Some Porter classics–“Every Time We Say Goodbye,” “So In Love”–demand sincerity. This one calls for a strong dose of the opposite, which Pop and Harry deliver, both vocally and in the barnstorming music video above. They’re dangerous, funny, and anything but canned, weaving through rat-glammy 1980s New York in thrift store finery, with side trips to a cemetery and a farm where Pop smooches a goat.
As Alex Cox, who brought further punk pedigree to the project as the director of Sid and Nancy and Repo Man told Spin: “Iggy had always wanted to make a video with animals and Debbie had always wanted to publicly burn lingerie so I let them.”
They also filled Pop’s palms with stigmata and ants, and swapped Porter’s champagne for a case of generic dog food.
There are a few minor tweaks to the lyrics (“What cocks!”) and the stars inject the patter with a gleefully louche downtown sensibility. Mars rises behind the Twin Towers, for a swelligantly off-beat package that raised a lot of money for AIDS research and awareness. Other gems from the project:
“It’s All Right with Me” performed by Tom Waits, directed by Jim Jarmusch
“Night and Day” performed by U2, directed by Wim Wenders
“Don’t Fence Me In” performed and directed by David Byrne
If you’ve seen the most famous photographs of Billie Holiday, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Frank Sinatra, Django Reinhardt, or nearly any other jazz legend from the mid-20th century, you’ve seen the work of William P. Gottlieb. His photos have graced many a classic album cover, magazine spread, and poster. “Between 1938 and 1948,” writes Maria Popova, Gottlieb “documented the jazz scene in New York City and Washington, D.C., and created what eventually became some of history’s most iconic portraits of jazz greats.” He initially did so as a self-taught amateur, a jazz columnist whose photography was “an afterthought,” notes Gottlieb’s 2006 Washington Post obituary,” mere visual accompaniment to his regular work.”
As Gottlieb once told The New York Times, “I got into photography because The Post was stingy and wouldn’t pay photographers to cover my 11 o’clock concerts.” But he developed an undeniably keen eye for performance.
What’s more, his work is deeply informed by affection and empathy. Gottlieb was an artist who had warm relationships with his subjects. He took the photo at the top, perhaps the most famous image of Billie Holiday, in 1947, when the singer “was at her peak,” he wrote, “musically and physically”—two years clean and sober after her time in a federal prison.
“Regrettably,” he writes, “Billie regressed.” Gottlieb tells the heartbreaking story of the last time he went to see her. The “audience waited… and waited.” The photographer, “playing a hunch,” went backstage to find her “pretty much ‘out of it.’”
I helped her finish dressing, then led her to the microphone. She looked horrible. She sounded worse. I replaced my notebook in my pocket, put a lens cap on my camera, and walked away, choosing to remember this remarkable woman as she once was.
Most of Gottlieb’s stories are not nearly so tragic. Take his last run-in with Louis Armstrong, at their dentist office’s waiting room. “After small talk,” he wrote, “Satchmo looked me over, deciding I, too, had been gaining weight. He reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out a printed diet (that he kept for friends-in-need), and handed me a copy. ‘Pops,’ he said, ‘try this.’ I quickly noted that it featured Pluto Water [a laxative]. But I thanked him, anyway.”
Gottlieb retired from photography and jazz writing in the fifties and made a career as a children’s book author and educational film producer. In 1979, he published 219 of his best photographs in a book called The Golden Age of Jazz, and in 2010, much of Gottlieb’s work entered the public domain, according to The Library of Congress (LOC). You can see hundreds of his photographs—famous images like those of Sarah Vaughan, further up, Thelonious Monk, above, Buddy Rich, below, and so many more—at the Library of Congress’s online William P. Gottlieb Collection. The LOC describes the collection thus:
The online collection provides access to digital images of all sixteen hundred negatives and transparencies, approximately one hundred annotated contact prints, and over two hundred selected photographic prints that show Gottlieb’s cropping, burning, and dodging preferences. One can follow the artist’s work process by examining first a raw negative, then an annotated contact print, and finally a finished, published product. The Web site also includes digital images of Down Beat magazine articles in which Gottlieb’s photographs were first published. Other special features of the online presentation are audio clips of Gottlieb discussing specific photographs, articles about the collection from Civilization magazine and the Library of Congress Information Bulletin, an essay describing Gottlieb’s life and work, and a “Gottlieb on Assignment” section that showcases Down Beat articles about Thelonious Monk, Dardanelle, Willie “the Lion” Smith, and Buddy Rich.
You can also download high resolution versions of nearly every image in the archive. (To purchase prints, see Gottlieb’s online gallery, Jazz Photos.) There may be no better way, short of actually being there and meeting the stars, to witness the golden age of jazz than through the eyes and ears of such a sympathetic observer as William P. Gottlieb. Enter the collection here.
American guitar came of age in the fifties, with the blues, folk, country, and jazz playing of Mississippi John Hurt, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Merle Travis, Chet Atkins, Wes Montgomery, Les Paul, and so many other incredible players who perfected the sound of Americana before it became inseparable from nostalgia and revivalism. Though it has usually been Chuck Berry who gets—or who took—most of the credit for rock and roll, and who is often enough named as a favorite influence of so many UK guitar heroes, one star British player who made his name a few years later always stuck fast to rock and roll’s deepest roots. We can hear all of those golden age players—Hurt, Tharpe, Travis, Atkins, Montgomery, Paul—in Mark Knopfler’s fingers, in some of the unlikeliest hits of the 80s, songs long on style and flashy solos, but also unquestionably rooted in roots music.
We may not have realized until we heard Knopfler’s country records just how much his Dire Straits sound grew out of acoustic music. (“Sultans of Swing” was first written on a National guitar in open tuning.) But he is, and has always been, a brilliant country and country blues player—recording with George Jones, Emmylou Harris, and Mary Chapin Carpenter and collaborating with Chet Atkins on record and on stage.
For Knopfler fans, the joy of slowly discovering the many angles in his playing, the many layers of influence and blends of tradition, constitutes much of the fun in watching him over the decades. You get an accelerated sense of the experience in the short video above, in which he discusses his favorite guitars—including the famous red Stratocaster (“my lust object as a child”) that carried him, with matching headbands, through those MTV years.
Hearing any beloved player talk about his or her guitars can be a treat in itself, but with Knopfler, each instrument offers an occasion to reveal, and effortlessly demonstrate, all of the ways his playing style developed and incorporated new techniques. As much as he learned from endless practice and from emulating his favorite players, he learned from the guitars; the tonality of the Strat “made me want to write another way.” He learned from a 1958 Les Paul that one might “get to the end of a song and have nothing left to say… but the guitar has.” Knopfler never deploys his impeccable vibrato, unique fingerpicking style, or gorgeous single notes wails just to show off—they arrive in service to the emotions of the song, and come out of the distinctive properties of each guitar. He may be the most tasteful, even restrained, of superstar rock guitarists.
Not every guitarist is as thoughtful about their instruments as Knopfler, and few are simultaneously as eloquent and genially demonstrative of their mastery of form and function. The clip at the top comes from the PBS documentary series Soundbreaking. In the 45-minute documentary, Guitar Stories, above, which we’ve featured here before, Knopfler tells the story of the six guitars that shaped his career. The host and interviewer is none other than bassist and Dire Straits co-founder John Illsley, who is as awestruck by Knopfler as any other fan—meaning not that he thinks Knopfler is superhuman or godlike, but that the guitarist is simply, unpretentiously, and unquestionably, “one of the truly great players,” a designation that both Illsley and his former bandmate realize cannot be divorced from the truly great instruments Knopfler has played.
The instrument in the video above dates back to 1566.
Meaning, if it were the patriarch of a human family, siring musical sons every 20 to 25 years, it would take more than 10 generations to get to composer Robert Schumann, born in 1810.
Were you to peek at the back, you’d see traces of King Charles IX of France’s coat of arms. The Latin motto Pietate et Justitia–piety and justice–still lingers on its rib.
It was constructed by the master creator, Andrea Amati, as part of a large set of stringed instruments, of which it is one of four survivors of its size and class.
After leaving Charles’ court, the violin spent time in the Henry Hottinger collection, which was eventually acquired by the Wurlitzer Company in New York. In 1966, it was donated to Cremona, Italy, Amati’s birthplace and home to an international school of violin making.
Venerable unto the point of pricelessness, from time to time it is taken out and played–to wondrous effect–by world class violinists. It’s tempting to keep anthropomorphizing, so as to wonder if it might not prefer a forever home with a gifted young musician who would take it out and play it every day. I know what a children’s author would say on that subject.
You can view Amati’s Charles IX violin in more detail here, but why stop there, when you can also like it on Facebook!
Image courtesy of The Victoria and Albert Museum
On any given weekend, in any part of the state where I live, you can find yourself standing in a hall full of knives, if that’s the kind of thing you like to do. It is a very niche kind of experience. Not so in some other weapons expos—like the Arms and Armor galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where everyone, from the most warlike to the staunchest of pacifists, stands in awe at the intricate ornamentation and incredibly deft craftsmanship on display in the suits of armor, lances, shields, and lots and lots of knives.
We must acknowledge in such a space that the worlds of art and of killing for fame and profit were never very far apart during Europe’s late Medieval and Renaissance periods. Yet we encounter many similar artisanal instruments from the time, just as finely tuned, but made for far less belligerent purposes.
As Maya Corry of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge—an institution with its own impressive arms and armor collection—comments in the video above (at 2:30), one unusual kind of 16th century knife meant for the table, not the battlefield, offers “insight into that harmonious, audible aspect of family devotions,” prayer and song.
From the collection of the Fitzwilliam Museum, in Cambridge. (Johan Oosterman )
These knives, which have musical scores engraved in their blades, brought a table together in singing their prayers, and may have been used to carve the lamb or beef in their “striking balance of decorative and utilitarian function.” At least historians think such “notation knives,” which date from the early 1500s, were used at banquets. “The sharp, wide steel would have been ideal for cutting and serving meat,” writes Eliza Grace Martin at the WQXR blog, “and the accentuated tip would have made for a perfect skewer.” But as Kristen Kalber, curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum, which houses the knives at the top of the post, tells us “diners in very grand feasts didn’t cut their own meat.” It’s unlikely they would have sung from the bloody knives held by their servants.
The knives’ true purpose “remains a mystery,” Martin remarks, like many “rituals of the Renaissance table.” Victoria and Albert Museum curator Kirstin Kennedy admits in the video above that “we are not entirely sure” what the “splendid knife” she holds was used for. But we do know that each knife had a different piece of music on each side, and that a set of them together contained different harmony parts in order to turn a roomful of diners into a chorus. One set of blades had the grace on one side, with the inscription, “the blessing of the table. May the three-in-one bless that which we are about to eat.” The other side holds the benediction, to be sung after the dinner: “The saying of grace. We give thanks to you God for your generosity.”
Common enough verbiage for any household in Renaissance Europe, but when sung, at least by a chorus from the Royal College of Music, who recreated the music and made the recordings here, the prayers are superbly graceful. Above, hear one version of the Grace and Benediction from the Victoria and Albert Museum knives; below, hear a second version. You can hear a captivating set of choral prayers from the Fitzwilliam Museum knives at WQXR’s site, recorded for the Fitzwilliam’s “Madonnas & Miracles” exhibit. We are as unlikely now to encounter singing kitchen knives as we are to run into a horse and rider bearing 100 pounds of finely-wrought wearable steel sculpture. Such strange artifacts seem to speak of a strange people who valued beauty whether carving up the main course or cutting down their enemies.
The story is well known. Syd Barrett, spiralling into depression, “hallucinations, disorganized speech, memory lapses, intense mood swings, and periods of catatonia,” left Pink Floyd in April, 1968, before recording two solo albums (The Madcap Laughs and Barrett) and then fading into obscurity. Above you can watch a delightful, new animation of “Effervescing Elephant,” a song Barrett first wrote during his teenage years and recorded in 1970. The new “retro-style” animation comes from Yoann Hervo. Below, find another animated take on “Effervescing Elephant,” this one from Steve Bobinksi.
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The history of the violin can be traced back to 1530, when a violin-like instrument first appeared in Gaudenzio Ferrari’s painting, “Madonna of the Orange Tree.” By the 1550s, Andrea Amati and his descendants began to craft priceless violins, in the form we know them today. And then followed other families closely associated with the golden age of these stringed instruments–the Bergonzi, the Guarneri, the Stradivari.
Shot by Baptiste Buob, the wordless documentary walks you through the making of a violin, from start to finish. A process that takes a luthier 3–4 weeks, working full-time, gets covered in 33 elegant minutes. Savor each and every one of them.
Bonus: Below, watch another film by Baptiste Buob–this one a 28-minute film detailing how French bow maker Roch Petitdemange practices his craft, again from beginning to end. A perfect complement.
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The wandering bards of old disappeared when the printing press came to town. So too have the great bandleaders largely vanished in the age of the super producer and jet-setting DJ. But for a time in the jazz and rock worlds, Olympian figures like Frank Zappa and Miles Davis played several important roles: finding and mentoring the best musicians; mastering old forms and making them new again; serving as curators, arbiters, and contrarians… issuing loud pronouncements on anything and everything as unsparing cultural critics.
Do we need tongues as sharp as Zappa and Davis’s in contemporary pop culture? Maybe, maybe not. They didn’t seem to enjoy much of anything they weren’t directly involved in creating. But man, was it fun to watch them dispense with the niceties and speak their brutal truths. We’ve heard from Zappa on everything from his loathing of the Velvet Underground to the fascism of the PMRC to the morbidity of the entire music industry. Davis’ observations were equally cutting. “His fascinating autobiography,” writes Kirk Hamilton at Kotaku, “is loaded with shit-talking, dismissals, and general acerbic jerkiness. It is fantastic.”
But you needn’t pick up Miles’ book to get an earful of his acid-tongued judgments. We need only revisit the series of “blindfold tests” he did for Downbeat magazine in the fifties and sixties. These experiments had famous musicians listen to new music, “try to pick out who is playing,” then offer their off-the-cuff takes. Davis’ first session, in 1955, began charitably enough, though not without some sweeping criticisms. He dismissed all of the soloists on Clifford Brown’s “Falling in Love with Love,” for example, except for a Swedish pianist whose name escaped him. But he gave the record four stars all the same. “The arrangement was pretty good.”
In 1958, Davis sat for his second blindfold test, with mixed results. He nearly obliterated Tiny Grimes and Coleman Hawkins’ “A Smooth One,” giving it “half a star just because… Hawkins is on it.” But in an effusive moment, he gushes over John Lewis’ “Waremeland (Dear Old Stockholm)” with a ten star rating. “All the stars are for John,” he says. By 1964, little evidence of that rare enthusiasm remained in the third blindfold test. Davis was at that moment, writes Richard Brody, “torn apart.” In a particularly irritable state of mind he “flung insults at Eric Dolphy,” Sonny Rollins, Cecil Taylor, and a few more greats. His commentary “perfectly captures his general distaste,” writes Hamilton, “for, well, everything.”
Of Dolphy’s “Miss Ann” (above), he says, “nobody else could sound that bad!” Of the Jazz Crusaders’ “All Blues”: “What’s that supposed to be? That ain’t nothin’.” Of Duke Ellington, Max Roach and Charles Mingus’ “Caravan”: “What am I supposed to say to that? That’s ridiculous. You see the way they can fuck up music?” Like another infamous trash-talker who currently dominates every conversation with his unbelievable egomania, Davis tosses out the condescending adjective “sad” at every opportunity. Clark Terry’s “Cielito Lindo” is a “sad record.” Dolphy is “a sad motherfucker.” Cecil Taylor’s “Lena” is “some sad shit, man.”
It’s not all bad. Miles loves Stan Getz and Joao Gilberto’s “Desafinando,” giving the record five stars and its two star players the highest of praise. Four years later, his typical mood had not improved. In 1968, Davis sat for his last blindfold test. He tore into Ornette Coleman, mistaking him for Archie Shepp on “Funeral.” Of Freddie Hubbard’s “On the Que-Tee,” he says, “I wouldn’t even put that shit on a record.” Sun Ra’s “Brainville” gets a serious slam: “They must be joking—the Florida A&M band sounds better than that. They should record them, rather than this shit.” It ain’t all pure cattiness. Davis tends to like music that stays out of his musical lane, like The Electric Flag’s “Over Lovin’ You,”—a “nice record,” he says. “It’s a pleasure to get a record like that.” Likewise, the prologue from the Fifth Dimension’s Magic Garden gets a thumbs up.
When Downbeat’sLeonard Feather visited the irascible trumpet player in his hotel room for the last test, the critic “seemed shocked to find records by the Byrds, James Brown, Dionne Warwick, Aretha Franklin, Tony Bennett, and the Fifth Dimension scattered around his room,” notes Davis biographer John Szwed. “Miles seemed to have lost all interest in what was then considered jazz.” No doubt about it, no musician then or now would want to be on the receiving end of his critical barbs. Perhaps the only jazz player he never put down was the “young savant drummer” Tony Williams. Otherwise, “at some point or another,” writes Hamilton, “Davis lays low just about every other luminary in the history of jazz.” But behind the vitriol lay true genius. No one was as competitive—or as demanding of himself as he was of others—as Miles Davis.
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As Gottlieb once told The New York Times, “I got into photography because The Post was stingy and wouldn’t pay photographers to cover my 11 o’clock concerts.” But he developed an undeniably keen eye for performance.
