In July 1963, Bob Dylan made his first appear­ance at the New­port Folk Fes­ti­val. On open­ing night, he cap­ti­vat­ed a crowd of 13,000 with a per­for­mance of “Blowin’ in the Wind,” accom­pa­nied by Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, and Peter, Paul, and Mary. Then, the fol­low­ing day, Dylan deliv­ered a ren­di­tion of “With God On Our Side” (a duet with Joan Baez) and per­formed “North Coun­try Blues” solo, a song that would lat­er appear on The Times They Are a‑Changin’ in 1964. You can watch these his­toric per­for­mances in orig­i­nal black-and-white footage. (Sim­ply click the links in the text.) Or, thanks to the YouTube chan­nel Toca o Dis­co, you can expe­ri­ence the moment in col­or. As a 22-year-old Bob Dylan sings, the audi­ence lis­tens in rapt atten­tion, tak­ing in his pow­er­ful folk song about the harsh real­i­ties of min­ing and indus­tri­al­iza­tion. Take note above.

Relat­ed Con­tent

Bob Dylan Explains Why Music Has Been Get­ting Worse

Com­pare the “It Ain’t Me Babe” Scene from A Com­plete Unknown to the Real Bob Dylan & Joan Baez Per­for­mance at the New­port Folk Fes­ti­val

Watch Bob Dylan Per­form “Only A Pawn In Their Game,” His Damn­ing Song About the Mur­der of Medgar Evers, at the 1963 March on Wash­ing­ton

How Bob Dylan Cre­at­ed a Musi­cal & Lit­er­ary World All His Own: Four Video Essays

Music video essay mae­stro Poly­phon­ic is back. What I dig about his videos is that he takes on some of the true warhors­es of mod­ern pop­u­lar music and man­ages to find some­thing new to say. Or at least he presents famil­iar sto­ries in a new and mod­ern way to an audi­ence who may be hear­ing ELO, Queen, or Neil Young for the first time.

His upload explores Dave Brubeck’s ground­break­ing jazz album Time Out. This is an album that reg­u­lar­ly tops best-of lists, gets reis­sued con­stant­ly, and is so ubiq­ui­tous in some cir­cles that it’s hard, like Led Zeppelin’s fourth album, to hear the album with fresh ears.

Poly­phon­ic touch­es on some­thing right at the begin­ning of the video that deserves a full video essay of its own–the State Department’s mis­sion to send Amer­i­can jazz musi­cians around the world as cul­tur­al ambas­sadors. This is a part of his­to­ry that has reced­ed from mem­o­ry, but had a major influ­ence not just on Brubeck, but so many records at that time. Brubeck joined Ben­ny Good­man, Louis Arm­strong, and Dizzy Gille­spie on a musi­cal tour that reached many coun­tries behind the Iron Cur­tain, and were able to cri­tique America’s racist his­to­ry while also pro­mot­ing its musi­cal cul­ture. (PBS made a fine doc­u­men­tary on the mis­sion in 2018.) But for the pur­pos­es of this video essay, and regard­ing Brubeck’s career, it was the polyrhythms and folk music that he heard while trav­el­ing through coun­tries like Turkey (from which he devel­oped “Blue Ron­do a la Turk”) that remained with him on his return.

Time Out was Brubeck’s four­teenth album for Colum­bia Records, but his break­through. Up to that point he and his quar­tet had released a num­ber of live albums record­ed at col­leges (which pro­mot­ed a safe but hip stu­dious kind of jazz) and sev­er­al albums of jazz cov­ers, such as Dave Digs Dis­ney. But Time Out was a ful­ly formed con­cept album of sorts: an explo­ration into time sig­na­tures that jazz hadn’t real­ly touched yet.

As Poly­phon­ic points out, Joe Morel­lo, Brubeck’s drum­mer, was indeed well versed in com­pli­cat­ed time sig­na­tures from his clas­si­cal back­ground as a vio­lin­ist. It was Morel­lo who exper­i­ment­ed with a groove in 5/4 time that became the back­bone of “Take Five.” Brubeck knew a good thing when he heard it and gives Morel­lo one of the best solos of the entire LP.

Best of all, Time Out is one those clas­sic albums because of how it mix­es the exper­i­men­tal with the com­mer­cial, a hard feat in any era, but even more impres­sive in that best of all jazz years, 1959. Brubeck con­tin­ued to explore time sig­na­tures on this album’s sequel Time Fur­ther Out, which is also rec­om­mend­ed.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2019.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Pak­istani Musi­cians Play an Enchant­i­ng Ver­sion of Dave Brubeck’s Jazz Clas­sic, “Take Five”

Louis Arm­strong Plays His­toric Cold War Con­certs in East Berlin & Budapest (1965)

Dave Brubeck’s Sur­prise Duet: A Mag­i­cal Moment at the Moscow Con­ser­va­to­ry (1997)

Watch an Incred­i­ble Per­for­mance of “Take Five” by the Dave Brubeck Quar­tet (1964)

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts.

Hear a sec­ond or two of Ver­non Burch’s “Get Up,” and you’re back in 1990; of “Bal­ance and Rehearsal” from the JBL sound-test album Ses­sion, and you’re back in 1999; of Eddie Johns’ “More Spell on You,” and you’re back in 2001. What, you don’t know any of those songs? Per­haps you’re more famil­iar with them in a dif­fer­ent form: chopped up, pitched up or down, and looped over and over again in the songs  “Groove Is in the Heart” by Deee-Lite, “Praise You” by Fat­boy Slim, and “One More Time” by Daft Punk. None of those hits would be con­ceiv­able with­out the clips they incor­po­rate from old­er record­ings, those named here and a vari­ety of oth­ers besides.

Three and a half decades ago, few ordi­nary lis­ten­ers would have under­stood how a song could be con­struct­ed out of oth­er songs; today, most of us know it as the tech­nol­o­gy and art of sam­pling. We tend to asso­ciate it with hip-hop, and indeed, last year we fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture Track­lib’s video on the most icon­ic hip-hop sam­ples of the past half-cen­tu­ry.

But the same chan­nel has also put out the video above, which sim­i­lar­ly breaks down the con­stituent son­ic ingre­di­ents of elec­tron­ic dance hits from “Groove Is in the Heart” onward. If you’ve ever want­ed to know what, exact­ly, went into Snap!‘s “Rhythm Is a Dancer,” Moby’s “Porce­lain,” Skrillex’s “First of the Year,” or James Hype and Miggy Dela Rosa’s “Fer­rari,” this is your chance.

Those over a cer­tain age may rec­og­nize all the titles of the songs includ­ed on the first twen­ty or so years of the video’s time­line, and almost none there­after. But they may well know the bod­ies of work from which they sam­ple, includ­ing those of Aaron Neville, Freeez, Bri­an Wil­son, Gladys Knight & the Pips, and Mel­ba Moore. For the last cou­ple of gen­er­a­tions of lis­ten­ers, seek­ing out the sources of a sam­ple in a favorite song has become a reli­able method of dis­cov­er­ing the music of past eras. By the same token, lis­ten­ers already well-versed in the music of those eras can hear it anew in the tracks to which kids are cur­rent­ly danc­ing, work­ing out, or sim­ply “vib­ing.” What­ev­er your gen­er­a­tion, once you hear how “Get Ready for This” was con­struct­ed, you’ll nev­er expe­ri­ence a bas­ket­ball game quite the same way again.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Brief His­to­ry of Sam­pling: From the Bea­t­les to the Beast­ie Boys

The Most Icon­ic Hip-Hop Sam­ple of Every Year (1973–2023)

Hear the Evo­lu­tion of Elec­tron­ic Music: A Son­ic Jour­ney from 1929 to 2019

How Gior­gio Moroder & Don­na Summer’s “I Feel Love” Cre­at­ed the “Blue­print for All Elec­tron­ic Dance Music Today” (1977)

How the Fairlight CMI Syn­the­siz­er Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Music

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Writ­ing in his 1995 diary about his sem­i­nal ambi­ent album Music for Air­ports, Eno remem­bered his ini­tial thoughts going into it: “I want to make a kind of music that pre­pares you for dying–that doesn’t get all bright and cheer­ful and pre­tend you’re not a lit­tle appre­hen­sive, but which makes you say to your­self, ‘Actu­al­ly, it’s not that big a deal if I die.’”

Cre­at­ed in 1978 from sec­onds-long tape loops from a much longer improv ses­sion with musi­cians includ­ing Robert Wyatt, Music for Air­ports start­ed the idea of slow, med­i­ta­tive music that aban­doned typ­i­cal major and minor scales, brought in melod­ic ambi­gu­i­ty, and began the explo­ration of sounds that were designed to exist some­where in the back­ground, beyond the scope of full atten­tion.

For those who think 50 min­utes is too short and those piano notes too rec­og­niz­able, may we sug­gest this 6‑hour, time-stretched ver­sion of the album, cre­at­ed by YouTube user “Slow Motion TV.” The tonal field is the same, but now the notes are no attack, all decay. It’s gran­u­lar as hell, but you could imag­ine the whole piece unspool­ing unno­ticed in a ter­mi­nal while a flight is delayed for the third time. (Maybe that’s when the accep­tance of death hap­pens, when you’ve giv­en up on ever get­ting home?)

Unlike Music for Films, which fea­tured sev­er­al tracks Eno had giv­en to film­mak­ers like Derek Jar­man, it took some time for Music for Air­ports to be real­ized in its intend­ed loca­tion: being piped in at a ter­mi­nal at La Guardia, New York, some­time in the 1980s. And that was just a one-time thing.

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The album seemed des­tined for per­son­al use only, but then in 1997 the mod­ern ensem­ble Bang on a Can played it live, trans­lat­ing the ran­dom­ness of out-of-sync tape loops into music nota­tion. Over the years they’ve per­formed it at air­ports in Brus­sels, the Nether­lands and Liv­er­pool, and in 2015 the group brought it to Ter­mi­nal 2 of San Diego Inter­na­tion­al. Writ­ing for KCET, Alex Zaragoza report­ed that “cry­ing babies, echoes of rolling suit­cas­es and board­ing pass­es serv­ing as tick­ets to the con­cert failed to remind any­one that they were, indeed, at one of the busiest air­ports in the coun­try. Even the tell­tale announce­ments were there: Air­port secu­ri­ty is every­one’s respon­si­bil­i­ty. Do not leave bags unat­tend­ed.”

And then in 2018, Lon­don City Air­port played the orig­i­nal album in a day-long loop for the album’s 40th anniver­sary.

As site-spe­cif­ic mul­ti-media art builds pop­u­lar­i­ty in the 21st cen­tu­ry with increas­ing­ly cheap­er and small­er tech­nol­o­gy, we might hope to hear ambi­ent drones, and not clas­sic rock or pop, in more and more land­scapes.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2019.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bri­an Eno’s Ambi­ent Album Music for Air­ports Per­formed by Musi­cians in an Air­port

Decon­struct­ing Bri­an Eno’s Music for Air­ports: Explore the Tape Loops That Make Up His Ground­break­ing Ambi­ent Music

Bri­an Eno’s Advice for Those Who Want to Do Their Best Cre­ative Work: Don’t Get a Job

Behold the Orig­i­nal Deck of Oblique Strate­gies Cards, Hand­writ­ten by Bri­an Eno Him­self

Bri­an Eno Explains the Loss of Human­i­ty in Mod­ern Music

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

One often hears that there’s no mon­ey to be made in music any­more. But then, there was no mon­ey to be made in music when Bob Dylan start­ed his career either—at least accord­ing to Bob Dylan. “If you could just sup­port your­self, you were doin’ good,” he says in an inter­view clip includ­ed in the short com­pi­la­tion above. “There was­n’t this big bil­lion-dol­lar indus­try that it is today, and peo­ple do go into it just to make mon­ey.” He appears to have made that remark in the late nine­teen-eight­ies (to judge by his Hearts of Fire look), by which time both the indus­try and nature of pop­u­lar music had evolved into very dif­fer­ent beasts than they were in the ear­ly six­ties, when he made his record­ing debut.

“Machines are mak­ing most of the music now,” Dylan adds. “Have you noticed that all songs sound the same?” It’s a com­plaint peo­ple had four decades ago, think­ing of syn­the­siz­ers and sequencers, and it’s one they have today, with stream­ing algo­rithms and arti­fi­cial-intel­li­gence engines in mind.

Not that Dylan could be accused of fail­ing to change up his sound, or even of refus­ing to acknowl­edge what advan­tages they offered to the indi­vid­ual musi­cian: “You can have your own lit­tle band, like a one-man band, with these machines,” he admit­ted, how­ev­er obvi­ous the lim­i­ta­tions of those machines at the time. But he under­stood that this new con­ve­nience, like that intro­duced by so many oth­er tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ments, came at a cul­tur­al price.

Even in the sev­en­ties, record­ing was becom­ing per­ilous­ly easy. In the six­ties, no mat­ter if you were the Bea­t­les, the Rolling Stones, or indeed Bob Dylan, “you played around, you paid enough dues to make a record.” But bands of the fol­low­ing gen­er­a­tion “expect to make a record right away, with­out any­body even hear­ing them.” As for the solo acts, “if you’re a good-look­ing kid, or you’ve got a good voice, they expect you to be able to do it all,” but “if you don’t have expe­ri­ence to go with it, you’re just going to be dis­pos­able,” a mere instru­ment of pro­duc­ers who took autho­r­i­al charge over the records they over­saw. All these decades lat­er, when it’s become eas­i­er than ever to find any kind of music we could pos­si­bly want, nobody must be less sur­prised than Bob Dylan to hear “so much medi­oc­rity going on.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

Bob Dylan’s Famous Tele­vised Press Con­fer­ence After He Went Elec­tric (1965)

Bri­an Eno on the Loss of Human­i­ty in Mod­ern Music

The Real Rea­son Why Music Is Get­ting Worse: Rick Beato Explains

How Com­put­ers Ruined Rock Music

The Dis­tor­tion of Sound: A Short Film on How We’ve Cre­at­ed “a McDonald’s Gen­er­a­tion of Music Con­sumers”

How Bob Dylan Cre­at­ed a Musi­cal & Lit­er­ary World All His Own: Four Video Essays

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Say what you want about YouTube’s neg­a­tive effects (end­less soy faces, influ­encers, its devi­ous and fas­cist-lean­ing algo­rithms) but it has offered to cre­ators a space in which to indulge. And that’s one of the rea­sons I’ve been a fan of Adam Neely’s work. A jazz musi­cian and a for­mer stu­dent at both the Berklee Col­lege of Music and the Man­hat­tan School of Music, his YouTube chan­nel is a must for those with an inter­est in the how and why of music the­o­ry. If not for Neely’s tal­ent and YouTube’s plat­form we wouldn’t have the above: a 30 minute (!) explo­ration of the bossa nova stan­dard, “The Girl from Ipane­ma.” And it is worth every sin­gle minute. (Even the com­pos­er Anto­nio Car­los Jobim him­self could not have con­vinced tra­di­tion­al tele­vi­sion execs to give him that long an indul­gence.)

See­ing we haven’t fea­tured Neely on Open Cul­ture before, let this be a great intro­duc­tion, because this is one of his bet­ter videos. It also helps that the sub­ject mat­ter just hap­pens to be one of the most cov­ered stan­dards in pop his­to­ry.

Its lega­cy is one of lounge lizards and kitsch. Neely shows it being used as a punch­line in The Blues Broth­ers and as mood music in V for Vendet­ta. I remem­ber it being hummed by two pep­per­pots (Gra­ham Chap­man and John Cleese) in a Mon­ty Python skit. And Neely gives us the “tl;dw” (“too long, did­n’t watch”) sum­ma­ry up front: the song’s his­to­ry con­cerns blues music, Amer­i­can cul­tur­al hege­mo­ny, and the influ­ence of the Berklee College’s “The Real Book.” There’s also loads of music the­o­ry thrown in too, so it helps to know just a lit­tle going in.

Neely first peels back decades of ele­va­tor music cov­ers to get to the birth of the song, and its mul­ti­ple par­ents: the Afro-Brazil­ian music called Sam­ba, the hip night­clubs of Rio de Janeiro dur­ing the 1950s, the hit film Black Orpheus which brought both sam­ba and bossa nova (the “new wave”) to an inter­na­tion­al audi­ence, Jobim and oth­er musi­cians’ inter­est in Amer­i­can blues and jazz chords, and Amer­i­can inter­est from musi­cians like Stan Getz. All this is a back and forth cir­cuit of influ­ences that results in this song, which bor­rows its struc­ture from Tin Pan Alley com­posers like Cole Porter and Irv­ing Berlin, and inserts a sad, self-pity­ing B‑section after two A‑section lyrics about a young woman pass­ing by on a beach (lyrics by Vini­cius de Moraes, who also wrote the screen­play to Black Orpheus).

The key in which you play the song also reveals the cul­tur­al divide. Play it in F and you are tak­ing sides with the Amer­i­cans; play it in Db and you are keep­ing it real, Brazil­ian style. Neely breaks apart the melody and the chord sequences, point­ing out its rep­e­ti­tion (which makes it so catchy) but also its ambi­gu­i­ty, which explains end­less YouTube videos of musi­cians get­ting the chord sequence wrong. And, what exact­ly *is* the true chord sequence? And how is it a riff on, of all things, Duke Ellington’s “Take the A Train”? Neely also shows the pro­gres­sion of var­i­ous cov­ers of the song, and what’s been added and what’s been delet­ed. Leav­ing things out, as he illus­trates with a clip from Leonard Bernstein’s 1973 Har­vard lec­tures, is what gives art its mag­ic.

There’s so much more to this 30 minute clip, but you real­ly should watch the whole thing (and then hit sub­scribe to his chan­nel). This essay is exact­ly what YouTube does best, and Neely is the best of teach­ers, a smart, self-dep­re­cat­ing guy who mix­es intel­lect with humor. Plus, you’ll be hum­ming the song for the rest of the day, just a bit more aware of the rea­son behind the ear worm.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2020.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

“The Girl from Ipane­ma” Turns 50; Hear Its Bossa Nova Sound Cov­ered by Sina­tra, Krall, Methe­ny & Oth­ers

Remem­ber­ing the “Father of Bossa Nova” João Gilber­to (RIP) with Four Clas­sic Live Per­for­mances: “The Girl From Ipane­ma,” “Cor­co­v­a­do” & More

Getz and Gilber­to Per­form ‘The Girl from Ipane­ma’ (and the Woman Who Inspired the Song)

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

As of this writ­ing, the Bea­t­les’ “Rev­o­lu­tion 9″ has more than 13,800,000 plays on Spo­ti­fy. This has no doubt gen­er­at­ed decent rev­enue, even giv­en the plat­for­m’s oft-lament­ed pay­out rates. But com­pare that num­ber to the more than half-a-bil­lion streams of “Black­bird,” also on the Bea­t­les’ self-titled 1968 “white album,” and you get an idea of “Rev­o­lu­tion 9”’s place in the band’s oeu­vre. Sim­ply put, even ultra-hard-core Fab Four fans tend to skip it. Regard­less, as Ian Mac­Don­ald writes in Rev­o­lu­tion in the Head: The Bea­t­les’ Records and the Six­ties, “this eight-minute exer­cise in aur­al free asso­ci­a­tion is the world’s most wide­ly dis­trib­uted avant-garde arti­fact.”

Mas­ter­mind­ed by John Lennon, “Rev­o­lu­tion 9” is not exact­ly a song, but rather an elab­o­rate “sound col­lage,” assem­bled in broad adher­ence to an aes­thet­ic devel­oped by such avant-garde cre­ators as William S. Bur­roughs, The Bea­t­les’ graph­ic design­er Richard Hamil­ton, John Cage, and Karl­heinz Stock­hausen. “While the cut-up texts of Bur­roughs, the col­lages of Hamil­ton, and the musique con­crète exper­i­ments of Cage and Stock­hausen have remained the pre­serve of the mod­ernist intel­li­gentsia,” writes Mac­Don­ald, “Lennon’s sor­tie into son­ic chance was pack­aged for a main­stream audi­ence which had nev­er heard of its prog­en­i­tors, let alone been con­front­ed by their work.”

In the new Poly­phon­ic video above, Noah Lefevre takes a dive into those prog­en­i­tors and their work, pro­vid­ing the con­text to under­stand how “the Bea­t­les’ weird­est song” came togeth­er. Points of inter­est on this cul­tur­al-his­tor­i­cal jour­ney include com­pos­er Pierre Scha­ef­fer­’s resis­tance-head­quar­ters-turned-exper­i­men­tal-music-lab Stu­dio d’Es­sai; Nazi Ger­many, where the ear­ly Mag­ne­tophon tape recorder was devel­oped; the BBC Radio­phon­ic Work­shop; avant-garde rock­er Frank Zap­pa’s Stu­dio Z; and the Mil­lion Volt Light and Sound Rave, a 1967 hap­pen­ing that host­ed “Car­ni­val of Light,” a Bea­t­les com­po­si­tion nev­er heard again since.

What did Lennon, in col­lab­o­ra­tion with George Har­ri­son and Yoko Ono (with whom he’d only just got togeth­er), think he was doing with “Rev­o­lu­tion 9”? “To the extent that Lennon con­cep­tu­al­ized the piece at all, it is like­ly to have been as a sen­so­ry attack on the citadel of the intel­lect,” writes Mac­Don­ald, “a rev­o­lu­tion in the head aimed, as he stressed at the time, at each indi­vid­ual lis­ten­er — and not a Maoist incite­ment to social con­fronta­tion, still less a call for gen­er­al anar­chy.” Indeed, as Lefevre points out, it expressed his ambiva­lence about the very con­cept of 1968-style revolt as much as the com­par­a­tive­ly con­ven­tion­al “Rev­o­lu­tion 1,” which comes ear­li­er on the album. The six­ties may be long over, but Lennon’s atti­tude has­n’t lost its rel­e­vance: we still hear an end­less stream of promised solu­tions to soci­ety’s prob­lems, and we’d still all love to see the plan.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How the Bea­t­les Exper­i­ment­ed with Indi­an Music & Pio­neered a New Rock and Roll Sound

The Bea­t­les’ 8 Pio­neer­ing Inno­va­tions: A Video Essay Explor­ing How the Fab Four Changed Pop Music

Hear Paul McCartney’s Exper­i­men­tal Christ­mas Mix­tape: A Rare & For­got­ten Record­ing from 1965

The 10-Minute, Nev­er-Released, Exper­i­men­tal Demo of The Bea­t­les’ “Rev­o­lu­tion” (1968)

How George Mar­tin Defined the Sound of the Bea­t­les: From String Quar­tets to Back­wards Gui­tar Solos

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.