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How Jaco Pastorius Invented the Electric Bass Solo & Changed Musical History (1976)

How does one define a mas­ter­piece? Is it per­son­al­ly sub­jec­tive, or it is just anoth­er word we use for sta­tus sym­bols? In an essay on bass play­er Jaco Pas­to­rius’ 1976 self-titled debut album, schol­ar Uri González offers an old­er def­i­n­i­tion: “in the old Euro­pean guild sys­tem, the aspir­ing jour­ney­man was expect­ed to cre­ate a piece of hand­i­craft of the high­est qual­i­ty in order to reach the sta­tus of ‘mas­ter.’ One was then offi­cial­ly allowed to join the guild and to take pupils under tute­lage.”

Pas­to­rius’ debut album cer­ti­fied him as a mas­ter musi­cian; he leapt from “anonymi­ty to jazz star­dom, earn­ing admi­ra­tion both from the aver­age musi­cal­ly une­d­u­cat­ed con­cert-goer to the hippest jazz cat,” and he gained a fol­low­ing among an “ever grow­ing num­ber of adept stu­dents that, still today, study his solos, licks, com­po­si­tions and arrange­ments.” Pas­to­rius’ solo on his ver­sion of the Char­lie Park­er tune  “Don­na Lee,” espe­cial­ly, helped rede­fine the instru­ment by, first, invent­ing the elec­tric bass solo.

The “Don­na Lee” solo, Pat Methe­ny writes,  is “one of the fresh­est looks at how to play on a well trav­eled set of chord changes in recent jazz his­to­ry — not to men­tion that it’s just about the hippest start to a debut album in the his­to­ry of record­ed music.”

Whether you like Jaco Pas­to­rius’ music or not, it’s beyond ques­tion that his play­ing changed musi­cal his­to­ry through a trans­for­ma­tive approach to the instru­ment. In the video at the top, pro­duc­er Rick Beato explains the impor­tance of the “Don­na Lee” solo, an inter­pre­ta­tion of a jazz stan­dard played on a fret­less bass Pas­to­rius made him­self, and cre­at­ing a sound no one had heard before.

Beato’s is a tech­ni­cal expla­na­tion for those with a back­ground in music the­o­ry, and it high­lights just how intim­i­dat­ing Pas­to­rius’ play­ing can be for musi­cians and non-musi­cians alike. But tech­nique, as Her­bie Han­cock not­ed in a blurb on Jaco Pas­to­rius, means lit­tle with­out the musi­cal sen­si­bil­i­ties that move peo­ple to care, and Pas­to­rius had it in abun­dance. “He had this wide, fat swath of a sound,” wrote one of his most famous col­lab­o­ra­tors, Joni Mitchell, in trib­ute. “He was an inno­va­tor…. He was chang­ing the bot­tom end of the time, and he knew it.”

One of those changes, from “Don­na Lee” to the end of Pas­to­rius’ tumul­tuous life and career in 1987 involved mov­ing the elec­tric bass into a melod­ic role it had not played before. This not only meant leav­ing the low­er root notes, but also craft­ing a bright, round, live­ly tone that for those upper reg­is­ters. “In the Six­ties and Sev­en­ties,” writes Mitchell, “you had this dead, dis­tant bass sound. I didn’t care for it. And the oth­er thing was, I had start­ed to think, ‘Why couldn’t the bass leave the bot­tom some­times and go up and play in the midrange and then return?’” She found the answer to her ques­tions in Jaco.

Hear Pas­to­rius’ orig­i­nal record­ing of “Don­na Lee” fur­ther up, and see a live ver­sion from 1982 above to take in what Mitchell called his “joie de vivre.” The song, which already had a ven­er­a­ble jazz his­to­ry, is now con­sid­ered, González writes, “the quin­tes­sen­tial bass play­ers’ man­i­festo.” Or, as con­ga play­er Don Alias, the only accom­pa­nist dur­ing Pas­to­rius’ famous solo, put it, “every bass play­er I know can now cut ‘Don­na Lee’ thanks to Jaco.”

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Jazz Leg­end Jaco Pas­to­rius Gives a 90 Minute Bass Les­son and Plays Live in Mon­tre­al (1982)

Leg­endary Stu­dio Musi­cian Car­ol Kaye Presents 150 Free Tips for Prac­tic­ing & Play­ing the Bass

What Makes Flea Such an Amaz­ing Bass Play­er? A Video Essay Breaks Down His Style

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

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The Pulp Tarot: A New Tarot Deck Inspired by Midcentury Pulp Illustrations

Graph­ic artist Todd Alcott has endeared him­self to Open Cul­ture read­ers by retro­fitting mid­cen­tu­ry pulp paper­back cov­ers and illus­tra­tions with clas­sic lyrics from the likes of David BowiePrinceBob Dylan, and Talk­ing Heads.

Although he’s dab­bled in the abstrac­tions that once graced the cov­ers of psy­chol­o­gy, phi­los­o­phy, and sci­ence texts, his over­ar­ch­ing attrac­tion to the visu­al lan­guage of sci­ence fic­tion and illic­it romance speak to the pre­mi­um he places on nar­ra­tive.

And with hun­dreds of “mid-cen­tu­ry mashups” to his name, he’s become quite a mas­ter of bend­ing exist­ing nar­ra­tives to his own pur­pos­es.

Recent­ly, Alcott turned his atten­tion to the cre­ation of the Pulp Tarot deck he is fund­ing on Kick­starter.

A self-described “clear-eyed skep­tic as far as para­nor­mal things” go, Alcott was drawn to the “sim­plic­i­ty and strange­ness” of Pamela Col­man Smith’s “bewitch­ing” Tarot imagery:

Maybe because they were sim­ply the first ones I saw, I don’t know, but there is some­thing about the nar­ra­tive thread that runs through them, the way they delin­eate the devel­op­ment of the soul, with all the choic­es and crises a soul encoun­ters on its way to ful­fill­ment, that real­ly struck a chord with me. You lay out enough Tarot spreads and they even­tu­al­ly coa­lesce around a hand­ful of cards that real­ly seem to define you. I don’t know how it hap­pens, but it does, every time: there are cards that come up for you so often that you think, “Yep, that’s me,” and then there are oth­ers that turn up so rarely that, when they do come up, you have to look them up in the lit­tle book­let because you’ve nev­er seen them before.

One such card for Alcott is the Page of Swords. In the ear­ly 90s, curi­ous to know what the Tarot would have to say about the young woman he’d start­ed dat­ing, he shuf­fled and cut his Rid­er-Waite-Smith deck “until some­thing inside said “now” and he flipped over the Page of Swords:

I looked it up in the book­let, which said that the Page of Swords was a secret-keep­er, like a spy. I thought about that for a moment; the woman I was see­ing was noth­ing like a spy, and had no spy-like attrib­ut­es. I shrugged and began the process again, shuf­fling and cut­ting and shuf­fling and cut­ting, until, again, some­thing inside said “now,” and turned up the card again. It was the Page of Swords, again. My heart leaped, I put the deck back in its box and qui­et­ly freaked out for a while. The next day, I asked the young lady if the Page of Swords meant any­thing to her, and she said “Oh sure, when I was a kid, that was my card.” Any­way, I’m now mar­ried to her.

The Three of Pen­ta­cles is anoth­er favorite, one that pre­sent­ed a par­tic­u­lar design chal­lenge.

The Smith deck shows a stone­ma­son, an archi­tect and a church offi­cial, col­lab­o­rat­ing on build­ing a cathe­dral. Now, there are no cathe­drals in the pulp world, so I had to think, well, in the pulp world, pen­ta­cles rep­re­sent mon­ey, so the obvi­ous choice would be to show three crim­i­nals plan­ning a heist. I could­n’t find an image any­thing close to the one in my head, so I had to build it: the room, the table, the map of the bank, the plan, the peo­ple involved, and then stitch it all togeth­er in Pho­to­shop so it end­ed up look­ing like a cohe­sive illus­tra­tion. That was a real­ly joy­ful moment for me: there were the three con­spir­a­tors, the Big Cheese, the Dame and The Goon, their roles clear­ly defined despite not see­ing any­one’s face. It was a real break­through, see­ing that I could put togeth­er a lit­tle nar­ra­tive like that.

Smith imag­ined a medieval fan­ta­sy world when design­ing her Tarot deck. Alcott is draw­ing on 70 years of pop-cul­ture ephemera to cre­ate a trib­ute to Smith’s vision that also works as a deck in their own right “with its own moral nar­ra­tive uni­verse, based on the atti­tudes and con­ven­tions of that world.”

Before draft­ing each of his 70 cards, Alcott stud­ied Smith’s ver­sion, research­ing its mean­ing and design as he con­tem­plates how he might trans­late it into the pulp ver­nac­u­lar. He has found that some of Smith’s work was delib­er­ate­ly exact­ing with regard to col­or, atti­tude, and cos­tume, and oth­er instances where spe­cif­ic details took a back seat to mood and emo­tion­al impact:

Once I under­stand what a card is about, I look through my library to find images that help get that across. It can get real­ly com­pli­cat­ed! A lot of times, the char­ac­ter’s body is in the right posi­tion but their face has the wrong expres­sion, so I have to find a face that fits what the card is try­ing to say. Or their phys­i­cal atti­tude is right, but I need them to be grip­ping or throw­ing some­thing, so I have to find hands and arms that I can graft on, Franken­stein style. In some cas­es, there will be fig­ures in the cards cob­bled togeth­er from five or six dif­fer­ent sources. 

These cards are eas­i­ly the most com­plex work I’ve ever done in that sense. The song pieces I do are a con­ver­sa­tion between the piece and the song, but these cards are a con­ver­sa­tion between me, Smith, the entire Tarot tra­di­tion, and the uni­verse. 

Vis­it Todd Alcott’s Etsy shop to view more of his mid-cen­tu­ry mash ups, and see more cards from The Pulp Tarot and sup­port Kick­starter here.

All images from the Pulp Tarot used with the per­mis­sion of artist Todd Alcott.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Clas­sic Songs Re-Imag­ined as Vin­tage Book Cov­ers Dur­ing Our Trou­bled Times: “Under Pres­sure,” “It’s the End of the World as We Know It,” “Shel­ter from the Storm” & More

David Bowie Songs Reimag­ined as Pulp Fic­tion Book Cov­ers: Space Odd­i­ty, Heroes, Life on Mars & More

Songs by Joni Mitchell Re-Imag­ined as Pulp Fic­tion Book Cov­ers & Vin­tage Movie Posters

Four Clas­sic Prince Songs Re-Imag­ined as Pulp Fic­tion Cov­ers: When Doves Cry, Lit­tle Red Corvette & More

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

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The Making of a Marble Sculpture: See Every Stage of the Process, from the Quarry to the Studio

Some mar­ble stat­ues, even when stripped of their col­or by the sands of time since the hey­day of Greece and Rome, look prac­ti­cal­ly alive. But they began their “lives,” their appear­ance often makes us for­get, as rough-hewn blocks of stone. Not that just any mar­ble will do: fol­low­ing the exam­ple of Michelan­ge­lo, the dis­cern­ing sculp­tor must make the jour­ney to the Tus­can town of Car­rara, “home of the world’s finest mar­ble.” So claims the video above, a brief look at the process of Hun­gar­i­an sculp­tor Már­ton Váró. That entire process, it appears, takes place in the open air: most­ly in his out­door stu­dio space, but first at the Car­rara quar­ry (see bot­tom video) where he picks just the right block from which to make his vision emerge.

Like Michelan­ge­lo, Váró has a man­i­fest­ly high lev­el of skill at his dis­pos­al — and unlike Michelan­ge­lo, a full set of mod­ern pow­er tools as well. But even today, some sculp­tors work with­out the aid of angle cut­ters and dia­mond-edged blades, as you can see in the video from the Get­ty above.

In it a mod­ern-day sculp­tor intro­duces tra­di­tion­al tools like the point chis­el, the tooth chis­els, and the rasp, describ­ing the dif­fer­ent effects achiev­able with them by using dif­fer­ent tech­niques. If you “lose your ego and just flow into the stone through your tools,” he says, “there’s no end of pos­si­bil­i­ties of what you can do inside that space” — the space of lim­it­less pos­si­bil­i­ties, that is, afford­ed by a sim­ple block of mar­ble.

In the video above, sculp­tor Sti­je­po Gavrić fur­ther demon­strates the prop­er use of such hand tools, painstak­ing­ly refin­ing a rough­ly human form into a life­like ver­sion of an already real­is­tic clay mod­el — and one that holds up quite well along­side the orig­i­nal mod­el, when she shows up for a com­par­i­son. The Great Big Sto­ry doc­u­men­tary short below takes us back to Tus­cany, and specif­i­cal­ly to the town of Pietrasan­ta, where mar­ble has been quar­ried for five cen­turies from a moun­tain first dis­cov­ered by Michelan­ge­lo.

It’s also home to hard­work­ing sculp­tors well known for their abil­i­ty to repli­cate clas­sic and sacred works of art. “Mar­ble is my life, because in this area you feed off mar­ble,” says one who’s been at such work for about 60 years. If stone gives the artist life, it does so only to the extent that he breathes life into it.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch a Mas­ter­piece Emerge from a Sol­id Block of Stone

Michelangelo’s David: The Fas­ci­nat­ing Sto­ry Behind the Renais­sance Mar­ble Cre­ation

How Ancient Greek Stat­ues Real­ly Looked: Research Reveals Their Bold, Bright Col­ors and Pat­terns

Roman Stat­ues Weren’t White; They Were Once Paint­ed in Vivid, Bright Col­ors

3D Print 18,000 Famous Sculp­tures, Stat­ues & Art­works: Rodin’s Thinker, Michelangelo’s David & More

Rare Film of Sculp­tor Auguste Rodin Work­ing at His Stu­dio in Paris (1915)

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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Take 193 Free Tech and Business Courses Online at Udacity: Product Design, Programming, A.I., Marketing & More

Each of us now com­mands more tech­no­log­i­cal pow­er than did any human being alive in pre­vi­ous eras. Or rather, we poten­tial­ly com­mand it: what we can do with the tech­nol­o­gy at our fin­ger­tips — and how much mon­ey we can make with it — depends on how well we under­stand it. Luck­i­ly, the devel­op­ment of learn­ing meth­ods has more or less kept pace with the devel­op­ment of every­thing else we now do with com­put­ers. Take the online-edu­ca­tion plat­form Udac­i­ty, which offers “nan­ode­gree” pro­grams in areas like pro­gram­ming, data sci­ence, and cyber­se­cu­ri­ty. While the nan­ode­grees them­selves come with fees, Udac­i­ty does­n’t charge for the con­stituent cours­es: in oth­er words, you can earn what you need to know for free.

Above you’ll find the intro­duc­tion to Udac­i­ty’s Prod­uct Design course by Google (also cre­ator of the Cours­era pro­fes­sion­al-cer­tifi­cate pro­grams pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture). “Designed to help you mate­ri­al­ize your game-chang­ing idea and trans­form it into a prod­uct that you can build a busi­ness around,” the course “blends the­o­ry and prac­tice to teach you prod­uct val­i­da­tion, UI/UX prac­tices, Google’s Design Sprint and the process for set­ting and track­ing action­able met­rics.”

This is a high­ly prac­ti­cal learn­ing expe­ri­ence at the inter­sec­tion of tech­nol­o­gy and busi­ness, as are many oth­er of Udac­i­ty’s 193 free cours­es, like App Mar­ket­ingApp Mon­e­ti­za­tion, How to Build a Start­up, and Get Your Start­up Start­ed.

If you have no par­tic­u­lar inter­est in found­ing and run­ning the next Google, Udac­i­ty also hosts plen­ty of cours­es that focus entire­ly on the work­ings of dif­fer­ent branch­es of tech­nol­o­gy, from pro­gram­ming and arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence to 2D game devel­op­ment and 3D graph­ics. (In addi­tion to the broad intro­duc­tions, there are also rel­a­tive­ly advanced cours­es of a much more spe­cif­ic focus: Devel­op­ing Android Apps with Kotlin, say, or Deploy­ing a Hadoop Clus­ter.) And if you’d sim­ply like to get your foot in the door with a job in tech, con­sid­er such offer­ings as Refresh Your Résumé, Strength­en Your LinkedIn Net­work & Brand, and a vari­ety of inter­view-prepa­ra­tion cours­es for jobs in data sci­encemachine learn­ing, prod­uct man­age­ment, vir­tu­al-real­i­ty devel­op­ment, and oth­er sub­fields. And how­ev­er cut­ting-edge their work, who could­n’t anoth­er spin through good old Intro to Psy­chol­o­gy?

Find a list of 193 Free Udac­i­ty cours­es here. For the next week Nan­ode­grees are 75% off (use code JULY75). Find more free cours­es in our list, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Note: Open Cul­ture has a part­ner­ship with Udac­i­ty. If read­ers enroll in cer­tain Udac­i­ty cours­es and pro­grams that charge a fee, it helps sup­port Open Cul­ture.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Google’s UX Design Pro­fes­sion­al Cer­tifi­cate: 7 Cours­es Will Help Pre­pare Stu­dents for an Entry-Lev­el Job in 6 Months

Learn How to Code for Free: A DIY Guide for Learn­ing HTML, Python, Javascript & More

1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties

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 Acoustics of Stonehenge: Researchers Build a Model to Understand How Sound Reverberated within the Ancient Structure

It’s impos­si­ble to resist a Spinal Tap joke, but the cre­ators of the com­plete scale mod­el of Eng­land’s ancient Druidic struc­ture pic­tured above had seri­ous inten­tions — to under­stand what those inside the cir­cle heard when the stones all stood in their upright “henge” posi­tion. A research team led by acousti­cal engi­neer Trevor Cox con­struct­ed the mod­el at one-twelfth the actu­al size of Stone­henge, the “largest pos­si­ble scale repli­ca that could fit inside an acoustic cham­ber at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Sal­ford in Eng­land, where Cox works,” reports Bruce Bow­er at Sci­ence News. The tallest of the stones is only two feet high.

This is not the first time acoustic research has been car­ried out on Stone­henge, but pre­vi­ous projects were “all based on what’s there now,” says Cox. “I want­ed to know how it sound­ed in 2200 B.C., when all the stones were in place.” The exper­i­ment required a lot of extrap­o­la­tion from what remains. The con­struc­tion of “Stone­henge Lego” or “Mini­henge,” as the researchers call it, assumes that “Stonehenge’s out­er cir­cle of stand­ing sarsen stones — a type of sil­crete rock found in south­ern Eng­land — had orig­i­nal­ly con­sist­ed of 30 stones.” Today, there are 17 sarsen stones in the out­er cir­cle among the 63 com­plete stones remain­ing.

“Based on an esti­mat­ed total 157 stones placed at the site around 4,200 years ago, the researchers 3‑D print­ed 27 stones of all sizes and shapes,” Bow­er explains. “Then, the team used sil­i­cone molds of those items and plas­ter mixed with oth­er mate­ri­als to re-cre­ate the remain­ing 130 stones. Sim­u­lat­ed stones were con­struct­ed to min­i­mize sound absorp­tion, much like actu­al stones at Stone­henge.” Once Cox and his team had the mod­el com­plet­ed and placed in the acoustic cham­ber, they began exper­i­ment­ing with sound waves and micro­phones, mea­sur­ing impulse respons­es and fre­quen­cy curves.

What were the results of this son­ic Stone­henge recre­ation? “We expect­ed to lose a lot of sound ver­ti­cal­ly, because there’s no roof,” says Cox. Instead, researchers found “thou­sands upon thou­sands of reflec­tions as the sound waves bounced around hor­i­zon­tal­ly.” Par­tic­i­pants in rit­u­al chants or musi­cal cel­e­bra­tions inside the cir­cle would have heard the sound ampli­fied and clar­i­fied, like singing in a tiled bath­room. For those stand­ing out­side the mon­u­ment, or even with­in the out­er cir­cle of stones, the sound would have been muf­fled or damp­ened. Like­wise, the arrange­ment would have damp­ened sound enter­ing the inner cir­cle from out­side.

Indeed, the effect was so pro­nounced that “the place­ment of the stones was capa­ble of ampli­fy­ing the human voice by more than four deci­bels, but pro­duced no echoes,” notes Art­net. This sug­gests that the site’s acoustic prop­er­ties were not acci­den­tal, but designed as part of its essen­tial func­tion for an elite group of par­tic­i­pants, “even though the site’s con­struc­tion would have required a huge amount of man­pow­er.” This is hard­ly dif­fer­ent from oth­er mon­u­men­tal ancient reli­gious struc­tures like pyra­mids and zig­gu­rats, built for roy­al­ty and an elite priest­hood. But it’s only one inter­pre­ta­tion of the structure’s pur­pose.

While Cox and his team do not believe acoustics were the pri­ma­ry moti­va­tion for Stonehenge’s design — astro­log­i­cal align­ment seems to have been far more impor­tant — it clear­ly played some role. Oth­er schol­ars have their own hypothe­ses. Research still needs to account for envi­ron­men­tal fac­tors — or why “Stone­henge hums when the wind blows hard,” as musi­col­o­gist Rupert Till points out. Some have spec­u­lat­ed the stones may have been instru­ments, played like a giant xylo­phone, a the­o­ry test­ed in a 2013 study con­duct­ed by researchers from the Roy­al Col­lege of Art, but this, too, remains spec­u­la­tive.

As the great Stone­henge enthu­si­ast Nigel Tufnel once sang, “No one knows who they were, or what they were doing.” But what­ev­er it sound­ed like, Cox and his col­leagues have shown that the best seats were inside the inner cir­cle. Read the research team’s full arti­cle here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Ancient Astron­o­my of Stone­henge Decod­ed

An Artist Vis­its Stone­henge in 1573 and Paints a Charm­ing Water­col­or Paint­ing of the Ancient Ruins

The Spinal Tap Stone­henge Deba­cle

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

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The Long-Lost Pieces of Rembrandt’s Night Watch Get Reconstructed with Artificial Intelligence

Most of us know Rem­brandt’s mas­ter­piece by the name The Night Watch, but it has a longer orig­i­nal title: Mili­tia Com­pa­ny of Dis­trict II under the Com­mand of Cap­tain Frans Ban­ninck Cocq. By the same token, the ver­sion of the paint­ing we’ve all seen — what­ev­er we hap­pen to call it — is small­er than the one Rem­brandt orig­i­nal­ly paint­ed in 1642. “In 1715, the mon­u­men­tal can­vas was cut down on all four sides to fit onto a wall between two doors in Amsterdam’s Town Hall,” writes The New York Times’ Nina Sie­gal. “The snipped pieces were lost. Since the 19th cen­tu­ry, the trimmed paint­ing has been housed in the Rijksmu­se­um, where it is dis­played as the museum’s cen­ter­piece, at the focal point of its Gallery of Hon­or.”

In recent years, the Rijksmu­se­um has hon­ored The Night Watch fur­ther with a thor­ough­go­ing restora­tion called Oper­a­tion Night Watch. This ambi­tious under­tak­ing has so far pro­duced attrac­tions like the largest and most detailed pho­to­graph of the paint­ing ever tak­en, zoom-in-able to the indi­vid­ual brush­stroke.

That phase required high imag­ing tech­nol­o­gy, to be sure, but it may appear down­right con­ven­tion­al com­pared to the just-unveiled recre­ation of the work’s three-cen­turies-miss­ing pieces, which will hang on all four sides of the orig­i­nal at the Rijksmu­se­um for the next three months. This mak­ing-whole would­n’t have been pos­si­ble with­out a small copy made in the 17th cen­tu­ry — or the lat­est arti­fi­cial-intel­li­gence tech­nol­o­gy of the 21st.

Image cour­tesy of the Rijksmu­se­um

“Rather than hir­ing a painter to recon­struct the miss­ing pieces, the museum’s senior sci­en­tist, Robert Erd­mann, trained a com­put­er to recre­ate them pix­el by pix­el in Rembrandt’s style,” writes Sie­gal. Erd­mann used “a rel­a­tive­ly new tech­nol­o­gy known as con­vo­lu­tion­al neur­al net­works, a class of arti­fi­cial-intel­li­gence algo­rithms designed to help com­put­ers make sense of images.” The process, explained in more detail by Shan­ti Escalante-De Mat­tei at ART­News, involved dig­i­tal­ly “split­ting up the paint­ing into thou­sands of tiles and plac­ing match­ing tiles from both the orig­i­nal and the copy side-by-side,” train­ing mul­ti­ple neur­al net­works to com­plete the paint­ing in a style as close as pos­si­ble to Rem­brandt’s rather than the copy­ist’s. The result, with a few new faces as well as a star­tling­ly dif­fer­ent com­po­si­tion­al feel than the Night Watch we’ve all seen, would no doubt please Cap­tain Ban­ninck Cocq and his mili­ti­a­men: this, after all, is the por­trait they paid for.

You can watch videos on this Rijksmu­se­um page show­ing how the clas­sic paint­ing was restored.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Makes The Night Watch Rembrandt’s Mas­ter­piece

The Restora­tion of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch Begins: Watch the Painstak­ing Process On-Site and Online

The Largest & Most Detailed Pho­to­graph of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch Is Now Online: Zoom In & See Every Brush Stroke

All the Rem­brandts: The Rijksmu­se­um Puts All 400 Rem­brandts It Owns on Dis­play for the First Time

Watch an Art Con­ser­va­tor Bring Clas­sic Paint­ings Back to Life in Intrigu­ing­ly Nar­rat­ed Videos

AI & X‑Rays Recov­er Lost Art­works Under­neath Paint­ings by Picas­so & Modigliani

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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Tom Jones Covers Talking Heads “Burning Down the House”–and Burns Down the House (1999)

It was sup­pos­ed­ly “the album that final­ly oblit­er­ates the thin line sep­a­rat­ing arty white pop music and deep black funk,” as David Fricke wrote on the release of Talk­ing Heads’ Speak­ing in Tongues. The praise maybe over­sells music that is more arty white pop than “deep black funk.” But there’s nev­er been any deny­ing the funk­i­ness of Talk­ing Heads, either, just as there’s nev­er been any deny­ing the soul­ful­ness of Tom Jones. Not that they’re musi­cal­ly com­pa­ra­ble artists, but both have incor­po­rat­ed Black musi­cal styles into their own idioms, win­ning respect on either side of the indus­try’s seg­re­gat­ed line for self-aware re-inter­pre­ta­tions of the blues, funk, soul, and R&B, as well as Ghan­ian high life and Niger­ian Afrobeat.

Jones’ late-career rein­ven­tion involved show­ing up on the Fresh Prince of Bel Air, cov­er­ing Prince, work­ing with Wyclef Jean, and mak­ing music one might char­ac­ter­ize as gen­er­al­ly good-humored pop that show­cased his still-got-it vocal abil­i­ties. In 1999, he took on Speak­ing in Tongues’ P‑Funk-inspired sin­gle “Burn­ing Down the House” in a cov­er that can be called a slick dance-pop inter­pre­ta­tion of an art-rock re-inter­pre­ta­tion of funk music.

Joined by the Cardi­gans, Jones belts it out with his typ­i­cal swag­ger, while Cardi­gans’ singer Nina Pers­son acts as the “foil” writes Patrick Garvin at Pop Cul­ture Exper­i­ment in a roundup of the song’s many cov­ers: “She sound­ed as monot­o­ne as he sound­ed mani­a­cal. And he sound­ed pret­ty damn mani­a­cal.”


But Jones doesn’t sound mani­a­cal like David Byrne sounds mani­a­cal. The orig­i­nal track came togeth­er from a jam ses­sion, with lyrics impro­vised by Byrne, who shout­ed ran­dom phras­es until he found those that best fit the song, chang­ing the Par­lia­ment-Funkadel­ic audi­ence chant “burn down the house!” into “burn­ing down the house,” a line which could mean any­thing at all. (At one point, he tells NPR, it changed to “Foam Rub­ber, U.S.A.”) Is it a threat? A pan­icked out­cry? A cel­e­bra­tion? A man­ic lamen­ta­tion? In Byrne’s anguished yelps one can nev­er tell.

Jones makes “burn­ing down the house” sound like a come-on, set against the ici­est of tight­ly syn­co­pat­ed arrange­ments, in the most 90s of music videos ever. (Con­trast it with the live ver­sion above, with P‑Funk’s own Bernie Wor­rell on key­boards, from Jonathan Demme’s Stop Mak­ing Sense.) Every cov­er of the song, and there are many, does its own thing. “The one con­sis­tent aspect,” Garvin writes, “is Byrne’s weird lyrics… because they don’t tell a sto­ry in a lin­ear sense, they can take on any vari­ety of mean­ings.”

Accord­ing to Byrne him­self, the song did take on added res­o­nance for him, per­fect­ly in keep­ing with the 90s rebirth of Tom Jones. “I didn’t real­ly know at the time,” he said in 1984, “but to me… it implies ecsta­t­ic rebirth or tran­scend­ing one’s own self…. In clas­sic psy­chol­o­gy, the house is the self. And burn­ing it down is destroy­ing your­self… And the assump­tion is you get reborn, like a Phoenix from the ash­es. See? It’s all there.” Indeed.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Tom Jones Per­forms “Long Time Gone” with Cros­by, Stills, Nash & Young–and Blows the Band & Audi­ence Away (1969)

Janis Joplin & Tom Jones Bring the House Down in an Unlike­ly Duet of “Raise Your Hand” (1969)

Talk­ing Heads Live in Rome, 1980: The Con­cert Film You Haven’t Seen

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

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1540 Monet Paintings in a Two Hour Video

I am dis­tressed, almost dis­cour­aged, and fatigued to the point of feel­ing slight­ly ill. What I am doing is no good, and in spite of your con­fi­dence I am very much afraid that my efforts will all lead to noth­ing. 

To know any­thing about the school of paint­ing called Impres­sion­ism, one must know Claude Mon­et, who gave the move­ment its name with his paint­ing Impres­sion, Sun­rise and pro­vid­ed its method — an almost con­fronta­tion­al rela­tion­ship with land­scape in plein-air. “I have gone back to some things that can’t pos­si­bly be done: water, with weeds wav­ing at the bot­tom,” Mon­et wrote in a let­ter to his friend Gus­tave Gef­froy in 1890. “It is a won­der­ful sight, but it dri­ves one crazy try­ing to paint it. But that is the kind of thing I am always tack­ling.”

That “kind of thing,” the com­pul­sion to paint nature in motion, required work­ing quick­ly, repeat­ing the same exper­i­ments over and over, despair­ing of get­ting it right, pro­duc­ing in the attempt his glo­ri­ous series of haystacks and water lilies. Mon­et began paint­ing land­scapes upon meet­ing artist Eugene Boudin, who taught him to paint in open air, and he nev­er stopped, refin­ing his brush­stroke for almost sev­en­ty years: from his first can­vas, 1858’s View from the banks of the Lezade, to his last, The Rose Bush, fin­ished in 1926, the final year of his life.

What­ev­er else Impres­sion­ism might mean, when it comes to Mon­et, it entails a prodi­gious amount of draw­ing, sketch­ing, and paint­ing. Over 2,500 such works have been attrib­uted to him. That num­ber is prob­a­bly much high­er “as it is known that Mon­et destroyed a num­ber of his own works and oth­ers have sure­ly been lost over time,” notes the Mon­et Gallery. Around 2,000 of those works are paint­ings, now spread around the world, with the largest col­lec­tion locat­ed at the Mar­mot­tan Mon­et Muse­um in Paris, where Impres­sion, Sun­rise (above) is held.

While it may be near­ly impos­si­ble to see all of Monet’s known works in one life­time (just as it seems impos­si­ble that he could have made so many mas­ter­pieces in one life), you can see 1540 of them in the video at the top — in a pre­sen­ta­tion that may or may not suit your art view­ing sen­si­bil­i­ties. If zoom­ing slow­ly into hun­dreds of Mon­et paint­ings for a few sec­onds leaves you feel­ing a lit­tle over­whelmed, you can also head to the Mon­et Gallery online to see over 1900 of the artist’s attempts at “fol­low­ing Nature,” as he put it, “with­out being able to grasp her.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Rare 1915 Film Shows Claude Mon­et at Work in His Famous Gar­den at Giverny

Claude Mon­et at Work in His Famous Gar­den at Giverny: Rare Film from 1915

How to Paint Water Lilies Like Mon­et in 14 Min­utes

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

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