Watch Prince Play Jazz Piano & Coach His Band Through George Gershwin’s “Summertime” in a Candid, Behind-the-Scenes Moment (1990)

in Music | January 5th, 2018

A rock enigma wrapped around an R&B quandary, wearing platform shoes and purple velour. The cheekbones of an angel, dance moves and lyrics from an infernally sexy place, and more musical talent than it seems possible for a single person to possess in one lifetime…. These are some of the ways we remember Prince Rogers Nelson.

We do not typically remember him as a jazz pianist. But his facility with jazz earned him the admiration of Miles Davis, who made several efforts to collaborate with the extremely busy pop star. (They performed together only once, it seems, on New Year’s Eve, 1987 at Paisley Park.) Prince’s style, stage show, songwriting, and arranging drew from jazz of all kinds—from zoot suit-era big band to the frenetic movement of hard bop to the classically-inflected show tunes of George Gershwin. Just above see him “casually own” Gershwin’s “Summertime” during a 1990 soundcheck in Osaka, Japan.

For the first minute, it’s a Prince showcase, but once he coaches the band through the changes, he lets them take it, settling back while the guitarist rides out a solo. The candid moment does much more than demonstrate his chops on the piano and appreciation for Gershwin. It offers yet another contrast to the popular image of Prince as a charismatic, self-sufficient solo artist who just happened to work with a regular crew of stellar musicians and not-so-stellar actresses.

It’s true Prince played most or all of the instruments on many of his albums, wrote nearly all his own songs, directed or produced nearly every aspect of his music, career, and persona.… As solo artists go, no one comes close to defining full creative control. The Purple One ruled over a musical empire; most of the time, it seems, he got what he wanted, even if he sometimes had to fight like hell for it. We might expect such an artist to be a petty tyrant, hogging the spotlight and throwing his weight around at every opportunity. What we hear and see behind the scenes paints a much richer picture.

The footage here was shot by Steve Purcell, who directed several videos for Prince and, as he remarked, “spent six years of my life working for, creating with and laying the foundation for the rest of my career with Prince.” In his introduction to the video, he writes, “This may not be the Prince you think of but it is the Prince I knew.” A bandleader who was also an ensemble player, and who constantly paid tribute to the music that inspired him in live performance.

We might have known Prince as a generous hitmaker, who gave song after song to artists like Sheena Easton, Chaka Khan, Sinead O’Connor, and the Bangles, and launched the careers of a good many of his collaborators, musical and otherwise. Since his death, we’ve also learned much more about both his tremendous financial and emotional goodwill, and the time he took with other musicians to help them develop and learn.

The impossibly cool aloofness with which he glided through pop stardom did not extend to his relationships with the people closest to him. Prince was so beloved that his two ex-wives worked together to organize a star-studded memorial service for him. Stories of his kindness, good humor, compassion, and loyalty pour out at the same rate as the music he had locked up in his Paisley Park vault. We’ll likely see more candid videos like this one emerge as well, from those who, like Purcell, found their time documenting the artist a totally life-changing experience.

via Classical FM

Prince Plays Unplugged and Wraps the Crowd Around His Little Finger (2004)

Hear Prince’s Personal Playlist of Party Music: 22 Tracks That Will Bring Any Party to Life

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Hear Glenn Gould Channel Marshall McLuhan and Create an Experimental Radio Documentary Analyzing the Pop Music of Petula Clark (1967)

in Music, Radio | January 5th, 2018

Glenn Gould, that intellectually intense, aesthetically austere interpreter of Johann Sebastian Bach, had little time for pop music. He had especially little time for the Beatles: “Theirs is a happy, cocky, belligerently resourceless brand of harmonic primitivism,” he wrote in High Fidelity in 1967, when the Fab Four had reached the top of the zeitgeist. “The indulgent amateurishness of the musical material, though closely rivaled by the indifference of the performing style, is actually surpassed only by the ineptitude of the studio production method,” he declares, likening “Strawberry Fields Forever” to “a mountain wedding between Claudio Monteverdi and a jug band.”

But the Beatle-bashing was incidental to the purpose of the article, a paean to English singer Petula Clark. At first listen, her four singles on which Gould focuses his analysis — 1964’s “Downtown,” 1956’s “My Love,” and 1966’s “A Sign of the Times” and “Who Am I?” — sound like nothing more than adolescent-oriented pop hardly touched by any of that decade’s musical (or indeed social) revolutions. But “this quartet of hits,” in Gould’s view, “was designed to convey the idea that, bound as she might be by limitations of timbre and range, she would not accept any corresponding restrictions of theme and sentiment,” with the result that she came to command an audience “large, constant, and possessed of an enthusiasm which transcends the generations.”

Gould says all this in The Search for Petula Clark, a 23-minute radio documentary that aired on the CBC on December 11, 1967, less than three weeks before his much better-known experimental documentary The Idea of North. He situates his analysis of the singer he calls “Pet Clark,” which gets into not just her songs’ themes and lyrics but their technical qualities as music, in the context of a solo road trip around Lake Superior when “Who Am I?” first hit the airwaves. So compelled did he find himself that he timed his drive to get within range of one of the radio stations scattered across the vastness of his homeland at the top of each hour in order to hear the song over and over again, after 700 miles he got to “know it if not better than the soloist, at least as well, perhaps, as most of the sidemen.”

Though born within two months of each other in 1932 and thereafter living lives dedicated to music, Gould and Clark would seem to have little else in common. While Gould died at 50, Clark, at the age of 85, continues to both record and perform. Gould, as J.D. Connor writes in an essay on The Search for Petula Clark, “stopped performing for live audiences in 1964. Freed from the rigors of the concert circuit, he dove into radio and television at just the moment when he and Canadian state media could parlay his immense musical popularity into something more.” This and the more intricate radio productions that would follow both sprang from and allowed Gould to construct “a media theory of his own. In print, on television, and, most important, on radio, Gould became the great complement to Marshall McLuhan.” And like McLuhan, when Gould obsesses over something that never seemed to merit serious attention, we’d do well to heed the insights he draws from it.

Glenn Gould: Off and On the Record: Two Short Films About the Life & Music of the Eccentric Musician

Glenn Gould Explains the Genius of Johann Sebastian Bach (1962)

Glenn Gould Gives Us a Tour of Toronto, His Beloved Hometown (1979)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities 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 or on Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Hear the Hagia Sophia’s Awe-Inspiring Acoustics Get Recreated with Computer Simulations, and Let Yourself Get Transported Back to the Middle Ages

in Architecture, Art, Music, Science, Stanford | January 4th, 2018

The technology used to produce, record, and process music has become ever more sophisticated and awe-inspiring, especially in the capability of software to emulate real instruments and acoustic environments. Digital emulation, or “modeling,” as it’s called, doesn’t simply mimic the sounds of guitar amplifiers, pianos, or synthesizers. At its best, it reproduces the feel of an aural experience, its textures and sonic dimensions, while also adding a seemingly infinite degree of flexibility.

When it comes to a technology called “convolution reverb,” we can virtually feel the air pressure of sound in a physical space, such that “listening in may be viewed as much as a spatial experience as it is a temporal one.” So notes Stanford’s Icons of Sound, a collaboration between the University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) and the Department of Art & Art History. The researchers in this joint project have combined resources to create a performance of Byzantine chant from the 6th century CE, simulated to sound like it takes place inside a prime acoustic environment designed for this very music, the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul.

Built by the emperor Justinian between 532 and 537, when the city was Constantinople, the massive church (later mosque and now state-run museum) “has an extraordinarily large nave spreading over 70 meters in length; it is surrounded by colonnaded aisles and galleries. Marble covers the floor and walls.” Its center is “crowned by a dome glittering in gold mosaics and rising 56 meters above the ground.” The effect of the building’s heavy, reflective surfaces and its architectural enormity “challenges our contemporary expectation of the intelligibility of language.”

We are accustomed to hear the spoken or sung word clearly in dry, non-reverberant spaces in order to decode the encoded message. By contrast, the wet acoustics of Hagia Sophia blur the intelligibility of the message, making words sound like emanation, emerging from the depth of the sea.

The Icons of Sound team has reconstructed the underwater acoustics of the Hagia Sophia using convolution reverb techniques and what are called “impulse responses”—recordings of the reverberations in particular spaces, which are then loaded into software to digitally simulate the same psychoacoustics, a process known as “auralization.” CCRMA describes an impulse response as an “imprint of the space,” which is then applied to sounds recorded in other environments. Typically, the process is used in studio music production, but Icons of Sound brought it to live performance at Stanford’s Bing Concert Hall last year, and made the group Cappella Romana sound like their voices had transported from the Holy Roman Empire.

“To recreate the unique sound,” writes Kat Eschner at Smithsonian, “performers sang while listening to the simulated acoustics of Hagia Sophia through earphones. Their singing was then put through the same acoustic simulator and played during the live performance through speakers in the concert hall.” As you can hear in these clips, the result is immersive and profound. One can only imagine what it must have been like live. To complete the effect, the production used “atmospheric reinforcement,” notes Stanford Live, “via projected images and lighting.” The audience was “immersed in an environment where the unique interplay of music, light, art, and sacred text has the potential to induce a quasi-mystical state of revelation and wonder.”

The only sounds the researchers were able to record in the actual space of the ancient church were four popping balloons. By layering the reverberations captured in these recordings, and compensating for the different decay times inside the Bing, they were able to approximate the acoustic properties of the building. You can hear several more audio samples recorded in different places at this site. In the video above, associate professor of medieval art Bissera Pentcheva explains how and why the Hagia Sophia shapes sound and light the way it does. While purists might prefer to see a performance in the actual space, one must admit, the ability to virtually deliver a version of it to potentially any concert hall in the world is pretty cool.

via The Smithsonian

The Same Song Sung in 15 Places: A Wonderful Case Study of How Landscape & Architecture Shape the Sounds of Music

What Did Ancient Greek Music Sound Like?: Listen to a Reconstruction That’s ‘100% Accurate’

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness.

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 6 ) |

The Story of How Beethoven Helped Make It So That CDs Could Play 74 Minutes of Music

in Music, Technology | January 4th, 2018

We music fans of the increasingly all-digital 2010s take compact discs for granted, so much so that many of us haven’t slid one into a player in years. But if we cast our minds back, and not even all that far, we can remember a time when CDs were precious, and the medium itself both impressive and controversial. Back when it first came on the market in 1982 (packaged in longboxes, you’ll recall) it seemed impossibly high-tech, inspiring dreamily futuristic promotional videos like the one below and emerging from a process of development that required the combined R&D and industrial might of both Japan and Europe’s biggest consumer-electronics giants, Sony and Philips.

That years-long coordinated effort, as Greg Milner writes in Perfecting Sound Forever, saw a team of engineers from both companies “shuttling between Eindhoven and Tokyo,” the prototype CD player “given its own first-class seat on KLM.”

Milner also mentions that “Philips wanted a 14-bit system and a disc that could hold an hour of music, while Sony argued for 16 bits and 74 minutes, supposedly because that was the length of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony,” though he calls the Beethoven bit “likely a digital audio urban legend.” But, like any urban legend, it contains grains of truth, though how many grains nobody quite knows for sure.

Philips’ preferred system would play 115-millimeter discs, while Sony’s would play 120-millimeter discs. As Wired’s Randy Alfred tells it:

When Sony and Philips were negotiating a single industry standard for the audio compact disc in 1979 and 1980, the story is that one of four people (or some combination of them) insisted that a single CD be able to hold all of the Ninth Symphony. The four were the wife of Sony chairman Akio Morita, speaking up for her favorite piece of music; Sony VP Norio Ohga (the company’s point man on the CD), recalling his studies at the Berlin Conservatory; Mrs. Ohga (her favorite piece, too); and conductor Herbert von Karajan, who recorded for Philips subsidiary Polygram and whose Berlin Philharmonic recording of the Ninth clocked in at 66 minutes.

Further research to find the longest recorded performance came up with a mono recording conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler at the Bayreuth Festival in 1951. That playing went a languorous 74 minutes.

A good story, sure, but as Philips Engineer Kees A. Schouhamer Immink writes in a technical article marking the CD’s 25th anniversary, “everyday practice is less romantic than the pen of a public relations guru.” Whatever the influence of Beethoven, in 1979 “Philips’ subsidiary Polygram — one of the world’s largest distributors of music — had set up a CD disc plant in Hanover, Germany that could produce large quantities of CDs with, of course, a diameter of 115mm. Sony did not have such a facility yet. So if Sony had agreed on the 115mm disc, Philips would have had a significant competitive edge in the music market. Ohga was aware of that, did not like it, and something had to be done.”

How much does the running time of a CD, which would enjoy a long reign as the dominant media for recorded music, owe to what Immink calls “Mrs. Ohga’s great passion for [Beethoven],” and how much to “the money and competition in the market of the two partners”? Not even Snopes, which rules the claim of a connection between Beethoven’s Ninth and the development of the CD as “undetermined,” can settle the matter. But whatever determined the length of the albums in the CD era, that 74-minute runtime remains a strong influence on our expectations of album length even now that musicians can record and sell them at any length they like — and now that we the consumers can listen any way we like, fragmenting, re-arranging, and customizing all of our music experiences, even Beethoven’s Ninth.

How Steely Dan Wrote “Deacon Blues,” the Song Audiophiles Use to Test High-End Stereos

A Celebration of Retro Media: Vinyl, Cassettes, VHS, and Polaroid Too

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

Neil Young on the Travesty of MP3s

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities 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 or on Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

A Big 44-Hour Chronological Playlist of Rolling Stones Albums: Stream 613 Tracks

in Music | January 4th, 2018

Image by Jim Pietryga, via Wikimedia Commons

“Would you let your daughter marry a Rolling Stone?”

From the start, the Rolling Stones were promoted as the more debauched, dangerous alternative to the Beatles, prompting the above rather-famous tabloid headline from their first years of fame. The Spotify playlist below collects a whopping 613 tracks from this seminal rock band, all placed for the most part in chronological order. (At 44 hours, there’s still whole albums–not major one mind you–missing, due to Spotify). The Stones may have been more complex than their bad boy image, but they’ve never shrugged it off over their five decades in music, and it’s probably too late to stop now.

But it was rough going at the start, wasn’t it? Their first single was a cover of a Chuck Berry song on the A‑side, and a Willie Dixon song on the flip. Their debut album contained only three originals, with only “Tell Me” standing out from the pack as something other than a carbon copy. Their second single was a song the Beatles gave to them–and even then the Fab Four recorded a version of it, unlike the hits they gave to Cilla Black and others. Andrew Loog Oldham was their manager first and a producer second, not used to the studio at all, and instead of the state-of-the-art Abbey Road studios to play in, the band had Regent Sound studios, with egg cartons taped to the ceiling to baffle noise. If this was competition against the Beatles, it certainly didn’t look good at first.

But despite–or due to–those challenges, the band gained success and earned respect, starting with “(I Can’t Get no) Satisfaction” and appearances on Ed Sullivan and the T.A.M.I. Show, where they actually followed James Brown and weren’t forgotten by history.

The Stones spent those first years following fashion, always one step behind the Beatles, going so far as to offer their own “Satanic” version of the psychedelic Sgt. Pepper’s. But then, instead of playing devilish dress-up, in May of 1968 they dropped “Jumpin Jack Flash,” which for the first time embodies a very real, dangerous energy. It wasn’t planned. But 1968 was when the Stones took the rock mantle from their friendly rivals. If any band was ready to be the bridge from the hopeful ‘60s to the grimy ‘70s, it was the Stones.

Their earlier mimicry of blues and rock’n’roll was one thing, but their amalgam of rock, blues, and Americana on albums like Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main Street was something else entirely, a special kind of alchemy that also seemed to tax the entire band–which eventually lost one founding member and shuffled through guitarists to find Ron Wood.

The late ‘70s and early ‘80s were an odd time for the band, as their biggest hits then were most unlike their previous hits, dallying with disco, channeling Lou Reed, and setting themselves up for a very confused decade. But still! All along the way the Stones kept releasing singles that other bands would give their eye teeth for.

The playlist ends with the release of 2016’s Blue and Lonesome, which found them right back where they started: a collection of well loved blues covers from Howlin’ Wolf, Little Walter, and Willie Dixon. In the end, they brought it all back home.

Mick Jagger Tells the Story Behind ‘Gimme Shelter’ and Merry Clayton’s Haunting Background Vocals

The Rolling Stones Release a Soulful, Never-Heard Acoustic Version of “Wild Horses”

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.

by Ted Mills | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Free, Open Source Modular Synth Software Lets You Create 70s & 80s Electronic Music—Without Having to Pay Thousands for a Real-World Synthesizer

in Music, Technology | January 3rd, 2018

In the past decade or so, the analog modular synth—of the kind pioneered by Robert Moog and Don Buchla—has made a comeback, creating a booming niche market full of musicians chasing the sounds of the 70s and 80s. These inscrutable racks of patchbays, oscillators, filters, etc. look to the non-initiated more like telephone operator stations of old than musical instruments. But the sounds they produce are sublime and otherworldly, with a saturated warmth unparalleled in the digital world.

But while analog technology may have perfected certain tones, one can’t beat the convenience of digital recording, with its nearly unlimited multi-tracking capability, ability to save settings, and the ease of editing and arranging in the computer. Digital audio workstations have become increasingly sophisticated, able to emulate with “plug-ins” the capabilities of sought-after analog studio gear of the past. It has taken a bit longer for virtual instruments to meet this same standard, but they may be nearly there.

Only the most finely-tuned ears, for example, can hear the difference between the highest-quality digitally modeled guitar amplifiers and effects and their real-world counterparts in the mix. Even the most high-end modeling packages don’t cost as much as their real life counterparts, and many also come free in limited versions. So too the wealth of analog synth software, modeled to sound convincingly like the old and newly reissued analog boxes that can run into the many thousands of dollars to collect and connect.

One such collection of synths, the VCV Rack, offers open-source virtual modular synths almost entirely free, with only a few at very modest prices. The standalone virtual rack works without any additional software. Once you’ve created an account and installed it, you can start adding dozens of plug-ins, including various synthesizers, gates, reverbs, compressors, sequencers, keyboards, etc. “It’s pretty transformative stuff,” writes CDM. “You can run virtual modules to synthesize and process sounds, both those emulating real hardware and many that exist only in software.”

The learning curve is plenty steep for those who haven’t handled this perplexing technology outside the box. A series of YouTube tutorials, a few of which you can see here, can get you going in short order. Those already experienced with the real-world stuff will delight in the expanded capabilities of the digital versions, as well as the fidelity with which these plug-ins emulate real equipment—without the need for a roomful of cables, unwieldly racks, and soldiering irons and spare parts for those inevitable bad connections and broken switches and inputs.

You can download the virtual rack here, then follow the instructions to load as many plug-ins as you like. CDM has instructions for the developer version (find the source code here), and a YouTube series called Modular Curiosity demonstrates how to install the rack and use the various plugins (see their first video further up and find the rest here). Modular System Beginner Tutorial is another YouTube guide, with five different videos. See number one above and the rest here. The longer video at the top of the post offers a “first look and noob tutorial.”

VCV Rack is only the latest of many virtual modular synths, including Native Instruments’ Reaktor Blocks and Softube’s Modular. “But these come with a hefty price tag,” notes FACT magazine. “VCV Rack can be downloaded for free on Linux, Mac and Windows platform.” And if you’re wondering how it stacks up against the real-life boxes it emulates, check out the video below.

The Mastermind of Devo, Mark Mothersbaugh, Shows Off His Synthesizer Collection

Hear What Music Sounds Like When It’s Created by Synthesizers Made with Artificial Intelligence

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness.

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

The Health Benefits of Drumming: Less Stress, Lower Blood Pressure, Pain Relief, and Altered States of Consciousness

in Health, Music, Science | January 2nd, 2018

Drumming—from tablas to tympani to djembes—is universal, so much so, says author Sayer Ji, that it seems “hard-wired into our biological, social and spiritual DNA.” Drumming may well be “an inborn capacity and archetypal social activity.” But many modern people have become alienated from the drum. We outsource drumming to professionals, and machines. Neuroscientists theorize that drummers may have different brains than “non-drummers”—findings that suggest the activity is confined to specially-designed people. Not so, say many scientists who believe that “drumming has some profound and holistic uses,” as Luke Sumpter writes at Reset.me, “to enhance physical, mental and emotional health.”

In addition to anthropological evidence noting the centrality of drumming to human culture, abundant research has demonstrated its potential for personal healing. While drum therapy may be nothing new for cultures who have retained the practice, those who haven’t can learn group drumming easily enough with teachers like Peter Marino in the short clip above. The benefits, as studies have shown, include reduced stress and increased immunity. Group drumming may reduce anxiety and blood pressure, it may work as pain relief and boost positive emotions, and may even lead to “improved executive function” and a growth in white matter in the brains of patients with Huntington’s disease and other neurological conditions.

The evidence-based approach to group drumming’s socio-physical benefits should sway skeptics, even those likely to see drum circle therapy as some kind of hippy-dippy woo. Science-minded people without such hangups may also take an interest in studies of drumming as a “shamanic” activity that “induces specific subjective experiences.” As Michael Drake reports, one recent study “demonstrates that even a brief drumming session can double alpha brain wave activity,” which is “associated with meditation, shamanic trance, and integrative modes of consciousness.” Drumming with others “produces greater self-awareness” as well as a sense of interconnectedness, and can strengthen social bonds among adults as well as children.

While much of the writing about group drumming as therapy stresses more intangible, mystical benefits, no small amount of data suggests that the physical effects are measurable and significant. This is not to minimize the musical prowess of your favorite drummers, or to belittle the musical value of machine-made beats. But the research strongly suggests that not only is most everyone able to pick up a drum and get into a groove, but also that most everyone who does so will be happier, healthier, and more peaceful and tuned-in.

via Reset

Playing an Instrument Is a Great Workout For Your Brain: New Animation Explains Why

Isolated Drum Tracks From Six of Rock’s Greatest: Bonham, Moon, Peart, Copeland, Grohl & Starr

Brian Eno Lists the Benefits of Singing: A Long Life, Increased Intelligence, and a Sound Civilization

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness.

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 6 ) |

Woody Guthrie Creates a Doodle-Filled List of 33 New Year’s Resolutions (1943): Beat Fascism, Write a Song a Day, and Keep the Hoping Machine Running

in Life, Music | January 1st, 2018

On January 1, 1943, the American folk music legend Woody Guthrie jotted in his journal a list of 33 “New Years Rulin’s.” Nowadays, we’d call them New Year’s Resolutions. Adorned by doodles, the list is down to earth by any measure. Family, song, taking a political stand, personal hygiene — they’re the values or aspirations that top his list. You can click the image above to view the list in a larger format. Below, we have provided a transcript of Guthrie’s Rulin’s.

1. Work more and better
2. Work by a schedule
3. Wash teeth if any
4. Shave
5. Take bath
6. Eat good — fruit — vegetables — milk
7. Drink very scant if any
8. Write a song a day
9. Wear clean clothes — look good
10. Shine shoes
11. Change socks
12. Change bed cloths often
13. Read lots good books
14. Listen to radio a lot
15. Learn people better
16. Keep rancho clean
17. Dont get lonesome
18. Stay glad
19. Keep hoping machine running
20. Dream good
21. Bank all extra money
22. Save dough
23. Have company but dont waste time
24. Send Mary and kids money
25. Play and sing good
26. Dance better
27. Help win war — beat fascism
28. Love mama
29. Love papa
30. Love Pete
31. Love everybody
32. Make up your mind
33. Wake up and fight

We wish you all a happy 2018.

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Note: This fine list originally appeared on our site back in 2014.

Hear Two Legends, Lead Belly & Woody Guthrie, Performing on the Same Radio Show (1940)

Woody Guthrie’s Fan Letter To John Cage and Alan Hovhaness (1947)

Seeger: To Hear Your Banjo Play

The Alan Lomax Sound Archive Now Online: Features 17,000 Recordings

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Watch Prince Play Jazz Piano & Coach His Band Through George Gershwin’s “Summertime” in a Candid, Behind-the-Scenes Moment (1990)

Hear Glenn Gould Channel Marshall McLuhan and Create an Experimental Radio Documentary Analyzing the Pop Music of Petula Clark (1967)

Hear the Hagia Sophia’s Awe-Inspiring Acoustics Get Recreated with Computer Simulations, and Let Yourself Get Transported Back to the Middle Ages

The Story of How Beethoven Helped Make It So That CDs Could Play 74 Minutes of Music

A Big 44-Hour Chronological Playlist of Rolling Stones Albums: Stream 613 Tracks

Free, Open Source Modular Synth Software Lets You Create 70s & 80s Electronic Music—Without Having to Pay Thousands for a Real-World Synthesizer

The Health Benefits of Drumming: Less Stress, Lower Blood Pressure, Pain Relief, and Altered States of Consciousness

Woody Guthrie Creates a Doodle-Filled List of 33 New Year’s Resolutions (1943): Beat Fascism, Write a Song a Day, and Keep the Hoping Machine Running

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