Artificial Intelligence Program Tries to Write a Beatles Song: Listen to “Daddy’s Car”

in Music, Science | September 29th, 2016

Last May, we told you about Flow Machine, an arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence-dri­ven music com­pos­er that analy­ses composer’s styles and then cre­ates new works from that data. Devel­oped by François Pachet at Sony CSL-Paris, the ini­tial exper­i­ments demon­strat­ed Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” as played in the style of bossa nova, the Bea­t­les’ “Pen­ny Lane,” and Ennio Morricone’s roman­tic work. Admit­ted­ly, it wasn’t the most stun­ning moment in A.I.—a com­put­er was now doing what arrangers have been doing for years, apply­ing genre rules to a melody cre­at­ed in anoth­er genre.

How­ev­er, Flow Machine has returned with an inter­est­ing devel­op­ment: two upcom­ing albums of A.I.-created songs, from which two tunes have been released to give you a taste of com­put­er cre­ativ­i­ty. French com­pos­er and musi­cian Benoît Car­ré helped out with the arrange­ments and pro­duc­tion of the songs, and also wrote the lyrics, so it’s not com­plete­ly an A.I. cre­ation, we should note.

So what should we make of “Daddy’s Car,” above, an attempt to cre­ate an A.I song in the style of the Bea­t­les? The open­ing sec­onds fea­ture the three-part har­mo­ny of “Because,” but when the band kicks in, it’s clos­er to the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds than the Fab Four. (If any­thing, it’s clos­er to the High Lla­mas.)

But does it sound like it was writ­ten by a human? Yes.

For some­thing stranger, try the oth­er song released so far: “Mr. Shad­ow,” writ­ten “in the style of Amer­i­can song­writ­ers such as Irv­ing Berlin, Duke Elling­ton, George Gersh­win and Cole Porter.”

Now this is much odd­er, a mix of coun­try twang, Daniel Lanois-style ambi­ence, along with a vocal that sounds like a cor­rupt­ed audio file. If you are look­ing for a true glimpse of the future, wrap your ears and san­i­ty around this one. Musi­cians and music fans, let us know in the com­ments what you think about this brave new world that has such hit sin­gles in it.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Two Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Chat­bots Talk to Each Oth­er & Get Into a Deep Philo­soph­i­cal Con­ver­sa­tion

Noam Chom­sky Explains Where Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Went Wrong

Stephen Hawk­ing Won­ders Whether Cap­i­tal­ism or Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Will Doom the Human Race

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the FunkZone Pod­cast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

The Art of Making Old-Fashioned, Hand-Printed Books

in Books, Technology | September 26th, 2016

Reports of tra­di­tion­al books’ death are great­ly exag­ger­at­ed, thanks in part to the suc­cess of print-on-demand pub­lish­ing and oth­er dig­i­tal inno­va­tions.

As thrilled as we are about the sur­vival of the print­ed page—it’s a relief to have some­thing to read after Wi-Fi fails dur­ing the zom­bie invasion—the crafts­man­ship that goes into hand-print­ed, hand-bound vol­umes is an almost-lost art.

The Vic­to­ria and Albert Museum’s video, above, doc­u­ments the painstak­ing process, begin­ning with the arrang­ing of met­al type that will result in an octa­vo, the most com­mon type of book.

It’s a qui­et endeav­or, though sure­ly a bit loud­er than the V&A’s silent doc­u­men­ta­tion, an unusu­al choice giv­en a cer­tain seg­ment of the mil­len­ni­al pop­u­lace’s appetite for well-edit­ed arti­sanal craft videos in which music plays a big part.

A well-deployed tune could ele­vate these love­ly visu­als to the realms of the advanced ele­gy.

YouTube user, Krafts­man Sheng, attempts to rem­e­dy the sit­u­a­tion by repro­duc­ing the video (sans attri­bu­tion) with a sound­track of his own choos­ing—pianist Roger Williams’ syrupy 1965 ren­di­tion of “Soft­ly As I Leave You,” below.

An uncon­ven­tion­al choice, to be sure. I should think some­thing baroque would go bet­ter with all of this metic­u­lous fold­ing, cut­ting, and bind­ing.

Though per­haps some­thing a lit­tle more robust could high­light the hard­core hero­ism of the arti­sans toil­ing to keep this ancient art alive. Elec­tric Lit has a round up of great book-inspired punk songs, of which “Time” by Richard Hell and the Voidoids seems par­tic­u­lar­ly apt.

Print­’s not dead!

via Atlas Obscu­ra

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Brazil Gives Out Books That Dou­ble as Sub­way Tick­ets, Pro­mot­ing Lit­er­a­cy & Mass Tran­sit at Once

The Art of Col­lo­type: See a Near Extinct Print­ing Tech­nique, as Lov­ing­ly Prac­ticed by a Japan­ese Mas­ter Crafts­man

Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty Presents the 550-Year-Old Guten­berg Bible in Spec­tac­u­lar, High-Res Detail

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Her play Zam­boni Godot is open­ing in New York City in March 2017. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

W.E.B. Du Bois Creates Revolutionary, Artistic Data Visualizations Showing the Economic Plight of African-Americans (1900)

in Data, Design, History | September 21st, 2016

Few peo­ple have done more to accu­rate­ly fore­see and help shape the cen­tu­ry ahead of them as W.E.B. Du Bois. And per­haps few intel­lec­tu­als from the ear­ly twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry still have as much crit­i­cal rel­e­vance to our con­tem­po­rary glob­al crises. Du Bois’ inci­sive soci­ol­o­gy of racism in The Souls of Black Folk, Black Recon­struc­tion in Amer­i­ca, and his arti­cles for the NAACP’s jour­nal, The Cri­sis, remained root­ed in a transcon­ti­nen­tal aware­ness that antic­i­pat­ed glob­al­ism as it cri­tiqued trib­al­ism. Du Bois, who stud­ied in Berlin and trav­eled wide­ly in Europe, Africa, and Latin Amer­i­ca, also became one of the most influ­en­tial of Pan-African­ist thinkers, unit­ing the anti-colo­nial con­cerns of African and Caribbean nations with the post-Recon­struc­tion issues of Black Amer­i­cans.

In 1900, Du Bois attend­ed the First Pan-African Con­fer­ence, held in Lon­don at West­min­ster Hall just pri­or to the Paris Exhi­bi­tion. Atten­dees pre­sent­ed papers on “the African ori­gins of human civ­i­liza­tion,” writes Ram­la Ban­dele at Northwestern’s Glob­al Map­pings, on African self-gov­ern­ment, and on the impe­r­i­al aggres­sion of Euro­pean coun­tries (includ­ing the host coun­try). Du Bois arrived armed with what might have seemed like a dull offer­ing to some: a col­lec­tion of sta­tis­tics. But not just any col­lec­tion of sta­tis­tics. Though they’re now an often banal sta­ple of our every­day work­ing lives, his pre­sen­ta­tion used then-inno­v­a­tive charts and graphs to con­dense his data into a pow­er­ful set of images.

Once again antic­i­pat­ing glob­al trends of over a cen­tu­ry hence, the activist and soci­ol­o­gy pro­fes­sor at Atlanta Uni­ver­si­ty cre­at­ed around 60 eye-catch­ing data visu­al­iza­tions, “charts and maps,” writes the blog All My Eyes, “hand drawn and col­ored at the turn of the 19th cen­tu­ry” by Du Bois and his stu­dents.

For audi­ences at the time, these must have packed the evi­den­tiary punch that Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow or Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “The Case for Repa­ra­tions” have recent­ly. Du Bois and his stu­dents’ charts show us—as the first “slide” at the top of the post notes—“the con­di­tion of the descen­dants of for­mer African slaves now res­i­dent in the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca.”

The col­lec­tion of info­graph­ics, Dan­ny Lewis argues at The Smith­son­ian, “is just as rev­o­lu­tion­ary now as it was when it was first cre­at­ed,” for an exhib­it Du Bois orga­nized with a lawyer named Thomas J. Cal­loway and his occa­sion­al rival Book­er T. Wash­ing­ton. “This was less than half a cen­tu­ry after the end of Amer­i­can slav­ery,” writes Alli­son Meier at Hyper­al­ler­gic, “and at a time when human zoos dis­play­ing peo­ple from col­o­nized coun­tries in repli­cas of their homes were still com­mon.” In the U.S., the grotesque stereo­types of black­face min­strels pro­vid­ed the pri­ma­ry depic­tion of African-Amer­i­can life.

“Du Bois’ stu­dents,” writes data blog See­ing Com­plex­i­ty, “made a rad­i­cal deci­sion when they visu­al­ized the eco­nom­ic plight of a group explic­it­ly exclud­ed from sta­tis­ti­cal analy­sis and thus hid­den from inter­na­tion­al atten­tion.” The lev­el of detail—for Du Bois’ time and ours—is over­whelm­ing, remind­ing us that “the sim­ple act of dis­sem­i­nat­ing infor­ma­tion can, in itself, be a rad­i­cal­ly and poten­tial­ly trans­for­ma­tive act.” In one of Du Bois’ graph­ic stud­ies, “The Geor­gia Negro,” he quotes his key line from The Souls of Black Folk, “The prob­lem of the 20th cen­tu­ry is the prob­lem of the col­or-line.” Far too much cur­rent data demon­strates that the state­ment still holds true in the 21st cen­tu­ry, as gross dis­par­i­ties in wealth and in the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem grim­ly per­sist, or wors­en, along racial lines.

Data may not be as trans­for­ma­tive as Du Bois had hoped, but it forces us to con­front the real­i­ty of the situation—and either ratio­nal­ize the sta­tus quo or seek to change it. One of three parts of the exhib­it, The Geor­gia Negro study was Du Bois’ “most impor­tant con­tri­bu­tion to the project,” writes Pro­fes­sor Eugene Proven­zo in his book on the sub­ject. The charts are tru­ly impres­sive for their dis­til­la­tion of “an enor­mous amount of sta­tis­ti­cal data,” drawn from “sources such as the Unit­ed States Cen­sus, the Atlanta Uni­ver­si­ty Reports, and var­i­ous gov­ern­men­tal reports that had been com­piled by Du Bois for groups such as the Unit­ed States Bureau of Labor.” (Much of the data would have gone uncol­lect­ed were it not for Du Bois’ tire­less efforts.)

The charts are also, Proven­zo notes, “remark­able in terms of their design,” as you can see for your­self. Du Bois and his stu­dents com­mit­ted to “exam­in­ing every­thing,” Meier writes, quot­ing Slate’s Rebec­ca Onion, “from the val­ue of house­hold and kitchen fur­ni­ture to the ‘rise of the negroes from slav­ery to free­dom in one gen­er­a­tion.’” And they did so in a way that still looks “strik­ing­ly vibrant and mod­ern, almost antic­i­pat­ing the cross­ing lines of Piet Mon­dri­an or the inter­sect­ing shapes of Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky.” How­ev­er much their cre­ators had explic­it­ly mod­ernist inten­tions, these designs also draw from his­tor­i­cal tech­niques in data visu­al­iza­tion—from 17th cen­tu­ry sci­en­tif­ic texts to Flo­rence Nightingale’s rev­o­lu­tion­ary 19th cen­tu­ry epi­demi­o­log­i­cal maps.

You can view and down­load scans of all the hand-drawn Du Bois’ Pan-African Con­fer­ence charts and graphs at the Library of Con­gress. There, you’ll also find oth­er fea­tures of the Du Bois/Calloway/Washington Exhib­it, includ­ing pho­tographs of sev­er­al African-Amer­i­can men who had “received appoint­ment as clerks in civ­il ser­vice depart­ments… through com­pet­i­tive exam­i­na­tions” and a “hand-let­tered descrip­tion of Hamp­ton Nor­mal and Agri­cul­tur­al Insti­tute” in Vir­ginia. Du Bois’ descrip­tion of his project says as much about his sense of Black Nation­al­ism as it does about pride in the progress made a gen­er­a­tion after slav­ery: “an hon­est straight­for­ward exhib­it of a small nation of peo­ple, pic­tur­ing their life and devel­op­ment with­out apol­o­gy or gloss, and above all made by them­selves.”

via Hyper­al­ler­gic/All My Eyes/See­ing Com­plex­i­ty/Slate

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Visu­al­iz­ing Slav­ery: The Map Abra­ham Lin­coln Spent Hours Study­ing Dur­ing the Civ­il War

Flo­rence Nightin­gale Saved Lives by Cre­at­ing Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Visu­al­iza­tions of Sta­tis­tics (1855)

The Art of Data Visu­al­iza­tion: How to Tell Com­plex Sto­ries Through Smart Design

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

Jorge Luis Borges Creates a List of 16 Ironic Rules for Writing Fiction

in Literature, Writing | September 20th, 2016

“Jorge Luis Borges 1951, by Grete Stern” via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons.

When we first read the work of Jorge Luis Borges, we may wish to write like him. When we soon dis­cov­er that nobody but Borges can write like Borges, we may wish instead that we could have col­lab­o­rat­ed with him. Once, he and his lumi­nary-of-Argen­tine-lit­er­a­ture col­leagues, friend and fre­quent col­lab­o­ra­tor Adol­fo Bioy Casares and Bioy Casares’ wife Silv­ina Ocam­po, got togeth­er to com­pose a sto­ry about a writer from the French coun­try­side. Though they nev­er did fin­ish it, one piece of its con­tent sur­vives: a list of six­teen rules, drawn up by Borges, for the writ­ing of fic­tion.

Or at least that’s how Bioy Casares told it to the French mag­a­zine L’Herne, which reprint­ed the list. Instead of six­teen rec­om­men­da­tions for what a writer of fic­tion should do, Borges play­ful­ly pro­vid­ed a list of six­teen pro­hi­bi­tions–things writ­ers of fic­tion should nev­er let slip into their work.

1. Non-con­formist inter­pre­ta­tions of famous per­son­al­i­ties. For exam­ple, describ­ing Don Juan’s misog­y­ny, etc.
2. Gross­ly dis­sim­i­lar or con­tra­dic­to­ry two­somes like, for exam­ple, Don Quixote and San­cho Pan­za, Sher­lock Holmes and Wat­son.
3. The habit of defin­ing char­ac­ters by their obses­sions; like Dick­ens does, for exam­ple.
4. In devel­op­ing the plot, resort­ing to extrav­a­gant games with time and space in the man­ner of Faulkn­er, Borges, and Bioy Casares.
5. In poet­ry, char­ac­ters or sit­u­a­tions with which the read­er can iden­ti­fy.
6. Char­ac­ters prone to becom­ing myths.
7. Phras­es, scenes inten­tion­al­ly linked to a spe­cif­ic time or a spe­cif­ic epoch; in oth­er words, local fla­vor.
8. Chaot­ic enu­mer­a­tion.
9. Metaphors in gen­er­al, and visu­al metaphors in par­tic­u­lar. Even more con­crete­ly, agri­cul­tur­al, naval or bank­ing metaphors. Absolute­ly un-advis­able exam­ple: Proust.
10. Anthro­po­mor­phism
11. The tai­lor­ing of nov­els with plots that are rem­i­nis­cent of anoth­er book. For exam­ple, Ulysses by Joyce and Homer’s Odyssey.
12. Writ­ing books that resem­ble menus, albums, itin­er­aries, or con­certs.
13. Any­thing that can be illus­trat­ed. Any­thing that may sug­gest the idea that it can be made into a movie.
14. Crit­i­cal essays, any his­tor­i­cal or bio­graph­i­cal ref­er­ence.  Always avoid allu­sions to authors’ per­son­al­i­ties or pri­vate lives. Above all, avoid psy­cho­analy­sis.
15. Domes­tic scenes in police nov­els; dra­mat­ic scenes in philo­soph­i­cal dia­logues. And, final­ly:
16. Avoid van­i­ty, mod­esty, ped­erasty, lack of ped­erasty, sui­cide.

The astute read­er will find much more of the coun­ter­in­tu­itive about this list than its focus on what not to do. Did­n’t Borges him­self spe­cial­ize in non-con­formist inter­pre­ta­tions, espe­cial­ly of exist­ing lit­er­a­ture? Don’t some of his most mem­o­rable char­ac­ters obsess over things, like imag­in­ing a human being into exis­tence or cre­at­ing a map the size of the ter­ri­to­ry, to the exclu­sion of all oth­er char­ac­ter­is­tics? Could­n’t he con­jure up the most exot­ic set­tings — even when draw­ing upon mem­o­ries of his native Buenos Aires — in the fewest words? And who else bet­ter used myths, metaphors, and games with time and space for his own, idio­syn­crat­ic lit­er­ary pur­pos­es?

But those who’ve spent real time read­ing Borges know that he also always wrote with a strong, if sub­tle, sense of humor. He had just the kind of sen­si­bil­i­ty that would pro­duce an iron­ic, self-par­o­dy­ing list such as this, though his­to­ry has­n’t record­ed whether his, Bioy Casares’, and Ocam­po’s young provin­cial writer would have per­ceived it in that way or pious­ly hon­ored its dic­tates. Borges does, how­ev­er, seem to have fol­lowed the bit about nev­er writ­ing “any­thing that may sug­gest the idea that it can be made into a movie” to the let­ter. I yield to none in my appre­ci­a­tion for Alex Cox’s cin­e­mat­ic inter­pre­ta­tion of Death and the Com­pass, but I enjoy even more the fact that Borges’ imag­i­na­tion has kept Hol­ly­wood stumped.

via lasesana/fae­na

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Jorge Luis Borges’ Favorite Short Sto­ries (Read 7 Free Online)

Jorge Luis Borges Selects 74 Books for Your Per­son­al Library

Jorge Luis Borges’ 1967–8 Nor­ton Lec­tures On Poet­ry (And Every­thing Else Lit­er­ary)

Bud­dhism 101: A Short Intro­duc­to­ry Lec­ture by Jorge Luis Borges

Borges: Pro­file of a Writer Presents the Life and Writ­ings of Argentina’s Favorite Son, Jorge Luis Borges

7 Tips from Edgar Allan Poe on How to Write Vivid Sto­ries and Poems

Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 Tips on How to Write a Good Short Sto­ry

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Watch 222 Great Films in the Public Domain: Alfred Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, Buster Keaton & More

in Archives, Film | September 16th, 2016

Want to learn about film his­to­ry? You can take a class on the sub­ject, where you’ll like­ly need a copy of Kristin Thomp­son and David Bor­d­well’s stan­dard text Film His­to­ry: An Intro­duc­tion, and pos­si­bly the com­pan­ion book, Film Art: An Intro­duc­tion. These are phe­nom­e­nal resources writ­ten by two top-notch schol­ars who have spent their lives watch­ing and ana­lyz­ing films, and should you have the time and mon­ey to study their com­pre­hen­sive intro­duc­tions, by all means do so. But of course, there’s no sub­sti­tute for actu­al­ly watch­ing the hun­dreds of films they ref­er­ence, from the ear­ly days of the medi­um through its many re-visions and inno­va­tions in the 20th cen­tu­ry.

But why, ask Thomp­son and Bor­d­well, “should any­body care about old movies?” The obvi­ous answer is that they “offer intense artis­tic expe­ri­ences or pen­e­trat­ing visions of human life in oth­er times and places.” Anoth­er key schol­ar­ly the­sis these the­o­rists advance is that in study­ing nar­ra­tive film his­to­ry, we see the devel­op­ment of film (and lat­er, by exten­sion, tele­vi­sion, video games, and oth­er visu­al media) as an inter­na­tion­al visu­al language—one near­ly every­one on the plan­et learns to read from a very young age.

In films like The Great Train Rob­bery (1903) and the tech­ni­cal­ly ground­break­ing, if nar­ra­tive­ly deplorable, Birth of a Nation (1915), we see the cre­ation and refine­ment of cross-cut­ting as an essen­tial cin­e­mat­ic tech­nique used in every visu­al sto­ry­telling medi­um. In Georges Méliès’ bril­liant fan­tasies A Trip to the Moon (1902) and The Impos­si­ble Voy­age (1904), we see the joy­ful ori­gins of the spe­cial effects film. In Sergei Eisenstein’s Bat­tle­ship Potemkin (1925), we see mon­tage the­o­ry brought to life onscreen. And in the many films of Alfred Hitch­cock, we see the inge­nious cam­era and edit­ing moves that define hor­ror and sus­pense.

All of these films, and many hun­dreds more, are in the pub­lic domain and free to view online as many times as you like, whether you do so as part of a for­mal course of study or sim­ply for sheer enjoy­ment. Nathan Heigert at MUBI has com­piled a list of 222 “Pub­lic Domain Greats” that rep­re­sents a wide spec­trum of film his­to­ry, “from the silents of Grif­fith, Keaton and Chap­lin, to neglect­ed noirs and the low-bud­get bliss of Roger Cor­man, plus near­ly all of Hitchcock’s British films—all free for down­load or stream­ing (though, nat­u­ral­ly, not in Cri­te­ri­on qual­i­ty)” from the Inter­net Archive. Heigert’s item­ized list offers a tremen­dous range and breadth, and con­tains a great many of the essen­tial films ref­er­enced in most film his­to­ry texts.

• A Man with a Movie Cam­era (Dzi­ga Ver­tov, 1929)
• Scar­let Street (Fritz Lang, 1945)
• M (Fritz Lang, 1931)
• D.O.A. (Rudolph Mate, 1950)
• Nanook of the North (Robert Fla­her­ty, 1922)
• Nos­fer­atu (F.W. Mur­nau, 1922)
• The Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari (Robert Wiene, 1920)
• Night of the Liv­ing Dead (George Romero, 1968)
• His Girl Fri­day (Howard Hawks, 1940)
• The 39 Steps (Alfred Hitch­cock, 1935)
• The Lodger (Alfred Hitch­cock, 1927)
• Sab­o­tage (Alfred Hitch­cock, 1936—find many more Hitch­cock films at our Hitch­cock list)
• Intol­er­ance (D.W. Grif­fith, 1915)
• The Gen­er­al (Buster Keaton, 1926)
• Car­ni­val of Souls (Herk Har­vey, 1962)
• Lit­tle Shop of Hor­rors (Roger Cor­man, 1960)

Most of the films on Heigert’s list can also be found in Open Culture’s col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More. That includes 16 films above that we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured with help­ful con­text on our site. So start watch­ing!

Note: You can find a list with links to all 222 films on Archive.org here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The His­to­ry of Stop-Motion Films: 39 Films, Span­ning 116 Years, Revis­it­ed in a 3‑Minute Video

Hol­ly­wood, Epic Doc­u­men­tary Chron­i­cles the Ear­ly His­to­ry of Cin­e­ma

A Trip to the Moon (and Five Oth­er Free Films) by Georges Méliès, the Father of Spe­cial Effects

The 5 Essen­tial Rules of Film Noir

Thomas Edi­son & His Trusty Kine­to­scope Cre­ate the First Movie Filmed In The US (c. 1889)

Free: British Pathé Puts Over 85,000 His­tor­i­cal Films on YouTube

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

Hear 9 Hours of Ennio Morricone’s Scores for Classic Western Films: From Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns to Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight

in Film, Music | September 14th, 2016

What goes into the mak­ing of a great film score? And how does a director/composer team like David Lynch and Ange­lo Badala­men­ti, or Ser­gio Leone and Ennio Mor­ri­cone, form such a per­fect part­ner­ship? Sev­er­al days ago, we brought you video of Badale­men­ti in a spir­it­ed, detailed recre­ation of how he and Lynch com­posed the unfor­get­table Twin Peaks’ themes, with­out which, I’d argue, there may have been no Twin Peaks.

Like­wise, with­out the music of Mor­ri­cone behind them, Leone’s spare, styl­ish, hard-boiled-yet-com­ic west­erns may nev­er have spear­head­ed the almost clas­si­cal genre of the “Spaghet­ti West­ern,” known just as often for its music as for its visu­al lan­guage.

What does Mor­ri­cone have to say about this? Pre­cious lit­tle. Or so dis­cov­ered Steely Dan’s Don­ald Fagen when he inter­viewed Mor­ri­cone for Pre­miere mag­a­zine in August of 1989. Fagen is well known for his obses­sive knowl­edge of cul­ture high and low and his hip, the­o­ret­i­cal bent. Mor­ri­cone, we learn, works more intu­itive­ly. But the results are the same. We may equal­ly find our­selves hum­ming the refrain to “Peg” as the theme to The Good, the Bad & the Ugly.

And we may find our­selves plea­sur­ably ana­lyz­ing “Peg”’s iron­ic rede­ploy­ment of soft rock tropes, just as we may approach Morricone’s inim­itable style as crit­i­cal the­o­rists, as Fagen does when he asks the ques­tion below. Like­ly the most lead­ing ques­tion in all of music jour­nal­ism (with the excep­tion of this Bri­an Eno inter­view):

But isn’t it true that the Leone films, with their ele­va­tion of myth­ic struc­tures, their com­ic book visu­al style and extreme irony, are now per­ceived as sig­nal­ing an aes­thet­ic trans­mu­ta­tion by a gen­er­a­tion of artists and film­mak­ers? And isn’t it also true that your music for those films reflect­ed and abet­ted Leone’s vision by draw­ing on the same eerie cat­a­log of gen­res — Hol­ly­wood west­ern, Japan­ese samu­rai, Amer­i­can pop, and Ital­ian Opera? That your scores func­tioned both “inside” the film as a nar­ra­tive voice and “out­side” the film as the com­men­tary of a wink­ing jester? Put it all togeth­er and does­n’t it spell “post­mod­ern,” in the sense that there has been a grotesque encroach­ment of the devices of art and, in fact, an estab­lish­ment of a new nar­ra­tive plane found­ed on the devices them­selves? Isn’t that what’s attract­ing low­er Man­hat­tan?

Mor­ri­cone: [shrugs]

Fagen quick­ly adapts, switch­es to rapid-fire ques­tions to which Mor­ri­cone gives a breezy one-word answer. “Bel­lis­si­mo!” He’s a very busy man. He does­n’t live in the same world as those La Dolce Vita peo­ple, a “small group of peo­ple who got up at 11 P.M. and lived at night.” He wakes up at 5 in the morn­ing. Mor­ri­cone needn’t indulge us with sto­ries or bore us with the­o­ret­i­cal pos­es. His last words to Fagen, “I have always want­ed to com­pose,” tell us what we need to know about him. Every­thing else is in the music.

Hear that music above in a five-hour playlist of some of Mor­ri­cone best-known scores from his sto­ried past—The Good, the Bad & the Ugly, A Fist­ful of Dol­lars, For a Few Dol­lars More, Once Upon a Time in the West, and non-Leone west­ern, The Mer­ce­nary.

And Mor­ri­cone’s still speak­ing through his west­ern scores, as he did just recent­ly in the work of anoth­er chat­ty, obses­sive, heav­i­ly ref­er­en­tial admirer—Quentin Taran­ti­no’s The Hate­ful Eight, also in the playlist above. Bel­lis­si­mo!

If you need Spo­ti­fy’s free soft­ware, down­load it here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Quentin Taran­ti­no Lists His 20 Favorite Spaghet­ti West­erns, Start­ing with The Good, the Bad, the Ugly

The Clas­si­cal Music in Stan­ley Kubrick’s Films: Lis­ten to a Free, 4 Hour Playlist

A Playlist of 172 Songs from Wes Ander­son Sound­tracks: From Bot­tle Rock­et to The Grand Budapest Hotel

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

Hear 21 Hours of Lectures & Talks by Howard Zinn, Author of the Bestselling A People’s History of the United States

in History, Politics | September 12th, 2016

Reg­u­lar­ly in these pres­sure cook­er days we hear plau­si­ble argu­ments from lib­er­als and con­ser­v­a­tives about how demo­c­ra­t­ic insti­tu­tions have recent­ly failed us, and how unique­ly polar­ized we have become as a peo­ple. We also hear often high­ly implau­si­ble claims about how cur­rent con­tenders intend to restore some kind of jus­tice or fair­ness. Read­ers of Howard Zinn’s A People’s His­to­ry of the Unit­ed States will have a dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive, one in which sup­pos­ed­ly demo­c­ra­t­ic insti­tu­tions were nev­er designed to work for the major­i­ty of the country’s inhab­i­tants. And in which, by design, cer­tain minori­ties have always remained at the bot­tom of the hier­ar­chy.

“There is not a coun­try in world his­to­ry,” writes Zinn in his famous rad­i­cal his­to­ry, “in which racism has been more impor­tant, for so long a time, as the Unit­ed States.” Far from a flawed yet excep­tion­al form of gov­ern­ment, the U.S.  sys­tem, Zinn argued, began as a means by which the founders seized the pre­rog­a­tives of the British for them­selves, with no inten­tion of expand­ing these lib­er­ties wide­ly. On the con­trary. As Zinn puts it in a chap­ter called “Tyran­ny is Tyran­ny”:

Around 1776, cer­tain impor­tant peo­ple in the Eng­lish colonies made a dis­cov­ery that would prove enor­mous­ly use­ful for the next two hun­dred years. They found that by cre­at­ing a nation, a sym­bol, a legal uni­ty called the Unit­ed States, they could take over land, prof­its, and polit­i­cal pow­er from favorites of the British Empire. In the process, they could hold back a num­ber of poten­tial rebel­lions and cre­ate a con­sen­sus of pop­u­lar sup­port for the rule of a new, priv­i­leged lead­er­ship.

The Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion swapped out one rule by elites for anoth­er, in oth­er words, and one empire for anoth­er. Or as Zinn wrote in his mem­oir, there is “some­thing rot­ten at the root.” Those who object to Zinn’s work may find flaws in his schol­ar­ly method­ol­o­gy. Accu­sa­tions of bias, however—even couched in polite pejo­ra­tives like “polem­i­cal” and “revisionist”—are pret­ty much moot. Zinn, who died in 2010, would agree. The neces­si­ty of tak­ing a posi­tion, after all, was inte­gral to the his­to­ri­an and activist’s entire ethos, such that he titled his auto­bi­og­ra­phy You Can’t Be Neu­tral on a Mov­ing Train. “The state and its police were not neu­tral ref­er­ees in a soci­ety of con­tend­ing inter­ests,” wrote Zinn, “They were on the side of the rich and pow­er­ful.” He always made it plain whose side he took, an approach by nature con­tro­ver­sial.

Was he a lib­er­al par­ti­san? Hard­ly. After tak­ing a beat­ing by police at a protest, Zinn writes, “I was no longer a lib­er­al, a believ­er in the self-cor­rect­ing char­ac­ter of Amer­i­can democ­ra­cy. I was a rad­i­cal, believ­ing that some­thing fun­da­men­tal was wrong in this coun­try.” A Com­mu­nist? “Marx,” wrote Zinn, “was often wrong, often dog­mat­ic… too insis­tent that the indus­tri­al work­ing class must be the agent of rev­o­lu­tion.” Zinn admired Marx. He wrote a play about him, Marx in Soho, and describes in the for­ward how his ear­ly read­ing of Marx, while grow­ing up in work­ing-class Brook­lyn, great­ly influ­enced his view of the world.

But after “grow­ing evi­dence of the hor­rors of Stal­in­ism” and his expe­ri­ence with the grass­roots “par­tic­i­pa­to­ry democ­ra­cy” of the Stu­dent Non­vi­o­lent Coor­di­nat­ing Com­mit­tee (SNCC), Zinn became drawn to anar­chism. Decid­ed­ly left­ist and fun­da­men­tal­ly egal­i­tar­i­an, Zinn’s analy­sis has proven broad enough to war­rant admi­ra­tion from sev­er­al dif­fer­ent polit­i­cal per­sua­sions: from mod­ern lib­er­als to Marx­ists to lib­er­tar­i­an com­mu­nists to free mar­ket lib­er­tar­i­ans like Rea­son’s Thad­deus Rus­sell, who pro­nounced him “no bet­ter exem­plar of that thor­ough­go­ing, anti-sta­tist left.”

Like anoth­er famous anar­chist intel­lec­tu­al of the rad­i­cal cam­pus left, Noam Chom­sky, Zinn first came to nation­al promi­nence in the 60s while orga­niz­ing protests against the Viet­nam War—and like Chom­sky, he debat­ed con­ser­v­a­tive stan­dard-bear­er William F. Buck­ley. Zinn pre­vi­ous­ly protest­ed seg­re­ga­tion with SNCC while he taught at Spel­man Col­lege, writ­ing an influ­en­tial his­to­ry of the orga­ni­za­tion. His tire­less activism con­tin­ued until the very end of his life, and he deliv­ered notable speech­es and lec­tures through­out his involve­ment in the civ­il rights, anti-war, envi­ron­men­tal, and eco­nom­ic jus­tice move­ments.

In the Spo­ti­fy playlist above, you can hear 22 of those talks for a total of 21 hours of Zinn, includ­ing that his­toric Buck­ley debate, which you can also hear in full at the top of the post. (If you need Spo­ti­fy’s free soft­ware, down­load it here.) After their Tufts Uni­ver­si­ty meet­ing, notes Ed Welchel, Zinn reflect­ed, “I found it curi­ous that Buck­ley did not seem to under­stand that unspar­ing crit­i­cism of gov­ern­ment is an essen­tial ele­ment of a demo­c­ra­t­ic soci­ety.”

The playlist of Zinn lec­tures and talks will be added to our col­lec­tion, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Illus­trat­ed Video: Howard Zinn’s “What the Class­room Didn’t Teach Me About the Amer­i­can Empire”

Adorn Your Gar­den with Howard the Zinn Monk

Noam Chom­sky vs. William F. Buck­ley, 1969

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

Take a Free Course on Digital Photography from Stanford Prof Marc Levoy

in How to Learn for Free, Online Courses, Photography | September 9th, 2016

Pho­tog­ra­phy and video have advanced to such a degree that any one of us, for a mod­est invest­ment of cap­i­tal, can own the req­ui­site equip­ment to make pro­duc­tions at the same lev­el of qual­i­ty as the pros. And most of us already hold in our hands com­put­ers capa­ble of pro­duc­ing and edit­ing hun­dreds of rich still and mov­ing images. What we may lack, what most of us lack, are the skills and expe­ri­ence of the pro­fes­sion­als. No amount of fan­cy pho­to gear can make up the dif­fer­ence, but you can at least acquire the education—a very thor­ough, tech­ni­cal edu­ca­tion in dig­i­tal photography—online, and for free.

Taught by Stan­ford pro­fes­sor Emer­i­tus of Com­put­er Sci­ence Marc Lev­oy, the course above, sim­ply called “Lec­tures on Dig­i­tal Pho­tog­ra­phy,” cov­ers seem­ing­ly every­thing you might need to know and then some: from the parts of a dig­i­tal cam­era (“every screw”), to the for­mu­la for depth of field, the prin­ci­ples of high dynam­ic range, and the his­to­ry and art of pho­to­graph­ic com­po­si­tion.

Beware, this course may not suit the casu­al Instagrammer—it requires aspi­ra­tion and “a cell phone won’t suf­fice.” Addi­tion­al­ly, though Lev­oy says he assumes no pri­or knowl­edge, he does expect a few non-cam­era-relat­ed aca­d­e­m­ic skill sets:

The only knowl­edge I assume is enough facil­i­ty and com­fort with math­e­mat­ics that you’re not afraid to see the depth-of-field for­mu­la in all its glo­ry, and an inte­gral sign here or there won’t send you run­ning for the hills. Some top­ics will require con­cepts from ele­men­tary prob­a­bil­i­ty and sta­tis­tics (like mean and vari­ance), but I define these con­cepts in lec­ture. I also make use of matrix alge­bra, but only at the lev­el of matrix mul­ti­pli­ca­tion. Final­ly, an expo­sure to dig­i­tal sig­nal pro­cess­ing or Fouri­er analy­sis will give you a bet­ter intu­ition for some top­ics, but it is not required.

Sound a lit­tle daunt­ing? You will not need an expen­sive SLR cam­era (sin­gle lens reflex), though it would help you get the most out of com­plex dis­cus­sions of set­tings. The top­ics of some inter­ac­tive fea­tures may sound mystifying—“gamut-mapping,” “cylindrical-panoramas”—but Levoy’s lec­tures, all in well-shot video, move at a brisk pace, and he con­tex­tu­al­izes new sci­en­tif­ic terms and con­cepts with a facil­i­ty that will put you at ease. Lev­oy for­mer­ly taught the course at Stan­ford between 2009 and 2014. The ver­sion he teach­es online here comes from a Google class giv­en this year—eigh­teen lec­tures span­ning 11 weeks.

Find all of the course materials—including inter­ac­tive applets and assignments—at Levoy’s course site. As he notes, since the course has “gone viral,” many videos embed­ded on the site won’t play prop­er­ly. Lev­oy directs poten­tial stu­dents to his Youtube chan­nel. You can see the full playlist of lec­tures at the top of this post as well.  For more resources in pho­tog­ra­phy education—practical and the­o­ret­i­cal, begin­ner to advanced—see PetaPixel’s list of “the best free online pho­tog­ra­phy cours­es and tuto­ri­als.”

“Lec­tures on Dig­i­tal Pho­tog­ra­phy” will be added to our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

via PetaPix­el

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hunter S. Thompson’s Advice for Aspir­ing Pho­tog­ra­phers: Skip the Fan­cy Equip­ment & Just Shoot

The Pho­tog­ra­ph­er Reveals the Phi­los­o­phy, Tech­niques & Artistry of Edward West­on (1948)

See the First Known Pho­to­graph Ever Tak­en (1826)

Muse­um of Mod­ern Art (MoMA) Launch­es Free Course on Look­ing at Pho­tographs as Art

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

An Animated Introduction to French Philosopher Jacques Derrida

in Philosophy | September 5th, 2016

Since the bold arrival of his book Of Gram­ma­tol­ogy in 1967, French philoso­pher Jacques Der­ri­da has been understood—or misunderstood—as many things: a rad­i­cal rel­a­tivist who ”rejects all of meta­phys­i­cal his­to­ry,” a fash­ion­able intel­lec­tu­al play­ing lan­guage games, a bril­liant phe­nom­e­nol­o­gist of lan­guage…. One asso­ci­a­tion he vehe­ment­ly reject­ed was with the kind of iron­ic, lais­sez faire post­mod­ernism rep­re­sent­ed by Sein­feld. But when it came to clar­i­fy­ing his work for puz­zled read­ers and onlook­ers, Der­ri­da could seem as will­ful­ly, frus­trat­ing­ly eva­sive in per­son as he was on the page. His work, writes Williams Col­lege pro­fes­sor Mark C. Tay­lor, can “seem hope­less­ly obscure… to peo­ple addict­ed to sound bites and overnight polls.”

Most peo­ple famil­iar with some of Derrida’s work know a few key terms of his thought: dif­férance, trace, apo­r­ia, phar­makon. Those who’ve only heard the name prob­a­bly know only one: Decon­struc­tion, a “way of doing phi­los­o­phy,” says Alain de Bot­ton in his video intro­duc­tion to Der­ri­da above, that “fun­da­men­tal­ly altered our under­stand­ing of many aca­d­e­m­ic fields, espe­cial­ly lit­er­ary stud­ies.” But what exact­ly is “Decon­struc­tion”? Rather than a method, Der­ri­da him­self described it as a process already occur­ring with­in a writ­ten work, one we can observe when we “do not assume that what is con­di­tioned by his­to­ry, insti­tu­tions, or soci­ety is nat­ur­al.” 

Derrida’s med­i­ta­tions on the inabil­i­ty of lan­guage to con­tain or com­mu­ni­cate nat­ur­al or meta­phys­i­cal truth devel­oped in unique life cir­cum­stances. Born into a Jew­ish fam­i­ly in French colo­nial Alge­ria in 1930, the philoso­pher grew up very con­scious of “hav­ing been in an infe­ri­or posi­tion at the nexus of three dif­fer­ent reli­gions, Judaism, Chris­tian­i­ty, and Islam, all of which claimed to speak the truth,” says de Bot­ton. Upon arriv­ing in Paris to study in 1949, Der­ri­da found him­self even fur­ther on the social mar­gins. “Though Der­ri­da was not an auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal writer, it’s hard not to read his work as a response to big­otry and exclu­sion.”

The claim that the philosopher—whose name has almost become syn­ony­mous with post-mod­ernism, for good or ill—was not an auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal writer may seem strange to some. One of his most-read books in col­lege cours­es, Mono­lin­gual­ism of the Oth­er, pro­ceeds from an inves­ti­ga­tion into his fraught rela­tion­ship with the French lan­guage because of his upbring­ing as a reli­gious minor­i­ty in a Euro­pean colony. Lat­er, Der­ri­da deliv­ered a ten-hour address to a con­fer­ence called The Auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal Ani­mal, pub­lished posthu­mous­ly (and excerpt­ed here).

Nonethe­less, Der­ri­da would not have made much of his place as the author, this being only a rhetor­i­cal occa­sion for analy­sis. Der­ri­da, writes Nazenin Ruso at Phi­los­o­phy Now, argued that “once the text is writ­ten, the author’s input los­es its sig­nif­i­cance.” The per­son of the author—his or her phys­i­cal pres­ence, bio­graph­i­cal expe­ri­ences, emo­tions, desires, and intentions—becomes irre­triev­able for read­ers, one of many absences in the text that we mis­take for pres­ence.

It’s hard to see, then, how we can speak of what Derrida’s “hope” was for his read­ers’ self-improve­ment, as de Bot­ton says in his video intro­duc­tion. This being the School of Life, we are treat­ed to a rather util­i­tar­i­an read­ing of the philoso­pher, one he would per­haps reject. But Der­ri­da bris­tled at the idea that lan­guage could suf­fice to tell us how and who to be in the world. His sus­pi­cion of logo­cen­trism, “an over-hasty, naïve devo­tion to rea­son, log­ic, and clear def­i­n­i­tion,” says de Bot­ton, means he felt that “many of the most impor­tant things we feel can nev­er be expressed in words.” To hear Der­ri­da talk about the prob­lem of priv­i­leg­ing lan­guage over oth­er means of expres­sion with an artist who unique­ly agreed with his posi­tion, read his inter­view with jazz great Ornette Cole­man.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

140 Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

Phi­los­o­phy with a South­ern Drawl: Rick Rod­er­ick Teach­es Der­ri­da, Fou­cault, Sartre and Oth­ers

Jacques Der­ri­da on Sein­feld: “Decon­struc­tion Doesn’t Pro­duce Any Sit­com”

Philoso­pher Jacques Der­ri­da Inter­views Jazz Leg­end Ornette Cole­man: Talk Impro­vi­sa­tion, Lan­guage & Racism (1997)

Teacher Calls Jacques Derrida’s Col­lege Admis­sion Essay on Shake­speare “Quite Incom­pre­hen­si­ble” (1951)

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

Hear 508 Hours of Songs Recorded by Rudy Van Gelder (1924–2016), the Engineer Who Created the Sound of Modern Jazz

in Jazz, Music | August 31st, 2016

The art of audio engi­neer­ing is most­ly a dark one, an alche­my per­formed behind closed stu­dio doors by peo­ple who speak a tech­ni­cal lan­guage most of us don’t rec­og­nize. That is until recent­ly. Musi­cians ama­teur and pro­fes­sion­al have had to get behind the con­trols them­selves and learn how to record their own music, a func­tion of dec­i­mat­ed stu­dio bud­gets and eas­i­ly avail­able dig­i­tal ver­sions of once rar­i­fied and pro­hib­i­tive­ly expen­sive ana­log equip­ment. As with all tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ments that put more con­trol into the hands of laypeo­ple, the results are mixed: a pro­lif­er­a­tion of quirky, inter­est­ing, home­made music, yes, and artists with total con­trol over their pro­duc­tion meth­ods and the means to release their music when and how they please…

But with the democ­ra­ti­za­tion of record­ing tech­nol­o­gy, I fear we may begin to for­get what real­ly great, real­ly expen­sive, audio engi­neer­ing sounds like, an unheard-of con­sid­er­a­tion in the fifties and six­ties, when the process may as well have been mag­ic to most record buy­ers, and when engi­neer Rudy Van Gelder record­ed some of the greatest—and best sounding—jazz albums ever made. A Love Supreme? That was Van Gelder. Also Miles Davis’ Walkin’, Her­bie Hancock’s Maid­en Voy­age, Son­ny Rollins’ Sax­o­phone Colos­sus, Horace Silver’s Song for My Father… Dex­ter Gor­don, Don­ald Byrd, Wayne Short­er, Art Blakey…. You’re get­ting the idea. “Thelo­nious Monk com­posed a trib­ute to Van Gelder’s home stu­dio,” writes The Guardian, and “record­ed it there in 1954.”

What made Van Gelder’s albums so amaz­ing, his skills so in-demand? Hear for your­self, in the incred­i­ble playlist below fea­tur­ing 508 hours of music record­ed by the man. (Need Spo­ti­fy? Down­load it here.) We can also let the engineer—who died at his New Jer­sey home and stu­dio at 91 last Thursday—tell us him­self in rare inter­views, and demys­ti­fy some of the intrin­sic prop­er­ties of the record­ing process. “When peo­ple talk about my albums,” Van Gelder said, “they often say the music has ‘space.’ I tried to repro­duce a sense of space in the over­all sound pic­ture.” His use of “spe­cif­ic micro­phones” locat­ed around the room to cre­ate “a sen­sa­tion of dimen­sion and depth” show us that record­ing isn’t sim­ply repro­duc­ing the sound of the instru­ments and play­ers, but of the space around them, which is why stu­dio own­ers spend mil­lions to build acousti­cal­ly treat­ed rooms.

But for all his pro­fes­sion­al­ism and pio­neer­ing use of top equip­ment like Ger­man-made Neu­mann micro­phones, we should note that Van Gelder got his start, and did some of his best work, in his bed­room, so to speak. The fas­tid­i­ous record­ing engi­neer, who wore gloves while record­ing and dressed like a cor­po­rate accoun­tant, actu­al­ly worked as an optometrist by day for over a decade, mak­ing records, The New York Times writes, “out of a stu­dio in his par­ents’ liv­ing room in Hack­en­sack, N.J. Not until 1959—by which time he had already engi­neered some of the most cel­e­brat­ed record­ings in jazz history—could he afford to make engi­neer­ing his full-time occu­pa­tion.”

That same stu­dio in Van Gelder’s par­ents’ liv­ing room is the one to which Monk paid homage in ’54. Not only that, but like many of today’s self-taught home engi­neers, Van Gelder “was involved in every aspect of mak­ing records, from prepa­ra­tion to mas­ter­ing.” Which goes to show, per­haps, that maybe great engi­neer­ing, like great musi­cian­ship, isn’t about access to expen­sive gear or high­ly spe­cial­ized train­ing. Maybe it’s about some­thing else. Van Gelder “had the final say in what the records sound­ed like, and he was, in the view of count­less pro­duc­ers and lis­ten­ers, bet­ter at that than any­one.” How? Aside from vague talk of “space” and “dimen­sion,” writes Tape Op, Van Gelder “nev­er dis­cussed his tech­niques,” even in an inter­view with the respect­ed record­ing mag­a­zine. Maybe there real­ly was a kind of mag­ic involved.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Sto­ry of John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, Released 50 Years Ago This Month

Jazz on the Tube: An Archive of 2,000 Clas­sic Jazz Videos (and Much More)

A 96-Song Playlist of Music in Haru­ki Murakami’s Nov­els: Miles Davis, Glenn Gould, the Beach Boys & More

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