Last September, I took Serena to see Calibro 35 perform live. She didn’t know them, and she was instantly in awe. At the end of the concert, I suggested we buy their album, right there at the booth (I already owned it in digital). She declined on the grounds that we don’t have a turntable, and I argued that the vinyl would be a memento of the special evening we shared, very much like the catalog we buy when we visit a worthy art exhibition.

In any case, during my walk along the riverbank last evening and this morning’s usual stroll through the town center, I listened to TKC after a long time in its entirety. It’s marvelous as always. There’s that section at about the seven and a half minutes mark that gives me the exact same goosebumps, each and every time.

When I got back, I re-read the story of that evening, when the album was recorded. If you don’t know about it, it’s worth checking out. Suffice to say that the whole thing was forcedly improvised on stage because the piano was the wrong one and in bad shape. Also, Jarrett was tired, suffering from back pain (he was wearing a brace), and hungry. The gem I discovered today is a short 9-minute BBC Witness History podcast episode in which Vera Brandes (the concert promoter) recounts the events of that evening¹.

The Köln Concert became the best-selling jazz solo concert of all time. Not bad for an improvised performance on a bad piano at a concert that was about to be canceled two hours before the start.

The lyrics may sound naive at first, but they’re not. Instead, they strike me as lucid and match my general feeling about what’s going on lately, the risks we’re taking as a society, and what we should do to move beyond and improve ourselves. The video is 100% Flea, and it’s adorable (it is directed by his daughter).

Digging further, I learned that Flea has a “trumpet album” coming out next year (apparently the trumpet was his first instrument), and that Nick Cave lent his voice to one of the tracks. In the process, I also learned about Cave’s trenchant opinion of RHCP, which thankfully doesn’t prevent Cave from admiring and respecting their bassist.

I don’t care about the act of politics. I think there is a much more transcendent place above it where there’s discourse to be had that can actually help humanity, and actually help us all to live harmoniously and productively in a way that’s healthy for the world. There’s a place where we meet, and it’s love.

– Flea

I am eager to listen to the new album.

The show’s soundtrack is a unique blend of jazz (big band hard bop, mainly), blues, and a bit of rock, which I’ve never seen before in anime and probably in movies. Even episode titles pay tribute to jazz, blues and rock tracks. We have “Valtz for Venus,” “Sympathy for the Devil,” “My Funny Valentine,” and stuff like that. Adorable. Episodes may appear rambling and superficial at first glance, but they are far from that. They strike a perfect balance between comedy and thought-provoking, often philosophical themes.

Last night’s episode, “Jamming with Edward”, struck me as prescient. In 2071, Earth is surrounded by a mountain of scrap metal (mostly decommissioned satellites and wreckage from missiles, probes, and spaceships). Space junk was not a theme in 1998 when the anime was conceived, or was it? And there’s this AI, a clear tribute to HAL 9000, left active on a derelict satellite, feeling lonely, misunderstood, and abandoned. It is tremendously timely, resonating with the issues we face today.

I bought the whole Space Cowboy soundtrack. It’s the bomb.

But what Sun Ra had done, and done best, was reminding earthlings everywhere that he wasn’t mortal. He was a signifier of a life beyond the reality of this one. He was a visual reassurance of the presence of another world. He brought the cosmos to the streets, and, most importantly, he was a reminder that one does not have to subscribe to the status quo—musically, stylistically, politically, ideologically.

More here.

Coltrane’s complexity is daunting for the most accomplished musicians. How much more so for non-musicians? It can seem like “you need a doctorate of music to go anywhere near his recordings,” Nicholson writes. But “nothing could be further from the truth.” With its dancing lines and circles, Brother’s visualization gives us another way to appreciate the “sheer joy of music making and the power and energy of his playing” that inspires students, serious fans, and newcomers alike through “universal values that still speak to us now.”

I suddenly want all my music visualized like this.

My nerdiness alarm immediately went off, and I wanted to know more, so I dug a little. Open Culture presentation is remarkable, but what’s mind-boggling is the author’s in-depth article on the fractal structure of the solo. It’s all about fractals, baby!

As I hope this makes clear, with Baker, music is only part of the story. In order to fully grasp his significance within popular culture, we must also look at the mythos surrounding him and the often less salacious truth that lies beneath that dramatic surface. It is only by looking concurrently at Baker’s music and image that we can truly understand why he has endured despite the existence of more technically-gifted trumpeters and impressive vocalists. Many such musicians came to the fore throughout his tumultuous lifetime, but few have captured the public’s attention or endured in the way that Baker has. For all of his limited range, not to mention the dramatic loss of the youthful good looks that are at the root of his image, he managed to make a living as a musician for decades and has persisted in the popular imagination and jazz fans’ collections almost 35 years after his death.

I’ve always listened to Barker with little attention, knowing and researching little about the artist and his music. This article fills a hole. Also, I am grateful to Duffus for letting me discover a gem like Live in Tokyo, an album recorded on stage less than a year before his premature, tragic death and then released posthumously. I am listening to it as I write this note, and man isn’t it just great.

Jazz is so interesting to me because of its fusion of intricate underlying structure with improvisation and spontaneity. As Ken Burns put it, jazz is “familiar, but brand new every night”. Moreover, I enjoy the intellectual demandingness of jazz as a genre. Jazz musicians seem to be the most thoughtful and intelligent of any genre. Many of the more Avant Garde songs mentioned in this post don’t sound good unless you’re really concentrating. Some of it sounds cacophonous to a newcomer. This is why jazz is considerably more difficult to get into than other genres and has a lack of listenership among the youth.

Sam put a lot of effort into his selection, and it shows. Should his list be overwhelming for you, my shortcut advice would be: listen to Kind of Blue, especially the first two tracks, So What and Freddie Freeloader. If they don’t move you, I am sorry, you’re probably not a jazz person.

Since the mid-1970s, almost every jazz musician has owned a copy of the same book. It has a peach-colored cover, a chunky, 1970s-style logo, and a black plastic binding. It’s delightfully homemade-looking—like it was printed by a bunch of teenagers at a Kinkos. And inside is the sheet music for hundreds of common jazz tunes—also known as jazz “standards”—all meticulously notated by hand. It’s called the Real Book.

But if you were going to music school in the 1970s, you couldn’t just buy a copy of the Real Book at the campus bookstore. Because the Real Book… was illegal. The world’s most popular collection of Jazz music was a totally unlicensed publication. It was a self-published book created without permission from music publishers or songwriters. It was duplicated at photocopy shops and sold on street corners, out of the trunks of cars, and under the table at music stores where people used secret code words to make the exchange. The full story of how the Real Book came to be this bootleg bible of jazz is a complicated one. It’s a story about what happens when an insurgent, improvisational art form like Jazz gets codified and becomes something that you can learn from a book.

The whole story, both as text or podcast, is available here.