Last year, we brought you an incred­i­ble cov­er of Dave Brubeck’s clas­sic “Take Five” per­formed by the Pak­istan-based group, the Sachal Stu­dios Orches­tra (also known as the Sachal Jazz Ensem­ble). You can find that song, along with two takes on “The Girl From Ipane­ma,” on their 2011 album Sachal Jazz. You won’t find the Sachal Orchestra’s ver­sion of “Eleanor Rig­by” (above) on that album. This comes to us from Sachal’s 2013 Jazz and All That, a record Guardian crit­ic John Ford­ham calls “smooth-jazz­i­er” than its pre­de­ces­sor and “more impro­vi­sa­tion­al­ly inhib­it­ed.” I must say, if that’s the case, I’ll take my jazz smooth just this once.

“Eleanor Rig­by,” of course, has always been played by an orches­tra, and its mix­ture of modes makes it a par­tic­u­lar­ly good choice for the sitar soloist, who could have sat in com­fort­ably in stu­dio ses­sions for near­ly every song on the East­ern-inflect­ed Revolver. He shares the spot­light with a dyna­mite tablas play­er (watch for his solo at 1:27). It’s no won­der the Sachal play­ers have made such an impres­sion with their unique inter­pre­ta­tions of stan­dards and clas­sics. Drawn from “vir­tu­osos who cut their teeth in Pakistan’s once-flour­ish­ing Lol­ly­wood film indus­try,” their web­site informs us, “the Sachal Jazz Ensem­ble brings togeth­er some of the most accom­plished clas­si­cal musi­cians of the sub­con­ti­nent.” Lol­ly­wood, Lahore’s once-thriv­ing film indus­try, has still bare­ly recov­ered from the repres­sive regime of Gen­er­al Zia-ul-Haq.

The musi­cians of Sachal are refugees of a sort; res­cued from pover­ty, these “vet­er­an ses­sion play­ers [had been] retired since the 1980s due to var­i­ous anti-music zealotries.” Dur­ing those times, writes Yaqoob Khan Ban­gash, tele­vi­sion dra­ma pro­vid­ed “great suc­cor to a fatigued and demor­al­ized soci­ety.” Musi­cals, how­ev­er, were very much frowned on by the regime, which banned most West­ern-influ­enced pro­duc­tions and shut­tered most of the Lahore stu­dios. We should be glad the Sachal Stu­dios Orches­tra can now per­form and tour. They recent­ly appeared with Wyn­ton Marsalis at Lin­coln Cen­ter in an event, Ford­ham writes, sug­gest­ing that “the most cre­ative phase of Sachal Stu­dios’ heart­en­ing sto­ry of renew­al might just be begin­ning.”

For more on Sachal Stu­dios, watch the intro­duc­to­ry video, “Who We Are…,” above—shot at, where else, the stu­dios at Abbey Road.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Pak­istani Musi­cians Play Amaz­ing Ver­sion of Dave Brubeck’s Jazz Clas­sic, “Take Five”

Watch Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Voodoo Chile’ Per­formed on a Gayageum, a Tra­di­tion­al Kore­an Instru­ment

A Mid­dle-East­ern Ver­sion of Radiohead’s 1997 Hit “Kar­ma Police”

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

Just thought you’d like to know: NPR’s First Lis­ten site is now stream­ing Leonard Cohen’s new album Pop­u­lar Prob­lems. But it will only be avail­able for a lim­it­ed time. So don’t waste time get­ting your lis­ten­ing par­ty start­ed.

In its review of the album, The Guardian notes that “finan­cial wor­ries may be dri­ving his come­back, but Leonard Cohen’s songs of despair have nev­er sound­ed so full of life.” Lis­ten to the free stream at NPR and see what they mean. (Also find a free stream at The Guardian.) Or pre-order your own copy on Ama­zon or iTunes.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ladies and Gen­tle­men… Mr. Leonard Cohen: The Poet-Musi­cian Fea­tured in a 1965 Doc­u­men­tary

Leonard Cohen Plays a Spell­bind­ing Set at the 1970 Isle of Wight Fes­ti­val

Street Artist Plays Leonard Cohen’s “Hal­lelu­jah” With Crys­tal Glass­es

Leonard Cohen Recounts “How I Got My Song,” or When His Love Affair with Music Began

In the fall of 1965, six months after Bob Dylan freaked out the folkies at New­port, he sat down with Vil­lage Voice music crit­ic and colum­nist Nat Hentoff for an inter­view for Play­boy. Like Dylan him­self, the result­ing con­ver­sa­tion, as pub­lished in Feb­ru­ary, 1966, is by turns illu­mi­nat­ing and com­plete­ly con­found­ing. Top­ics shift abrupt­ly, words take on unfa­mil­iar mean­ings, and for all of the many strong opin­ions Dylan seems to express, it’s remark­able how lit­tle he actu­al­ly seems to say, since he takes back almost every­thing as soon as he says it.

The ver­bal tan­gles of his answers take many philo­soph­i­cal turns. Dylan defines the con­tem­po­rary art scene, say­ing “Art, if there is such a thing, is in the bath­rooms; every­body knows that. […] I spend a lot of time in the bath­room. I think muse­ums are vul­gar. They’re all against sex.” Asked “why rock ‘n’ roll has become such an inter­na­tion­al phe­nom­e­non,” Dylan wax­es onto­log­i­cal: “I can’t real­ly think that there is any rock ’n’ roll. Actu­al­ly, when you think about it, any­thing that has no real exis­tence is bound to become an inter­na­tion­al phe­nom­e­non.”

The bizarre nature of the pub­lished exchange is clas­sic, com­i­cal­ly aloof, mid-six­ties Dylan—so much in char­ac­ter we can imag­ine Cate Blanchett’s ser­pen­tine Dylan in I’m Not There say­ing the lines. But the print ver­sion of the con­ver­sa­tion is stream­lined and lucid com­pared to the unedit­ed, taped con­ver­sa­tion Dylan and Hentoff had the year pri­or before an edi­tor pared it down. As music site All Dylan has it, “to call them ver­sions ignores the fact that they are total­ly dif­fer­ent inter­views.”

The orig­i­nal take, which you can hear above in two parts, was much messier, and stranger.  Dylan often sounds like he’s not answer­ing ques­tions so much as putting words togeth­er in sen­tence-like forms. His speech takes on the qual­i­ties of abstract expressionism—recursive, and point­ed­ly vague. We might assume he’s real­ly stoned, except for a long-wind­ed speech about how passé it is to smoke pot.

Well, I nev­er felt as if there’s an answer through pot. I don’t want to make this, kind of, a drug inter­view or any­thing, like. LSD like… once you take LSD a few times… I mean, LSD is a med­i­cine. You know, you take it and you know… you don’t real­ly have to keep tak­ing it all the time. It’s noth­ing like that. It’s not that kind of thing, you know, where­as pot, you know, nobody’s got any answers through pot. Pot’s, you know, not that kind of thing. I’m sure that the peo­ple that say that the peo­ple who fig­ure they got their answers through pot, first of all, those peo­ple who say that, they’re just invent­ing some­thing. And the peo­ple that real­ly actu­al­ly think that they got their answers through pot, prob­a­bly nev­er even smoked pot, you know. I mean, it’s like… pot is, you know…who smokes pot any more, you know, any­way? 

Ever non­com­mit­tal, Dylan deflects a ques­tion about his rela­tion­ship with John­ny Cash, say­ing “I can’t real­ly talk about it too much,” but assur­ing Hentoff that he likes Cash “a lot. I like every­thing he does real­ly.” If Dylan gives as much as he takes away in the pub­lished inter­view, he does so dou­bly in this unedit­ed ver­sion, and it’s odd­ly fas­ci­nat­ing, even—and especially—when he decides to stop mak­ing words make sense. The taped inter­view was, in fact, the sec­ond inter­view Hentoff con­duct­ed with Dylan. After see­ing an edit­ed tran­script of the first attempt, Dylan insist­ed that Hentoff inter­view him again over the phone. Hentoff turned on his tape recorder and imme­di­ate­ly “real­ized I was going to be the straight guy,” he tells John White­head, “Dylan was impro­vis­ing sur­re­al­is­ti­cal­ly and very fun­ny.”

Vul­ture ranks the Play­boy inter­view at num­ber one in their list of “The 10 Most Incom­pre­hen­si­ble Bob Dylan Inter­views of All Time.” It must have been a tough call. At num­ber 10, they have the Time mag­a­zine inter­view from that same year, which you can see in the clip above from 1967’s Don’t Look Back. Dylan is con­fronta­tion­al, almost the­atri­cal­ly angry, but he is most­ly clear on the details. He ends the inter­view with a cryp­tic joke, com­par­ing him­self to opera singer Enri­co Caru­so: “I hap­pen to be just as good as him—a good singer. You have to lis­ten close­ly, but I hit all those notes.”

via All Dylan

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bob Dylan Reads From T.S. Eliot’s Great Mod­ernist Poem The Waste Land

Two Leg­ends Togeth­er: A Young Bob Dylan Talks and Plays on The Studs Terkel Pro­gram, 1963

Bob Dylan Final­ly Makes a Video for His 1965 Hit, “Like a Rolling Stone”

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

Every sphere of record­ed music, from late-1960s folk to Philadel­phia hip-hop to Japan­ese jazz (a per­son­al pur­suit of mine), has its crate-dig­gers, those hap­py to flip through hun­dreds — nay, hun­dreds of thou­sands — of obscure, for­got­ten vinyl albums in search of their sub­gen­re’s even obscur­er, more for­got­ten gems. This holds espe­cial­ly true, if not in num­ber than in avid­i­ty, for enthu­si­asts of the 20th-cen­tu­ry clas­si­cal-exper­i­men­tal-elec­troa­coustic tra­di­tion that The Avant-Garde Project takes as its preser­va­tion man­date. The site offers mate­r­i­al “dig­i­tized from LPs whose music has in most cas­es nev­er been released on CD, and so is effec­tive­ly inac­ces­si­ble to the vast major­i­ty of music lis­ten­ers today.” To the best of the Archive’s knowl­edge, the LPs are all cur­rent­ly out of print, and all the music is extract­ed with an ana­log rig that ranks as “near state-of-the-art, pro­duc­ing almost none of the track­ing dis­tor­tion or sur­face noise nor­mal­ly asso­ci­at­ed with LPs.”

The Avant-Garde Pro­jec­t’s efforts, the archive of which you can browse here (or alpha­bet­i­cal­ly by com­pos­er, or through choice sam­plers, or through the “AGP top twen­ty,” or through the founder’s per­son­al favorites), has borne a great deal of fruit so far, espe­cial­ly from such music-his­to­ry class favorites as Arnold Schoen­berg, whose String Trio per­formed by the Los Ange­les String Trio you can hear above, and Igor Stravin­sky, whose Sym­pho­ny of Psalms you’ll find below. Every­thing in the Avant-Garde Pro­jec­t’s archive comes down­load­able as tor­rents of Free Loss­less Audio Codec (FLAC) files. This audio­phile’s com­pres­sion for­mat of choice requires a bit of spe­cial but eas­i­ly obtained soft­ware to play or burn to CDs, all of which you can get explained here (with even more infor­ma­tion here). Those who’d like to keep it sim­ple (if not quite as aural­ly pris­tine) can lis­ten through a small­er ver­sion of the archive at Ubuweb. Either way, you’ll enjoy all the artis­tic rich­ness of rare 20th-cen­tu­ry clas­si­cal-exper­i­men­tal-elec­troa­coustic music with none of the dig­ging.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Exten­sive Archive of Avant-Garde & Mod­ernist Mag­a­zines (1890–1939) Now Avail­able Online

Vi Hart Uses Her Video Mag­ic to Demys­ti­fy Stravin­sky and Schoenberg’s 12-Tone Com­po­si­tions

Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, Visu­al­ized in a Com­put­er Ani­ma­tion for Its 100th Anniver­sary

Inter­views with Schoen­berg and Bartók

Hear Theodor Adorno’s Avant-Garde Musi­cal Com­po­si­tions

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.

These days “demo tapes” are often radio-ready record­ings, and bands often record one before they’ve even played their first gig. It’s a recent devel­op­ment, a byprod­uct of the rev­o­lu­tion in afford­able home record­ing tech­nol­o­gy. For most of the his­to­ry of rock and pop music, demos were raw sketch­es, pre­serv­ing ideas, tem­pos, changes, moods, but not at all ready to air. Lis­ten­ing back to demo ver­sions of songs we already know well can be like exca­vat­ing stra­ta under­neath a site like Stone­henge. Some­times you find noth­ing but sed­i­ment. Some­times you find anoth­er Stone­henge. Take for exam­ple John Lennon’s hyp­not­ic demo record­ings of “Straw­ber­ry Fields For­ev­er,” the Bea­t­les’ acoustic White Album demos, or Roger Waters’ ear­ly demos of The Wall. Intrigu­ing­ly rough gems all.

Today we bring you demo record­ings of anoth­er artist whose work typ­i­cal­ly bespeaks pol­ish and stu­dio panache. As in the past, song­writ­ers today still push play on cheap voice recorders—or expen­sive iphones—and cap­ture new songs on the fly. But nobody today writes like Bowie did in his “Zig­gy Star­dust” phase. At the top of the post, hear Bowie’s solo acoustic demo record­ing of that song. You’ll find it on the sec­ond CD of the 30th Anniver­sary edi­tion of Zig­gy Star­dust and the Spi­ders from Mars, which also includes a demo ver­sion of “Lady Star­dust” and two ver­sions of “Moon­age Day­dream” and “Hang on to Your­self” by “Arnold Corns,” the orig­i­nal name of Zig­gy. I’ve heard more solo acoustic ver­sions of “Zig­gy” than I’d care to remem­ber, played by earnest cof­fee-shop croon­ers and gui­tar-bear­ing par­ty guests. But Bowie’s orig­i­nal demo I could lis­ten to again and again.

While the “Arnold Corns” incar­na­tions of Zig­gy Star­dust songs def­i­nite­ly fall into the cat­e­go­ry of not-Stone­henge, the 1969 demo record­ing of “Space Odd­i­ty” has a very mon­u­men­tal feel indeed—if that mon­u­ment were 2001’s enig­mat­ic Mono­lith. Set here to clips from that film, it seems like the per­fect accom­pa­ni­ment to the glossy fore­bod­ing of Kubrick’s space vision. This drum­less arrange­ment sounds some­how more con­tem­po­rary than the record­ing we’ve heard count­less times. It also sounds much clos­er to the psy­che­del­ic folk on the rest of the Space Odd­i­ty album, a col­lec­tion of songs many Bowie fans, myself includ­ed, great­ly admire, but which his first audi­ence didn’t take to so read­i­ly. “Space Odd­i­ty” went through at least one more iter­a­tion before land­ing on the album. Hear the slight­ly more funked-up ver­sion, and see its awk­ward video, below.

Per­haps no song oth­er than “Ash­es to Ash­es” so well artic­u­lates the cre­ative destruc­tion of Bowie’s many rock star personae—and the toll those meta­mor­phoses take—than 1971’s “Changes.” But it’s a song writ­ten and record­ed ear­ly in his career, before Zig­gy Star­dust, the char­ac­ter that first broke him into super­star­dom. The song appears on Hunky Dory in a record­ing with the Star­dust band—Mick Ron­son, Trevor Bold­er, and Mick Woodmansey—but it’s such a Bowie-cen­tric lyric that it out­last­ed hun­dreds of cos­tume changes and served as the obvi­ous choice of title for the 1990 com­pi­la­tion Changes­bowie.

Does the piano demo above reveal an alter­nate pre-his­to­ry? Not real­ly. The hand­claps and odd vocal­iza­tions are half-formed ideas at best, and the poor audio qual­i­ty is not a fea­ture. But what it does demon­strate, as do all of the rough record­ings above, is that Bowie is Bowie—a stel­lar song­writer and vocal performer—whether cap­tured on a cheap home tape machine or the best stu­dio equip­ment mon­ey can buy. Stu­dio wiz­ardry of the present can do things pro­duc­ers forty years ago could only dream about, but no amount of tech­nol­o­gy can sub­sti­tute for raw musi­cal tal­ent, nor for the long years of prac­tice Bowie endured.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Bowie Recalls the Strange Expe­ri­ence of Invent­ing the Char­ac­ter Zig­gy Star­dust (1977)

The Sto­ry of Zig­gy Star­dust: How David Bowie Cre­at­ed the Char­ac­ter that Made Him Famous

A 17-Year-Old David Bowie Defends “Long-Haired Men” in His First TV Inter­view (1964)

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