How many gen­er­a­tions of gui­tarists have come and gone since B.B. King emerged on the Beale Street blues scene in the late 1940s?

60s blues-rock giants, 70s hard rock­ers, 80s met­al shred­ders… at least two gen­er­a­tions between B.B. and Slash, who is prob­a­bly him­self a gui­tar grand­fa­ther by now. Whether they know it or not, every rock and blues play­er descends from the Kings of the blues (B.B., Albert, Fred­die, and gui­tarists who bore the title but not the sur­name). Slash knows it well.

We have three gen­er­a­tions of gui­tar greats, and Sim­ply Red’s Mick Huck­nall, join­ing an 86-year-old King in the live per­for­mance above from 2011 at Roy­al Albert Hall with Derek Trucks and Susan Tedeschi, the Rolling Stones’ Ron Wood, and Slash, who sits next to the great man and lends him his top hat for a few bars.

The Guns n Ros­es lead gui­tarist named B.B. his favorite blues­man when King died in 2015 and put “The Thrill is Gone” in an ulti­mate gui­tar mix he com­piled for Q mag­a­zine in 2004. At the live jam ses­sion above, he gets to play it with his hero, “the only hit I ever had,” says King by way of self-dep­re­cat­ing intro­duc­tion.

Slash keeps a low pro­file, fit­ting him­self into the mix of six gui­tars onstage (see the longer jam ses­sion fur­ther up). Anoth­er gui­tarist, John May­er, maybe three gen­er­a­tions of play­ers removed from King, got to spread out a bit more in his jam with B.B. at the Gui­tar Cen­ter King of the Blues event in 2006. “It’s like steal­ing some­thing from some­one right in front of them,” he says. It’s a good joke, and it’s the truth.

Musi­cians have been fol­low­ing in B.B. King’s wake for over 60 years now. The best learn the same hum­bling les­son U2’s Bono did after his 1988 duet with King on “When Love Comes to Town” — “We had learned and absorbed, but the more we tried to be like B.B., the less con­vinc­ing we were.” See more of King and May­er just below.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

B.B. King Plays Live at Sing Sing Prison in One of His Great­est Per­for­mances (1972)

B.B. King Explains in an Ani­mat­ed Video Whether You Need to Endure Hard­ship to Play the Blues

How B.B. King & Ste­vie Ray Vaugh­an Dealt With Break­ing Strings Onstage Mid-Song: A Mas­ter­class in Han­dling Onstage Mishaps

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

Unless they’ve got fans among pen­guins, there’s no prac­ti­cal rea­son for a band to make the jour­ney to Antarc­ti­ca to play. So why did Metal­li­ca do exact­ly that in 2013? Because they could, and because it made them the first musi­cal act to play all sev­en con­ti­nents — a Guin­ness World Record — doing it all in the same cal­en­dar year, no less. They’re also the only rock band to trav­el to Antarc­ti­ca. (With the excep­tion of Nunatak, an indie rock band made up of British cli­mate sci­en­tists, who played a “sold-out” show to 17 peo­ple at the Rothera Research Sta­tion where they worked in 2007.)

If those aren’t rea­sons enough, the con­cert was a dream real­ized for the 120 fans in atten­dance, includ­ing research sta­tion sci­en­tists and Coca Cola con­test win­ners from all over Latin Amer­i­ca who were able to see Metal­li­ca in a trans­par­ent dome near the heli­port of Argentina’s Car­li­ni Base after a week-long cruise. “Due to the continent’s frag­ile envi­ron­ment,” notes Guin­ness, the band’s amps were placed in “iso­la­tion cab­i­nets” and the audi­ence heard every­thing through head­phones, sort of like a silent rave. Called “Freeze ‘Em All,” the show was live-streamed and is now ful­ly avail­able online (see it above).

“The ener­gy in the lit­tle dome was amaz­ing!” the band writes on their Face­book page. “Words can not describe how hap­py every­one was.” But how cold were they? More spon­sor­ship, in the form of out­er­wear from snow­board and ski giant Bur­ton, kept the band bun­dled up through­out. Metal­li­ca has uploaded the audio of “Freeze ‘Em All” in MP3 and var­i­ous high-end loss­less for­mats at LiveMetallica.com. It’s a very cool idea, but is the con­cert video an hour-long Coke Zero ad? I don’t know.… I am a lit­tle curi­ous about what might have hap­pened if their amps had been at full blast in the Antarc­tic wild….

Here’s the full setlist, with time­stamps, of the record-set­ting gig:

Creep­ing Death (1:25​)
For Whom the Bell Tolls (7:47​)
Sad But True (12:28​)
Wel­come Home (San­i­tar­i­um) (18:58​)
Mas­ter of Pup­pets (25:58​)
One (34:12​)
Black­ened (41:58​)
Noth­ing Else Mat­ters (50:01​)
Enter Sand­man (55:06​)
Seek & Destroy (1:02:20​)

You too, like many a com­ment­ing fan, may feel betrayed by the lack of “Trapped Under Ice” in the setlist. Maybe too on-the-nose, they thought, too cute. But sure­ly a missed oppor­tu­ni­ty that won’t come again. Fill in the gap your­self with the live take below.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Metal­li­ca Is Putting Free Con­certs Online: 6 Now Stream­ing, with More to Come

Metallica’s Bassist Robert Tru­jil­lo Plays Metal­li­ca Songs Fla­men­co-Style, Joined by Rodri­go y Gabriela

Bud­dhist Monk Cov­ers Metallica’s ”Enter Sand­man,” Then Med­i­tates

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

Do met­al singers take vocal lessons? Sure­ly not the greats of old! Did Bruce Dick­in­son, Rob Hal­ford, and Ozzy Osbourne take lessons? Or did they dive into the debauch­ery head­first, scream­ing?

Iron Maiden’s Dick­in­son has been rumored to have received opera train­ing. This is not true. Instead, he stole his vocal tech­nique from his “den­tist ex-girl­friend,” he says. “As an ex-pupil of the very pres­ti­gious Chel­tenham Ladies’ Col­lege, she’d had quite exten­sive singing lessons, and she kept a note­book.” It changed his life.

Ozzy’s gui­tarist Zakk Wylde tells a fun­ny sto­ry of the Black Sab­bath legend’s wife Sharon order­ing him up a coach… just once… a “man with a brief­case,” says the burly shred­der, sent to take care of “our Joe Mon­tana.” But Osbourne did end up work­ing with a vocal coach, Kath­leen Rig­gs, more reg­u­lar­ly in lat­er years.

Judas Priest’s Hal­ford? He doesn’t men­tion a coach, but he does talk a lot about care and train­ing. “My form of extreme singing,” he says, “it’s like a work­out, you know…. Your vocal cords are mus­cles — they get burned out, they get tired.” As for his pio­neer­ing screams of over 40 years ago, he mus­es, “I some­times think that’s a bit of a curse that I sang and record­ed those cer­tain songs so long ago, when I was a younger guy with a younger set of vocal cords.” He near­ly wrecked his voice, he says, with cocaine and Jack Daniels.

It’s not opera, but met­al singing is a seri­ous­ly ath­let­ic activ­i­ty and has only become more so as its vocals have grown more extreme, even if its fash­ion sense has not. As clas­si­cal­ly trained singer and actress Melis­sa Cross — the “Queen of Scream” — relates in the video at the top, she first became a met­al vocal coach when a pro­duc­er friend called her in dis­may: the singers he was record­ing couldn’t get through a ses­sion with­out cough­ing blood.

Where did the met­al scream come from, and why is it so preva­lent if it’s such an unhealthy way to move one’s vocal folds day after day with­out train­ing and tech­nique? Vikings, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ “I Put a Spell on You,”; Led Zep­pelin, Black Sab­bath, AC/DC, and Judas Priest, of course… babies…. These are all points of ori­gin for today’s extreme met­al singing, say hosts LA Buck­n­er and Nahre Sol in the PBS video fur­ther up.

The two talk to Cross about scream­ing with­out bleed­ing, and met­al vocal­ist Natal­ie Kreuger talks about how warmups and opera-like breath­ing tech­niques are essen­tial to main­tain­ing vocal fit­ness. And if you need more con­vinc­ing that met­al singing requires seri­ous pow­er and sta­mi­na, take a look at the 10 longest live screams in met­al, above. Let’s hope they all heed the exam­ple of the elder met­al gods.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Ori­gins of the Death Growl in Met­al Music

Sci­en­tif­ic Study Reveals What Made Fred­die Mercury’s Voice One of a Kind; Hear It in All of Its A Cap­pel­la Splen­dor

96-Year-Old Holo­caust Sur­vivor Fronts a Death Met­al Band

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

Dis­creet Music came out in 1975, when most of its first lis­ten­ers had nev­er heard any­thing quite like it; there must have been some debate as to whether to call it “music” at all. Bri­an Eno’s fourth solo album, released on his own label Obscure Records, rep­re­sent­ed a depar­ture from his own pre­vi­ous work, and even more so from that of his for­mer band, the art-rock out­fit Roxy Music. The record­ing that occu­pies the entire A side of Dis­creet Music fea­tures no vocals, and indeed no lyrics; no per­cus­sion, and no beat. Those qual­i­ties, of course, had plen­ty of prece­dent in music his­to­ry, but the same can’t be said for its near-acci­den­tal com­po­si­tion­al method, which involved a syn­the­siz­er, a tape-delay sys­tem, a graph­ic equal­iz­er, an echo unit, and a cou­ple of tape recorders, all con­nect­ed in a loop: a series of devices, left to their own devices.

Some cite Dis­creet Music, which pre­ced­ed Eno’s well-known Music for Air­ports by three years, as the ori­gin point of ambi­ent music as we know it today. Its inspi­ra­tion goes a few years fur­ther back, as Eno him­self tells it, to a peri­od around about 1970 when he was con­va­lesc­ing after a car wreck. “A friend of mine came over to see me. I was con­fined to bed; I could­n’t move. But as she left she said, ‘Shall I put a record on?’ ”

The music “was much too qui­et but I could­n’t reach to turn it up, and it was rain­ing out­side. It was a record of 18th-cen­tu­ry harp music, I remem­ber. I lay there at first kind of frus­trat­ed by this sit­u­a­tion, but then I start­ed lis­ten­ing to the rain and lis­ten­ing to these odd notes of the harp that were just loud enough to be heard above the rain.”

Today Eno counts this “a great musi­cal expe­ri­ence for me, and I sud­den­ly thought of this idea of mak­ing music that did­n’t impose itself on your space in the same way, but cre­at­ed a sort of land­scape you could belong to.” His sto­ry illu­mi­nates the emer­gence of not just a new music, but a new way of hear­ing old music. Dis­creet Music’s B side per­forms a rein­ter­pre­ta­tion of its own with vari­a­tions on Johann Pachel­bel’s Canon in D, “Full­ness of Wind,” “French Cat­a­logues,” and “Bru­tal Ardour.” On Eno’s instruc­tions, the Cock­pit Ensem­ble repeat­ed parts of the score while grad­u­al­ly alter­ing it, imbu­ing this famil­iar (not least from wed­dings) 17th-cen­tu­ry piece with an oth­er­world­ly grandeur. Like their mis­trans­lat­ed-from-the French titles, these vari­a­tions may in some sense be “man­gled,” but they become all the more ambigu­ous­ly evoca­tive for it.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Decon­struct­ing Bri­an Eno’s Music for Air­ports: Explore the Tape Loops That Make Up His Ground­break­ing Ambi­ent Music

Expe­ri­ence a Video Paint­ing of Bri­an Eno’s Thurs­day After­noon That Has Soothed & Relaxed Mil­lions of Peo­ple

Hear Albums from Bri­an Eno’s 1970s Label, Obscure Records

The “True” Sto­ry Of How Bri­an Eno Invent­ed Ambi­ent Music

The Authen­tic Pachelbel’s Canon: Watch a Per­for­mance Based on the Orig­i­nal Man­u­script & Played with Orig­i­nal 17th-Cen­tu­ry Instru­ments

Pachelbel’s Canon Played by Train Horns

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.