Last month, Pres­i­dent Oba­ma award­ed Paul McCart­ney the Library of Con­gress Gersh­win Prize for Pop­u­lar Song. And then the con­cert (aired last night on PBS) began. Among the high­lights was Elvis Costel­lo singing “Pen­ny Lane” with a mem­ber of the Pres­i­den­t’s Unit­ed States Marine band play­ing the pic­co­lo trum­pet. It’s a down­right won­der­ful ver­sion. You can watch the entire pro­gram online here.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mal­colm Glad­well on Why Genius Takes Time: A Look at the Mak­ing of Elvis Costello’s “Depor­tee” & Leonard Cohen’s “Hal­lelu­jah”

Hear a Playlist of 300 Songs That Influ­enced Elvis Costel­lo, Drawn From His New Mem­oir, Unfaith­ful Music & Dis­ap­pear­ing Ink

In 1971, The Rolling Stones went into vol­un­tary exile. They left Britain and its 93% tax­es (applied to the super wealthy) and head­ed to a big vil­la on the French Riv­iera, where they hun­kered down with fam­i­ly, friends and intox­i­cants and began record­ing their 10th stu­dio album, Exile on Main Street. (Kei­th Richards talks more about that stint here.) Crit­ics were ini­tial­ly cool to the album. But, with 40 years’ hind­sight, it’s now wide­ly con­sid­ered their mas­ter­piece.

This past spring, the band issued a remas­tered ver­sion of Exile on Main Street (CD — MP3), and, along with it, came a new doc­u­men­tary Stones in Exile, which uses archival mate­r­i­al and inter­views with band mem­bers to revis­it the band’s sojourn in France and the mak­ing of their land­mark album. Stones in Exile is now avail­able on DVD, and hap­pi­ly I have one review copy to give away. It will go to the first read­er who sends us a piece of open/intelligent media that we post on the site. If you spot some great audio or video (they type of thing we usu­al­ly post here) send it our way with this form. We’ll announce the win­ner when we share your great find.

(Note: this DVD prob­a­bly does­n’t work on DVD play­ers out­side of North Amer­i­ca.)

Today, the BBC has unveiled a new archive of world music, allow­ing you to sam­ple the musi­cal tra­di­tions of more than 40 coun­tries. India, Cor­si­ca, Chi­na, Cuba, Iran, Brazil, Mozam­bique, Turkey – they’re all rep­re­sent­ed in this eclec­tic col­lec­tion of indige­nous music. Often assum­ing a fair amount of risk, BBC 3 trav­eled to each coun­try (includ­ing sev­er­al con­flict zones) to record the music. But it pays off when you get to hear the lit­tle known music com­ing out of North Korea, for exam­ple. Fea­tur­ing 100s of hours of free record­ings, this archive is now avail­able to a glob­al audi­ence. You can start explor­ing right here, right now.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Intro­duc­ing the Free Music Archive

via NZHer­ald and @freemusicarchiv

Imi­ta­tion is the sin­cer­est form of flat­tery…

(The Bowie clip is from 1973.)

Take The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again” from 1971. Now break it down, sep­a­rat­ing out the tracks instru­ment by instru­ment, and you get some insight into how rock ‘n roll anthems come togeth­er. Above, we have Kei­th Moon’s dri­ving drum track. Then Pete Town­shend play­ing the pow­er chords on gui­tar (plus some syn­the­siz­er); John Entwistle thump­ing out the bass; and Roger Dal­trey on vocals. Put them back togeth­er and the whole becomes greater than the sum of the parts.

via metafil­ter

When play­ing a con­cert in San Fran­cis­co in July 2010, Paul McCart­ney recalled for his audi­ence how the Bea­t­les released Sgt. Pep­per’s Lone­ly Hearts Club Band in June, 1967. The album came out on a Fri­day, and by Sun­day night, Jimi Hen­drix learned the songs and opened his own show with a cov­er of the title track. It would have looked some­thing like this. Watch above. And watch out for your ears!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Decon­struct­ing The Mas­ter Track of The Bea­t­les’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lone­ly Hearts Club Band”

Eric Clapton’s Iso­lat­ed Gui­tar Track From the Clas­sic Bea­t­les Song, ‘While My Gui­tar Gen­tly Weeps’ (1968)

The Bea­t­les: Unplugged Col­lects Acoustic Demos of White Album Songs (1968)

In 1969 Telegram, Jimi Hen­drix Invites Paul McCart­ney to Join a Super Group with Miles Davis

Jimi Hendrix’s Final Inter­view on Sep­tem­ber 11, 1970: Lis­ten to the Com­plete Audio

Let’s rewind the video tape to 1957. A very young Jim­my Page appears on a BBC chil­dren’s tal­ent show to play some skif­fle. Mix­ing togeth­er strands of Amer­i­can blues, jazz, coun­try and folk music, this style of music became all the rage in the UK dur­ing the 1950s. Lon­nie Done­gan got the craze going. And it was­n’t long before John Lennon formed his own skif­fle band – The Quar­ry Men (pho­to here) … lat­er to become The Bea­t­les. Head­ing into the 60s, a matur­ing Jim­my Page took his music in entire­ly new direc­tions, which brings us to our post last week: The Strange Tale of Dazed and Con­fused.

Video via Laugh­ingSquid