A Charlie Brown Christmas uses a cast of amateur child voice actors, deals with the theme of seasonal depression, and culminates in the recitation of a Bible verse, all to a jazz score. It was not, safe to say, the special that CBS had expected, to say nothing of its sponsor, the Coca-Cola Company. In all likelihood, it would have been canceled, but seeing as it had already been announced and promoted (and in any case, was completed only a few days before it was scheduled to air), the show went on. In the event, not only did it please the viewers of America, it went on to become one of the most beloved pieces of Christmas animation — and that jazz score went on to become one of the most beloved Christmas albums.
In the new Digging the Greats video above, bassist Brandon Shaw breaks down some of the distinguishing characteristics of Vince Guaraldi’s score, with help from drummer Ryan Shaw (not just Brandon’s brother, but also a musician with his own direct connection to Peanuts productions) and pianist Jonté Moore.
“There’s beauty, because of the major 9 sounding, but there’s, like, this tension,” Moore explains while playing the immediately recognizable chords of “Christmastime Is Here.” “Something’s maybe missing: it could be people who have lost a loved one, or are maybe just tired of the holiday season, so they have this weight that they carry.” We’re a long way indeed from the insipid cheer of many a holiday production.
“Christmastime Is Here” may be the single most influential piece of A Charlie Brown Christmas’ musical legacy. But it’s best heard in the context of the whole soundtrack, where it sounds of a piece with the “jazz arrangements of Christmas classics,” as Shaw puts it, as well as with “Linus and Lucy,” the Peanuts theme song Guaraldi had previously composed. This coherent aesthetic and sensibility — the composer’s, of course, but also that of the world Charles Schulz created — goes a long way toward making the project not just a collection of Christmas songs, but an enduring Christmas album: one that, over the next couple of days, even those of us without enthusiasm for Christmas music in general will be spinning as many times as we can get away with.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
I’m not sure the Sex Pistols had “available for children’s parties” on their press release, but on a cold and grim Christmas in 1977, that’s exactly what happened. While many Britons were settling in for a warm yuletide, the Pistols decided to host a party/benefit for the children of striking firemen and miners at a venue called Ivanhoe’s in Huddersfield, UK.
It turned out that this afternoon gig, along with an evening concert with full-grown punks in the audience, would be the Pistols’ final UK appearance. In a few weeks the band would fly to America for a set of ill-fated gigs and then break up. Soon after that Sid Vicious would be dead.
At the children’s concert John Lydon handed out t‑shirts, buttons, records, and posters. There was a pogo dancing competition with a skateboard as a prize, disco music on the sound system, and a gigantic cake with “Sex Pistols” written on it. (A food fight not only broke out, but was encouraged.)
Understand that by December 1977, the Pistols were pretty much banned from playing anywhere in Britain, so the announcement of this benefit show was a big deal, and what we would now call “community outreach” was the opposite of the monstrous image that the British gutter press had whipped up against the band.
Fantastic. The ultimate reward. One of my all-time favourite gigs. Young kids, and we’re doing Bodies and they’re bursting out with laughter on the ‘f*ck this f*ck that’ verse. The correct response: not the shock horror ‘How dare you?’ Adults bring their own filthy minds into a thing. They don’t quite perceive it as a child does. Oh, Johnny’s used a naughty word. ‘Bodies’ was from two different points of view. You’ll find that theme runs through a lot of things I write like ‘Rise’ – “I could be wrong, I could be right”. I’m considering both sides of the argument, always.
Film director Julian Temple caught the entire gig on a “big old crappy U‑matic low-band camera” and while clips from the footage have been used in various docs beforehand, it was only in 2013 that the entire footage was shown on British television, along with reminiscences from the adults who were children at the time of the gig.
In the Guardian interview with Temple, he looked back at the footage and commented on the strangeness of a UK Christmas in 1977:
“In a way, the Pistols seem the only thing that’s connected with today. Everything else seems halfway into the Victorian period, whereas the Pistols seem very modern and aware of what’s going to happen. Hopefully, there’s resonance in the fuel bills and firemen’s strikes of today. Even though it’s a different planet, people face the same problems.
“The sound with just one camera is raw and searing. I hope kids watching it today will go: ‘Fuck me, bands like that just don’t exist.’ ”
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.
Nearly fifty years ago, the celebrated young pianist Keith Jarrett arrived in the West German city of Köln (better known in English as Cologne). Having just come off a 500-mile-long road trip from Switzerland, where he’d played a concert the previous day, he was left with barely any time to recover before going onstage at the Köln Opera House that night — at 11:30 that night, to be precise, the only time that august cultural institution would give a jazz musician. Because the restaurant where he attempted to have dinner beforehand mixed up his order, he could barely eat a thing before showtime. And his back was acting up.
Yet all of those difficulties were as nothing against the miserable instrument awaiting Jarrett at the opera house. He’d requested a Bösendorfer 290 Imperial grand piano, but a series of errors led to the staff setting up a dilapidated, frail-sounding baby grand of the same make.
Unable to procure a replacement, the concert’s teenage organizer Vera Brandes called in a tuner to do his best to bring the piano up to playability and managed to persuade Jarrett to go on with the show. All the seats were sold, after all, and the recording engineers had their gear ready to roll; in the worst case scenario, he’d end up with another tape for the archives.
In the event, the concert was more of a best-case scenario. “What Keith Jarrett did so brilliantly was to take this broken piano and use it to play music that only that piano could have played,” says Youtuber David Hartley in the video above. “He didn’t hide away from the faults of the piano; instead, he embraced them and put them in the music. This is the very essence of improvisation.” A classical musician with a defined set of pieces could never have worked at all under these conditions, but Jarrett ended up putting on quite a successful show — and, with the recording, putting out a hugely successful album.
After it came out in November that same year, The Köln Concert went on to become both the best-selling solo jazz album and the best-selling piano album. For decades, it was easily found even in the record collections of those who owned no other releases from ECM, the German jazz and avant-garde label with which Jarrett has long been associated, and heard on the soundtracks of films by auteurs like Nicolas Roeg and Nanni Moretti. Still today, it stands in support of any number of proverbs about necessity being the mother of invention, playing the hand you’re dealt, and not waiting for ideal conditions. If we listen to it enough, we may even find ourselves waiting for terrible ones.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
It’s easy to get the impression that enthusiasts of electronic music listen to nothing else. (Not that it isn’t true for some of them, who tend to relegate themselves to smaller subgenres: consult Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music for a map of the sonic territory.) And it’s equally easy to believe that, if you aren’t explicitly into electronic music, then you don’t listen to it. But in fact, its history is one of long-term integration so thorough that many of us frequently listen to electronic music — or at any rate, electronic-adjacent music — without being conscious of that fact.
Watch the video above, a 24-minute journey through the evolution of electronic music from 1929 to 2019, and take note of how many songs you know after hearing them for only a few seconds. Early experiments by the likes of Olivier Messiaen, Halim El-Dabh, and Rune Lindblad may ring no bells (and to the uninitiated, may not sound like music at all). Doctor Who fans will perk up when the timeline reaches 1963, with the appearance of that show’s theme song — a recording by Delia Derbyshire, incidentally, whose pioneering work we’ve often featured here on Open Culture. The first piece of full-fledged pop music is Gershon Kingsley’s “Popcorn,” from 1969, one of those songs whose melody we all know even if we’d never be able to come up with the title.
In the mid-seventies, the names now widely associated with the development of modern electronic music start to emerge: Kraftwerk’s “Autobahn” in 1974, Tangerine Dream’s “Rubycon” in 1975, Jean-Michel Jarre’s “Oxygene” in 1976. But more important to the history of popular culture is the song that represents the following year: Donna Summer’s hit “I Feel Love,” which was co-produced by a certain Giorgio Moroder. Perhaps the defining figure of electronic music’s passage through the discos into the mainstream, Moroder made an even bigger impact in 1978 with his own instrumental composition “Chase,” which won him an Academy Award by being included in the film Midnight Express.
The movies did a great deal to sell the world on the fusion of electronic technology and pop music in the eighties. Who in the developed world — or indeed, in most of the developing world — could fail to recognize, for instance, Harold Faltermeyer’s “Axel F”? (And surely nobody who came of age at the time of A Night at theRoxbury can claim ignorance of Haddaway’s “What Is Love.”) As this video assembles its history, electronic music finds its way back to the dance floor in the nineties, and it more or less stays there through the twenty-tens; perhaps you would’ve had to spend a lot of time in the clubs in that decade to know such seemingly era-defining names as Marshmello, Armin van Buuren, Shapov, Major Lazer, and DJ Snake. But from an electronic-influenced hit like Ed Sheeran’s “Shape of You,” alas, there was no escape.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
Between 750 BC and 400 BC, the Ancient Greeks composed songs meant to be accompanied by the lyre, reed-pipes, and various percussion instruments. More than 2,000 years later, modern scholars have finally figured out how to reconstruct and perform these songs with (it’s claimed) 100% accuracy.
[Ancient Greek] instruments are known from descriptions, paintings and archaeological remains, which allow us to establish the timbres and range of pitches they produced.
And now, new revelations about ancient Greek music have emerged from a few dozen ancient documents inscribed with a vocal notation devised around 450 BC, consisting of alphabetic letters and signs placed above the vowels of the Greek words.
The Greeks had worked out the mathematical ratios of musical intervals — an octave is 2:1, a fifth 3:2, a fourth 4:3, and so on.
The notation gives an accurate indication of relative pitch.
So what did Greek music sound like? Below you can listen to David Creese, a classicist from the University of Newcastle, playing “an ancient Greek song taken from stone inscriptions constructed on an eight-string ‘canon’ (a zither-like instrument) with movable bridges. “The tune is credited to Seikilos,” says Archaeology Magazine.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in October, 2013.
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Hip-hop was once a subculture, but by now it’s long since been one of the unquestionably dominant forms of popular music — not just in America, and not just among young people. There are, of course, still a fair few hip-hop holdouts, but even they’ve come to know a thing or two about it through cultural osmosis alone. They’re aware, for example — whether or not they approve of it — that rappers usually perform over music constructed through sampling: that is, stitched together out of pieces of other songs. If you’re not sure how it works, you can see the process clearly visualized in the video above from sample provider Tracklib.
Offering a breakdown of sampling as it’s happened through “fifty years of hip-hop,” the video begins even before the genre really took shape, in 1973. It was then that DJ Kool Herc developed what he called “the ‘Merry-Go-Round’ Technique,” an early example of which involved using dual turntables to switch back and forth between the instrumental breaks of James Brown’s “Give It Up or Turnit a Loose” and the Incredible Bongo Band’s “Bongo Rock.” The original idea was to give dancers more time to do their thing, but when the MCs picked up their microphones and started getting creative, a new music took shape almost immediately.
Mainstream America got its first taste of hip-hop in 1979, with the release of “Rapper’s Delight” by the Sugarhill Gang. In its repeating rhythm part, many would have recognized Chic’s “Good Times,” which actually wasn’t a sample but an interpolation, i.e. a re-recording. This drew a lawsuit — hardly the last of its kind in hip-hop — but it also set thousands of DJs-to-be digging through their record collections in search of usable breaks. Disco proved a fount of inspiration for early hip-hop, but so did jazz and even electronic music, as demonstrated by Afrika Bambaataa and the Soul Sonic Force’s “Planet Rock,” which sampled Kraftwerk’s “Trans-Europe Express.”
As sampling goes, nothing is artistically off-limits; in some sense, the less immediately recognizable, the better. With the evolution of audio editing technology, hip-hop artists have long gone even further in making these borrowed clips their own by slowing them down; speeding them up; chopping them into pieces and rearranging them; and layering them one atop another. This sometimes causes problems, as when the difficulty of licensing De La Soul’s many and varied source materials kept their catalog out of official availability. Along with A Tribe Called Quest, also featured in this video, De La Soul are, of course, known as hip-hop groups beloved by music nerds. But if you seriously break down any major work of hip-hop, you’ll find that all its artists are music nerds at heart.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Alice’s Restaurant. It’s now a Thanksgiving classic, and something of a tradition around here. Recorded in 1967, the 18+ minute counterculture song recounts Arlo Guthrie’s real encounter with the law, starting on Thanksgiving Day 1965. As the long song unfolds, we hear all about how a hippie-bating police officer, by the name of William “Obie” Obanhein, arrested Arlo for littering. (Cultural footnote: Obie previously posed for several Norman Rockwell paintings, including the well-known painting, “The Runaway,” that graced a 1958 cover of The Saturday Evening Post.) In fairly short order, Arlo pleads guilty to a misdemeanor charge, pays a $25 fine, and cleans up the thrash. But the story isn’t over. Not by a long shot.
Later, when Arlo (son of Woody Guthrie) gets called up for the draft, the petty crime ironically becomes a basis for disqualifying him from military service in the Vietnam War. Guthrie recounts this with some bitterness as the song builds into a satirical protest against the war: “I’m sittin’ here on the Group W bench ’cause you want to know if I’m moral enough to join the Army, burn women, kids, houses and villages after bein’ a litterbug.” And then we’re back to the cheery chorus again: “You can get anything you want, at Alice’s Restaurant.”
We have featured Guthrie’s classic during past years. But, for this Thanksgiving, we give you the illustrated version. As a sad post script, Alice Brock, the owner of Alice’s Restaurant–died last week at the age of 83.
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Charles Mingus, the innovative jazz musician, was known for having a bad temper. He once got so irritated with a heckler that he ended up trashing his $20,000 bass. Another time, when a pianist didn’t get things right, Mingus reached right inside the piano and ripped the strings out with his bare hands — a true story mentioned in the BBC documentary, 1959: The Year that Changed Jazz.
But Mingus had a softer, nurturing side too. If you head to the official Charles Mingus website, you will find a copy of the Charles Mingus Cat Toilet Training Program, a loving little guide created for cat owners everywhere. The trick to potty training your cat comes down to edging the litter box closer to the bathroom, eventually placing the box on the potty, and then cutting a hole in the center of the box. Expect to spend about three weeks making the transition. And who knows, Mingus says, your cat may even learn to flush. The full guide appears here. Or read it below:
1
First, you must train your cat to use a home-made cardboard litter box, if you have not already done so. (If your box does not have a one-piece bottom, add a cardboard that fits inside, so you have a false bottom that is smooth and strong. This way the box will not become soggy and fall out at the bottom. The grocery store will have extra flat cardboards which you can cut down to fit exactly inside your box.)
Be sure to use torn up newspaper, not kitty litter. Stop using kitty litter. (When the time comes you cannot put sand in a toilet.)
Once your cat is trained to use a cardboard box, start moving the box around the room, towards the bathroom. If the box is in a corner, move it a few feet from the corner, but not very noticeably. If you move it too far, he may go to the bathroom in the original corner. Do it gradually. You’ve got to get him thinking. Then he will gradually follow the box as you move it to the bathroom. (Important: if you already have it there, move it out of the bathroom, around, and then back. He has to learn to follow it. If it is too close to the toilet, to begin with, he will not follow it up onto the toilet seat when you move it there.) A cat will look for his box. He smells it.
2
Now, as you move the box, also start cutting the brim of the box down, so the sides get lower. Do this gradually.
Finally, you reach the bathroom and, eventually, the toilet itself. Then, one day, prepare to put the box on top of the toilet. At each corner of the box, cut a little slash. You can run string around the box, through these slashes, and tie the box down to the toilet so it will not fall off. Your cat will see it there and jump up to the box, which is now sitting on top of the toilet (with the sides cut down to only an inch or so.)
Don’t bug the cat now, don’t rush him, because you might throw him off. Just let him relax and go there for awhile-maybe a week or two. Meanwhile, put less and less newspaper inside the box.
3
One day, cut a small hole in the very center of his box, less than an apple-about the size of a plum-and leave some paper in the box around the hole. Right away he will start aiming for the hole and possibly even try to make it bigger. Leave the paper for awhile to absorb the waste. When he jumps up he will not be afraid of the hole because he expects it. At this point you will realize that you have won. The most difficult part is over.
From now on, it is just a matter of time. In fact, once when I was cleaning the box and had removed it from the toilet, my cat jumped up anyway and almost fell in. To avoid this, have a temporary flat cardboard ready with a little hole, and slide it under the toilet lid so he can use it while you are cleaning, in case he wants to come and go, and so he will not fall in and be scared off completely. You might add some newspaper up there too, while you are cleaning, in case your cat is not as smart as Nightlife was.
4
Now cut the box down completely until there is no brim left. Put the flat cardboard, which is left, under the lid of the toilet seat, and pray. Leave a little newspaper, still. He will rake it into the hole anyway, after he goes to the bathroom. Eventually, you can simply get rid of the cardboard altogether. You will see when he has got his balance properly.
Don’t be surprised if you hear the toilet flush in the middle of the night. A cat can learn how to do it, spurred on by his instinct to cover up. His main thing is to cover up. If he hits the flush knob accidentally and sees that it cleans the bowl inside, he may remember and do it intentionally.
Also, be sure to turn the toilet paper roll around so that it won’t roll down easily if the cat paws it. The cat is apt to roll it into the toilet, again with the intention of covering up- the way he would if there were still kitty litter.
It took me about three or four weeks to toilet train my cat, Nightlife. Most of the time is spent moving the box very gradually to the bathroom. Do it very slowly and don’t confuse him. And, remember, once the box is on the toilet, leave it a week or even two. The main thing to remember is not to rush or confuse him.
Bonus: Below you can hear The Wire’s Reg E. Cathey read “The Charles Mingus CAT-alog for Toilet Training Your Cat.”
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