Music

And Things for Them to Blog About

As the year breaks, the internets are abuzz with deep thoughts!

What will change everything? is this year’s Edge Annual Question. Many interesting answers, as you might expect. Choose from Massive Technological Failure (David Bodanis), Breaking the Species Barrier (Richard Dawkins), Coordinated and Expanded Computational Power (Lisa Randall), Faster Evolution (Jonathan Haidt), Happiness (Betsy Devine), Synthetic Biology (Dimitar Sasselov), and more. The book of last year’s question is out soon.

The blog posts to be reprinted in the Open Lab 2008 anthology have been announced — only 50 selections from over 500 nominations, I’m glad I wasn’t responsible for making the tough choices. Also glad that they chose one of my posts, The First Quantum Cosmologist. You can also read about The Igneous Petrology of Ice Cream (Green Gabbro), Expect the Unexpected (A canna’ change the laws of physics), How do cave bats know when it is dark outside? (Pondering Pikaia), and perhaps the most courageous blog post of all time: Liveblogging the Vasectomy (Terra Sigillata). Some sort of new journalism” going on there.

Finally, if all those ideas are weighing you down, play with the David Lee Roth ‘Runnin’ With the Devil’ Soundboard (via Cynical-C). Deconstructed from this classic track.

The complete version is here, but it only detracts.

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Gabriela Montero

The bad news is that Rick Warren, author of The Purpose-Driven Life, will be giving the invocation at Obama’s inauguration. A terrible choice; reaching out to evangelicals is fine, but honoring bigoted homophobes is a bad strategy.

The good news is that pianist Gabriela Montero will be performing at the inauguration! (Along with some other jokers: Aretha Franklin, Yo-Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman, and Anthony McGill.) Hopefully this prestigious venue will bring an incredibly talented performer to much-deserved wider recognition.

If you tend not to click on YouTube clips of musicians, you might want to make an exception this time. Here is Montero at a concert in Germany. She asks the audience to suggest a German song for her — “Mer losse de Dom in Kölle,” if commenters are to be believed — and gets them to sing it. She catches the tune (which apparently she’s never heard before), and starts improvising based on it. (There’s not nearly enough improvisation in modern classical music, in my jazz-inflected opinion.) It’s a throwaway, but quite joyous and beautiful. And most of all, fun.

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Run On

I must not be a very good atheist, because I love gospel music. Here are the Blind Boys of Alabama, with “Run On.”

The Boys first got together in 1939. And they’re not some ongoing concern whose membership turns over, like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir; their current lead singer, Jimmy Lee Carter, was a founding member of the group. Other charter members were active until recently: vocalist Clarence Fountain cut down on touring in 2006, and George Scott (singing lead in this track) passed away in 2005. They gained a bit of late-career notoriety when their cover of Tom Waits’ “Way Down in the Hole” was used as the theme song for the first season of The Wire.

Sorry for the lack of substantive blogging of late. Science comes first.

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Giant Steps

Today would have been John Coltrane’s 82nd birthday. Here he is playing Naima.

And here is an interview from 1960. “The reason I play so many — maybe it sounds angry, because I’m trying so many things at one time, you see — I haven’t sorted them out. I have a whole bag of things that I’m trying to work through and get the one essential, you know?”

Here is a computer animation, to the tune of Giant Steps.

And here is a robot playing the Giant Steps solo. Not as good as the original.

Coltrane died in 1967, at the age of 40.

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Friday Tunes: Squeeze

Wednesday night we walked over to the Orpheum — a wonderful theater from the 1920’s, recently refurbished to its former glory — to catch a concert by Squeeze — one of my favorite bands from high school, who have recently been refurbished to something like their former glory. Which is to say, they put on a great show of classic tunes played with crowd-pleasing gusto. And we had the unexpected pleasure of being recognized by CV reader David and his wife (Sarah? I didn’t catch her name, sorry). Scientists are kind of a big deal in this town.

So here is Up the Junction.

Note how the lyrics play with the notion of chronology. The temporal point of view shifts gradually throughout the narrative.

This morning at 4:50
I took her rather nifty
Down to an incubator
Where thirty minutes later
She gave birth to a daughter
Within a year a walker
She looked just like her mother
If there could be another

Sadly, I couldn’t find a decent video of Slaughtered, Gutted and Heartbroken.

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Friday Tunes: The Bad Plus

The addition of The Bad Plus to our blogroll got a positive review. Here they are, recorded by some guy in the back of the room with a hand-held camera, playing Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” (Here is the original, and here is Paul Anka.)

Usually I like my jazz a little less adulterated — and the Bad Plus have stirred up considerable controversy by mixing in frequent pop covers along with their straight-ahead tunes. But these guys are playful, intelligent, and infectious, as well as accomplished musicians. The blog is worth reading, too — here’s a thoughtful commentary on Barack Obama and discrimination in jazz. Besides, it’s named “Do the Math”!

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Ain’t Got No…I’ve Got Life

Every day is better with a little Nina Simone.

Simone affected an imperturbable demeanor onstage, but she had an eventful life. She gave her first classical piano recital at age ten and later trained at Julliard, but started playing jazz and blues to earn a living at a time when black women pianists were not highly sought-after in the world of classical music. In the 1960’s she became active in the civil rights movement, marching with Martin Luther King and recording protest songs such as Mississippi Goddam. Her struggles with bipolar disorder were kept secret until after her death in 2003. Her music brought together influences from jazz, classical, and soul. And she could rock out when the occasion required.

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