Prince is hav­ing an after­life the oppo­site of most rock stars. Where the years after death seems to bring our gods down to human size, the more sto­ries I hear about Prince, the more I am con­vinced he was either beyond human or one of the very few con­stant­ly work­ing at max­i­mum poten­tial. But not only that, he also helped oth­ers real­ize their own poten­tial, espe­cial­ly mem­bers of his tour­ing band.

I hope that’s your take­away after hav­ing watched not just this mini-doc of his 2007 Super Bowl Half­Time show, but read­ing this thor­ough­ly enter­tain­ing oral his­to­ry of the event from The Ringer. Even if foot­ball is not your thing, and you con­sid­er the half­time show to be cheesy, this one year was not. Prince con­sid­ered it one of his crown­ing achieve­ments, and it was going to be the end point of the mem­oirs he planned to write.

Half-time shows had tra­di­tion­al­ly been the venue for march­ing bands and col­or guard, but by the 1990s they had turned into Hol­ly­wood pro­duc­tions, with pop stars and dancers. How­ev­er, they had also been dealt a blow with Nip­ple­gate, when Justin Tim­ber­lake ripped open Janet Jackson’s corset and exposed a met­al pastie in 2004. Mid­dle Amer­i­ca reeled, peo­ple thought of the chil­dren, the FCC levied some fines, and the NFL went into defen­sive mode, pro­gram­ming the kind of Boomer-safe artists that would please as many peo­ple as pos­si­ble: The Rolling Stones and Paul McCart­ney. (I mean, all amaz­ing artists, mind you. Just noth­ing dan­ger­ous.)

Prince was dif­fer­ent. He wasn’t going to do this like an aging rock star, just come on out and play the hits. He could have done and he cer­tain­ly had the back cat­a­log to do so. Instead, he put togeth­er a show that could stand on its own, a mix of his hits and a wild selec­tion of cov­er ver­sions: Queen’s “We Will Rock You”, “Proud Mary”, Hendrix/Dylan’s “All Along the Watch­tow­er”, and the Foo Fight­ers’ “Best of You.”

The day of the Super Bowl in Mia­mi it rained, Flori­da-style. Mon­soon weath­er. Yet, Prince and his band went ahead, defy­ing the ele­ments. The dancers—Maya and Nan­cy McClean—put grips on their high heel boots so as not to slip on the glass-like stage, formed in the shape of Prince’s “sym­bol”. There was an under­stand­able pan­ic: would some­body be elec­tro­cut­ed? Would this be Prince’s last con­cert?

But no. Prince seemed to tran­scend the ele­ments. Ruth Arzate, Prince’s per­son­al assistant/manager asked the musician’s hair­styl­ist: “Am I hal­lu­ci­nat­ing or is there no rain on him?” You could see a cou­ple of droplets on his shoul­der. And we’re look­ing and she’s like, “It just looks like a fine mist on his face.””

Prince end­ed the con­cert with “Pur­ple Rain,” which you can see above, singing *in the rain* and then bust­ing out a solo for the ages behind bil­low­ing fab­ric as a shad­ow, wield­ing that sym­bol gui­tar like a glo­ri­ous phal­lus.

Half­time show pro­duc­tion design­er Bruce Rogers says it best:

“To me, it’s about one guy in the mid­dle of a hun­dred thou­sand peo­ple and a hun­dred mil­lion peo­ple on tele­vi­sion, and it’s your moment to be Prince at the Super Bowl and Moth­er Nature is drop­ping thou­sands and thou­sands of gal­lons of rain. I always thought how cool the guy is to rise up and just get stormed upon, and just bring what he brought. That was so spe­cial.”

There are sev­er­al take­aways from the Ringer piece: how Prince would glide around on cus­tom-made Heelys. How he would per­form in meet­ings with a full band instead of just play­ing a CD. How when a cable acci­den­tal­ly got run over before the show a road­ie lit­er­al­ly held the stripped cable togeth­er for 20 or so min­utes, run­ning the risk of elec­tro­cu­tion, to keep the show going. But my favorite take­away is this quote, from Chica­go Tribune’s Mark Caro: “He took this mas­sive­ly over­scaled event and just sort of bent it to his will.”

Super Bowl XLI became a Prince con­cert with a foot­ball game on either side of it, and that’s because he made it so.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Prince’s First Tele­vi­sion Inter­view (1985)

Four Clas­sic Prince Songs Re-Imag­ined as Pulp Fic­tion Cov­ers: When Doves Cry, Lit­tle Red Corvette & More

Prince Plays a Mind-Blow­ing Gui­tar Solo On “While My Gui­tar Gen­tly Weeps”

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

Jazz and hip hop have been in a live­ly con­ver­sa­tion in recent years, break­ing new ground for both forms, as the work of artists like Kendrick Lamar and his col­lab­o­ra­tors amply shows. Lamar cre­at­ed his major­ly-acclaimed albums To Pimp a But­ter­fly and Damn with the indis­pens­able play­ing and arrang­ing of jazz-fusion sax­o­phon­ist Kamasi Wash­ing­ton and his fre­quent side­man, bassist Stephen “Thun­der­cat” Bruner, who have con­tributed to the work of Fly­ing Lotus. That’s the artist name of Stephen Elli­son, nephew of Alice and John Coltrane, who has also been instru­men­tal, no pun intend­ed, in reshap­ing the sound of con­tem­po­rary hip hop.

“The influ­ence cuts both ways—from jazz to hip hop and back again,” writes John Lewis at The Guardian. Or as Wash­ing­ton puts it, “We’ve now got a whole gen­er­a­tion of jazz musi­cians who have been brought up with hip-hop. We’ve grown up along­side rap­pers and DJs, we’ve heard this music all our life. We are as flu­ent in J Dil­la and Dr Dre as we are in Min­gus and Coltrane.”

The fusion of avant-garde hip hop with live jazz impro­vi­sa­tion, instru­men­ta­tion, and arrang­ing may seem like a new phe­nom­e­non, though one could date it at least as far back as the Roots’ ear­ly 90s debut.

“Hip hop’s love affair with jazz goes back more than 30 years,” Lewis writes. The music was every­where in the 90s, in the fore­ground on the records of A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, and Diga­ble Plan­ets and in more cut-and-paste ways in albums like Nas’ instant clas­sic Ill­mat­ic, pro­duced by Pete Rock, who craft­ed tracks like “N.Y. State of Mind” from lay­ered sam­ples of Ahmad Jamal, Don­ald Byrd, and lit­tle-known jazz-funk out­fits like Jim­my Gor­don & His Jaz­zn­pops Band. As pianist Robert Glasper shows above in the brief NPR Jazz Night in Amer­i­ca video at the top, “Jazz is the moth­er of hip-hop.”

Both jazz and hip hop were born out of oppres­sion, and both are forms of protest music, “going against the grain,” Glasper argues. But there’s more to it. Why do hip hop pro­duc­ers grav­i­tate toward jazz, chop­ping and lift­ing clas­sics and obscure rar­i­ties? For a wealth of melod­ic content—”for a mood, for a son­ic tim­bre, for a unique rhyth­mic com­po­nent,” writes inter­view­er Alex Ariff on YouTube; for a shared his­to­ry of strug­gle and cel­e­bra­tion and a desire to change the sound of music with each release. Glasper’s brief, three-minute demon­stra­tion is fas­ci­nat­ing and it could, as one YouTube com­menter points out, eas­i­ly extend to three hours.

Until he makes that video, you can find jazz sam­ples in hip hop records to your heart’s eter­nal con­tent at Whosampled.com and con­sid­er how the influ­ence of hip hop on jazz musi­cians has cre­at­ed new forms of fusion akin to Miles Davis’ exper­i­ments in the 70s. “I nev­er had a prob­lem mov­ing between jazz and hip hop,” says Wash­ing­ton. “Peo­ple like to com­part­men­tal­ize music, espe­cial­ly African-Amer­i­can music, but it’s real­ly one thing. One very wide thing…. When I first played some Coltrane-type stuff on the Pimp a But­ter­fly ses­sions, Kendrick got it imme­di­ate­ly. ‘I want it to sound like it’s on fire,’ he’d say. That’s the kind of com­mon ground that the best jazz and the best hip-hop have.”

via The Kids Should See This

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

How Nina Simone Became Hip Hop’s “Secret Weapon”: From Lau­ryn Hill to Jay Z and Kanye West

The His­to­ry of Hip Hop Music Visu­al­ized on a Turntable Cir­cuit Dia­gram: Fea­tures 700 Artists, from DJ Kool Herc to Kanye West

150 Songs from 100+ Rap­pers Get Art­ful­ly Woven into One Great Mashup: Watch the “40 Years of Hip Hop”

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

Jesus, that ear. He should donate it to the Smith­son­ian.
                        —Bob Dylan on Bri­an Wil­son

The Beach Boys tar­nished their rep­u­ta­tion when they reformed in lat­er years and tried to “reclaim their whole­some­ness,” Dan Caf­frey writes at Con­se­quence of Sound, “only to find that it had all but dis­ap­peared.” But in the days when they sound­ed like the most whole­some thing on earth, they also had the dis­tinct advan­tage of sound­ing seri­ous­ly weird: “Weird­er than Waits, weird­er than Zap­pa, and def­i­nite­ly weird­er than the Bea­t­les. The immac­u­late vocal har­mo­ny that made them famous was their weird­est weapon of all; a sun­ny fortress of eupho­ny that shone through the dark­est of times and strangest of lyrics in their lat­ter days.”

The phe­nom­e­non could emerge “only out of the fer­ment that char­ac­ter­izes today’s pop music scene,” said Leonard Bern­stein when he heard “Surf’s Up.” Despite the sur­face-lev­el corni­ness, there were “real­ly deep, pro­found emo­tions” in the band’s music, emo­tions “that came out of a lot of pain,” Lin­da Ron­stadt remarked.

The full depths of Pet Sounds may nev­er be plumbed, yet one can also put it on and imme­di­ate­ly feel the SoCal sun­shine hit them square­ly in the face. Only a genius like Bri­an Wil­son could turn surf pop into clas­si­cal com­po­si­tion, with­out com­pro­mis­ing the sim­ple emo­tions of pop or the pro­fun­di­ty of a clas­si­cal arrange­ment. (“I fig­ure no one is edu­cat­ed musi­cal­ly ’til they’ve heard ‘Pet Sounds,’ ” says Paul McCart­ney.)

And only the Beach Boys as a group could pull off those har­monies. The rest of the band may not have quite grasped what their quixot­ic leader was up to. (Mike Love once famous­ly com­plained, “Who’s gonna hear this shit? The ears of a dog?”) But they knew how to sing togeth­er like no one else before or since. (When David Cros­by heard “In My Room,” he says, “I thought, ‘I give up–I can’t do that–I’ll nev­er be able to do that.’”) They were so good, they could pull off gor­geous a‑capella pas­sages like those in “Sloop John B,” Pet Sounds’ lead sin­gle. Hear it at the top in a full iso­lat­ed vocal ver­sion.

A tra­di­tion­al folk song that orig­i­nat­ed in the Bahamas and was record­ed in the six­ties by every­one from John­ny Cash to Lon­nie Done­gan to the Kingston Trio, the arrang­ing of the song took only 24 hours, Al Jar­dine remem­bers, from the time he brought it to Wil­son as a pos­si­ble cov­er to the time Wil­son com­plet­ed his ver­sion of the track. The vocals were anoth­er mat­ter. Jar­dine assumed he would sing lead, but Wil­son had a process:

It was like inter­view­ing for a job. Pret­ty fun­ny. He didn’t like any of us. My vocal had a much more mel­low approach because I was bring­ing it from the folk idiom. For the radio, we need­ed a more rock approach. Bri­an and Mike end­ed up singing it.

Those demand­ing vocal record­ing ses­sions, Jar­dine wrote in the Pet Sounds lin­er notes, could last 12–15 hours a day. The end results are an espe­cial­ly impres­sive feat con­sid­er­ing that the back­ing vocals were all record­ed at once, with no over­dub­bing or any of the dig­i­tal stu­dio wiz­ardry used today to nudge stray voic­es into the right pitch and rhythm:

At the vocal ses­sions, there was so much good ten­sion. At any one time, you would have four out of five of us get our parts just fine, and there would be one who would screw up. But it would­n’t be the same per­son each time. Then the next take, he would get it right, but some­body else would get it wrong. Kind of like the chaos the­o­ry at work. The more peo­ple you have in a giv­en sit­u­a­tion, the more chance there is for error. Then, there would be the mag­ic moment when it all came togeth­er, and then you had your take.

Just below, hear Pet Sounds’ sad­dest song, “Car­o­line, No,” in a vocal take fea­tur­ing only Wil­son. He thought of it as “prob­a­bly the best [song] I’ve ever writ­ten… a pret­ty love song about how this guy and this girl lost it and there’s no way to get it back. I just felt sad, so I wrote a sad song.” It’s also a song, for all its melan­choly, born from the sense of inno­cent long­ing the band brought to all their music in their prime, con­veyed in har­monies that would nev­er shine as bright­ly for any oth­er band at any oth­er time. Hear more of the Beach Boys, a‑cappella, in the YouTube playlist here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

How the Beach Boys Cre­at­ed Their Pop Mas­ter­pieces: “Good Vibra­tions,” Pet Sounds, and More

The Beach Boys’ Bri­an Wil­son & Bea­t­les Pro­duc­er George Mar­tin Break Down “God Only Knows,” the “Great­est Song Ever Writ­ten”

The Mak­ing (and Remak­ing) of the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, Arguably the Great­est Rock Album of All Time

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

A musi­cian in Van­cou­ver, British Colum­bia took to the streets and busked some ZZ Top, much to the delight of a young child wait­ing for the bus. From the moment he starts play­ing “La Grange,” the child bops up and down, then twirls in a cir­cle, los­ing her­self in the song. On YouTube he writes, “I don’t often see this, but when it hap­pens it’s always 99% kids that are doing it. Before they become jad­ed (age 8), they still have that spon­ta­neous spark, that reac­tion to music that we all used to have. Emo­tion is no.1 pri­or­i­ty and they express it with­out shame.”

If this bright­ens your day, even a lit­tle, con­sid­er giv­ing the busker a tip on Pay­pal or Patre­on. As he explains on YouTube, he’s had–like many of us–a rough year. He writes:

1) I’m glad every­one is enjoy­ing this video but I want to men­tion a few things.

Street play­ing is not all fun and games and danc­ing kids. Doing this for 7 years. I reg­u­lar­ly face not only ver­bal abuse, but phys­i­cal assault as I work a few blocks from down­town east­side Van­cou­ver. I’m sur­round­ed by addicts, drunks, and peo­ple who should be in men­tal homes.

2) I’m unem­ployed. All live music includ­ing busk­ing, is banned. I lost all work last year and received ZERO com­pen­sa­tion. I had a very bad year in 2020 and only recent­ly came out of a depres­sion.

3) I make ZERO from youtube no mat­ter how many views I get. I don’t run ads. And more impor­tant­ly, even if I did, most of my videos are instant­ly copy­right­ed and auto mon­e­tized by record labels because they are COVERS. If you see an ad, it’s the record label col­lect­ing. If you liked the per­for­mance, please think about sup­port­ing me on patreon/paypal tip/bandcamp.

4) I’m a musi­cian that writes his own music and has been doing it for 20 years. Check out my band­camp page to see what I can real­ly do with a gui­tar.

5) It’s a lot of unpaid work to post these videos all the time so please try to help me keep the chan­nel going. Many thanks to those that have sup­port­ed me! It means a lot!

6) I get asked this 100 times a day so here’s the answer: I play on the street and not in a band because all the clubs closed years ago. I used to lead many bands from 2006 to 2018. That’s all gone. Live music is dead, as well as banned. It’s also a lot more has­sle, and less mon­ey, to run a band than play by myself.

Any­one who has music work to offer can con­tact me at sh***************@***oo.com

via Laugh­ing Squid

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ital­ian Street Musi­cian Plays Amaz­ing Cov­ers of Pink Floyd Songs, Right in Front of the Pan­theon in Rome

Crowd Breaks into Singing Bon Jovi in the Park: The Pow­er of Music in 46 Sec­onds

80s Pop Singer Jim­my Somerville Sur­pris­es Ger­man Street Musi­cian as the Busker Sings Somerville’s Hit

Lenny Kravitz Over­hears High School Kids Play­ing His Music and Sur­pris­es Them by Join­ing In

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

Neil Young Busk­ing in Glas­gow, 1976: The Sto­ry Behind the Footage

Come on you raver, you seer of visions
Come on you painter, you piper, you pris­on­er, and shine

“It’s a gift I sup­pose,” David Gilmour respond­ed humbly when a 2015 inter­view­er asked the ques­tion he’s always asked about his leg­endary gui­tar tone. “It’s some­thing that just arrives nat­u­ral­ly at this point.” Gilmour seemed gen­uine­ly mys­ti­fied. “I think there’s some kind of strange pecu­liar­i­ty or my lack of coor­di­na­tion between hands that gives it some­thing rather off and thus dis­tinct.” Maybe there’s more than he real­izes to his answer: the qual­i­ties that make an artist unique can be those that seem like deficits or defects in oth­er lights.

There are hints of this wis­dom in “Shine on You Crazy Dia­mond,” Gilmour and Roger Waters’ trib­ute to Syd Bar­rett, the child­hood friend whom Gilmour replaced as the band’s gui­tarist. What­ev­er it was that drove Barrett’s bril­liant mind also seems to have dri­ven him to excess and mad­ness under the spotlights—”You were caught on the cross­fire of child­hood and star­dom… Threat­ened by shad­ows at night, and exposed in the light.” Yet with­out Barrett’s “crazi­ness,” or Gilmour’s lack of coor­di­na­tion, there would be no Pink Floyd.

“Shine on You Crazy Dia­mond” is a trag­ic song—made more so when we learn that an unrec­og­niz­able Bar­rett arrived at the stu­dio the moment they began record­ing it, sev­en years after he left the band with men­tal health strug­gles. With typ­i­cal bit­ter­ness, Waters described him in an inter­view that year as “a sym­bol for all the extremes of absence some peo­ple have to indulge in because it’s the only way they can cope with how f—ing sad it is—modern life.”

The band lost not only a found­ing mem­ber but also a friend when they lost Bar­rett. These sad per­son­al asso­ci­a­tions notwith­stand­ing, the song can also be an uniron­ic call to those who may be hold­ing back or hid­ing because they think there’s some­thing wrong with them. And it’s a song fea­tur­ing some of the most impres­sive gui­tar work of Gilmour’s record­ing career. On “the epic 13-minute open­ing track to Wish You Were Here, he lays down more awe­some tones than most gui­tarists achieve in a life­time,” writes Chris Gill at Gui­tar World.

Play­ing onstage above with Richard Wright at Roy­al Albert Hall in 2006, just months before Bar­ret­t’s death, Gilmour casu­al­ly blows the audi­ence away with awe­some tones. Then he is joined by David Cros­by and Gra­ham Nash in a live ren­di­tion that sounds like both an ele­gy and an anthem, a fit­ting trib­ute to an artist who “reached for the secret too soon”—or what­ev­er com­bi­na­tion of drugs and men­tal health crises caused Bar­rett to retreat into him­self in the last decades of his life—but who also, by shin­ing for a brief moment, left a cre­ative lega­cy in Pink Floyd that few artists can hope to equal.

via Laugh­ing Squid 

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Watch David Gilmour Play the Songs of Syd Bar­rett, with the Help of David Bowie & Richard Wright

Under­stand­ing Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here, Their Trib­ute to Depart­ed Band­mate Syd Bar­rett

How Pink Floyd’s “Com­fort­ably Numb” Was Born From an Argu­ment Between Roger Waters & David Gilmour

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

Direc­tor Hayao Miyazaki’s work­ing rela­tion­ship with com­pos­er Joe Hisaishi is up there with the oth­er great film pair­ings: Ser­gio Leone with Ennio Mor­ri­cone, Alfred Hitch­cock with Bernard Her­rmann, David Lynch with Ange­lo Badala­men­ti. Work­ing togeth­er they attain a sym­bio­sis of sound and vision, one of the rea­sons their work has become part of film his­to­ry. But it’s also rare that a film com­pos­er gets to cel­e­brate that rela­tion­ship with a stun­ner of a ret­ro­spec­tive con­cert like the one above.

In 2008, Hisaishi con­duct­ed and per­formed at a two-hour ret­ro­spec­tive of 25 years work­ing with Miyaza­ki at Stu­dio Ghi­b­li. This mam­moth per­for­mance at the 14,000-seat Tokyo Budokan was big in every way: six fea­tured vocal­ists, the 200-mem­ber New Japan Phil­har­mon­ic World Dream Orches­tra, the 800 com­bined voic­es of the Ippan Koubo, Rit­suyuukai and Lit­tle Singers of Tokyo choirs, along with a 160-piece march­ing band made up of mem­bers from four high schools.

The con­cert fea­tures selec­tions from Nau­si­caä of the Val­ley of Wind, Princess Mononoke, My Neigh­bor Totoro, Kiki’s Deliv­ery Ser­vice, Howl’s Mov­ing Cas­tle, Spir­it­ed Away, Por­co Rosso, and what would have been his most recent score at the time, Ponyo. For those won­der­ing when the march­ing band and col­or guard turn up, it’s 50 min­utes in, play­ing selec­tions from Lapu­ta, Cas­tle in the Sky.

Hayao Miyaza­ki met Joe Hisaishi in 1983, when his record com­pa­ny rec­om­mend­ed him to score Nau­si­caä of the Val­ley of the Wind. They became true friends and col­lab­o­ra­tors, and the direc­tor him­self appears just after an hour in to speak to the audi­ence.

“After [our first] meet­ing,” Miyaza­ki says (accord­ing to a trans­la­tion in the com­ments) “he sent me some piano sketch­es, which are used in many scenes in Nau­si­caä any­way, and those were so amaz­ing that I played tapes of them on my desk over and over again while I was working…I have been work­ing thanks to so many pieces of luck, and meet­ing him is def­i­nite­ly one of them. I guess I couldn’t wish for bet­ter luck than that.”

For some­one whose music is often roman­tic, beau­ti­ful, and relaxed, the com­pos­er says the work doesn’t come easy.

“The most painful ele­ment of my life is com­pos­ing because some­times noth­ing comes to mind,” he told the South Chi­na Morn­ing Post. “It is very hard and very dif­fi­cult. Some­times the result is zero, but I go to bed and I feel some­thing and some idea is born. So in the end there might be a com­po­si­tion, but the expe­ri­ence is often most painful.” For those who have recent­ly seen sim­i­lar memes of Miyaza­ki being super hard on him­self, it’s no won­der the two are friends.

A few in the YouTube com­ment sec­tion actu­al­ly attend­ed the con­cert, and this quote from “Love W” sums up what was an emo­tion­al con­cert for Ghi­b­li and Hisaishi fans:

“It was also qui­et after­wards. No one was talk­ing very loud­ly, even with hun­dreds of peo­ple stream­ing out of the build­ing. I think every­one were just too touched and want­ed to reflect over what they had seen.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stu­dio Ghi­b­li Makes 1,178 Images Free to Down­load from My Neigh­bor Totoro, Spir­it­ed Away & Oth­er Beloved Ani­mat­ed Films

Stu­dio Ghi­b­li Pro­duc­er Toshio Suzu­ki Teach­es You How to Draw Totoro in Two Min­utes

A Vir­tu­al Tour Inside the Hayao Miyazaki’s Stu­dio Ghi­b­li Muse­um

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.