What Alan Freed did for rock ‘n ‘ roll in the ‘50s, DJ John Peel did for punk and new wave in the 70s and 80s, play­ing ground­break­ing artists like Joy Divi­sion on his show and curat­ing essen­tial in-stu­dio per­for­mances in his Peel Ses­sions. But long before he first played the Ramones on his BBC show in 1976, Peel played the 1969 debut album by the Stooges, the scrap­py Detroit garage band whose front­man, Iggy Pop, would lat­er be grant­ed the title “god­fa­ther of punk.” He’s cer­tain­ly lived up to it, con­sis­tent­ly, writes Kris Needs at Clash, “dump­ing on rock ‘n’ roll’s pre­vi­ous­ly set-in stone inhi­bi­tions.” Each new gen­er­a­tion has giv­en Pop a new set of restric­tions to dump on, but many of them could, per­haps, boil down to the same thing, the very con­di­tion Peel so often diag­nosed in pop cul­ture: the pack­ag­ing and sell­ing of rock ‘n’ roll that com­pro­mis­es its raw pow­er and dimin­ish­es its artists.

Who bet­ter then to deliv­er the 2014 John Peel Lec­ture for the BBC at the UK Radio Fes­ti­val, despite the fact that Iggy Pop—who Rolling Stone describes as “a vis­it­ing pro­fes­sor from the School of Punk Rock Hard Knocks”—has nev­er deliv­ered a lec­ture before? But he has always been wit­ty and wise, on albums and inter­views, and he is now—as was Peel for over three decades—a BBC DJ, a role that grants him a cer­tain amount of crit­i­cal author­i­ty.

It’s not his only side gig. Dur­ing his lec­ture, Pop admits he’s had to begin “diver­si­fy­ing my income,” appear­ing, for exam­ple, in insur­ance ads for UK insur­ance com­pa­ny Swift­cov­er (England’s been good to him). “If I had to depend on what I actu­al­ly get from sales,” says Pop, “I’d be tend­ing bars between sets.” This is the sit­u­a­tion he addresses—the plight of the artists, the labels, and the fans in today’s mar­ket­place. The top­ic of his lec­ture: “free music in a cap­i­tal­ist soci­ety.”

Iggy is crit­i­cal of the U2/Apple alliance and their intru­sive and unpop­u­lar recent mass album release, but he prais­es Thom Yorke’s deci­sion to release his lat­est solo album on peer-to-peer file shar­ing ser­vice Bit­Tor­rent for $6. Acknowl­edg­ing that Bit­Tor­rent “is a pirate’s friend,” he claims nonethe­less that “all pirates want to go legit, just like I want­ed to be respectable.” This last remark may come as a sur­prise from the guy who want­ed to be your dog, but although he defines cap­i­tal­ism as dom­i­nat­ing and destruc­tive, Pop isn’t anti-entrepreneurial—he’s sim­ply a cham­pi­on of the lit­tle guy. He denounces dig­i­tal theft, call­ing it “bad for every­thing,” but he doesn’t want to see file-shar­ers jailed, which is “a lot like send­ing some­body to Aus­tralia a cou­ple hun­dred years ago for poach­ing his lordship’s rab­bit.”

The larg­er prob­lem is the media con­glom­er­ates, includ­ing not only major labels, but also, and maybe more so, Apple and Google sub­sidiary YouTube, who are “try­ing to put the squeeze” on the indies, “the only place to go for new tal­ent, out­side of the Mick­ey Mouse Club.” Over­all, the talk is a very sober and sober­ing look at the music indus­try from an old pro who has clear­ly paid care­ful atten­tion to the trends. And although his glass­es and stance behind a podi­um might make him look the part, Pop is a lit­tle less pro­fes­so­r­i­al than con­ver­sa­tion­al, deliv­er­ing some bad news with sev­er­al dos­es of opti­mism and good humor, and exhibit­ing an unabashed will­ing­ness to mix tech, cre­ativ­i­ty, and com­merce in a TED-like way.

The com­plete lec­ture was broad­cast on BBC DJ Marc Riley’s show, and you can stream it here for the next four weeks (the talk begins at 37:00, but lis­ten to the first thir­ty min­utes of the show for some excel­lent music and an intro­duc­tion to John Peel). And if you’re in a hur­ry, catch the high­lights of Iggy’s lec­ture in The Guardian’s “Cliff­sish Notes ver­sion” here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

From The Stooges to Iggy Pop: 1986 Doc­u­men­tary Charts the Rise of Punk’s God­fa­ther

Iggy Pop Con­ducts a Tour of New York’s Low­er East Side, Cir­ca 1993

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

Free Online Eco­nom­ics Cours­es

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

We’ve shown you two exceed­ing­ly rare pieces of footage that cap­ture jazz sax­o­phon­ist Char­lie “Bird” Park­er in action: one fea­tur­ing him play­ing with Dizzy Gille­spie, his fel­low “found­ing father of bebop,” in 1952; and anoth­er, from two years before, where he plays with the likes of Cole­man Hawkins, Bud­dy Rich, Lester Young, and Ella Fitzger­ald. But since so lit­tle motion-pic­ture mate­r­i­al of Park­er exists, his fans must have savored even see­ing just the sheet music of his piece “Con­fir­ma­tion” ani­mat­ed when we post­ed it last year, along­side oth­er such videos bring­ing to life the nota­tion of works by greats like Miles Davis and John Coltrane. “To see it ani­mat­ed,” wrote Josh Jones, “is to see Park­er dance a very dif­fer­ent step than Miles’ post-bop cool, one filled with com­plex melod­ic para­graphs instead of chordal phras­es.” Indeed.

And the source of those videos, Dan Cohen’s Youtube chan­nel Ani­mat­ed Sheet Music, has even more Park­er in store. Here you can also enjoy Cohen’s ani­ma­tions of “Au Pri­vave,” that 1951 bebop stan­dard with the mys­te­ri­ous­ly un-French French title, and Park­er’s 1953 blues “Bloom­di­do.” These will, nat­u­ral­ly, pro­vide a rich watch­ing and lis­ten­ing expe­ri­ence to those well-versed in the mechan­ics of both music nota­tion and the forms of jazz, but even if you know noth­ing at all about either sub­ject, these ani­ma­tions more than repay the short time spent. If you’d like to get less an expla­na­tion than a feel of how sheet music works, and indeed how jazz works, you could do much worse than get­ting it through a visu­al­iza­tion of Park­er’s inim­itable play­ing — and you might well come away with just a lit­tle bit more of a grasp on what, exact­ly, makes it inim­itable in the first place. “After spend­ing sev­er­al hours pre­cise­ly tim­ing Char­lie Park­er’s eighth and six­teenth notes,” writes Cohen, “I have come to the con­clu­sion that the dude can swing.” Indeed.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Char­lie Park­er Plays with Jazz Greats Cole­man Hawkins, Bud­dy Rich, Lester Young & Ella Fitzger­ald (1950)

Char­lie Park­er Plays with Dizzy Gille­spie in Only Footage Cap­tur­ing the “Bird” in True Live Per­for­mance

The Genius of J.S. Bach’s “Crab Canon” Visu­al­ized on a Möbius Strip

Watch Ani­mat­ed Sheet Music for Miles Davis’ “So What,” Char­lie Parker’s “Con­fir­ma­tion” & Coltrane’s “Giant Steps”

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

It’s an old joke at this point—the hipster’s retro-obses­sion with vinyl is an affec­ta­tion as bogus as lou­vered sun­glass­es and high-waist­ed acid washed jeans, right? Well, there are plen­ty of peo­ple who buy records and lis­ten to them, too. There are even peo­ple who buy and lis­ten to cas­sette tapes, imag­ine that! You can count me in both camps, and it isn’t because—or only because—I love the look and feel of these ana­log cul­tur­al arti­facts or that I’m nos­tal­gic for sim­pler times. It’s because I love the sound. Even cheapo cas­sette tapes can often sound bet­ter to me than the medi­um of music we’ve all grown so accus­tomed to over the last decade or so—the MP3.

Begin­ning in the CD era, the so-called “Loud­ness Wars” more or less killed the dynam­ics of record­ed music, push­ing every sound to the absolute limit—from the most del­i­cate­ly plucked acoustic gui­tar string to a black met­al singer’s most demon­ic roar. With­out the pleas­ing push-pull of musi­cal dynam­ics, songs lose their depth and pow­er. Once the music is released as prod­uct, it suf­fers anoth­er indig­ni­ty in the data com­pres­sion of MP3s and stream­ing ser­vices, for­mats that—according to high-end audio com­pa­ny Harmon—“have dimin­ished the qual­i­ty and flat­tened the emo­tion” of music. In the short film above, The Dis­tor­tion of Sound, Har­mon brings togeth­er a num­ber of engi­neers, pro­duc­ers, and musi­cians, includ­ing big names like Quin­cy Jones, Slash, Hans Zim­mer, and Snoop Dogg to dis­cuss what Har­mon acoustic engi­neer Dr. Sean Olive, calls “the val­ley of sound qual­i­ty” we’ve sup­pos­ed­ly reached in the last five years.

Harmon’s Chief Engi­neer Chris Lud­wig claims that data com­pres­sion (not audio compression—a dif­fer­ent tech­nol­o­gy), “removes up to 90% of the orig­i­nal song.” With our low-qual­i­ty MP3s and cheap, tin­ny ear­buds and lap­top speak­ers, says Zim­mer, we’ve become “a McDonald’s gen­er­a­tion of music con­sumers.” It’s a depress­ing real­i­ty for audio­philes and musi­cians, but Har­mon has the solu­tion and Dis­tor­tion of Sound is essen­tial­ly an adver­tise­ment for it. Whether or not you buy in is your call, but along the way, you’ll get an inter­est­ing intro­duc­tion to the record­ing process and the his­to­ry of record­ed music. Scroll down to the bot­tom of the “Dis­tor­tion of Sound” page to see how Har­mon is “bring­ing sound qual­i­ty back.” They aren’t doing it with tape decks and turnta­bles.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Neil Young Reveals the New Killer Gad­get That Will Save Music

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

How many reunions will it take before we’ve final­ly seen the end of Pink Floyd? I’m not com­plain­ing, mind you, but mar­veling at how durable an out­fit the band has been for their fifty-year, on again, off again his­to­ry. Yet aside from the occa­sion­al char­i­ty show, they’ve most­ly been off, hav­ing sup­pos­ed­ly called it quits after 1994’s Divi­sion Bell. As the A.V. Club reminds us, “Pink Floyd has not real­ly exist­ed since Pulp Fic­tion was in the­aters.” Now, after twen­ty years of dor­man­cy, they’re back with a new album, The End­less Riv­er—David Gilmour and Nick Mason’s rework­ing of Divi­sion Bell sessions—due out Novem­ber 10th (see a track­list and hear teasers here). “It’s a shame,” Gilmour tells Rolling Stone, “but this [album] is the end.”

Yeah, we’ve heard that before. This time, it’ll prob­a­bly stick. Key­boardist Richard Wright died in 2008 (the new album is a trib­ute to him), Gilmour and Roger Waters have had a most­ly icy rela­tion­ship, and drum­mer Nick Mason has chan­neled his pas­sion, and for­tune, into clas­sic cars. But it does seem like­ly that they’ll take the stage again, at least for a one-off per­for­mance, as they have a hand­ful of times through­out the years.

Today in trib­ute to their longevi­ty, or their refusal to fade away, we bring you a few of those reunion shows, begin­ning at the top with their Live 8 reunion con­cert in London’s Hyde Park in 2005, a ben­e­fit orga­nized by their old friend Bob Geld­of to coin­cide with the G8 sum­mit. This con­cert is the last time all four mem­bers would play on stage togeth­er, joined by a host of guest musi­cians, and they sound amaz­ing. Gilmour ruled out any fur­ther shows after this, but then two years lat­er, he joined Waters onstage at an event for the Hop­ing Foun­da­tion to ben­e­fit Pales­tin­ian chil­dren. See them play for an inti­mate crowd of just 200 in the video above.

While Roger Waters offi­cial­ly left the band in 1985 on acri­mo­nious terms, he has con­tin­ued to tour both his solo mate­r­i­al and his Floyd music, per­form­ing a solo ver­sion of the The Wall Live to huge audi­ences in North Amer­i­ca and Europe since 2010. At one of those shows, in 2011 at London’s O2 Are­na, Gilmour joined him onstage—atop the wall—for “Com­fort­ably Numb” (above), then returned with a man­dolin, and Nick Mason with a tam­bourine, for “Out­side the Wall” (below).

It seems cyn­i­cal to call the remain­ing mem­bers’ occa­sion­al appear­ances togeth­er oppor­tunis­tic since they gen­er­al­ly only occur at char­i­ty events. But giv­en how long it’s been since they’ve released any­thing new, we might well ask, as the title of their 2011 remas­ter project has it, “Why Pink Floyd?” Why new music, and why now? Since their spaced-out psy­che­del­ic debut, they’ve made increas­ing­ly thought­ful, fine­ly-craft­ed albums for very patient lis­ten­ers, veer­ing into rock opera, stretch­ing out into space opera, becom­ing more and more cin­e­mat­ic in scope. It’s those long, com­plex arrange­ments (like Wish You Were Here and 1977’s Ani­mals), tied togeth­er by Gilmour’s soar­ing gui­tar lines and Wright’s moody key­boards, that hold up best, I think, at least for devot­ed fans, and that’s exact­ly what we can expect from The End­less Riv­er. See Gilmour and Mason dis­cuss the new album, and hear some stun­ning audio sam­ples, at the band’s web­site.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

Pink Floyd Plays With Their Brand New Singer & Gui­tarist David Gilmour on French TV (1968)

Watch Doc­u­men­taries on the Mak­ing of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here

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

The jazz stan­dard “Body and Soul” was first per­formed live in Lon­don by singer Gertrude Lawrence in 1930, and then record­ed lat­er that year by the great Louis Arm­strong. But Cole­man Hawkins cut the most his­toric ver­sion on Octo­ber 11, 1939 — exact­ly 75 years ago today. The Mis­souri-born musi­cian made the record­ing almost by acci­dent, on a spur-of-the-moment-deci­sion, and he had no inkling that he had cre­at­ed the first com­mer­cial hit of a pure jazz record­ing.

He lat­er mused,“It’s fun­ny how it became such a clas­sic.” “Even the ordi­nary pub­lic is crazy about it. It’s the first and only record I ever heard of that all the squares dig as well as the jazz peo­ple, and I don’t under­stand how and why, because I was mak­ing notes all the way. I was­n’t mak­ing a melody for the squares. I thought noth­ing of it. I did­n’t even both­er to lis­ten to it after­wards.”

For jazz his­to­ri­ans, the song is rec­og­nized as one of the “ear­ly tremors of bebop.” That’s large­ly because “Hawkins hints at the song’s melody dur­ing his first six bars, but he is impro­vis­ing right from the start, nev­er actu­al­ly stat­ing the theme,” writes Ken­ny Berg­er in The Oxford Com­pan­ion to Jazz.

In 2004, the Library of Con­gress placed Hawk­in’s record­ing into the Nation­al Record­ing Reg­istry. Above, you can lis­ten to the land­mark 1939 ver­sion and also watch Hawkins per­form “Body and Soul” live in 1967 at Nor­man Granz’s Jazz at the Phil­har­mon­ic.

A spe­cial thanks goes to Michael for flag­ging this anniver­sary for us.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

10 Great Per­for­mances From 10 Leg­endary Jazz Artists: Djan­go, Miles, Monk, Coltrane & More

Philoso­pher Jacques Der­ri­da Inter­views Jazz Leg­end Ornette Cole­man: Talk Impro­vi­sa­tion, Lan­guage & Racism (1997)

Haru­ki Murakami’s Pas­sion for Jazz: Dis­cov­er the Novelist’s Jazz Playlist, Jazz Essay & Jazz Bar

Rock ‘n’ roll has a sad tra­di­tion of genius­es who’ve suc­cumbed to men­tal ill­ness and addic­tion. Some of them have, para­dox­i­cal­ly, pro­duced some of the best music of their careers dur­ing peri­ods of decline. We’d have to men­tion Pink Floyd’s Syd Bar­rett, Moby Grape’s Skip Spence, Big Star’s Chris Bell… all of whom record­ed strange, inti­mate, and heart­felt solo albums after leav­ing their respec­tive bands. Then, of course, there’s Bri­an Wil­son, whose 1966 Pet Sounds re-invent­ed pop, and laid the ground­work for Sgt. Pepper’s Lone­ly Hearts Club Band. (Wil­son is said to have been inspired by Rub­ber Soul). We may know Pet Sounds as a Beach Boys release, but it was real­ly Wilson’s record. In the video series here, “Behind the Sounds,” we get a unique lis­ten in to the cre­ation of the album by way of ear­ly takes, lots of stu­dio chat­ter, and pop-up video style fac­toids in the Pet Sounds cover’s Coop­er Black font over behind-the-scenes pho­tos.

At the top, hear behind the sounds of “Wouldn’t It Be Nice.” Just above, hear the mak­ing of “I Know There’s An Answer,” and below, hear Parts 1 and 2 of the cre­ation of “God Only Knows,” the lush, self-effac­ing bal­lad whose harp­si­chord and French horn intro clear­ly inspired the orches­tra­tion in songs like “Pen­ny Lane” and “Straw­ber­ry Fields For­ev­er.” See videos for the rest of Pet Sounds’ songs at the “Behind the Sounds” Youtube chan­nel.

Pet Sounds has been named the great­est album of all time by NME and Mojo mag­a­zines and ranks at num­ber two in Rolling Stone’s 500 Great­est Albums of All Time, right behind Sgt. Pepper’s. Wil­son wrote the songs with lyri­cist Tony Ash­er dur­ing a time when he was pulling away from his sun­ny surf-pop group and expand­ing his reper­toire of stu­dio tech­niques in unprece­dent­ed ways. The songs can sound super­fi­cial­ly like breezy Beach Boys pop, but reveal them­selves as com­plex, baroque orches­tra­tions that hold enough instru­men­tal sur­pris­es and lyri­cal sub­tleties for a life­time of lis­ten­ing. It’s a record both thor­ough­ly of its time and thor­ough­ly time­less.

Unlike many a trag­ic rock com­pos­er, Wil­son has sur­vived and recov­ered (many times over) into old age, record­ing and tour­ing on and off with the Beach Boys and open­ing up about his dark­er times. And unless you’re spend­ing this week under a rock some­where, you’ll catch the BBC’s star-stud­ded video re-make of “God Only Knows,” just below, cir­cu­lat­ing all over the ‘net. Both a pro­mo for the more than two dozen musi­cians involved and a ben­e­fit sin­gle for char­i­ta­ble orga­ni­za­tion BBC Chil­dren in Need, the glam­orous pro­duc­tion fea­tures Wil­son behind his piano, look­ing state­ly and healthy. For more on the mak­ing of Pet Sounds, see this 2002 BBC doc­u­men­tary, Art That Shook The World: The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds. And please, amidst this flur­ry of Pet Sounds good­ies, don’t for­get to lis­ten to the album itself, best appre­ci­at­ed, says Wil­son, with “ear­phones, in the dark.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd Get Bri­an Wil­son Out of Bed and Force Him to Go Surf­ing, 1976

The Straw­ber­ry Fields For­ev­er Demos: The Mak­ing of a Bea­t­les Clas­sic (1966)

Watch Doc­u­men­taries on the Mak­ing of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here

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