A theory: one of the drivers of our current wave of nostalgia—lo-fi analog hiss and pop in music and readymade vintage filters in digital photography—is the loss of imperfection. Increasingly powerful technologies render sound and vision too slickly pristine, glossy, hyperreal, and thus impersonal and alien. The latest episode of PBS Arts’ “Off Book” series (above) features a trend toward disrupting digital overproduction by deliberately exploiting the weaknesses in new technologies. Glitch artists makes use of “naturally occurring” (so to speak) corruptions of software, or create their own corruptions in a process called “databending”—opening images as text files, for example, and adding and/or deleting information from the image.
Unlike punk rock, to which glitch is compared by one of the artists above, some glitch art requires a fairly sophisticated understanding of digital technologies. For example, video artist Anton Marini describes how he writes his own software to produce glitch effects. But since virtually anyone can access a pc and standard text and image-editing software, it remains a fairly democratic aesthetic, similar to the bedroom technologies that enable almost anyone to produce and distribute their own musical compositions. There are sites offering tutorials on how to create your own glitch art and even a Flickr account called Glitchbot that will automatically generate glitch images for you, like Hipstamatic or Instagram will convert your careless snapshots into intriguing vintage artifacts. Sound too easy? Maybe, but so was Duchamp’s urinal. Context, as always, matters, and whether glitch art is “art” may ultimately become a historical question. At the moment, glitch images, video and music offer a way to humanize all-too-inhuman corporate products and technologies.
When you hear the guitar playing of Django Reinhardt, with its fluid phrasing and lightning-fast arpeggios, it’s incredible to think that he had only two good fingers on his left hand.
When Reinhardt was 18 years old he was badly burned in a fire. It was late on the night of November 2, 1928. The young guitarist was at home with his common-law wife, Bella, in their gypsy caravan on the edge of Paris. To scrape together a little money, Bella had been making artificial flowers out of paper and highly flammable celluloid. When Django accidently knocked over a candle, the material from the flowers ignited and the trailer was quickly engulfed in flames.
They both survived, but Django would spend the next 18 months recovering from terrible injuries. When a doctor expressed interest in amputating his right leg, Reinhardt left the hospital and moved into a nursing home, where he eventually got better. The two smallest fingers on his left hand–crucial to a guitarist for articulating notes on the fretboard–were paralyzed. A lesser musician would have given up, but Reinhardt overcame the limitation by inventing his own method of playing. With his two good fingers he moved rapidly up and down the guitar neck while making very limited use of his two shriveled fingers on chords, double-stops and triple-stops. He rose above his handicap to create one of the most distinctive instrumental styles in 20th century music.
For a rare look at Reinhardt’s amazing technique, watch the excerpt above from the 1938 short film, Jazz “Hot.”It features Reinhardt with violinist Stéphane Grappelli and their band, Quintette du Hot Club de France, playing a swing version of the popular song “J’attendrai.” (It means “I will wait.”)
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It started back in the 1950s. Bill Haley and Elvis burst onto the scene. Rock ‘n’ roll was born. The guitar took center stage, and it never left. How the guitar came to “dominate the soundtrack of our lives” is the subject of The Story of the Guitar, a three part documentarynarrated by the BBC’s creative director Alan Yentob.
The story of the guitar is, of course, a big one. The instrument, and its stringed precursors, goes way back — all the way to the Greeks. And the influence of the guitar can be felt far and wide. It plays a lead role in classical music in Spain (and China); jazz in France (think Django); the blues in the Mississippi Delta, and beyond. Yentob paints the bigger picture for you in the first segment, “In the Beginning” (above). Part II (Out of the Frying Pan) focuses on the big moment when the guitar went electric. And Part III gets you up close and personal with the masters of the electric guitar. The documentary features interviews with Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour, The Who’s Pete Townshend, Iggy Pop, and The Edge from U2 (Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3), to name a few. We’ve got more great guitar-related resources listed below. H/T Mental Floss
Here’s a rare gem from the video vault: Tom Waits on the Australian TV program, The Don Lane Show, in 1979.
Don Lane was an American nightclub performer who somehow managed to become the Johnny Carson of Australia. The Don Lane Show ran from 1975 to 1983, and featured comedy, interviews and musical performances by a variety of international stars who were touring Australia, including Elton John, Stevie Wonder, Jerry Lee Lewis and, on more than one occasion, Tom Waits.
On his first appearance in 1979, the 29-year-old Waits gave a disjointed, comic interview (above), before going to the piano (below) to perform “On the Nickel,” which he wrote for the soundtrack of the 1980 film of the same name. “The Nickel” refers to the skid row area of Los Angeles, along 5th Street. The song was included on Waits’s 1980 album, Heartattack and Vine. Australian TV viewers apparently didn’t know what to think about the mumbling, chain-smoking singer. When Waits returned in 1981, Lane said, “The last time Tom Waits appeared with us, his unusual style and sense of humor lit up our switchboard for about an hour after the show. And not all with compliments, either.”
In the mid 1980s, Bob Dylan found his career hitting an unmistakable low point. In his autobiography, he recalls “Everything was smashed. My own songs had become strangers to me, I didn’t have the skill to touch the right nerves, couldn’t penetrate the surfaces. It wasn’t my moment of history anymore.”
For a while, Dylan toured with Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers, and it only led him to one conclusion: “Tom was at the top of his game and I was at the bottom of mine.” It was time to pack things in, to exit music altogether.
Before he could retire, Dylan agreed to do some shows with The Grateful Dead. In the summer of 1987, the singer-songwriter traveled to San Rafael, California to rehearse with the band. But it turned out to be trying, more than he could have ever imagined. In Chronicles, Volume 1 he writes:
After an hour or so, it became clear to me that the band wanted to rehearse more and different songs than I had been used to doing with Petty. They wanted to run over all the songs, the ones they liked, the seldom seen ones. I found myself in a peculiar position and I could hear the brakes screech. If I had known this to begin with, I might not have taken the dates.… There were so many [songs] that I couldn’t tell which was which‑I might even get the words to some mixed up with others.
Dylan eventually excused himself from the studios, intending never to return. But an encounter with a local jazz band — call it a simple twist of fate — brought him back. Dylan and The Dead started playing through his big repertoire. It was tough sledding at first. “But then miraculously,” he adds, “something internal came unhinged.” “I played these shows with The Dead and never had to think twice about it. Maybe they just dropped something in my drink, I can’t say, but anything they wanted to do was fine with me.”
It’s a great little story. Even better, the rehearsal is recorded for posterity. Thanks to the Internet Archive, you can sit back and listen to 74 tracks, which includes some classics — “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” “Gotta Serve Somebody,” “Maggie’s Farm,” “Tangled Up in Blue,” “Simple Twist of Fate,” and more.
You can stream all of the tracks right below, from start to end. Or find individual recordings here.
When I was young, the first songs every aspiring rock star would learn on guitar were Bowie’s “Ziggy Stardust” and Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here.” I dutifully learned both baroque compositions before stumbling on to sludgy three-chord hardcore punk. “Wish You Were Here,” the song is, yes, a staple of high-school talent shows and every singer/songwriter in every coffeeshop, but that’s only because it is an incredibly powerful song from an incredibly powerful record, also called Wish You Were Here (WYWH). The documentary above tells the story of that record’s making. It begins with the atmospheric blues of “Shine on You Crazy Diamond,” and its tragic inspiration, Floyd’s former leader Syd Barret—whose absence haunts the band as they discuss the genesis of WYWH—then the film continues on to the band’s collective sense of ennui after the success of 1973’s Dark Side of the Moon. All along, we’re treated to lengthy interviews, impromptu solo performances from Roger Waters and David Gilmour (never in the same room, of course), and fascinating looks at the recording process at Abbey Road Studios. An excerpt from the film description cites more specifics:
Wish You Were Here, released in September 1975, was the follow up album to the globally successful The Dark Side Of The Moon and is cited by many fans, as well as band members Richard Wright and David Gilmour, as their favorite Pink Floyd album. On release it went straight to Number One in both the UK and the US and topped the charts in many other countries around the world. This program tells the story of the making of this landmark release through new interviews with Roger Waters, David Gilmour and Nick Mason and archive interviews with the late Richard Wright. Also featured are sleeve designer Storm Thorgerson, guest vocalist Roy Harper, front cover burning man Ronnie Rondell and others involved in the creation of the album. In addition, original recording engineer Brian Humphries revisits the master tapes at Abbey Road Studios to illustrate aspects of the songs construction.
Richard Metzger at Dangerous Minds reviews the film here.
In November of 1966, the great jazz bassist and composer Charles Mingus was forcibly evicted from his apartment in New York City. Thomas Reichman’s documentary Mingus (above) captures the sad moment when the musician, with his five-year-old daughter Carolyn at his side, looks through his scattered belongings the night before city officials arrive to cart everything away.
With the camera rolling, Mingus plays a few notes on a piano and then picks up a rifle and shoots a bullet into the ceiling. He finds a bottle of wine and gives a sip to his daughter. He recites his own version of the Pledge of Allegiance:
I pledge allegiance to the flag–the white flag. I pledge allegiance to the flag of America. When they say “black” or “negro,” it means you’re not an American. I pledge allegiance to your flag. Not that I have to, but just for the hell of it I pledge allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. The white flag, with no stripes, no stars. It is a prestige badge worn by a profitable minority.
Scenes from the apartment are intercut with footage of Mingus and his sextet performing at a little club in Peabody, Massachusetts called Lennie’s-on-the-Turnpike. The combo features Mingus on bass, Dannie Richmond on drums, Charles McPherson on alto saxophone, John Gilmore on tenor saxophone, Lonnie Hillyer on trumpet and Walter Bishop, Jr., on piano. The music includes parts of “All the Things You Are,” Take the ‘A’ Train” and “Secret Love.”
But the film is more about the man than the music. It records an especially painful moment in Mingus’s life. He had hoped to use the loft at 5 Great Jones Street in Greenwich Village as a music school. In the final sequence, a crowd of reporters and cameramen jostle for position to record the humiliating scene as Mingus’s belongings, including his musical instruments, are hauled out to the curb and loaded onto a truck. Tears appear in Mingus’s eyes when the police block him from going back into the building. When the cops find hypodermic needles among his things, Mingus himself is loaded into a police car and taken away.
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