Spheres Dance to the Music of Bach, Performed by Glenn Gould: An Animation from 1969

in Animation | January 9th, 2018

From Nor­man McLaren and René Jodoin comes a 1969 short ani­ma­tion called “Spheres.” Here, you can watch “spheres of translu­cent pearl float weight­less­ly in the unlim­it­ed panora­ma of the sky, group­ing, regroup­ing or col­lid­ing like the styl­ized burst of some atom­ic chain reac­tion.” All the while, “the dance is set to the musi­cal cadences of Bach, played by pianist Glenn Gould.” A per­fect com­bi­na­tion.

This film par­tic­i­pates in a long tra­di­tion of ani­ma­tions explor­ing geom­e­try, some of which you can find in the Relat­eds right below.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The First Avant Garde Ani­ma­tion: Watch Wal­ter Ruttmann’s Licht­spiel Opus 1 (1921)

Chuck Jones’ The Dot and the Line Cel­e­brates Geom­e­try & Hard Work: An Oscar-Win­ning Ani­ma­tion (1965)

Jour­ney to the Cen­ter of a Tri­an­gle: Watch the 1977 Dig­i­tal Ani­ma­tion That Demys­ti­fies Geom­e­try

Watch “Geom­e­try of Cir­cles,” the Abstract Sesame Street Ani­ma­tion Scored by Philip Glass (1979)

A Short Animated Introduction to Karl Marx

in Economics, Politics | January 9th, 2018

Is Karl Marx’s cri­tique of cap­i­tal­ism still rel­e­vant to the 21st cen­tu­ry? Can we ever read him inde­pen­dent­ly of the move­ments that vio­lent­ly seized state pow­er in his name, claim­ing to rep­re­sent the work­ers through the sole will of the Par­ty? These are ques­tions Marx­ists must con­front, as must all seri­ous defend­ers of cap­i­tal­ism, who can­not afford to ignore Marx. He under­stood and artic­u­lat­ed the prob­lems of polit­i­cal econ­o­my bet­ter than any the­o­rist of his day and posed a for­mi­da­ble intel­lec­tu­al chal­lenge to the val­ues lib­er­al democ­ra­cies claim to espouse, and those they actu­al­ly prac­tice through eco­nom­ic exploita­tion, per­pet­u­al rent-seek­ing, and the alien­at­ing com­mod­i­fi­ca­tion of every­thing.

In his School of Life video explain­er above, Alain de Bot­ton sums up the received assess­ment of Com­mu­nist his­to­ry as “dis­as­trous­ly planned economies and nasty dic­ta­tor­ships.” “Nev­er­the­less,” he says, we should view Marx “as a guide, whose diag­no­sis of capitalism’s ills helps us to nav­i­gate toward a more promis­ing future”—the future of a “reformed” cap­i­tal­ism. No Marx­ist would ever make this argu­ment; de Botton’s video appeals to the skep­tic, new to Marx and not whol­ly inoc­u­lat­ed against giv­ing him a hear­ing. His ideas get boiled down to some most­ly uncon­tro­ver­sial state­ments: Mod­ern work is alien­at­ing and inse­cure. The rich get rich­er while wages fall. Such the­ses have attained the sta­tus of self-evi­dent tru­isms.

More inter­est­ing and provoca­tive is Marx’s (and Engels’) notion that cap­i­tal­ism is “bad for cap­i­tal­ists,” in that it pro­duces the repres­sive, patri­ar­chal domin­ion of the nuclear fam­i­ly, “fraught with ten­sion, oppres­sion, and resent­ment.” Addi­tion­al­ly, the impo­si­tion of eco­nom­ic con­sid­er­a­tions into every aspect of life ren­ders rela­tion­ships arti­fi­cial and forms of life sharply con­strained by the demands of the labor mar­ket. Here Marx’s eco­nom­ic cri­tique takes on its sub­tly rad­i­cal fem­i­nist dimen­sion, de Bot­ton says, by claim­ing that “men and women should have the per­ma­nent option to enjoy leisure,” not sim­ply the equal oppor­tu­ni­ty to sell their labor pow­er for equal amounts of inse­cu­ri­ty.

The video won’t sway staunch­ly anti-com­mu­nist minds, but it might make some view­ers curi­ous about what exact­ly it was Marx had to say. Those who turn to his mas­ter­work, Das Kap­i­tal, are like­ly to give up before they reach the twists and turns of the argu­ments de Bot­ton out­lines in broad strokes. The first and most famous vol­ume is hard going with­out a guide, and you’ll find few­er bet­ter than David Har­vey, Pro­fes­sor of Anthro­pol­o­gy and Geog­ra­phy at the City Uni­ver­si­ty of New York’s Grad­u­ate Cen­ter.

Harvey’s Com­pan­ion to Marx’s Cap­i­tal has guid­ed read­ers through the text for years, and his lec­tures on Marx have done so for stu­dents going on four decades. In the video above, see an intro­duc­tion to Harvey’s lec­ture series on vol­ume one of Marx’s Cap­i­tal, and at our pre­vi­ous post, find com­plete videos of his full lec­ture series on Vol­umes One, Two, and part of Vol­ume Three. Har­vey doesn’t claim that a kinder, gen­tler cap­i­tal­ism can be found in Marx. But as to the ques­tion of whether Marx is still rel­e­vant to the vast­ly accel­er­at­ed, tech­no­crat­ic cap­i­tal­ism of the present, he would unequiv­o­cal­ly answer yes.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Harvey’s Course on Marx’s Cap­i­tal: Vol­umes 1 & 2 Now Avail­able Free Online

6 Polit­i­cal The­o­rists Intro­duced in Ani­mat­ed “School of Life” Videos: Marx, Smith, Rawls & More

What Makes Us Human?: Chom­sky, Locke & Marx Intro­duced by New Ani­mat­ed Videos from the BBC

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

Hear the 50 Best Post-Punk Albums of All Time: A Nostalgia-Inducing Playlist Curated by Paste Magazine

in Music | January 8th, 2018

Post­mod­ernism began as an archi­tec­tur­al term to describe the loss of a seem­ing­ly sta­ble social order and the build­ing of new forms in the 1960s and 70s. The new archi­tec­ture was an elab­o­rate patch­work of high and low cul­ture and past and present design trends. In both the­o­ry and prac­tice, post­mod­ernism delight­ed in odd jux­ta­po­si­tions and self-ref­er­en­tial irony. It did not shy away from pol­i­tics but made sar­don­ic crit­i­cal com­men­tary its méti­er rather than the total­iz­ing agen­das of late mod­ernism.

Post­mod­ernism added to mod­ernism’s genre-hop­ping a broad­er cul­tur­al scope and wider inclu­siv­i­ty of forms of expres­sion. We can see a sim­i­lar cul­tur­al shift hap­pen­ing in pop­u­lar music in the mid- to late-20th cen­tu­ry. The pop and rock of the six­ties frag­ment­ed into dozens of radio friend­ly gen­res, all of which met their crit­i­cal match in the aggres­sive­ness of punk, a move­ment with high aes­thet­ic com­mit­ments and a cor­re­spond­ing desire to det­o­nate cul­tur­al norms by any means nec­es­sary.

When we arrive at the “post-punk,” we find all things counter-cul­ture rub­bing up against each oth­er, fill­ing the void left by the old social order with new sounds and visions, some deter­mined­ly grim, some play­ful and iron­ic, near­ly all of them dance­able.

A fine descrip­tion for what the world of “post-punk” looked like comes from a recent per­son­al essay by the poet Patrick Ros­al:

It was the ear­ly 1980s, a brief few years when punk rock kids, b‑boys, new wave freaks, and dis­co fiends might all get down on the same dance floor: this one in moc­casin boots this one in a track suit with three side-stripes down the sleeves and legs, this one in a bag­gy neon sweater and extra eye­lin­er.

This was a time when bands like Pub­lic Image Lim­it­ed (John Lydon’s post Sex Pis­tols project) and Bauhaus incor­po­rat­ed dub reg­gae rhythms, basslines, and stu­dio effects into the core of their sound. The Clash had already embarked on such exper­i­ments, and Clash gui­tarist Mick Jones took things fur­ther with Big Audio Dyna­mite, a punk/funk/reggae/hip hop hybrid that didn’t make the list of Paste Mag­a­zine’s “50 Best Post-Punk Albums,” but was cer­tain­ly rep­re­sen­ta­tive of a strain of post-punk expan­sive­ness.

Bauhaus doesn’t make the list either, but Pub­lic Image Limited’s 1979 Met­al Box appears, at num­ber 14, an album of wob­bly, dub-inflect­ed “death dis­co” that won a spe­cial place in the hearts and record col­lec­tions of an eclec­tic group of fans as the eight­ies dawned. At #36 we find the equal­ly exper­i­men­tal Dub Hous­ing, the 1978 sec­ond album of Ohio’s Pere Ubu, a project that coa­lesced in the midst of Cleveland’s punk scene to make what front­man David Thomas called “avant garage.”

These dis­parate bands define post-punk as much as do the jan­g­ly, south­ern, Byrds-influ­enced sounds of R.E.M. or The dB’s, the surf-rock revival­ism of The B52’s, jazzy, angu­lar art-rock of Tele­vi­sion, jit­tery, So-Cal punk/jazz/country/funk of Min­ute­men, dark drone of Joy Divi­sion, chaot­ic blues-punk of Birth­day Par­ty, anar­chic noise and motorik beats of Swell Maps or Son­ic Youth, sham­bling rants of The Fall, new roman­tic pop of The Smiths or Orange Juice, satir­i­cal syn­th­punk of Devo…. The list can and does go on and on. You can see the full 50 at Paste Mag­a­zine, cho­sen and anno­tat­ed by the magazine’s writ­ers. Above, we’ve com­piled 48 of these albums in a Spo­ti­fy playlist—save Met­al Box and Dub Hous­ing, which are not avail­able on Spo­ti­fy.

This is music made by peo­ple “inter­est­ed in see­ing where music could go.” Many of them for­mer punks, many new to the scene. Many of them left behind these ear­ly exper­i­men­tal phas­es to become more con­ven­tion­al­ly genre-based, while some had only start­ed to push in new direc­tions lat­er in their career. Some of these bands arrived at a sound, made it their own, and rarely devi­at­ed, some shift­ed and changed through­out their career; some burned bright­ly, or dark­ly, for a short time, leav­ing indeli­ble marks of odd great­ness in a time when pop­u­lar music took more risks than before or maybe since.

At least that’s what it feels like look­ing back. If this is a nos­tal­gia trip for you, you’ll find it’s pret­ty com­pre­hen­sive, with the inevitable omis­sion of a favorite album, band, or two (where, I must ask, is My Bloody Valen­tine?) If you’re new to the range of this music, con­sid­er that, for all the vagary a term like “post-punk” might evoke, like the “post­mod­ern,” it has a spe­cif­ic his­tor­i­cal con­text, one in which a hand­ful of artists saw tremen­dous cre­ative oppor­tu­ni­ty amidst a gen­er­al sense of cul­tur­al malaise.

via Paste Mag­a­zine

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The His­to­ry of Punk Rock in 200 Tracks: An 11-Hour Playlist Takes You From 1965 to 2016

33 Songs That Doc­u­ment the His­to­ry of Fem­i­nist Punk (1975–2015): A Playlist Curat­ed by Pitch­fork

Hear the 20 Favorite Punk Albums of Black Flag Front­man Hen­ry Rollins

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

A Map Shows What Every Country in the World Calls Itself in its Own Language: Explore the “Endonyms of the World” Map

in Maps | January 8th, 2018

I live in South Korea, but the South Kore­ans don’t call it South Korea. The coun­try has its own lan­guage, of course, and that lan­guage has its own name for the coun­try, dae­han min­guk (대한 민국), or more com­mon­ly hanguk (한국) — not that it stops the glob­al brand­ing-friend­ly let­ter K, which has made its way from “K‑pop” to “K‑beauty” to even (albeit much less suc­cess­ful­ly) things like “K‑food.” As far as our much-report­ed-on north­ern neigh­bor, South Kore­ans call it bukhan (북한), but its inhab­i­tants call their land joseon min­ju­jueui inmin gongh­waguk (조선민주주의인민공화국). And as with Korea South and North, so with every coun­try in the world: each one has an endonym.

“An endonym is the name for a place, site or loca­tion in the lan­guage of the peo­ple who live there. These names may be offi­cial­ly des­ig­nat­ed by the local gov­ern­ment or they may sim­ply be wide­ly used.” So says the front page of the Endonym Map, which labels every coun­try (or dis­put­ed ter­ri­to­ry) in the world with its endonym, writ­ten in the lan­guage’s own script.

When you first learned the names of for­eign coun­tries, you actu­al­ly learned their exonyms, their names in a for­eign lan­guage: yours. “South Korea” and “North Korea” are exonyms, as are names like “Japan,” “Fin­land,” “Turkey,” and “France.” Nihon-koku (日本国), Suomen tasaval­ta, Türkiye Cumhuriyeti, and la République française all appear on the Endonym Map, as do many oth­er well-known coun­tries you might at first glance assume you’ve nev­er heard of. 

The map’s cre­ator notes that “the most com­mon offi­cial or nation­al lan­guage in the world is Eng­lish, with 86 coun­tries or ter­ri­to­ries,” which rep­re­sents “one-third the num­ber of total coun­tries and approx­i­mate­ly 30% of the plan­et’s land area.” Because of that, peo­ple all over the world do tend to know the Eng­lish exonym for their own coun­try, but that’s hard­ly an excuse not to learn its real name should you decide to pay them a vis­it. And that counts as the first step toward actu­al­ly learn­ing its lan­guage, a jour­ney that the For­eign Ser­vice Insti­tute’s lan­guage-learn­ing map we fea­tured last year can help you plan. Hwait­ing, as we say here in the Kore­anized Eng­lish — or Eng­lishized Kore­an? — of hanguk.

You can view the Endonym Map in a larg­er, zoomable for­mat here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Favorite Lit­er­ary Work of Every Coun­try Visu­al­ized on a World Map

The “True Size” Maps Shows You the Real Size of Every Coun­try (and Will Change Your Men­tal Pic­ture of the World)

A Map Show­ing How Much Time It Takes to Learn For­eign Lan­guages: From Eas­i­est to Hard­est

1934 Map Resizes the World to Show Which Coun­try Drinks the Most Tea

“Every Coun­try in the World”–Two Videos Tell You Curi­ous Facts About 190+ Coun­tries

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include 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.

A Supercut of Buster Keaton’s Most Amazing Stunts

in Comedy, Film, Writing | January 8th, 2018

Joseph Frank Keaton was born into show­biz. His father was a come­di­an. His moth­er, a soubrette. He emerged into the world dur­ing a one night engage­ment in Kansas City. His father’s busi­ness part­ner, escape artist Har­ry Hou­di­ni, inad­ver­tent­ly renamed him Buster, approv­ing of the way the rub­bery lit­tle Keaton weath­ered an acci­den­tal tum­ble down a flight of stairs.

As Keaton recalls in the inter­view accom­pa­ny­ing silent movie fan Don McHoull’s edit of some of his most amaz­ing stunts, above:

My old man was an eccen­tric com­ic and as soon as I could take care of myself at all on my feet, he had slapped shoes on me and big bag­gy pants. And he’d just start doing gags with me and espe­cial­ly kickin’ me clean across the stage or tak­ing me by the back of the neck and throw­ing me. By the time I got up to around sev­en or eight years old, we were called The Rough­est Act That Was Ever in the His­to­ry of the Stage. 

By the time of his first film role in the 1917 Roscoe “Fat­ty” Arbuck­le vehi­cle, The Butch­er Boy, Keaton was a sea­soned clown, with plen­ty of expe­ri­ence string­ing phys­i­cal gags into an enter­tain­ing nar­ra­tive whole.

Like his silent peers, Harold Lloyd and Char­lie Chap­lin, Keaton was an idea man, who saw no need for a script. Armed with a firm con­cept of how the film should begin and end, he rolled cam­eras with­out much idea of how the mid­dle would turn out, fine tun­ing his phys­i­cal set pieces on the fly, scrap­ping the ones that didn’t work and embrac­ing the hap­py acci­dents.

Could such an approach work for today’s come­di­ans? In lat­er inter­views, Keaton was gen­er­ous toward oth­er com­e­dy pro­fes­sion­als who got their laughs via meth­ods he steered clear of, from Bob Hope’s wordi­ness to direc­tor Bil­ly Wilder’s deft han­dling of Some Like It Hot’s far­ci­cal cross-dress­ing. His was nev­er a one-size-fits-all phi­los­o­phy.

Per­haps it’s more help­ful to think of his approach as an anti­dote to cre­ative block and timid­i­ty. We’ve cob­bled togeth­er some of his advice, below, in the hope that it might prove use­ful to sto­ry­tellers of all stripes.

Buster Keaton’s 5 Rules of Com­ic Sto­ry­telling

Make a strong start - grab the audi­ence with a dynam­ic, easy to grasp premise, like the one in 1920’s One Week, which finds a new­ly­wed Buster strug­gling to assem­ble a house from a do-it-your­self kit.

Decide how you want things to fin­ish up - for Keaton, this usu­al­ly involved get­ting the girl, though he learned to keep a pok­er face after a pre­view audi­ence booed the broad grin he tried out in one of Arbuckle’s shorts. Once you know where your story’s going, trust that the mid­dle will take care of itself.

If it’s not work­ing, cut it — Keaton may not have had a script, but he invest­ed a lot of thought into the phys­i­cal set pieces of his films. If it didn’t work as well as he hoped in exe­cu­tion, he cut it loose. If some serendip­i­tous sna­fu turned out to be fun­nier than the intend­ed gag, he put that in instead.

Play it like it mat­ters to you. As many a begin­ning improv stu­dent finds out, if you let your own mate­r­i­al crack you up, the audi­ence is rarely inclined to laugh along. Why set­tle for low stakes and dif­fi­dence, when high stakes and com­mit­ment are so much fun­nier?

Action over words Whether deal­ing with dia­logue or expo­si­tion, Keaton strove to min­i­mize the inter­ti­tles in his silent work. Show, don’t tell.

Films excerpt­ed at top:

Three Ages
Cops
Day Dreams
Sher­lock Jr.
One Week
Hard Luck
Neigh­bors
The Gen­er­al
Steam­boat Bill, Jr.
Sev­en Chances
Our Hos­pi­tal­i­ty
The Bell

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Buster Keaton: The Won­der­ful Gags of the Found­ing Father of Visu­al Com­e­dy

Some of Buster Keaton’s Great, Death-Defy­ing Stunts Cap­tured in Ani­mat­ed Gifs

The Pow­er of Silent Movies, with The Artist Direc­tor Michel Haz­anavi­cius

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” Reworked in Major Key, Becomes a Cheerful Pop Song

in Music | January 8th, 2018

Last year, Josh Jones took a good look at what hap­pens when Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spir­it” gets shift­ed from minor to major key, and Radiohead’s “Creep” moves in the oppo­site direc­tion. Sud­den­ly, two songs you know so well sound so dif­fer­ent.

Over the week­end, “Sleep Good,” a psy­che­del­ic pop band from Austin, TX,  took their own whack at shift­ing Nir­vana’s 1991 song into major key. And the result will catch you a bit off-guard. A grunge anthem abrupt­ly turns into a cheery pop song, and the bop­ping cheer­lead­ers in the orig­i­nal music video strange­ly fit into the mood of the adapt­ed song.

You can find a ver­sion of “Teen Sprite,” as the song has been dubbed, over on Sound­cloud.

via Uncrate

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent

Watch Nir­vana Per­form “Smells Like Teen Spir­it,” Just Two Days After the Release of Nev­er­mind (Sep­tem­ber 26, 1991)

Hear Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spir­it” Shift­ed from Minor to Major Key, and Radiohead’s “Creep” Moved from Major to Minor

1,000 Musi­cians Play Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spir­it” Live, at the Same Time

Quantum Field Theory: A Free Course from Cambridge University

in | January 7th, 2018

These video lec­tures on Quan­tum Field The­o­ry were pre­sent­ed by Cam­bridge’s David Tong in 2009. They’re based on an intro­duc­to­ry course on quan­tum field the­o­ry. The full set of lec­ture notes can be found on this quan­tum field the­o­ry web­page.

This lec­ture series will be added to our col­lec­tion of Free Physics Cours­es, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

The Movements of a Symphony Conductor Get Artistically Visualized in an Avant-Garde Motion Capture Animation

in Animation, Computer Science, Film, Music, Technology | January 5th, 2018

Some clas­si­cal music enthu­si­asts are purists with regard to visu­al effects, lis­ten­ing with eyes firm­ly fixed on lin­er notes or the ceil­ings of grand con­cert halls.

Those open to a more avant-garde ocu­lar expe­ri­ence may enjoy the short motion cap­ture ani­ma­tion above.

Moti­vat­ed by the Lon­don Sym­pho­ny Orches­tra’s desire for a hip­per iden­ti­ty, the project hinged on recent­ly appoint­ed Musi­cal Direc­tor Sir Simon Rat­tle’s will­ing­ness to con­duct Edward Elgar’s Enig­ma Vari­a­tions with a spe­cial­ly mod­i­fied baton, while 12 top-of-the-range Vicon Van­tage cam­eras not­ed his every move at 120 frames per sec­ond.

Dig­i­tal design­er Tobias Gremm­ler, who’s pre­vi­ous­ly used motion-cap­ture ani­ma­tion as a lens through which to con­sid­er kung fu and Chi­nese Opera, stuck with musi­cal metaphors in ani­mat­ing Sir Simon’s data with Cin­e­ma 4D soft­ware. The move­ments of con­duc­tor and baton morph into a “vor­tex of wood, brass, smoke and strings” and “wires rem­i­nis­cent of the strings of the instru­ments them­selves.” Else­where, he draws on the atmos­phere and archi­tec­ture of clas­sic con­cert halls.

(The unini­ti­at­ed may find them­selves flash­ing on less rar­i­fied sources of inspi­ra­tion, from lava lamps and fire danc­ing to the 80’s‑era dig­i­tal uni­verse of Tron.)

via Atlas Obscu­ra

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Grace­ful Move­ments of Kung Fu & Mod­ern Dance Revealed in Stun­ning Motion Visu­al­iza­tions

Visu­al­iz­ing WiFi Sig­nals with Light

The Entire Dis­ci­pline of Phi­los­o­phy Visu­al­ized with Map­ping Soft­ware: See All of the Com­plex Net­works

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Watch Prince Play Jazz Piano & Coach His Band Through George Gershwin’s “Summertime” in a Candid, Behind-the-Scenes Moment (1990)

in Music | January 5th, 2018

A rock enig­ma wrapped around an R&B quandary, wear­ing plat­form shoes and pur­ple velour. The cheek­bones of an angel, dance moves and lyrics from an infer­nal­ly sexy place, and more musi­cal tal­ent than it seems pos­si­ble for a sin­gle per­son to pos­sess in one life­time…. These are some of the ways we remem­ber Prince Rogers Nel­son.

We do not typ­i­cal­ly remem­ber him as a jazz pianist. But his facil­i­ty with jazz earned him the admi­ra­tion of Miles Davis, who made sev­er­al efforts to col­lab­o­rate with the extreme­ly busy pop star. (They per­formed togeth­er only once, it seems, on New Year’s Eve, 1987 at Pais­ley Park.) Prince’s style, stage show, song­writ­ing, and arrang­ing drew from jazz of all kinds—from zoot suit-era big band to the fre­net­ic move­ment of hard bop to the clas­si­cal­ly-inflect­ed show tunes of George Gersh­win. Just above see him “casu­al­ly own” Gersh­win’s “Sum­mer­time” dur­ing a 1990 sound­check in Osa­ka, Japan.

For the first minute, it’s a Prince show­case, but once he coach­es the band through the changes, he lets them take it, set­tling back while the gui­tarist rides out a solo. The can­did moment does much more than demon­strate his chops on the piano and appre­ci­a­tion for Gersh­win. It offers yet anoth­er con­trast to the pop­u­lar image of Prince as a charis­mat­ic, self-suf­fi­cient solo artist who just hap­pened to work with a reg­u­lar crew of stel­lar musi­cians and not-so-stel­lar actress­es.

It’s true Prince played most or all of the instru­ments on many of his albums, wrote near­ly all his own songs, direct­ed or pro­duced near­ly every aspect of his music, career, and per­sona.… As solo artists go, no one comes close to defin­ing full cre­ative con­trol. The Pur­ple One ruled over a musi­cal empire; most of the time, it seems, he got what he want­ed, even if he some­times had to fight like hell for it. We might expect such an artist to be a pet­ty tyrant, hog­ging the spot­light and throw­ing his weight around at every oppor­tu­ni­ty. What we hear and see behind the scenes paints a much rich­er pic­ture.

The footage here was shot by Steve Pur­cell, who direct­ed sev­er­al videos for Prince and, as he remarked, “spent six years of my life work­ing for, cre­at­ing with and lay­ing the foun­da­tion for the rest of my career with Prince.” In his intro­duc­tion to the video, he writes, “This may not be the Prince you think of but it is the Prince I knew.” A band­leader who was also an ensem­ble play­er, and who con­stant­ly paid trib­ute to the music that inspired him in live per­for­mance.

We might have known Prince as a gen­er­ous hit­mak­er, who gave song after song to artists like Sheena Eas­t­on, Cha­ka Khan, Sinead O’Connor, and the Ban­gles, and launched the careers of a good many of his col­lab­o­ra­tors, musi­cal and oth­er­wise. Since his death, we’ve also learned much more about both his tremen­dous finan­cial and emo­tion­al good­will, and the time he took with oth­er musi­cians to help them devel­op and learn.

The impos­si­bly cool aloof­ness with which he glid­ed through pop star­dom did not extend to his rela­tion­ships with the peo­ple clos­est to him. Prince was so beloved that his two ex-wives worked togeth­er to orga­nize a star-stud­ded memo­r­i­al ser­vice for him. Sto­ries of his kind­ness, good humor, com­pas­sion, and loy­al­ty pour out at the same rate as the music he had locked up in his Pais­ley Park vault. We’ll like­ly see more can­did videos like this one emerge as well, from those who, like Pur­cell, found their time doc­u­ment­ing the artist a total­ly life-chang­ing expe­ri­ence.

via Clas­si­cal FM

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Read Prince’s First Inter­view, Print­ed in His High School News­pa­per (1976)

Prince Plays Unplugged and Wraps the Crowd Around His Lit­tle Fin­ger (2004)

Hear Prince’s Per­son­al Playlist of Par­ty Music: 22 Tracks That Will Bring Any Par­ty to Life

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

Hear Glenn Gould Channel Marshall McLuhan and Create an Experimental Radio Documentary Analyzing the Pop Music of Petula Clark (1967)

in Music, Radio | January 5th, 2018

Glenn Gould, that intel­lec­tu­al­ly intense, aes­thet­i­cal­ly aus­tere inter­preter of Johann Sebas­t­ian Bach, had lit­tle time for pop music. He had espe­cial­ly lit­tle time for the Bea­t­les: “Theirs is a hap­py, cocky, bel­liger­ent­ly resource­less brand of har­mon­ic prim­i­tivism,” he wrote in High Fideli­ty in 1967, when the Fab Four had reached the top of the zeit­geist. “The indul­gent ama­teur­ish­ness of the musi­cal mate­r­i­al, though close­ly rivaled by the indif­fer­ence of the per­form­ing style, is actu­al­ly sur­passed only by the inep­ti­tude of the stu­dio pro­duc­tion method,” he declares, liken­ing “Straw­ber­ry Fields For­ev­er” to “a moun­tain wed­ding between Clau­dio Mon­tever­di and a jug band.”

But the Bea­t­le-bash­ing was inci­den­tal to the pur­pose of the arti­cle, a paean to Eng­lish singer Petu­la Clark. At first lis­ten, her four sin­gles on which Gould focus­es his analy­sis — 1964’s “Down­town,” 1956’s “My Love,” and 1966’s “A Sign of the Times” and “Who Am I?” — sound like noth­ing more than ado­les­cent-ori­ent­ed pop hard­ly touched by any of that decade’s musi­cal (or indeed social) rev­o­lu­tions. But “this quar­tet of hits,” in Gould’s view, “was designed to con­vey the idea that, bound as she might be by lim­i­ta­tions of tim­bre and range, she would not accept any cor­re­spond­ing restric­tions of theme and sen­ti­ment,” with the result that she came to com­mand an audi­ence “large, con­stant, and pos­sessed of an enthu­si­asm which tran­scends the gen­er­a­tions.”

Gould says all this in The Search for Petu­la Clark, a 23-minute radio doc­u­men­tary that aired on the CBC on Decem­ber 11, 1967, less than three weeks before his much bet­ter-known exper­i­men­tal doc­u­men­tary The Idea of North. He sit­u­ates his analy­sis of the singer he calls “Pet Clark,” which gets into not just her songs’ themes and lyrics but their tech­ni­cal qual­i­ties as music, in the con­text of a solo road trip around Lake Supe­ri­or when “Who Am I?” first hit the air­waves. So com­pelled did he find him­self that he timed his dri­ve to get with­in range of one of the radio sta­tions scat­tered across the vast­ness of his home­land at the top of each hour in order to hear the song over and over again, after 700 miles he got to “know it if not bet­ter than the soloist, at least as well, per­haps, as most of the side­men.”

Though born with­in two months of each oth­er in 1932 and there­after liv­ing lives ded­i­cat­ed to music, Gould and Clark would seem to have lit­tle else in com­mon. While Gould died at 50, Clark, at the age of 85, con­tin­ues to both record and per­form. Gould, as J.D. Con­nor writes in an essay on The Search for Petu­la Clark, “stopped per­form­ing for live audi­ences in 1964. Freed from the rig­ors of the con­cert cir­cuit, he dove into radio and tele­vi­sion at just the moment when he and Cana­di­an state media could par­lay his immense musi­cal pop­u­lar­i­ty into some­thing more.”  This and the more intri­cate radio pro­duc­tions that would fol­low both sprang from and allowed Gould to con­struct “a media the­o­ry of his own. In print, on tele­vi­sion, and, most impor­tant, on radio, Gould became the great com­ple­ment to Mar­shall McLuhan.” And like McLuhan, when Gould obsess­es over some­thing that nev­er seemed to mer­it seri­ous atten­tion, we’d do well to heed the insights he draws from it.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lis­ten to Glenn Gould’s Shock­ing­ly Exper­i­men­tal Radio Doc­u­men­tary, The Idea of North (1967)

Glenn Gould: Off and On the Record: Two Short Films About the Life & Music of the Eccen­tric Musi­cian

Glenn Gould Explains the Genius of Johann Sebas­t­ian Bach (1962)

Glenn Gould Gives Us a Tour of Toron­to, His Beloved Home­town (1979)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include 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.