Miles Davis did­n’t put out any stu­dio albums from 1973 until the mid­dle of 1981. In explain­ing the rea­sons for this lacu­na in his record­ing career, Milesol­o­gists can point to a vari­ety of fac­tors in the man’s pro­fes­sion­al and per­son­al life. But one in par­tic­u­lar looms large: the fail­ure of his 1972 album On the Cor­ner. Davis was­n’t known for occu­py­ing any one style of jazz for very long, to put it mild­ly, but the On the Cor­ner ses­sions find him very near­ly break­ing with jazz itself. In a bid to recap­ture the atten­tion of young black lis­ten­ers, he took the plunge into a mix of what he lat­er described as “Stock­hausen plus funk plus Ornette Cole­man.”

“Miles want­ed the kids who were into rock,” writes Jaz­zTimes’ Col­in Flem­ing. “That was the tar­get demo, an audi­ence he’d been court­ing since 1970’s Bitch­es Brew. He played for that audi­ence on the psy­che­del­ic ball­room cir­cuit, doing so with rock groups — the Steve Miller Band, for instance — that he had no respect for as musi­cians. Davis thought he was slum­ming it while shar­ing such bills, but he also believed in the lis­ten­ing skills of youth, which is usu­al­ly a wise thing to do.” “The result­ing, seem­ing­ly incon­gru­ous mix of musi­cal expe­ri­ences and desires led him and a host of col­lab­o­ra­tors — includ­ing Her­bie Han­cock, John McLaugh­lin, Chick Corea, and James Mtume — to make ‘one holy hell of a groov­ing, min­i­mal­ist rack­et.’”

Upon its release, On the Cor­ner “was derid­ed as an affront to taste, an insult to lis­ten­ers, a sham per­pet­u­at­ed by a man who want­ed to rub your face in some­thing most unpleas­ant, just because he thought he could.” And yet, hear­ing it in this era — as I did not long ago while lis­ten­ing through Davis’ entire discog­ra­phy — you’d strug­gle to under­stand the source of the offense. Indeed, a twen­ty-first-cen­tu­ry lis­ten­er may well be more trou­bled by Corky McCoy’s infa­mous cov­er art, with its stereo­typ­i­cal street scene whose char­ac­ters range from pros­ti­tute to pimp, hus­tler to homo­sex­u­al. The image has been described as “ghet­todel­ic,” a word that could also label the inchoate musi­cal sub­genre Davis was attempt­ing to forge.

The cul­ture has long since caught up with the par­tic­u­lar son­ic exper­i­ment run in On the Cor­ner, which “has been hailed in recent years as the album that helped birth hip-hop, funk, post-punk, elec­tron­i­ca, and just about any oth­er pop­u­lar music with a repet­i­tive beat, which was quite the feat for a record that not many peo­ple have ever lis­tened to.” But if you join those ranks, you can hard­ly avoid notic­ing the tex­tures its son­ic col­lage shares with pop­u­lar gen­res of the past few decades, thanks not least to the splic­ing, and loop­ing that was the spe­cial­ty of pro­duc­er Teo Macero (also Davis’ col­lab­o­ra­tor on Sketch­es of Spain, In a Silent Way, and Bitch­es Brew). Maybe, when all this proved to be a bit much for the ear­ly sev­en­ties, Davis had no choice but to take a break, hav­ing final­ly got­ten a few too many miles ahead.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear a 65-Hour, Chrono­log­i­cal Playlist of Miles Davis’ Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Jazz Albums

Miles Davis Icon­ic 1959 Album Kind of Blue Turns 60: Revis­it the Album That Changed Amer­i­can Music

Miles Davis’ Bitch­es Brew Turns 50: Cel­e­brate the Funk-Jazz-Psych-Rock Mas­ter­piece

The Night When Miles Davis Opened for the Grate­ful Dead (1970)

Miles Davis’ Entire Discog­ra­phy Pre­sent­ed in a Styl­ish Inter­ac­tive Visu­al­iza­tion

Miles Davis Opens for Neil Young and “That Sor­ry-Ass Cat” Steve Miller at The Fill­more East (1970)

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.

She’s worked with Stan­ley Kubrick *and* “Weird Al” Yankovic, and helped Robert Moog in the devel­op­ment of his epony­mous syn­the­siz­er. Wendy Car­los is also one of the first high pro­file trans­gen­der artists–credited as Wal­ter Car­los for Kubrick’s A Clock­work Orange but hav­ing tran­si­tioned to Wendy by the time of The Shin­ing, in which only a few of her pieces were used.

In this brief clip from a 1989 BBC episode of Hori­zon, Car­los, accom­pa­nied by her two cats, explains how she uses ana­log synths to cre­ate elec­tron­ic fac­sim­i­les of real instruments–in this case cre­at­ing an approx­i­ma­tion of a xylo­phone, sculpt­ing a sine wave until it sounds like a mal­let on wood.

The seg­ment also shows Car­los oper­at­ing one of the orig­i­nal Moog synths, about the size of a fridge and look­ing like an old tele­phone switch­board with a key­board attached. By plug­ging and unplug­ging a series of cables, she demon­strates, the sine wave is decon­struct­ed from its orig­i­nal “pure” but harsh sound. Lat­er ana­log synths were addi­tive, not sub­trac­tive, she explains. (It’s one of the few times I’ve seen old tech explained so well and so quick­ly.)

Along with work­ing with Bob Moog, Car­los stud­ied at Colum­bia-Prince­ton Elec­tron­ic Music Cen­ter along­side two pio­neers of ear­ly elec­tron­ic music: Vladimir Ussachevsky and Otto Luen­ing, both of whom would make very chal­leng­ing com­po­si­tions and musique con­crete.

But Wendy chose both the clas­si­cal and pop­u­lar path, cre­at­ing the Switched on Bach series that fea­tured 18th cen­tu­ry music played on the Moog synth and oth­ers. It would lead her to Kubrick and A Clock­work Orange’s idio­syn­crat­ic score and even more suc­cess. Apart from her score for Disney’s Tron, now very much beloved by fans, Car­los turned to more per­son­al, sound­scape work lat­er. And in 2005, if you can find a copy, she put out a mul­ti­ple-CD set of all her sound­track work that Kubrick nev­er used for The Shin­ing and oth­ers.

The descrip­tion of the entire Hori­zon episode has a tech­nofear theme: “In Paris, Xavier Rodet has taught a com­put­er to sing Mozart; in Green­wich Vil­lage, Wendy Car­los syn­the­sis­es a clas­si­cal con­cer­to from elec­tron­ic tones…In Aus­tralia, Man­fred Clynes reck­ons he has dis­cov­ered a uni­ver­sal human lan­guage of emo­tion. To prove it he cre­ates feel­ings on tape. What’s left for human per­form­ers to con­tribute?”

This pro­gram was at least a decade after the first sam­pling key­board, so the anx­i­ety is either late or over­hyped. But it also sounds famil­iar to our cur­rent con­cerns over AI (as seen in these very web pages!). Synths nev­er replaced human instru­ments, but it did cre­ate more synth play­ers. AI won’t replace human deci­sion mak­ing (prob­a­bly), but it will cer­tain­ly cre­ate more AI pro­gram­mers.

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

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Glenn Gould Sing the Praise of the Moog Syn­the­siz­er and Wendy Car­los’ Switched-On Bach, the “Record of the Decade” (1968)

Wendy Car­los’ Switched on Bach Turns 50 This Month: Learn How the Clas­si­cal Synth Record Intro­duced the World to the Moog

The Scores That Elec­tron­ic Music Pio­neer Wendy Car­los Com­posed for Stan­ley Kubrick’s A Clock­work Orange and The Shin­ing

Elec­tron­ic Music Pio­neer Wendy Car­los Demon­strates the Moog Syn­the­siz­er on the BBC (1970)

What the Future Sound­ed Like: Doc­u­men­tary Tells the For­got­ten 1960s His­to­ry of Britain’s Avant-Garde Elec­tron­ic Musi­cians

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts.

Here’s a remark­able short film of the great jazz gui­tarist Djan­go Rein­hardt, vio­lin­ist Stéphane Grap­pel­li and their band the Quin­tette du Hot Club de France per­form­ing on a movie set in 1938. The film was hasti­ly orga­nized by the band’s British agent Lew Grade as a way to intro­duce the band’s unique style of gui­tar- and vio­lin-based jazz to the British pub­lic before their first UK tour. As Michael Dreg­ni writes in Gyp­sy Jazz: In Search of Djan­go Rein­hardt and the Soul of Gyp­sy Swing:

The Quin­tette was unknown to the British pub­lic, and there was no telling how their new music would res­onate. So, Grade sought to edu­cate his audi­ence. He hired a movie crew to film a six-minute-plus pro­mo­tion­al short enti­tled Jazz “Hot” to be shown in British the­aters pro­vid­ing a les­son in jazz appre­ci­a­tion to warm up the crowds.

That would explain the didac­tic tone of the first two and a half min­utes of the film, which plods along as a reme­di­al les­son on the nature of jazz. It opens with an orches­tra giv­ing a note-for-note per­for­mance of Han­del’s “Largo,” from the opera Xerx­es, which the nar­ra­tor then con­trasts to the free­dom of jazz impro­vi­sa­tion.

But the film real­ly comes alive when Djan­go arrives on the screen and launch­es into a jazz arrange­ment of the pop­u­lar French song “J’at­tendrai.” (The name means “I will wait,” and it’s a rework­ing of a 1933 Ital­ian song, “Tornerai” or “You Will Return,” by Dino Olivieri and Nino Rastel­li.) Although the sequences of Rein­hardt and the band per­form­ing were obvi­ous­ly syn­chro­nized to a pre­vi­ous­ly record­ed track, Jazz “Hot” is the best sur­viv­ing visu­al doc­u­ment of the leg­endary gui­tarist’s two-fin­gered fret­ting tech­nique, which he devel­oped after los­ing the use of most of his left hand in a fire. To learn more about Rein­hardt, vis­it the links in the Relat­eds below.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2013.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Djan­go Rein­hardt & Stéphane Grap­pel­li Play Mas­ter­ful­ly Togeth­er in Vivid Col­or (1938)

Hear Lost Record­ing of Pink Floyd Play­ing with Jazz Vio­lin­ist Stéphane Grap­pel­li on “Wish You Were Here”

How Djan­go Rein­hardt, After Los­ing Two Fin­gers, Devel­oped An Inno­v­a­tive Style & Inspired Black Sab­bath Gui­tarist Toni Iom­mi to Do the Same

Djan­go Rein­hardt Demon­strates His Gui­tar Genius in Rare Footage From the 1930s, 40s & 50s

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.