Back in 2012, I first told you about the amazing youth chamber orchestra from Cateura, Paraguay. The families from this small impoverished town, located alongside a vast landfill, can’t afford many luxuries — like buying instruments for their kids. But what they lack in money, they make up for in ingenuity and good spirit. The short documentary above gives you a glimpse of their touching story, showing how creative leaders in the community fashioned instruments with their own hands, turning oil cans into cellos, and aluminum bowls into violins. Watch them in action:
But why stop with the short story, when you can get the longer story. Last week, a full blown film called Landfill Harmonicpremiered at the SXSW Film Festival 2015. And now the film (see a short trailer here) will be screened at selected film festivals while the producers try to find a distributor who can bring the production to a wider audience. And, in another piece of good news, Simon & Schuster announced that it plans to publish a picture book about the Recycled Orchestra. Look for Ada’s Violin: The Story of the Recycled Orchestra of Paraguay in March 2016.
You can watch Landfill Harmonic at the festivals mentioned below. To keep tabs on future showings, follow this Facebook page.
New York Children’s Film Festival March 21, 2015
Environmental Film Festival DC March 25, 2015
They’re billed as “the youngest string quartet ever.” The kids began playing in The Joyous String Quartet when they were four years old. Now, fast forward four more years, and they find themselves performing 20 concerts a year around the globe — in places like South Korea and China, and on the Ellen DeGeneres Show. Above you can watch them perform Summer “Presto” by Vivaldi. Below, they give you a classical version of Katy Perry’s “Firework:
And finally Michael Jackson’s “Smooth Criminal.” In case you’re wondering, the students come out of The Joyous Music School in Hicksville, NY.
The “British Invasion” as a historical phenomenon, has achieved a status almost like that of Paul Revere’s ride, a watershed moment condensed to a singular image: The Stones, or—if you’re more inclined, The Beatles—step onto the tarmac, young girls scream, cameras flash, microphones jostle… suits abound. We remember the scenery, and the haircuts, but the history disappears. The all important context when the British landed in the mid sixties has to do with another invasion at the same time on England’s shores, of black American blues artists who toured the UK and performed on British TV, beginning in 1963: Howlin’ Wolf, Big Joe Williams, Muddy Waters, Lightnin’ Hopkins… and Sister Rosetta Tharpe.
If Keith Richards has credited Chuck Berry for his chops, saying he “listened to every lick he played and picked it up,” he could perhaps say something similar about Sister Tharpe, as could dozens of other guitarists who watched her strut across the stage, picking out hot, countrified blues licks on her Gibson SG. “Nobody—not Chuck Berry, not Scotty Moore, not James Burton, not Keith Richards—played wilder or more primal rock ‘n’ roll guitar than this woman who gave her life to God and would have celebrated her 100th birthday on 20 March,” writes The Guardian.
And yet, perhaps because of her religiosity, or her race, or her gender, Sister Tharpe has long remained unsung as a hero of both early rock ‘n’ roll and country.
A pioneering crossover artist from the gospel world, Tharpe came from Cotton Plant, Arkansas, a town on the banks of the Mississippi. Born to musical parents, she toured the country with her mother in revival performances across the south and made her first record at the age of 23. By the time she took the Manchester stage to sing “Didn’t it Rain” in the video at the top of the post, Tharpe was 49 years old and a highly seasoned, confident performer who could captivate any audience with her powerful voice and phenomenal playing. Just above, see a younger Tharpe play some jazz-inflected blues in “That’s All,” a sexy-sounding song about tolerance for sinful men. Sister Tharpe worked clean, but she could get down with the best of ‘em.
Like most rock pioneers, Rosetta didn’t have an easy road to stardom, and like many women in the music business, her story involves a fair amount of exploitation and abuse. But Tharpe rose above it, moved to the big city, and pitched her southern gospel tent in the heart of electric blues territory. Learn about Rosetta Tharpe’s life and career in the 2014 documentary above, The Godmother of Rock & Roll. It’s a title Tharpe well deserves, as well as some long overdue recognition from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
A philosopher perhaps more widely known for his prodigious mustache than for the varieties of his thought, Friedrich Nietzsche often seems to be misread more than read. Even someone like Michel Foucault could gloss over a crucial fact about Nietzsche’s body of work: Foucault remarked in an unpublished interview that Nietzsche’s “wonderful ideas” were “used by the Nazi Party.” But that use, he neglected to mention, came about through a scheme hatched by Nietzsche’s sister, after his mental collapse and death, to edit, change, and otherwise manipulate the thinker’s work in a way The Telegraph deemed “criminal.” Foucault may not have known the full context, but Nietzsche had about as much sympathy for fascism as he did for Christianity–both reasons for his break with composer Richard Wagner.
What Nietzsche loved most was music. Even in the wake of this scandal, with Nietzsche fully rehabilitated at the scholarly level at least, the philosopher is generally read piecemeal, used to prop up some ideology or critical theory or another, a tendency his anti-systematic, aphoristic work inspires. A more holistic approach yields two important general observations: Nietzsche found the mundane work of politics and nationalist conquest, with its tribalism and moral pretensions, thoroughly distasteful. Instead, he considered the creative work of artists, writers, and musicians, as well as scientists, of paramount importance.
Nietzsche almost entered medicine and was himself an artist: “before he engaged himself fully as a philosopher, he had already created a substantial output as poet and composer,” writes Albany Records. In an 1887 letter written three years before his death, Nietzsche claimed, “There has never been a philosopher who has been in essence a musician to such an extent as I am,” though he also admitted he “might be a thoroughly unsuccessful musician.” In any case, he hoped that at least some of his compositions would become known and heard as complementary to his philosophical project.
Now serious readers of Nietzsche, or those simply curious about his musicianship, can hear most of those compositions in a Spotify playlist above. Performed by Canadian musicians Lauretta Altman, Wolfgang Bottenberg, and the Montreal Orpheus Singers, the music ranges from sprightly to pensive, romantic to mournful, and some of it seems to come right out of the Protestant hymnals he grew up with as the son of a Lutheran minister. Nietzsche composed music throughout his life—a complete chronology spans the years 1854, when he was only ten, to 1887. See The Nietzsche Channel for a thorough list of published Nietzsche recordings and sheet music. To listen to the music here, you will need to download and register for Spotify.
Marc Maron’s WTF podcast now clocks in at 585 episodes. Certainly one I remember — and so does Maron too — is Episode 400, which featured the godfather of punk, Iggy Pop. Above, an animated Marc Maron recalls the many musicians he’s interviewed in his Los Angeles garage. And especially the summer day when Pop paid a visit, tore off his shirt, and gave his own nipple a little twist. Good times in LA.
Bob Dylan’s newly-released album, Shadows in the Night, features Dylan covering pop standards made famous by Frank Sinatra during the 1940s and 1950s. And what better way to promote the album than to release a music video that pays homage to a great style of film from the same era — film noir. The track showcased in the noir video, “The Night We Called It A Day,” was recorded by Sinatra not once, not twice, but three times — in 1942, 1947 and 1957. Between the second and third recordings, Sinatra starred in a noir film of his own. Now in the public domain, Suddenly (1954) can be viewed online. It also appears in our collection of 60 Free Noir Films.
(Note: The clip above is the first of six parts. Hear the remaining parts here: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)
John Lennon’s last days were filled with professional and domestic routines characteristic of both a typical wealthy New Yorker and a legendary rock star and activist: making breakfast and watching Sesame Street with his son Sean, going on epic shopping sprees, spending late nights in the studio, staging demonstrations, arguing with his retinue of servants and hangers-on. After five years in semi-retirement, or “siegelike retreat,” spent raising Sean, John Lennon seemed ready to emerge from seclusion and renew his career. On his final day, December 8, 1980, he was feeling hopeful about his creative future. He had just learned that his album with Yoko, Double Fantasy, had gone gold, and he and Yoko were engaged in promotion, and were looking forward to their next musical endeavor.
That morning, Annie Leibovitz and her assistant came to the Lennon’s apartment building, The Dakota, to shoot those now iconic photographs for Rolling Stone of the Lennons in bed. Meanwhile, a devoted fan named Paul Goresh, and Lennon’s murderer Mark David Chapman, started to hang around outside the building. Less than two hours later, a crew from San Francisco’s RKO radio arrived at The Dakota to interview John and Yoko. Interviewer Dave Sholin remembers meeting Lennon, who was getting dressed after the nude photo shoot: “the door opens and John jumps in with his arms extended, like ‘here I am folks!’ We were meeting John Lennon and we were all maybe a little nervous but that just put us right at ease in probably less than a minute.” “He was a regular guy, very, very sharp and extremely quick witted,” Sholin continued. “And he connected with all of us. He had been out of the public eye for five years and he was open to speaking about anything. He did not hold back.”
You can hear that interview, in six parts, above, and read a transcript here at Beatles Archive. John and Yoko talk in great detail about Double Fantasy, about parenting, about meeting, falling in love, and working together. Lennon also talks about his social vision and the need for “holistic” solutions to “stop this paranoia of 90-year old men playing macho games with the world and possibly the galaxy.” Notably, he offers his assessment of the cultural shifts from the sixties through the seventies.
The bit about the sixties we were all full of hope and then everybody got depressed and the seventies were terrible – that attitude that everybody has; that the sixties was therefore negated for being naïve and dumb. And the seventies is really where it’s at, which means, you know, putting makeup on and dancing in the disco – which was fine for the seventies – but I don’t negate the sixties. I don’t negate the seventies. The … the seeds that were planted in the sixties – and possibly they were planted generations before – but the seed… whatever happened in the sixties the… the flowering of that is in the feminist, feminization of society. The meditation, the positive learning that people are doing in all walks of life. That is a direct result of the opening up of the sixties. Now, maybe in the sixties we were naïve and like children everybody went back to their room and said, ‘Well, we didn’t get a wonderful world of just flowers and peace and happy chocolate and, and, and it wasn’t just pretty and beautiful all the time’ and that’s what everybody did, ‘we didn’t get everything we wanted’ just like babies and everybody went back to their rooms and sulked. And we’re just gonna play rock and roll and not do anything else . We’re gonna stay in our rooms and the world is a nasty, horrible place ’cause it didn’t give us everything we cried for’, right? Cryin’ for it wasn’t enough. The thing the sixties did was show us the possibility and the responsibility that we all had. It wasn’t the answer. It just gave us a glimpse of the possibility, and the seventies everybody gone ‘Nya, nya, nya, nya’. And possibly in the eighties everybody’ll say, ‘Well, ok, let’s project the positive side of life again’, you know? The world’s been goin’ on a long time, right? It’s probably gonna go on a long time… ”
After the interview, Sholin boarded a plane back to San Francisco, and John and Yoko went back to work, meeting with producer Jack Douglas. When they returned home that night, they found Mark David Chapman still waiting outside The Dakota with his .38. At 11:15 that night, Lennon was pronounced dead at Roosevelt Hospital. Sholin tells the story in a lengthy intro to the interview above. You can also listen to a streamlined version of the interview without the intro below.
As we’ve previously noted, Jimi Hendrix spent several years as a journeyman guitarist, playing the early rock ‘n’ roll circuit with stars like Wilson Pickett and Little Richard, before he finally came into his own. One point in his career, writes the Daily Beast, found him “on the bad side of a horrible recording contract” with “notoriously shady label owner and producer” Ed Chalpin of RSVP Records. This was during his tenure with a group called Curtis Knight & The Squires, many of whose recordings ended up “locked in litigation for years, a period that stretched to decades.”
Now that these tracks have been acquired by the Hendrix-family run company Experience Hendrix, they can finally be heard for the first time. Soon to be released as part of the compilation You Can’t Use My Name: Curtis Knight & The Squires (Featuring Jimi Hendrix), the instrumental above, “Station Break”—unlike so many other supposedly “new” Hendrix releases—has never appeared before in any other version. It’s not a Hendrix composition, but it’s his guitar, restrained in some fairly standard R&B licks.
“What makes [the recordings] so special” on the new compilation album, says Hendrix’s sister Janie, “is that they provide an honest look at a great artist during a pivotal time when he was on the cusp of his breakthrough.” Though Hendrix may seem to have descended from outer space, he actually honed his skills in groups like the Squires, before Animals bassist Chas Chandler discovered him and brought him to the UK. These early R&B releases “represent a significant segment in the timeline of Jimi’s musical existence.” They may not be as mind-blowing as, say, the psychedelic riffs in “Third Stone From the Sun,” but they show us an incredibly talented guitarist at work, straining to break free of a pop template and venture into musical realms uncharted.
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