Sources: music

Interesting consideration of Rick Beato’s recent video arguing, in part, why music is getting worse. DeLong compares Beato’s argument to the complaint of John Philip Sousa in 1908 that the infernal talking machines were stealing music from the people. Beato and Ted Gioia have been working on this theme lately and, while I’m a big fan of both Beato and Gioia and I think they have legitamate grounds for concern, I can’t help feeling that their arguments aren’t quite fully considered. The rescue of music from the ease and mediocrity of AI as propssed has the whiff of precisely the kind of control and professionalization that Sousa was arguing against, and suggesting to young people that they should just do it the way we used to sounds guaranteed to provoke eye-rolls…

The inclusion of Sousa in the article reminds me of a quite different use of the same argument of Sousa by Lawrence Lessig in his TED talk of 2007 arguing for freedom of the commons with respect to music — Laws that choke creativity.

I suspect, and hope, that this conversation goes on and sees some refinement.

Long historico-biographical article on the career and habits of Tom Waits at the time of the release of the Frank’s Wild Years trilogy for its 40th anniversary reissue. Good summary of Waits’ work and influence and a timely reminder of these startlingly original and compelling recordings.

The article gets at something in Waits’ sound that reminds me of an interview with Keith Jarrett published by Ted Gioia where Jarrett talks about the essence of music he is grasping after, something unstructured and organic… Something intimated in the Waits article, in passages like this:

Ribot remembers how Waits would often be writing the lyrics moments before he sang them. “The groove was the main thing, which he would keep trying to communicate with the way he was moving his body and guitar.” As Richards recently said in an interview with Uncut: “[Tom] had a lot of rhythms going on in his head and in his body… the groove is another word for the grail. People search for it everywhere, and when you find it you hang on to it.”

A re-publication of a 1986 interview from Keyboard Magazine. A rambling philosophical engagement with the role of music and the responsibility of the musician, the essence of music and its relation to the essence of experience. Beyond my capacity to summarize but there are several passages that are strikingly similar to things said in a recent article about Tom Waits — worth reading these together.

Short history of the Vilnius Jazz Trio and their place in the history of both modern jazz and the last decades of the Soviet Union.

Not like any interpretation of Satin Doll you’ve heard but it is strangley gripping. Great video, too. Via Ted Gioia.

Don’t really inow what to do with this but I find it pleasing. A dead-pan intro about plant evolution concludes with the assertion that flowers appeared and invented love, and then led to everything we care about. The article is really an introduction to a work of musical and collage-animation art based on Emily Dickenson’s poem Bloom — the song is beautiful and Joan as Police Woman has a great voice.

A great cautionary essay on the critic’s reactions to first performances of music we now consider classic or great or revolutionary, from Jazz to the Beatles to Beethoven. The upshot: when something is different and innovative it usually gets a bad first review. The Beatle’s albums were all different from each other, each one a fresh, innovative experiment; therefore, most of their first reviews were bad. Amazing reflection on the folly of history.

Beautiful performance of a beautiful aria, made somehow more pleasing by being a studio performance rather than on stage; brings home the talent involved in doing the job of the artist when the infrastructure of performance is removed.