Back in 2008, Bob Boilen (host of All Songs Considered) and NPR music critic Stephen Thompson attended a noisy concert where they struggled to hear Laura Gibson perform. Jokingly, Thompson suggested that Gibson perform at Boilen’s office desk instead. She did. And, with that, the NPR Tiny Desk Concert was born. Since then, more than 1,300 musical acts have performed their own stripped-down, authentic shows in the cramped confines of NPR’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. That includes everyone from Taylor Swift to Dua Lipa, to the Pixies, the Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir, and Gary Clark Jr. In the video above, Architectural Digest takes you behind the scenes, showing the set where the magic happens. There you can see “a real desk in a real office, surrounded by shelves packed with priceless mementos left by artists–from Adele’s water bottle to Sabrina Carpenter’s martini glass and even Chappell Roan’s wig.” And you can meet the team behind the production, while learning how Tiny Desk became a beloved series. Below watch a complete playlist of all Tiny Desk Concerts. Enjoy!
“The last people anyone expected to come out of that gig as being the memorable ones was Queen,” said Bob Geldof in an interview, looking back at the band’s stunning 24 minute set at Live Aid on July 13, 1985. In front of 72,000 people in Wembley Stadium and millions watching worldwide, Queen resuscitated their career with a selection of hits and new material.
The band, as Roger Taylor says in the mini dochere, was “bored” and “in a bit of a trough.” They also had been criticized for playing Sun City in South Africa during the reign of Apartheid.
Going into Live Aid, a lot of the artists didn’t know what to expect of the entire event. Many, including Bob Geldof himself, wondered if the event would flop. But Queen more than any of them seemed to intuit right from the start the importance of the day, though they were very nervous backstage. But once onstage they completely own it, even more so Freddie Mercury who rises to the occasion as a front man and as a singer, giving one of his best performances.
In that short set, Queen gives a full concert worth of energy and the audience responds. Not all were Queen fans, but by the end everybody had become one, singing along to “We Are the Champions” and “We Will Rock You.” Across the Atlantic, the 90,000 strong Philadelphia audience followed suit, watching the jumbotron simulcast.
“Do you know how hard it is to get someone’s attention who’s on the other side of the room?” asks Dave Grohl of Foo Fighters in this other short doc on the set. “Imagine a stadium and making them sing along with you.”
This hot summer concert would turn out to be the zenith of Queen’s career. There would be more albums and singles, but Freddie Mercury would slowly succumb to AIDS, and disappear from public view, until passing in 1991. The Live Aid set stands as one of the band’s final, iconic, and major achievements. Watch it, in all of its glory, above.
You can watch the full Live Aid broadcast on Internet Archive. You can also watch 10+ hours of the best performances here on the Live Aid YouTube channel. Videos will be added to the playlist below throughout the day.
“Tomorrow Never Knows” couldn’t be made today, and not just because the Beatles already made it in 1966. Marking perhaps the single biggest step in the group’s artistic evolution, that song is in every sense a product of its time. The use of psychedelic drugs like LSD was on the rise in the counterculture, as was the awareness of the religion and music of faraway lands such as India. At the same moment, developments in recording-studio technology were making new approaches possible, involving sounds that musicians never would have imagined trying before — and, when brought together, produced a result that many listeners of just a few years earlier would hardly have recognized as music at all.
In the new You Can’t Unhear This video above, host Raymond Schillinger explains all that went into the recording of “Tomorrow Never Knows,” which he calls “arguably the most pivotal song of the Beatles’ career.” It seems that John had undergone some considerable experiences during the group’s five-month-long break after Rubber Soul, given that he turned up to EMI Studios afterward with a song that “defied pretty much every convention of pop music at the time: the lyrics didn’t rhyme, the chord progression didn’t really progress, and instead of romantic love, the subject matter was expanding one’s psychic consciousness through ego death.” A young Geoff Emerick, who’d just been promoted to the role of the Beatles’ recording engineer, rose to the challenge of facilitating an equally non-standard studio process.
The wholly new sonic texture that resulted owes in large part to the use of multiple tape loops, literal sections of audio tape connected at the beginning and end to allow theoretically infinite repetition of their content. This was a fairly new musical technology at the time, and the Beatles made use of it with gusto, creating loops of all manner of sped-up sounds — an orchestra playing, a Mellotron, a reversed Indian sitar, Paul sounding like a seagull — and orchestrating them “live” during recording. (Ringo’s drum track, despite what sounds like a superhuman regularity in this context, was not, in fact a loop.) Other technologically novel elements included John’s double-tracked vocals run through a revolving Leslie speaker and a backwards guitar solo about whose authorship Beatles enthusiasts still argue.
What John had called “The Void,” was retitled after one of Ringo’s signature askew expressions (“a hard day’s night” being another) in order to avoid drawing too much attention as a “drug song.” But listeners tapped into the LSD scene would have recognized lyrical inspiration drawn from The Tibetan Book of the Dead, the ancient work that also informed The Psychedelic Experience, the guidebook by Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (later Baba Ram Dass) with which John directed his own first trip. But even for the least turned-on Beatle fan, “Tomorrow Never Knows” was “like stepping from a black-and-white world into full color,” as Schillinger puts it. The Beatles might have gone the way of the Rolling Stones and chosen to record in an American studio rather than their home-away-from-home on Abbey Road, the unconventional use of its less-than-cutting-edge gear resulted in what remains a vividly powerful dispatch from the analog era — even here in the twenty-twenties, when consciousness expansion itself has gone digital.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue changed jazz. It changed music, period. So I take it very seriously. But when I see the animated sheet music of the first cut, “So What,” I can’t help but think of Charles Schulz’s Peanuts cartoons, and their Vince Guaraldi compositions. I mean no offense to Miles. His modal jazz swings, and it’s fun, as fun to listen to as it is to watch in rising and falling arpeggios. The YouTube uploader, Dan Cohen, gives us this on his channel Animated Sheet Music, with apologies to Jimmy Cobb for the lack of drum notation.
Also from Cohen’s channel, we have Charlie Parker’s music animated. Never one to keep up with his admin, Parker left his estate unable to recuperate royalties from compositions like “Confirmation” (above).
Nonetheless, everyone knows it’s Bird’s tune, and to see it animated above is to see Parker dance a very different step than Miles’ post-bop cool, one filled with complex melodic paragraphs instead of chordal phrases.
And above, we have John Coltrane’s massive “Giant Steps,” with its rapid-fire bursts of quarter notes, interrupted by half-note asides. Coltrane’s iconic 1960 composition displays what Ira Gitler called in a 1958 Downbeat piece, “sheets of sound.” Gitler has said the image he had in his head was of “bolts of cloth undulating as they unfurled,” but he might just as well have thought of sheets of rain, so multitudinous and heavy is Coltrane’s melodic attack.
See Cohen’s Animated Sheet Music channel for two more Charlie Parker pieces, “Au Privave” and “Bloomdido.”
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Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2013.
In 1939, Igor Stravinsky emigrated to the United States, first arriving in New York City, before settling in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he delivered the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard during the 1939–40 academic year. While living in Boston, the composer conducted the Boston Symphony and, on one famous occasion, he decided to conduct his own arrangement of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” which he made out of a “desire to do my bit in these grievous times toward fostering and preserving the spirit of patriotism in this country.” The date was January 1944. And he was, of course, referring to America’s role in World War II.
As you might expect, Stravinsky’s version of “The Star-Spangled Banner” wasn’t entirely conventional, seeing that it added a dominant seventh chord to the arrangement. And the Boston police, not exactly an organization with avant-garde sensibilities, issued Stravinsky a warning, claiming there was a law against tampering with the national anthem. (They were misreading the statute.) Grudgingly, Stravinsky pulled it from the bill.
You can hear Stravinsky’s “Star-Spangled Banner” above, apparently performed by the London Symphony Orchestra, and conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas. The YouTube video features an apocryphal mugshot of Stravinsky. Despite the mythology created around this event, Stravinsky was never arrested.
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If asked to name our favorite French composer of the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, most of us would reach straight for Erik Satie, being able to bring to mind only his most famous pieces, the Gymnopédies and perhaps the Gnossiennes. We may not know that those works all date from the same few years of his career between the late eighteen-eighties and the early nineties. They also represent only a small portion indeed of his artistic output, which includes a great deal of instrumental and vocal music as well as compositions for dramatic works, written between 1886 and his death in 1925 — the coming hundredth anniversary of which is being celebrated with the recording of newly discovered pieces.
As the Guardian’s Dalya Alberge writes, these “twenty-seven previously unheard works by Erik Satie, from playful cabaret songs to minimalist nocturnes” have been “painstakingly pieced together from hundreds of small notebooks,” most of them written “in the bohemian bistros of Montmartre in Paris where Satie worked as a pianist.”
Their rediscovery owes to the efforts of two composers, James Nye and Sato Matsui, who “tracked down the lost material in various archival collections, including the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.” They’ve now been recorded by pianist Alexandre Tharaud, and you can hear the resulting album, Satie: Discoveries, in the Youtube playlist at the top of the post.
Famous in his native France and elsewhere, Tharaud’s professional involvement with the work of his esteemed predecessor and countryman goes back to at least 2009, when he organized a Satie Day at Paris’ Cité de la Musique. That same year, he recorded Satie’s 1915 compositions Avant-dernières Pensées, or “Penultimate Thoughts. Once dismissed as minor, even by the composer’s enthusiasts, the Avant-dernières Pensées have since risen in status to become some of his most often performed later works. With the 27 short pieces that constitute Discoveries, Tharaud’s challenge wasn’t to come up with a fresh reinterpretation, but the very first interpretation any of us will ever have heard, leaving it to the next century of pianists to put their own spins on them.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Several years ago, we brought you a transcription and a couple of audio interpretations of the oldest known song in the world, discovered in the ancient Syrian city of Ugarit and dating back to the 14th century B.C.E.. Likely performed on an instrument resembling an ancient lyre, the so-called “Hurrian Cult Song” or “Hurrian Hymn No. 6” sounds otherworldly to our ears, although modern-day musicologists can only guess at the song’s tempo and rhythm.
When we reach even further back in time, long before the advent of systems of writing, we are completely at a loss as to the forms of music prehistoric humans might have preferred. But we do know that music was likely a part of their everyday lives, as it is ours, and we have some sound evidence for the kinds of instruments they played. In 2008, archeologists discovered fragments of flutes carved from vulture and mammoth bones at a Stone Age cave site in southern Germany called Hohle Fels. These instruments date back 42,000 to 43,000 years and may supplant earlier findings of flutes at a nearby site dating back 35,000 years.
Image via the The Archaeology News Network
The flutes are meticulously crafted, reports National Geographic, particularly the mammoth bone flute, which would have been “especially challenging to make.” At the time of their discovery, researchers speculated that the flutes “may have been one of the cultural accomplishments that gave the first European modern-human (Homo sapiens) settlers an advantage over their now extinct Neanderthal-human (Homo neanderthalensis) cousins.” But as with so much of our knowledge about Neanderthals, including new evidence of interbreeding with Homo sapiens, these conclusions may have to be revised.
It is perhaps possible that the much-underestimated Neanderthals made their own flutes. Or so a 1995 discovery of a flute made from a cave bear femur might suggest. Found by archeologist Ivan Turk in a Neanderthal campsite at Divje Babe in northwestern Slovenia, this instrument (above) is estimated to be over 43,000 years old and perhaps as much as 80,000 years old. According to musicologist Bob Fink, the flute’s four finger holes match four notes of a diatonic (Do, Re, Mi…) scale. “Unless we deny it is a flute at all,” Fink argues, the notes of the flute “are inescapably diatonic and will sound like a near-perfect fit within ANY kind of standard diatonic scale, modern or antique.” To demonstrate the point, the curator of the Slovenian National Museum had a clay replica of the flute made. You can hear it played at the top of the post by Slovenian musician Ljuben Dimkaroski.
The prehistoric instrument does indeed produce the whole and half tones of the diatonic scale, so completely, in fact, that Dimkaroski is able to play fragments of several compositions by Beethoven, Verdi, Ravel, Dvořák, and others, as well as some free improvisations “mocking animal voices.” The video’s YouTube page explains his choice of music as “a potpourri of fragments from compositions of various authors,” selected “to show the capabilities of the instrument, tonal range, staccato, legato, glissando….” (Dimkaroski claims to have figured out how to play the instrument in a dream.) Although archeologists have hotly disputed whether or not the flute is actually the work of Neanderthals, as Turk suggested, should it be so, the finding would contradict claims that the close human relatives “left no firm evidence of having been musical.” But whatever its origin, it seems certainly to be a hominid artifact—not the work of predators—and a key to unlocking the prehistory of musical expression.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2015.
Most Dylanologists disagree about which is the single greatest song in Bob Dylan’s catalog, but few would deny “Blind Willie McTell” a place high in the running. It may come as a surprise — or, to those with a certain idea of Dylan and his fan base, the exact opposite of a surprise — to learn that that song is an outtake, recorded but never quite completed in the studio and available for years only in bootleg form. “Blind Willie McTell” was a product of the sessions for what would become Infidels. Released in 1983, that album was received as something of a return to form after the Christian-themed trilogy of Slow Train Coming, Saved, and Shot of Love that Dylan put out after being born again.
Of the material officially included on Infidels, the greatest impact was probably made by the album’s opener “Jokerman,” at least in the punk rendition Dylan performed on Late Night with David Letterman. Not that every Dylanologist is a fan of that song: in the Daily Maverick, Drew Forrest calls it “random and incoherent,” drawing an unfavorable comparison with “Blind Willie McTell,” which is “sure to be remembered as one of Dylan’s most perfect creations.”
The sources of that perfection are many, as explained by Noah Lefevre in the new, nearly 50-minute long Polyphonic video above on this “unreleased masterpiece,” whose origin and afterlife underscore how thoroughly Dylan inhabits the musical traditions from which he draws.
Like most major Dylan songs, “Blind Willie McTell” exists in several versions, but the one most listeners know (officially released in 1991, eight years after its recording) features Mark Knopfler on twelve-string guitar and Dylan himself on piano. Melodically based on the jazz standard “St. James Infirmary Blues” and named after a real, prolific musician from Georgia, its sparse music and lyrics manage to evoke a panoramic view encompassing the blues, the Bible, the ways of the old South, and indeed, the very history of American music and slavery. Though Dylan himself considered the song unfinished, he came around to see its value after hearing The Band work it into their show, and has by now performed it live himself more than 200 times — none, in adherence to the protean character of blues, folk, and jazz, quite the same as the last.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
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