American jazz composer and bandleader
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8 episodes with arkestra
4 episodes with arkestra
3 episodes with arkestra
3 episodes with arkestra
3 episodes with arkestra
2 episodes with arkestra
2 episodes with arkestra
2 episodes with arkestra
2 episodes with arkestra
The Kronos Quartet — founded in Seattle, now based in San Francisco — has shaped modern classical music for more than 50 years. Their 2024 album Outer Spaceways Incorporated reimagines the work of the trailblazing American jazz pianist, Sun Ra, featuring covers and collaborations with artists like Jlin, Armand Hammer, and others. In addition to recorded testimonials from Laraaji, Georgia Anne Muldrow, and longtime Arkestra leader Marshall Allen, KEXP’s Larry Mizell, Jr. spoke with one of the Kronos Quartet’s founding members, David Harrington. “The more I’ve learned of Sun Ra, the more I’ve realized we’re like brothers or something,” Harrington laughs in the interview. “The question I have been asking all these years is: What’s next? What can music be that it hasn’t been so far? How might I become a better musician? How might I learn more about the world through music, with music, because of music?” Support the show: kexp.org/deeper photo via Impulse! Records and ABC/Dunhill RecordsSupport the show: https://www.kexp.org/sound/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
5/8/25: Mallory Hanora, Co-Dr, Fam.for Justice: the FreeHer campaign -- women in MA prisons. Amherst Survival Ctr Ex Dir Lev BenEzra: hunger here & fighting back. Rep. Natalie Blais: remembering Molly McGovnern, funding cuts & PILOTs. Ruth Griggs w/ Jim Olsen: Sun Ra's Arkestra coming to Northampton.
5/8/25: Mallory Hanora, Co-Dr, Fam.for Justice: the FreeHer campaign -- women in MA prisons. Amherst Survival Ctr Ex Dir Lev BenEzra: hunger here & fighting back. Rep. Natalie Blais: remembering Molly McGovnern, funding cuts & PILOTs. Ruth Griggs w/ Jim Olsen: Sun Ra's Arkestra coming to Northampton.
5/8/25: Mallory Hanora, Co-Dr, Fam.for Justice: the FreeHer campaign -- women in MA prisons. Amherst Survival Ctr Ex Dir Lev BenEzra: hunger here & fighting back. Rep. Natalie Blais: remembering Molly McGovnern, funding cuts & PILOTs. Ruth Griggs w/ Jim Olsen: Sun Ra's Arkestra coming to Northampton.
5/8/25: Mallory Hanora, Co-Dr, Fam.for Justice: the FreeHer campaign -- women in MA prisons. Amherst Survival Ctr Ex Dir Lev BenEzra: hunger here & fighting back. Rep. Natalie Blais: remembering Molly McGovnern, funding cuts & PILOTs. Ruth Griggs w/ Jim Olsen: Sun Ra's Arkestra coming to Northampton.
Israel’s cabinet approved plans that include “conquering the [Gaza] strip,” which would displace over a million Gazans. It could lead to long-term Israeli occupation of the territory. A federal judge ruled that the White House could not invoke the Alien Enemies Act to justify deporting people alleged to be members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. Since 1961, The Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra (aka The Ark) has been an avant-garde jazz innovator and community magnet in turbulent times. Their new album is “Live at Widney High December 26th, 1971.”
Este sábado 12 de abril, a las 20:30 h., el Teatro Jofre de Ferrol acoge la explosiva actuación de Los Mambo Jambo Arkestra, una formación de 16 músicos que presentará su segundo álbum, El Gran Ciclón. Las entradas ya están a la venta a 15 € (general) y 12 € (reducida) en taquilla y en Ataquilla.com. Con un sonido propio y arrollador, el sonido jambofónico, la banda combina rock & roll instrumental, surf, swing y rhythm & blues. A los fundadores de Los Mambo Jambo —Dani Nel·lo (saxo), Ivan Kovacevic (contrabajo), Dani Baraldés (guitarra) y Anton Jarl (batería)— se une su potente Arkestra: 6 saxos, 3 trompetas, 3 trombones, una guitarra adicional y una puesta en escena espectacular. El Gran Ciclón incluye 11 temas originales y ha sido producido por Dani Nel·lo, con arreglos de Kovacevic. La portada, obra del ilustrador Adrián Bago, representa a un músico brindando desde el ojo del ciclón, símbolo del carácter vibrante y despreocupado de la banda. Una oportunidad única de vivir un directo energético, elegante y de altísimo nivel musical.
El concejal de Cultura, José Antonio Ponte Far, ha dado a conocer la programación cultural prevista para el segundo trimestre de 2025, destacando una oferta diversa para todos los públicos. Según el edil, la agenda incluirá conciertos, teatro, cine, exposiciones y mesas redondas, con el objetivo de llegar a los ferrolanos de diferentes edades. La primera actuación será este sábado 12 de abril, con el concierto de Los Mambo Jambo Arkestra en el Auditorio Municipal, donde el cuarteto barcelonés presentará su segundo álbum, O Gran Ciclón. Entre otros destacados, se incluyen a Rulo y la Contrabanda (26 de abril), y Salvador Sobral (10 de mayo) y Milladoiro (17 de mayo), así como un recital de Rosa Cedrón (18 de mayo). El teatro también estará presente con Poncia de Lolita Flores el 31 de mayo y el ciclo infantil en el Teatro Jofre. Además, se continuarán los ciclos de cine y música en vivo, con el ciclo Os Xoves da Capela y el ciclo de Cineconcerto. Las exposiciones no faltarán en el Centro Cultural Torrente Ballester, donde se podrán disfrutar muestras como Gonzalo Torrente Ballester y Exposición Antológica de Sergio Vázquez.
El disco doble 'Lights on a satellite' contiene la grabación inédita de un concierto que Sun Ra dio con su Arkestra en Baltimore, en el salón de baile de la Left Bank Jazz Society, el 23 de julio de 1978. Suenan los temas 'Space traveller blues', 'Big John´s special', 'Yeah man', 'Lights on a satellite', 'Lady Bird', 'Over the rainbow', 'Cocktails for two', 'Watusi', 'We travel the spaceway' y 'They plan to leave'.Escuchar audio
Filmmaker and writer Miranda July, whose novel All Fours is on many best books of the year lists, and was described in the New York Times as "the year's literary conversation piece." July spoke with Terry Gross about issues in the novel, like separating from a spouse you're growing distant from, perimenopause, and having an affair. And jazz historian Kevin Whitehead reviews a newly released recording of a concert he attended in 1978, by pianist Sun Ra and his Arkestra.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Filmmaker and writer Miranda July, whose novel All Fours is on many best books of the year lists, and was described in the New York Times as "the year's literary conversation piece." July spoke with Terry Gross about issues in the novel, like separating from a spouse you're growing distant from, perimenopause, and having an affair. And jazz historian Kevin Whitehead reviews a newly released recording of a concert he attended in 1978, by pianist Sun Ra and his Arkestra.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
In onda Gigi Longo. Musiche: Paolo Presta, Ry Cooder and Manuel Galban, Antonio Freno, Mike Cooper, Le Sun Ra and his Arkestra, Chick Corea Bela Fleck, Matthias Hopf, Ramberto Ciammarughi, Fennesz, Fire! Orchestra.
This week, we speak with Tim Hayward, author of a new book all about steak. Also on the programme: Monocle's Guy de Launey heads to Tabar's new location in a former bike factory in Ljubljana to sample Slovenian-inspired tapas and we meet Cenk Debensason of Arkestra in Istanbul. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Sheffield welcomes Space-Jazz royalty as the legendary Sun Ra brings his Arkestra to the new University concert space for a mind-blowing night of free-flowing, transcendental music. Artwork by Rionagh.Music by Simon Elliott-Kemp (thank you so much Simon!)Additional FX courtesy of Freesound.org, with particular thanks to:AJ Heels - twinkling stars intro.Therac 25 - starship hum.Rikus246 - audience ambience.Recording Hopkins - applause. Never miss an episode.Follow me at: https://twitter.com/rogerquailhttps://www.instagram.com/rogerquail/RSS feed - https://feeds.buzzsprout.com/289673.rss
The lights are about to come up at the Musicland Concert Hall, but what part is Moe going to play? With her seat in the Arkestra otherwise occupied, Moe learns to get by with a little help from her friends, sharing the song that's been inside her all along. Want more kids podcasts for the whole family? Grown-ups, subscribe to Starglow+ here Learn more about Starglow Media here Follow Starglow on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube
Moe's made it across the galaxy and now only one thing stands between her and her gig with the Arkestra Obscura. Waiting for her when she arrives at the Arkestra's gig at the Musicland Concert Hall is The Conductor and her special guest: Krupa Khan himself. And Krupa wants his sticks back. Want more kids podcasts for the whole family? Grown-ups, subscribe to Starglow+ here Learn more about Starglow Media here Follow Starglow on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube
Episode 444... Our beloved Niners took a fat crap in the Big Game, of course, but that didn't prevent us from featuring a new BGP cover of San Francisco's Bad Shit Niners song! If you remember the SF Bay Area Thrasher Skate Rock band with members such as Tony and Trixie Trujillo, and the late and great Thrasher Mag skate legend Jake Phelps. We gave it a modern twist with some updated lyrics. With the loss, not much love in the air as far as Valentine's Day lix, so a few of those along with some annoying sports-themed tunes and a handful of 2024 rippers from Bandcamp! Enjoy!Listen to Episode 444: (scroll for set list)On ARCHIVE.On Apple or Google Podcasts, hit "play."On blogspot, play it below:Listen to The Brothers Grim Punkcast:ARCHIVE.Org - hear/download past episodesPUNK ROCK DEMONSTRATION - Wednesdays 7 p.m. PSTRIPPER RADIO - Fridays & Saturdays 7 p.m. PSTApple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsYouTube PodcastsContact Brothers Grim Punk:brothersgrimpunk@gmail.com - In a punk band? Send us your music! Want us to make you a punk song? Email us some lyrics!@Punkbot138 on Instagram@BrosGrimPunk on XMore Punk Music:Bandcamp - Follow us and download our albums: Brothers Grim Punk, Fight Music, and more!YouTube - tons of punk playlists, from Anarchy to Zombies!Cover art by @zidnyfx. BGP logo by @asherfreeman.Niners got punked...Niners 1:19 BROTHERS GRIM PUNK 2024 Bandcamp Single (Bad Shit cover)Stop Football Violence 1:13 HEADxUP 2021 Single Iron Lung Recs -mute witness 0:49 KEVLAR UPPER 2024 Demo Hammond IN HEARTACHE 1:08 ZHOOP DEVIL'S LETTUCE My Girlfriend (bkgrd) 2:36 Guttermouth Gusto! Extreme Ear Slaughter Greece Βγάλε το σκασμό (Shut the Fuck Up) 1:05 YAKUZA極道 EER 037: S/T LP 2024 Sweden Verzwifelfe stunden (Lost Hours) 1:10 Zelta Laiki 私たち二人が一つになるとき Chemical Warfare 1:13 CMOΓ Nothing to Harvest Records NTH048. CMOΓ/Ergophobia - Paranöid VisionsTenant Recordings LB CA ILLEGAL HOT TUB PARTY 1:48 BAD BEAT HOLLOW POINT/BOTTLED VIOLENT/BAD BEAT/SPAD 4 WAY SPLIT BOTTLED VIOLENT - PERSONAL 1:09 HOLLOW POINT/BOTTLED VIOLENT/BAD BEAT/SPAD 4 WAY SPLIT TN Poser Disposer 1:35 Kuru Four tracks of noise hell democo dependent love song (bkgrd) 2:43 Drunk Ugly Insane Killing The Record Industry Vol 2 MY FAVORITE SPORT IS WIFE BEATING 0:36 FUCKING CHRIST Catchy As Aids - CAR 03 AL BUNDY RULES 0:33 FUCKING CHRIST Catchy As Aids - CAR 03OBSESSED FAN 1:40 KLINEFELTER Klinefelter - Party Time - CAR 09 Referees Are Not Paid To Call A Fair Game They Are Employees Of The League And They Are Paid To Ensure That Their Employer Is As Profitable As Possible 1:30 Gefilte Fist Aural Skidmark Jock Parade 1:30 OAF Court With No TrialDis beer Continues 1:02 CHAINSAW MASSACRE The Dis Slaugther ContinuesmNo Love 0:51 School Damage No Love EP NC Valentine 2:11 The Dirty Digits Reverb Nation SingleThe Love Song (bkgrd) 3:06 The Stupid Stupid Henchmen No-I.Q. Presents... Skate Song 1:56 Sick Crap Take No Shit Shift of Power 1:13 Scheme SCHEME ALCOHOL ABUSE 1:05 SYSTEM SHIT THE LAST HALIFAX RECORDINGS GHETTO TRASH 1:22 BEERLORDS Small Towns And Shitty Cities Vol. 2 - Cheap Ass Records 04 Richmond VA Fair Weather Friend 1:05 Putrid Boys Tape #1 Debaucher 0:40 Shitkickers Cool Bands 0815 Lovesongs (bkgrd) 2:33 Over The Top Keep On Trucking 7'' Nuklear Wah 1:01 D-Boys Cool Bands 3 Jackass 0:29 HCG V.A. NOISECORE CONGREGATION Vol.2 DIRTY HARRY - Do You Feel Lucky Punk? 0:28 V.A. NOISECORE CONGREGATION Vol.213 0:44 ARKESTRA DMU-009: DEMO Hey Baws 0:48 Big Zit DemoIn Love This Way (bkgrd) 2:31 Descendents I Don't Want To Grow Up_New Alliance Recs Blood On Your Boots 1:23 Rat Cage Total Vermin Tape Scorched Earth 1:08 Bruxism Agonising Noise For The Helpless Equality In Death 1:08 Toaster Trash Equality In Death VULTURES 0:59 YIELD TO NONE DMU-008: DEMO 2 Deadbeat 1:14 Misled Youth (DC) Misled Youth Brazil Vihaan Työtä (I Hate Work) 1:06 Helvetin Viemärit Kauhea Melu Oksennus (Terrible Noise Vomiting) 7" EP Brazilian Punk family Rawpunk 4 Life! 1:47 Luta Armada Rawpunk 4 Life!I LOVE PUNK ROCK 2:13 LIQUORED UP Wasted Again - CAR 13
Episode 117 Electronic Keyboards in Jazz, A Recorded History, Part 1 of 2 Playlist Length Start Time Introduction 05:42 00:00 1. Vernon Geyer, “Day After Day” from All Ashore / Day After Day (1938 Bluebird). Soloist, Hammond Electric Organ, Vernon Geyer. 02:22 05:42 2. Milt Herth Quartet / Milt Herth Trio, “Minuet in Jazz” from Home-Cookin' Mama With The Fryin' Pan / Minuet In Jazz (1938 Decca). Milt Herth was one of the first to record with the Hammond Organ Model A. His playing was more focused on melody and counterpoint and not so much on creating a lush progression of chords. This was recorded a few years before the availability of the Leslie rotating speaker, which added a special tone quality to later Hammonds, such as the model B3. 02:44 08:04 3. Milt Herth Quartet / Milt Herth Trio, “Looney Little Tooney” from Flat Foot Floojie / Looney Little Tooney (1938 Decca). Vocals, O'Neil Spencer; Drums, O'Neil Spencer; Guitar, Teddy Bunn; Hammond Organ, Milt Herth; Piano, Willie Smith (The Lion). 02:50 10:46 4. "Fats" Waller And His Rhythm, “Come Down to Earth, My Angel” from Come Down To Earth, My Angel / Liver Lip Jones (1941 Bluebird). Waller was an extremely popular ragtime and stride piano player and vocalist. In this number, he takes a rare turn on an electric organ, presumably an early model Hammond. Vocals, Piano, Electric Organ, "Fats" Waller; Bass, Cedric Wallace; Clarinet, Tenor Saxophone, Gene Sedric; Drums, Slick Jones; Guitar, Al Casey; Trumpet, John Hamilton. 03:10 13:36 5. Collins H. Driggs, “When Day is Done” from The Magic Of The Novachord (1941 Victor). Soloist, Hammond Novachord, Collins H. Driggs. This was an early polyphonic keyboard that generated its sounds using valve, or vacuum tube, oscillators. Made by Hammond, the Novachord was an entirely different electronic instrument than its tone-wheel organs. The Novachord had unique, synthesizer-like controls over envelope generation, band pass filtering and vibrato controlled by a series of flip switches, offering the keyboardist a unique suite of sounds. 03:11 16:45 6. The Four Clefs, “It's Heavenly” from It's Heavenly / Dig These Blues (1943 Bluebird). Hammond Electric Organ, James Marshall. Another organ recording and a nice duet with a guitarist Johnny "Happy" Green. 02:41 19:54 7. Ethel Smith And The Bando Carioca, “Tico-Tico” from Tico-Tico / Lero Lero / Bem Te Vi Atrevido (1944 Decca). Another was a popular and skilled organist using a pre-B3 Hammond. 02:45 22:36 8. Slim Gaillard Quartette, “Novachord Boogie” from Tee Say Malee / Novachord Boogie (1946 Atomic Records). Bass, Tiny Brown; Drums, Oscar Bradley; Guitar, Slim Gaillard; Piano, Dodo Marmarosa. While the Hammond Novachord plays a prominent role in this recording, the player is not credited. 02:57 25:20 9. Milt Herth And His Trio,” Twelfth Street Rag” from Herthquake Boogie / Twelfth Street Rag (1948 Decca). Recorded in New York, NY, September 5, 1947. Described on the recording as a “Boogie Woogie Instrumental.” Hammond Organ, Milt Herth; Drums, Piano, Uncredited. Herth had been recording with the Hammond organ since 1937. 03:10 28:16 10. Ben Light With Herb Kern And Lloyd Sloop, “Benny's Boogie” from Benny's Boogie / Whispering (1949 Tempo). This track includes the triple keyboard combination of piano, organ, and Novachord. Hammond Electric Organ , Herb Kern; Piano, Ben Light; Hammond Novachord, Lloyd Sloop. 02:37 31:27 11. Johnny Meyer Met Het Kwartet Jan Corduwener, “There's Yes! Yes! in your Eyes” from Little White Lies / Thereʼs Yes! Yes! In Your Eyes (1949 Decca). Accordion player Johnny Meyer added a Hammond Solovox organ to his musical arrangements. The Solovox was monophonic and it added a solo voice to his performances. This recording is from the Netherlands. 03:22 34:04 12. E. Robert Scott, R.E. Wolke, “Instructions For Playing Lowrey Organo” (excerpt) from Instructions For Playing Lowrey Organo (circa 1950 No Label). Promotional disc produced by piano and organ distributor Janssen, presumably with the cooperation of Lowrey. This is a 12-inch 78 RPM disc, but is undated, so I believe that picking 1950 as the release year is safe because the Organo was introduced in 1949 and 78 RPM records were already beginning to be replaced in 1950 by the 33-1/3 RPM disc. Recordings of this instrument are extremely rare. I have no such examples within a jazz context, but being a competitor of the Hammond Solovox, I thought this was worth including. 03:23 37:26 13. Ethel Smith, “Toca Tu Samba” from Souvenir Album (1950 Decca). One of the great female masters of the Hammond Electric Organ was Ethel Smith. Her performances were mostly considered as pop music, but she had the knack for creating Latin jazz tracks such as this. Featuring The Bando Carioca; Hammond Electric Organ soloist, Ethel Smith. 02:25 40:48 14. The Harmonicats, “The Little Red Monkey” from The Little Red Monkey / Pachuko Hop (1953 Mercury). Jerry Murad's Harmonicats were an American harmonica-based group. On this number, they included the electronic instrument known as the Clavioline. The Clavioline produced a fuzzy square wave that could be filtered to roughly imitate many other instruments. The record is inscribed with the message, “Introducing the Clavioline,” but the player is not mentioned. 01:56 43:12 15. Djalma Ferreira E Seus Milionarios Do Ritmo, “Solovox Blues” from Parada De Dança N. 2 (1953 Musidisc). From Brazil comes a jazz group that included the Hammond Solovox Organ as part of its ensemble. Invented in 1940, the Solovox was a monophonic keyboard intended as an add-on to a piano for playing organ-flavored solos. It had a 3-octave mini keyboard and controls over vibrato and attack time, and tone settings for deep, full, and brilliant. Piano, Hammond Solovox Organ, Djalma Ferreira; Bass, Egidio Bocanera; Bongos, Amaury Rodrigues; Drums, Cecy Machado; Guitar, Nestor Campos. 02:31 45:08 16. Eddie Baxter, “Jalousie” from Temptation (1957 Rendezvous Records). Piano, Hammond Organ, Celesta (Electronic Celeste), Krueger Percussion Bass, Eddie Baxter; rhythm section, uncredited. Like Ethel Smith, Baxter was pushing the limits of popular music with his virtuosity on the organ and other instruments. In this track you can hear the electronic celesta with its chime-like sounds near the beginning before the electric organ and guitar dominate the rest of the piece. 02:33 47:38 17. Eddie Baxter, “Temptation” from Temptation (1957 Rendezvous Records). Hammond Electric Organ, Eddie Baxter. Piano, Hammond Organ, Wurlitzer Electric Piano, Krueger Percussion Bass, Eddie Baxter. In this track, you can clearly hear the Wurlitzer electric piano in several sections. 02:08 50:10 18. Le Sun Ra And His Arkestra, “Advice to Medics” from Super-Sonic Jazz (1957 El Saturn Records). This excursion into one of the first records released by Sun Ra as a bandleader of the Arkestra was recorded in 1956 at RCA Studios, Chicago. This track is a solo for the Wurlitzer Electric Piano, an instrument invented in 1954 and that was quickly adopted by many jazz and popular music players. 02:02 52:17 19. Le Sun Ra And His Arkestra, “India” from Super-Sonic Jazz (1957 El Saturn Records). A work featuring the Wurlitzer Electric Piano played by Sun Ra, miscellaneous percussion; electric bass, Wilburn Green; Drums, Robert Barry and William Cochran; Timpani, Timbales, Jim Herndon; and trumpet, Art Hoyle. 04:48 54:18 20. Le Sun Ra And His Arkestra, “Springtime in Chicago” from Super-Sonic Jazz (1957 El Saturn Records). This work features Sun Ra playing the acoustic and electric pianos. Wurlitzer Electric Piano, piano Sun Ra; bass, Victor Sproles; Tenor Saxophone, John Gilmore; Drums, Robert Barry and William Cochran. 03:50 59:14 21. Le Sun Ra And His Arkestra, “Sunology” from Super-Sonic Jazz (1957 El Saturn Records). Another number with both the acoustic and electric pianos. Of interest is how Sun Ra moves deftly from one keyboard to the other (these recordings were made in real time), often mid-phrase. This was a style of playing that Sun Ra would continue to perfect throughout his long career and many electronic keyboards. Wurlitzer Electric Piano, piano Sun Ra; bass, Victor Sproles; Tenor Saxophone, John Gilmore; Drums, Robert Barry and William Cochran; Alto Saxophone, James Scales; Alto Saxophone, Baritone Saxophone, Pat Patrick. 12:47 01:02:54 22. Steve Allen, “Electronic Boogie” from Electrified Favorites (1958 Coral). From Steve Allen, who played the Wurlitzer Electric Piano on this track. This track has the characteristic brashness that was typical of the Wurlitzer sound. 02:23 01:15:40 23. Steve Allen, “Steverino Swings” from Electrified Favorites (1958 Coral). From Wurlitzer Electric Piano, Steve Allen. Unlike many tracks featuring the Wurlitzer Electric, which make use of its distortion and emphasize its sharp attack, it was possible to closely mimic an acoustic piano as well, as Allen does here. I had to listen to this several times before I believed that it was the Wurlitzer, as the liner notes state. But you can hear certain tell-tale sounds all along the way—such as the slight electrified reverb after a phrase concludes and the occasional thump of the bass notes played by the left hand. 02:54 01:18:02 24. Michel Magne, “Larmes En Sol Pleureur (Extrait D'un Chagrin Emmitouflé)” from Musique Tachiste (1959 Paris). Jazz expression in a third-stream jazz setting by French composer Michel Magne. Third-stream was a music genre that fused jazz and classical music. The term was coined in 1957 by composer Gunther Schuller after which there was a surge of activity around this idea. In this example, the Ondes Martenot and vocalist add jazz nuances to a chamber music setting, the interpretation being very jazz-like. Ondes Martenot, Janine De Waleine; Piano, Paul Castagnier; Violin, Lionel Gali; Voice, Christiane Legrand. 02:38 01:20:54 25. Ray Charles, “What'd I Say” from What'd I Say (1959 Atlantic). This might be the most famous track ever recorded using a Wurlitzer Electric Piano. The fuzzy, sharp tone added depth and feeling to the playing. The opening bars were imitated far and wide for radio advertising of drag races during the 1960s. 05:05 01:23:30 26. Lew Davies And His Orchestra, “Spellbound” from Strange Interlude (1961 Command). This was one of Enoch Light's productions from the early 1960s, when stereo separation was still an experiment. This is the theme from the Hitchcock movie with a melody played on the Ondioline, a monophonic organ and an otherwise jazzy arrangement with a rhythm section, reeds, and horns. Arrangement, Lew Davies; Ondioline, Sy Mann; Bass, Bob Haggart, Jack Lesberg; Cymbalum, Michael Szittai; Drums, George Devens, Phil Kraus; French Horn,Paul Faulise, Tony Miranda; Guitar, Tony Mottola; Reeds, Al Klink, Ezelle Watson, Phil Bodner, Stanley Webb; Trombone, Bobby Byrne, Dick Hixon, Urbie Green; Produced by, Enoch Light. 03:29 01:28:34 27. Sy Mann and Nick Tagg, “Sweet and Lovely” from 2 Organs & Percussion (1961 Grand Award). Duets on the Hammond B3 and Lowrey Organs “propelled by the urgent percussive drive of a brilliant rhythm section.” This is a unique opportunity to contract and compare the sounds of the Hammond and Lowrey organs with percussion. Hammond B3 Organ, Sy Mann, Nick Tagg. The track begins with the Lowrey and demonstrates the sliding tone effects made possible by its Glide foot switch. 02:58 01:32:02 28. Enoch Light And The Light Brigade, “Green Eyes” from Vibrations (1962 Command). More stereo separation hijinks from Enoch Light. This tune features the Ondioline in an exchange of lines with the guitar and other instruments. The Ondioline is first heard at about 35 seconds. Ondioline, Milton Kraus; Bass, Bob Haggart; Guitar, Tony Mottola; Percussion, Bobby Rosengarden, Dan Lamond, Ed Shaughnessy, Phil Kraus; Piano, Moe Wechsler; Trumpet – Doc Severinsen; Woodwind – Phil Bodner, Stanley Webb; Produced by, Enoch Light. 02:50 01:34:59 29. Jimmy Smith, “Begger for the Blues” from The Unpredictable Jimmy Smith--Bashin' (1962 Verve). Jimmy Smith was a great jazz soloist on the Hammond B3 organ. This stripped-down arrangement shows his nuanced expression skills with the organ. 07:26 01:37:49 30. Jimmy Smith, “Walk On The Wild Side” from The Unpredictable Jimmy Smith--Bashin' (1962 Verve). This big band arrangement of a theme from the movie Walk on the Wild Side features the Hammond B3 of Smith in the context of a full jazz orchestration. 05:54 01:45:12 31. Dick Hyman And His Orchestra, “Stompin' At The Savoy” from Electrodynamics (1963 Command). Arranged, Lowrey Organ, Dick Hyman; Bass, Bob Haggart; Drums, Osie Johnson; Guitar, Al Casamenti, Tony Mottola; Marimba, Xylophone, Vibraphone, Bongos, Congas, Bass Drum, Bells, Cowbell, Bob Rosengarden, Phil Kraus; Produced by Enoch Light. Hyman shows off the steady, smooth tonalities of the Lowrey and also makes use of the Glide foot switch right from the beginning with that little whistling glissando that he repeats five times in the first 30 seconds. 02:50 01:51:06 32. Sun Ra, “The Cosmos” from The Heliocentric Worlds Of Sun Ra, Vol. I (1965 ESP Disc). The instrumentation on this entire album is quite experimental, especially the dominance of the bass marimba, Electronic Celesta, and timpani of Sun Ra. The celesta is seldom heard on jazz records, but it is the only electronic keyboard found on this track. Marimba, Electronic Celesta, timpani, Sun Ra; Percussion, Jimhmi (sp Jimmy) Johnson; Performer, Sun Ra And His Solar Arkestra; Baritone Saxophone, Percussion, Pat Patrick; Bass, Ronnie Boykins; Bass Clarinet, Wood Block, Robert Cummings; Bass Trombone, Bernard Pettaway; Flute, Alto Saxophone, Danny Davis; Percussion, timpani, Jimmi Johnson; Piccolo Flute, Alto Saxophone, Bells, Spiral Cymbal, Marshall Allen. 07:31 01:53:54 33. Sun Ra And His Solar Arkestra, “The Magic City” from The Magic City (1966 Saturn Research). You won't be disappointed to know that Sun Ra gave the Clavioline a turn on this album. This was prior to his experimenting with synthesizers, which we will cover in Part 2 of this exploration of early electronic keyboards in jazz. He incorporated the Clavioline in many of his mid-1960s recordings. Clavioline, Piano, Sun Ra; Alto Saxophone, Danny Davis, Harry Spencer; Percussion, Roger Blank; Trombone, Ali Hassan; Trumpet, Walter Miller. 27:24 02:01:22 34. Clyde Borly & His Percussions, “Taboo” from Music In 5 Dimensions (1965 Atco). Vocals, Ondes Martenot, Janine De Waleyne. Yes, Ms. De Waleyne was a French vocalist and Ondes Martenot player. 03:33 02:28:44 35. Jeanne Loriod, Stève Laurent and Pierre Duclos, ''Ordinateur X Y Z” from Ondes Martenot (1966 SONOROP). Album of broadcast library music from France that happened to feature the Ondes Martenot played Jeanne Loriod; drums, uncredited. The dynamic expression features of the monophonic electronic instrument can be clearly experienced on this track. 02:05 02:32:16 36. Roger Roger, “Running with the Wind” from Chappell Mood Music Vol. 21 (1969 Chappell). Broadcast library recording with various themes played using the Ondes Martenot. This track features a solo Ondes Martenot and is backed by an electric harpsichord. The Ondes Martenot used the same electronic principle to create smooth, flowing tones as the Theremin, only that it was controlled by a keyboard. In this piece, the articulation of the Ondes Martenot is quite apart from that of the Theremin, including its double-tracked tones and the quick pacing which is rather un-Theremin-like. 01:28 02:34:20 37. Roger Roger, “Night Ride” from Chappell Mood Music Vol. 21 (1969 Chappell). Broadcast library recording with various themes played using the Ondes Martenot. While this track features a flute solo, you can hear the Ondes Martenot from time to time, especially in the middle break. Other uncredited musician play drums, harp, and perhaps a celesta on this track. 01:35 02:35:45 Opening background music: Dick Hyman And His Orchestra, “Mack the Knife,” “Satin Doll” and “Shadowland” from Electrodynamics (1963 Command). Dick Hyman playing the Lowrey organ. Arranged, Lowrey Organ, Dick Hyman; Bass, Bob Haggart; Drums, Osie Johnson; Guitar, Al Casamenti, Tony Mottola; Marimba, Xylophone, Vibraphone, Bongos, Congas, Bass Drum, Bells, Cowbell, Bob Rosengarden, Phil Kraus; Produced by Enoch Light. Opening and closing sequences voiced by Anne Benkovitz. Additional opening, closing, and other incidental music by Thom Holmes. See my companion blog that I write for the Bob Moog Foundation. For a transcript, please see my blog, Noise and Notations. I created an illustrated chart of all of the instruments included in this podcast, paying special attention to the expressive features that could be easily adopted by jazz musicians. You can download the PDF, for free, on my blog, Noise and Notations at thomholmes.com
Í janúar mun Gunnar Þorri Pétursson, þýðandi og sjálfstætt starfandi fræðimaður bjóða upp á leiðsagnarnámskeið á Hótel Holti um bókina Glæpur og refsing eftir Fjodor Dostojevskíj. Við tökum Gunnar tali um bókina og höfundinn í þætti dagsins. Við fáum líka við til okkar þær Snædísi Lilju Ingadóttur og Valgerði Rúnarsdóttur sem frumsýna nýtt íslenskt dansverk í Borgarleikhúsinu um næstu helgi. Verkið er innblásið af árstíðum Vivaldis og í því mætast 20 ólíkir dansarar. Ólíkir, því þar er að finna bæði atvinnudansara og dansara sem eru á leið í atvinnumennsku, og svo leikara sem eru ástríðudansarar. Einnig kynnumst við hljómsveitinni Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra sem hefur verið starfandi í suðurhluta Los Angeles frá árinu 1961.
On a planet where everyone has two hearts that beat constantly out of sync, there's one child, Moe, whose heart hammers out a unique rhythm unlike anyone else. An intergalactically famous cosmic jazz band, The Arkestra Obscura, visits the planet in search of a new drummer… Will Moe show the Arkestra what she's made of? Want more kids podcasts for the whole family? Grown-ups, subscribe to Starglow+ here Learn more about Starglow Media here Follow Starglow on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube
The Arkestra has been without a drummer for years, since their original drummer disappeared, leaving his sticks behind. When Moe auditions her skills for the Arkestra, the sticks glow in her hands, a clear sign that she has what it takes. The Arkestra gives Moe three days to say goodbye to her friends and family before embarking on an intergalactic tour… But The Conductor has a couple tricky detours in store. Want more kids podcasts for the whole family? Grown-ups, subscribe to Starglow+ here Learn more about Starglow Media here Follow Starglow on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube
Muchos de los músicos de bandas suecas de jazz de vanguardia como Fire! Orchestra o Angles se han reunido en torno al trompetista Goran Kajfeš para llevar a cabo una música más ligera, variada, divertida y adictiva. En este programa vamos a escuchar y comentar la trilogía The Reason Why , una maravillosa serie compuesta en su mayoría por versiones llenas de imaginación, con unos arreglos y una producción verdaderamente sorprendentes, desde la psicodelia y el rock progresivo de los 70 al rock alternativo actual pasando por el folk turco. Repertorio: 1. Yakar Inciden Inciden - The Reason Why Vol. 1 2. Desire Be, Desire Go - The Reason Why Vol. 1 3. Badidoom - The Reason Why Vol. 1 4. Adimiz Miskindir Bizim - The Reason Why Vol. 2 5. Tamzara - The Reason Why Vol. 2 6. Yet Again - The Reason Why Vol. 2 7. Trance Dance - The Reason Why Vol. 3 8. Sandy - The Reason Why Vol. 3
Torna el format XXL de Los Mambo Jambo. La banda liderada per Dani Nel
Torna el format XXL de Los Mambo Jambo. La banda liderada per Dani Nel
El saxofonista Dani Nel-lo y el contrabajista Ivan Kovacevic nos visitan para presentar el nuevo trabajo de Los Mambo Jambo Arkestra, esa formación en donde el cuarteto barcelonés se convierte en una big band de dieciséis músicos. En “El Gran Ciclón” rescatan canciones de sus últimos álbumes y singles para llevarlas a esa nueva dimensión de exponencial poderío sónico. (Fotos del podcast por Noemí Elías; Mambo Jambo Arkestra) Playlist; MAMBO JAMBO ARKESTRA “Fiesta en el Motel” (El gran ciclón, 2023) MAMBO JAMBO ARKESTRA “El gran ciclón” (El gran ciclón, 2023) MAMBO JAMBO ARKESTRA “Dizzy” (El gran ciclón, 2023) MAMBO JAMBO ARKESTRA “Cayo Diablo” (El gran ciclón, 2023) MAMBO JAMBO ARKESTRA “Roadrace” (El gran ciclón, 2023) MAMBO JAMBO ARKESTRA “Fuego cruzado” (El gran ciclón, 2023) MAMBO JAMBO ARKESTRA “El grito” (El gran ciclón, 2023) MESSER CHUPS “Cadabra box Pandora strip” (Night rider EP, 2023) SUPERTUBOS “Magnetika” (The fourth drive, 2023) THE ROUTES “Everybody’s happy nowadays” (Reverberation addict, 2023) Versión y original; THE BUZZCOCKS “Everybody’s happy nowadays” (1979) THE BOMBORAS “The good the bad and the single fin” (Songs from beyond, 2023) Escuchar audio
Men die as dogs die Checkerheads! CP/SC welcomes back Ska keyboard phenom, Esteban Flores to run through another batch of records by legendary Ska band, Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra! Rob welcomes guest co-host, Skassociate Producer Chris Reeves to dive in to the bands late 90s fare, from the city pop of Tokyo Strut to the vocal-based Arkestra before finishing with the international hit Full Tension Beaters. Along the way, Esteban regales with tour stories, anime and his future projects before finishing with a game of Kanpai or Uso.Go back and listen to Parts 1 and 2 to get caught up on the Time Skachine!Hosts: Rob and ChrisEngineer: JoeyEditor: RobSkassociate Producer: Chris Reeves of Ska Punk InternationalPatreon: www.patreon.com/checkeredpastMerch: www.checkeredpast.ca/merchThis episode is sponsored by BlendJet!Use our special link CHECKERED12 to save 12% at blendjet.com. The discount will be applied at checkout!
The future that Sun Ra sang of has arrived in so many ways. No one knows this better than the musicians who made the music with him. Ahmed Abdullah was part of Sun Ra's Arkestra for more than 20 years and his insights about that time could fill a book. In fact, they have. "A Strange Celestial Road" is newly released and Ahmed joins host Mitch Goldman to discuss it on this week's Deep Focus. Monday night 6p to 9p NYC time on WKCR 89.9FM, WKCR-HD and wkcr.org. Next week it goes up on the Deep Focus podcast on your favorite podcasting app or at https://mitchgoldman.podbean.com/ Special bonus: Tuesday 7/25 at 7pm Mitch Goldman interviews Ahmed Abdullah about "A Strange Celestial Road" at Strand Books at 828 Broadway in Greenwich Village. The event is free and open to all. Photo credit: Sun Ra - Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture - Gift of David D. Spitzer #WKCR #SunRa #AhmedAbdullah #JazzAlternatives #MitchGoldman #DeepFocus #SunRaArkestra #AStrangeCelestialRoad #BlankForms #JazzInterview #JazzPodcast #LoftJazz #FreeJazz
The future that Sun Ra sang of has arrived in so many ways. No one knows this better than the musicians who made the music with him. Ahmed Abdullah was part of Sun Ra's Arkestra for more than 20 years and his insights about that time could fill a book. In fact, they have. "A Strange Celestial Road" is newly released and Ahmed joins host Mitch Goldman to discuss it on this week's Deep Focus. Monday night 6p to 9p NYC time on WKCR 89.9FM, WKCR-HD and wkcr.org. Next week it goes up on the Deep Focus podcast on your favorite podcasting app or at https://mitchgoldman.podbean.com/ Special bonus: Tuesday 7/25 at 7pm Mitch Goldman interviews Ahmed Abdullah about "A Strange Celestial Road" at Strand Books at 828 Broadway in Greenwich Village. The event is free and open to all. Photo credit: Sun Ra and Mitch Goldman by Andy Hill #WKCR #SunRa #AhmedAbdullah #JazzAlternatives #MitchGoldman #DeepFocus #SunRaArkestra #AStrangeCelestialRoad #BlankForms #JazzInterview #JazzPodcast #LoftJazz #FreeJazz
The future that Sun Ra sang of has arrived in so many ways. No one knows this better than the musicians who made the music with him. Ahmed Abdullah was part of Sun Ra's Arkestra for more than 20 years and his insights about that time could fill a book. In fact, they have. "A Strange Celestial Road" is newly released and Ahmed joins host Mitch Goldman to discuss it on this week's Deep Focus. Monday night 6p to 9p NYC time on WKCR 89.9FM, WKCR-HD and wkcr.org. Next week it goes up on the Deep Focus podcast on your favorite podcasting app or at https://mitchgoldman.podbean.com/ Special bonus: Tuesday 7/25 at 7pm Mitch Goldman interviews Ahmed Abdullah about "A Strange Celestial Road" at Strand Books at 828 Broadway in Greenwich Village. The event is free and open to all. Photo credit: Sun Ra - Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture - Gift of David D. Spitzer #WKCR #SunRa #AhmedAbdullah #JazzAlternatives #MitchGoldman #DeepFocus #SunRaArkestra #AStrangeCelestialRoad #BlankForms #JazzInterview #JazzPodcast #LoftJazz #FreeJazz
A rollicking hour of experimental music action on this week's Independent Music Podcast, where an intro of colourful, DIY, Japanese ambient-pop lulls you into a false sense of security as ferocious tracks from Guinea-Bissau, South Africa, and the inimitable Godflesh punctuate throughout. But there's subtlety amongst the power, with a roots-flavoured new one from Mungo's Hi Fi, a stunning track of the year contender from China's Yikii, and a beautiful solo record from Throwing Muses' Kristin Hersh. You can listen to the first six tracks for free. To listen to the full episode, get a huge back catalogue of music, and access to our live shows and Discord group, please join our Patreon: patreon.com/independentmusicpodcast. The podcast only survives with Patron support Tracklistingく ま ち ゃ ん シ ー ル Kumachan Seal – 食 む （ Hamu ） Graze (EM Records, Japan)Mungo's Hi Fi x Pupajim – Past and Present (Scotch Bonnet Records, UK)Normal Nada the Krakmazter – Beautiful Chaos (Nyege Nyege Tapes, Uganda)Kristin Hersh – Dandelion (Fire Records, UK)Angel-Ho – ID Lock (self-release, South Africa)Godflesh – Land Lord (Avalanche Recordings, UK)Yikii – 盐 与 蔷 薇 辉 石 / Slat and Rhodonite (self-release, China)Doom Snakes (of the Moon) – Virid City (self-release, UK)Man Rei – Mangeler (Somewhere Between Tapes, UK)Pan African Peoples Arkestra – Little A's Chant (The Village, USA) This week's episode is sponsored by the state51 Conspiracy, an independent music house. Go to state51.com to find out more about everything they do: state51 Factory sessions and events; hand-made Atelier products; a diverse roster of Label releases; Greedbag stores, pop-up and fanzine, and the Collective of distribution partner labels and artists Produced and edited by Nick McCorriston.
Desde las sombras más fresquitas del Sótano cocinamos un menú de novedades que arranca con una de las mejores party bands a este lado de la Vía Láctea, los ingleses The Fuzillis, que ya tienen en la calle su nuevo álbum “Grind a Go Go Vol. 2”. Playlist; THE FUZILLIS “Tacoma” (Grind a Go Go Vol. 2, 2023) THE FUZILLIS “The Gee Gee Walk” (Grind a Go Go Vol. 2, 2023) THE FUZILLIS “Bule Bule” (Grind a Go Go Vol. 2, 2023) HOWLIN’ RAMBLERS “Drunken hearted man” (Drunken hearted man) MAMBO JAMBO ARKESTRA “Fiesta en el motel” (single, 2023) MOJO MANTRA “Willie Mae Blues” (single, 2023) THE BARRERACUDAS “Baby baby baby” (Nocturnal missions, 2011) KURT BAKER “Anchor’s up” (single, 2023) MUCK AND THE MIRES “Cool imposter” (single, 2023) THE TRIPWIRES “Do it some more” (Do it some more, 2023) THE TRIPWIRES “Shuffle in the gravel” (Are knife, fork, spoon & plate in good party tape, 2023) Versión y original; YOUNG JESSE “Shuffle in the gravel” (1957) DOCTOR EXPLOSION “Soy un truhán soy un señor” (single, 2023) FUNDACIÓN FRANCISCO FRANKENSTEIN “El verano ya llegó” (single, 2023) CHRIS ISAAK “There she goes” (Forever Blue, 1995) Escuchar audio
Len shares his Top Five with Vincent proving that Space Ain't Always the Place for some brothers, and Vincent counters with his enthusiastic review of the Afrofuturistism tentpole SPACE IS THE PLACE (1974), featuring the almighty Sun Ra and his Arkestra—plus Six Degrees of D'Urville Martin to two Sons of Hollywood. Rate & Review The Mission on Apple Email micheauxmission@gmail.com Follow The Mission on IG, Twitter @micheauxmission Leave Voicemail for Vincent & Len Subscribe to the Mission on YouTube Get your Micheaux Mission SWAG from TeePublic We are a proud member of The Podglomerate - we make podcasts work! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Episode 164 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "White Light/White Heat" and the career of the Velvet Underground. This is a long one, lasting three hours and twenty minutes. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-three minute bonus episode available, on "Why Don't You Smile Now?" by the Downliners Sect. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Errata I say the Velvet Underground didn't play New York for the rest of the sixties after 1966. They played at least one gig there in 1967, but did generally avoid the city. Also, I refer to Cale and Conrad as the other surviving members of the Theater of Eternal Music. Sadly Conrad died in 2016. Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by the Velvet Underground, and some of the avant-garde pieces excerpted run to six hours or more. I used a lot of resources for this one. Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story by Victor Bockris and Gerard Malanga is the best book on the group as a group. I also used Joe Harvard's 33 1/3 book on The Velvet Underground and Nico. Bockris also wrote one of the two biographies of Reed I referred to, Transformer. The other was Lou Reed by Anthony DeCurtis. Information on Cale mostly came from Sedition and Alchemy by Tim Mitchell. Information on Nico came from Nico: The Life and Lies of an Icon by Richard Witts. I used Draw a Straight Line and Follow it by Jeremy Grimshaw as my main source for La Monte Young, The Roaring Silence by David Revill for John Cage, and Warhol: A Life as Art by Blake Gopnik for Warhol. I also referred to the Criterion Collection Blu-Ray of the 2021 documentary The Velvet Underground. The definitive collection of the Velvet Underground's music is the sadly out-of-print box set Peel Slowly and See, which contains the four albums the group made with Reed in full, plus demos, outtakes, and live recordings. Note that the digital version of the album as sold by Amazon for some reason doesn't include the last disc -- if you want the full box set you have to buy a physical copy. All four studio albums have also been released and rereleased many times over in different configurations with different numbers of CDs at different price points -- I have used the "45th Anniversary Super-Deluxe" versions for this episode, but for most people the standard CD versions will be fine. Sadly there are no good shorter compilation overviews of the group -- they tend to emphasise either the group's "pop" mode or its "avant-garde" mode to the exclusion of the other. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I begin this episode, there are a few things to say. This introductory section is going to be longer than normal because, as you will hear, this episode is also going to be longer than normal. Firstly, I try to warn people about potentially upsetting material in these episodes. But this is the first episode for 1968, and as you will see there is a *profound* increase in the amount of upsetting and disturbing material covered as we go through 1968 and 1969. The story is going to be in a much darker place for the next twenty or thirty episodes. And this episode is no exception. As always, I try to deal with everything as sensitively as possible, but you should be aware that the list of warnings for this one is so long I am very likely to have missed some. Among the topics touched on in this episode are mental illness, drug addiction, gun violence, racism, societal and medical homophobia, medical mistreatment of mental illness, domestic abuse, rape, and more. If you find discussion of any of those subjects upsetting, you might want to read the transcript. Also, I use the term "queer" freely in this episode. In the past I have received some pushback for this, because of a belief among some that "queer" is a slur. The following explanation will seem redundant to many of my listeners, but as with many of the things I discuss in the podcast I am dealing with multiple different audiences with different levels of awareness and understanding of issues, so I'd like to beg those people's indulgence a moment. The term "queer" has certainly been used as a slur in the past, but so have terms like "lesbian", "gay", "homosexual" and others. In all those cases, the term has gone from a term used as a self-identifier, to a slur, to a reclaimed slur, and back again many times. The reason for using that word, specifically, here is because the vast majority of people in this story have sexualities or genders that don't match the societal norms of their times, but used labels for themselves that have shifted in meaning over the years. There are at least two men in the story, for example, who are now dead and referred to themselves as "homosexual", but were in multiple long-term sexually-active relationships with women. Would those men now refer to themselves as "bisexual" or "pansexual" -- terms not in widespread use at the time -- or would they, in the relatively more tolerant society we live in now, only have been in same-gender relationships? We can't know. But in our current context using the word "homosexual" for those men would lead to incorrect assumptions about their behaviour. The labels people use change over time, and the definitions of them blur and shift. I have discussed this issue with many, many, friends who fall under the queer umbrella, and while not all of them are comfortable with "queer" as a personal label because of how it's been used against them in the past, there is near-unanimity from them that it's the correct word to use in this situation. Anyway, now that that rather lengthy set of disclaimers is over, let's get into the story proper, as we look at "White Light, White Heat" by the Velvet Underground: [Excerpt: The Velvet Underground, "White Light, White Heat"] And that look will start with... a disclaimer about length. This episode is going to be a long one. Not as long as episode one hundred and fifty, but almost certainly the longest episode I'll do this year, by some way. And there's a reason for that. One of the questions I've been asked repeatedly over the years about the podcast is why almost all the acts I've covered have been extremely commercially successful ones. "Where are the underground bands? The alternative bands? The little niche acts?" The answer to that is simple. Until the mid-sixties, the idea of an underground or alternative band made no sense at all in rock, pop, rock and roll, R&B, or soul. The idea would have been completely counterintuitive to the vast majority of the people we've discussed in the podcast. Those musics were commercial musics, made by people who wanted to make money and to get the largest audiences possible. That doesn't mean that they had no artistic merit, or that there was no artistic intent behind them, but the artists making that music were *commercial* artists. They knew if they wanted to make another record, they had to sell enough copies of the last record for the record company to make another, and that if they wanted to keep eating, they had to draw enough of an audience to their gigs for promoters to keep booking them. There was no space in this worldview for what we might think of as cult success. If your record only sold a thousand copies, then you had failed in your goal, even if the thousand people who bought your record really loved it. Even less commercially successful artists we've covered to this point, like the Mothers of Invention or Love, were *trying* for commercial success, even if they made the decision not to compromise as much as others do. This started to change a tiny bit in the mid-sixties as the influence of jazz and folk in the US, and the British blues scene, started to be felt in rock music. But this influence, at first, was a one-way thing -- people who had been in the folk and jazz worlds deciding to modify their music to be more commercial. And that was followed by already massively commercial musicians, like the Beatles, taking on some of those influences and bringing their audience with them. But that started to change around the time that "rock" started to differentiate itself from "rock and roll" and "pop", in mid 1967. So in this episode and the next, we're going to look at two bands who in different ways provided a model for how to be an alternative band. Both of them still *wanted* commercial success, but neither achieved it, at least not at first and not in the conventional way. And both, when they started out, went by the name The Warlocks. But we have to take a rather circuitous route to get to this week's band, because we're now properly introducing a strand of music that has been there in the background for a while -- avant-garde art music. So before we go any further, let's have a listen to a thirty-second clip of the most famous piece of avant-garde music ever, and I'll be performing it myself: [Excerpt, Andrew Hickey "4'33 (Cage)"] Obviously that won't give the full effect, you have to listen to the whole piece to get that. That is of course a section of "4'33" by John Cage, a piece of music that is often incorrectly described as being four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence. As I've mentioned before, though, in the episode on "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag", it isn't that at all. The whole point of the piece is that there is no such thing as silence, and it's intended to make the listener appreciate all the normal ambient sounds as music, every bit as much as any piece by Bach or Beethoven. John Cage, the composer of "4'33", is possibly the single most influential avant-garde artist of the mid twentieth century, so as we're properly introducing the ideas of avant-garde music into the story here, we need to talk about him a little. Cage was, from an early age, torn between three great vocations, all of which in some fashion would shape his work for decades to come. One of these was architecture, and for a time he intended to become an architect. Another was the religious ministry, and he very seriously considered becoming a minister as a young man, and religion -- though not the religious faith of his youth -- was to be a massive factor in his work as he grew older. He started studying music from an early age, though he never had any facility as a performer -- though he did, when he discovered the work of Grieg, think that might change. He later said “For a while I played nothing else. I even imagined devoting my life to the performance of his works alone, for they did not seem to me to be too difficult, and I loved them.” [Excerpt: Grieg piano concerto in A minor] But he soon realised that he didn't have some of the basic skills that would be required to be a performer -- he never actually thought of himself as very musical -- and so he decided to move into composition, and he later talked about putting his musical limits to good use in being more inventive. From his very first pieces, Cage was trying to expand the definition of what a performance of a piece of music actually was. One of his friends, Harry Hay, who took part in the first documented performance of a piece by Cage, described how Cage's father, an inventor, had "devised a fluorescent light source over which Sample" -- Don Sample, Cage's boyfriend at the time -- "laid a piece of vellum painted with designs in oils. The blankets I was wearing were white, and a sort of lampshade shone coloured patterns onto me. It looked very good. The thing got so hot the designs began to run, but that only made it better.” Apparently the audience for this light show -- one that predated the light shows used by rock bands by a good thirty years -- were not impressed, though that may be more because the Santa Monica Women's Club in the early 1930s was not the vanguard of the avant-garde. Or maybe it was. Certainly the housewives of Santa Monica seemed more willing than one might expect to sign up for another of Cage's ideas. In 1933 he went door to door asking women if they would be interested in signing up to a lecture course from him on modern art and music. He told them that if they signed up for $2.50, he would give them ten lectures, and somewhere between twenty and forty of them signed up, even though, as he said later, “I explained to the housewives that I didn't know anything about either subject but that I was enthusiastic about both of them. I promised to learn faithfully enough about each subject so as to be able to give a talk an hour long each week.” And he did just that, going to the library every day and spending all week preparing an hour-long talk for them. History does not relate whether he ended these lectures by telling the housewives to tell just one friend about them. He said later “I came out of these lectures, with a devotion to the painting of Mondrian, on the one hand, and the music of Schoenberg on the other.” [Excerpt: Schoenberg, "Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte"] Schoenberg was one of the two most widely-respected composers in the world at that point, the other being Stravinsky, but the two had very different attitudes to composition. Schoenberg's great innovation was the creation and popularisation of the twelve-tone technique, and I should probably explain that a little before I go any further. Most Western music is based on an eight-note scale -- do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do -- with the eighth note being an octave up from the first. So in the key of C major that would be C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C: [demonstrates] And when you hear notes from that scale, if your ears are accustomed to basically any Western music written before about 1920, or any Western popular music written since then, you expect the melody to lead back to C, and you know to expect that because it only uses those notes -- there are differing intervals between them, some having a tone between them and some having a semitone, and you recognise the pattern. But of course there are other notes between the notes of that scale. There are actually an infinite number of these, but in conventional Western music we only look at a few more -- C# (or D flat), D# (or E flat), F# (or G flat), G# (or A flat) and A# (or B flat). If you add in all those notes you get this: [demonstrates] There's no clear beginning or end, no do for it to come back to. And Schoenberg's great innovation, which he was only starting to promote widely around this time, was to insist that all twelve notes should be equal -- his melodies would use all twelve of the notes the exact same number of times, and so if he used say a B flat, he would have to use all eleven other notes before he used B flat again in the piece. This was a radical new idea, but Schoenberg had only started advancing it after first winning great acclaim for earlier pieces, like his "Three Pieces for Piano", a work which wasn't properly twelve-tone, but did try to do without the idea of having any one note be more important than any other: [Excerpt: Schoenberg, "Three Pieces for Piano"] At this point, that work had only been performed in the US by one performer, Richard Buhlig, and hadn't been released as a recording yet. Cage was so eager to hear it that he'd found Buhlig's phone number and called him, asking him to play the piece, but Buhlig put the phone down on him. Now he was doing these lectures, though, he had to do one on Schoenberg, and he wasn't a competent enough pianist to play Schoenberg's pieces himself, and there were still no recordings of them. Cage hitch-hiked from Santa Monica to LA, where Buhlig lived, to try to get him to come and visit his class and play some of Schoenberg's pieces for them. Buhlig wasn't in, and Cage hung around in his garden hoping for him to come back -- he pulled the leaves off a bough from one of Buhlig's trees, going "He'll come back, he won't come back, he'll come back..." and the leaves said he'd be back. Buhlig arrived back at midnight, and quite understandably told the strange twenty-one-year-old who'd spent twelve hours in his garden pulling the leaves off his trees that no, he would not come to Santa Monica and give a free performance. But he did agree that if Cage brought some of his own compositions he'd give them a look over. Buhlig started giving Cage some proper lessons in composition, although he stressed that he was a performer, not a composer. Around this time Cage wrote his Sonata for Clarinet: [Excerpt: John Cage, "Sonata For Clarinet"] Buhlig suggested that Cage send that to Henry Cowell, the composer we heard about in the episode on "Good Vibrations" who was friends with Lev Termen and who created music by playing the strings inside a piano: [Excerpt: Henry Cowell, "Aeolian Harp and Sinister Resonance"] Cowell offered to take Cage on as an assistant, in return for which Cowell would teach him for a semester, as would Adolph Weiss, a pupil of Schoenberg's. But the goal, which Cowell suggested, was always to have Cage study with Schoenberg himself. Schoenberg at first refused, saying that Cage couldn't afford his price, but eventually took Cage on as a student having been assured that he would devote his entire life to music -- a promise Cage kept. Cage started writing pieces for percussion, something that had been very rare up to that point -- only a handful of composers, most notably Edgard Varese, had written pieces for percussion alone, but Cage was: [Excerpt: John Cage, "Trio"] This is often portrayed as a break from the ideals of his teacher Schoenberg, but in fact there's a clear continuity there, once you see what Cage was taking from Schoenberg. Schoenberg's work is, in some senses, about equality, about all notes being equal. Or to put it another way, it's about fairness. About erasing arbitrary distinctions. What Cage was doing was erasing the arbitrary distinction between the more and less prominent instruments. Why should there be pieces for solo violin or string quartet, but not for multiple percussion players? That said, Schoenberg was not exactly the most encouraging of teachers. When Cage invited Schoenberg to go to a concert of Cage's percussion work, Schoenberg told him he was busy that night. When Cage offered to arrange another concert for a date Schoenberg wasn't busy, the reply came "No, I will not be free at any time". Despite this, Cage later said “Schoenberg was a magnificent teacher, who always gave the impression that he was putting us in touch with musical principles,” and said "I literally worshipped him" -- a strong statement from someone who took religious matters as seriously as Cage. Cage was so devoted to Schoenberg's music that when a concert of music by Stravinsky was promoted as "music of the world's greatest living composer", Cage stormed into the promoter's office angrily, confronting the promoter and making it very clear that such things should not be said in the city where Schoenberg lived. Schoenberg clearly didn't think much of Cage's attempts at composition, thinking -- correctly -- that Cage had no ear for harmony. And his reportedly aggressive and confrontational teaching style didn't sit well with Cage -- though it seems very similar to a lot of the teaching techniques of the Zen masters he would later go on to respect. The two eventually parted ways, although Cage always spoke highly of Schoenberg. Schoenberg later gave Cage a compliment of sorts, when asked if any of his students had gone on to do anything interesting. At first he replied that none had, but then he mentioned Cage and said “Of course he's not a composer, but an inventor—of genius.” Cage was at this point very worried if there was any point to being a composer at all. He said later “I'd read Cowell's New Musical Resources and . . . The Theory of Rhythm. I had also read Chavez's Towards a New Music. Both works gave me the feeling that everything that was possible in music had already happened. So I thought I could never compose socially important music. Only if I could invent something new, then would I be useful to society. But that seemed unlikely then.” [Excerpt: John Cage, "Totem Ancestor"] Part of the solution came when he was asked to compose music for an abstract animation by the filmmaker Oskar Fischinger, and also to work as Fischinger's assistant when making the film. He was fascinated by the stop-motion process, and by the results of the film, which he described as "a beautiful film in which these squares, triangles and circles and other things moved and changed colour.” But more than that he was overwhelmed by a comment by Fischinger, who told him “Everything in the world has its own spirit, and this spirit becomes audible by setting it into vibration.” Cage later said “That set me on fire. He started me on a path of exploration of the world around me which has never stopped—of hitting and stretching and scraping and rubbing everything.” Cage now took his ideas further. His compositions for percussion had been about, if you like, giving the underdog a chance -- percussion was always in the background, why should it not be in the spotlight? Now he realised that there were other things getting excluded in conventional music -- the sounds that we characterise as noise. Why should composers work to exclude those sounds, but work to *include* other sounds? Surely that was... well, a little unfair? Eventually this would lead to pieces like his 1952 piece "Water Music", later expanded and retitled "Water Walk", which can be heard here in his 1959 appearance on the TV show "I've Got a Secret". It's a piece for, amongst other things, a flowerpot full of flowers, a bathtub, a watering can, a pipe, a duck call, a blender full of ice cubes, and five unplugged radios: [Excerpt: John Cage "Water Walk"] As he was now avoiding pitch and harmony as organising principles for his music, he turned to time. But note -- not to rhythm. He said “There's none of this boom, boom, boom, business in my music . . . a measure is taken as a strict measure of time—not a one two three four—which I fill with various sounds.” He came up with a system he referred to as “micro-macrocosmic rhythmic structure,” what we would now call fractals, though that word hadn't yet been invented, where the structure of the whole piece was reflected in the smallest part of it. For a time he started moving away from the term music, preferring to refer to the "art of noise" or to "organised sound" -- though he later received a telegram from Edgard Varese, one of his musical heroes and one of the few other people writing works purely for percussion, asking him not to use that phrase, which Varese used for his own work. After meeting with Varese and his wife, he later became convinced that it was Varese's wife who had initiated the telegram, as she explained to Cage's wife "we didn't want your husband's work confused with my husband's work, any more than you'd want some . . . any artist's work confused with that of a cartoonist.” While there is a humour to Cage's work, I don't really hear much qualitative difference between a Cage piece like the one we just heard and a Varese piece like Ionisation: [Excerpt: Edgard Varese, "Ionisation"] But it was in 1952, the year of "Water Music" that John Cage made his two biggest impacts on the cultural world, though the full force of those impacts wasn't felt for some years. To understand Cage's 1952 work, you first have to understand that he had become heavily influenced by Zen, which at that time was very little known in the Western world. Indeed he had studied with Daisetsu Suzuki, who is credited with introducing Zen to the West, and said later “I didn't study music with just anybody; I studied with Schoenberg, I didn't study Zen with just anybody; I studied with Suzuki. I've always gone, insofar as I could, to the president of the company.” Cage's whole worldview was profoundly affected by Zen, but he was also naturally sympathetic to it, and his work after learning about Zen is mostly a continuation of trends we can already see. In particular, he became convinced that the point of music isn't to communicate anything between two people, rather its point is merely to be experienced. I'm far from an expert on Buddhism, but one way of thinking about its central lessons is that one should experience things as they are, experiencing the thing itself rather than one's thoughts or preconceptions about it. And so at Black Mountain college came Theatre Piece Number 1: [Excerpt: Edith Piaf, "La Vie En Rose" ] In this piece, Cage had set the audience on all sides, so they'd be facing each other. He stood on a stepladder, as colleagues danced in and around the audience, another colleague played the piano, two more took turns to stand on another stepladder to recite poetry, different films and slides were projected, seemingly at random, onto the walls, and the painter Robert Rauschenberg played scratchy Edith Piaf records on a wind-up gramophone. The audience were included in the performance, and it was meant to be experienced as a gestalt, as a whole, to be what we would now call an immersive experience. One of Cage's students around this time was the artist Allan Kaprow, and he would be inspired by Theatre Piece Number 1 to put on several similar events in the late fifties. Those events he called "happenings", because the point of them was that you were meant to experience an event as it was happening rather than bring preconceptions of form and structure to them. Those happenings were the inspiration for events like The 14 Hour Technicolor Dream, and the term "happening" became such an integral part of the counterculture that by 1967 there were comedy films being released about them, including one just called The Happening with a title track by the Supremes that made number one: [Excerpt: The Supremes, "The Happening"] Theatre Piece Number 1 was retrospectively considered the first happening, and as such its influence is incalculable. But one part I didn't mention about Theatre Piece Number 1 is that as well as Rauschenberg playing Edith Piaf's records, he also displayed some of his paintings. These paintings were totally white -- at a glance, they looked like blank canvases, but as one inspected them more clearly, it became apparent that Rauschenberg had painted them with white paint, with visible brushstrokes. These paintings, along with a visit to an anechoic chamber in which Cage discovered that even in total silence one can still hear one's own blood and nervous system, so will never experience total silence, were the final key to something Cage had been working towards -- if music had minimised percussion, and excluded noise, how much more had it excluded silence? As Cage said in 1958 “Curiously enough, the twelve-tone system has no zero in it.” And so came 4'33, the piece that we heard an excerpt of near the start of this episode. That piece was the something new he'd been looking for that could be useful to society. It took the sounds the audience could already hear, and without changing them even slightly gave them a new context and made the audience hear them as they were. Simply by saying "this is music", it caused the ambient noise to be perceived as music. This idea, of recontextualising existing material, was one that had already been done in the art world -- Marcel Duchamp, in 1917, had exhibited a urinal as a sculpture titled "Fountain" -- but even Duchamp had talked about his work as "everyday objects raised to the dignity of a work of art by the artist's act of choice". The artist was *raising* the object to art. What Cage was saying was "the object is already art". This was all massively influential to a young painter who had seen Cage give lectures many times, and while at art school had with friends prepared a piano in the same way Cage did for his own experimental compositions, dampening the strings with different objects. [Excerpt: Dana Gillespie, "Andy Warhol (live)"] Duchamp and Rauschenberg were both big influences on Andy Warhol, but he would say in the early sixties "John Cage is really so responsible for so much that's going on," and would for the rest of his life cite Cage as one of the two or three prime influences of his career. Warhol is a difficult figure to discuss, because his work is very intellectual but he was not very articulate -- which is one reason I've led up to him by discussing Cage in such detail, because Cage was always eager to talk at great length about the theoretical basis of his work, while Warhol would say very few words about anything at all. Probably the person who knew him best was his business partner and collaborator Paul Morrissey, and Morrissey's descriptions of Warhol have shaped my own view of his life, but it's very worth noting that Morrissey is an extremely right-wing moralist who wishes to see a Catholic theocracy imposed to do away with the scourges of sexual immorality, drug use, hedonism, and liberalism, so his view of Warhol, a queer drug using progressive whose worldview seems to have been totally opposed to Morrissey's in every way, might be a little distorted. Warhol came from an impoverished background, and so, as many people who grew up poor do, he was, throughout his life, very eager to make money. He studied art at university, and got decent but not exceptional grades -- he was a competent draughtsman, but not a great one, and most importantly as far as success in the art world goes he didn't have what is known as his own "line" -- with most successful artists, you can look at a handful of lines they've drawn and see something of their own personality in it. You couldn't with Warhol. His drawings looked like mediocre imitations of other people's work. Perfectly competent, but nothing that stood out. So Warhol came up with a technique to make his drawings stand out -- blotting. He would do a normal drawing, then go over it with a lot of wet ink. He'd lower a piece of paper on to the wet drawing, and the new paper would soak up the ink, and that second piece of paper would become the finished work. The lines would be fractured and smeared, broken in places where the ink didn't get picked up, and thick in others where it had pooled. With this mechanical process, Warhol had managed to create an individual style, and he became an extremely successful commercial artist. In the early 1950s photography was still seen as a somewhat low-class way of advertising things. If you wanted to sell to a rich audience, you needed to use drawings or paintings. By 1955 Warhol was making about twelve thousand dollars a year -- somewhere close to a hundred and thirty thousand a year in today's money -- drawing shoes for advertisements. He also had a sideline in doing record covers for people like Count Basie: [Excerpt: Count Basie, "Seventh Avenue Express"] For most of the 1950s he also tried to put on shows of his more serious artistic work -- often with homoerotic themes -- but to little success. The dominant art style of the time was the abstract expressionism of people like Jackson Pollock, whose art was visceral, emotional, and macho. The term "action paintings" which was coined for the work of people like Pollock, sums it up. This was manly art for manly men having manly emotions and expressing them loudly. It was very male and very straight, and even the gay artists who were prominent at the time tended to be very conformist and look down on anything they considered flamboyant or effeminate. Warhol was a rather effeminate, very reserved man, who strongly disliked showing his emotions, and whose tastes ran firmly to the camp. Camp as an aesthetic of finding joy in the flamboyant or trashy, as opposed to merely a descriptive term for men who behaved in a way considered effeminate, was only just starting to be codified at this time -- it wouldn't really become a fully-formed recognisable thing until Susan Sontag's essay "Notes on Camp" in 1964 -- but of course just because something hasn't been recognised doesn't mean it doesn't exist, and Warhol's aesthetic was always very camp, and in the 1950s in the US that was frowned upon even in gay culture, where the mainstream opinion was that the best way to acceptance was through assimilation. Abstract expressionism was all about expressing the self, and that was something Warhol never wanted to do -- in fact he made some pronouncements at times which suggested he didn't think of himself as *having* a self in the conventional sense. The combination of not wanting to express himself and of wanting to work more efficiently as a commercial artist led to some interesting results. For example, he was commissioned in 1957 to do a cover for an album by Moondog, the blind street musician whose name Alan Freed had once stolen: [Excerpt: Moondog, "Gloving It"] For that cover, Warhol got his mother, Julia Warhola, to just write out the liner notes for the album in her rather ornamental cursive script, and that became the front cover, leading to an award for graphic design going that year to "Andy Warhol's mother". (Incidentally, my copy of the current CD issue of that album, complete with Julia Warhola's cover, is put out by Pickwick Records...) But towards the end of the fifties, the work for commercial artists started to dry up. If you wanted to advertise shoes, now, you just took a photo of the shoes rather than get Andy Warhol to draw a picture of them. The money started to disappear, and Warhol started to panic. If there was no room for him in graphic design any more, he had to make his living in the fine arts, which he'd been totally unsuccessful in. But luckily for Warhol, there was a new movement that was starting to form -- Pop Art. Pop Art started in England, and had originally been intended, at least in part, as a critique of American consumerist capitalism. Pieces like "Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?" by Richard Hamilton (who went on to design the Beatles' White Album cover) are collages of found images, almost all from American sources, recontextualised and juxtaposed in interesting ways, so a bodybuilder poses in a room that's taken from an advert in Ladies' Home Journal, while on the wall, instead of a painting, hangs a blown-up cover of a Jack Kirby romance comic. Pop Art changed slightly when it got taken up in America, and there it became something rather different, something closer to Duchamp, taking those found images and displaying them as art with no juxtaposition. Where Richard Hamilton created collage art which *showed* a comic cover by Jack Kirby as a painting in the background, Roy Lichtenstein would take a panel of comic art by Kirby, or Russ Heath or Irv Novick or a dozen other comic artists, and redraw it at the size of a normal painting. So Warhol took Cage's idea that the object is already art, and brought that into painting, starting by doing paintings of Campbell's soup cans, in which he tried as far as possible to make the cans look exactly like actual soup cans. The paintings were controversial, inciting fury in some and laughter in others and causing almost everyone to question whether they were art. Warhol would embrace an aesthetic in which things considered unimportant or trash or pop culture detritus were the greatest art of all. For example pretty much every profile of him written in the mid sixties talks about him obsessively playing "Sally Go Round the Roses", a girl-group single by the one-hit wonders the Jaynettes: [Excerpt: The Jaynettes, "Sally Go Round the Roses"] After his paintings of Campbell's soup cans, and some rather controversial but less commercially successful paintings of photographs of horrors and catastrophes taken from newspapers, Warhol abandoned painting in the conventional sense altogether, instead creating brightly coloured screen prints -- a form of stencilling -- based on photographs of celebrities like Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor and, most famously, Marilyn Monroe. That way he could produce images which could be mass-produced, without his active involvement, and which supposedly had none of his personality in them, though of course his personality pervades the work anyway. He put on exhibitions of wooden boxes, silk-screen printed to look exactly like shipping cartons of Brillo pads. Images we see everywhere -- in newspapers, in supermarkets -- were art. And Warhol even briefly formed a band. The Druds were a garage band formed to play at a show at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art, the opening night of an exhibition that featured a silkscreen by Warhol of 210 identical bottles of Coca-Cola, as well as paintings by Rauschenberg and others. That opening night featured a happening by Claes Oldenburg, and a performance by Cage -- Cage gave a live lecture while three recordings of his own voice also played. The Druds were also meant to perform, but they fell apart after only a few rehearsals. Some recordings apparently exist, but they don't seem to circulate, but they'd be fascinating to hear as almost the entire band were non-musician artists like Warhol, Jasper Johns, and the sculptor Walter de Maria. Warhol said of the group “It didn't go too well, but if we had just stayed on it it would have been great.” On the other hand, the one actual musician in the group said “It was kind of ridiculous, so I quit after the second rehearsal". That musician was La Monte Young: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Well-Tuned Piano"] That's an excerpt from what is generally considered Young's masterwork, "The Well-Tuned Piano". It's six and a half hours long. If Warhol is a difficult figure to write about, Young is almost impossible. He's a musician with a career stretching sixty years, who is arguably the most influential musician from the classical tradition in that time period. He's generally considered the father of minimalism, and he's also been called by Brian Eno "the daddy of us all" -- without Young you simply *do not* get art rock at all. Without Young there is no Velvet Underground, no David Bowie, no Eno, no New York punk scene, no Yoko Ono. Anywhere that the fine arts or conceptual art have intersected with popular music in the last fifty or more years has been influenced in one way or another by Young's work. BUT... he only rarely publishes his scores. He very, very rarely allows recordings of his work to be released -- there are four recordings on his bandcamp, plus a handful of recordings of his older, published, pieces, and very little else. He doesn't allow his music to be performed live without his supervision. There *are* bootleg recordings of his music, but even those are not easily obtainable -- Young is vigorous in enforcing his copyrights and issues takedown notices against anywhere that hosts them. So other than that handful of legitimately available recordings -- plus a recording by Young's Theater of Eternal Music, the legality of which is still disputed, and an off-air recording of a 1971 radio programme I've managed to track down, the only way to experience Young's music unless you're willing to travel to one of his rare live performances or installations is second-hand, by reading about it. Except that the one book that deals solely with Young and his music is not only a dense and difficult book to read, it's also one that Young vehemently disagreed with and considered extremely inaccurate, to the point he refused to allow permissions to quote his work in the book. Young did apparently prepare a list of corrections for the book, but he wouldn't tell the author what they were without payment. So please assume that anything I say about Young is wrong, but also accept that the short section of this episode about Young has required more work to *try* to get it right than pretty much anything else this year. Young's musical career actually started out in a relatively straightforward manner. He didn't grow up in the most loving of homes -- he's talked about his father beating him as a child because he had been told that young La Monte was clever -- but his father did buy him a saxophone and teach him the rudiments of the instrument, and as a child he was most influenced by the music of the big band saxophone player Jimmy Dorsey: [Excerpt: Jimmy Dorsey, “It's the Dreamer in Me”] The family, who were Mormon farmers, relocated several times in Young's childhood, from Idaho first to California and then to Utah, but everywhere they went La Monte seemed to find musical inspiration, whether from an uncle who had been part of the Kansas City jazz scene, a classmate who was a musical prodigy who had played with Perez Prado in his early teens, or a teacher who took the class to see a performance of Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra: [Excerpt: Bartok, "Concerto for Orchestra"] After leaving high school, Young went to Los Angeles City College to study music under Leonard Stein, who had been Schoenberg's assistant when Schoenberg had taught at UCLA, and there he became part of the thriving jazz scene based around Central Avenue, studying and performing with musicians like Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, and Eric Dolphy -- Young once beat Dolphy in an audition for a place in the City College dance band, and the two would apparently substitute for each other on their regular gigs when one couldn't make it. During this time, Young's musical tastes became much more adventurous. He was a particular fan of the work of John Coltrane, and also got inspired by City of Glass, an album by Stan Kenton that attempted to combine jazz and modern classical music: [Excerpt: Stan Kenton's Innovations Orchestra, "City of Glass: The Structures"] His other major musical discovery in the mid-fifties was one we've talked about on several previous occasions -- the album Music of India, Morning and Evening Ragas by Ali Akhbar Khan: [Excerpt: Ali Akhbar Khan, "Rag Sindhi Bhairavi"] Young's music at this point was becoming increasingly modal, and equally influenced by the blues and Indian music. But he was also becoming interested in serialism. Serialism is an extension and generalisation of twelve-tone music, inspired by mathematical set theory. In serialism, you choose a set of musical elements -- in twelve-tone music that's the twelve notes in the twelve-tone scale, but it can also be a set of tonal relations, a chord, or any other set of elements. You then define all the possible ways you can permute those elements, a defined set of operations you can perform on them -- so you could play a scale forwards, play it backwards, play all the notes in the scale simultaneously, and so on. You then go through all the possible permutations, exactly once, and that's your piece of music. Young was particularly influenced by the works of Anton Webern, one of the earliest serialists: [Excerpt: Anton Webern, "Cantata number 1 for Soprano, Mixed Chorus, and Orchestra"] That piece we just heard, Webern's "Cantata number 1", was the subject of some of the earliest theoretical discussion of serialism, and in particular led to some discussion of the next step on from serialism. If serialism was all about going through every single permutation of a set, what if you *didn't* permute every element? There was a lot of discussion in the late fifties in music-theoretical circles about the idea of invariance. Normally in music, the interesting thing is what gets changed. To use a very simple example, you might change a melody from a major key to a minor one to make it sound sadder. What theorists at this point were starting to discuss is what happens if you leave something the same, but change the surrounding context, so the thing you *don't* vary sounds different because of the changed context. And going further, what if you don't change the context at all, and merely *imply* a changed context? These ideas were some of those which inspired Young's first major work, his Trio For Strings from 1958, a complex, palindromic, serial piece which is now credited as the first work of minimalism, because the notes in it change so infrequently: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "Trio for Strings"] Though I should point out that Young never considers his works truly finished, and constantly rewrites them, and what we just heard is an excerpt from the only recording of the trio ever officially released, which is of the 2015 version. So I can't state for certain how close what we just heard is to the piece he wrote in 1958, except that it sounds very like the written descriptions of it I've read. After writing the Trio For Strings, Young moved to Germany to study with the modernist composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. While studying with Stockhausen, he became interested in the work of John Cage, and started up a correspondence with Cage. On his return to New York he studied with Cage and started writing pieces inspired by Cage, of which the most musical is probably Composition 1960 #7: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "Composition 1960 #7"] The score for that piece is a stave on which is drawn a treble clef, the notes B and F#, and the words "To be held for a long Time". Other of his compositions from 1960 -- which are among the few of his compositions which have been published -- include composition 1960 #10 ("To Bob Morris"), the score for which is just the instruction "Draw a straight line and follow it.", and Piano Piece for David Tudor #1, the score for which reads "Bring a bale of hay and a bucket of water onto the stage for the piano to eat and drink. The performer may then feed the piano or leave it to eat by itself. If the former, the piece is over after the piano has been fed. If the latter, it is over after the piano eats or decides not to". Most of these compositions were performed as part of a loose New York art collective called Fluxus, all of whom were influenced by Cage and the Dadaists. This collective, led by George Maciunas, sometimes involved Cage himself, but also involved people like Henry Flynt, the inventor of conceptual art, who later became a campaigner against art itself, and who also much to Young's bemusement abandoned abstract music in the mid-sixties to form a garage band with Walter de Maria (who had played drums with the Druds): [Excerpt: Henry Flynt and the Insurrections, "I Don't Wanna"] Much of Young's work was performed at Fluxus concerts given in a New York loft belonging to another member of the collective, Yoko Ono, who co-curated the concerts with Young. One of Ono's mid-sixties pieces, her "Four Pieces for Orchestra" is dedicated to Young, and consists of such instructions as "Count all the stars of that night by heart. The piece ends when all the orchestra members finish counting the stars, or when it dawns. This can be done with windows instead of stars." But while these conceptual ideas remained a huge part of Young's thinking, he soon became interested in two other ideas. The first was the idea of just intonation -- tuning instruments and voices to perfect harmonics, rather than using the subtly-off tuning that is used in Western music. I'm sure I've explained that before in a previous episode, but to put it simply when you're tuning an instrument with fixed pitches like a piano, you have a choice -- you can either tune it so that the notes in one key are perfectly in tune with each other, but then when you change key things go very out of tune, or you can choose to make *everything* a tiny bit, almost unnoticeably, out of tune, but equally so. For the last several hundred years, musicians as a community have chosen the latter course, which was among other things promoted by Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, a collection of compositions which shows how the different keys work together: [Excerpt: Bach (Glenn Gould), "The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II: Fugue in F-sharp minor, BWV 883"] Young, by contrast, has his own esoteric tuning system, which he uses in his own work The Well-Tuned Piano: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Well-Tuned Piano"] The other idea that Young took on was from Indian music, the idea of the drone. One of the four recordings of Young's music that is available from his Bandcamp, a 1982 recording titled The Tamburas of Pandit Pran Nath, consists of one hour, thirteen minutes, and fifty-eight seconds of this: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Tamburas of Pandit Pran Nath"] Yes, I have listened to the whole piece. No, nothing else happens. The minimalist composer Terry Riley describes the recording as "a singularly rare contribution that far outshines any other attempts to capture this instrument in recorded media". In 1962, Young started writing pieces based on what he called the "dream chord", a chord consisting of a root, fourth, sharpened fourth, and fifth: [dream chord] That chord had already appeared in his Trio for Strings, but now it would become the focus of much of his work, in pieces like his 1962 piece The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer, heard here in a 1982 revision: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer"] That was part of a series of works titled The Four Dreams of China, and Young began to plan an installation work titled Dream House, which would eventually be created, and which currently exists in Tribeca, New York, where it's been in continuous "performance" for thirty years -- and which consists of thirty-two different pure sine wave tones all played continuously, plus purple lighting by Young's wife Marian Zazeela. But as an initial step towards creating this, Young formed a collective called Theatre of Eternal Music, which some of the members -- though never Young himself -- always claim also went by the alternative name The Dream Syndicate. According to John Cale, a member of the group, that name came about because the group tuned their instruments to the 60hz hum of the fridge in Young's apartment, which Cale called "the key of Western civilisation". According to Cale, that meant the fundamental of the chords they played was 10hz, the frequency of alpha waves when dreaming -- hence the name. The group initially consisted of Young, Zazeela, the photographer Billy Name, and percussionist Angus MacLise, but by this recording in 1964 the lineup was Young, Zazeela, MacLise, Tony Conrad and John Cale: [Excerpt: "Cale, Conrad, Maclise, Young, Zazeela - The Dream Syndicate 2 IV 64-4"] That recording, like any others that have leaked by the 1960s version of the Theatre of Eternal Music or Dream Syndicate, is of disputed legality, because Young and Zazeela claim to this day that what the group performed were La Monte Young's compositions, while the other two surviving members, Cale and Conrad, claim that their performances were improvisational collaborations and should be equally credited to all the members, and so there have been lawsuits and countersuits any time anyone has released the recordings. John Cale, the youngest member of the group, was also the only one who wasn't American. He'd been born in Wales in 1942, and had had the kind of childhood that, in retrospect, seems guaranteed to lead to eccentricity. He was the product of a mixed-language marriage -- his father, William, was an English speaker while his mother, Margaret, spoke Welsh, but the couple had moved in on their marriage with Margaret's mother, who insisted that only Welsh could be spoken in her house. William didn't speak Welsh, and while he eventually picked up the basics from spending all his life surrounded by Welsh-speakers, he refused on principle to capitulate to his mother-in-law, and so remained silent in the house. John, meanwhile, grew up a monolingual Welsh speaker, and didn't start to learn English until he went to school when he was seven, and so couldn't speak to his father until then even though they lived together. Young John was extremely unwell for most of his childhood, both physically -- he had bronchial problems for which he had to take a cough mixture that was largely opium to help him sleep at night -- and mentally. He was hospitalised when he was sixteen with what was at first thought to be meningitis, but turned out to be a psychosomatic condition, the result of what he has described as a nervous breakdown. That breakdown is probably connected to the fact that during his teenage years he was sexually assaulted by two adults in positions of authority -- a vicar and a music teacher -- and felt unable to talk to anyone about this. He was, though, a child prodigy and was playing viola with the National Youth Orchestra of Wales from the age of thirteen, and listening to music by Schoenberg, Webern, and Stravinsky. He was so talented a multi-instrumentalist that at school he was the only person other than one of the music teachers and the headmaster who was allowed to use the piano -- which led to a prank on his very last day at school. The headmaster would, on the last day, hit a low G on the piano to cue the assembly to stand up, and Cale had placed a comb on the string, muting it and stopping the note from sounding -- in much the same way that his near-namesake John Cage was "preparing" pianos for his own compositions in the USA. Cale went on to Goldsmith's College to study music and composition, under Humphrey Searle, one of Britain's greatest proponents of serialism who had himself studied under Webern. Cale's main instrument was the viola, but he insisted on also playing pieces written for the violin, because they required more technical skill. For his final exam he chose to play Hindemith's notoriously difficult Viola Sonata: [Excerpt: Hindemith Viola Sonata] While at Goldsmith's, Cale became friendly with Cornelius Cardew, a composer and cellist who had studied with Stockhausen and at the time was a great admirer of and advocate for the works of Cage and Young (though by the mid-seventies Cardew rejected their work as counter-revolutionary bourgeois imperialism). Through Cardew, Cale started to correspond with Cage, and with George Maciunas and other members of Fluxus. In July 1963, just after he'd finished his studies at Goldsmith's, Cale presented a festival there consisting of an afternoon and an evening show. These shows included the first British performances of several works including Cardew's Autumn '60 for Orchestra -- a piece in which the musicians were given blank staves on which to write whatever part they wanted to play, but a separate set of instructions in *how* to play the parts they'd written. Another piece Cale presented in its British premiere at that show was Cage's "Concerto for Piano and Orchestra": [Excerpt: John Cage, "Concerto for Piano and Orchestra"] In the evening show, they performed Two Pieces For String Quartet by George Brecht (in which the musicians polish their instruments with dusters, making scraping sounds as they clean them), and two new pieces by Cale, one of which involved a plant being put on the stage, and then the performer, Robin Page, screaming from the balcony at the plant that it would die, then running down, through the audience, and onto the stage, screaming abuse and threats at the plant. The final piece in the show was a performance by Cale (the first one in Britain) of La Monte Young's "X For Henry Flynt". For this piece, Cale put his hands together and then smashed both his arms onto the keyboard as hard as he could, over and over. After five minutes some of the audience stormed the stage and tried to drag the piano away from him. Cale followed the piano on his knees, continuing to bang the keys, and eventually the audience gave up in defeat and Cale the performer won. After this Cale moved to the USA, to further study composition, this time with Iannis Xenakis, the modernist composer who had also taught Mickey Baker orchestration after Baker left Mickey and Sylvia, and who composed such works as "Orient Occident": [Excerpt: Iannis Xenakis, "Orient Occident"] Cale had been recommended to Xenakis as a student by Aaron Copland, who thought the young man was probably a genius. But Cale's musical ambitions were rather too great for Tanglewood, Massachusetts -- he discovered that the institute had eighty-eight pianos, the same number as there are keys on a piano keyboard, and thought it would be great if for a piece he could take all eighty-eight pianos, put them all on different boats, sail the boats out onto a lake, and have eighty-eight different musicians each play one note on each piano, while the boats sank with the pianos on board. For some reason, Cale wasn't allowed to perform this composition, and instead had to make do with one where he pulled an axe out of a single piano and slammed it down on a table. Hardly the same, I'm sure you'll agree. From Tanglewood, Cale moved on to New York, where he soon became part of the artistic circles surrounding John Cage and La Monte Young. It was at this time that he joined Young's Theatre of Eternal Music, and also took part in a performance with Cage that would get Cale his first television exposure: [Excerpt: John Cale playing Erik Satie's "Vexations" on "I've Got a Secret"] That's Cale playing through "Vexations", a piece by Erik Satie that wasn't published until after Satie's death, and that remained in obscurity until Cage popularised -- if that's the word -- the piece. The piece, which Cage had found while studying Satie's notes, seems to be written as an exercise and has the inscription (in French) "In order to play the motif 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, and in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities." Cage interpreted that, possibly correctly, as an instruction that the piece should be played eight hundred and forty times straight through, and so he put together a performance of the piece, the first one ever, by a group he called the Pocket Theatre Piano Relay Team, which included Cage himself, Cale, Joshua Rifkin, and several other notable musical figures, who took it in turns playing the piece. For that performance, which ended up lasting eighteen hours, there was an entry fee of five dollars, and there was a time-clock in the lobby. Audience members punched in and punched out, and got a refund of five cents for every twenty minutes they'd spent listening to the music. Supposedly, at the end, one audience member yelled "Encore!" A week later, Cale appeared on "I've Got a Secret", a popular game-show in which celebrities tried to guess people's secrets (and which is where that performance of Cage's "Water Walk" we heard earlier comes from): [Excerpt: John Cale on I've Got a Secret] For a while, Cale lived with a friend of La Monte Young's, Terry Jennings, before moving in to a flat with Tony Conrad, one of the other members of the Theatre of Eternal Music. Angus MacLise lived in another flat in the same building. As there was not much money to be made in avant-garde music, Cale also worked in a bookshop -- a job Cage had found him -- and had a sideline in dealing drugs. But rents were so cheap at this time that Cale and Conrad only had to work part-time, and could spend much of their time working on the music they were making with Young. Both were string players -- Conrad violin, Cale viola -- and they soon modified their instruments. Conrad merely attached pickups to his so it could be amplified, but Cale went much further. He filed down the viola's bridge so he could play three strings at once, and he replaced the normal viola strings with thicker, heavier, guitar and mandolin strings. This created a sound so loud that it sounded like a distorted electric guitar -- though in late 1963 and early 1964 there were very few people who even knew what a distorted guitar sounded like. Cale and Conrad were also starting to become interested in rock and roll music, to which neither of them had previously paid much attention, because John Cage's music had taught them to listen for music in sounds they previously dismissed. In particular, Cale became fascinated with the harmonies of the Everly Brothers, hearing in them the same just intonation that Young advocated for: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "All I Have to Do is Dream"] And it was with this newfound interest in rock and roll that Cale and Conrad suddenly found themselves members of a manufactured pop band. The two men had been invited to a party on the Lower East Side, and there they'd been introduced to Terry Phillips of Pickwick Records. Phillips had seen their long hair and asked if they were musicians, so they'd answered "yes". He asked if they were in a band, and they said yes. He asked if that band had a drummer, and again they said yes. By this point they realised that he had assumed they were rock guitarists, rather than experimental avant-garde string players, but they decided to play along and see where this was going. Phillips told them that if they brought along their drummer to Pickwick's studios the next day, he had a job for them. The two of them went along with Walter de Maria, who did play the drums a little in between his conceptual art work, and there they were played a record: [Excerpt: The Primitives, "The Ostrich"] It was explained to them that Pickwick made knock-off records -- soundalikes of big hits, and their own records in the style of those hits, all played by a bunch of session musicians and put out under different band names. This one, by "the Primitives", they thought had a shot at being an actual hit, even though it was a dance-craze song about a dance where one partner lays on the floor and the other stamps on their head. But if it was going to be a hit, they needed an actual band to go out and perform it, backing the singer. How would Cale, Conrad, and de Maria like to be three quarters of the Primitives? It sounded fun, but of course they weren't actually guitarists. But as it turned out, that wasn't going to be a problem. They were told that the guitars on the track had all been tuned to one note -- not even to an open chord, like we talked about Steve Cropper doing last episode, but all the strings to one note. Cale and Conrad were astonished -- that was exactly the kind of thing they'd been doing in their drone experiments with La Monte Young. Who was this person who was independently inventing the most advanced ideas in experimental music but applying them to pop songs? And that was how they met Lou Reed: [Excerpt: The Primitives, "The Ostrich"] Where Cale and Conrad were avant-gardeists who had only just started paying attention to rock and roll music, rock and roll was in Lou Reed's blood, but there were a few striking similarities between him and Cale, even though at a glance their backgrounds could not have seemed more different. Reed had been brought up in a comfortably middle-class home in Long Island, but despised the suburban conformity that surrounded him from a very early age, and by his teens was starting to rebel against it very strongly. According to one classmate “Lou was always more advanced than the rest of us. The drinking age was eighteen back then, so we all started drinking at around sixteen. We were drinking quarts of beer, but Lou was smoking joints. He didn't do that in front of many people, but I knew he was doing it. While we were looking at girls in Playboy, Lou was reading Story of O. He was reading the Marquis de Sade, stuff that I wouldn't even have thought about or known how to find.” But one way in which Reed was a typical teenager of the period was his love for rock and roll, especially doo-wop. He'd got himself a guitar, but only had one lesson -- according to the story he would tell on numerous occasions, he turned up with a copy of "Blue Suede Shoes" and told the teacher he only wanted to know how to play the chords for that, and he'd work out the rest himself. Reed and two schoolfriends, Alan Walters and Phil Harris, put together a doo-wop trio they called The Shades, because they wore sunglasses, and a neighbour introduced them to Bob Shad, who had been an A&R man for Mercury Records and was starting his own new label. He renamed them the Jades and took them into the studio with some of the best New York session players, and at fourteen years old Lou Reed was writing songs and singing them backed by Mickey Baker and King Curtis: [Excerpt: The Jades, "Leave Her For Me"] Sadly the Jades' single was a flop -- the closest it came to success was being played on Murray the K's radio show, but on a day when Murray the K was off ill and someone else was filling in for him, much to Reed's disappointment. Phil Harris, the lead singer of the group, got to record some solo sessions after that, but the Jades split up and it would be several years before Reed made any more records. Partly this was because of Reed's mental health, and here's where things get disputed and rather messy. What we know is that in his late teens, just after he'd gone off to New
Paseo por la huerta ibérica para llenar la marmita con novedades de nuestra cosecha.Playlist;(sintonía) JAVIER COLIS y JUAN PÉREZ MARINA “Otro forastero” (Sangre fácil II, 2023)JAVIER COLIS y JUAN PÉREZ MARINA “Besos en el laberinto” (Sangre fácil II, 2023)HEROÍNAS “Odio” (Hocus Pocus, 2022)THE SICK BOYS “Fancy Cars” (Travelling in disguise, 2022)RAMBALAYA “Lonesome land” (adelanto del álbum “Only in my dreams”)DANI NEL-LO and ORGAN TRIO “Grand prix” (Grand Prix, 2022)LOS MAMBO JAMBO ARKESTRA “Promenade” (Arkestra, 2018)DOCTOR DIVAGO “El día después” (La tierra prometida, 2023)LOS DELTONOS “Menudeo” (Mueve, 2023)LOS PREMODERNOS “Laboratorio secreto” (Laboratorio secreto, 2023)LAPIDO “Antes de que acabe el día” (adelanto del álbum “A primera sangre”)WEE HEYS “Wee heys” (The sounds of punk and roll, 2023)THE HOLDENS “Do it right” (Do it right, 2005)SCREAMIN’ WITCH DOCTORS “The end of the world” (Back from Transylvania, 2022) Escuchar audio
Sun Ra may have joined the outer spaceways almost 30 years ago but he continues to inspire our earthly affairs through the musicians that have worked with him. We explore recent releases of the Arkestra and of bassist Tyler Mitchell, both of which revolve around the contribution of Marshall Allen. The other cluster of tracks is centered around the interlinkages among three musicians that have collaborated for a long time Brian Blade, Jon Cowherd, Chris Potter. In between, Santi Debriano with his own Arkestra Bembe. Detailed playlist at https://spinitron.com/RFB/pl/16899336/Mondo-Jazz (up to "Marshall's Groove"). Happy listening! Photo credit: Andrea Palmucci
Originally recorded on September 24 2022, this episode sets us on a course far past this world and the next as we kick off our last series of the year, "Sun Ra and the Great Beyond." Released in 1983, Sun Ra & His Outer Space Arkestra's "A Fireside Chat with Lucifer" starts with a warning of the times ("Nuclear war, it's a motherfucker") and ends with a 20 minute sonic journey through the mind and story of the one and only Sun Ra.
** PLEASE SUBSCRIBE ** Brought to you by FUNKNSTUFF.NET and hosted by Scott "DR GX" Goldfine — musicologist and author of “Everything Is on THE ONE: The First Guide of Funk” ― “TRUTH IN RHYTHM” is the interview show that gets DEEP into the pocket with contemporary music's foremost masters of the groove. Become a TRUTH IN RHYTHM Member through YouTube or at https://www.patreon.com/truthinrhythm. Featured in TIR Episode 257 (Part 2 of 2): Trumpeter Michael Ray, best known since 1978 as a member of legendary jazz futurist Sun Ra's group known as Arkestra, and for his longtime association with Kool & the Gang. In addition, he leads his own band called Cosmic Krewe and over the course of several decades has contributed his horn playing to artists that include Patti LaBelle; the Delfonics; the Stylistics; Kleeer; Instant Funk; Jimmy Cliff; Stanton Moore; Aquarium Rescue Unit; Widespread Panic; Deep Banana Blackout; Medeski, Martin & Wood; Porno for Pyros; Barenaked Ladies; and U2. RECORDED JUNE 2022 LEGAL NOTICE: All video and audio content protected by copyright. Any use of this material is strictly prohibited without expressed consent from original content producer and owner Scott Goldfine, dba FUNKNSTUFF. For inquiries, email info@funknstuff.net. TRUTH IN RHYTHM is a registered U.S. Trademark (Serial #88540281). Get your copy of "Everything Is on the One: The First Guide of Funk" today! https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1541256603/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1541256603&linkCode=as2&tag=funknstuff-20&linkId=b6c7558ddc7f8fc9fe440c5d9f3c400
** PLEASE SUBSCRIBE ** Brought to you by FUNKNSTUFF.NET and hosted by Scott "DR GX" Goldfine — musicologist and author of “Everything Is on THE ONE: The First Guide of Funk” ― “TRUTH IN RHYTHM” is the interview show that gets DEEP into the pocket with contemporary music's foremost masters of the groove. Become a TRUTH IN RHYTHM Member through YouTube or at https://www.patreon.com/truthinrhythm. Featured in TIR Episode 257 (Part 1 of 2): Trumpeter Michael Ray, best known since 1978 as a member of legendary jazz futurist Sun Ra's group known as Arkestra, and for his longtime association with Kool & the Gang. In addition, he leads his own band called Cosmic Krewe and over the course of several decades has contributed his horn playing to artists that include Patti LaBelle; the Delfonics; the Stylistics; Kleeer; Instant Funk; Jimmy Cliff; Stanton Moore; Aquarium Rescue Unit; Widespread Panic; Deep Banana Blackout; Medeski, Martin & Wood; Porno for Pyros; Barenaked Ladies; and U2. RECORDED JUNE 2022 LEGAL NOTICE: All video and audio content protected by copyright. Any use of this material is strictly prohibited without expressed consent from original content producer and owner Scott Goldfine, dba FUNKNSTUFF. For inquiries, email info@funknstuff.net. TRUTH IN RHYTHM is a registered U.S. Trademark (Serial #88540281). Get your copy of "Everything Is on the One: The First Guide of Funk" today! https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1541256603/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1541256603&linkCode=as2&tag=funknstuff-20&linkId=b6c7558ddc7f8fc9fe440c5d9f3c400
Courtney's playing refreshingly cool new jazzy vibes for you to work, rest and play to! Jam-packed full of new releases and plenty of fun, including many of the artists introducing their own tracks! This week we've got Canadian drums, Spanish jazz trio, Brazil samba beats, Egyptian vibes, Icelandic vocals, Norwegian piano jazz, USA free-funk - the beat goes on folks & Courtney's got this one in the bag JUST FOR YOU!!1 Anthony Fung - Flashpoint (Revisited) 6'14What Does it Mean to Be Free? SELF-RELEASE Tr4Anthony Fung dr David Binney alto Luca Mendoza pno(Fung)Student of Danilo Perez & Herbie Hancock, Anthony's kicking' off proceedings this wk with wonderful David Binney on alto. "To be free is to break the self-imposed fortress, to let go and have faith".2 Manel Fortia - Circular 8'16Desparater SELF-RELEASE Tr2Manel Fortia bs Marco Mezquida pno Raphael Pannier dr(Fortia)"Desperate is a gorgeous declaration of emancipation from the assumptions that sometimes are erroneously made about Spanish jazz. This is fresh thinking and beautiful playing...Manel's bass sound is huge and fluid & his bandmates are almost telepathic in their interaction with it". (Arturo O'Farrill)3 Erik Friedlander - The Fire in You 3'24A Queen's Firefly SKIPSTONE Tr8Erik Friedlander cl The Throw ft Uri Caine pno Mark Helias bs Ches Smith dr(Friedlander)Sounds from NYC's downtown scene - electric cello, Uri Caine swingin' hard, Mark Helias' soulful bass: this fantastic track combines folk energy with fiery jazz..4 Flora Purim - If You Will 4'10If You Will STRUT Tr1Flora Purim vc Dave Sartori pno Thiago Duarte bs Endrigo Bettega dr Airto Moreira perc(G Duke arr Mutti)Brazil's golden couple Flora & Airto on a feel good George Duke groove - need we say more! Gorgeous new album with happiness on tap.5 Rudresh Mahanthappa - Animal Crossing: New Horizons Theme 6'08Animal Crossing WHIRLWIND Tr1Rudresh Mahanthappa sx Francois Moutin bs Rudy Royston dr(Totaka)Who wasn't playing Animal Crossing in Lockdown? Wildly popular vid game given a genius jazz lick by the incredible Rudresh + trio. You'll be humming this one non-stop!6 Sun Ra Arkestra - Dawn 12'19Sun Ra Meets Salah Ragab in Egypt 1983 STRUT Tr2Sun Ra keys Salah Ragab congas John Gilmore tnr Marshall Allen, Danny Thompson alto Leroy Taylor bs cl James Jackson bss Tyron Hill tb Eric Walker, Chris Henderson, Claude Broche dr(Ragb)"My music demonstrates infinity. Most people can't comprehend that" (Sun Ra). The historic moment the Arkestra met Salah Ragab in Cairo 1983 - amazing release from Strut with new photos, incredible liner notes - go check!7 Anna Greta - The Tunnel 3'06Nightjar in the Northern Sky ACT Tr4Anna Greta vc Skuli Sverrisson bs Einar Scheving dr Hilmar Jensson gtr Sigurour Flosason sx Johan Tengholm bs Ragnheiour Grondal bv(Gretas/Creeley)The new sound of Nordic jazz! Beautiful Icelandic melodies from Anna - multi-award winning rising star!8 Johan Lindvall Trio - Give Up 4'16This is Not About You JAZZLAND Tr2Johan Lindvall pno Adrian Myhr bs Andreas Skar Winther dr(Lindvall)We just love hearing jazz with a Nordic accent - really feelin this swingin groove from Johan + crew!9 Bright Dog Red - On the Avenue 4'13Under the Porch ROPEADOPE Tr2Joe Pignato dr perc Tim Lefebvre bs Eric Person sx fl Mike LaBombard tar fx Cody Davies sounds Matt Coonan vc(Bright Dog Red)Free-form jazz, rock, funk, hip-hop all thrown in the pot for this "part Ornette Coleman/Lounge Lizards/A Tribe Called Quest" sound-fest!10 Lettuce - Gravy Train 4'39Unify ROUND HILL RECORDS Tr11Adam Deitch dr Ryan Zoidis sx Adam 'Shmeeans' Smirnoff gtr Erick 'Jesus' Coomes bs Nigel Hall keys vc Eric 'Benny' Bloom tpt(Clark/Kobalt arr Deitch/Daniels/Zoidis)Let Boston's Lettuce teleport you to a funky galaxy, far, far away, where all life co-exists as one in peace, love, harmony...and music!
For almost 80 years, the world has refrained from using or, for the most part, even seriously pondering the use of nuclear weapons. Russia's invasion of Ukraine has eroded that taboo. Avian flu is spreading around the world, threatening birds' health and contributing to rising egg and poultry prices. And Sun Ra's huge, weird and wonderful Arkestra is back on the road. For full access to print, digital and audio editions of The Economist, subscribe here www.economist.com/intelligenceoffer See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
For almost 80 years, the world has refrained from using or, for the most part, even seriously pondering the use of nuclear weapons. Russia's invasion of Ukraine has eroded that taboo. Avian flu is spreading around the world, threatening birds' health and contributing to rising egg and poultry prices. And Sun Ra's huge, weird and wonderful Arkestra is back on the road. For full access to print, digital and audio editions of The Economist, subscribe here www.economist.com/intelligenceoffer See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Sun Ra was more than a musician. The pioneering jazz composer, keyboardist, and conductor was an experience - from his signature attire to his proclaimed connection to the cosmos. Nearly three decades after his death, Sun Ra’s house in Germantown was designated a historic landmark by the Philadelphia Historical Commission. Shara Dae Howard and Justin Udo, curators of KYW Newsradio’s Artists’ Block series, put Sun Ra’s legendary career into perspective, while also explaining why his home was instrumental in inspiring the out-of-this-world sound he and his Arkestra created. Never heard or seen a Sun Ra performance before? Check out this clip (credit: Night Music). The Jawncast is Jay Scott Smith, Sabrina Boyd-Surka, and Brian Seltzer. Follow @TheJawncast on Twitter for every new episode.
Exceptional long workouts on this week's Independent Music Podcast coming at you from all over the musical spectrum. From ferocious Japanese space rock to twisted metal, to fire and brimstone spiritual jazz, there's a lot to spend some good quality time with. On the shorter side, we have Maori recordings from the early 20th Century, ex-Black Dice/Lightning Bolt genre melder Hisham Akira Bharoocha's Yokubari moniker, supreme reissued Israeli post-punk, lo-fi folk, and lots more. Tracklisting Dhidalah – Invader Summer (Guruguru Brain, Netherlands) Yokubari – Buki vs Buki (Chinabot, UK) Cerrero y la Marea – Lamento (Canta Lizeth Micolta) (Llorona Records, Colombia) Minimal Compact – Statik Dancin' (Fortuna Records, Israel) Martha Maclaren – Jake (self-release, UK) GAF & The Love Supreme Arkestra – Fuego en el Cielo (Discrepant, UK / Keroxen, Spain / Foehn Records, Spain) Konvent – Harena (Napalm Records, Austria) Dvanov – Функциональная музыка (Functional Music) (Cruel Nature Records, UK) William Basinski & Janek Schaefer – …On Reflection (One) (Temporary Residence Ltd., USA) Ana Hato – Waita Poi (Canary Records, USA) This week's episode is sponsored by The state51 Conspiracy, a creative hub for music. Head to state51.com to find releases by JK Flesh vs Gnod, Steve Jansen, MrUnderwSood, Wire, Ghost Box, Lo Recordings, Subtext Records and many more Produced and edited by Nick McCorriston.
Caleb Clark and Patrick Murphy discuss cosmic jazz bandleader/keyboardist Sun Ra and his Arkestra. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/caleb-clark6/support
Intro: One More Night – Can 1. Nutbush City Limits – Ike & Tina Turner (2:55) 2. City in the Sky – Staple Singers (3:45) 3. I'm Going to that City – Sister O.M. Terrell (2:56) 4. Carson City (Owed t'Alex) – Captain Beefheart & his Magic Band (4:07) 5. City of New Orleans – Steve Goodman (3:52) 6. Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler) – Marvin Gaye (5:32) 7. Big City Blues – Sun Ra & his Arkestra (3:15) 8. Weary City – Johnny Dodds & his Washboard Band (2:49) 9. Phoenix City – Roland Al & the Soul Brothers (3:01) 10. Kansas City – Wilbert Harrison (2:24) 11. Emarabhini – Dark City Sisters (2:27) 12. I'm Doin' Fine Now – New York City (2:54) 13. City Fade – Against All Logic (5:41) 14. In the City of Red Dust – Jon Hassell (5:39) 15. City in Progress – Broadcast (3:27) 16. The Sicilian Clan – Naked City (3:35) 17. Sin City – Flying Burrito Brothers (4:09) 18. Johnson City Rag – Roane County Ramblers (2:49) 19. I Saw the Light – Blind Gary (with Bull City Red) (3:05) 20. City Don't Cry – Jimmy Page & Robert Plant (6:09) 21. Nya Asem Hwe – City Boys of Ghana (4:49) 22. The Lass of London City – Nic Jones (2:06) 23. Taunder Naken – City Waites (2:11) 24. Rapid City, South Dakota – Kinky Friedman (2:49) 25. The Decay of Cities – Henry Cow (6:56) 26. Inter-City 125 – Holden (5:29) 27. Worcester City – Joseph Taylor (2:41) 28. All Across the City – Jimmy Raney (4:51) 29. City Life (opening excerpt) – Steve Reich Outro: Pogles Walk – Vernon Elliott Ensemble
We have official SXSW Artist and Performer, Topaz McGarrigle , of Golden Dawn Arkestra on “Concert Queen Connect”, talking about the time performed on 6th street as a kid, the time he rode a white horse into Sahara Lounge, his musical journey through instruments performing with 10+ members in ‘Golden Dawn Arkestra ' + more!Make sure to check out their instagram and website about upcoming performances and tour date reveals!Check them out as they headline Auditorium Shores during SXSW this Thursday, March 17th!Enjoy this special SXSW episode of ‘Concert Queen Connect'!#goldendawnarkestra #topazmcgarrigle #concertqueenconnect #sxsw2022 Guest: Topaz McGarrigle Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/goldendawnarkestra/Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/GOLDENDAWNARKESTRAWebsite: http://goldendawnarkestra.comTo watch new episodes of “Concert Queen Connect”, make sure to ‘like' and ‘subscribe' to our YouTube channel:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbNiyZMWKbK2pH4J2rdj69Q?sub_confirmation=1Host: Clarissa CardenasIG: https://www.instagram.com/concertqueenofficial/ Website: http://www.theconcertqueen.com Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/theconcertqueenVenmo: https://account.venmo.com/u/Concert-QueenListen to our podcast:Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/concert-queen-connect/id1538535270Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6y3m5SLW5CnBvBpvh7cXgT?si=dN1Vlr9eQf2diQFrPIffugProducer: Steve Souza (http://www.souzamedia.com)IG : https://www.instagram.com/the.souz
We're thrilled to have Jared Michael Nickerson as our guest. He grew up right in the middle of the funk capital of the world, Dayton, Ohio. He talks about the effect it had on his life and how it shaped his music. He attended the University of Notre Dame where one of the priests introduced him to the early works of Miles Davis. There's also a pretty wild story of how he wound up with the bass he's been playing decades. After playing with bands like Human Switchboard & The The, he joined Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber with Greg Tate and helped shaped the direction of the band. Jared sheds some light on the conduction method that makes the band so unique and improvisational. He also reveals the difficulties of putting Burnt Sugar on vinyl. Give Jared and Burnt Sugar a follow on social media (they're pretty easy to find). Buy the new release, Angels Over Oakanda through Bandcamp or their website burtntsugarindex.com. Follow us @PerformanceAnx on social media. Support us through ko-fi.com/performanceanxiety or performanceanx.threadless.com. Rate & review & tell a friend or two about the podcast. And thank you for tuning in to Jared Michael Nickerson on Performance Anxiety, part of the Pantheon Podcast Network.
We're thrilled to have Jared Michael Nickerson as our guest. He grew up right in the middle of the funk capital of the world, Dayton, Ohio. He talks about the effect it had on his life and how it shaped his music. He attended the University of Notre Dame where one of the priests introduced him to the early works of Miles Davis. There's also a pretty wild story of how he wound up with the bass he's been playing decades. After playing with bands like Human Switchboard & The The, he joined Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber with Greg Tate and helped shaped the direction of the band. Jared sheds some light on the conduction method that makes the band so unique and improvisational. He also reveals the difficulties of putting Burnt Sugar on vinyl. Give Jared and Burnt Sugar a follow on social media (they're pretty easy to find). Buy the new release, Angels Over Oakanda through Bandcamp or their website burtntsugarindex.com. Follow us @PerformanceAnx on social media. Support us through ko-fi.com/performanceanxiety or performanceanx.threadless.com. Rate & review & tell a friend or two about the podcast. And thank you for tuning in to Jared Michael Nickerson on Performance Anxiety, part of the Pantheon Podcast Network.
Subscribe to Quotomania on Simplecast or search for Quotomania on your favorite podcast app!Sun Ra was one of the most unusual musicians in the history of jazz, moving from Fletcher Henderson swing to free jazz with ease, sometimes in the same song. Portraying himself as a product of outer space, he "traveled the spaceways" with a colorful troupe of musicians, using a multitude of percussion and unusual instrumentation, from tree drum to celeste.Sun Ra, who enjoyed cloaking his origins and development in mystery, is known to have studied piano early on with Lula Randolph in Washington, DC. Sun Ra's band became a central part of the early avant-garde jazz movement in Chicago, being one of the first jazz bands to employ electronic instruments (as early as 1956), including electric piano, clavioline, celeste, and synthesizers. In 1960, he moved his band to New York, where he established a communal home for his musicians, known as the Sun Palace. In March 1966, the band began one of its most significant residencies, playing every Monday night at Slug's nightclub on New York's Lower East Side.By the 1970s, the Sun Ra Arkestra and its various permutations began touring Europe extensively. His performances had by then expanded to include singers, dancers, martial arts practitioners, film, and colorful homemade costumes, becoming a true multimedia attraction. An outsider who linked the African-American experience with ancient Egyptian mythology and outer space, Sun Ra was years ahead of all other avant-garde musicians in his experimentation with sound and instruments, a pioneer in group improvisations and the use of electric instruments in jazz. Since Sun Ra's death, the Arkestra has continued to perform under the direction of Allen.From https://www.arts.gov/honors/jazz/sun-raFor more information about Sun Ra:Previously on The Quarantine Tapes:Sonny Rollins about Sun Ra, at 15:40: https://quarantine-tapes.simplecast.com/episodes/the-quarantine-tapes-130-sonny-rollinsAngel Bat Dawid about Sun Ra, at 10:45: https://quarantine-tapes.simplecast.com/episodes/the-quarantine-tapes-030-angel-bat-dawid“A Somewhat Comprehensive Guide of Sun Ra's Cosmic Jazz”: https://www.vulture.com/2017/10/a-guide-to-legendary-jass-musician-sun-ra.html“How Sun Ra Taught Us to Believe in the Impossible”: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/07/05/how-sun-ra-taught-us-to-believe-in-the-impossible
Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, is a curator best known as the artistic director of SAVVY—The Laboratory of Form-Ideas, a self-organized art institution located in Berlin. He has recently been appointed as the new director at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin. We hear from Bonaventure on the importance of positioning oneself, within collaboration but always in response and with response-ability. He is someone who didn't wait for legitimization and instead went ahead to create a space, and let things emerge from that space and from the people who end up hanging out there. Episode Notes & LinksThis episode was recorded during the Mediterranean wildfires that have taken place in Greece, Turkey, Italy, Algeria and Tunisia.SAVVY, the laboratory of form and ideas is a public cultural institution located in Berlin. https://savvy-contemporary.comTo go further deep into Bonaventure's thinking, check out this talk organized by the After the Archive? Initiative. https://open.spotify.com/episode/6SbXJlNDSJjYQPN5tWjM93?si=F0kjcbEERPOIJTQdSmVPqQ&dl_branch=1To get a better sense of his story of becoming, check out this conversation for the NKATA podcast. He also touches on the impact of the life, work and untimely deaths of two giants of contemporary art: Bisi Silva and Okwui Enwezor. https://nkatapodcast.com/2019/04/05/nkata-with-bonaventure-soh-bejeng-ndikung/At documenta 14 in Athens and in Kassel, the slogan “Wir (alle) sind das Volk” [We (all) are the people] was displayed on banners and posters in German and Greek and the languages understood by most foreign Documenta visitors, as well as the languages of the migrants and refugees who are exposed to xenophobic aggression in Europe. Among the languages are Arabic, Kurdish, Turkish, Farsi (as spoken in Afghanistan), and the language of refugees from Eritrea.https://www.documenta14.de/en/artists/13591/hans-haackeCurated by Bonaventure, the 13th edition of the Bamako Encounters - African Biennale of Photography will be on view in Bamako, Mali from November 20, 2021–January 20, 2022.In his essay titled “The Globalized Museum? Decanonization as Method: A Reflection in Three Acts”, Bonaventure proposes to utilize decanonization as method for “what might be a global museum of self-reflexivity, whereby the idea will not be to create new or parallel canons, or place them side by side, or universalize the Western canon, but to decanonize the entire notion of the canon.” https://www.moussemagazine.it/magazine/the-globalized-museum-bonaventure-soh-bejeng-ndikung-documenta-14-2017/Thomas Mann was a writer known for his highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas which are noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_MannHenry Louis Gates is a literary critic, teacher, historian and filmmaker that conceptualized Signifyin', a critical approach to context-bound significance of words, which is accessible only to those who share the cultural values of a given speech community. The expression comes from stories about the Signifying Monkey, a trickster figure said to have originated during slavery in the United. States. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Louis_Gates_Jr.Theaster Gates is a Chicago based artist whose work sources from social practice. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theaster_GatesThe Nettelbeckplatz is a square in the Berlin district of Wedding. https://second.wiki/wiki/nettelbeckplatzAn originally well known Armenian/Greek Christian neighborhood called Tatavla, Kurtuluş is a district of Istanbul. Meaning "liberation", "salvation", "independence" or "deliverance" in Turkish, Kurtuluş's non muslim population of the neighborhood is greatly diminished. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KurtuluşSonsbeek is an international exhibition in Arnhem, Netherlands which largely focuses on public works of contemporary art. https://www.sonsbeek20-24.org“Chercher midi à quatorze heures" is a quirky way of telling someone that it is making an issue more difficult than it needs to be—turning something simple into something complicated in French.Director Jef Cornelis made an in-situ documentary about the Sonsbeek that had taken place in 1971 titled “Sonsbeek: buiten de perken” for the Belgian TV Channel VRT. His body of work is influential to imagine what television can be and how it can be used to document and represent art. https://vimeo.com/433640306Known as the founder of the art movement fluxus, Joseph Beuys was an influential teacher and artist who was influential in the latter half of the 20th century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_BeuysA champion of Africa's oral tradition and traditional knowledge, Amadou Hampâté Bâ was a writer, historian and ethnologist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amadou_Hampâté_BâCuratorial Statement of Bamako Biennial quotes Amadou Hampâté Bâ's statement (Aspects de la civilisation africaine, Éditions Présence Africaine, 1972) presiding over the manifestation, Maa ka Maaya ka ca a yere kono, translates to, “the persons of the person are multiple in the person.”https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/361013/rencontres-de-bamako-african-biennale-of-photographymaa-ka-maaya-ka-ca-a-yere-kono/Sun Ra, was a jazz composer, bandleader, piano and synthesizer player, and poet known for his experimental music, "cosmic" philosophy, prolific output, and theatrical performances. For much of his career, Ra led "The Arkestra," an ensemble with an ever-changing name and flexible line-up.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_RaThelonious Monk was a seminal jazz pianist and composer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thelonious_MonkStephen Wright is a writer and gardener based in France. He was the first guest of the previous season of Ahali. Listen at https://www.ahali.space/episodes/episode-1-stephen-wrightAssembled by the king of 6/8, the living legend Brice WassyKelin-Kelin Orchestra is a big band that consists of twelve musicians. Called the "queen of Taarab and Unyago music, Fatima binti Baraka also known as Bi Kidude, was a Zanzibari-born Tanzanian Taarab singer.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bi_Kidude Influenced by the musical traditions of the African Great Lakes, North Africa, the Middle East, and the Indian subcontinent. Taarab is a music genre popular in Tanzania and Kenya.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TaarabNatasha Ginwala is a curator working in the field of contemporary art.Ayesha Hameed is a lecturer, writer and practitioner who produces videos, audio essays and performance lectures.Matana Roberts is a sound experimentalist, visual artist, jazz saxophonist, clarinetist and composer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matana_RobertsFormed in 1979 by Pierre-Edouard Décimus and Jacob Desvarieux, Kassav' is a Zouk band that makes Guadeloupean carnival music recording it in a more fully orchestrated yet modern and polished style. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kassav%27Jacob Desvarieux was a singer, arranger, and music producer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_DesvarieuxJocelyne Béroard is a singer and songwriter. She is one of the lead singers of the Kassav'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jocelyne_BéroardZouk is a musical movement pioneered by the French Antillean band Kassav' in the early 1980s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZoukNégritude (from French "Nègre" and "-itude" to denote a condition that can be translated as "Blackness") is a framework of critique and literary theory, developed mainly by francophone intellectuals, writers, and politicians of the African diaspora during the 1930s, aimed at raising and cultivating "Black consciousness" across Africa and its diaspora. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NégritudeOne of the founders of the Négritude movement, Aimé Césaire was a Martinican poet, author, and politician. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aimé_CésaireServed as the first president of Senegal from 1960 to 1980, Léopold Sédar Senghor was a poet, politician and cultural theorist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Léopold_Sédar_Senghor Episode recorded on Zoom on August 4th, 2021. Interview by Can Altay. Produced by Aslı Altay & Sarp Renk Özer. Music by Grup Ses.
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