One of my favorite Brian Eno quotes, or rather one that became an Oblique Strategy, is “Honor Your Mistake as a Hidden Intention.” (Or to be pedantic, the original version was “Honor Thy Error…”).
As a teenager growing up and trying to make art (at that time music and comics) there was no advice more freeing. It was the opposite of what I thought I knew: mistakes were shameful, the sign of an amateur or of the lack of practice. But the more art I made, the more I referenced Eno’s idea, and the more I read and listened, the more I realized it wasn’t just Eno. The Beatles left in an alarm clock meant for the musicians on “A Day in the Life” and the sound of empty booze bottles vibrating on a speaker was left in at the end of “Long Long Long” (along with tons more). The Beastie Boys left in a jumping needle intended for a smooth scratch on “The Sounds of Science.” Radiohead left in Jonny Greenwood’s warm-up chord that became essential to “Creep.” (There’s a whole Reddit thread devoted to these mistakes if you choose to go down the rabbit hole.)
But those examples relate to the recording process of rock music. What about jazz? Surely there’s “wrong” notes when it comes to playing, especially if you’re not the soloist.
In this very short video based around an interview with pianist Herbie Hancock, the master improvisor Miles Davis honored Hancock’s mistake as a hidden intention by playing along with it. It’s both a surprising look into the arcane world of jazz improvisation and a revealing anecdote of Davis, usually known as a difficult collaborator.
“It taught me a very big lesson not only about music,” says Hancock, “but about life.”
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
How to classify the singing-songwriting of Rufus Wainwright? Pop? Folk? Surely we’ll have to throw a “neo-” or two in there. And we can’t ignore the importance of all things operatic to the work of this musician who grows more sui generis with every album he puts out — and indeed, with every stage production he puts on. His interest in opera dates back to his youth, and as early as his self-titled 2001 debut we can hear its direct influence in a song like “Barcelona,” whose lyrics borrow from Verdi’s Macbeth. Verdi, of course, was also working with some pretty rich inspirational material himself, and Wainwright has found an occasion to pay more direct tribute to William Shakespeare this April 22nd, on almost the 400th anniversary of that most influential English playwright’s death.
On that date, he’ll release Take All My Loves: 9 Shakespeare Sonnets, an album that finds him, in the words of NPR’s Stephen Thompson, “tackling the Bard’s work in a grandly sweeping collection of recordings” featuring the talents of “an assortment of singers and actors to perform these 16 tracks, many of which pair rich orchestral pieces with dramatic readings by the likes of Helena Bonham Carter, Carrie Fisher, and even William Shatner.” Yes, Wainwright has somehow managed to bring Star Wars and Star Trek together — and in the least likely of all possible contexts, one in which we also hear Austrian soprano Anna Prohaska, Florence of Florence + the Machine, Wainwright’s sister Martha, and a fair bit of German.
Fans of both the ambitious and nearly uncategorizable singer, fans of the (if you believe Harold Bloom) humanity-inventing dramatist, and many in-between will find in Take All My Lovesmany more feats of musical craftsmanship, literary creativity, and sheer cleverness. And they don’t have to wait until the actual anniversary (or in any case the day before) to do it. You can hear “A Woman’s Face Reprise” (based on Sonnet 20, for those playing the Shakespeare-scholarship home game) at the top of the post; “When in Disgrace with Fortune and Men’s Eyes” (Sonnet 29) below that; and for a limited time, the entire album available to stream free from NPR, which gives everyone a chance to hear what one of our age’s most interesting bards has done in partnership with the Bard himself.
The names Leo Fender and Les Paul will be forever associated with the explosion of the electric guitar into popular culture. And rightly so. Without engineer Fender and musician and studio wiz Paul’s timeless designs, it’s hard to imagine what the most iconic instruments of decades of popular music would look like.
They just might look like frying pans.
Though Fender and Paul (and the Gibson company) get all the glory, it’s two men named George who should rightly get much of the credit for inventing the electric guitar. The first, naval officer George Breed, has a status vis-à-vis the electric guitar similar to Leonardo da Vinci’s to the helicopter.
In 1890, Breed submitted a patent for a one-of-a-kind design, utilizing the two basic elements that would eventually make their way into Stratocasters and Les Pauls—a magnetic pickup and wire strings. Unfortunately for Breed, his design also included some very impractical circuitry and required battery operation, “resulting in a small but extremely heavy guitar with an unconventional playing technique,” writes the International Repertory of Music Literature, “that produced an exceptionally unusual and unguitarlike, continuously sustained sound.”
Like a Renaissance flying machine, the design went nowhere. That is, until George Beauchamp, a “musician and tinkerer” from Texas, came up with a design for an electric guitar pickup that worked beautifully. The first “Frying Pan Hawaiian” lap steel guitar, whose schematic you can see at the top of the post, “now sits in a case in a museum,” writes Andre Millard in his history of the electric guitar, “looking every inch the historic artifact but not much like a guitar.” Gizmodo quotes guitar historian Richard Smith, who discusses the need in the 20s and 30s for an electric guitar to be heard over the rhythm instruments in jazz and in Beauchamp’s preferred style, Hawaiian music, “where… the guitar was the melody instrument. So the real push to make the guitar electric came from the Hawaiian musicians.”
Beauchamp developed the guitar after he was fired as general manager of the National Instrument Manufacture Company. Needing a new project, he and another National employee, Paul Barth, began experimenting with Breed’s ideas. After building a working pickup, they called on another National employee, writes Rickenbacker.com, “to make a wooden neck and body for it. In several hours, carving with small hand tools, a rasp, and a file, the first fully electric guitar took form.” (An earlier electro-acoustic guitar—the Stromberg Electro—contributed to amplifier technology but its awkward pickup design didn’t catch on.)
Needing capital, manufacturing, and distribution, Beauchamp contracted with toolmaker Adolph Rickenbacker, who mass produced the Frying Pan as “The Rickenbacher A‑22″ under the company name “Electro String.” (The company became Rickenbacker Guitars after its owner sold it in the 50s.) Although the novelty of the instrument and its cost during the Great Depression inhibited sales, Beauchamp and Rickenbacker still produced several versions of the Frying Pan, with cast aluminum bodies rather than wood. (See an early model here.) Soon, the Frying Pan became integrated into live jazz bands (see it at the 3:34 mark above in a 1936 Adoph Zukor short film) and recordings.
How does the Frying Pan sound? Astonishingly good, as you can hear for yourself in the demonstration videos above. Although Rickenbacker and other guitar makers moved on to installing pickups in so-called “Spanish” guitars—hollow-bodied jazz boxes with their familiar f‑holes—the Frying Pan lap steel continues to have a particular mystique in guitar history, and was manufactured and sold into the early 1950s.
The next leap forward in electric guitar design? After the Frying Pan came Les Paul’s first fully solidbody electric: The Log.
Learn More about the invention of the electric guitar in the short Smithsonian video just above.
If you’ve taken any introductory course or even read any introductory books on music, you’ll almost certainly have heard it described as “organized sound.” Fair enough, but then what do you call disorganized sound? Why, noise of course. And all this makes perfect sense until your first encounter with the seemingly paradoxical but robust and ever-expanding tradition of noise music.
“Modern ‘noise music’ finds its roots in early electronic and industrial musics,” says Static Signals, which used to review a lot of the stuff. “Where composers began expanding their vocabulary of sound and instrumentation is where the concept of ‘noise’ begins: what sounds can produce music and which are purely static or noise? For some, music’s outer boundary is defined by western European classical instruments designed hundreds of years ago and the sounds, pitches, rhythms they can (classically) produce. For others, no sound, rhythm, tone, or pitch is off limits; music can be made by anything that can vibrate air.”
The development of electronic musical instruments — and indeed, any kind of sound-manipulating electronic device — came as a great boon to this exploration of the borderlands between organized and disorganized sound. You can hear the effects of that sort of technology and much else besides in An Anthology of Noise and Electronic Music, a seven-part anthology released by formidable Belgian experimental music label Sub Rosa, all of it available on Spotify (whose software you can download here if you need it). The first two volumes are embedded above; all seven volumes can be streamed via the links below. If you dig the collection, we’d encourage you to purchase your own copy and support Sub Rosa’s project.
To the noise music-uninitiated — and probably even to a few of the initiated — some of the tracks here will sound like music, and some certainly won’t. But most of them fall fascinatingly in-between the two states, ideally expanding the listener’s conception of the sonic territory music can explore. Some musical experiments, just like scientific experiments, point in more fruitful directions than others, but each one sheds a little new light on the musical enterprise itself. And “the noise,” to take the words straight from Sub Rosa themselves, “goes on…”
For most of us, making a list of our favorite albums involves no small amount of nostalgia. We remember highlights from high school and college: songs on constant rotation after breakups and during summers of bliss. More so than any other media we consume, music—from classical to the most commercial pop—feels deeply personal.
But there are many other ways to relate to music. Brian Eno’s journey through the world of recorded sound, for example, more resembles that of a 19th century explorer. He gravitates toward the culturally exotic, makes studious observations, and advances hypotheses and theories. In reading through an interview he gave to The Quietus for their “baker’s dozen” series—in which they ask famous artists to name their top 13 albums—one theme emerges in the way Eno talks about music: discovery.
And as Eno reminds us in his commentary on his first pick—a gospel record by Reverend Maceo Woods and The Christian Tabernacle Choir—one precursor to discovery is curiosity, unbounded by prejudice or preconception. It’s an approach that has enabled him to create some of the most consistently interesting records decade after decade (hear 150 Eno tracks here), and to remain relevant long after most of his ’70s peers have disappeared.
Eno first heard, or misheard, the gospel group on U.S. radio. To his ears, the refrain “surrender to His will” sounded like “surrender to the wheel,” a cryptic phrase that provoked all sorts of associations. But even after he learned the real lyric, he was hooked on the group’s sound, and wanted to know more, though he himself is entirely non-religious.
“Why am I so moved by a music based on something that I just don’t believe in?,” Eno asked himself. His response ranges into philosophical territory, then ends on an unexpectedly upbeat note. If it surprises you that one of Eno’s favorite albums is an obscure record by an amateur gospel group, take a look at the rest of his picks. We’d expect the Velvet Underground to appear—given his famous comment about their massive influence—and they do. The rest is a collection of wild cards. See the eclectic list below and stop by The Quietus to read Eno’s thoughtful, candid commentary on each album.
If you’ve ever learned to play an instrument, especially the guitar or piano, odds are you’ve spent countless hours trying to master the rhythms and melodies of your favorite songs. And odds are at least one of those songs was written by Messrs. Lennon & McCartney. If you’re anything like me, you probably realized early in the exercise that The Beatles weren’t only praised as great songwriters because of their lyricism and social and romantic insights. Their songs are also packed with ingenious chord changes, unexpected time shifts, unusual hooks, etc.
What may seem at first listen like a simple tune reveals itself as highly challenging for the amateur musician. I well remember sweating over two of my favorites—“Julia” and “Martha My Dear”—for many days.
Even in modified versions that simplify difficult voicings, I struggled to master the letter of the songs while still conveying the spirit. Surely, that’s a testament to my own lack of skill, and yet the trouble I’ve had pulling off my favorite Beatles’ songs has given me all the more respect for musicians who make it look easy.
Even a straight-ahead blues like “Why Don’t We Do It In the Road” ain’t easy to sell—far from it. But I’ve never heard anyone do it better than Tulsa, Oklahoma-born bluesman Lowell Fulsom (top). Further down, St. Vincent does a stellar live rendition of another of my favorites, “Dig a Pony.” A great song can take all kinds of bending, stretching, and pulling and still retain its essence. In Paolo Nutini’s smooth, stripped-down, organ, voice, and drums take on Lennon’s “Don’t Let Me Down,” above, the passion remains, even if the impassioned shouts have been tamed.
There are hundreds more great Beatles’ covers out there, and probably hundreds of terrible ones, too—and many an oddball interpretation that sharply divides opinion in either direction (such as Marc Ribot’s machine-shop “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” which I happen to love). Just above, we’ve put together a Spotify playlist of over 80 great cover versions of Beatles’ songs, culled from suggestions made by @openculture followers/fans on Twitter. (You can download Spotify’s software here.) And in the list below, find links to 20 fabulous cover versions on Youtube. (Those weren’t available on Spotify, but they’re definitely worth hearing). In total, you’ll find 100 tracks, by artists ranging from Ray Charles, to Joe Cocker and Sarah McLachlan, to Patti Smith, David Bowie, and Johnny Cash. It makes for 6 hours of Beatles bliss.
If we’ve missed an essential cover, let us know in the comments below, and drop in a link if you can.
No matter how many readers they attract, the creators of these small-circulation labors of love take their agendas very seriously. Whether the ultimate goal is to inform, to agitate, to smear or to celebrate, their contents are as raw as the cut-and-paste aesthetic that provided their defacto look, pre-Etsy.
While some zinesters are good about preserving master copies and donating back issues to zine libraries, many others’ titles fall through the cracks of history, as the makers age out of the practice, or move on to other interests.
Individual zines’ best chance at survival lies in academia, where experienced archivists and fleets of interns have the time and resources to catalogue and digitize thousands of poorly photocopied, often handwritten pages.
Unsurprisingly, the largest number of titles falls into the Music category. Before the Internet, punk shows were the most reliable channel of zinely distribution, and few of these fanzines are devoid of political content.
Below, Kansas University English professor Frank Farmer (who arranged for the donation) and archivist Becky Schulte discuss the importance of “counter-public documents” and zine culture.
We’ve seen variousperformances of John Cage’s famous silent piece 4′33″. But never during our decade digging up cultural curiosities have we encountered 4′33″ performed by Cage himself. That is, until now. Above you can watch a video outtake from Nam June Paik’s Tribute to John Cage, filmed in 1973, in Harvard Square. Boston’s WBGH describes the scene:
In the video he is seated at a piano, with spectators surrounding him. He toys with his viewer’s expectations by not playing the piano, which is what the general populace would expect from a performance involving a piano. On the piano shelf there are a pocket watch and a slip of paper. He keeps touching and looking at the pocket watch which draws the audience’s attention to the idea of time, and that they are waiting for something to happen, and he also raises and lowers the piano fallboard. There is also text that appears in this particular video that says “This is Zen for TV. Open your window and count the stars. If rainy count the raindrops on the puddle. Do you hear a cricket? …or a mouse.”
Another unconventional item to add to the list: Cage performs 4′33″ in 1′22″!
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