The ukulele has gotten a bad rap, thanks to some well-meaning musicians who turned the small, guitar-like Hawaiian lute into a novelty instrument. Chief among the offenders is Tiny Tim. Exploding into fame in the early sixties with his ukulele version of the ‘20s ditty “Tiptoe Thru’ the Tulips,” he became so famous, wrote Roger Ebert, “The Beatles asked him to sing ‘Nowhere Man’ on a bootleg Christmas recording. He did a night at Royal Albert Hall.” His marriage to Vicki Budinger on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show is “still one of the top-rated TV shows of all time.”
Tiny Tim played the guileless manchild, the Pee Wee Herman of his day. He was not a serious spokesperson for the instrument he popularized. He died in 1996, doing what he loved, playing his hit to a Women’s Club in Minneapolis. “The last thing he heard was the applause,” his widow said.
Tiny Tim had a good run, but it may not be mere coincidence that since he tiptoed thru’ his last tulip, the ukulele has seen a major pop culture revival, from indie folk singer/songwriters to TV theme songs, an orchestra, and Jake Shimabukuro, “a genre-demolishing artist,” writes NPR, “who plays jazz, blues, funk, classical, bluegrass, flamenco and rock” on his four-string axe.
Joining the ranks of serious ukulele artists are Overdriver Duo, who interpret songs with some very challenging guitar riffs and solos, like Guns ‘n’ Roses’ “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” Dire Straits’ “Sultans of Swing,” and AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck.” One thing these songs all have in common is their melodies in the upper register, where the ukulele, and their vocals, really shine. Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” on the other hand, depends on power chords and pounding drums for its impact. Leave it to these accomplished players to turn their tiny-bodied instruments into a convincing alt-rock rhythm section.
Contemporary players have more than earned the ukulele the respect it deserves. That’s not to say ukulele lovers of the past, like devoted life-long player George Harrison, did not appreciate the instrument. Harrison played a mean jazz uke, and took it seriously. But even he declared “you can’t play and not laugh!” Players like Shimabukuro and Overdriver Duo tend to inspire more awe than comedy.
Try calling to mind Nirvana’s Nevermind without its naked, swimming baby; or London Calling without Paul Simenon smashing his bass. Think of Sgt. Pepper’s or Abbey Road without thinking about their sleeves. Classic rock albums and classic, unforgettable album covers are inseparably intertwined.
Imagine Dark Side of the Moon without its prism….
Hipgnosis, the design team behind the nearly 50-year-old album cover/t‑shirt/poster/bumper sticker/coffee mug/etc. completely nailed it, as they say, with this design. They did so after several less-than-iconic but still memorable attempts to represent the band’s sound with a single image.
Made up of designers Storm Thorgerson, Aubrey Powell, and, later, Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson, Hipgnosis first got its start when the former art school friends of Pink Floyd asked to design the sleeve for the band’s 1968 A Saucerful of Secrets, their second studio album and first without founding singer/songwriter Syd Barrett. Thereafter followed designs for More, Ummagumma, Atom Heart Mother, Meddle, and Obscured by Clouds.
In-between Pink Floyd albums, Hipgnosis picked up commissions from dozens of other musicians, including well-known names like T. Rex, Wishbone Ash, The Hollies, The Pretty Things, Electric Light Orchestra, Rory Gallagher, and many others.
Once the Dark Side prism appeared in 1973, “all the top high-profile bands who could afford the London designers’ artwork showed up at their door,” as one account puts it.
Led Zeppelin knocked, as did Peter Frampton, Nazareth, Bad Company, Genesis, Peter Gabriel… Hipgnosis’ recognition as premier graphic interpreters of rock, most notably of albums that emerged in the post-PF progressive boom of the 70s, was fully secured by a string of unforgettable covers. Many other album designs from their 190-cover career you may have never seen, and may not find nearly as compelling as, say, Wish You Were Here, whose man-on-fire handshake burns into the retinas.
The team had an unusual approach with many of their post-Dark Side covers, recalling the 60s with psychedelic and satirical imagery, especially on album art for bands who got their start the previous decade. But they updated the aesthetic, inventing the “techno-psychedelic visual identity” of the 70s, as The Guardian writes, and turning flower power into machine power, post-industrial landscapes, apocalyptic fantasies, and pop art collages. The influence of Christopherson, who became a full partner in 1978, helped pull the designers into the sleeker 1980s with covers for Peter Gabriel, The Police, and Scorpions.
Many classic album artists find a visual brand and stick with it. Some, like H.R. Giger, are already extremely niche. Others, like the legendary design team at Blue Note records, have the mandate of defining not only an individual album’s look, but also that of an entire record label. One of the remarkable things about Hipgnosis is their range—a characteristic that further fits with their reputation as “The Beatles of album cover art,” writes Why It Matters. “Nobody has ever done it better than the British design firm.”
As free agents, they could approach each record as a singular work. They were as comfortable working with photography as they were creating original artwork. They could represent brooding English folk and neon New Wave. Album covers have sold popular music for about as long as it has existed as a commodity, but Hipgnosis significantly raised the bar, especially in their continued work with Pink Floyd and their Led Zeppelin covers.
Some Hipgnosis covers are timeless, some dated, some baffling conceptual experiments that surely made more sense in the planning stages. A NSFW theme of female torsos predominates. It’s hard to say to what degree each band had a hand in choosing and directing each image. The designers’ last cover was for Led Zeppelin’s Coda, released in 1982. “There’s quite a bit of poetry in that. In their fifteen years together the firm produced many of the most iconic covers in music history.” As for correlations between the quality of the music and the quality of the cover art—that’s an investigation we leave to you. See many more Hipgnosis covers at Why It Matters and The Guardian. And if you can swing it, see Thorgerson and Powell’s book, For the Love of Vinyl: The Album Art of Hipgnosis. Or Powell’s Vinyl, Album, Cover Art: The Complete Hipgnosis.
The story of popular music in the late 20th century is never complete without an account of the explosive psychedelic rock, funk, Afrobeat, and other hybrid styles that proliferated on the African continent and across Latin American and the Caribbean in the 1960s and 70s. It’s only lately, however, that large audiences are discovering how much pioneering music came out of Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, and other postcolonial countries, thanks to UK labels like Strut and Soundway (named by The Guardian as “one of the 10 British Labels defining the sound of 2014” and named “Label of the Year” in 2017).
Germany’s Analogue Africa, a label that reissues classic albums from the era, puts it this way: “the future of music happened decades ago.” Only most Western audiences weren’t paying attention—with notable exceptions, of course: superstar drummer Ginger Baker apprenticed himself to Fela Kuti and became an evangelist for African drumming; Brian Eno and Talking Heads’ David Byrne (who also introduced thousands to “world music”) imported the sound of African rock to New Wave in the 80s, as did post-punk bands like Orange Juice and others in Britain, where music from Africa generally had a bigger impact.
But the fusion of African polyrhythms with rock instruments and song structures had been done, and done incredibly well, already by dozens of bands, including several in the East African country of Zambia, which had been British-controlled Northern Rhodesia until its independence in 1964. In the decade after, bands formed around the country to create a unique form of music known as “Zamrock,” as it came to be called, “forged by a particular set of national circumstances,” writes Calum MacNaughton at Music in Africa.
Zamrock bands were influenced by the funk and soul of James Brown and the heavy rock of Hendrix, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, The Who, and Cream—the same music everyone else was listening to. As Rikki Ililonga from the band Musi-O-Tunya says in the Vinyl Me, Please mini-documentary above, says, “the hippie time, the flowers, love and everything, Woodstock. We were a part of that culture too. If the record was in the Top 10 in the UK, it was in the Top 10 here.” But Zambia had its own concerns, and its own powerful musical traditions.
“As much as we wanted to play rock from the Western world, we are Africans,” says Jagari Chanda, vocalist for a band called WITCH (“we intend to cause havoc”), “so the other part is from Africa—Zambia. So it’s Zambian type of rock—Zamrock.” The term was coined by Zambian DJ Manasseh Phiri. The music itself “was the soundtrack of Kenneth Kaunda’s socialist ideology of Zambian Humanism,” MacNaughton notes. “In fact, Zamrock owed much of its existence to the nation’s first president and founding father. A guitar-picker who took great pleasure in song” and who promoted local music “via a quota system” imposed on the newly-formed Zambia Broadcasting Service (ZBS).
Vinyl Me, Please has collaborated with MacNaughton and others from Now-Again Records to release 8 Zamrock albums, “7 of which have never been reissued in their original form.” The video above, “The Story of Zamrock,” reflects their decade-long journey to rediscover the 70s scene and its pioneers. In the video at the top from Bandsplaining, you can learn more about Zamrock, which has been gaining prominence in album reissues for the last several years, and which “deserves to be a part of the musical history of Africa in a much bigger way than it has been up to now,” Henning Goranson Sandberg writes at The Guardian. See all of the music featured in the video at the top in the tracklist below.
In the late 70s and early 80s, a handful of musical duos emerged who would have tremendous impact on post-punk, alternative, new wave, and experimental electronic music. Bands like Suicide, NEU!, and the Pet Shop Boys made far bigger sounds than their size would suggest. Before them all came Silver Apples, a duo who should rightly get credit as pioneers of electronic experimentation in pop song form. Like many a pioneer, Silver Apples had no idea what they were doing. They also suffered from a string of some of the worst luck a band could have, disappearing after their second album in 1969 until a mid-90s rediscovery and brief return.
Bandmembers Simeon Coxe and Danny Taylor formed the band in 1967 from the ruins of a rock group called The Overland Stage Electric Band, which fell apart when Coxe began experimenting with old oscillators onstage. All of the members quit except Taylor, and Coxe set about building his own synthesizer, “a machine nicknamed ‘the Simeon,’” Daniel Dylan Wray writes at The Guardian, “which grew to consist of nine audio oscillators with 86 manual controls—including telegraph keys—to control lead, rhythm and bass pulses with the user’s hands, feet and elbows.”
Coxe was the only person who could play the Simeon, and he sang as he did so, his weird, warbly voice complementing his machine, as Taylor played proto-Krautrock beats behind him. “I had heard the word synthesizer,” he says, “but I had no idea what it was. We were dirt poor and used what we had, which was often discarded world war two gear.” They were essentially making up electronic pop music as they went along, isolated from parallel developments happening at the same time. They named the project after a line by William Butler Yeats (many of their lyrics were written by poet Stanley Warren). Around the same time, composer Morton Subotnick released his groundbreaking all-electronic album, titled—after Yeats—Silver Apples of the Moon.
It was Silver Apples’ fate to be overshadowed by other releases that came out immediately after their 1968 self-titled debut, such as Wendy Carlos’ Switched on Bach and Gershon Kingsley’s hit “Popcorn,” both of which popularized Robert Moog’s modular synthesizers. Moog himself became so fascinated with Coxe’s singular creation that he visited the Silver Apples studio to see it for himself. The band’s manager scored them their very first gig playing for 30,000 people in Central Park, “providing a live soundtrack to the Apollo moon landing—broadcast on enormous screens beside them,” writes Cian Traynor at Huck magazine, “as people took their clothes off in the rain.”
This magical experience—and other brushes with fame, such as a one-off recording session with Jimi Hendrix—was no indication of a bright future for the band. For their second album, they were allowed to photograph themselves inside the cockpit of a Pan Am jet. The inclusion of drug paraphernalia in the photo, and of a crashed airplane on the back, prompted a lawsuit from the airline. The album was pulled from the shelves, the band shut out of the industry, and a third album, The Garden, remained unreleased until 1998.
For a look at how musically forward-thinking Silver Apples were, see the short documentary about their rise and fall above. They ended up influencing neo-psychedelic electronic bands like Stereolab and 90s duo Portishead, whose Geoff Barrow says, “for people like us, they are the perfect band…. They should definitely be up there with the pioneers of electronic music.” Taylor sadly died in 2005, just after Coxe had partially recovered from a broken neck suffered the year of their 90s resurgence. But Silver Apples music is immortal, and immortally otherworldly and strange, even if its creators never quite understood why. “To me and Danny,” says Coxe, “it sounded perfectly normal and was a normal progression into the areas we were trying to go.”
As so much experimental electronic pop music that emerged around the same time proves, Coxe was more right than he knew. What Silver Apples did turned out to be a “normal” musical development, though they had no idea that it was happening when they made their astonishingly groovy, spaced-out records.
Édith Piaf’s life was anything but rosy. Born in a Parisian slum, she was abandoned by her mother and lived for awhile in a brothel run by her grandmother. As a teenager she sang on the streets for money. She was addicted to alcohol and drugs for much of her life, and her later years were marred by chronic pain. Through it all, Piaf managed to hold onto a basically optimistic view of life. She sang with a lyrical abandon that seemed to transcend the pain and sorrow of living.
On April 3, 1954 Piaf was the guest of honor on the French TV show La Joie de Vivre. She was 38 years old but looked much older. She had recently undergone a grueling series of “aversion therapy” treatments for alcoholism, and was by that time in the habit of taking morphine before going onstage. Cortisone treatments for arthritis made the usually wire-thin singer look puffy. But when Piaf launches into her signature song, “La Vie en Rose” (see above), all of that is left behind.
Nine years after this performance, when Piaf died, her friend Jean Cocteau said of her: “Like all those who live on courage, she didn’t think about death–she defied it. Only her voice remains, that splendid voice like black velvet.”
Note: An earlier version of this post originally appeared on our site in February 2013.
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Playing a musical instrument with wet hands usually falls somewhere between a bad idea and a very bad idea indeed. The Cristal Baschet, however, requires its players to keep their hands wet at all times, and that’s hardly the only sense in which it’s an exceptional musical instrument. Have a listen to the performance above, Erik Satie’s Gnossienne No. 1 by Marc Antoine Millon and Frédéric Bousquet, and you’ll understand at once how exceptional it sounds. Both ideally suited to Satie’s composition and like nothing else in the history of music — a history which may ultimately remember it as, among other things, one of the most French musical devices ever created.
“It was invented in France, so perhaps that’s why I have one,” says composer Marc Chouarain as he prepares to demonstrate his Cristal Baschet in the video above. “I put water on my finger and I have to put pressure on the glass rods, and the sound is amplified.” That amplification happens, like every other process within the instrument, without the involvement of electricity. Despite being fully acoustic, the Cristal Baschet produces sounds so loud and otherworldly that few could hear them without instinctively imagining a sci-fi movie to go along with the soundtrack.
Perhaps it’s no coincidence that Chouarain is a film composer, nor that the Cristal Baschet was invented in the early 1950s, when the cinematic visions of the future as we know them began to take shape. That era also saw the dawn of musique concrète (1964), with its use of recorded sounds as compositional elements, and the influence of the early Moog synthesizer, which would go on to change the sound of music forever. What influence the brothers Bernard and François Baschet expected of the Cristal Baschet when they invented it is unclear, but it has surely left more of a legacy than their other creations like the inflatable guitar and aluminum piano.
“Ravi Shankar, Damon Albarn (Gorillaz), Daft Punk, Radiohead, Tom Waits, and Manu Dibango are among the musical acts who have used the Cristal Baschet,” writes Colossal’s Andrew Lasane, citing the official Baschet Sound Structures Association brochure. The instrument also continues to get respect from adventurous film composers like Cliff Martinez, who tickles the glass rods in the video above. According to an interview at Vulture, Martinez first encountered the instrument when composing for the Steven Soderbergh remake of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris. He seems to have become a serious Cristal Baschet fan since: the video’s notes mentions that he now “incorporates the instrument in all of his scores,” for more pictures by Soderbergh, as well as by Nicolas Winding Refn — another director of possessed of distinctive visions, and thus always in need of sounds to match.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
As non-essential workers adjusted to spending more time at home, their ears adjusted to the increasingly non-foreign sound of birdsong outside their windows.
Those sweet tweets are no doubt largely responsible for the record breaking turnout at this year’s Global Big Day, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s annual birding event, held earlier this spring.
50,000 participants logged 2.1 million individual observations, and 6,479 species.
Apparently, there are even more birds in this world than there are sourdough starters…
…though for the immediate future, civic-minded birdwatchers will be confining their observations to the immediate vicinity, as a matter of public health.
We look forward to the day when bird enthusiasts residing outside of Belize, Mexico, or Guatemala can again travel to the Yucatán Peninsula in hopes of a face-to-face encounter with the Black Cat Bird.
Til then, the animated video above, in which a Black Catbird unwittingly duets with Belize’s Garifuna Collective, makes a soothing place holder.
A Black-cheeked Ant-Tanager joins NILLO, a producer and DJ from Costa Rica who draws musical inspiration from the tribal communities around him.
Siete Catorce, a producer who helped popularize the popular border genre known as ruidosón—a mix of cumbia and prehispanic tribal sounds—is paired with a Yellow-headed Parrot.
Jordan “Time Cow” Chung of Equiknoxx seamlessly integrates a Jamaican Blackbird into his unique brand of organic, experimental dancehall.
There’s something really nice about focusing on endangered species and songs that are disappearing and not being preserved and to use music to raise awareness about the species. I believe music has a big power for social activism and social change and for environmental change.
Listen to A Guide to the Birdsong of Mexico, Central America & the Caribbean for free on Spotify.
Buy the album or individual tracks on Bandcamp to benefit the charities above.
Robin Perkins’ limited edition prints of the featured birds also benefit the bird-focused regional charities and can be purchasedhere.
Debates about whether a guitarist is underrated often involve a lot of posturing and needless name-dropping—they don’t tend to go anywhere, in other words. This is not the case with Peter Green, founder and former singer, songwriter, and guitarist for Fleetwood Mac, who died this past weekend. He is, probably most definitely, “the most underrated guitarist in British Blues,” argues the Happy Bluesman, or at least he became so in the last decades of his life.
Green experienced a tragic end to his career with Fleetwood Mac when his mental health declined precipitously in 1970, and he was eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia. His legend lived long among musicians (and fans of the band who preferred their early work), but Green more or less disappeared from public view, even after releasing a handful of solo albums in a period of recovery.
Fleetwood Mac, the group he founded and carried to its first years of major stardom became, of course, “a household name, widely recognized as one of the best soft rock bands ever for hits like ‘The Chain,’ ‘Go Your Own Way,’ and ‘Everywhere’”—songs Peter Green had nothing to do with, though he had the soft rock chops, as the melancholy “Man of the World” beautifully demonstrates. Hear him in some of his other finest moments in the band, including a phenomenal “Black Magic Woman” at the top, before Carlos Santana made the song his signature.
The argument for Green’s most underrated-ness as a blues guitarist is more than compelling, with endorsements from B.B. King—who said Green had “the sweetest tone I ever heard”—and John Mayall, who said he was better than Clapton when Green joined the Bluesbreakers at age 20. After founding Fleetwood Mac, Green wrote “Black Magic Woman,” sent a guitar instrumental, “Albatross,” to the top of the British Charts in 1969 and, that same year, recorded at Chess Records with, among other blues legends, Willie Dixon and Buddy Guy.
Was he the “best” British blues guitarist? He was “the only one who gave me the cold sweats,” King confessed, which sure is something, even if you prefer Clapton or Jeff Beck. Is he the most underrated? Probably most definitely. “Within a few short years, Peter Green had achieved greater commercial success than two of the world’s most famous bands,” selling more records in 1969 than “both The Rolling Stones and The Beatles, combined.” Then he disappeared.
Green is receiving the recognition in death that eluded him in his last years, though fame never seemed to truly motivate him at any time in his life. Fellow musicians have spared no superlatives in online memorials, including Metallica’s Kirk Hammett, not known for going anywhere near an early Fleetwood Mac sound. But Green was a consummate musician’s musician (he named his band after the rhythm section!), and he earned the respect of serious rock artists and serious blues artists and serious metal artists.
A longtime friend and admirer, Hammett owns Green’s ’59 Gibson Les Paul (nicknamed “Greeny”). He recently covered Green’s last Fleetwood Mac song—“The Green Manalishi (With the Two Prong Crown)”—live onstage and was collaborating on new material with his idol. “Our loss is total,” Hammett wrote in tribute, perhaps the most succinct and devastating tribute among so many. Fleetwood Mac would never have existed without him. And his influence on the British Blues and beyond goes even deeper. See Green revisit his lovely “Man of the World” in a more recent performance, just below. He steps back from the fiery leads, playing subtle rhythm parts, but he still has the old magic in his fingers.
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