Sonic Explorations of Japanese Jazz: Stream 8 Mixes of Japan’s Jazz Tradition Free Online

in Music | May 11th, 2021

“Man,” a fel­low work­ing the check­out counter at Los Ange­les’ Amoe­ba Music once said to me, “you sure do like Japan­ese jazz.” His tone was one of faint dis­be­lief, but then, this par­tic­u­lar record-shop­ping trip hap­pened well over a decade ago. Since then the glob­al lis­ten­er­ship of Japan­ese jazz has increased enor­mous­ly, thanks to the expan­sion of audio­vi­su­al stream­ing plat­forms and the enter­pris­ing col­lec­tors and cura­tors who’ve used them to share the glo­ry of the most Amer­i­can of all art forms as mas­tered and re-inter­pret­ed by ded­i­cat­ed musi­cians in the Land of the Ris­ing Sun.

High-pro­file Japan­ese-jazz enthu­si­asts of the 2020s include the Turk­ish DJ Zag Erlat, cre­ator of the Youtube chan­nel My Ana­log Jour­nal, whose short 70s mix of the stuff we fea­tured last year here on Open Cul­ture. But it was only a mat­ter of time before the musi­cal minds at Lon­don-based online radio sta­tion NTS broad­cast the defin­i­tive Japan­ese Jazz ses­sion to the world.

Pre­vi­ous­ly, NTS have ded­i­cat­ed large blocks of air­time to projects like the his­to­ry of spir­i­tu­al jazz and a trib­ute to the favorite music of nov­el­ist Haru­ki Muraka­mi — a Japan­ese man and a jazz-lover, but one whose Amer­i­ca-inspired cul­tur­al ener­gy has­n’t been par­tic­u­lar­ly direct­ed toward jazz of the Japan­ese vari­ety.

“Japan­ese jazz” refers not to a sin­gle genre, but to a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent kinds of jazz giv­en Japan­ese expres­sion. Hence NTS’ Japan­ese Jazz Week, each of whose bilin­gual­ly announced broad­casts spe­cial­izes in a dif­fer­ent facet of the music. The first mix is ded­i­cat­ed to the late gui­tarist Ryo Kawasa­ki; the sec­ond, to tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese instru­ments like the shakuhachi, and the koto; the third, to Three Blind Mice, often described as “the Japan­ese Blue Note”; the fourth, to jazz fusion, one of the musi­cal cur­rents in Japan that gave rise to city pop in the 1980s; the fifth, to pianist Masabu­mi Kikuchi, who played with the likes of Son­ny Rollins and Miles Davis; the sixth, to modal jazz and bop from the 1960s to the 1980s; and the sev­enth, to free-impro­vis­ing sax­o­phon­ist Kaoru Abe, “a true mav­er­ick of late 70’s Japan­ese jazz.”

Japan­ese Jazz Week also includes a spe­cial on spir­i­tu­al and free jazz as played in Japan “from its ear­li­est stir­rings in the 1960s until it reached inter­na­tion­al recog­ni­tion in the 1970s.” The 70s, as the inter­na­tion­al fan con­sen­sus appears to reflect, was the gold­en age of Japan­ese jazz; as I recall, the heap of LPs I set down before that Amoe­ba clerk came most­ly from that decade. The decade’s play­ers, pro­duc­ers, labels, and con­cert venues con­tin­ue their work today, the cur­rent pan­dem­ic-relat­ed dif­fi­cul­ties of live per­for­mance aside. When the shows start and trav­el resumes again in earnest, no small num­ber of Japan­ese-jazz fans will be book­ing their tick­ets to Tokyo at once, all in search of an offline Japan­ese Jazz Week — or two or three — of their own.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

Hear Enchant­i­ng Mix­es of Japan­ese Pop, Jazz, Funk, Dis­co, Soul, and R&B from the 70s and 80s

Haru­ki Muraka­mi Day: Stream Sev­en Hours of Mix­es Col­lect­ing All the Jazz, Clas­si­cal & Clas­sic Amer­i­can Pop Music from His Nov­els

The His­to­ry of Spir­i­tu­al Jazz: Hear a Tran­scen­dent 12-Hour Mix Fea­tur­ing John Coltrane, Sun Ra, Her­bie Han­cock & More

Hear a 9‑Hour Trib­ute to John Peel: A Col­lec­tion of His Best “Peel Ses­sions”

Hear a Six-Hour Mix Tape of Hunter S. Thompson’s Favorite Music & the Songs Name-Checked in His Gonzo Jour­nal­ism

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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 or on Face­book.

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Who Invented Heavy Metal Music?: A Search for Origins

in Music | May 10th, 2021

Where exact­ly did “heavy met­al” start? Like a sim­i­lar question—“what is the first rock and roll song?”–there’s not so much a direct answer as a spread­ing of ingre­di­ents over a num­ber of years, all of which com­bine to cre­ate “heavy met­al,” and its numer­ous sub-gen­res that have sprung forth from it. There’s not so much a year of ori­gin as there is a year after which one can­not claim a begin­ning. (Now that’s a sen­tence!)

If you’re con­fused, this quick his­to­ry by Poly­phon­ic will answer all of your ques­tions, and hope­ful­ly turn you on to a few tracks you’ve nev­er heard before.

So what makes a heavy met­al track? Well, first you have to have some loud, heavy, dis­tort­ed gui­tars. Poly­phon­ic goes back to blues musi­cians, as so many rock gui­tarists con­tin­ue to do, to sug­gest the gui­tar sounds of Pat Hare and Joe Hill Lewis as pre­cur­sors to that sound. Next you have to have some light­ing-fast fin­ger­work all over the frets—maybe the hyper­fast riffage of surf rock leg­end Dick Dale will do?

That’s all fine and good. But we need to get *heavy* in this met­al. And it was the Brits who took on this job. Cre­at­ing a mood and exper­i­ment­ing with sound marked bands like the Bea­t­les, Stones, and The Who, as they tried to out-do each oth­er. When Paul McCart­ney heard that The Who had deliv­ered the heav­i­est song so far in “I Can See for Miles” (which now sounds sur­pris­ing­ly twee com­pared to lat­er Who songs), he sat down with the band and blast­ed out “Hel­ter Skel­ter.” Take that, Pete Town­shend.

The Bea­t­les weren’t steeped in the blues, but so many oth­er British bands were, and here’s where blues picked up the gaunt­let thrown down by these heavy, dron­ing, bass-laden sounds. While the British Inva­sion bands wore their Eng­lish­ness on their (record) sleeves, trad- and psych-blues bands like Cream and Led Zep­pelin want­ed to sound Amer­i­can. Things got loud­er, crunchi­er, slow­er, and dark­er. They got real­ly dark with Black Sab­bath, which named them­selves after the Mario Bava hor­ror film, and brought anoth­er ingre­di­ent to the stew: dark, fan­tas­tic, Satan­ic imagery. Final­ly, Deep Pur­ple brought the ban­shee screech­ings of Ian Gillan as a final part to the puz­zle. Put it all togeth­er and what you have is heavy met­al, man.

Heavy Met­al has gone on to delight gen­er­a­tions and piss off all the right peo­ple at the same time. It’s giv­en rise to a new sub genre every year, and come out of it with a hard-earned respectabil­i­ty.

The above ani­mat­ed video from Pitch­fork will get you caught up with the evo­lu­tion into chart dom­i­na­tion and back out into purist obscu­ri­ty.

And for those who would rather lis­ten to a his­to­ry rather than watch one, check this out.

Poly­phon­ic hits most of the well known sign­posts on the jour­ney, but if you think an essen­tial song is miss­ing, let us know in the com­ments.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Dev­il­ish His­to­ry of the 1980s Parental Advi­so­ry Stick­er: When Heavy Met­al & Satan­ic Lyrics Col­lid­ed with the Reli­gious Right

Watch Heavy Met­al Park­ing Lot, the Cult Clas­sic Film That Ranks as One of the “Great Rock Doc­u­men­taries” of All Time

Punk & Heavy Met­al Music Makes Lis­ten­ers Hap­py and Calm, Not Aggres­sive, Accord­ing to New Aus­tralian Study

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

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An Immersive Pink Floyd Museum Exhibition Is Coming to the U.S.: Get Tickets Online

in History, Music | May 7th, 2021

While it’s not tech­ni­cal­ly incor­rect to call Pink Floyd a rock band, the term feels some­how unequal to the descrip­tive task at hand. One does­n’t so much lis­ten to albums like The Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall as expe­ri­ence them, and this went even more so for their elab­o­rate, increas­ing­ly colos­sal live per­for­mances. A ret­ro­spec­tive of Pink Floy­d’s his­to­ry, which stretched back to 1965, must do jus­tice to Pink Floy­d’s tran­scen­dent ambi­tion: this was the goal of Pink Floyd: Their Mor­tal Remains, an exhi­bi­tion that first opened at Lon­don’s Vic­to­ria and Albert Muse­um in 2017 and is now prepar­ing to make its Unit­ed States debut at Los Ange­les’ Vogue Mul­ti­cul­tur­al Muse­um this sum­mer.

“You arrive into Their Mor­tal Remains via a life-size repli­ca of the band’s Bed­ford van, their black-and-white tour­ing vehi­cle in the mid-Six­ties,” Rolling Stone’s Emi­ly Zem­ler writes of the V&A show. “The sto­ry is told by let­ters, draw­ings, posters, video footage, news­pa­per clip­pings, music instru­ments, tick­et stubs and odd objects, some of them repli­cas.”

The items on dis­play come not just from the pro­fes­sion­al life of the band but the per­son­al lives of it mem­bers as well: “Syd Barrett’s red-orange bicy­cle,” for instance, or “the actu­al cane used on Waters dur­ing his ear­ly years” to deliv­er pun­ish­ment for mis­be­hav­ior at school.

Also on dis­play are no few notable musi­cal instru­ments, includ­ing a kit paint­ed for drum­mer Nick Mason with ukiyo‑e artist Kat­sushi­ka Hoku­sai’s The Great Wave off Kana­gawa. “Once it’s behind glass, it just looks a mil­lion dol­lars,” Mason says in one of Their Mor­tal Remains’ trail­ers, appear­ing in his capac­i­ty as a con­sul­tant to the project. It main cura­tor, graph­ic design­er Aubrey “Po” Pow­ell, co-cre­at­ed the cov­er art for The Dark Side of the Moon, and brings to bear a thor­ough knowl­edge of Pink Floy­d’s music, their his­to­ry, and their sen­si­bil­i­ty. “It’s way out of scale to any­thing that you’ve ever seen before,” he says of the exhi­bi­tion’s design, “and that sort of jour­ney is very rem­i­nis­cent of psy­che­delia, of being on psy­che­del­ic drugs.”

In its way, the alter­ation of con­scious­ness is as essen­tial to the Pink Floyd phe­nom­e­non as the incor­po­ra­tion of tech­nol­o­gy (sub­ject of a recent Mason-host­ed BBC pod­cast series) and the expan­sion of rock music’s son­ic ter­ri­to­ry. On a deep­er lev­el, there’s also what V&A direc­tor Tris­tram Hunt calls “an Eng­lish pas­toral idiom,” which will cer­tain­ly make for an intrigu­ing jux­ta­po­si­tion when Their Mor­tal Remains com­pletes its instal­la­tion in the thick of Hol­ly­wood Boule­vard. There it will run from August 3rd to Novem­ber 28th, though tick­ets are already on sale at the Vogue Mul­ti­cul­tur­al Muse­um’s web site. Though in Los Ange­les the con­scious­ness-alter­ing sub­stances that have tra­di­tion­al­ly accom­pa­nied their music are now more legal than ever, be warned that what Sal­vador Dalí said of him­self also holds true for Pink Floyd: they are drugs.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Hour-Long Col­lec­tion of Live Footage Doc­u­ments the Ear­ly Days of Pink Floyd (1967–1972)

The Dark Side of the Moon Project: Watch an 8‑Part Video Essay on Pink Floyd’s Clas­sic Album

“The Dark Side of the Moon” and Oth­er Pink Floyd Songs Glo­ri­ous­ly Per­formed by Irish & Ger­man Orches­tras

Pink Floyd Drum­mer Nick Mason Presents the His­to­ry of Music & Tech­nol­o­gy in a Nine-Part BBC Pod­cast

Bruce Spring­steen and Pink Floyd Get Their First Schol­ar­ly Jour­nals and Aca­d­e­m­ic Con­fer­ences

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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 or on Face­book.

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Electronic Music Pioneer Wendy Carlos Demonstrates the Moog Synthesizer on the BBC (1970)

in Music, Technology, Television | May 6th, 2021


We can break pop­u­lar music into two peri­ods: before the Moog and after the Moog. Upon its debut in 1964, that syn­the­siz­er made a big splash in the small but long-estab­lished elec­tron­ic-music world by, among oth­er inno­v­a­tive qual­i­ties, being small­er than an entire room. Over the next few years, inven­tor Bob Moog (whose pre­vi­ous line was in theremins) refined his epony­mous brain­child to the point that it became acces­si­ble to com­posers not already on the cut­ting edge of music tech­nol­o­gy. But for Wendy Car­los, the cut­ting edge of music tech­nol­o­gy was where she’d spent most of her life; hence her abil­i­ty to cre­ate the first best­selling all-Moog album, 1968’s Switched-On Bach.

By the begin­ning of the 1970s, great pub­lic curios­i­ty had built up about these new music-mak­ing machines, thanks to Car­los’ work as well as that of com­posers like the BBC Radio­phon­ic Work­shop’s Daphne Oram. It was the BBC that pro­duced the clip above, in which Car­los explains the fun­da­men­tals of not just the Moog but sound syn­the­sis itself.

She even plays a bit of the sec­ond move­ment of Bach’s Bran­den­burg Con­cer­to #4, Car­los’ ren­di­tion of which on Switch-On Bach’s fol­low-up The Well-Tem­pered Syn­the­siz­er moved no less an author­i­ty than Glenn Gould to call it “the finest per­for­mance of any of the Bran­den­burgs — live, canned, or intu­it­ed — I’ve ever heard.”

In this footage, more than half a cen­tu­ry old as it is, only an evi­dent skill at oper­at­ing the Moog and under­stand­ing of the prin­ci­ples of syn­the­siz­ers sug­gest Car­los’ iden­ti­ty. At that time in her career she was still known as Wal­ter Car­los, and she has since spo­ken of hav­ing main­tained that image by apply­ing a pair of fake side­burns for pub­lic appear­ances. (She would return to the BBC to do anoth­er Moog demon­stra­tion as Wendy nine­teen years lat­er.) Today one dares say those mut­ton chops look a bit obvi­ous, but it isn’t as a mas­ter of dis­guise that Car­los has gone down in his­to­ry. Rather, her work has showed the way for gen­er­a­tions of musi­cians, well out­side of cam­pus lab­o­ra­to­ries, to make use of elec­tron­i­cal­ly gen­er­at­ed sounds in a man­ner that res­onates, as it were, with the wider lis­ten­ing pub­lic.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Com­pos­er Wendy Car­los Demo an Orig­i­nal Moog Syn­the­siz­er (1989)

Hear Glenn Gould Sing the Praise of the Moog Syn­the­siz­er and Wendy Car­los’ Switched-On Bach, “the Record of the Decade” (1968)

The Scores That Elec­tron­ic Music Pio­neer Wendy Car­los Com­posed for Stan­ley Kubrick’s A Clock­work Orange and The Shin­ing

Bob Moog Demon­strates His Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Moog Mod­el D Syn­the­siz­er

How the Moog Syn­the­siz­er Changed the Sound of Music

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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 or on Face­book.

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Watch a New Director’s Cut of Prince’s Blistering “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” Guitar Solo (2004)

in Music | May 5th, 2021

Recent­ly, I was walk­ing with a young rel­a­tive who, upon pass­ing a mur­al of the late Prince Rogers Nel­son, looked up at me and asked, “who is that?,” where­upon my eyes grew wide as saucers and I began the tale of a musi­cal hero who con­quered every instru­ment, every musi­cal style, every chord and scale, etc. It was a sto­ry fit for young ears, mind you, but myth­ic enough, I guess, that it inspired my rel­a­tive to stop me mid-sen­tence and ask in awe, “was he a god?” To which I stam­mered, caught off guard, “well, kind of…..”

Human­ly flawed though he was, Prince comes as close as any recent fig­ure to musi­cal divin­i­ty in the flesh. He seemed to con­jure and cre­ate effort­less­ly, ex nihi­lo, nev­er seem­ing to tire and always look­ing as though he just stepped off of a cloud. Now we know a lit­tle more about the source of some of that seren­i­ty, but it dimin­ish­es his leg­end not one bit. If not a god, he was at least some sort of wiz­ard.

Prince’s famous­ly epic live solo at the 2004 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induc­tion Cer­e­mo­ny in the star-packed jam­boree cov­er of George Harrison’s “While My Gui­tar Gen­tly Weeps” holds up as a won­drous­ly suc­cinct case in point to show the chil­dren. Now, the per­for­mance has been re-edit­ed in a “director’s cut” by the broadcast’s orig­i­nal direc­tor Joel Gallen. Thom Dunn at Boing Boing quotes his expla­na­tion: “there were sev­er­al shots that were both­er­ing me. I got rid of the dis­solves and made them all cuts, and added lots more close ups of Prince dur­ing his solo.” (See the orig­i­nal below.)

“For­tu­nate­ly,” notes Dunn, “Gallen pre­served the dis­ap­pear­ing gui­tar at the end.” No one knows to this day where the gui­tar went, not even Tom Pet­ty and the Heart­break­ers drum­mer Steve Fer­rone, who was on stage behind Prince at the time. The stunt was unre­hearsed, and so was every­thing about the solo — no one had any idea what was going to hap­pen, a fright­en­ing prospect on live tele­vi­sion but a risk one must take, I sup­pose, when work­ing with the Pur­ple One.

In 2016, Gallen told The New York Times the sto­ry, worth quot­ing in full, of the performance’s rehearsal, a moment of pri­vate humil­i­ty from Prince behind his live bravu­ra show onstage.

The Pet­ty rehearsal was lat­er that night. And at the time I’d asked him to come back, there was Prince; he’d shown up on the side of the stage with his gui­tar. He says hel­lo to Tom and Jeff and the band. When we get to the mid­dle solo, where Prince is sup­posed to do it, Jeff Lyn­ne’s gui­tar play­er just starts play­ing the solo. Note for note, like Clap­ton. And Prince just stops and lets him do it and plays the rhythm, strums along. And we get to the big end solo, and Prince again steps for­ward to go into the solo, and this guy starts play­ing that solo too! Prince does­n’t say any­thing, just starts strum­ming, plays a few leads here and there, but for the most part, noth­ing mem­o­rable.

They fin­ish, and I go up to Jeff and Tom, and I sort of hud­dle up with these guys, and I’m like: “This can­not be hap­pen­ing. I don’t even know if we’re going to get anoth­er rehearsal with him. [Prince]. But this guy can­not be play­ing the solos through­out the song.” So I talk to Prince about it, I sort of pull him aside and had a pri­vate con­ver­sa­tion with him, and he was like: “Look, let this guy do what he does, and I’ll just step in at the end. For the end solo, for­get the mid­dle solo.” And he goes, “Don’t wor­ry about it.” And then he leaves. They nev­er rehearsed it, real­ly. Nev­er real­ly showed us what he was going to do, and he left, basi­cal­ly telling me, the pro­duc­er of the show, not to wor­ry. And the rest is his­to­ry. It became one of the most sat­is­fy­ing musi­cal moments in my his­to­ry of watch­ing and pro­duc­ing live music.

No, kid, he wasn’t a god, just a guy who could do things no one else could. He was a genius.

via Boing Boing / Laugh­ing Squid

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Prince Plays a Mind-Blow­ing Gui­tar Solo On “While My Gui­tar Gen­tly Weeps”

Watch Prince Per­form “Pur­ple Rain” in the Rain in His Tran­scen­dent Super Bowl Half-Time Show (2007)

Prince’s First Tele­vi­sion Inter­view (1985)

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

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Keith Richards Demonstrates His Famous 5‑String Technique (Used on Classic Stones Songs Like “Start Me Up,” “Honky Tonk Women” & More)

in Music | May 4th, 2021

For the gui­tarist, alter­nate tun­ings expand the son­ic pos­si­bil­i­ties of the instru­ment. But where, say, a pro­gres­sive met­al play­er will add a sev­enth or eighth string, pitch every­thing down, and get tech­ni­cal, the oppo­site is the case with “open” tun­ings in folk and blues. They are an ide­al basis for slide gui­tar and three-chord, 12-bar vamps, and became the per­fect plat­form for Kei­th Richards, giv­ing him the room he need­ed to trans­late the music of his folk heroes into the grit­ty, dis­tort­ed rock and roll of the Stones.

Feel­ing like he had gone as far as he could in stan­dard tun­ing, Richards first turned to an open D on the band’s 1968 return to roots, Beg­gars Ban­quet and non-album sin­gle “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.” In his auto­bi­og­ra­phy, Life, he describes how he moved to open G from a desire to imi­tate the five-string ban­jo: “With the five-string it was just like turn­ing a page; there’s anoth­er sto­ry. And I’m still explor­ing. With five strings you can be sparse; that’s your frame, that’s what you work on. ‘Start Me Up,’ ‘Can’t You Hear Me Knock­ing,’ ‘Honky Tonk Women,’ all leave gaps between the chords.”

As Keef tells it, the great Ry Cood­er — who plays on Let it Bleed and Sticky Fin­gers — first intro­duced him to five-string open G tun­ing in the 60s, thir­ty years before curat­ing Cuban music for the world on Bue­na Vista Social Club. Cood­er “had the tun­ings down. He had the open G,” Richards writes:

The advan­tage (of the open‑G tun­ing) is that you can get cer­tain drone notes going. It’s an open‑G tun­ing, with the low E‑string removed and there’s real­ly only three notes you use. My favorite phrase about this style of play­ing is that all you need to play it is five strings, two notes, two fin­gers and one assh*le.

Doing an impres­sion of a mean Ike Turn­er, Richards demon­strates “that five-string sh*t” above on a beat-up Mar­tin acoustic at the top of the post. Gui­tarists who cov­er the Stones in stan­dard tun­ings “know something’s wrong, that an ele­ment is amiss,” writes George Raj­na at Huff­in­g­ton Post. “Alter­ing to Keith’s open ‘G’ tun­ing makes songs such as ‘Can’t You Hear Me Knock­ing’ sim­ple to play.”

Open G can also help play­ers break out of a six-string rut. As Kei­th says, when he “found the five-string, it was like dis­cov­er­ing a new instru­ment.” Cood­er, it seems wasn’t very hap­py about Richards tak­ing his licks, call­ing the Stones “blood­suck­ers” in a 70s Rolling Stone inter­view. But as far as Keef is con­cerned, it seems, everything’s fair game, and “if it’s in the bones, it’s in the bones,” he writes.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Rolling Stones Jam with Mud­dy Waters for the First and Only Time at Chicago’s Leg­endary Checker­board Lounge (1981)

The Rolling Stones Release a Long Lost Track Fea­tur­ing Led Zeppelin’s Jim­my Page

Hunter S. Thomp­son Talks with Kei­th Richards in a Very Mem­o­rable and Mum­ble-Filled Inter­view (1993)

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

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How the Internet Archive Has Digitized More than 250,000 78 R.P.M. Records: See the Painstaking Process Up-Close

in History, Internet Archive, Music | May 4th, 2021

In the his­to­ry of record­ed music, no medi­um has demon­strat­ed quite the stay­ing pow­er of the phono­graph record. Hear­ing those words, most of us envi­sion a twelve-inch disc designed to play at 33 1⁄3 rev­o­lu­tions per minute, the kind still man­u­fac­tured today. But like every oth­er form of tech­nol­o­gy, that famil­iar vinyl LP did­n’t appear ex nihi­lo: on its intro­duc­tion in 1948, it was the lat­est in a series of phono­graph records of dif­fer­ent sizes and speeds. The first dom­i­nant record for­mat spun at 78 r.p.m., a speed stan­dard­ized in the mid-1920s, though the discs them­selves (made of rub­ber, shel­lac, or oth­er pre-vinyl mate­ri­als) had been in pro­duc­tion since the end of the 19th cen­tu­ry and remained in pro­duc­tion until the 1950s.

The half-cen­tu­ry of the “78” adds up to quite a lot of music, most of which has long been inac­ces­si­ble to non-anti­quar­i­ans. Enter the his­tor­i­cal­ly mind­ed tech­nol­o­gists of the Inter­net Archive, who since 2016 have been work­ing with media preser­va­tion com­pa­ny George Blood LP to dig­i­tize, pre­serve, and make avail­able, as of this writ­ing, more than 250,000 such records.

The process involves much more than play­ing them all into a com­put­er, due not least to the toll the past cen­tu­ry or so has tak­en on the discs’ sur­faces. “Each record is cleaned on a machine that sprays dis­tilled water onto its sur­face,” writes The Verge’s Kait Sanchez. “A lit­tle vac­u­um arm then sucks up the water, along with what­ev­er dirt and nas­ti­ness has built up in the record’s grooves.”

“The discs are then pho­tographed, and the pho­tos are ref­er­enced to pull info from the discs’ labels and add it to the archive’s data­base by hand.” There fol­lows the actu­al dig­i­ti­za­tion, which records each disc with four styli at once: since 78s nev­er had stan­dard­ized groove sizes, “record­ings tak­en with var­i­ous sty­lus tips will each sound slight­ly dif­fer­ent,” but for any record in the George Blood Col­lec­tion the lis­ten­er can choose which of the four they’d pre­fer to lis­ten through. You can see each step of the process in the video at the top of the post, part of a Twit­ter thread recent­ly post­ed by the Inter­net Archive. There the Archive notes that, “after scan­ning 250,000 sides, we’ve found 80% of these 78s were pro­duced by the ‘Big Five’ labels” — Colum­bia, RCA Vic­tor, Dec­ca, Capi­tol and Mer­cury — “but along the way, we’ve uncov­ered 1700 oth­er music labels and some pret­ty beau­ti­ful pic­ture discs.”

You can look at — and more to the point, lis­ten to — every­thing in the the George Blood Col­lec­tion here, which is a sub­set of the Inter­net Archive’s larg­er col­lec­tion of dig­i­tized 78 records as well as the cylin­ders that 78s whol­ly dis­placed as a con­sumer for­mat. As the Inter­net Archive’s Twit­ter thread reminds us, “from 1898–1950, this was THE way music was record­ed & shared.” In oth­er words, if your par­ents were lis­ten­ing to music in that peri­od — or maybe your grand­par­ents, great-grand­par­ents, or great-great grand­par­ents — 78s were their MP3s, their Spo­ti­fy, their Youtube. We descend as lis­ten­ers from enthu­si­as­tic buy­ers of 78s, and now, thanks to the Inter­net Archive and its col­lab­o­ra­tors, we can enjoy a large and ever-increas­ing pro­por­tion of their entire world of record­ed music for free.

via The Verge

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mas­sive Archive of 78RPM Records Now Dig­i­tized & Put Online: Stream 78,000 Ear­ly 20th Cen­tu­ry Records from Around the World

25,000+ 78RPM Records Now Pro­fes­sion­al­ly Dig­i­tized & Stream­ing Online: A Trea­sure Trove of Ear­ly 20th Cen­tu­ry Music

The Inter­net Archive Is Dig­i­tiz­ing & Pre­serv­ing Over 100,000 Vinyl Records: Hear 750 Full Albums Now

The Boston Pub­lic Library Will Dig­i­tize & Put Online 200,000+ Vin­tage Records

The Ground­break­ing Art of Alex Stein­weiss, Father of Record Cov­er Design

How the Inter­net Archive Dig­i­tizes 3,500 Books a Day–the Hard Way, One Page at a Time

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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 or on Face­book.

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The Story of the Rolling Stones: A Selection of Documentaries on the Quintessential Rock-and-Roll Band

in History, Music | May 3rd, 2021

The Rolling Stones define the rock-and-roll band, as they have for near­ly six decades now. Exact­ly how they’ve done so is thor­ough­ly doc­u­ment­ed, not least by the band’s own expan­sive and still-grow­ing cat­a­log of songs and albums (all of which I hap­pen to have spent the last few months lis­ten­ing through). But the sto­ry of the Stones con­tin­ues to com­pel, told and re-told as it is in every form of media pro­duced by each era through which the band has passed: books, arti­cles, pod­casts, and also the sort of doc­u­men­taries we’ve col­lect­ed here today. Some were orig­i­nal­ly pro­duced for tele­vi­sion; oth­ers, like Watch­Mo­jo’s “The Rolling Stones: The Sto­ry & the Songs” above, for the inter­net. Each of them address­es the same ques­tion: how did a cou­ple of blues-obsessed lads from Kent come to run the biggest rock group in the world?

Even when straight­for­ward­ly pre­sent­ed, as in the Biog­ra­phy broad­cast above, the his­to­ry of the Rolling Stones con­sti­tutes a pop-cul­tur­al thrill ride. It begins, by most accounts, with for­mer class­mates Mick Jag­ger and Kei­th Richards bump­ing into each oth­er at a train sta­tion in 1961. Their shared inter­est in music, and espe­cial­ly Amer­i­can blues, inspired them to put a band togeth­er.

Before long, Jag­ger and Richards’ Blues Boys made the acquain­tance of anoth­er band, Blues Incor­po­rat­ed, whose mem­bers includ­ed Bri­an Jones, Ian Stew­art and Char­lie Watts. Though Watts would­n’t join up until lat­er, the oth­er four con­sti­tut­ed most of the first line­up of the Rolling Stones, who made their debut at Lon­don’s Mar­quee Club in July 1962.

You can see a great deal of archive footage depict­ing the Stones in their ear­ly years in the doc­u­men­tary above, Rolling Stones: Rock of Ages. The title implies an obvi­ous and much-repeat­ed joke about the once-rebel­lious young­sters’ insis­tence on rock­ing into rel­a­tive­ly advanced age. But onstage — and the live per­for­mance has always been essen­tial to their appeal, more so even than their albums — they remain very much the same band once pro­mot­ed with the ques­tion “Would you let your sis­ter go with a Rolling Stone?” That line was only one of the strate­gies used by its author, the Stones’ first man­ag­er Andrew Loog Old­ham, to launch his boys into world­wide pop­u­lar­i­ty by fram­ing them as the brash oppo­site of the Bea­t­les — to whom, despite their con­sid­er­able musi­cal dif­fer­ences, one can hard­ly avoid mak­ing ref­er­ence in the sto­ry of the Stones.

Though the bands became fast friends in real life, the press of the 1960s could­n’t resist craft­ing a rival­ry, as recount­ed in The Bea­t­les vs. The Rolling Stones, the Canal+ doc­u­men­tary above. What­ev­er com­pe­ti­tion exist­ed between them (or with Amer­i­can bands like the Beach Boys) only encour­aged them to make their music more pow­er­ful and dis­tinc­tive. This they did in the face of count­less per­son­al and pro­fes­sion­al set­backs, which for the Stones includ­ed the loss of found­ing mem­ber Bri­an Jones and the vio­lent Alta­mont Free Con­cert, wide­ly inter­pret­ed as the end of the utopi­an 1960s. As prod­ucts and sur­vivors of that era, the Stones also remain embod­i­ments of its insou­ciant ambi­tion. “For my gen­er­a­tion, what was hap­pen­ing and the feel­ing in the air was: it’s time to push lim­its, says no less a sur­vivor than the sub­ject of Kei­th Richards: The Ori­gin Of The Species. “The world is ours now, and you can rise or fall on it.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Visu­al His­to­ry of The Rolling Stones Doc­u­ment­ed in a Beau­ti­ful, 450-Page Pho­to Book by Taschen

Watch the Rolling Stones Write “Sym­pa­thy for the Dev­il”: Scenes from Jean-Luc Godard’s ’68 Film One Plus One

Revis­it the Infa­mous Rolling Stones Free Fes­ti­val at Alta­mont: The Ill-Fat­ed Con­cert Took Place 50 Years Ago

The Rolling Stones at 50: Mick, Kei­th, Char­lie & Ron­nie Revis­it Their Favorite Songs

Watch the Rolling Stones Play “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” While Social Dis­tanc­ing in Quar­an­tine

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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 or on Face­book.

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