Category: Music

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A Love Supreme

SF Chronicle’s Greg Tate pays tribute to John Coltrane on his 80th birthday.

[McCoy] Tyner has said he knew it was time for him to leave the band when he saw Trane bleeding from the mouth while blowing and not even seeming to care. That degree of indefatigable discipline and unbridled passion can still render so many fans of the quartet speechless, enchanted, focused, uplifted. An avowed atheist and libertine friend once told me that when he wanted to hear God, he listened to Coltrane. He was hedging his bets that the religious ardor Trane’s music invoked in him would be deliverance enough for his sins.

Miles and Coltrane share a birthday. On the eve of Miles’ “fourthest” birthday, Miles greeted me home from work with a lovely bush in a rattan basket, so that “When you die and go away you won’t get lonely” (seems to be some Egyptian philosophy going on here). We then talked about life and death for a while, on the way to the park. Suddenly he stopped at a corner, looked around, and asked, “But daddy, why is our world THIS world and not another world?” Always knew kids ask a lot of hard questions, but was unprepared for this kind of cosmological probing.

Music: Patricia Barber :: Call Me
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Plinkety Pleasures

Just back from “Plinkety Pleasures: A Ukelele Revue” at 21 Grand. Singing saws, a washboard with cat food cans and hotel service desk bell attached, ukes of all stripes. First time I’ve seen a banjolele in action. “Just Henry” performed a down-tempo but soaring version of Bowie’s “Suffragette City” that floored me. Stella! had piles of charisma. Tippy Canoe, not so much (though she does possess the absolutely perfect ukulele name). 5 Cent Coffee owned the evening with gritty, soulful, sometimes Tom Waits-ish grit and soul. All of it a total gas.

Music: Mighty Sparrow :: Jean Marabunta

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Soul Train

One of the things I loved about Soul Train was the fact that they had actual train tracks running right down the middle of the dance floor and up the wall. Here, grooving with the Isley Brothers.

I was probably about 7 or 8 years old during this era of Soul Train, and the whole thing was just mystifying to me. Made me think grown-ups had a secret, separate world where they went to have strange kinds of fun when they weren’t busy taking care of us.

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Eno to Score Spore

Spore1 Follow-up to Eno, Wright, Generative Systems: Eno later described the session as “Two strangers becoming friends in front of 900 people.” Two guys in completely different fields working on exactly the same thing — building generative systems from cellular automata. Numberless:

[Each of them] use the idea of cellular automata as a basis for their creations. Cellular automata … refers to a simple initial rule-set that is capable of generating very complex and disparate results.

Shortly after the session, Wright announced that Eno would be creating the soundtrack to the upcoming game Spore. I’m not a gamer, but I’ve been looking forward to this game (due in 2007) for a long time now.

Wikipedia: Spore is, at first glance, a “teleological evolution” game: the player molds and guides a species across many generations, growing it from a single-celled organism into a more complex animal, until the species becomes intelligent. At this point the player begins molding and guiding this species’ society, progressing towards a spacefaring civilization.

Some of the screenshots and video floating around the internet are amazing, but apparently don’t do the actual gameplay justice. The generative link between Eno and Wright could result in some great audio. Most game music is set on endless repeat, but Eno’s audio will be sui generis, and will never repeat. Wright:

“Science is all about compressing reality to minimal rule sets, but generative creation goes the opposite direction. You look for a combination of the fewest rules that can generate a whole complex world which will always surprise you, yet within a framework that stays recognizable…..It’s not engineering and design, so much as it is gardening. You plant seeds.”

Music: Pere Ubu :: A Day Such As This
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Bush of Ghosts

bush-of-ghosts.com forks to both the official Warner Music site representing the great 1981 collaboration between Brian Eno and David Byrne and a second site, from which users can download individual source tracks from the original album and re-mix them into their own creations — many of them quite beautiful.

When Bush of Ghosts was first released, the kind of remixology Eno/Byrne were doing was pretty unusual, though now commonplace (but seldom as successful). Their decision to offer the album up for public remix 25 years later (!) is poetry. But Eno has always taken the long view (he talks on the SALT podcast about how he had to tell a gallery owner in which he was doing an installation that the duration of the audio he was using was “approximately 6,410 years.”)

Music: Arthur Lyman :: March Of The Siamese Children
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Eno, Wright, Generative Systems

Posted back in 2002 about the Long Now Foundation – created by Stewart Brand to think about the very distant future of humanity. Their flagship project is the construction of a clock to last 10,000 years, which will chime once per century.

The foundation recently hosted a conversation between musician Brian Eno and game designer Will Wright (The Sims, Spore). Haven’t heard the whole thing yet, but the first half hour was fascinating — Eno and Wright mostly discussing generative systems — complexity arising from simple rules. Eno reminisces about the first time he heard Steve Reich perform a pair of tape loops — an inflection point in Eno’s career.

Reich took two identical 1.8-second audio segments and created identical loops out of them, strung them through two decks, and played one slightly slower than the other. Gradually the two segments went out of phase with one another, giving rise to complex and beautiful relationships. The pieces come back into sync 30 minutes later, and the piece ends. Objective correlative: Near the end of the work day, I watched sadly as the J-School hauled its last remaining reel-to-reel tape decks out to the electronic recycling bin, their usefulness behind them.

Wright talks about the Game of Life as a generative system giving rise to complex relationships from a base of a few simple rules, correlates to the Chinese game of Go, which also has very few rules but tremendous complexity. Eno demonstrates a version of “Life” that generates music from the ongoing relationships in the same game.

The conversation is downloadable as MP3 or Ogg/Vorbis, and is accesible through the SALT podcast.

Surfing around the longnow site this morning, arrived back at the homepage to find the face of my boss (Orville Schell) gazing back at me – no escape!

Eno has released a CD, Bell Studies for the Clock of the Long Now, which I haven’t yet heard. Still listening to Eno almost nightly, putting Miles to bed. It’s almost impossible to burn out on them.

Music: Gilgamesh :: Extract
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The Joker, Cute Version

For all you “cute” fans out there (you know who you are), Fatboy Slim has a new cover out of Steve Miller’s classic “The Joker” that’s killing me and Miles here. Steve Miller provided the backing track for some of the best junior high parties and surf sessions ever, but we never saw it like this:

Trying to imagine the PETA reaction. Am I crazy or is that Boot-say’s voice in the background? Way too funky. In case you’ve ever wondered about “the pompatus of love,” Straight Dope has the dope.

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Trout Mask Ramshackle

Positive Ape Index:

The Woodland Hills home in which Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band recorded the legendary Trout Mask Replica LP is for sale. At $849,900, it’s a little out of my price range, but man, what kinda crazy vibes must be in that place.

Wonder whether the good capn’s bent-up lamp shade wireframe or Rocket Morton’s ride-on vacuum cleaner come with the deal?

Music: Tom Glazer & Dottie Evans :: What Is Gravity?

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Singing Science

Experiment If you had been an elementary school student in the 1960s, there might have been a dusty record player in a corner of your classroom, and a stack of scratchy educational records to choose from. And you might have heard songs like these playing in the background while you built a papier mache’ volcano with an orange juice concentrate container for its core, which you would later fill with baking soda and vinegar and red food coloring the night the parents came to see what you had been up to all year.

Why anyone can tell you what a mammal is
anyone who understands
they’re warm-blooded, have hair on their bodies
and suckle their young from mammary glands.

Hy Zaret and Lou Singer produced an amazing collection of science songs for kids back in the day as a six-record set, now available as an essential pile of 160kbps MP3s.

via Dylan

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