch­ing fit­ness videos like “Rhythm,” at the top? Or per­haps even the far-less-sexy morn­ing pro­gram above from 1987, with its syn­th­pop sound­track, bag­gy sweat­suits, and what look like futon mat­tress­es for exer­cise mats?

In anoth­er exam­ple of Sovi­et aer­o­bics and dance music, one must rely upon imag­i­na­tion to get the moves right. This record, Aer­o­bic Exer­cis­es by a col­lec­tion of obscure artists, was meant for more than just home work­outs, as impor­tant as they are.

The record label Melodiya—the only record label in Sovi­et Russia—and the album’s artists man­aged to get 1984’s Aer­o­bic Exer­cis­es cer­ti­fied by the “USSR Sports Com­mit­tee,” who, writes Ter­ry Matthew at 5 Mag­a­zine, “envi­sioned these records as a sort of robot replac­ing ath­let­ic train­ers.” “I don’t know if bureau­crats dream,” writes Matthew, “but if they do, I can imag­ine them envi­sion­ing a whole nation of com­rades in leg­warm­ers, rhyth­mi­cal­ly jog­ging and touch­ing their toes in time with some of the most fas­ci­nat­ing Ita­lo-sound­ing tracks of the era.”

There is a rea­son the music sounds so inter­est­ing, though some of it, Matthews admits, is “out­right putrid.” Most of the artists were well-known engi­neers and pro­duc­ers record­ing under pseu­do­nyms. These were peo­ple already work­ing in a long tra­di­tion of Sovi­et music that stretched back to Leon Theremin but also drew influ­ence from Europe and the U.S.—“a Funk move­ment in the Sovi­et Union, and one for Dis­co, and an elec­tron­ic music move­ment too, both offi­cial & above ground and under­ground and some­where in between.” Many of those artists only man­aged to get records made “through luck, through com­pro­mise and some­times through sub­terfuge.” Records like Aer­o­bic Exer­cise rep­re­sent some com­bi­na­tion of the last two cat­e­gories, “inge­nious­ly and absurd­ly” dis­guis­ing short orig­i­nal tracks as fit­ness mood music.

You’ll notice that there’s lit­tle instruc­tion on some of these tracks, and it’s in the vocal con­tri­bu­tions that much of the music’s “Ita­lo roots are exposed” notes Matthew, refer­ring to the grand tra­di­tion of most­ly non­sen­si­cal Ita­lo-dis­co, a term for a vari­ety of elec­tron­ic dance music made in Italy through­out the late 70s and 80s. These tracks “abide and gen­er­al­ly adhere to the super­fi­cial but abid­ing prin­ci­ple of Italo—that it’s less impor­tant what words mean com­pared to how they sound.” (Russ­ian speak­ers will have to con­firm this con­tention, though one doesn’t need to stretch to dis­cern the com­mands “Left, Right, Left Right!”) If some of this music sounds strik­ing­ly hip, that’s because it draws from the same Euro-dis­co well as so many con­tem­po­rary retro-elec­tro acts. (I couldn’t help but think of Mira Aroyo’s Bul­gar­i­an con­tri­bu­tions to Ladytron.)

Aer­o­bic Exer­cise was appar­ent­ly a suc­cess, such that Melodiya “launched an entire series of records in the style of the album called Sport and Music,” a four LP-col­lec­tion with much less focus and qual­i­ty con­trol. Mov­ing away from the aer­o­bics theme, the sec­ond of these albums fea­tured “some kind of com­pet­i­tive skate­board­er on the cov­er” and some “pret­ty dread­ful Hol­ly­wood Lite inci­den­tal music. By the third vol­ume, for­mer jazz musi­cians were beat­ing out 3rd rate riffs with vague­ly elec­tron­ic-sound­ing over­tones.” As with any fad, deriv­a­tive copies over sev­er­al gen­er­a­tions will always be sub­ject to seri­ous aes­thet­ic degra­da­tion. But for seri­ous fans of Sovi­et dance music, of 80s fit­ness, or, ide­al­ly, of both, Aer­o­bic Exer­cise rep­re­sents some­thing tru­ly spe­cial.

via 5 Mag­a­zine,

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Sovi­ets Who Boot­legged West­ern Music on X‑Rays: Their Sto­ry Told in New Video & Audio Doc­u­men­taries

Sovi­et Union Cre­ates a List of 38 Dan­ger­ous Rock Bands: Kiss, Pink Floyd, Talk­ing Heads, Vil­lage Peo­ple & More (1985)

How the Sovi­ets Imag­ined in 1960 What the World Would Look in 2017: A Gallery of Retro-Futur­is­tic Draw­ings

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

Pho­to via Adaman­tios at Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Back in the Mad Men hey­day of high-end home stereo, audio­philes could buy records full of sound-but-not-exact­ly-music, specif­i­cal­ly engi­neered to test the lim­its of — or sim­ply show off — their per­son­al sys­tems. Less tech­ni­cal­ly obses­sive but still proud hi-fi own­ers could drop the nee­dle on one of the albums known almost as well for the rich­ness of its sound as the artistry of its music, such as Frank Sina­tra’s In the Wee Small Hours or Charles Min­gus’ Min­gus Ah Um. The web­site, What Hi-Fi?, includes both of those 1950s land­marks on their list of twelve of the best vinyl test records, which goes on to men­tion Neil Young’s Tonight’s the Night, Talk­ing Heads’ Remain in Light, and Radio­head­’s In Rain­bows, all worth a lis­ten no mat­ter your set­up.

But what if you lis­ten, as so many of us in the 21st cen­tu­ry do, not on vinyl through speak­ers but on dig­i­tal data inter­net-streamed through head­phones? Spo­ti­fy (whose free soft­ware you can down­load here) has assem­bled a 150-song playlist designed to give you a sense of how well those head­phones are serv­ing you, bring­ing togeth­er the work of such audio-con­scious artists as the afore­men­tioned Neil Young (a vocal crit­ic of today’s music for­mats), David Bowie, Suzanne Vega (known as “the Moth­er of the MP3”), Leonard Cohen, Pink Floyd, and those con­sum­mate stu­dio genius­es Steely Dan (albeit not “Dea­con Blues,” long their audio­phile-pre­ferred stereo-test­ing song). Mixed in with the big­ger names, you’ll also hear from musi­cians less wide­ly known but no less ded­i­cat­ed to craft­ing rich and var­ied sound­scapes.

You don’t have to be Neil Young, though, to object to the very premise of the playlist, argu­ing that inter­net-streamed music, which first under­goes dig­i­ti­za­tion and com­pres­sion, can offer noth­ing but a bad­ly sub­stan­dard lis­ten­ing expe­ri­ence — let alone when through a pair of head­phones, and often cheap ear­buds at that. But as all the best record­ing and mix­ing engi­neers know today, you should­n’t release an album unless you’ve first lis­tened to it close­ly through some­thing hum­bler than your ultra-high-end stu­dio mon­i­tors or fan­cy pro­fes­sion­al head­phones, mak­ing sure it sounds accept­able on every­thing all the way down to lap­top and cell­phone speak­ers. Bear in mind, a music fan who’s nev­er giv­en a thought to audio qual­i­ty might well, when they’ve test­ed their cheap ear­buds with this nev­er­the­less son­i­cal­ly scin­til­lat­ing playlist, find them­selves want­i­ng to hear not just more, but bet­ter.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Steely Dan Wrote “Dea­con Blues,” the Song Audio­philes Use to Test High-End Stere­os

The Dis­tor­tion of Sound: A Short Film on How We’ve Cre­at­ed “a McDonald’s Gen­er­a­tion of Music Con­sumers”

Suzanne Vega, “The Moth­er of the MP3,” Records “Tom’s Din­er” with the Edi­son Cylin­der

Neil Young on the Trav­es­ty of MP3s

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.