Music

Leonard Cohen

What a goddamn week. Leonard Cohen, one of the greatest singer-songwriters in living memory, has died at age 82. His music meant a lot to me personally, as it did to countless others. Usually sad, sometimes melodramatic, always thoughtful and poetic and provocative. I never met him in person (though I did go to a couple of concerts), but he lived not too far away from me in LA, and somehow felt as if I knew him. We’ll miss you, Leonard.

Let’s hope he was right about this democracy thing.

Leonard Cohen - Democracy

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Entropic Time

A temporary break from book-related blogging to bring you this delightful video from A Capella Science, in which Tim Blais sings about entropy while apparently violating one of my favorite laws of physics. I don’t even want to think about how much work this was to put together.

Entropic Time (Backwards Billy Joel Parody) | A Capella Science

Tim was gracious enough to tip his hat to a lecture of mine as partial inspiration for the video. And now that I think about it, entropy and the arrow of time play crucial roles in The Big Picture. So this is a book-related blog post after all! Had you fooled.

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Paco de Lucía

Sad news for guitar fans: the brilliant Spanish musician Paco de Lucía just passed away yesterday. While I’m not a major flamenco fan myself, I am a jazz fan — and like many others, I fell in love with Friday Night in San Francisco, an astonishing collaboration between de Lucía and fellow guitar masters Al Di Meola and John McLaughlin. Here are the three gents showing the rest of the world how its done.

Paco De Lucia, Al Di Meola and John McLaughlin - Mediterranian Sun Dance Live

After composing this post, I just noticed I used the same tune above for the very first post in this newly-constituted blog.

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Vi Hart on Twelve-Tone Music

Chances are good that you’ve already seen, or at least seen a link to, Vi Hart’s astonishing video about twelve-tone music. It has almost a million views, which represents a pretty tiny fraction of the total number of people on Earth, but I suspect the correlation with readers of this blog is high.

But I’m posting it anyway, because there might still be some readers who haven’t watched it yet, and that would be a shame. It’s that good. Now, it is a #longwatch, as they say in Twitter-land — half an hour long! Let’s just say it’s more rewarding than catching the latest episode of Two Broke Girls.

Crazy shapes.

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The Universe on a Stratocaster

There are those who believe that music brings meaning to an uncaring universe. It’s only natural, then, to try to capture the essence of reality on a musical instrument.

Sadly, the true essence of reality remains unknown. But we are able to sum up the physics underlying the world of everyday experience in a single equation. So mathematician Nicholas Hoell did the obvious thing — or at least, what should be obvious — and painted that equation on his Stratocaster. (Click to embiggen.)

Guitar_pic

Note the depiction of a few complex arrangements of the underlying reductionistic constituents, providing a nod to the importance of emergent phenomena in encompassing a complete view of the world.

I’m pretty sure that the perfect solo, played on this guitar, would reveal how to quantize gravity.

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Higgs Boson Blues

Almost enough to make me believe in a benevolent force guiding the universe: Nick Cave, on his new album Push the Sky Away, has a song called “Higgs Boson Blues.” (Hat tip to Ian Sample.)

Okay, don’t expect to hear a lot about spontaneous gauge symmetry breaking or giving mass to chiral fermions. But still:

Have you ever heard about the Higgs Boson blues
I’m goin’ down to Geneva baby, gonna teach it to you

Apparently Cave’s lyrics throughout the album came about from “Googling curiosities, being entranced by exotic Wikipedia entries ‘whether they’re true or not’.”

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Welcome

Welcome to the latest incarnation of my blog-related programming activities. As our friend Lucretius says, “All that we see about us consists of transient arrangements of atoms. Some awaken to life. None holds forever.”

I’ve bid an extremely fond farewell to Cosmic Variance, with great memories and enormous respect for my co-bloggers there who are keeping the torch lit. But I wanted to shift to a less formal, more personal and carefree mode of blogging, one where nobody else but me was responsible in any way. I’ll still be doing my best to understand and explain cool ideas in physics, but the only common thread holding the content together will be “things that popped into my head.” It may be intermittent and even inchoate, but hopefully it will be fun.

To set the tone, here’s a little ditty from Paco de Lucia, Al Di Meola, and John McLaughlin. A mixture of heavy thinking and joyful exuberance. Something to shoot for.

PACO DE LUCIA , John McLaughlin , AL DI MEOLA

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Dave Brubeck

Dave Brubeck, an innovative and influential jazz pianist over many years, has died at the age of 91. Based in California, he was a leader of so-called West Coast Jazz, bringing a spirit of experimentation to a part of the jazz world that had been resolutely mainstream.

Dave Brubeck Quartet Blue Rondo à la Turk

Brubeck loved to experiment with unusual time signatures, a tendency that culminated in his masterpiece album, Time Out. The tune played above, Blue Rondo à la Turk, is predominantly in 9/8 time, with the beats broken mostly into a 2+2+2+3 pattern. But things aren’t quite so simple, as Wikipedia explains.

The best thing about Brubeck’s experimentations was that they never sounded formal; they were highly musical and fun to listen to, seemingly flowing without effort unless you tried to really focus on what was going on. He was a much-beloved figure in jazz, and will be sorely missed.

Update: An anecdote from Russ Gershon on Facebook:

I heard him tell a story of when he was on the cover of Time in the late 50s. He was at a hotel with Duke Ellington (they were playing in the same jazz festival, maybe Newport). When Brubeck learned about the coverage he immediately went to Duke’s room and apologized that it was him and not Duke who first earned Time’s cover.

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Von Freeman

Von Freeman, legendary jazz saxophonist, passed away Sunday. He was 88 years old.

Here he is at the 2002 Berlin jazzfest, when Von was a spry 78: Mike Allemana on guitar, Michael Raynor on drums, and Jack Zara on bass. Playing one of Von’s tunes, “Blues for Sunnyland.”

Von Freeman Berlin 2002 Blues For Sunnyland Slim

From 2002 to 2007, listening to Von play live was an integral part of my life in Chicago. He had two regular gigs: once a month at Andy’s downtown, where tourists would squeeze in shoulder-to-shoulder to experience something only Chicago had to offer, and every Tuesday night at the New Apartment Lounge on 75th Street, in one of the sketchier neighborhoods on the South Side. Andy’s was great, but the Apartment was special. A tiny little bar, no cover charge, where you could sit within three feet of the band as they explored the outer regions of improvisational possibility. Starting at 10:30, going into the early morning hours — I went often, but never managed to stay for the whole thing. An eclectic crowd of locals, jazz freaks, and University of Chicago students mixed with the musicians who would make the weekly pilgrimage, because after finishing his set Von would turn the stage over to a jam session that nurtured generations of jazz players.

This video was taken in 2010 by someone who was apparently sitting in my old seat at the Apartment. Matt Ferguson is now on bass.

Von Freeman - Produced by JazzOnTheTube.com

Von was absolutely unique, as a saxophonist and as a person. As a musician he managed to intermingle an astonishing variety of styles, from classic ballads to bebob all the way to free jazz, with more than a few things you would never hear anywhere else. Some thought that his playing was an acquired taste, full of skronks and trills and lighting-fast tempo changes. But once you “got it,” you could hear something in Von that you just couldn’t hear anywhere else. This isn’t just formerly-local pride talking; when John Coltrane left Miles Davis’s band in the 1950’s, Miles tried to get Von to replace him. But Von never left Chicago for more than a few days at a time.

As a person, Von was charming, roguish, stubborn, warm, irascible, and utterly compelling. Sometimes on stage he would get in the mood for talking instead of playing, and honestly it was hard to tell which you preferred. The wisecracks, the wisdom, the Billie Holiday stories, all mixed with the smoke and the cheap beer to create an unforgettable atmosphere.

There wasn’t anybody else like him, and there never will be. We’ll miss you, Von.

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Music Was Better in the Sixties, Man

Actually, popular music is arguably “better” today. But in the Sixties it was more creative — or at least more experimental. So says science. (Via Kevin Drum.)

The science under consideration was carried out by a group of Spanish scientists led by Joan Serrà, and appeared in Scientific Reports, an open-access journal published by Nature. They looked at something called the Million Song Dataset, which is pretty amazing in its own right. The MSD collects data from over a million songs recorded since 1955, including tempo and volume and some information about the pitches of the actual notes (seems unclear to me exactly how detailed this data is).

And the answer is … popular music is in many ways unchanged over the years. The basic frequencies of different notes and so forth haven’t changed that much. But in certain crucial ways they have: in particular, they’ve become more homogeneous. This chart shows “timbral variety” over the years — a way of measuring how diverse the different kinds of sounds appearing in songs are. Nobody should really be surprised that the late 1960’s was the peak of different kinds of instrumentation being used in pop music. On the other hand, one could I suppose argue that this is because back then we didn’t know how to do it right, and there was a lot of experimental crap, whereas we’ve now figured it out. I suppose.

On the other hand, songs have gotten louder! So you get more volume for your money.

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