Podcasts about Cecil Taylor

The Practical Faith Academy Podcast from Cecil Taylor Ministries presents guests who have important things to say about putting your faith into practice. Cecil interviews each guest to understand their life stories and their ideas for living a seven-day practical faith. David Taylor is a Christian from the Dallas-Fort Worth area who undertook a seven-day Camino de Santiago pilgrimage in Spain this spring. David experienced both difficulties and blessings on this famous spiritual walk. He shares his journey and his observations on how the Camino maps to our seven-day practical faith on this episode of the Practical Faith Academy. Highlights of the podcast:  2:26 What does seven-day practical faith mean to David 3:43 About the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage 6:28 How he trained for the pilgrimage walk 8:44 How David's walk changed with a new attitude on Day 3 after two difficult days 12:00 How the pilgrimage mirrored our surrender to Jesus 13:50 How self-doubts can wreck us, and how David dramatically triumphed over those doubts in a lasting way during the Camino 16:46 How the Camino's lessons apply to our daily faith David Taylor is a practicing Christian who wanted to enhance his faith journey by traveling the Camino de Santiago in Spain. He originally shared his observations on Facebook and now expands on those observations in this podcast. Cecil Taylor is an author, speaker, podcaster, blogger, and provider of Instant Content to churches and small groups. Cecil wants to give you a sample of his writing with a free mini-book gift, “Collections, Volume 1,” containing 31 of his most popular devotions and essays from years of social media posting. Register on the Cecil Taylor Ministries home page at CecilTaylorMinistries.com through the pop-up window or the orange box, and he'll send you a soft copy of the mini-book to your email inbox. You'll also receive his two free monthly newsletters, Backstage Pass and Monthly Connections. For more free content like this podcast from Cecil Taylor Ministries, visit https://www.CecilTaylorMinistries.com/free-content. +++++ SEE BELOW for an incredible sale on Cecil's latest book! +++++ Cecil's new book, “Unison Parenting”, is on sale for just $10 plus free shipping at https://www.ceciltayloracademy.com/link.php?id=3&h=19480d6cdc. In addition, you'll receive more than $200 in free bonuses when you buy the book directly from Cecil! This offer is 60% off the price you would pay at the big bookseller sites.  Cecil's parenting advice can be found at https://www.UnisonParenting.com, at  https://www.instagram.com/unison_parenting/ and at https://www.pinterest.com/CecilTaylorMinistries. In June, Cecil and three collaborators are launching the Unison Parenting newsletter. Author and pastor Kim Meyers shares her parenting perspective; pediatric therapist and author Ginny Cruz offers “Diaper Days” advice; and Tawny Kinslow writes about parent-child relationships. Sign up for the newsletter at https://www.UnisonParenting.com#newsletter-registration. Cecil's award-winning books and video studies can be found and purchased through https://www.CecilTaylorMinistries.com. Every video study's first lesson can be seen for free via the Free Content link above by clicking on “Sample Lessons.” Cecil's Instant Content portfolio of books and video studies includes the following: - “Unison Parenting: The Comprehensive Guide to Navigating Christian Parenthood with One Voice” is about Christian parenting. Cecil provides proven parenting strategies with an underlying layer of parenting in unison through all the ages and stages of a child's life. “Unison Parenting” has been honored with the 2025 Independent Press Award for Parenting/Family and the 2025 Living Water Award for Best Nonfiction. - “From Comfort Zone to Trust Zone” is about deepening faith. Cecil explores a dozen Bible studies of Jesus inviting people out of their comfort zones into their trust zones and how to apply these stories to our lives today. - “The Next Thing” is about crisis responses. Cecil shares a four-part Christian model for dealing with crisis. You'll find the model to be flexible and applicable to many crises. - “Live Like You're Loved” is about vibrant living. Cecil affirms the scriptural truths that God loves you, forgives you, sends you, and walks with you in eternal relationship. Then he shows how your life is transformed when you embed these truths into your daily faith and your soul.

Send us a textThe amazing Cecil Taylor, in his own words:  "I have a mission to teach Christians how to live a seven-day practical faith. As a preacher's kid and as a long-time Sunday School teacher of adults, I kept hearing people say, "I can do this Christian stuff on Sundays, but it's hard for me to do it the rest of the week." I eventually felt a call to go outside my own church to share the gospel in new ways, urging Christians into a deeper level of following Jesus, through books, videos, speaking, blogs, podcasts, and more." This is his mission.  Listen now. https://www.ceciltaylorministries.com/https://podmatch.com/hostdetail/1739390916454597dda0211aaContact us:Rumble/ YouTube/ IG: @powerofmanpodcastEmail: powerofmanpodcast@gmail.com.Twitter: @rorypaquetteLooking for Like-Minded Fathers and Husbands? Join our Brotherhood!"Power of Man Within" , in Facebook Groups:https://www.facebook.com/groups/490821906341560/?ref=share_group_linkFree Coaching Consultation call whenever you are ready... Message me!Believe it!

Guest: Cecil TaylorMinistry: Cecil Taylor MinistriesPosition: FounderBook: Unison Parenting: The Comprehensive Guide to Navigating Christian Parenthood with One VoiceInterview Location: 2025 Blue Lake Christian Writers Conference near Andalusia, ALWebsites: ceciltaylorministries.com, unisonparenting.com

Guest: Cecil TaylorMinistry: Cecil Taylor MinistriesPosition: FounderBook: Unison Parenting: The Comprehensive Guide to Navigating Christian Parenthood with One VoiceInterview Location: 2025 Blue Lake Christian Writers Conference near Andalusia, ALWebsites: ceciltaylorministries.com, unisonparenting.com

The Practical Faith Academy Podcast from Cecil Taylor Ministries presents guests who have important things to say about putting your faith into practice. Cecil interviews each guest to understand their life stories and their ideas for living a seven-day practical faith. Amy Chastain has been a caregiver for fifteen years. Her experience and God's nudging led her to write the book, “Enduring Together: Strength for the Weary Caregiver.” Chastain's ministry is taking care of those who are taking care of others. In this podcast, Chastain explores the details of caregiving combined with sharing faith perspectives on the act of caring for others. Highlights of the podcast:  2:41  What does seven-day practical faith mean to Chastain 5:04   How being a long-time caregiver has impacted her faith journey 7:06  What does Chastain wish that others knew about caregiving? 8:48  How friends and family can support caregivers 11:29  Chastain discusses the concept of discerning vs. deciding, as well as how to discern the right helpers to trust. 16:51  How people can prepare themselves for caregiving 21:50  Advice for caregivers needing self-care 23:24  What does God do to help our self-care? 25:01  The hardest part of putting faith into practice 27:16  Chastain's best tip for living a seven-day practical faith 28:35  How to follow Chastain and find her book Amy Chastain is the author of “Enduring Together: Strength for the Weary Caregiver.” It is based on a season of difficulty in her own life. Her approach is Christian, showing people how to shift perspectives to look at caregiving situations as the Lord would look at them. Her book is available from her website and on all major bookseller sites. You can find her blogs and her caring-for-caregivers ministry at AmyChastain.com. She's also on Instagram and Facebook as “Amy Chastain Author.” Cecil Taylor is an author, speaker, podcaster, blogger, and provider of Instant Content to churches and small groups. Cecil wants to give you a sample of his writing with a free mini-book gift, “Collections, Volume 1,” containing 31 of his most popular devotions and essays from years of social media posting. Register on the Cecil Taylor Ministries home page at CecilTaylorMinistries.com through the pop-up window or the orange box, and he'll send you a soft copy of the mini-book to your email inbox. You'll also receive his two free monthly newsletters, Backstage Pass and Monthly Connections. For more free content like this podcast from Cecil Taylor Ministries, visit https://www.CecilTaylorMinistries.com/free-content. >>>>> SEE BELOW for an incredible sale on Cecil's latest book!

The Practical Faith Academy Podcast from Cecil Taylor Ministries presents guests who have important things to say about putting your faith into practice. Cecil interviews each guest to understand their life stories and their ideas for living a seven-day practical faith. Ana Megrelishvili lives in Atlanta and is the founder of Christian Professionals Network Worldwide. She has an incredible life story and faith journey to share. Ana began life in a nearly homeless situation with her atheist family in the streets of Russia. She later relocated to the United States for a college education and a successful professional career, with wealth acquisition on her mind. But finding that goal empty once achieved, Ana became a Christian with a passion for serving those who are homeless, as she nearly was. A theme you'll hear on this podcast is “relational poverty.” Ana believes that a lack of relationship and community is the #1 factor in homelessness. It's a situation that we Christians can do something about. Highlights of the podcast:  2:41 What does seven-day practical faith mean to Ana? 3:46 Ana shares her origin story, growing up atheist (“Every single one of the Ten Commandments was broken in my family”) and nearly homeless in Russia, and how she came to the United States, where she has prospered and become a Christian. 11:01 Ana explains how relational poverty almost made her family homeless, and how relational support rescued them. 14:54 How the lack of church community contributes to relational poverty, which also has an economic impact on the country. 20:06 About the Christian Professionals Network Worldwide organization and how its mentoring program helps the homeless. 24:56 How her own faith has changed while serving others. 27:57 The hardest part about putting faith into practice. 32:03 Her best tip to develop and maintain a seven-day practical faith. 36:41 How people can get involved in the Christian Professionals Network Worldwide by starting a local chapter Ana Megrelishvili is the founder of Christian Professionals Network Worldwide and the author of the book, “Finding Courage to Change.” She holds a Bachelors degree from Berea College and a MBA from the University of Kentucky. She seeks to expand the Christian Professionals Network Worldwide with new chapters dedicated to fostering meaningful relationships through a common faith, values, and service. You can learn more at https://CPNworldwide.com. Cecil Taylor is an author, speaker, podcaster, blogger, and provider of Instant Content to churches and small groups. Cecil wants to give you a sample of his writing with a free mini-book gift, “Collections, Volume 1,” containing 31 of his most popular devotions and essays from years of social media posting. Register on the Cecil Taylor Ministries home page at CecilTaylorMinistries.com through the pop-up window or the orange box, and he'll send you a soft copy of the mini-book to your email inbox. You'll also receive his two free monthly newsletters, Backstage Pass and Monthly Connections. For more free content like this podcast from Cecil Taylor Ministries, visit https://www.CecilTaylorMinistries.com/free-content. Cecil's parenting advice can be found at his new website, https://www.UnisonParenting.com, at  https://www.instagram.com/unison_parenting/ and at https://www.pinterest.com/CecilTaylorMinistries. Cecil's award-winning books and video studies can be found and purchased through https://www.CecilTaylorMinistries.com. Every video study's first lesson can be seen for free via the Free Content link above by clicking on “Sample Lessons.” Cecil's Instant Content portfolio of books and video studies includes the following: - “Unison Parenting: The Comprehensive Guide to Navigating Christian Parenthood with One Voice” is about Christian parenting. Cecil provides proven parenting strategies with an underlying layer of parenting in unison through all the ages and stages of a child's life. “Unison Parenting” has been honored with the 2025 Independent Press Award for Parenting/Family and the 2025 Living Water Award for Best Nonfiction. - “From Comfort Zone to Trust Zone” is about deepening faith. Cecil explores a dozen Bible studies of Jesus inviting people out of their comfort zones into their trust zones and how to apply these stories to our lives today. - “The Next Thing” is about crisis responses. Cecil shares a four-part Christian model for dealing with crisis. You'll find the model to be flexible and applicable to many crises. - “Live Like You're Loved” is about vibrant living. Cecil affirms the scriptural truths that God loves you, forgives you, sends you, and walks with you in eternal relationship. Then he shows how your life is transformed when you embed these truths into your daily faith and your soul.

Music includes: After Yor Gone by the Benny Goodman Quartet, If You Were Mine by Billie Holiday, Harlem Airshaft by Duke Ellington, Manteca by Dizzy Gillespie, Boplicity by Miles Davis and I Love paris by Cecil Taylor. 

The Practical Faith Academy Podcast from Cecil Taylor Ministries presents guests who have important things to say about putting your faith into practice. Cecil interviews each guest to understand their life stories and their ideas for living a seven-day practical faith. What do teachers teach us about faith? Gretchen Huesmann is a veteran teacher and pastor's wife who is supporting fellow teachers with her new devotional book, “It's a Good Day to Be a Teacher.” Huesmann gives us insights into the modern classroom, the role of parents, and how we can support our valuable teachers in this episode of the Practical Faith Academy. And she also shares her own story, how she has discerned God's will and built a seven-day practical faith herself. Highlights of the podcast:   2:56 What does seven-day practical faith mean to Huesmann. 4:39 What Huesmann wants to convey to teachers through It's a Good Day to Be a Teacher. 6:46 Why this title, It's a Good Day to Be a Teacher? 11:44 How parents can support teachers. 17:41 What should teachers' attitudes be toward holding the sacred trust of teaching the next generation? 19:58 What teachers teach the rest of us about living our faith 23:26 How can a teacher (or any of us outside the church) show their faith to others? 28:12 The hardest part of putting faith into practice 29:42 Huesmann's best tip for living a seven-day practical faith 31:28 How to follow Huesmann and find her book Gretchen Huesmann is a longtime teacher who recently released her book “It's a Good Day to Be a Teacher: 52 Devotions to Equip and Encourage Educators,” published by Ironstream Media and found on major bookseller sites. Her website is GretchenHuesmann.com. You can find her author page on Facebook as “Gretchen Huesmann Speaker – Writer – Teacher.” She also is on Instagram and X. Cecil Taylor is an author, speaker, podcaster, blogger, and provider of Instant Content to churches and small groups. Cecil wants to give you a sample of his writing with a free mini-book gift, “Collections, Volume 1,” containing 31 of his most popular devotions and essays from years of social media posting. Register on the Cecil Taylor Ministries home page at CecilTaylorMinistries.com through the pop-up window or the orange box, and he'll send you a soft copy of the mini-book to your email inbox. You'll also receive his two free monthly newsletters, Backstage Pass and Monthly Connections. For more free content like this podcast from Cecil Taylor Ministries, visit https://www.CecilTaylorMinistries.com/free-content. Cecil's parenting advice can be found at his new website, https://www.UnisonParenting.com, at  https://www.instagram.com/unison_parenting/ and at https://www.pinterest.com/CecilTaylorMinistries. Cecil's award-winning books and video studies can be found and purchased through https://www.CecilTaylorMinistries.com. Every video study's first lesson can be seen for free via the Free Content link above by clicking on “Sample Lessons.” Cecil's Instant Content portfolio of books and video studies includes the following: - “Unison Parenting: The Comprehensive Guide to Navigating Christian Parenthood with One Voice” is about Christian parenting. Cecil provides proven parenting strategies with an underlying layer of parenting in unison through all the ages and stages of a child's life. “Unison Parenting” has been honored with the 2025 Independent Press Award for Parenting/Family and the 2025 Living Water Award for Best Nonfiction. - “From Comfort Zone to Trust Zone” is about deepening faith. Cecil explores a dozen Bible studies of Jesus inviting people out of their comfort zones into their trust zones and how to apply these stories to our lives today. - “The Next Thing” is about crisis responses. Cecil shares a four-part Christian model for dealing with crisis. You'll find the model to be flexible and applicable to many crises. - “Live Like You're Loved” is about vibrant living. Cecil affirms the scriptural truths that God loves you, forgives you, sends you, and walks with you in eternal relationship. Then he shows how your life is transformed when you embed these truths into your daily faith and your soul.

durée : 00:59:40 - Confirmation - par : Nathalie Piolé -

The Practical Faith Academy Podcast from Cecil Taylor Ministries presents guests who have important things to say about putting your faith into practice. Cecil interviews each guest to understand their life stories and their ideas for living a seven-day practical faith. Enduring family difficulties and tragedies, Karen Dittman relied on scripture and prayer to learn the secret of finding wellbeing in all circumstances. The result is a book she co-authored with her husband, Michael, entitled “Thriving Grace,” to achieve lasting change in the shadow of God's grace. Dittman shares her learnings on this episode of the Practical Faith Academy podcast. Highlights of the podcast: 2:32 What does seven-day practical faith mean to Dittman 4:03 Dittman shares her family's back story and the incredible trauma they have been through, which informed her book. 7:37 How did she find peace and rest in the middle of trauma and trials? 11:24 How living her book's principles helped Dittman transmit the ideas to readers 13:51 Dittman explains one of her key concepts, The Grace Cycle, and how changing from the inside out leads to true transformation. 19:27 Dittman shows how different kinds of wellness interact within us 21:07 Tips to weave wellness concepts into our lives 24:01 The hardest part of putting faith into practice 25:18 Dittman's best tip for living a seven-day practical faith 26:41 How to follow Dittman and find her book Karen Dittman is a mother, grandmother, and author who co-wrote with her husband, “Thriving Grace: Unleashing Wellness from a Biblical Perspective.” The book and its Bible study companion are available through her website, KarenADittman.com, and major booksellers. See her website for this quiz, “How Fast Is Your Hamster Wheel Spinning?” At its end, Dittman shares practical ideas to incorporate into your life and options for how she can support you. Cecil Taylor is an author, speaker, podcaster, blogger, and provider of Instant Content to churches and small groups. Please register for Cecil's two free monthly newsletters on the Cecil Taylor Ministries home page. When you do, you'll receive a free gift, which changes from time to time, and two monthly newsletters, Backstage Pass and Monthly Connection. Currently the free gift is “Collections, Volume 1,” containing 31 of his most popular devotions and essays from years of online posting. For more free content like this podcast from Cecil Taylor Ministries, visit https://www.CecilTaylorMinistries.com/free-content. Cecil's parenting advice can be found at his new website, https://www.UnisonParenting.com, at  https://www.instagram.com/unison_parenting/ and at https://www.pinterest.com/CecilTaylorMinistries. Cecil's award-winning books and video studies can be found and purchased through https://www.CecilTaylorMinistries.com. Every video study's first lesson can be seen for free via the Free Content link above by clicking on “Sample Lessons.” Cecil's Instant Content portfolio of books and video studies includes the following: - “Unison Parenting: The Comprehensive Guide to Navigating Christian Parenthood with One Voice” is about Christian parenting. Cecil provides proven parenting strategies with an underlying layer of parenting in unison through all the ages and stages of a child's life. “Unison Parenting” has been honored with the 2025 Independent Press Award for Parenting/Family and the 2025 Living Water Award for Best Nonfiction. - “From Comfort Zone to Trust Zone” is about deepening faith. Cecil explores a dozen Bible studies of Jesus inviting people out of their comfort zones into their trust zones and how to apply these stories to our lives today. - “The Next Thing” is about crisis responses. Cecil shares a four-part Christian model for dealing with crisis. You'll find the model to be flexible and applicable to many crises. - “Live Like You're Loved” is about vibrant living. Cecil affirms the scriptural truths that God loves you, forgives you, sends you, and walks with you in eternal relationship. Then he shows how your life is transformed when you embed these truths into your daily faith and your soul.

The Practical Faith Academy Podcast from Cecil Taylor Ministries presents guests who have important things to say about putting your faith into practice. Cecil interviews each guest to understand their life stories and their ideas for living a seven-day practical faith. Constance Hastings is a church deacon and mental health counselor who was raised outside of a church environment, so she understands both the outsider and the insider perspectives on faith. Hastings' book, “The Trouble with Jesus: Considerations before You Walk Away” shows how Jesus encountered trouble but also caused trouble throughout his life, and how his life, death, and resurrection still cause trouble today. Highlights of the podcast:  2:18 (ORIG 0:32) What does seven-day practical faith mean to Hastings 3:27 (ORIG 1:41)  Her origin story as a Christian outsider in a non-religious family and how Christian school gave her a start on faith 6:33 On her current role as a church deacon who works in mental health 7:46 Her understanding of the prodigal experience 9:53 Since her book is entitled, “The Trouble with Jesus,” what does Hastings want people to know about Jesus? 11:45 Hastings explains the book's subtitle regarding considerations before we walk away from Jesus, mapping it to the story of the Rich Young Ruler 15:33 How she addresses both non-believers and believers in her book 17:46 How Hastings sees Jesus challenging believers, such as in the Parable of the Good Samaritan, and how Jesus challenged her views on race 23:26 How Jesus challenges us in this day and time 27:58 How faith exists in tension with fear, and how we can gain strength in hard times 31:17 What is the hardest part about putting faith into practice? 32:29 How to follow Hastings and find her book   Constance Hastings is an author, church deacon, and mental health counselor who wrote “The Trouble with Jesus: Considerations before You Walk Away.”  Her weekly blog is a companion to the book and can be accessed at ConstanceHastings.com. Constance recommends purchasing the book from a local bookstore in order to introduce the book to other people while it sits on the shelf. Cecil Taylor is an author, speaker, podcaster, blogger, and provider of Instant Content to churches and small groups. Please register for Cecil's free monthly newsletters on the Cecil Taylor Ministries home page. You'll receive a free gift, which changes from time to time, and two monthly newsletters, Backstage Pass and Monthly Connection. For more free content like this from Cecil Taylor Ministries, visit https://www.CecilTaylorMinistries.com/free-content. Cecil's parenting advice can be found at his new website, https://www.UnisonParenting.com, at  https://www.instagram.com/unison_parenting/ and at https://www.pinterest.com/CecilTaylorMinistries. Cecil's award-winning books and video studies can be found and purchased through https://www.CecilTaylorMinistries.com. Every video study's first lesson can be seen for free via the Free Content link above by clicking on “Sample Lessons.” Cecil's Instant Content portfolio of books and video studies includes: - In “Unison Parenting: The Comprehensive Guide to Navigating Christian Parenthood with One Voice” (book and eWorkbook available now; book study Leader Guide and first video study available later in 2025), Cecil provides proven parenting strategies with an underlying layer of parenting in unison through all the ages and stages of a child's life. “Unison Parenting” has been honored with the 2025 Independent Press Award for Parenting/Family. - In “From Comfort Zone to Trust Zone” (book, six-week video study, Leader Guide, and Participant's Guide), Cecil explores a dozen Bible studies of Jesus inviting people out of their comfort zones into their trust zones and how to apply these stories to our lives today. You'll uncover your own comfort zones and learn how to deepen your faith by getting uncomfortable for Jesus. - “The Next Thing” (book, five-week video study, Leader Guide, and Participant's Guide) supplies a four-part Christian model for dealing with crisis. You'll find the model to be flexible and applicable to many crises.

Join us for a special episode of Making The Leap, recorded live from the National Religious Broadcasters Convention! We had the incredible opportunity to speak with inspiring leaders, content creators, and change-makers in Christian media. From discussing the impact of faith-driven education and parental rights to media innovation and cultural shifts, this episode is packed with insightful conversations.Special guests include Moms for America's Debbie Kraulidis on the power of engaged mothers, Daniel Cohen on faith-based media in Israel, and author Cecil Taylor on biblical parenting. Stay tuned for part two next week!Follow Making the Leap on Facebook, Instagram, X, and YouTube. You can also sign-up for our newsletter or send us an email hello@makingtheleappodcast.com.To learn more about the Herzog Foundation, visit HerzogFoundation.com. Like and follow us on Facebook, X, and Instagram, or sign up to receive monthly email updates.

The Practical Faith Academy Podcast from Cecil Taylor Ministries presents guests who have important things to say about putting your faith into practice. Cecil interviews each guest to understand their life stories and their ideas for living a seven-day practical faith. Courtney Dailey is an east Tennessee author who, along with her husband and many others, answered the call to serve when Hurricane Helene blew through her region last year. In addition to getting her own hands dirty, Dailey has been posting Facebook videos of the progress, sharing “God Stories” of how prayer and faith have brought people together to serve those whose lives were upended by the hurricane. Her first video has received five million views. Highlights of the podcast:  2:54 What does seven-day practical faith mean to Courtney? She also shares how she and her husband launched the reconstruction project for their friend Jerry. 11:20 What strikes Courtney about sacrifice being part of the faith experience of the relief effort. 14:43 How service unites us across the Great Cultural Divide we're experiencing right now. 16:49 What is the scope of the relief effort she and her church and helpers have undertaken? 19:50 One of Courtney's favorite God Stories of how a Kentucky church miraculously came through with exactly what the relief effort needed, when they needed it. 24:06 Courtney shares project progress online, but what people really want are the God Stories and the awareness of God's presence. 28:35 How Courtney has been equipped by God for the organizational tasks she has taken on. 32:19 What lesson she has taken away that we can all apply to our faith journeys 36:31 Her best tip to develop and maintain a seven-day practical faith 38:17 What can people do to help this effort and help the people of eastern Tennessee. NOTE: Courtney asks specifically for sheds. These may or may not still be needed at the time you listen. Courtney Dailey is a novelist who is also writing a book based on the hurricane relief experiences in eastern Tennessee. You can learn more about the East Tennessee Flood Recovery effort by visiting the Author Courtney Dailey Facebook page or her church's page at https://www.jesusiscentral.com/. Click on the box reading “East Tennessee Flood Recovery” to donate to the Flood Relief Fund via Central Community Christian Church in Johnson City, TN. The link to help the Kentucky church mentioned in the podcast is https://www.givelify.com/donate/meades-branch-freewill-baptist-church-louisa-ky-2j7wy5MTQ5OTI5Nw== Learn more about Courtney's award-winning writing at AuthorCourtneyDailey.com. Cecil Taylor is an author, speaker, podcaster, blogger, and provider of Instant Content to churches and small groups. Please register for Cecil's free monthly newsletters on the Cecil Taylor Ministries home page. You'll receive a free gift, which changes from time to time, and two monthly newsletters, Backstage Pass and Monthly Connection. For more free content like this from Cecil Taylor Ministries, visit https://www.CecilTaylorMinistries.com/free-content. Cecil's parenting advice can be found at his new website, https://www.UnisonParenting.com, at  https://www.instagram.com/unison_parenting/ and at https://www.pinterest.com/CecilTaylorMinistries. Cecil's award-winning books and video studies can be found and purchased through https://www.CecilTaylorMinistries.com. Every video study's first lesson can be seen for free via the Free Content link above by clicking on “Sample Lessons.” Cecil's Instant Content portfolio of books and video studies includes: - In “Unison Parenting: The Comprehensive Guide to Navigating Christian Parenthood with One Voice” (book and eWorkbook available now; book study Leader Guide and first video study available later in 2025), Cecil provides proven parenting strategies with an underlying layer of parenting in unison through all the ages and stages of a child's life. “Unison Parenting” has been honored with the 2025 Independent Press Award for Parenting/Family. - In “From Comfort Zone to Trust Zone” (book, six-week video study, Leader Guide, and Participant's Guide), Cecil explores a dozen Bible studies of Jesus inviting people out of their comfort zones into their trust zones and how to apply these stories to our lives today. You'll uncover your own comfort zones and learn how to deepen your faith by getting uncomfortable for Jesus. - “The Next Thing” (book, five-week video study, Leader Guide, and Participant's Guide) supplies a four-part Christian model for dealing with crisis. You'll find the model to be flexible and applicable to many crises. - “Live Like You're Loved” (book, five-week video study, Leader Guide, and Participant's Guide) affirms that God loves you, forgives you, sends you, and walks with you in eternal relationship. You'll learn how to embed each of these scriptural truths into your daily life.

The Practical Faith Academy Podcast from Cecil Taylor Ministries presents guests who have important things to say about putting your faith into practice. Cecil interviews each guest to understand their life stories and their ideas for living a seven-day practical faith. Jan White is a small-town newspaper columnist who struck it big when she compiled a selection of her religion columns into a book during Covid. The book was a smashing success at a time when people were looking for hope. White still writes for the Andalusia, Alabama Star-News. She has also won an award for her column on forgiveness as opposed to hatred. In this podcast, White shares her views on following Jesus and how her work as a columnist intertwines with her faith. Highlights of the podcast:  2:45 What inspired Jan to publish a compilation of her newspaper columns 5:22 Jesus made the complex simple. Do we do the same in our faith, or are we too complex? 6:40 To her, seven-day practical faith means a faith that addresses all circumstances. 8:06 Examples of columns she has written, such as about the cross at Ground Zero. 10:55 Favorite stories from the book 11:45 Jan wrote an award-winning column on how forgiveness unlocks hatred. She explains her reasoning. 14:28 How she sees her job as being an essential part of putting faith into practice. 16:43 The hardest part about putting faith into practice 21:01 Her best tip to develop and maintain a seven-day practical faith 21:54 How to find Jan's books and her future authoring plans Jan White is the author of “Everyday Faith for Daily Life,” a collection of her newspaper religion columns over 25 years. She has won a newspaper writing award for “Forgiveness: The Key to Unlocking Hatred.” White writes for the Andalusia, Alabama Star-News and the Enterprise, Alabama Southeast Sun. Her website is janwhitewriter.com. Cecil Taylor is an author, speaker, podcaster, blogger, and provider of Instant Content to churches and small groups. Please register for Cecil's free monthly newsletters on the Cecil Taylor Ministries home page. You'll receive a free gift, which changes from time to time, and two monthly newsletters, Backstage Pass and Monthly Connection. For more free content like this from Cecil Taylor Ministries, visit https://www.CecilTaylorMinistries.com/free-content. Cecil's parenting advice can be found at his new website, https://www.UnisonParenting.com, at  https://www.instagram.com/unison_parenting/ and at https://www.pinterest.com/CecilTaylorMinistries. Cecil's award-winning books and video studies can be found and purchased through https://www.CecilTaylorMinistries.com. Every video study's first lesson can be seen for free via the Free Content link above by clicking on “Sample Lessons.” Cecil's Instant Content portfolio of books and video studies includes: - In “Unison Parenting: The Comprehensive Guide to Navigating Christian Parenthood with One Voice” (book and eWorkbook available now; book study Leader Guide and first video study available later in 2025), Cecil provides proven parenting strategies with an underlying layer of parenting in unison through all the ages and stages of a child's life. “Unison Parenting” has been honored with the 2025 Independent Press Award for Parenting/Family. - In “From Comfort Zone to Trust Zone” (book, six-week video study, Leader Guide, and Participant's Guide), Cecil explores a dozen Bible studies of Jesus inviting people out of their comfort zones into their trust zones and how to apply these stories to our lives today. You'll uncover your own comfort zones and learn how to deepen your faith by getting uncomfortable for Jesus. - “The Next Thing” (book, five-week video study, Leader Guide, and Participant's Guide) supplies a four-part Christian model for dealing with crisis. You'll find the model to be flexible and applicable to many crises. - “Live Like You're Loved” (book, five-week video study, Leader Guide, and Participant's Guide) affirms that God loves you, forgives you, sends you, and walks with you in eternal relationship. You'll learn how to embed each of these scriptural truths into your daily life.

The Practical Faith Academy Podcast from Cecil Taylor Ministries presents guests who have important things to say about putting your faith into practice. Cecil interviews each guest to understand their life stories and their ideas for living a seven-day practical faith. Kathy White is a Niceville, Florida licensed mental health counselor and marriage and family therapist. She is a Christian and brings her faith background into her therapy sessions. As a result, she sees and expresses the ways that both faith and good mental health can work together to help people. Highlights of the podcast:   2:08  How “seven-day practical faith” can be interpreted as loving actions 4:23  People should be open to counseling and the healing and change it can provide. 5:58  How Kathy came to faith 7:56  How being a Christian changes her approach to counseling 10:33  Impacts of narcissism on others 13:16  How God inspired her to write a novel centered on therapy experiences 14:38  The supreme importance of a therapist diagnosing people who aren't in the room but are affecting the patient 16:37  Suggested approach for Christians seeking therapy 19:03  The hardest part about putting faith into practice is confronting fear. 21:45  Her best tip for putting faith into practice: Structure. 23:47  Information about her first book, “The Therapist,” and the marriage advice book she's writing now. Kathy White is a Christian therapist whose practice in Niceville, Florida is called Carpenter House and can be found at CarpenterHouse.net. She has written a novel-like book based on her experiences, “The Therapist: Short Stories about Parenting, Narcissists, Combat, Abuse and Marriage,” written under the name Kathlyn C. White. You can find more information about the book at TheTherapist.biz. Cecil Taylor is an author, speaker, podcaster, blogger, and provider of Instant Content to churches and small groups. Please register for Cecil's free monthly newsletter on the Cecil Taylor Ministries home page. You'll receive a free gift, which changes from time to time, and the newsletter itself will enrich you with practical faith tips, tips for your church, updates on Cecil Taylor Ministries, a devotional, and more. It's the best way to stay in touch with Cecil! Cecil writes for Chicken Soup for the Soul, Guideposts, and Inspiration Ministry at https;//inspiration.org. You can learn more about Cecil and what he offers at https://www.CecilTaylorMinistries.com, at https://www.facebook.com/ceciltaylorministries , and the Cecil Taylor Ministries YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHP_khu3r77ubl5jvHsf5-w . Cecil's parenting advice can be found at his new website, https://www.UnisonParenting.com, at  https://www.instagram.com/unison_parenting/ and at https://www.pinterest.com/CecilTaylorMinistries. For more free content like this from Cecil Taylor Ministries, visit https://www.CecilTaylorMinistries.com/free-content. Cecil's books and video studies can be found and purchased through https://www.CecilTaylorMinistries.com. Every video study's first lesson can be seen for free via the Free Content link above by clicking on “Sample Lessons.” Cecil's Instant Content portfolio of books and video studies includes: - NEW: In “Unison Parenting: The Comprehensive Guide to Navigating Christian Parenthood with One Voice” (book and eWorkbook available now; book study Leader Guide and first video study available in early 2025), Cecil provides proven parenting strategies with an underlying layer of parenting in unison through all the ages and stages of a child's life. The goal is to help the child become a mature adult who makes good decisions. - In “From Comfort Zone to Trust Zone” (book, six-week video study, Leader Guide, and Participant's Guide), Cecil explores a dozen Bible studies of Jesus inviting people out of their comfort zones into their trust zones and how to apply these stories to our lives today. You'll uncover your own comfort zones and learn how to deepen your faith by getting uncomfortable for Jesus. - “The Next Thing” (book, five-week video study, Leader Guide, and Participant's Guide) supplies a four-part Christian model for dealing with crisis. You'll find the model to be flexible and applicable to many crises. - “Live Like You're Loved” (book, five-week video study, Leader Guide, and Participant's Guide) affirms that God loves you, forgives you, sends you, and walks with you in eternal relationship. You'll learn how to embed each of these scriptural truths into your daily life.

The Practical Faith Academy Podcast from Cecil Taylor Ministries presents guests who have important things to say about putting your faith into practice. Cecil interviews each guest to understand their life stories and their ideas for living a seven-day practical faith. Lori Hatcher is a noted author, speaker, and writing coach, all while working her day job as a dental hygienist. In all her roles, she is an encourager, which she terms as bringing life to those who need a boost. Hatcher has a number of great ideas for putting faith into practice, which she shares during this podcast. Take a listen to get a fresh start in your faith journey during 2025. Highlights of the podcast:   2:44  To Lori, practical faith is based on Romans 12:1-2. 4:27  How Lori and her husband David approach each day through prayer. 6:23  Why it's important to Lori to be an encourager. 8:01  How the lives of she and her husband were transformed when they committed to daily Bible reading. 9:29  The significance of realizing that prayer is supposed to be a two-way conversation. 12:31  On what she learns newly from the Bible in repeated readings. 16:50  How to live as Christians in our jobs and daily endeavors. 20:32  The hardest part about putting faith into practice. 23:05  Her best tip for putting faith into practice. 24:55  About her latest devotional book based on Philippians 4:8. Lori Hatcher is the author of several devotional books and others to which she has contributed. Her brand-new devotional book is called “Think on These Things: 60 Thoughtful Devotions for Renewed Peace,” based on Philippians 4:8. Her previous book, “A Word for Your Day: 66 Devotions to Refresh Your Mind,” visited every book of the Bible to find a meaningful word to pace a related devotion. To learn more about her books, blogs, weekly devotion subscription, speaking availability, and more, please visit LoriHatcher.com. Cecil Taylor is an author, speaker, podcaster, blogger, and provider of Instant Content to churches and small groups. Please register for Cecil's free monthly newsletter on the Cecil Taylor Ministries home page. You'll receive a free gift, which changes from time to time, and the newsletter itself will enrich you with practical faith tips, tips for your church, updates on Cecil Taylor Ministries, a devotional, and more. It's the best way to stay in touch with Cecil! Cecil is now a Chicken Soup for the Soul author! He is a contributor to “Tales of Christmas,” a Chicken Soup for the Soul book that was released on Oct. 15, 2024. You can learn more about Cecil and what he offers at https://www.CecilTaylorMinistries.com, at https://www.facebook.com/ceciltaylorministries , and the Cecil Taylor Ministries YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHP_khu3r77ubl5jvHsf5-w . Cecil's parenting advice can be found at his new website, https://www.UnisonParenting.com, at  https://www.instagram.com/unison_parenting/ and at https://www.pinterest.com/CecilTaylorMinistries. For more free content like this from Cecil Taylor Ministries, visit https://www.CecilTaylorMinistries.com/free-content. Cecil's books and video studies can be found and purchased through https://www.CecilTaylorMinistries.com. Every video study's first lesson can be seen for free via the Free Content link above by clicking on “Sample Lessons.” Cecil's Instant Content portfolio of books and video studies includes: - NEW: In “Unison Parenting: The Comprehensive Guide to Navigating Christian Parenthood with One Voice” (book and eWorkbook available now; book study Leader Guide and first video study available in early 2025), Cecil provides proven parenting strategies with an underlying layer of parenting in unison through all the ages and stages of a child's life. The goal is to help the child become a mature adult who makes good decisions. - In “From Comfort Zone to Trust Zone” (book, six-week video study, Leader Guide, and Participant's Guide), Cecil explores a dozen Bible studies of Jesus inviting people out of their comfort zones into their trust zones and how to apply these stories to our lives today. You'll uncover your own comfort zones and learn how to deepen your faith by getting uncomfortable for Jesus. - “The Next Thing” (book, five-week video study, Leader Guide, and Participant's Guide) supplies a four-part Christian model for dealing with crisis. You'll find the model to be flexible and applicable to many crises. - “Live Like You're Loved” (book, five-week video study, Leader Guide, and Participant's Guide) affirms that God loves you, forgives you, sends you, and walks with you in eternal relationship. You'll learn how to embed each of these scriptural truths into your daily life.

A mediados de la década de los '60 del pasado siglo irrumpe en Estados Unidos el Free Jazz como una manifestación más de los movimientos emergentes que reivindicaban, cada vez con mayor vehemencia, los derechos de los negros norteamericanos. Esta nueva música, suponía un nuevo paradigma en la concepción del jazz que prescindía de las normas que regían hasta el momento la forma de hacer jazz en sus aspectos melódicos, armónicos y rítmicos. Un movimiento rebelde y disruptivo, más político que musical, que rompía amarras con los estándares impuestos por la sociedad y la cultura blanca que mantenía una intolerable opresión sobre el colectivo afroamericano hastiado de abusos e injusticias. Sin embargo. una buena parte de los músicos de aquella generación, aún simpatizando con los principios políticos y sociales que justificaban esa nueva música, decidieron no dar un paso tan osado hacia aquellos territorios desconocidos y se mantuvieron en una frontera musical en un límite que, conservando en lo esencial los vínculos con el jazz ortodoxo, introducía elementos innovadores procedentes de aquel revolucionario movimiento encabezado por músicos como Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry o Cecil Taylor y del que John Coltrane fue proclamado su líder espiritual. El resultado sería una música fronteriza y apasionante, navegando entre dos aguas, con continuas incursiones dentro y fuera de la tonalidad, que conformaría finalmente el mainstream jazzístico de los ‘60 y ‘70 del pasado siglo y que, aún hoy en día, es la principal referencia del jazz acústico contemporáneo. Radio Jazznoend os invita en nuestro nuevo podcast a un largo viaje por aquella frontera azarosa y aventurera de la mano de algunos de los mas relevantes artistas de aquella era, como Miles Davis, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Joe Henderson, Charles Tolliver, George Russell o Booker Ervin, entre otros.

The Practical Faith Academy Podcast from Cecil Taylor Ministries presents guests who have important things to say about putting your faith into practice. Cecil interviews each guest to understand their life stories and their ideas for living a seven-day practical faith. Prolific author Lenora Worth shares her thoughts on daily faith practices in this episode. A number of Worth's books share themes of forgiveness and redemption, which closely match the themes of her faith life as well. As Worth shares her story and her faith tips, you'll learn more about the difficult topics of forgiveness and redemption and will come away with ideas for how to make them a substantial part of your seven-day practical faith. Highlights of the podcast: 2:31 Cecil asks about her prolific amount of writing, including 32 books this decade. 4:20 Her definition of a seven-day practical faith 6:17 Who influenced her as she grew up 10:23 Lenora frequently writes Christmas books. Why is Christmas special to her? 12:46 How Lenora puts Christ into Christmas 15:49 Lenora has written fiction books that include themes of returning home, forgiveness, and redemption. She gives her advice for people returning home this Christmas to difficult situations. 18:44 How meaningful the Bible verse “Be still and know” is to her 20:34 The hardest part about putting faith into practice 22:28 Info on Lenora's latest books and how people can follow her 25:55 How she interweaves faith into her fiction Lenora Worth is an American Christian Fiction Writers honor roll member. She has authored 115 books and currently writes inspirational fiction for Harlequin's Love Inspired and sweet romance for Tule Publishing. She also writes for Kensington Books. You can find her books on major online booksellers as well as at https://www.lenoraworth.com/lenoras-library.html. Cecil Taylor is an author, speaker, podcaster, blogger, and provider of Instant Content to churches and small groups. Please register for Cecil's free monthly newsletter on the Cecil Taylor Ministries home page. You'll receive a free gift, which changes from time to time, and the newsletter itself will enrich you with practical faith tips, tips for your church, updates on Cecil Taylor Ministries, a devotional, and more. It's the best way to stay in touch with Cecil! Cecil is now a Chicken Soup for the Soul author! He is a contributor to “Tales of Christmas,” a Chicken Soup for the Soul book that was released on Oct. 15, 2024. You can learn more about Cecil and what he offers at https://www.CecilTaylorMinistries.com, at https://www.facebook.com/ceciltaylorministries , and the Cecil Taylor Ministries YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHP_khu3r77ubl5jvHsf5-w . Cecil's parenting advice can be found at his new website, https://www.UnisonParenting.com, at  https://www.instagram.com/unison_parenting/ and at https://www.pinterest.com/CecilTaylorMinistries. For more free content like this from Cecil Taylor Ministries, visit https://www.CecilTaylorMinistries.com/free-content. Cecil's books and video studies can be found and purchased through https://www.CecilTaylorMinistries.com. Every video study's first lesson can be seen for free via the Free Content link above by clicking on “Sample Lessons.” Cecil's Instant Content portfolio of books and video studies includes: - NEW: In “Unison Parenting: The Comprehensive Guide to Navigating Christian Parenthood with One Voice” (book and eWorkbook available now; book study Leader Guide and first video study available in early 2025), Cecil provides proven parenting strategies with an underlying layer of parenting in unison through all the ages and stages of a child's life. The goal is to help the child become a mature adult who makes good decisions. - In “From Comfort Zone to Trust Zone” (book, six-week video study, Leader Guide, and Participant's Guide), Cecil explores a dozen Bible studies of Jesus inviting people out of their comfort zones into their trust zones and how to apply these stories to our lives today. You'll uncover your own comfort zones and learn how to deepen your faith by getting uncomfortable for Jesus. - “The Next Thing” (book, five-week video study, Leader Guide, and Participant's Guide) supplies a four-part Christian model for dealing with crisis. You'll find the model to be flexible and applicable to many crises.

ORNETTE COLEMAN “THE SHAPE OF JAZZ TO COME” Hollywood, CA, May 22, 1959Lonely womanDon Cherry (cnt) Ornette Coleman (as) Charlie Haden (b) Billy Higgins (d) JOHN COLTRANE “ASCENSION” Englewood Cliffs, N.J., June 28, 1965Ascension (Edition I – Part 1)Freddie Hubbard, Dewey Johnson (tp) John Tchicai, Marion Brown (as) John Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, Archie Shepp (ts) McCoy Tyner (p) Jimmy Garrison, Art Davis (b) Elvin Jones (d) CECIL TAYLOR “UNIT STRUCTURE” Englewood Cliffs, N.J., May 19, 1966StepsEddie Gale (tp-1) Jimmy Lyons (as-2) Makanda Ken McIntyre (as-3,oboe-4,b-cl-5) Cecil Taylor (p,bells-4) Henry Grimes, Alan Silva (b) Andrew Cyrille (d) ALBERT AYLER TRIO “SPIRITUAL UNITY” New York, July 10, 1964Ghosts (first variation)Albert Ayler (ts) Gary Peacock (b) Sunny Murray (d) PETER BROTZMANN OCTET “MACHINE GUN” Bremen, May, 1968Music for Han Bennink IPeter Brotzmann (ts,bar) Willem Breuker (ts,b-cl) Evan Parker (ts) Fred Van Hove (p) Peter Kowald, Buschi Niebergall (b) Han Bennink (d) Sven-Ake Johansson (d,perc) Continue reading Puro Jazz 16 de diciembre, 2024 at PuroJazz.

ORNETTE COLEMAN “THE SHAPE OF JAZZ TO COME” Hollywood, CA, May 22, 1959Lonely womanDon Cherry (cnt) Ornette Coleman (as) Charlie Haden (b) Billy Higgins (d) JOHN COLTRANE “ASCENSION” Englewood Cliffs, N.J., June 28, 1965Ascension (Edition I – Part 1)Freddie Hubbard, Dewey Johnson (tp) John Tchicai, Marion Brown (as) John Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, Archie Shepp (ts) McCoy Tyner (p) Jimmy Garrison, Art Davis (b) Elvin Jones (d) CECIL TAYLOR “UNIT STRUCTURE” Englewood Cliffs, N.J., May 19, 1966StepsEddie Gale (tp-1) Jimmy Lyons (as-2) Makanda Ken McIntyre (as-3,oboe-4,b-cl-5) Cecil Taylor (p,bells-4) Henry Grimes, Alan Silva (b) Andrew Cyrille (d) ALBERT AYLER TRIO “SPIRITUAL UNITY” New York, July 10, 1964Ghosts (first variation)Albert Ayler (ts) Gary Peacock (b) Sunny Murray (d) PETER BROTZMANN OCTET “MACHINE GUN” Bremen, May, 1968Music for Han Bennink IPeter Brotzmann (ts,bar) Willem Breuker (ts,b-cl) Evan Parker (ts) Fred Van Hove (p) Peter Kowald, Buschi Niebergall (b) Han Bennink (d) Sven-Ake Johansson (d,perc) Continue reading Puro Jazz 16 de diciembre, 2024 at PuroJazz.

The Practical Faith Academy Podcast from Cecil Taylor Ministries presents guests who have important things to say about putting your faith into practice. Cecil interviews each guest to understand their life stories and their ideas for living a seven-day practical faith. Christine Trimpe underwent a dramatic change in her life at age 48. Raised in the church but a self-identified “casual Christian” as an adult, Trimpe reached a point in her life when she was ready to give everything to God, from her obesity to her spiritual heart. In the ten years since, Trimpe has transformed into a passionate Christian who has lost 100 pounds and now helps others with both their faith and weight loss goals. Trimpe describes herself as a joy seeker, looking for joy daily in all circumstances, buoyed by scripture study that guides her life. Highlights of the podcast: 2:17 Her definition of a seven-day practical faith 3:57 How Christine went from being a casual Christian to a passionate Christian 6:17 How she embarked on a health and healing journey 8:24 Transformation came from daily Bible study 9:26 How to bury joy into every fiber of your being, with Psalm 4:7 as a core passage 12:27 The background of how her book “Seeking Joy through the Gospel of Luke” came to be written 15:30 Christine is a joy seeker. Why does she pursue joy in particular? 17:49 What she does as a certified Christian health and wellness coach. 20:57 How people can experience lasting change in their lives 23:57 Advice for integrating faith into your health journey 25:29 The hardest part about putting faith into practice 27:08 How people can learn more about Christine's books, coaching, and the SugarFreed program Christine Trimpe is the author of the award-winning book “Seeking Joy through the Gospel of Luke,” an Advent study. Her latest book is “SugarFreed: Stop Losing the Weight Loss Battle, Start Gaining the Victory.” Her coaching, her books, and more are available at ChristineTrimpe.com, and her books are also available on Amazon and other online booksellers. Cecil Taylor is an author, speaker, podcaster, blogger, and provider of Instant Content to churches and small groups. Please register for Cecil's free monthly newsletter on the Cecil Taylor Ministries home page. You'll receive a free gift, which changes from time to time, and the newsletter itself will enrich you with practical faith tips, tips for your church, updates on Cecil Taylor Ministries, a devotional, and more. It's the best way to stay in touch with Cecil! Cecil is now a Chicken Soup for the Soul author! He is a contributor to “Tales of Christmas,” a Chicken Soup for the Soul book that was released on Oct. 15, 2024. You can learn more about Cecil and what he offers at https://www.CecilTaylorMinistries.com, at https://www.facebook.com/ceciltaylorministries , and the Cecil Taylor Ministries YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHP_khu3r77ubl5jvHsf5-w . Cecil's parenting advice can be found at his new website, https://www.UnisonParenting.com, at  https://www.instagram.com/unison_parenting/ and at https://www.pinterest.com/CecilTaylorMinistries. For more free content like this from Cecil Taylor Ministries, visit https://www.CecilTaylorMinistries.com/free-content. Cecil's books and video studies can be found and purchased through https://www.CecilTaylorMinistries.com. Every video study's first lesson can be seen for free via the Free Content link above by clicking on “Sample Lessons.” Cecil's Instant Content portfolio of books and video studies includes: - NEW: In “Unison Parenting: The Comprehensive Guide to Navigating Christian Parenthood with One Voice” (book and eWorkbook available now; book study Leader Guide and first video study available in early 2025), Cecil provides proven parenting strategies with an underlying layer of parenting in unison through all the ages and stages of a child's life. The goal is to help the child become a mature adult who makes good decisions. - In “From Comfort Zone to Trust Zone” (book, six-week video study, Leader Guide, and Participant's Guide), Cecil explores a dozen Bible studies of Jesus inviting people out of their comfort zones into their trust zones and how to apply these stories to our lives today. You'll uncover your own comfort zones and learn how to deepen your faith by getting uncomfortable for Jesus. - “The Next Thing” (book, five-week video study, Leader Guide, and Participant's Guide) supplies a four-part Christian model for dealing with crisis. You'll find the model to be flexible and applicable to many crises. - “Live Like You're Loved” (book, five-week video study, Leader Guide, and Participant's Guide) affirms that God loves you, forgives you, sends you, and walks with you in eternal relationship. You'll learn how to embed each of these scriptural truths into your daily life.

The Practical Faith Academy Podcast from Cecil Taylor Ministries presents guests who have important things to say about putting your faith into practice. Cecil interviews each guest to understand their life stories and their ideas for living a seven-day practical faith. Deb and Bruce Potts have served as marriage mentors in their church for a dozen years, using techniques they've learned during 48 years of marriage. The Potts also endured a trying health crisis that overlapped with the pandemic, which stretched and renewed their faith. Their wisdom about marriage and about life shines in this podcast that focuses on changing yourself to help your marriage and to equip you to deal with life's difficulties. Highlights of the podcast:  (:31 start) (+1:01 delta) 1:55 (ORIG 0:54) Their definitions of a seven-day practical faith 4:57 (ORIG 3:56) The role that faith plays in their marriage 7:23 (ORIG 6:22) On Christ being in the center of their marriage 9:01 (ORIG 8:00) Three key principles they share with couples. 11:33 (ORIG 10:32) How reactions to family of origin affect marriage and parenting 14:36 (ORIG 13:35) Bruce talks about his medical crisis requiring two brain surgeries during the Covid pandemic, how his faith helped him during that time, and how the crisis changed his approach to life. 19:55 (ORIG 18:54) Deb's experience during Bruce's hospital stay in isolation and how faith and community pulled her through. 23:49 (ORIG 22:48) Why and how they wrote a novel, “Love on Life Support,” about Bruce's crisis within the Covid crisis. 28:37 (ORIG 27:36) The hardest part for them about putting faith into practice. 31:03 (ORIG 30:02) Their best tips for developing and maintaining a seven-day practical faith. 32:02 (ORIG 31:01) How people can learn more about their work in marriage mentoring You can learn more about what the Potts offer at DebPotts.com and by searching for MarriageMentorMoments on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Also check out their award-winning book, “Love on Life Support," which can be accessed from their website or from Amazon. Cecil Taylor is an author, speaker, podcaster, blogger, and provider of Instant Content to churches and small groups. Please register for Cecil's free monthly newsletter on the Cecil Taylor Ministries home page. You'll receive a free gift, which changes from time to time, and the newsletter itself will enrich you with practical faith tips, tips for your church, updates on Cecil Taylor Ministries, a devotional, and more. It's the best way to stay in touch with Cecil! Cecil is now a Chicken Soup for the Soul author! He is a contributor to “Tales of Christmas,” a Chicken Soup for the Soul book that was released on Oct. 15. You can learn more about Cecil and what he offers at https://www.CecilTaylorMinistries.com, at https://www.facebook.com/ceciltaylorministries , and the Cecil Taylor Ministries YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHP_khu3r77ubl5jvHsf5-w . Cecil's parenting advice can be found at his new website, https://www.UnisonParenting.com, at  https://www.instagram.com/unison_parenting/ and at https://www.pinterest.com/CecilTaylorMinistries. For more free content like this from Cecil Taylor Ministries, visit https://www.CecilTaylorMinistries.com/free-content. Cecil's books and video studies can be found and purchased through https://www.CecilTaylorMinistries.com. Every video study's first lesson can be seen for free via the Free Content link above by clicking on “Sample Lessons.” Cecil's Instant Content portfolio of books and video studies includes: - NEW: “Unison Parenting: The Comprehensive Guide to Navigating Christian Parenthood with One Voice” (book and eWorkbook available now; book study Leader Guide and first video study available in early 2025). Cecil provides proven parenting strategies with an underlying layer of parenting in unison through all the ages and stages of a child's life. The goal is to help the child become a mature adult who makes good decisions. - “From Comfort Zone to Trust Zone” (book, six-week video study, Leader Guide, and Participant's Guide). Cecil explores a dozen Bible studies of Jesus inviting people out of their comfort zones into their trust zones and how to apply these stories to our lives today. You'll uncover your own comfort zones and learn how to deepen your faith by getting uncomfortable for Jesus. - “The Next Thing” (book, five-week video study, Leader Guide, and Participant's Guide). “The Next Thing” supplies a four-part Christian model for dealing with crisis. You'll find the model to be flexible and applicable to many crises. - “Live Like You're Loved” (book, five-week video study, Leader Guide, and Participant's Guide). “Live Like You're Loved” affirms that God loves you, forgives you, sends you, and walks with you in eternal relationship. You'll learn how to embed each of these scriptural truths into your daily life.  

The Practical Faith Academy Podcast from Cecil Taylor Ministries presents guests who have important things to say about putting your faith into practice. Cecil interviews each guest to understand their life stories and their ideas for living a seven-day practical faith. Tracy Crump is a former nurse who became a writer and editor. She draws upon her experiences in nursing and in caregiving to bring a message of healing, hope, and encouragement to others. Crump talks on this podcast about how she transitioned from nurse to writer, how she continues to take care of caregivers, and her thoughts on putting faith into practice based on the Great Commission. Highlights of the podcast:  1:47 Her definition of a seven-day practical faith 3:23 How surprised she is that she became an author 6:32 The differences in serving people as a nurse and as an author 9:19 Healing may come physically but can always come spiritually. 10:11 Tracy tells a moving story that did not appear in her book about the faith of a burn patient who wanted to glorify God with his healing. 15:08 Does Tracy start writing from scripture and bring in a real world scenario, or start from the real world scenario and find accompanying scripture? 18:29 The importance of encouraging others. Her focus is on caregivers. 20:42 The hardest part about putting faith into practice. 23:12 Tracy's best tip for developing and maintaining a seven-day practical faith. 24:23 Techniques for talking to unbelievers about faith. 25:39 How people can learn more about her work. Tracy Crump is a writer and editor who has written books, devotions in publications such as Chicken Soup for the Soul and Guideposts, and blogs on caregiving and more. Learn more at https://tracycrump.com/ about her book, “Health, Healing and Wholeness: Devotions of Hope in the Midst of Illness.” You can also sign up for her caregivers' newsletter and her Write Life newsletter to writers. Cecil Taylor is an author, speaker, podcaster, blogger, and provider of Instant Content to churches and small groups. Please register for Cecil's free monthly newsletter on the Cecil Taylor Ministries home page. You'll receive a free gift, which changes from time to time, and the newsletter itself will enrich you with practical faith tips, tips for your church, updates on Cecil Taylor Ministries, a devotional, and more. It's the best way to stay in touch with Cecil! Cecil is now a Chicken Soup for the Soul author! He is a contributor to “Tales of Christmas,” a Chicken Soup for the Soul book that was released on Oct. 15. You can learn more about Cecil and what he offers at https://www.CecilTaylorMinistries.com, at https://www.facebook.com/ceciltaylorministries , and the Cecil Taylor Ministries YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHP_khu3r77ubl5jvHsf5-w . Cecil's parenting advice can be found at his new website, https://www.UnisonParenting.com, at  https://www.instagram.com/unison_parenting/ and at https://www.pinterest.com/CecilTaylorMinistries. For more free content from Cecil Taylor Ministries, visit https://www.CecilTaylorMinistries.com/free-content. Cecil's books and video studies can be found and purchased through https://www.CecilTaylorMinistries.com. Every video study's first lesson can be seen for free via the Free Content link above by clicking on “Sample Lessons.” Cecil's Instant Content portfolio of books and video studies includes: - NEW: “Unison Parenting: The Comprehensive Guide to Navigating Christian Parenthood with One Voice” (book and eWorkbook available now; book study Leader Guide and first video study available in early 2025). Cecil provides proven parenting strategies with an underlying layer of parenting in unison through all the ages and stages of a child's life. The goal is to help the child become a mature adult who makes good decisions. - “From Comfort Zone to Trust Zone” (book, six-week video study, Leader Guide, and Participant's Guide). Cecil explores a dozen Bible studies of Jesus inviting people out of their comfort zones into their trust zones and how to apply these stories to our lives today. You'll uncover your own comfort zones and learn how to deepen your faith by getting uncomfortable for Jesus. - “The Next Thing” (book, five-week video study, Leader Guide, and Participant's Guide). “The Next Thing” supplies a four-part Christian model for dealing with crisis. You'll find the model to be flexible and applicable to many crises. - “Live Like You're Loved” (book, five-week video study, Leader Guide, and Participant's Guide). “Live Like You're Loved” affirms that God loves you, forgives you, sends you, and walks with you in eternal relationship. You'll learn how to embed each of these scriptural truths into your daily life.

EVERY OTHER KREATIVE KONTROL EPISODE IS ONLY ACCESSIBLE TO MONTHLY $6 USD PATREON SUPPORTERS. This one is fine, but please subscribe now on Patreon so you never miss full episodes. Thanks!Oren Ambarchi discusses his trio with Johan Berthling and Andreas Werliin and their latest album, Ghosted II, living in Berlin and Winnipeg, Drag City Chicago pizza advice, when he lived in New York for stints as a young man until he was broke from buying records and seeing shows by Cecil Taylor and Miles Davis, why Stephanie Stone woke John Zorn up to meet Oren and be friends with him ever since, his work with Jim O'Rourke and Alvin Lucier, forthcoming projects and shows, other future plans, and much more. Support vish on Patreon! Thanks to the Bookshelf, Planet Bean Coffee, and Grandad's Donuts. Support Y.E.S.S., Pride Centre of Edmonton, and Letters to Santa. Follow vish online.Related episodes/links:Ep. #898: Jon Benjamin – Jazz DaredevilEp. #884: Tim KinsellaEp. #877: Gastr del SolEp. #817: Nicole Rampersaud & Off WorldEp. #731: Bill NaceEp. #692: WilcoEp. #673: Sonic YouthSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/kreative-kontrol. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Practical Faith Academy Podcast from Cecil Taylor Ministries presents guests who have important things to say about putting your faith into practice. Cecil interviews each guest to understand their life stories and their ideas for living a seven-day practical faith. Barbara Ann Holmes is an interior designer who uses Biblical principles to help clients design their spaces. Barbara Ann believes every good design begins on the foundation of God our Creator and the study of His designs and desires for our homes. In this fascinating podcast, Barbara Ann discusses how she relies on the Bible and on the Holy Spirit to guide her and her clients in her profession. Highlights of the podcast:   2:07   How a seven-day practical faith is like music. 4:03   She started her interior design business by pursuing a worldly path. 7:30   How she repurposed her business to use Christian principles in design. 9:22   How Barbara Ann combines a Biblical foundation with design concepts. 11:39   She uses Biblical models, including the seven days of creation, as a model for guiding customers through their house design. 13:31   Serving others through both the product and the relationship. 15:29   The Biblical model of Tabitha's house as an example for designing a home that serves others. 18:39   People use her ideas on partnering with God in their own creative pursuits, even if they don't consider themselves creative. 20:15   Design Magnified is her online program allowing a wide range of people to tap into their creativity. 22:10   The hardest part about putting faith into practice – remembering! 23:47   Barbara Ann's best tip for living and maintaining a seven-day practical faith. 24:59   What's going on with her business and speaking. You can learn more about Barbara Ann Holmes and her Christian interior design business at https://lintelsandlallies.com. Be sure to click on “About” to watch the funny film clip that led to the business name! She invites you to follow her business at https://www.facebook.com/LINTELSandLALLIES and personally on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/barbara.a.holmes. Consider joining Barbara Ann's online learning and sharing program, Design Magnified, at https://www.facebook.com/groups/designmagnified. It's a free program with 12 videos on how to perform interior design from a Biblical perspective, and it's a community to share your ideas. Cecil Taylor is an author, speaker, podcaster, blogger, and provider of Instant Content to churches and small groups. Please stop down to register for Cecil's free monthly newsletter on the Cecil Taylor Ministries home page. You'll receive a free gift, which changes from time to time, and the newsletter itself will enrich you with practical faith tips, tips for your church, updates on Cecil Taylor Ministries, a devotional, and more. It's the best way to stay in touch with Cecil! You can learn more about Cecil and what he offers at https://www.CecilTaylorMinistries.com, at https://www.facebook.com/ceciltaylorministries , and the Cecil Taylor Ministries YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHP_khu3r77ubl5jvHsf5-w . His parenting advice can be found at https://www.instagram.com/cecil.taylor.ministries and https://www.pinterest.com/CecilTaylorMinistries. Cecil is now a Chicken Soup for the Soul author! He is a contributor to “Tales of Christmas,” a Chicken Soup for the Soul book that was released on Oct. 15. For more free content from Cecil Taylor Ministries, visit https://www.CecilTaylorMinistries.com/free-content. Cecil's books and video studies can be found and purchased through https://www.CecilTaylorMinistries.com. Every video study's first lesson can be seen for free via the Free Content link above by clicking on “Sample Lessons.” Cecil's Instant Content portfolio of books and video studies includes: - NEW: “Unison Parenting: The Comprehensive Guide to Navigating Christian Parenthood with One Voice” (book and eWorkbook available now; book study Leader Guide and first video study available in early 2025). Cecil provides proven parenting strategies with an underlying layer of parenting in unison through all the ages and stages of a child's life. The goal is to help the child become a mature adult who makes good decisions. - “From Comfort Zone to Trust Zone: How Jesus Urges Us to Take Leaps of Faith for His Kingdom” (book, six-week video study, Leader Guide, and Participant's Guide). Cecil explores a dozen Bible studies of Jesus inviting people out of their comfort zones into their trust zones and how to apply these stories to our lives today. You'll uncover your own comfort zones and learn how to deepen your faith by getting uncomfortable for Jesus. - “The Next Thing: A Christian Model for Dealing with Crisis in Personal Life” (book, five-week video study, Leader Guide, and Participant's Guide). “The Next Thing” supplies a four-part model for dealing with crisis. You'll find the model to be flexible and applicable to many crises. - “Live Like You're Loved: Living in the Freedom and Immediacy of God's Love” (book, five-week video study, Leader Guide, and Participant's Guide). “Live Like You're Loved” affirms that God loves you, forgives you, sends you, and walks with you in eternal relationship. You'll learn how to embed each of these scriptural truths into your daily life.

CECIL TAYLOR TRIO “JAZZ ADVANCE” Boston, September 14, 1956Bemsha swing, Charge 'em blues (1)Steve Lacy (sop-1) Cecil Taylor (p) Buell Neidlinger (b) Denis Charles (d) IVO PERELMAN / MATTHEW SHIPP “MAGICAL INCANTATIONS” Brooklyn, NY?, Lanzamiento mayo, 2024Thirteen, Three, Eleven Ivo Perelman (sax), Matthew Shipp (p) ILLEGAL CROWNS “UNCLOSING” New Haven, CT, June 20, 2022Crooked frame, Unclosing, Osmosis crownTaylor Ho Bynum (cnt,flhrn) Benoit Delbecq (p) Mary Halvorson (el-g) Tomas Fujiwara (d) Continue reading Puro Jazz 09 de agosto, 2024 at PuroJazz.

Send us a Text Message.Author Phil Freeman joins hosts David C. Gross and Tom Semioli to discuss the first full-length biography of Avant Garde jazz pioneer Cecil Taylor. Brewing Luminous: The Life & Music of Cecil Taylor with Phil Freeman Playlist

In this episode, we delve into an intriguing conversation with Cecil Taylor, a multiple award-winning author. Cecil founded Cecil Taylor Ministries, which is focused on teaching Christians how to live a seven-day practical faith. His latest book is From Comfort Zone to Trust Zone. Cecil shares his lifelong struggle with the human desire for comfort, a challenge that resonates deeply with many Christians. This episode explores how Jesus calls us to transcend our comfort zones and embrace the profound trust zones where genuine faith and courage flourish. Cecil recounts his personal experiences and the inspiration behind his transformative book, offering insights and practical advice for anyone seeking to take bold steps in their spiritual journey. Whether battling to leave your comfort zone or striving to serve more faithfully, Cecil's wisdom and heartfelt stories will inspire you to trust more deeply and take meaningful risks for Christ's Kingdom.   Podcast Sponsor: The Unconventional Ministry podcast is sponsored by SAT-7 USA, a Middle East and North Africa broadcast media ministry, sponsored this podcast. SAT-7 strengthens the Church, often serving as the only Christian connection for believers facing persecution. Learn more at www.sat7usa.org.  The SAT-7 ministry equips and strengthens the Church. For many believers in the Middle East and North Africa, SAT-7 is their sole connection to other Christians. Their countries are closed to the Gospel, and they face persecution because of their faith. Our Bible teaching, worship, talk shows, and other programs are helping Christians feel connected and grow in their faith. CLICK HERE to learn how you can be involved.

THIS WEEK's BIRDS: Ava Mendoza & Dave Sewelson; Fay Victor & Herbie Nichols SUNG; Herbie Nichols himself, w/ trio; Mal Waldron w. Steve Lacy; Romanian song from Dona Dumitru Siminica, as well as  Dumitru Ridescu & Mituța Ridescu; Balkan music from Ilieve Glogovac Vaska and Ivo Popasov; Anthony Braxton's #296 (w/ quintet;) Algerian cha'abi from Amar el Achab, Cheikh el Hasnaoui, Dahmane el Harrache; Lebanese song from Ziyad Al Rahbani; Liba Villavecchia Trio w. Luis Vicente; Antillean flute from Max Cilla;  Cecil Taylor's Orchestra of Two Continents; Rumbavana (from Cuba) as well as Santeria/ Rumba from Martha Galarraga and others; and of course, much, much more!!!!  Catch the BIRDS live on Friday nights, 9:00pm-MIDNIGHT (EST), in Central New York on WRFI, 88.1 FM Ithaca/ 88.5 FM Odessa;. and WORLDWIDE online via our MUSIC PLAYER at WRFI.ORG. 24/7 via PODBEAN: https://conferenceofthebirds.podbean.com/ via iTUNES: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/conference-of-the-birds-podcast/id478688580 Also available at podomatic, Internet Archive, podtail, iheart Radio, and elsewhere. Always FREE of charge to listen to the radio program and free also to stream, download, and subscribe to the podcast online: PLAYLIST at SPINITRON: https://spinitron.com/WRFI/pl/18952193/Conference-of-the-Birds and via the Conference of the Birds page at https://www.facebook.com/groups/conferenceofthebirds/?ref=bookmarks FIND WRFI on Radio Garden: http://radio.garden/visit/ithaca-ny/aqh8OGBR Contact: confbirds@gmail.com  

Have you ever felt the tug at your heart, urging you to step beyond the known and into a life of deeper faith? Join me, Lyvita and my guest Cecil Taylor as we traverse the path that takes us from the cozy confines of our comfort zones to the exhilarating trust zone where God's plan becomes our compass. Cecil, author of "From Comfort Zone to Trust Zone How Jesus Urges Us to Take Leaps of Faith for His Kingdom," imparts wisdom on how to quiet the anxieties that chain us to predictability and how to confidently say yes to the divine adventures set before us. His profound insights promise to guide you through the mental barriers that keep you from experiencing God's full potential for your life.Resources Mentioned on the Episode and suggested reading & social media handles:CecilTaylorMinistries.comhttps://www.facebook.com/ceciltaylorministriesPractical Faith Academy PodcastFrom Comfort Zone to Trust Zone by Cecil TaylorLyvitabrooks.com/contactThe Me Project Academy Email Newsletter: FREE Calls to Action:·        Sign up for The Me Project Academy Newsletter for resources on decluttering your mind in order to grow in Christ, academy news and new releases of the podcast. ·        Website: www.hangingoutwithjesuspodcast.com·        @themeprojectacademy (Pinterest)·        support@themeprojectacademy.com (for comments)·        YouTube Channel: Hanging Out With Jesus PodcastThanks for listening. I pray this episode was a blessing to you. Leave a comment or rate this episode . Then pass it on. Share this link: https://lyvitabrooks.com/

David First “I define immersive as the first time I realized that there was a bigger universe than my daily life.”  David First is a many-sided composer-musician having played in Dead Cheese, a hippie guitar band in his youth, performed with Cecil Taylor in Carnegie Hall, produced many records of minimalist drone music some of which were released on Phill Niblockʼs XI label, he's played in rowdy bar bands, led the no-wavish band the Notekillers, which had a significant influence on Sonic Youth and he has even conducted a Mummerʼs String Band in various Philly parades. The Village Voice once described him as "a bizarre cross between Hendrix and La Monte Young." He's performed at most of the avant garde's hallowed halls including The Kitchen, Bang On A Can, Central Park Summerstage, The Knitting Factory, Tonic, the Deep Listening Institute, CBGBʼs as well as De Ijsbreker in Amsterdam and many festivals throughout Europe.  Other projects include working with the sonification of the atmospheric phenomena known as the Schumann Resonances and human brainwaves and other esoteric projects such as The Western Enisphere, a drone and micro-pulse acoustic-electric ensemble. Samples Playlist Wave Music III - 60 Clarinets & a Boat • Charlie Morrow Tape Letter to Michigan • David First Dead Cheese Twice Daily live @ Cheese Nation 1971 • David First Harmonic Dance • David First The Distant Softening Spirit Wave Pulse Tape Girder Interference Etude • Wreck, First & Morrow  Live at AmbientChaos • David First  Wave Music V - Conch Chorus and Bagpipe • Charlie Morrow Tell Tale • David First Etude 15 • David First Distant Signals • Charlie Morrow Pulse Piece • David First Blossom Dearie Snippet of her Air • Wreck Mix Spirit Voices • Charlie Morrow Subjects touched upon: drones, bar bands, rock & roll bands, Lamonte Young, Dave's Waves, Sunview Luncheonette Greenpoint, psychedelic revolution, poet Jerome Rothenberg, bending notes, Douglas Kahn, minimalist tendencies, free jazz, world music, Meteor Crater AZ, the heavens, the Kitchen, Phill Niblock, guitar, oscillators, signal generators, Muddy Waters, electronic music, Dennis Sandole, Hermann von Helmholtz, ancient voltaic cells, Harry Partch, Charles Ives, the minor third, blues, Gert Stern, new age, pseudo-science, Schumann resonances, improv, Discman, electrical engineer father, heterodyning, pursuit of magic, Canal Street ... 

I am watching the Taubman Technique videos. Actually, I am absolutely consuming this material. Friends, it's what you are searching for in giving freedom and new levels to your playing.  On those tapes, there is an interesting quote of Dorothy Taubman some of which appears in the publicly available documentary, The Choreography of the Hands. (We have it available on the Golandsky Institute YouTube channel). She says something to the effect that teachers must provide answers and direction to these sincere, talented and earnest people who are studying the piano. It seems that Taubman really wanted to provide answers to students. Like for example, how do you put your finger on the key? Why do you get really tired playing? How do you play scales? How do you move in an arpeggio? The Taubman Approach through the Golandsky Institute and its certified teachers has answers. The Taubman Approach has solutions for jazz pianists. It opens up possibilities never seen before. Today's guest, jazz pianist Adam Klipple, gives us a window into the artistic freedom that this paradigm can give. Listen to the full episode because we talk about a ton of amazing ideas. And - Adam on a fun departure from the conversation, heads to the piano and plays! Wow. “The body is capable of fulfilling all pianistic demands without a violation of its nature if the most efficient ways are used; pain, insecurity, and lack of technical control are symptoms of incoordination rather than a lack of practice, intelligence, or talent."Dorothy TaubmanAdam Klipple is a student of John BloomfieldVisit Adam Klipple's website at: https://adamklipple.com/Adam Klipple, who has been described as "a standout pianist who has gone to school on McCoy Tyner and Cecil Taylor and earned his degree," plays piano, Hammond organ, sampler, and a variety of vintage keyboards. He currently records and performs with Veronica Swift, and is a member of the legendary jazz rock band Blood, Sweat & Tears.Adam has recorded and performed onstage with the likes of Ghostface Killah, Lauryn Hill, Graham Haynes, the Sun Ra Arkestra, Craig Harris, Joe Bowie's Defunkt, Sekou Sundiata, Marc Ribot, John Medeski, Kurt Rosenwinkle, Carla Cook, Dave Fiuczynski, David Gilmore, Josh Roseman, Peter Apfelbaum, Jay Rodriguez, Groove Collective, and Smokey Robinson. He has appeared at renowned venues including the Blue Note, Iridium, the Jazz Standard, Blues Alley, and the Knitting Factory, and at jazz festivals around the world.Also a composer and arranger, Adam has earned grants from Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, Arts International, Meet the Composer, and the U.S. Department of State, enabling him to tour and teach master classes in southeast Asia, the Pacific Rim, Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Central Asia, and the Caucasus.The Golandsky Institute's mission is to provide cutting-edge instruction to pianists based on the groundbreaking work of Dorothy Taubman. This knowledge can help them overcome technical and musical challenges, cure and prevent playing-related injuries, and lead them to achieve their highest level of artistic excellence.Please visit our website at: www.golandskyinstitute.org.

Welcome back to the Burning Ambulance Podcast! To find out about upcoming episodes, as well as all things Burning Ambulance, sign up for our free weekly newsletter.It's been a long time since I've done one of these. In fact, the last episode was released in December of 2022. I talked then to film critic Walter Chaw about his book on the work of director Walter Hill. Since then, a lot's been going on. Most notably, I wrote a book of my own, In The Brewing Luminous: The Life And Music Of Cecil Taylor, which will be released this year. It's the first full-length biography and critical analysis of Taylor, who is not only a hugely important jazz musician – along with Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler and others, he was one of the pioneers of free jazz and really pushed the music forward in undeniable ways – but is also, I believe and argue in the book, a brilliant and under-recognized American composer whose work spans a much broader range than many people realize.Ethan Iverson is also a really interesting American composer. You could be reductive about it and call him a synthesist of old and new pop and jazz styles, but he has a strong and recognizable voice that becomes easy to hear the more of his music you listen to. There are chords and types of melodies that he favors that set him apart from his peers, and he's got a real attraction to big hooks, which manifested in the Bad Plus's work in a number of ways and shows up in his solo work too. The Bad Plus developed a reputation for piano trio covers of pop songs that people often seemed to think were ironic, but were in fact performed from a perspective of real love for compositional form. A great tune is a great tune. And it's worth remembering that they also recorded Igor Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, which is an avant-garde landmark but also has some really kick-ass and highly memorable melodies. After all, it was originally written for dancers.Ethan's new album, Technically Acceptable, is his second record for Blue Note and he's doing some things on it that he's never done before. First of all, he's playing with two different rhythm sections that are made up of musicians more or less his own age, even younger than himself. Until now, he's tended to record with older players, legends like Jack DeJohnette, Albert "Tootie" Heath, Billy Hart, Paul Motian, Ron Carter, etc. This is his first time post-Bad Plus making an album entirely with musicians of his own generation. Also, it includes a solo piano sonata – three movements, fifteen minutes, a through composed classical piece that still manages to fit under the umbrella of jazz in a George Gershwin meets Fats Waller kind of way. This album is a real showcase for him as a composer.Ethan and I talk about Cecil Taylor in the interview you're about to hear. We also talk about his work and how it's evolved over the years, the economics of surviving as a jazz musician in the 21st century, and we talk about other piano players of his generation like Jason Moran, Aaron Diehl, Aaron Parks, Jeb Patton, and Sullivan Fortner. We talk about diving into the music's history, and about how there's as much to learn and draw from in the music of the 1920s and 1930s as in the music of the 1960s and afterward, and about the increasing movement toward composition in current jazz. This is his second time on the podcast – a couple of years ago, I interviewed him alongside Mark Turner, because they'd made a duo album together. But this time it's a one on one conversation, and I hope you'll find it as interesting as I did.

In this episode of MFM Speaks Out, Dawoud Kringle comes out of retirement to present a 2023 retrospective. We will share some of the content we brought to you in 2023, and  enjoy a few other surprises as well.   Our guest for the January episode was Haana.  Haana is a violinist, vocalist, electronic music artist, visual performer, and entirely self-contained as a one-woman orchestra. She played with Kanye West, and Alvin Ailey, as well as festivals such as Joshua Tree Festival and Coachella and others in the US, Canada, UAE, and Australia, Barack Obama's inaugural ball, and at Michael Jordan's wedding. Haana has endorsement deals with Ableton, Native Instruments, Even Headphones (manufactured by Blue Microphones), and Realist Violins. She appeared in ads for Intel, Harvey Nichols, Nike, Ferrari, and Apple Computers. In addition, she has experience as a film composer and does artist mentorship/marketing, branding, and production consultation.  In February, MFM board member and co-producer of this very podcast Adam Reifsteck joined us for a very fascinating discussion. Adam is a New York-based composer, electronic music artist, producer, entrepreneur, and music activist. He writes for small ensembles, produces electronic music, and performs improvised group compositions on Wi-Fi-connected laptops. He has collaborated with string quartets, university choirs, and visual and electronic artists. His approach to composition includes elements of improvisation. He is a recipient of grants from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the Irving S. Gilmore Foundation, and the Kalamazoo (MI) Community Foundation. His music has been performed by the Attacca Quartet, Amernet String Quartet, Cadillac Moon Ensemble, Duquesne University Chamber Singers, Flutronix, Gaudete Brass Quintet, Mana Saxophone Quartet, Western Michigan University Chorale, and many other ensembles. Adam is also an active recording engineer and producer whose studio alias SONIC FEAR has become synonymous with lush, genre-bending sounds—from dance floor-ready tracks to downtempo meditations. He is the founder and CEO of Teknofonic Recordings, an independent record label and artist development platform providing electronic musicians with learning resources, networking opportunities, and career support. Adam holds a master's of music degree in composition from Western Michigan University and a bachelor's of music in music technology from Duquesne University. He is a member of Broadcast Music Inc., the Society of Composers and Lyricists, the Recording Academy, the Audio Engineering Society, and Musicians for Musicians. Our March episode was a landmark. We interviewed Keyna Wilkins, the first MFM member from Australia. Wilkins holds a Master of Music Composition at Sydney Conservatorium, studied composition, classical and jazz piano, and classical flute with several prestigious instructors, and intuitive conceptual improvisation with Tibetan Buddhist musician Tenzin Cheogyal. holds an MA in Flute Performance at Bristol University (UK) in 2008. She is known as a soloist and leader of cutting-edge ensembles and has written over 60 compositions, including 4 major orchestral works. Her works have been commissioned and/or performed by ensembles such as The Metropolitan Orchestra, Syzygy Ensemble, Elysian Fields, The Sydney Bach Society, and many others. She has released 9 albums of original music on all streaming platforms including 4 solo albums. Wilkins is also an Associate Artist with the Australian Music Centre and has five tunes in the Australian Jazz Realbook. She also writes music for films and theatre including the short film "Remote Access" which won Best Short Film at the Imagine This International Film Festival in New York in 2019 and her works are featured on ABC, Triple J, Fine Music FM, Cambridge Radio, SOAS London and many more. Her music is published by Wirripeng and she is a member of Musicians for Musicians. MFM member Sylvian Leroux was our guest in April. Sylvian is a flutist, saxophonist, guitarist, composer, arranger, bandleader, educator, inventor, and prominent member of Musicians for Musicians.  Sylvain Leroux grew up in Montreal where he studied classical flute at Vincent d'Indy; and improvisation and composition in New York at the Creative Music Studio where he attended classes by luminaries Don Cherry, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Karl Berger, Cecil Taylor, and many others. A pioneer of African/Jazz collaborations, Sylvain is a foremost player of the Fula flute, the traditional flute from Guinea. He was selected as “Rising Flute Star” by the Downbeat Magazine Critics' Poll for many years, achieving the #2 spot in 2019. As a bandleader, he brought traditional West African music to Zankel Hall with his Fula Flute Ensemble and held the fort for more than a decade at New York City's Zinc Bar with his African Jazz group “Source”. His 2002 CD “Fula Flute" achieved cult status, and stimulated a worldwide interest in the instrument. His 2012 album “Quatuor Creole” was hailed as “a perfect contemporary music release.” He curated New York's “Griot Summits” which featured performances by 25 West African griots from five countries. He has performed and recorded with Emeline Michel, Adam Rudolph, Karl Berger, Hassan Hakmoun, Billy Martin, and many West African stars. As a maker and seller of Fula flutes around the world, he invented and patented the Qromatica, a Fula flute capable of chromatic functionality. This led him to initiate "L'ecole Fula Flute", a music literacy project that graduated many excellent young flutists who are now re-energizing an endangered flute tradition. Our May 2023 episode featured Mark Chimples, a.k.a. Mark C. Mark is the guitarist and synthesizer player with Live Skull. Formed in 1982, Live Skull is considered by many aficionados to be the quintessential New York City noise band. Rising concurrently with bands such as Sonic Youth and Swans, Live Skull helped define the post-No Wave underground "noise rock" in the 1980s music scene in New York City. Over the following decades, Live Skull released five albums and three EPs with a rotating cast of 11 members, all of whom added new ideas to the group's evolving sound. Themes of struggle and chaos permeated and inspired their music. Their constant progression inspired New York Times critic Robert Palmer to call them “as challenging, as spiritually corrosive, and ultimately as transcendent as Albert Ayler's mid-'60s free-jazz or the implacable drone-dance of the early Velvet Underground. It's one of the essential sounds of our time." Music on this episode:Haana - Bison RougeAdam Reifsteck / Sonic Fear - AuroraKeyna Wilkins - Floating in SpaceSylvain Leroux - In Walked BudLive Skull - Party ZeroSpaghetti Eastern - Jungle BlueArturo O'Farrill and the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra - Amidst the Fire and WhirlwindDave Liebman - Journey Around Truth  SoSaLa - Dadada Dadada DaaDawoud Kringle - Keep Trying CreditsProducer and host: Dawoud KringlePublisher: Musicians For Musicians (MFM), Inc. and Sohrab Saadat LadjvardiTechnical support: Adam ReifsteckLinksBe sure to follow and tag MFM on Facebook ([https://www.facebook.com/M4M.org/] and Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/mfm_association/).

THE MAHAVISHNU PROJECT (Neil Alexander/Brian Mooney/Robbie Mangano/GB) is on tour playing the complete BIRDS OF FIRE by the Mahavishnu Orchestra, and in this episode of The ProgCast we meet up to discuss our history with the incredible music of John McLaughlin, Jan Hammer, Billy Cobham, Jerry Goodman, and Rick Laird. We talk about the joys and challenges of interpreting this classic jazz-rock unit's richly rhythmic, melodic and harmonic material and what it means for us as a jazz-rock fusion repertory ensemble. https://www.bendianmusic.com BONUS EPISODES AVAILABLE ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/theprogcast Study Drums/Composition/Music with Gregg: https://www.bendianmusic.com GREGG BENDIAN is a percussionist/composer/producer/educator/podcaster from Teaneck, New Jersey. During his wide-ranging career he has toured internationally and recorded with Todd Rundgren, Jan Hammer, The Mahavishnu Project, Keneally-Bendian-Lunn, The Musical Box, John Zorn, Derek Bailey, Nels Cline, Cecil Taylor, Pat Metheny, Ornette Coleman and Zoot Horn Rollo. On the academic front, Gregg develops and teaches courses in studio production aesthetics, music history, and composing/arranging at William Paterson University of New Jersey. For the Yale Oral History of American Music, he has contributed over 100 expansive interviews with major figures including Wayne Shorter, Sonny Rollins, Quincy Jones, Carla Bley and Steve Reich. Bendian is archivist/producer for the Bottom LIne Archive of historic concerts. Recorded over 30 years at the Greenwich Village venue, the series features discs by Jack Bruce with Billy Cobham, The Brecker Bros, Lou Reed/Kris Kristofferson, Pete Seeger/Roger McGuinn, and Doc Watson. An accomplished percussionist and a composer of over 200 works, he has created a body of innovative music for jazz, rock, percussion (solo and ensemble) and mixed chamber groups, which include his Interzone and Trio Pianissimo bands. Gregg's music is published by Iamuziks (ASCAP). Begun in August of 2020, The ProgCast explores the creative process and musical history of a diverse assortment of cutting edge artists. You can also find us on: SPOTIFY: https://open.spotify.com/show/0x9bzb0... APPLE PODCASTS: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast... https://www.bendianmusic.comhttps://open.spotify.com/artist/0HBmV... https://www.bottomlinearchive.comhttps://guides.library.yale.edu/oham/... https://www.mahavishnuproject.comhttps://www.wpunj.edu/coac/department...

(Almost) falling into the water, post-dumb-house-party-bike-rides, wildness and mastery. The musician and member of Xiu Xiu discusses three important albums.Hyunhye's picks:Chris Watson – El Tren FantasmaPJ Harvey – To Bring You My LoveCecil Taylor – Solo (1973)Hyunhye's new album, Eel, is out now on Room40. Check out her website and Instagram.Donate to Crucial Listening on Ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/cruciallistening

Do you struggle with internal insecurity and a constant feeling of being unloved? Join me, Lyvita Brooks, in a heartfelt conversation with Cecil Taylor, author of "Live Like You're Loved: Fully Accepting That You Are Loved, Forgiven, Sent and Eternal." Together, we dive into the importance of overcoming these insecurities and embracing our value and worth as God's beloved children. Learn how to move from head knowledge to heart knowledge and develop a mindset and lifestyle that truly reflects the love you receive in Christ Jesus.Cecil shares practical daily steps for living like we're loved, forgiven, and sent with purpose, as well as the role of the Bible and the Holy Spirit in guiding us through this journey.   So take a leap of faith and tune in to this episode that will surely fill your heart with love and inspiration.Resources Mentioned on the Episode and suggested reading & social media handles:·        Cecil Taylor Ministries – www.ceciltaylorministries.com·        The Next Thing book by Cecil Taylor·        Live Like You Are Loved book by Cecil Taylor·        CIPA·        Christianpublishers.net Calls to Action:·        Sign up for The Me Project Academy Newsletter for resources on developing disciplines to help you grow in Christ, prayer and new releases of the podcast. ·        Website: www.hangingoutwithjesuspodcast.com·        @hangingoutwithjesuspodcast (Instagram)·        @themeprojectacademy (Pinterest)·        support@themeprojectacademy.com (for comments)·        www.goodreads.com/lyvitabrooksThanks for listening. I pray this episode was a blessing to you. Leave a comment or rate this episode . Check us out on Instagram and Pinterest.Thanks for listening. I pray this episode was a blessing to you. Leave a comment or rate this episode . Check us out on Instagram and Pinterest.

Cecil Taylor Remembrance

This week on Echoes of Indiana Avenue we'll celebrate the July birthday of Charles Tyler – an important avant-garde saxophonist known for his work in free jazz music. Tyler spent much of his childhood in Indianapolis. He attended Crispus Attucks High School, and studied music with the Indianapolis Junior Symphony Orchestra. During his historic career, Tyler performed with many of the greatest legends in jazz – including Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor, Wes Montgomery, Albert Ayler, Billy Bang, Steve Lacy, and others. We'll share an hour of classic music from Charles Tyler and speak with his cousin Gregg Bacon, who calls Tyler a mentor and inspiration.

Navigating life's crises can feel overwhelming, but what if there was a way to face these challenges with renewed faith and mental resilience? In our recent episode of Hanging Out with Jesus Podcast, I had the pleasure of chatting with Cecil Taylor, author of The Next Thing and Live Like Your Loved, who shared his personal insights on maintaining mental health and relying on faith during tough times.Cecil and I dove into the different types of crises we may face, such as health, financial, and relationship issues, and explored how God's power can work through these situations to bring about positive outcomes. We also discussed the importance of renewing our minds in Christ, and Cecil shared his principles of trust, simplification, rest, and grieving as essential tools for navigating life's storms. His wisdom and guidance offer a beacon of hope for those who may be struggling.Don't miss this powerful conversation as we uncover the role of faith in overcoming life's challenges and maintaining mental health in a collapsing culture. Be sure to subscribe to Hanging Out with Jesus Podcast for more inspiring discussions and valuable resources to support your spiritual journey.Resources Mentioned on the Episode and suggested reading & social media handles:·        Cecil Taylor Ministries – www.ceciltaylorministries.com·        The Next Thing book by Cecil Taylor·        Live Like You Are Loved book by Cecil Taylor·        CIPA·        Christianpublishers.net Calls to Action:·        Sign up for The Me Project Academy Newsletter for resources on developing disciplines to help you grow in Christ, prayer and new releases of the podcast. ·        Website: www.hangingoutwithjesuspodcast.com·        @hangingoutwithjesuspodcast (Instagram)·        @themeprojectacademy (Pinterest)·        support@themeprojectacademy.com (for comments)·        www.goodreads.com/lyvitabrooksThanks for listening. I pray this episode was a blessing to you. Leave a comment or rate this episode . Check us out on Instagram and Pinterest.

RICHARD SINCLAIR, bassist, guitarist, vocalist, is one of the founding fathers of Canterbury prog. What a pleasure to speak with him on The ProgCast about his time with Caravan, Hatfield & The North, Camel and of course, his solo music as well. https://richardsinclairsongs.bandcamp.comhttps://www.bendianmusic.comhttps://www.timmotzer.com BONUS EPISODES AVAILABLE ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/theprogcast Study Drums/Composition/Music with Gregg: https://www.bendianmusic.com GREGG BENDIAN is a percussionist/composer/producer/educator/podcaster from Teaneck, New Jersey. During his wide-ranging career he has toured internationally and recorded with Todd Rundgren, Jan Hammer, The Mahavishnu Project, Keneally-Bendian-Lunn, The Musical Box, John Zorn, Derek Bailey, Nels Cline, Cecil Taylor, Pat Metheny, Ornette Coleman and Zoot Horn Rollo. On the academic front, Gregg develops and teaches courses in studio production aesthetics, music history, and composing/arranging at William Paterson University of New Jersey. For the Yale Oral History of American Music, he has contributed over 100 expansive interviews with major figures including Wayne Shorter, Sonny Rollins, Quincy Jones, Carla Bley and Steve Reich. Bendian is archivist/producer for the Bottom LIne Archive of historic concerts. Recorded over 30 years at the Greenwich Village venue, the series features discs by Jack Bruce with Billy Cobham, The Brecker Bros, Lou Reed/Kris Kristofferson, Pete Seeger/Roger McGuinn, and Doc Watson. An accomplished percussionist and a composer of over 200 works, he has created a body of innovative music for jazz, rock, percussion (solo and ensemble) and mixed chamber groups, which include his Interzone and Trio Pianissimo bands. Gregg's music is published by Iamuziks (ASCAP). Begun in August of 2020, The ProgCast explores the creative process and musical history of a diverse assortment of cutting edge artists. You can also find us on: SPOTIFY: https://open.spotify.com/show/0x9bzb0... APPLE PODCASTS: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast... www.greggbendian.com https://open.spotify.com/artist/0HBmV... https://www.bottomlinearchive.comhttps://guides.library.yale.edu/oham/... https://www.mahavishnuproject.comhttps://www.wpunj.edu/coac/department...

Bassist William Parker has spent 50 years at the heart of jazz, as a collaborator with many of the music's greats and as a composer and bandleader in his own right. In this episode, recorded live at the Big Ears Festival in 2023, he discusses how Duke Ellington, Don Cherry and Cecil Taylor shaped his work. Essential Tremors is produced by Matt Byars and Lee Gardner and distributed by Your Public Studios.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode 165 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Dark Stat” and the career of the Grateful Dead. This is a long one, even longer than the previous episode, but don't worry, that won't be the norm. There's a reason these two were much longer than average. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-minute bonus episode available, on "Codine" by the Charlatans. Errata I mispronounce Brent Mydland's name as Myland a couple of times, and in the introduction I say "Touch of Grey" came out in 1988 -- I later, correctly, say 1987. (I seem to have had a real problem with dates in the intro -- I also originally talked about "Blue Suede Shoes" being in 1954 before fixing it in the edit to be 1956) Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by the Grateful Dead, and Grayfolded runs to two hours. I referred to a lot of books for this episode, partly because almost everything about the Grateful Dead is written from a fannish perspective that already assumes background knowledge, rather than to provide that background knowledge. Of the various books I used, Dennis McNally's biography of the band and This Is All a Dream We Dreamed: An Oral History of the Grateful Dead by Blair Jackson and David Gans are probably most useful for the casually interested. Other books on the Dead I used included McNally's Jerry on Jerry, a collection of interviews with Garcia; Deal, Bill Kreutzmann's autobiography; The Grateful Dead FAQ by Tony Sclafani; So Many Roads by David Browne; Deadology by Howard F. Weiner; Fare Thee Well by Joel Selvin and Pamela Turley; and Skeleton Key: A Dictionary for Deadheads by David Shenk and Steve Silberman. Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is the classic account of the Pranksters, though not always reliable. I reference Slaughterhouse Five a lot. As well as the novel itself, which everyone should read, I also read this rather excellent graphic novel adaptation, and The Writer's Crusade, a book about the writing of the novel. I also reference Ted Sturgeon's More Than Human. For background on the scene around Astounding Science Fiction which included Sturgeon, John W. Campbell, L. Ron Hubbard, and many other science fiction writers, I recommend Alec Nevala-Lee's Astounding. 1,000 True Fans can be read online, as can the essay on the Californian ideology, and John Perry Barlow's "Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace". The best collection of Grateful Dead material is the box set The Golden Road, which contains all the albums released in Pigpen's lifetime along with a lot of bonus material, but which appears currently out of print. Live/Dead contains both the live version of "Dark Star" which made it well known and, as a CD bonus track, the original single version. And archive.org has more live recordings of the group than you can possibly ever listen to. Grayfolded can be bought from John Oswald's Bandcamp Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript [Excerpt: Tuning from "Grayfolded", under the warnings Before we begin -- as we're tuning up, as it were, I should mention that this episode contains discussions of alcoholism, drug addiction, racism, nonconsensual drugging of other people, and deaths from drug abuse, suicide, and car accidents. As always, I try to deal with these subjects as carefully as possible, but if you find any of those things upsetting you may wish to read the transcript rather than listen to this episode, or skip it altogether. Also, I should note that the members of the Grateful Dead were much freer with their use of swearing in interviews than any other band we've covered so far, and that makes using quotes from them rather more difficult than with other bands, given the limitations of the rules imposed to stop the podcast being marked as adult. If I quote anything with a word I can't use here, I'll give a brief pause in the audio, and in the transcript I'll have the word in square brackets. [tuning ends] All this happened, more or less. In 1910, T. S. Eliot started work on "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", which at the time was deemed barely poetry, with one reviewer imagining Eliot saying "I'll just put down the first thing that comes into my head, and call it 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.'" It is now considered one of the great classics of modernist literature. In 1969, Kurt Vonnegut wrote "Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death", a book in which the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, comes unstuck in time, and starts living a nonlinear life, hopping around between times reliving his experiences in the Second World War, and future experiences up to 1976 after being kidnapped by beings from the planet Tralfamadore. Or perhaps he has flashbacks and hallucinations after having a breakdown from PTSD. It is now considered one of the great classics of modernist literature or of science fiction, depending on how you look at it. In 1953, Theodore Sturgeon wrote More Than Human. It is now considered one of the great classics of science fiction. In 1950, L. Ron Hubbard wrote Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health. It is now considered either a bad piece of science fiction or one of the great revelatory works of religious history, depending on how you look at it. In 1994, 1995, and 1996 the composer John Oswald released, first as two individual CDs and then as a double-CD, an album called Grayfolded, which the composer says in the liner notes he thinks of as existing in Tralfamadorian time. The Tralfamadorians in Vonnegut's novels don't see time as a linear thing with a beginning and end, but as a continuum that they can move between at will. When someone dies, they just think that at this particular point in time they're not doing so good, but at other points in time they're fine, so why focus on the bad time? In the book, when told of someone dying, the Tralfamadorians just say "so it goes". In between the first CD's release and the release of the double-CD version, Jerry Garcia died. From August 1942 through August 1995, Jerry Garcia was alive. So it goes. Shall we go, you and I? [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Dark Star (Omni 3/30/94)"] "One principle has become clear. Since motives are so frequently found in combination, it is essential that the complex types be analyzed and arranged, with an eye kept single nevertheless to the master-theme under discussion. Collectors, both primary and subsidiary, have done such valiant service that the treasures at our command are amply sufficient for such studies, so extensive, indeed, that the task of going through them thoroughly has become too great for the unassisted student. It cannot be too strongly urged that a single theme in its various types and compounds must be made predominant in any useful comparative study. This is true when the sources and analogues of any literary work are treated; it is even truer when the bare motive is discussed. The Grateful Dead furnishes an apt illustration of the necessity of such handling. It appears in a variety of different combinations, almost never alone. Indeed, it is so widespread a tale, and its combinations are so various, that there is the utmost difficulty in determining just what may properly be regarded the original kernel of it, the simple theme to which other motives were joined. Various opinions, as we shall see, have been held with reference to this matter, most of them justified perhaps by the materials in the hands of the scholars holding them, but none quite adequate in view of later evidence." That's a quote from The Grateful Dead: The History of a Folk Story, by Gordon Hall Gerould, published in 1908. Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse-Five opens with a chapter about the process of writing the novel itself, and how difficult it was. He says "I would hate to tell you what this lousy little book cost me in money and anxiety and time. When I got home from the Second World War twenty-three years ago, I thought it would be easy for me to write about the destruction of Dresden, since all I would have to do would be to report what I had seen. And I thought, too, that it would be a masterpiece or at least make me a lot of money, since the subject was so big." This is an episode several of my listeners have been looking forward to, but it's one I've been dreading writing, because this is an episode -- I think the only one in the series -- where the format of the podcast simply *will not* work. Were the Grateful Dead not such an important band, I would skip this episode altogether, but they're a band that simply can't be ignored, and that's a real problem here. Because my intent, always, with this podcast, is to present the recordings of the artists in question, put them in context, and explain why they were important, what their music meant to its listeners. To put, as far as is possible, the positive case for why the music mattered *in the context of its time*. Not why it matters now, or why it matters to me, but why it matters *in its historical context*. Whether I like the music or not isn't the point. Whether it stands up now isn't the point. I play the music, explain what it was they were doing, why they were doing it, what people saw in it. If I do my job well, you come away listening to "Blue Suede Shoes" the way people heard it in 1956, or "Good Vibrations" the way people heard it in 1966, and understanding why people were so impressed by those records. That is simply *not possible* for the Grateful Dead. I can present a case for them as musicians, and hope to do so. I can explain the appeal as best I understand it, and talk about things I like in their music, and things I've noticed. But what I can't do is present their recordings the way they were received in the sixties and explain why they were popular. Because every other act I have covered or will cover in this podcast has been a *recording* act, and their success was based on records. They may also have been exceptional live performers, but James Brown or Ike and Tina Turner are remembered for great *records*, like "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" or "River Deep, Mountain High". Their great moments were captured on vinyl, to be listened back to, and susceptible of analysis. That is not the case for the Grateful Dead, and what is worse *they explicitly said, publicly, on multiple occasions* that it is not possible for me to understand their art, and thus that it is not possible for me to explain it. The Grateful Dead did make studio records, some of them very good. But they always said, consistently, over a thirty year period, that their records didn't capture what they did, and that the only way -- the *only* way, they were very clear about this -- that one could actually understand and appreciate their music, was to see them live, and furthermore to see them live while on psychedelic drugs. [Excerpt: Grateful Dead crowd noise] I never saw the Grateful Dead live -- their last UK performance was a couple of years before I went to my first ever gig -- and I have never taken a psychedelic substance. So by the Grateful Dead's own criteria, it is literally impossible for me to understand or explain their music the way that it should be understood or explained. In a way I'm in a similar position to the one I was in with La Monte Young in the last episode, whose music it's mostly impossible to experience without being in his presence. This is one reason of several why I placed these two episodes back to back. Of course, there is a difference between Young and the Grateful Dead. The Grateful Dead allowed -- even encouraged -- the recording of their live performances. There are literally thousands of concert recordings in circulation, many of them of professional quality. I have listened to many of those, and I can hear what they were doing. I can tell you what *I* think is interesting about their music, and about their musicianship. And I think I can build up a good case for why they were important, and why they're interesting, and why those recordings are worth listening to. And I can certainly explain the cultural phenomenon that was the Grateful Dead. But just know that while I may have found *a* point, *an* explanation for why the Grateful Dead were important, by the band's own lights and those of their fans, no matter how good a job I do in this episode, I *cannot* get it right. And that is, in itself, enough of a reason for this episode to exist, and for me to try, even harder than I normally do, to get it right *anyway*. Because no matter how well I do my job this episode will stand as an example of why this series is called "*A* History", not *the* history. Because parts of the past are ephemeral. There are things about which it's true to say "You had to be there". I cannot know what it was like to have been an American the day Kennedy was shot, I cannot know what it was like to be alive when a man walked on the Moon. Those are things nobody my age or younger can ever experience. And since August the ninth, 1995, the experience of hearing the Grateful Dead's music the way they wanted it heard has been in that category. And that is by design. Jerry Garcia once said "if you work really hard as an artist, you may be able to build something they can't tear down, you know, after you're gone... What I want to do is I want it here. I want it now, in this lifetime. I want what I enjoy to last as long as I do and not last any longer. You know, I don't want something that ends up being as much a nuisance as it is a work of art, you know?" And there's another difficulty. There are only two points in time where it makes sense to do a podcast episode on the Grateful Dead -- late 1967 and early 1968, when the San Francisco scene they were part of was at its most culturally relevant, and 1988 when they had their only top ten hit and gained their largest audience. I can't realistically leave them out of the story until 1988, so it has to be 1968. But the songs they are most remembered for are those they wrote between 1970 and 1972, and those songs are influenced by artists and events we haven't yet covered in the podcast, who will be getting their own episodes in the future. I can't explain those things in this episode, because they need whole episodes of their own. I can't not explain them without leaving out important context for the Grateful Dead. So the best I can do is treat the story I'm telling as if it were in Tralfamadorian time. All of it's happening all at once, and some of it is happening in different episodes that haven't been recorded yet. The podcast as a whole travels linearly from 1938 through to 1999, but this episode is happening in 1968 and 1972 and 1988 and 1995 and other times, all at once. Sometimes I'll talk about things as if you're already familiar with them, but they haven't happened yet in the story. Feel free to come unstuck in time and revisit this time after episode 167, and 172, and 176, and 192, and experience it again. So this has to be an experimental episode. It may well be an experiment that you think fails. If so, the next episode is likely to be far more to your taste, and much shorter than this or the last episode, two episodes that between them have to create a scaffolding on which will hang much of the rest of this podcast's narrative. I've finished my Grateful Dead script now. The next one I write is going to be fun: [Excerpt: Grateful Dead, "Dark Star"] Infrastructure means everything. How we get from place to place, how we transport goods, information, and ourselves, makes a big difference in how society is structured, and in the music we hear. For many centuries, the prime means of long-distance transport was by water -- sailing ships on the ocean, canal boats and steamboats for inland navigation -- and so folk songs talked about the ship as both means of escape, means of making a living, and in some senses as a trap. You'd go out to sea for adventure, or to escape your problems, but you'd find that the sea itself brought its own problems. Because of this we have a long, long tradition of sea shanties which are known throughout the world: [Excerpt: A. L. Lloyd, "Off to Sea Once More"] But in the nineteenth century, the railway was invented and, at least as far as travel within a landmass goes, it replaced the steamboat in the popular imaginary. Now the railway was how you got from place to place, and how you moved freight from one place to another. The railway brought freedom, and was an opportunity for outlaws, whether train robbers or a romanticised version of the hobo hopping onto a freight train and making his way to new lands and new opportunity. It was the train that brought soldiers home from wars, and the train that allowed the Great Migration of Black people from the South to the industrial North. There would still be songs about the riverboats, about how ol' man river keeps rolling along and about the big river Johnny Cash sang about, but increasingly they would be songs of the past, not the present. The train quickly replaced the steamboat in the iconography of what we now think of as roots music -- blues, country, folk, and early jazz music. Sometimes this was very literal. Furry Lewis' "Kassie Jones" -- about a legendary train driver who would break the rules to make sure his train made the station on time, but who ended up sacrificing his own life to save his passengers in a train crash -- is based on "Alabamy Bound", which as we heard in the episode on "Stagger Lee", was about steamboats: [Excerpt: Furry Lewis, "Kassie Jones"] In the early episodes of this podcast we heard many, many, songs about the railway. Louis Jordan saying "take me right back to the track, Jack", Rosetta Tharpe singing about how "this train don't carry no gamblers", the trickster freight train driver driving on the "Rock Island Line", the mystery train sixteen coaches long, the train that kept-a-rollin' all night long, the Midnight Special which the prisoners wished would shine its ever-loving light on them, and the train coming past Folsom Prison whose whistle makes Johnny Cash hang his head and cry. But by the 1960s, that kind of song had started to dry up. It would happen on occasion -- "People Get Ready" by the Impressions is the most obvious example of the train metaphor in an important sixties record -- but by the late sixties the train was no longer a symbol of freedom but of the past. In 1969 Harry Nilsson sang about how "Nobody Cares About the Railroads Any More", and in 1968 the Kinks sang about "The Last of the Steam-Powered Trains". When in 1968 Merle Haggard sang about a freight train, it was as a memory, of a child with hopes that ended up thwarted by reality and his own nature: [Excerpt: Merle Haggard, "Mama Tried"] And the reason for this was that there had been another shift, a shift that had started in the forties and accelerated in the late fifties but had taken a little time to ripple through the culture. Now the train had been replaced in the popular imaginary by motorised transport. Instead of hopping on a train without paying, if you had no money in your pocket you'd have to hitch-hike all the way. Freedom now meant individuality. The ultimate in freedom was the biker -- the Hell's Angels who could go anywhere, unburdened by anything -- and instead of goods being moved by freight train, increasingly they were being moved by truck drivers. By the mid-seventies, truck drivers took a central place in American life, and the most romantic way to live life was to live it on the road. On The Road was also the title of a 1957 novel by Jack Kerouac, which was one of the first major signs of this cultural shift in America. Kerouac was writing about events in the late forties and early fifties, but his book was also a precursor of the sixties counterculture. He wrote the book on one continuous sheet of paper, as a stream of consciousness. Kerouac died in 1969 of an internal haemmorage brought on by too much alcohol consumption. So it goes. But the big key to this cultural shift was caused by the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, a massive infrastructure spending bill that led to the construction of the modern American Interstate Highway system. This accelerated a program that had already started, of building much bigger, safer, faster roads. It also, as anyone who has read Robert Caro's The Power Broker knows, reinforced segregation and white flight. It did this both by making commuting into major cities from the suburbs easier -- thus allowing white people with more money to move further away from the cities and still work there -- and by bulldozing community spaces where Black people lived. More than a million people lost their homes and were forcibly moved, and orders of magnitude more lost their communities' parks and green spaces. And both as a result of deliberate actions and unconscious bigotry, the bulk of those affected were Black people -- who often found themselves, if they weren't forced to move, on one side of a ten-lane highway where the park used to be, with white people on the other side of the highway. The Federal-Aid Highway Act gave even more power to the unaccountable central planners like Robert Moses, the urban planner in New York who managed to become arguably the most powerful man in the city without ever getting elected, partly by slowly compromising away his early progressive ideals in the service of gaining more power. Of course, not every new highway was built through areas where poor Black people lived. Some were planned to go through richer areas for white people, just because you can't completely do away with geographical realities. For example one was planned to be built through part of San Francisco, a rich, white part. But the people who owned properties in that area had enough political power and clout to fight the development, and after nearly a decade of fighting it, the development was called off in late 1966. But over that time, many of the owners of the impressive buildings in the area had moved out, and they had no incentive to improve or maintain their properties while they were under threat of demolition, so many of them were rented out very cheaply. And when the beat community that Kerouac wrote about, many of whom had settled in San Francisco, grew too large and notorious for the area of the city they were in, North Beach, many of them moved to these cheap homes in a previously-exclusive area. The area known as Haight-Ashbury. [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Grayfolded"] Stories all have their starts, even stories told in Tralfamadorian time, although sometimes those starts are shrouded in legend. For example, the story of Scientology's start has been told many times, with different people claiming to have heard L. Ron Hubbard talk about how writing was a mug's game, and if you wanted to make real money, you needed to get followers, start a religion. Either he said this over and over and over again, to many different science fiction writers, or most science fiction writers of his generation were liars. Of course, the definition of a writer is someone who tells lies for money, so who knows? One of the more plausible accounts of him saying that is given by Theodore Sturgeon. Sturgeon's account is more believable than most, because Sturgeon went on to be a supporter of Dianetics, the "new science" that Hubbard turned into his religion, for decades, even while telling the story. The story of the Grateful Dead probably starts as it ends, with Jerry Garcia. There are three things that everyone writing about the Dead says about Garcia's childhood, so we might as well say them here too. The first is that he was named by a music-loving father after Jerome Kern, the songwriter responsible for songs like "Ol' Man River" (though as Oscar Hammerstein's widow liked to point out, "Jerome Kern wrote dum-dum-dum-dum, *my husband* wrote 'Ol' Man River'" -- an important distinction we need to bear in mind when talking about songwriters who write music but not lyrics). The second is that when he was five years old that music-loving father drowned -- and Garcia would always say he had seen his father dying, though some sources claim this was a false memory. So it goes. And the third fact, which for some reason is always told after the second even though it comes before it chronologically, is that when he was four he lost two joints from his right middle finger. Garcia grew up a troubled teen, and in turn caused trouble for other people, but he also developed a few interests that would follow him through his life. He loved the fantastical, especially the fantastical macabre, and became an avid fan of horror and science fiction -- and through his love of old monster films he became enamoured with cinema more generally. Indeed, in 1983 he bought the film rights to Kurt Vonnegut's science fiction novel The Sirens of Titan, the first story in which the Tralfamadorians appear, and wrote a script based on it. He wanted to produce the film himself, with Francis Ford Coppola directing and Bill Murray starring, but most importantly for him he wanted to prevent anyone who didn't care about it from doing it badly. And in that he succeeded. As of 2023 there is no film of The Sirens of Titan. He loved to paint, and would continue that for the rest of his life, with one of his favourite subjects being Boris Karloff as the Frankenstein monster. And when he was eleven or twelve, he heard for the first time a record that was hugely influential to a whole generation of Californian musicians, even though it was a New York record -- "Gee" by the Crows: [Excerpt: The Crows, "Gee"] Garcia would say later "That was an important song. That was the first kind of, like where the voices had that kind of not-trained-singer voices, but tough-guy-on-the-street voice." That record introduced him to R&B, and soon he was listening to Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, to Ray Charles, and to a record we've not talked about in the podcast but which was one of the great early doo-wop records, "WPLJ" by the Four Deuces: [Excerpt: The Four Deuces, "WPLJ"] Garcia said of that record "That was one of my anthem songs when I was in junior high school and high school and around there. That was one of those songs everybody knew. And that everybody sang. Everybody sang that street-corner favorite." Garcia moved around a lot as a child, and didn't have much time for school by his own account, but one of the few teachers he did respect was an art teacher when he was in North Beach, Walter Hedrick. Hedrick was also one of the earliest of the conceptual artists, and one of the most important figures in the San Francisco arts scene that would become known as the Beat Generation (or the Beatniks, which was originally a disparaging term). Hedrick was a painter and sculptor, but also organised happenings, and he had also been one of the prime movers in starting a series of poetry readings in San Francisco, the first one of which had involved Allen Ginsberg giving the first ever reading of "Howl" -- one of a small number of poems, along with Eliot's "Prufrock" and "The Waste Land" and possibly Pound's Cantos, which can be said to have changed twentieth-century literature. Garcia was fifteen when he got to know Hedrick, in 1957, and by then the Beat scene had already become almost a parody of itself, having become known to the public because of the publication of works like On the Road, and the major artists in the scene were already rejecting the label. By this point tourists were flocking to North Beach to see these beatniks they'd heard about on TV, and Hedrick was actually employed by one cafe to sit in the window wearing a beret, turtleneck, sandals, and beard, and draw and paint, to attract the tourists who flocked by the busload because they could see that there was a "genuine beatnik" in the cafe. Hedrick was, as well as a visual artist, a guitarist and banjo player who played in traditional jazz bands, and he would bring records in to class for his students to listen to, and Garcia particularly remembered him bringing in records by Big Bill Broonzy: [Excerpt: Big Bill Broonzy, "When Things Go Wrong (It Hurts Me Too)"] Garcia was already an avid fan of rock and roll music, but it was being inspired by Hedrick that led him to get his first guitar. Like his contemporary Paul McCartney around the same time, he was initially given the wrong instrument as a birthday present -- in Garcia's case his mother gave him an accordion -- but he soon persuaded her to swap it for an electric guitar he saw in a pawn shop. And like his other contemporary, John Lennon, Garcia initially tuned his instrument incorrectly. He said later "When I started playing the guitar, believe me, I didn't know anybody that played. I mean, I didn't know anybody that played the guitar. Nobody. They weren't around. There were no guitar teachers. You couldn't take lessons. There was nothing like that, you know? When I was a kid and I had my first electric guitar, I had it tuned wrong and learned how to play on it with it tuned wrong for about a year. And I was getting somewhere on it, you know… Finally, I met a guy that knew how to tune it right and showed me three chords, and it was like a revelation. You know what I mean? It was like somebody gave me the key to heaven." He joined a band, the Chords, which mostly played big band music, and his friend Gary Foster taught him some of the rudiments of playing the guitar -- things like how to use a capo to change keys. But he was always a rebellious kid, and soon found himself faced with a choice between joining the military or going to prison. He chose the former, and it was during his time in the Army that a friend, Ron Stevenson, introduced him to the music of Merle Travis, and to Travis-style guitar picking: [Excerpt: Merle Travis, "Nine-Pound Hammer"] Garcia had never encountered playing like that before, but he instantly recognised that Travis, and Chet Atkins who Stevenson also played for him, had been an influence on Scotty Moore. He started to realise that the music he'd listened to as a teenager was influenced by music that went further back. But Stevenson, as well as teaching Garcia some of the rudiments of Travis-picking, also indirectly led to Garcia getting discharged from the Army. Stevenson was not a well man, and became suicidal. Garcia decided it was more important to keep his friend company and make sure he didn't kill himself than it was to turn up for roll call, and as a result he got discharged himself on psychiatric grounds -- according to Garcia he told the Army psychiatrist "I was involved in stuff that was more important to me in the moment than the army was and that was the reason I was late" and the psychiatrist thought it was neurotic of Garcia to have his own set of values separate from that of the Army. After discharge, Garcia did various jobs, including working as a transcriptionist for Lenny Bruce, the comedian who was a huge influence on the counterculture. In one of the various attacks over the years by authoritarians on language, Bruce was repeatedly arrested for obscenity, and in 1961 he was arrested at a jazz club in North Beach. Sixty years ago, the parts of speech that were being criminalised weren't pronouns, but prepositions and verbs: [Excerpt: Lenny Bruce, "To is a Preposition, Come is a Verb"] That piece, indeed, was so controversial that when Frank Zappa quoted part of it in a song in 1968, the record label insisted on the relevant passage being played backwards so people couldn't hear such disgusting filth: [Excerpt: The Mothers of Invention, "Harry You're a Beast"] (Anyone familiar with that song will understand that the censored portion is possibly the least offensive part of the whole thing). Bruce was facing trial, and he needed transcripts of what he had said in his recordings to present in court. Incidentally, there seems to be some confusion over exactly which of Bruce's many obscenity trials Garcia became a transcriptionist for. Dennis McNally says in his biography of the band, published in 2002, that it was the most famous of them, in autumn 1964, but in a later book, Jerry on Jerry, a book of interviews of Garcia edited by McNally, McNally talks about it being when Garcia was nineteen, which would mean it was Bruce's first trial, in 1961. We can put this down to the fact that many of the people involved, not least Garcia, lived in Tralfamadorian time, and were rather hazy on dates, but I'm placing the story here rather than in 1964 because it seems to make more sense that Garcia would be involved in a trial based on an incident in San Francisco than one in New York. Garcia got the job, even though he couldn't type, because by this point he'd spent so long listening to recordings of old folk and country music that he was used to transcribing indecipherable accents, and often, as Garcia would tell it, Bruce would mumble very fast and condense multiple syllables into one. Garcia was particularly impressed by Bruce's ability to improvise but talk in entire paragraphs, and he compared his use of language to bebop. Another thing that was starting to impress Garcia, and which he also compared to bebop, was bluegrass: [Excerpt: Bill Monroe, "Fire on the Mountain"] Bluegrass is a music that is often considered very traditional, because it's based on traditional songs and uses acoustic instruments, but in fact it was a terribly *modern* music, and largely a postwar creation of a single band -- Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys. And Garcia was right when he said it was "white bebop" -- though he did say "The only thing it doesn't have is the harmonic richness of bebop. You know what I mean? That's what it's missing, but it has everything else." Both bebop and bluegrass evolved after the second world war, though they were informed by music from before it, and both prized the ability to improvise, and technical excellence. Both are musics that involved playing *fast*, in an ensemble, and being able to respond quickly to the other musicians. Both musics were also intensely rhythmic, a response to a faster paced, more stressful world. They were both part of the general change in the arts towards immediacy that we looked at in the last episode with the creation first of expressionism and then of pop art. Bluegrass didn't go into the harmonic explorations that modern jazz did, but it was absolutely as modern as anything Charlie Parker was doing, and came from the same impulses. It was tradition and innovation, the past and the future simultaneously. Bill Monroe, Jackson Pollock, Charlie Parker, Jack Kerouac, and Lenny Bruce were all in their own ways responding to the same cultural moment, and it was that which Garcia was responding to. But he didn't become able to play bluegrass until after a tragedy which shaped his life even more than his father's death had. Garcia had been to a party and was in a car with his friends Lee Adams, Paul Speegle, and Alan Trist. Adams was driving at ninety miles an hour when they hit a tight curve and crashed. Garcia, Adams, and Trist were all severely injured but survived. Speegle died. So it goes. This tragedy changed Garcia's attitudes totally. Of all his friends, Speegle was the one who was most serious about his art, and who treated it as something to work on. Garcia had always been someone who fundamentally didn't want to work or take any responsibility for anything. And he remained that way -- except for his music. Speegle's death changed Garcia's attitude to that, totally. If his friend wasn't going to be able to practice his own art any more, Garcia would practice his, in tribute to him. He resolved to become a virtuoso on guitar and banjo. His girlfriend of the time later said “I don't know if you've spent time with someone rehearsing ‘Foggy Mountain Breakdown' on a banjo for eight hours, but Jerry practiced endlessly. He really wanted to excel and be the best. He had tremendous personal ambition in the musical arena, and he wanted to master whatever he set out to explore. Then he would set another sight for himself. And practice another eight hours a day of new licks.” But of course, you can't make ensemble music on your own: [Excerpt: Jerry Garcia and Bob Hunter, "Oh Mary Don't You Weep" (including end)] "Evelyn said, “What is it called when a person needs a … person … when you want to be touched and the … two are like one thing and there isn't anything else at all anywhere?” Alicia, who had read books, thought about it. “Love,” she said at length." That's from More Than Human, by Theodore Sturgeon, a book I'll be quoting a few more times as the story goes on. Robert Hunter, like Garcia, was just out of the military -- in his case, the National Guard -- and he came into Garcia's life just after Paul Speegle had left it. Garcia and Alan Trist met Hunter ten days after the accident, and the three men started hanging out together, Trist and Hunter writing while Garcia played music. Garcia and Hunter both bonded over their shared love for the beats, and for traditional music, and the two formed a duo, Bob and Jerry, which performed together a handful of times. They started playing together, in fact, after Hunter picked up a guitar and started playing a song and halfway through Garcia took it off him and finished the song himself. The two of them learned songs from the Harry Smith Anthology -- Garcia was completely apolitical, and only once voted in his life, for Lyndon Johnson in 1964 to keep Goldwater out, and regretted even doing that, and so he didn't learn any of the more political material people like Pete Seeger, Phil Ochs, and Bob Dylan were doing at the time -- but their duo only lasted a short time because Hunter wasn't an especially good guitarist. Hunter would, though, continue to jam with Garcia and other friends, sometimes playing mandolin, while Garcia played solo gigs and with other musicians as well, playing and moving round the Bay Area and performing with whoever he could: [Excerpt: Jerry Garcia, "Railroad Bill"] "Bleshing, that was Janie's word. She said Baby told it to her. She said it meant everyone all together being something, even if they all did different things. Two arms, two legs, one body, one head, all working together, although a head can't walk and arms can't think. Lone said maybe it was a mixture of “blending” and “meshing,” but I don't think he believed that himself. It was a lot more than that." That's from More Than Human In 1961, Garcia and Hunter met another young musician, but one who was interested in a very different type of music. Phil Lesh was a serious student of modern classical music, a classically-trained violinist and trumpeter whose interest was solidly in the experimental and whose attitude can be summed up by a story that's always told about him meeting his close friend Tom Constanten for the first time. Lesh had been talking with someone about serialism, and Constanten had interrupted, saying "Music stopped being created in 1750 but it started again in 1950". Lesh just stuck out his hand, recognising a kindred spirit. Lesh and Constanten were both students of Luciano Berio, the experimental composer who created compositions for magnetic tape: [Excerpt: Luciano Berio, "Momenti"] Berio had been one of the founders of the Studio di fonologia musicale di Radio Milano, a studio for producing contemporary electronic music where John Cage had worked for a time, and he had also worked with the electronic music pioneer Karlheinz Stockhausen. Lesh would later remember being very impressed when Berio brought a tape into the classroom -- the actual multitrack tape for Stockhausen's revolutionary piece Gesang Der Juenglinge: [Excerpt: Karlheinz Stockhausen, "Gesang Der Juenglinge"] Lesh at first had been distrustful of Garcia -- Garcia was charismatic and had followers, and Lesh never liked people like that. But he was impressed by Garcia's playing, and soon realised that the two men, despite their very different musical interests, had a lot in common. Lesh was interested in the technology of music as well as in performing and composing it, and so when he wasn't studying he helped out by engineering at the university's radio station. Lesh was impressed by Garcia's playing, and suggested to the presenter of the station's folk show, the Midnight Special, that Garcia be a guest. Garcia was so good that he ended up getting an entire solo show to himself, where normally the show would feature multiple acts. Lesh and Constanten soon moved away from the Bay Area to Las Vegas, but both would be back -- in Constanten's case he would form an experimental group in San Francisco with their fellow student Steve Reich, and that group (though not with Constanten performing) would later premiere Terry Riley's In C, a piece influenced by La Monte Young and often considered one of the great masterpieces of minimalist music. By early 1962 Garcia and Hunter had formed a bluegrass band, with Garcia on guitar and banjo and Hunter on mandolin, and a rotating cast of other musicians including Ken Frankel, who played banjo and fiddle. They performed under different names, including the Tub Thumpers, the Hart Valley Drifters, and the Sleepy Valley Hog Stompers, and played a mixture of bluegrass and old-time music -- and were very careful about the distinction: [Excerpt: The Hart Valley Drifters, "Cripple Creek"] In 1993, the Republican political activist John Perry Barlow was invited to talk to the CIA about the possibilities open to them with what was then called the Information Superhighway. He later wrote, in part "They told me they'd brought Steve Jobs in a few weeks before to indoctrinate them in modern information management. And they were delighted when I returned later, bringing with me a platoon of Internet gurus, including Esther Dyson, Mitch Kapor, Tony Rutkowski, and Vint Cerf. They sealed us into an electronically impenetrable room to discuss the radical possibility that a good first step in lifting their blackout would be for the CIA to put up a Web site... We told them that information exchange was a barter system, and that to receive, one must also be willing to share. This was an alien notion to them. They weren't even willing to share information among themselves, much less the world." 1962 brought a new experience for Robert Hunter. Hunter had been recruited into taking part in psychological tests at Stanford University, which in the sixties and seventies was one of the preeminent universities for psychological experiments. As part of this, Hunter was given $140 to attend the VA hospital (where a janitor named Ken Kesey, who had himself taken part in a similar set of experiments a couple of years earlier, worked a day job while he was working on his first novel) for four weeks on the run, and take different psychedelic drugs each time, starting with LSD, so his reactions could be observed. (It was later revealed that these experiments were part of a CIA project called MKUltra, designed to investigate the possibility of using psychedelic drugs for mind control, blackmail, and torture. Hunter was quite lucky in that he was told what was going to happen to him and paid for his time. Other subjects included the unlucky customers of brothels the CIA set up as fronts -- they dosed the customers' drinks and observed them through two-way mirrors. Some of their experimental subjects died by suicide as a result of their experiences. So it goes. ) Hunter was interested in taking LSD after reading Aldous Huxley's writings about psychedelic substances, and he brought his typewriter along to the experiment. During the first test, he wrote a six-page text, a short excerpt from which is now widely quoted, reading in part "Sit back picture yourself swooping up a shell of purple with foam crests of crystal drops soft nigh they fall unto the sea of morning creep-very-softly mist ... and then sort of cascade tinkley-bell-like (must I take you by the hand, ever so slowly type) and then conglomerate suddenly into a peal of silver vibrant uncomprehendingly, blood singingly, joyously resounding bells" Hunter's experience led to everyone in their social circle wanting to try LSD, and soon they'd all come to the same conclusion -- this was something special. But Garcia needed money -- he'd got his girlfriend pregnant, and they'd married (this would be the first of several marriages in Garcia's life, and I won't be covering them all -- at Garcia's funeral, his second wife, Carolyn, said Garcia always called her the love of his life, and his first wife and his early-sixties girlfriend who he proposed to again in the nineties both simultaneously said "He said that to me!"). So he started teaching guitar at a music shop in Palo Alto. Hunter had no time for Garcia's incipient domesticity and thought that his wife was trying to make him live a conventional life, and the two drifted apart somewhat, though they'd still play together occasionally. Through working at the music store, Garcia got to know the manager, Troy Weidenheimer, who had a rock and roll band called the Zodiacs. Garcia joined the band on bass, despite that not being his instrument. He later said "Troy was a lot of fun, but I wasn't good enough a musician then to have been able to deal with it. I was out of my idiom, really, 'cause when I played with Troy I was playing electric bass, you know. I never was a good bass player. Sometimes I was playing in the wrong key and didn't even [fuckin'] know it. I couldn't hear that low, after playing banjo, you know, and going to electric...But Troy taught me the principle of, hey, you know, just stomp your foot and get on it. He was great. A great one for the instant arrangement, you know. And he was also fearless for that thing of get your friends to do it." Garcia's tenure in the Zodiacs didn't last long, nor did this experiment with rock and roll, but two other members of the Zodiacs will be notable later in the story -- the harmonica player, an old friend of Garcia's named Ron McKernan, who would soon gain the nickname Pig Pen after the Peanuts character, and the drummer, Bill Kreutzmann: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Drums/Space (Skull & Bones version)"] Kreutzmann said of the Zodiacs "Jerry was the hired bass player and I was the hired drummer. I only remember playing that one gig with them, but I was in way over my head. I always did that. I always played things that were really hard and it didn't matter. I just went for it." Garcia and Kreutzmann didn't really get to know each other then, but Garcia did get to know someone else who would soon be very important in his life. Bob Weir was from a very different background than Garcia, though both had the shared experience of long bouts of chronic illness as children. He had grown up in a very wealthy family, and had always been well-liked, but he was what we would now call neurodivergent -- reading books about the band he talks about being dyslexic but clearly has other undiagnosed neurodivergences, which often go along with dyslexia -- and as a result he was deemed to have behavioural problems which led to him getting expelled from pre-school and kicked out of the cub scouts. He was never academically gifted, thanks to his dyslexia, but he was always enthusiastic about music -- to a fault. He learned to play boogie piano but played so loudly and so often his parents sold the piano. He had a trumpet, but the neighbours complained about him playing it outside. Finally he switched to the guitar, an instrument with which it is of course impossible to make too loud a noise. The first song he learned was the Kingston Trio's version of an old sea shanty, "The Wreck of the John B": [Excerpt: The Kingston Trio, "The Wreck of the John B"] He was sent off to a private school in Colorado for teenagers with behavioural issues, and there he met the boy who would become his lifelong friend, John Perry Barlow. Unfortunately the two troublemakers got on with each other *so* well that after their first year they were told that it was too disruptive having both of them at the school, and only one could stay there the next year. Barlow stayed and Weir moved back to the Bay Area. By this point, Weir was getting more interested in folk music that went beyond the commercial folk of the Kingston Trio. As he said later "There was something in there that was ringing my bells. What I had grown up thinking of as hillbilly music, it started to have some depth for me, and I could start to hear the music in it. Suddenly, it wasn't just a bunch of ignorant hillbillies playing what they could. There was some depth and expertise and stuff like that to aspire to.” He moved from school to school but one thing that stayed with him was his love of playing guitar, and he started taking lessons from Troy Weidenheimer, but he got most of his education going to folk clubs and hootenannies. He regularly went to the Tangent, a club where Garcia played, but Garcia's bluegrass banjo playing was far too rigorous for a free spirit like Weir to emulate, and instead he started trying to copy one of the guitarists who was a regular there, Jorma Kaukonnen. On New Year's Eve 1963 Weir was out walking with his friends Bob Matthews and Rich Macauley, and they passed the music shop where Garcia was a teacher, and heard him playing his banjo. They knocked and asked if they could come in -- they all knew Garcia a little, and Bob Matthews was one of his students, having become interested in playing banjo after hearing the theme tune to the Beverly Hillbillies, played by the bluegrass greats Flatt and Scruggs: [Excerpt: Flatt and Scruggs, "The Beverly Hillbillies"] Garcia at first told these kids, several years younger than him, that they couldn't come in -- he was waiting for his students to show up. But Weir said “Jerry, listen, it's seven-thirty on New Year's Eve, and I don't think you're going to be seeing your students tonight.” Garcia realised the wisdom of this, and invited the teenagers in to jam with him. At the time, there was a bit of a renaissance in jug bands, as we talked about back in the episode on the Lovin' Spoonful. This was a form of music that had grown up in the 1920s, and was similar and related to skiffle and coffee-pot bands -- jug bands would tend to have a mixture of portable string instruments like guitars and banjos, harmonicas, and people using improvised instruments, particularly blowing into a jug. The most popular of these bands had been Gus Cannon's Jug Stompers, led by banjo player Gus Cannon and with harmonica player Noah Lewis: [Excerpt: Gus Cannon's Jug Stompers, "Viola Lee Blues"] With the folk revival, Cannon's work had become well-known again. The Rooftop Singers, a Kingston Trio style folk group, had had a hit with his song "Walk Right In" in 1963, and as a result of that success Cannon had even signed a record contract with Stax -- Stax's first album ever, a month before Booker T and the MGs' first album, was in fact the eighty-year-old Cannon playing his banjo and singing his old songs. The rediscovery of Cannon had started a craze for jug bands, and the most popular of the new jug bands was Jim Kweskin's Jug Band, which did a mixture of old songs like "You're a Viper" and more recent material redone in the old style. Weir, Matthews, and Macauley had been to see the Kweskin band the night before, and had been very impressed, especially by their singer Maria D'Amato -- who would later marry her bandmate Geoff Muldaur and take his name -- and her performance of Leiber and Stoller's "I'm a Woman": [Excerpt: Jim Kweskin's Jug Band, "I'm a Woman"] Matthews suggested that they form their own jug band, and Garcia eagerly agreed -- though Matthews found himself rapidly moving from banjo to washboard to kazoo to second kazoo before realising he was surplus to requirements. Robert Hunter was similarly an early member but claimed he "didn't have the embouchure" to play the jug, and was soon also out. He moved to LA and started studying Scientology -- later claiming that he wanted science-fictional magic powers, which L. Ron Hubbard's new religion certainly offered. The group took the name Mother McRee's Uptown Jug Champions -- apparently they varied the spelling every time they played -- and had a rotating membership that at one time or another included about twenty different people, but tended always to have Garcia on banjo, Weir on jug and later guitar, and Garcia's friend Pig Pen on harmonica: [Excerpt: Mother McRee's Uptown Jug Champions, "On the Road Again"] The group played quite regularly in early 1964, but Garcia's first love was still bluegrass, and he was trying to build an audience with his bluegrass band, The Black Mountain Boys. But bluegrass was very unpopular in the Bay Area, where it was simultaneously thought of as unsophisticated -- as "hillbilly music" -- and as elitist, because it required actual instrumental ability, which wasn't in any great supply in the amateur folk scene. But instrumental ability was something Garcia definitely had, as at this point he was still practising eight hours a day, every day, and it shows on the recordings of the Black Mountain Boys: [Excerpt: The Black Mountain Boys, "Rosa Lee McFall"] By the summer, Bob Weir was also working at the music shop, and so Garcia let Weir take over his students while he and the Black Mountain Boys' guitarist Sandy Rothman went on a road trip to see as many bluegrass musicians as they could and to audition for Bill Monroe himself. As it happened, Garcia found himself too shy to audition for Monroe, but Rothman later ended up playing with Monroe's Blue Grass Boys. On his return to the Bay Area, Garcia resumed playing with the Uptown Jug Champions, but Pig Pen started pestering him to do something different. While both men had overlapping tastes in music and a love for the blues, Garcia's tastes had always been towards the country end of the spectrum while Pig Pen's were towards R&B. And while the Uptown Jug Champions were all a bit disdainful of the Beatles at first -- apart from Bob Weir, the youngest of the group, who thought they were interesting -- Pig Pen had become enamoured of another British band who were just starting to make it big: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "Not Fade Away"] 29) Garcia liked the first Rolling Stones album too, and he eventually took Pig Pen's point -- the stuff that the Rolling Stones were doing, covers of Slim Harpo and Buddy Holly, was not a million miles away from the material they were doing as Mother McRee's Uptown Jug Champions. Pig Pen could play a little electric organ, Bob had been fooling around with the electric guitars in the music shop. Why not give it a go? The stuff bands like the Rolling Stones were doing wasn't that different from the electric blues that Pig Pen liked, and they'd all seen A Hard Day's Night -- they could carry on playing with banjos, jugs, and kazoos and have the respect of a handful of folkies, or they could get electric instruments and potentially have screaming girls and millions of dollars, while playing the same songs. This was a convincing argument, especially when Dana Morgan Jr, the son of the owner of the music shop, told them they could have free electric instruments if they let him join on bass. Morgan wasn't that great on bass, but what the hell, free instruments. Pig Pen had the best voice and stage presence, so he became the frontman of the new group, singing most of the leads, though Jerry and Bob would both sing a few songs, and playing harmonica and organ. Weir was on rhythm guitar, and Garcia was the lead guitarist and obvious leader of the group. They just needed a drummer, and handily Bill Kreutzmann, who had played with Garcia and Pig Pen in the Zodiacs, was also now teaching music at the music shop. Not only that, but about three weeks before they decided to go electric, Kreutzmann had seen the Uptown Jug Champions performing and been astonished by Garcia's musicianship and charisma, and said to himself "Man, I'm gonna follow that guy forever!" The new group named themselves the Warlocks, and started rehearsing in earnest. Around this time, Garcia also finally managed to get some of the LSD that his friend Robert Hunter had been so enthusiastic about three years earlier, and it was a life-changing experience for him. In particular, he credited LSD with making him comfortable being a less disciplined player -- as a bluegrass player he'd had to be frighteningly precise, but now he was playing rock and needed to loosen up. A few days after taking LSD for the first time, Garcia also heard some of Bob Dylan's new material, and realised that the folk singer he'd had little time for with his preachy politics was now making electric music that owed a lot more to the Beat culture Garcia considered himself part of: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Subterranean Homesick Blues"] Another person who was hugely affected by hearing that was Phil Lesh, who later said "I couldn't believe that was Bob Dylan on AM radio, with an electric band. It changed my whole consciousness: if something like that could happen, the sky was the limit." Up to that point, Lesh had been focused entirely on his avant-garde music, working with friends like Steve Reich to push music forward, inspired by people like John Cage and La Monte Young, but now he realised there was music of value in the rock world. He'd quickly started going to rock gigs, seeing the Rolling Stones and the Byrds, and then he took acid and went to see his friend Garcia's new electric band play their third ever gig. He was blown away, and very quickly it was decided that Lesh would be the group's new bass player -- though everyone involved tells a different story as to who made the decision and how it came about, and accounts also vary as to whether Dana Morgan took his sacking gracefully and let his erstwhile bandmates keep their instruments, or whether they had to scrounge up some new ones. Lesh had never played bass before, but he was a talented multi-instrumentalist with a deep understanding of music and an ability to compose and improvise, and the repertoire the Warlocks were playing in the early days was mostly three-chord material that doesn't take much rehearsal -- though it was apparently beyond the abilities of poor Dana Morgan, who apparently had to be told note-by-note what to play by Garcia, and learn it by rote. Garcia told Lesh what notes the strings of a bass were tuned to, told him to borrow a guitar and practice, and within two weeks he was on stage with the Warlocks: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, “Grayfolded"] In September 1995, just weeks after Jerry Garcia's death, an article was published in Mute magazine identifying a cultural trend that had shaped the nineties, and would as it turned out shape at least the next thirty years. It's titled "The Californian Ideology", though it may be better titled "The Bay Area Ideology", and it identifies a worldview that had grown up in Silicon Valley, based around the ideas of the hippie movement, of right-wing libertarianism, of science fiction authors, and of Marshall McLuhan. It starts "There is an emerging global orthodoxy concerning the relation between society, technology and politics. We have called this orthodoxy `the Californian Ideology' in honour of the state where it originated. By naturalising and giving a technological proof to a libertarian political philosophy, and therefore foreclosing on alternative futures, the Californian Ideologues are able to assert that social and political debates about the future have now become meaningless. The California Ideology is a mix of cybernetics, free market economics, and counter-culture libertarianism and is promulgated by magazines such as WIRED and MONDO 2000 and preached in the books of Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly and others. The new faith has been embraced by computer nerds, slacker students, 30-something capitalists, hip academics, futurist bureaucrats and even the President of the USA himself. As usual, Europeans have not been slow to copy the latest fashion from America. While a recent EU report recommended adopting the Californian free enterprise model to build the 'infobahn', cutting-edge artists and academics have been championing the 'post-human' philosophy developed by the West Coast's Extropian cult. With no obvious opponents, the global dominance of the Californian ideology appears to be complete." [Excerpt: Grayfolded] The Warlocks' first gig with Phil Lesh on bass was on June the 18th 1965, at a club called Frenchy's with a teenage clientele. Lesh thought his playing had been wooden and it wasn't a good gig, and apparently the management of Frenchy's agreed -- they were meant to play a second night there, but turned up to be told they'd been replaced by a band with an accordion and clarinet. But by September the group had managed to get themselves a residency at a small bar named the In Room, and playing there every night made them cohere. They were at this point playing the kind of sets that bar bands everywhere play to this day, though at the time the songs they were playing, like "Gloria" by Them and "In the Midnight Hour", were the most contemporary of hits. Another song that they introduced into their repertoire was "Do You Believe in Magic" by the Lovin' Spoonful, another band which had grown up out of former jug band musicians. As well as playing their own sets, they were also the house band at The In Room and as such had to back various touring artists who were the headline acts. The first act they had to back up was Cornell Gunter's version of the Coasters. Gunter had brought his own guitarist along as musical director, and for the first show Weir sat in the audience watching the show and learning the parts, staring intently at this musical director's playing. After seeing that, Weir's playing was changed, because he also picked up how the guitarist was guiding the band while playing, the small cues that a musical director will use to steer the musicians in the right direction. Weir started doing these things himself when he was singing lead -- Pig Pen was the frontman but everyone except Bill sang sometimes -- and the group soon found that rather than Garcia being the sole leader, now whoever was the lead singer for the song was the de facto conductor as well. By this point, the Bay Area was getting almost overrun with people forming electric guitar bands, as every major urban area in America was. Some of the bands were even having hits already -- We Five had had a number three hit with "You Were On My Mind", a song which had originally been performed by the folk duo Ian and Sylvia: [Excerpt: We Five, "You Were On My Mind"] Although the band that was most highly regarded on the scene, the Charlatans, was having problems with the various record companies they tried to get signed to, and didn't end up making a record until 1969. If tracks like "Number One" had been released in 1965 when they were recorded, the history of the San Francisco music scene may have taken a very different turn: [Excerpt: The Charlatans, "Number One"] Bands like Jefferson Airplane, the Great Society, and Big Brother and the Holding Company were also forming, and Autumn Records was having a run of success with records by the Beau Brummels, whose records were produced by Autumn's in-house A&R man, Sly Stone: [Excerpt: The Beau Brummels, "Laugh Laugh"] The Warlocks were somewhat cut off from this, playing in a dive bar whose clientele was mostly depressed alcoholics. But the fact that they were playing every night for an audience that didn't care much gave them freedom, and they used that freedom to improvise. Both Lesh and Garcia were big fans of John Coltrane, and they started to take lessons from his style of playing. When the group played "Gloria" or "Midnight Hour" or whatever, they started to extend the songs and give themselves long instrumental passages for soloing. Garcia's playing wasn't influenced *harmonically* by Coltrane -- in fact Garcia was always a rather harmonically simple player. He'd tend to play lead lines either in Mixolydian mode, which is one of the most standard modes in rock, pop, blues, and jazz, or he'd play the notes of the chord that was being played, so if the band were playing a G chord his lead would emphasise the notes G, B, and D. But what he was influenced by was Coltrane's tendency to improvise in long, complex, phrases that made up a single thought -- Coltrane was thinking musically in paragraphs, rather than sentences, and Garcia started to try the same kind of th

Nasheet Waits, drummer and music educator, is a New York native. His interest in playing the drums was encouraged by his father, legendary percussionist, Frederick Waits, who played with such legendary artists as Ella Fitzgerald, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Sonny Rollins, Lee Morgan, Max Roach, Cecil Taylor, McCoy Tyner, and countless others. While attending Long Island University, Nasheet studied privately with renowned percussionist Michael Carvin. Carvin's tutelage provided a vast foundation upon which Waits added influences from his father, as well as mentor Max Roach and percussionist Fred King. It was Max that first gave Nasheet's formidable talent international spotlight, hiring him as a member of the famed percussion ensemble M'BOOM. One highlight of Nasheet's tenure with M'BOOM was the live concert performance of M'BOOM with special guests Tony Williams and Ginger Baker.  Nasheet's recording and performing discography is a veritable who's who in Jazz. Waits has boasted stints with jazz notables Antonio Hart, Jackie McLean, Wadada Leo Smith, Dave Douglas, Mark Turner, Bunky Green, Kurt Rosenwinkel, Eddie Gomez, Steve Coleman, The New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, Greg Osby, Wallace Roney, Jacky Terrason, and The Mingus Big Band. Waits has recorded and toured extensively in Africa, Europe, Japan, Canada, South America and the United States. In this episode, Nasheet talks about: Learning from Christian McBride's "played with everybody" experience, and high level consistency as a performer The early influence of his father, musically and culturally How friends and colleague of his father like like Michael Carvin and Max Roach stepped in to mentor him after his father died Lessons from Carvin His experience attending an HBCU in Atlanta

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

Alec and Nick pull back the Flavortone curtain and take up influential sitcom Frasier to discuss the decorum of Foibles as a primary engine of music. Known as a minor weakness or eccentricity in one's character, or the weaker part of a sword blade—the conversation uses the Foible to explore wide-ranging commentary on Christianity, the trial of Socrates, sites of contested authorship in American minimalism, Rip Van Winkle sleeping through the Revolutionary War, comedy, Fluxus, the work of Torn Hawk, and more. Ultimately, the duo asks: is the foible of a blade actually the avant-garde? Are the aesthetics of experimental music actually defined and determined by the foible? And, is the foible a primary site for our social life and shared narratives of music? The discussion ends with Alec and Nick sharing anecdotes of their own personal foibles in the realm of music: including getting embarrassingly wasted at Cecil Taylor's birthday party, abandoning one's post as a handbell choir director in Ohio, and the foible masterclass of co-running a DIY music space in the early 2010s. 

In Soundworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production (Duke UP, 2020), Anthony Reed argues that studying sound requires conceiving it as process and as work. Since the long Black Arts era (ca. 1958–1974), intellectuals, poets, and musicians have defined black sound as radical aesthetic practice. Through their recorded collaborations as well as the accompanying interviews, essays, liner notes, and other media, they continually reinvent black sound conceptually and materially.  Soundwork is Reed's term for that material and conceptual labor of experimental sound practice framed by the institutions of the culture industry and shifting historical contexts. Through analyses of Langston Hughes's collaboration with Charles Mingus, Amiri Baraka's work with the New York Art Quartet, Jayne Cortez's albums with the Firespitters, and the multimedia projects of Archie Shepp, Matana Roberts, Cecil Taylor, and Jeanne Lee, Reed shows that to grasp black sound as a radical philosophical and aesthetic insurgence requires attending to it as the product of material, technical, sensual, and ideological processes. Henry Ivry is a Lecturer in 20th and 21st Century Literature in the School of Critical Studies at the University of Glasgow. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

In Soundworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production (Duke UP, 2020), Anthony Reed argues that studying sound requires conceiving it as process and as work. Since the long Black Arts era (ca. 1958–1974), intellectuals, poets, and musicians have defined black sound as radical aesthetic practice. Through their recorded collaborations as well as the accompanying interviews, essays, liner notes, and other media, they continually reinvent black sound conceptually and materially.  Soundwork is Reed's term for that material and conceptual labor of experimental sound practice framed by the institutions of the culture industry and shifting historical contexts. Through analyses of Langston Hughes's collaboration with Charles Mingus, Amiri Baraka's work with the New York Art Quartet, Jayne Cortez's albums with the Firespitters, and the multimedia projects of Archie Shepp, Matana Roberts, Cecil Taylor, and Jeanne Lee, Reed shows that to grasp black sound as a radical philosophical and aesthetic insurgence requires attending to it as the product of material, technical, sensual, and ideological processes. Henry Ivry is a Lecturer in 20th and 21st Century Literature in the School of Critical Studies at the University of Glasgow. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In Soundworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production (Duke UP, 2020), Anthony Reed argues that studying sound requires conceiving it as process and as work. Since the long Black Arts era (ca. 1958–1974), intellectuals, poets, and musicians have defined black sound as radical aesthetic practice. Through their recorded collaborations as well as the accompanying interviews, essays, liner notes, and other media, they continually reinvent black sound conceptually and materially.  Soundwork is Reed's term for that material and conceptual labor of experimental sound practice framed by the institutions of the culture industry and shifting historical contexts. Through analyses of Langston Hughes's collaboration with Charles Mingus, Amiri Baraka's work with the New York Art Quartet, Jayne Cortez's albums with the Firespitters, and the multimedia projects of Archie Shepp, Matana Roberts, Cecil Taylor, and Jeanne Lee, Reed shows that to grasp black sound as a radical philosophical and aesthetic insurgence requires attending to it as the product of material, technical, sensual, and ideological processes. Henry Ivry is a Lecturer in 20th and 21st Century Literature in the School of Critical Studies at the University of Glasgow. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Veteran ER doctor Thomas Fisher's new book describes his experiences in the first year of the Covid pandemic treating patients on Chicago's South Side. He never had enough time or resources for his needy patients before the pandemic, but 2020 brought COVID and a wave of gun violence that stressed patients, doctors and staff in new ways. His new book is The Emergency.Also John Powers reviews the new Apple TV series Pachinko, based on the best-selling novel by Korean American author Min Jin Lee, and Kevin Whitehead reviews an album by Cecil Taylor.