Even COVID-19 can’t stop NPR’s series of Tiny Desk Concerts, which has previously featured Yo-Yo Ma, Adele, Wilco, The Pixies, and many, many other talented musicians. As NPR explains below, the performance involved a little bit of technology and some magic. Enjoy:
It didn’t take long for Billie Eilish to become one of the biggest pop stars in the world, sweep the Grammy Awards’ major categories and release the latest James Bond theme. And today, at just 18, she and her brother, Finneas, have accomplished what no one has been able to do for five and a half months: perform a Tiny Desk concert in what certainly appears to be the NPR Music offices.
Of course, due to safety concerns, even the NPR Music staff can’t set foot in the building that houses Bob Boilen’s desk. But if you look over Eilish’s shoulder, there’s no mistaking the signs that she’s appearing at the Tiny Desk in its present-day form: On the last day before staff began working from home, I took home the Green Bay Packers helmet that sat on the top shelf — the one Harry Styles had signed a few weeks earlier — for safe keeping. In this performance, that spot is empty.
So how the heck did they do it?
Honestly, it’s best that you watch the whole video to experience the extent of the technical feat — which, in the spirit of Eilish’s Saturday Night Live performance, they’re willing to share with you. And thankfully, we still have our ways of photographing the desk, even if the room has fallen silent.
So settle in for a welcome jolt of Tiny Desk innovation, not to mention two of the excellent standalone singles Billie Eilish has released in the past year: “my future” and “everything i wanted.” And, seriously, be sure to watch until the very end.
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People do not tend to answer the question, “do you like Phish?” with, “yeah, I guess they’re okay.” Those who like Phish, love Phish, devotedly and without reservation. And those who don’t like Phish, well….
For the purposes of maintaining objectivity, I shall pretend to remain agnostic on the question, but I do happen to think this kind of polarization is a mark of greatness, wherever one lands. Great art provokes. What could be more provocative than awesome riffs, 20-minute jams, and obscure in-jokes? There is, admittedly, a significant you-had-to-have-been-there quality to Phish fandom.…
Phish, and The Grateful Dead before them, have been instrumental in keeping live music—played at length and with abandon—relevant, not only through their constant touring but through the number of bands in their orbit who inspire their own devoted followings. Now the pandemic has made it impossible for fans of Phish, the String Cheese Incident, the Dave Matthews Band, Widespread Panic, or the Avett Brothers to make it out to shows.
To ease their pain, JamBase launched a Live Video Archive, a music aggregator that allows fans to search 100,000 free streaming concerts on YouTube. “Looking to find videos of Phish performing ‘Harry Hood’ in 2013? Enter ‘Harry Hood’ in the song filter and you’ll see a list of every version in our database,” Jambase explains.
“Use the ‘Event Year’ filter to pick 2013. You’ll then see many videos to choose from. Press ‘Play’ to watch in the player or press ‘queue’ to start a list of videos that will display in the order you selected to view at your leisure.”
Given their audience, JamBase’s catalogue skews heavily toward jam and jam-adjacent bands. But you’ll also find a huge archive of performances, over 14,000 clips, from Seattle independent radio station KEXP. “Performances from The Barr Brothers, Wilco, Jason Isbell and Yo La Tengo are just a few of the dozens of acts featured in KEXP videos on the JBLVA.”
JamBase’s own homepage is also full of great stuff for fans not only of jams and bluegrass bands but other genres as well, from Lucinda Williams’ gritty country folk to Emily King’s acoustic R&B, such as her latest single “See Me,” released in support of Black Lives Matter. These are tough times all around. It can be easy to lose sight of the good things we’re missing as we watch current events unfold. Let the JamBase Live Video Archive remind us of groovy times we had, and will have again.
Prompted by the release of new album Folklore and the 2020 documentary Miss Americana, your hosts Mark Linsenmayer, Erica Spyres, and Brian Hirt speak with guest Amber Padgett about her love of Taylor, ranking the albums/eras, Taylor as songwriter/puppetmaster, why the hate, weird levels of fan engagement, double standards in expectations for female artists, and more. Like all of our discussions, this one is should be interesting to fans, haters, and folks who’re just curious as to what all the fuss is about.
It seems as inevitable as bell bottoms and shoulder-wide collars that Stevie Nicks would transform into the New Age priestess who greeted the 70s with a wave of a billowy, shawl-draped arm. “It makes sense,” Bill DeMain writes at Classic Rock, that her “signature song was inspired by a kind of ancient magic” of the kind that everybody was getting into. That song, “Rhiannon,” takes its name from “an old Welsh witch,” as Nicks would often announce onstage. During Fleetwood Mac’s Nicks/Buckingham heyday, Nicks embodied the character as though possessed, her performances of the song “like an exorcism,” Mick Fleetwood recalled.
The story of how “Rhiannon” came to be, however, is not as straightforward as Nicks’ reaching into the pages of the Mabinogion, the Welsh prose cycle in which Rhiannon first appears. The name came to her several steps removed from its mythical origins, from a novel by Mary Leader called Triad.
“It was just a stupid little paperback that I found somewhere at somebody’s house,” she recalls of the uncanny 1974 composition. “And it was all about this girl who becomes possessed by a spirit named Rhiannon. I read the book, but I was so taken with that name that I thought: ‘I’ve got to write something about this.’ So I sat down at the piano and started this song about a woman that was all involved with these birds and magic.”
“I come to find out,” she says, “after I’ve written the song, that in fact Rhiannon was the goddess of steeds, maker of birds.” The perfect anthem for a singer on the threshold of turning the already famous Fleetwood Mac into one of the biggest rock bands in the world. They were in a kind of wilderness period, having fired longtime guitarist and musical linchpin Danny Kirwan and lost guitarist Bob Welch. When Lindsay Buckingham, his replacement, insisted that Nicks join with him, she brought the song “about an old Welsh witch” along with the pair’s collection of shawls, capes, and kimonos.
You can learn more about the myths of the Mabinogion, the oldest known prose stories in Britain, in the Polyphonic video above. The collection inspired the epic fantasies of J.R.R. Tolkien, and by proxy the epic fantasies of Led Zeppelin and every heavy metal band thereafter. It also features in Lloyd Alexander’s 1960’s fantasy series Chronicles of Prydain (later poorly adapted in Disney’s The Black Cauldron). The pop culture of the 70s had been infused with ancient Welsh before Rhiannon came along, but the goddess herself seemed to belong exclusively to Stevie Nicks, who intuited a deep magic in the music of her ancient name.
We could say that the music of Johann Sebastian Bach transcends instrumentation. Wendy Carlos did a great deal to prove that with her 1968 album Switched-On Bach, composed entirely (and laboriously) on an early Moog synthesizer. Despite its controversial union of long-revered compositions with practically untested musical technology, that project won high praise, not least from as famed an interpreter of Bach as Glenn Gould. Here at Open Culture we’ve featured many of Gould’s own performances of Bach: of the Keyboard Concerto No. 1 in D minor in his 1960 U.S. television debut, of the cantata BWV 54 on a 1962 CBC special, of The Art of Fugue and the Goldberg Variationsas played toward the end of his life in the early 1980s.
Going back to 1959, we find a 27-year-old Gould playing Bach in a National Film Board of Canada documentary, and on “the piano he favors above all others for practicing: a 70-year-old Chickering with a resonant, harpsichord quality recalling the instruments of the time of Bach.” But to truly hear Bach’s music as Bach himself would have heard it, you need to bring out those very same instruments.
The ten selections on Voices of Music’s Bach playlist include the Cello Suite No. 2 in D Minor BWV 1008, Allemande and Courante played on the baroque cello by Eva Lymenstull; the Arioso from Cantata 156 (Sinfonia) with Marc Schachman on the baroque oboe; the Brandenburg Concerto No. 6 in B Flat Major BWV 1051 played by Kati Kyme and Elizabeth Blumenstock on baroque viola (viole da braccio), Elisabeth Reed and William Skeen on the viola da gamba, Tanya Tomkins on the baroque cello, Farley Pearce on the violone, and Hanneke van Proosdij on the harpsichord; and the Sonata No. 3 in C Major for baroque violin BWV 1005 interpreted by August and Georgina McKay Lodge, the former playing the baroque violin and the latter reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s poem “Hymn to Time.”
This isn’t the first time the work of Le Guin, now remembered as an influential author of science fiction and fantasy literature, has been set to music. Just after her death in 2018 we featured Rigel 9, the space rock opera she created in collaboration with avant-garde composer David Bedford in 1985. If Le Guin’s words suited a tale of the future told with high-tech New Wave sounds, they suit an acoustic return to the eighteenth century just as well.
This is a versatility much like Bach’s own, which has guaranteed that, more than 250 years after his death, his music retains its power and depth whether expressed through a piano, a synthesizer, or indeed the instruments of his day — not that the players of percussion tubes or wine glasses have done him great injustice either.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include 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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
What makes one artisan stand out in a field of highly skilled competitors? When we think of classical instruments, we think of the Stradivari family, famed makers of violins, violas, cellos, and other instruments. But the Stradivarius’ success may owe as much to chance as to superior craftsmanship. A Texas A&M professor emeritus of biochemistry, Joseph Nagyvary (also a violinist and violin maker), discovered that Stradivarius instruments were soaked in chemicals “to protect them from a worm infestation that was sweeping through Italy in the 1700s.”
“By pure accident,” this method of pest control, Texas A&M Today writes, had “the unintended result of producing the unique sounds that have been almost impossible to duplicate in the past 400 years.”
So, there you have it, the secret of the Stradivarius sound: borax and brine. There’s more to it than that, of course, but the chemical bath advantage makes for a fascinating bit of trivia. To the ear, it matters little whether a sound is the result of accident, intention, or some measure of the two.
If it sounds sweet, it is, and Stradivarius instruments (in playable condition, anyway) sound like the voices of angels. Happily, the Stradivarius experiment was repeatable hundreds of times, and not only for the famed orchestral instruments with which we’re familiar, if only by reputation. The family made around 1000 instruments, 960 of which are violins. They also made a couple handfuls of guitars, five of which exist in complete form. These are:
The first, and earliest of these instruments, the so-called Sabionari, was made by Antonio Stradivari himself and happens to be the only playable guitar of the five, due to a restoration by three master luthiers. All of the Stradivari guitars are ten-string (five-course) instruments, with doubled notes like a modern 12-string guitar. But, “as with all Stradivari instruments,” The Strad points out, “the ‘Sabionari’ was modernized,” converted to six-string in a process that sounds especially violent in relation to what we now view as a precious museum piece (especially as Andrés Segovia signed the guitar in 1948).
In the early 19th century, Italian luthier Giuseppe Marconcini “changed the neck, peghead and bridge, and added new linings and braces.” The original parts he removed were long gone, so restorers had to fit new ones to the body. Curiously, Marconcini’s 150-year-old parts were “infested by woodworm,” but “the insects spared the original soundboard and bracing wood by Stradivari.” Effective pest control not only preserved the wood; it also contributed to the sound we hear above in these many videos featuring the Sabionari, with players Krishnasol Jimenéz, Ugo Nasrucci, and Rolf Lislevand, who plays a lively Tarantella below and gives us a taste of how the instrument was likely used to accompany dances.
Where it was once “extremely rare” to hear the sound of a Baroque guitar, we can now all, thanks to the internet, enjoy Stradivarius guitar performances. You can see many more here, and learn much more about the 1679 guitar itself, here.
Nina Simone’s creative and political community meant everything to her, and the many losses she suffered in the 60s sent her deeper into the depression of the last decades of her life. “Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, and Lorraine Hansberry [were] prominent,” writes Malik Gaines at LitHub, “among… socially engaged writers and dramatists” whom she considered not only her “political tutors” but also her heroes and closest friends. She never stopped grieving the loss of Hansberry and Hughes and frequently memorialized them in tributes like “Backlash Blues.”
Written by Hughes, and one of Simone’s fiercest and most timely civil rights songs, “Backlash Blues” represents the significant influence the poet had on her and her art. In a live 1967 recording, she sings, “When Langston Hughes died—He told me many months before—Nina keep working until they open up that door.” The two first met when Simone was still Eunice Waymon from Tryon, North Carolina: an aspiring classical pianist, “president of the 11th-grade class and an officer with the school’s NAACP chapter,” explains Andrew J. Fletcher, a board member of the Nina Simone Project in Asheville.
This was 1949, and Hughes had come to Asheville to address Allen High School, the private school for African American girls Simone attended through a scholarship that her music teacher and early champion collected from her hometown. The poet “could not have known,” Maria Popova writes at Brain Pickings, “that [Simone] would soon revolutionize the music canon under her stage name.” But nearly ten years later, he recognized her talent immediately.
On the release of Simone’s first album, Little Girl Blue, Hughes was “so stunned that he lauded it with lyrical ardor” in his column for the Chicago Defender.
She is different. So was Billie Holiday, St. Francis, and John Donne. So in Mort Sahl. She is a club member, a coloured girl, an Afro-American, a homey from Down Home. She has hit the Big Town, the big towns, the LP discs and the TV shows — and she is still from down home. She did it mostly all by herself. Her name is Nina Simone.
They would become close friends and mutual admirers. Hughes sent her “books he thought would inspire her,” including several of his own, and wrote “words for her to set to song.” She wrote to him with earnest expressions of appreciation, especially in the letter here, penned in 1966 just before Hughes’ death.
Simone had just read Hughes’ autobiography The Big Sea. The book, she says, “gives me such pleasure—you have no idea! It is so funny.” She also writes, with candor:
Then too, if I’m in a negative mood and want to get more negative (about the racial problem, I mean) if I want to get downright mean and violent I go straight to this book and there is also material for that. Amazing—
I use the book—what I mean is I underline all meaningful sentences to me…. And as I said there is a wealth of knowledge concerning the negro problem, especially if one wants to trace the many many areas that we’ve had it rough in all these years—sometimes when I’m with white “liberals” who want to know why we’re so bitter—I forget (I don’t forget—I just get tongue-tied) how complete has been the white races’ rejection of us all these years and then when this happens I go get your book.
Hughes’ is rarely “mean and violent,” but Simone brought to her reading her own despair and rage and raw sense of rejection, emotions she was never afraid to explore in her work or talk about with humor and fierce ire in her life. “Brother, you’ve got a fan,” she gushes. The Big Sea “grips my imagination immediately plus everything in it I identify with, even your going to sea and I’ve never been to sea.” She had not been to sea, but she had been adrift, “depressed, alienated and low,” as she sang at Morehouse College in 1969 in a performance of her civil rights anthem and tribute to Lorraine Hansberry, “To Be Young, Gifted and Black.”
The adlib framed Simone’s feelings with the same “emotional and political dimensions,” writes Gaines, she found in Hughes’ work. Though she does not mention it in her letter, her annotated copy of The Big Sea surely marks up the passage below, in which Hughes’ describes his early unhappiness and his transformative encounter with art:
When I was in the second grade, my grandmother took me to Lawrence to raise me. And I was unhappy for a long time, and very lonesome, living with my grandmother. Then it was that books began to happen to me, and I began to believe in nothing but books and the wonderful world in books–where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas.
For Simone, music gave her suffering purpose, but not the music she played for audiences and on record. One of the saddest ironies of her career is that the woman dubbed “The High Priestess of Soul” had little interest in playing soul. She embarked on her popular music career to fund her classical education. However, the opportunities to play the way she wanted to did not arise. “Nina closed her letter on a strangely down note,” writes Nadine Cohodas in Princess Noire: The Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone. “Her melancholy overwhelmed any excitement about playing for the first time in France and Belgium. ‘No pleasure,’ she told Langston, ‘just work.’”
So much of Simone’s frustration and burnout in the music industry came out of a deep sense of alienation from her work. The shy Eunice Waymon had never craved the spotlight, something Hughes must have come to know about her in the years of their acquaintance. In his first note of praise, however, he gets one thing wrong. As she was always the first to point out, Simone did not do it “mostly all by herself.”
The support of her mother, her teacher, and her small “down home” community took her as far as it could. Her relationships with Hansberry, Hughes, and other artists/activists carried her the rest of the way. Until they were gone. But when Hughes died, Popova writes, “a devastated Simone turned her coveted set at the Newport Jazz Festival into a tribute and closed it with an exhortation to the audience: ‘Keep him with you always. He was a beautiful, a beautiful man, and he’s still with us, of course.’” See much more of their correspondence at the Beinecke.
I like to think that, when the occasion arises, I can speak passable Japanese. But pride goeth before the fall, and I fell flat on my first attempt to order a whisky in Tokyo. To my request for a Suntory neat the bartender responded only with embarrassed incomprehension. I repeated myself, pushing my Japanified pronunciation to parodic limits: saaan-to-riii nee-to. At some point the man deciphered my linguistic flailing. “Ah,” he said, brightening, “suuu-to-raaay-to?” To think that I could have handled this situation with dignity had I but seen the Suntory commercial above, in which Herbie Hancock suggests having a drink “straight.”
Would even the maddest men of the American advertising industry countenance the idea of putting a jazz musician in a commercial? Japan thinks differently, however, and in its economic-bubble era of the 1970s and 80s thought more differently still.
Of all the things American embraced (and repurposed) by Japan after its defeat in the Second World War, jazz music has maintained the most intensely enthusiastic fan base. Japanese-made jazz has long been a formidable genre of its own, just as Japanese-made whisky has long held its own with the Western varieties. But when the makers of Japanese whisky made an effort to sell their own product on television to the newly wealthy Japanese people, they looked to American jazzmen to give it a shot of authenticity. Having recruited Hancock to promote drinking their single-malt whisky at room temperature, Suntory got bassist Ron Carter as well as both Branford and Ellis Marsalis to promote drinking it hot.
Could the cultural association between jazz and whisky extend to other liquors? That was the gambit of a 1987 commercial featuring Miles Davis, recently investigated by InsideHook’s Aaron Goldfarb. Its product: shōchū, “a colorless, odorless, yet often challenging spirit typically distilled from rice (known as kome-jochu), barley (mugi-jochu) or sweet potatoes (imo-jochu).” Newly launched with an apparent intent to pitch that staid beverage to moneyed younger people, the brand VAN hired Davis to play a few notes on his trumpet, then take a sip of its shōchū and pronounce it a “miracle.” He also describes himself as “always on the vanguard,” hence, presumably, the name VAN (though its being reminiscent of VAN JACKET, the company that had earlier brought Ivy League style to the same target demographic, couldn’t have been unwelcome).
Though Davis’ brand of cool did its part for the success of Honda scooters and TDK cassette tapes, it proved not to be enough for VAN shōchū. The brand “was a big flop and had a very short life,” Goldfarb quotes an industry expert as saying, “probably because shōchū is so quintessentially Japanese, and a foreign-style shōchū just didn’t make sense to most.” Perhaps the commercial itself also lacked the pleasurable simplicity of Suntory’s many jazz-oriented spots, none of which turned out simpler or more pleasurable than the one with Sammy Davis Jr. performing a cappella just above. In the process of pouring himself a drink Davis plays the part of an entire jazz combo, using only his mouth and the objects at hand, including the ice in his glass. The concept wouldn’t have worked quite so well had he taken his Suntory neat — or rather, straight.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include 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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
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