Tagged: Music

Mini review: Summer of Soul (…or, when the revolution could not be televised)

Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful stuff. Way more than just the music – a look at a significant moment in time. Simply do not miss this.

Mini review: “The Storyteller” by Dave Grohl (audiobook edition)

An excellent autobiography – his time in Nirvana is only a small part of the story.

It’s great having him read the book himself (this is definitely the way to experience it, so naturally done) and I really enjoyed every minute.

If you are in any way interested in music this is a book you should hear…

Article: “SPACEWAR” by Stewart Brand (Rolling Stone magazine, December 1972)

• Read the article: “SPACEWAR” by Stewart Brand (Rolling Stone magazine, December 1972)

I buy quite a few books that then sit on a shelf, Kindle or Audible account for several years. Since the year 2000 I’ve had “Dealers of Lightning”, a history of the earliest days of (American) computing, waiting to be read. The other day I was flicking through the notes at the back of the book and this article was mentioned so I tracked it down online.

SPACEWAR is an article that appeared in Rolling Stone magazine in December 1972 written by Stewart Brand. Brand is fondly remembered by older technologists as the founder of an early online community called the WELL and the Whole Earth Catalog, a late 60’s / 70’s catalogue for members of the American counter-culture.

Friends, I won’t be able to explain every computer-technical term that comes by. Fortunately you don’t need them to get the gist of what’s happening.

 

A distinct, intelligent vibe

There is a distinct, intelligent vibe in the style of writing, although I wonder how much readers at the time were able to decipher what the author meant when he describes what is happening during the game. It makes sense to people today because we are all familiar with video games, but to put this article in some kind of context it appeared one week after the arcade game Pong was released and six years before Space Invaders.

Talking of vibe, this article reminds me a lot of Tom Wolfe’s wonderful look at the invention of the integrated circuit  (microchip) and the birth of Silicon Valley in “The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce” from Esquire magazine. If you haven’t read either article, start with Wolfe’s. You won’t regret it.

 

Plus ça change…

Something else you notice is how things haven’t changed much in 45 years – for example  Artificial Intelligence is still the bleeding edge in technical prowess…

There’s a speech recognition project. There’s the hand-eye project, in which the computer is learning to see and visually correct its robot functions. There’s work on symbolic computation and grammatical inference.

…and the image of the computer geek (“Computer Bum” or “hacker”) was also already being cultivated:

The hackers are the technicians of this science – “It’s a term of derision and also the ultimate compliment.” They are the ones who translate human demands into code that the machines can understand and act on. They are legion. Fanatics with a potent new toy. A mobile new-found elite, with its own apparat, language and character, its own legends and humor.

 

The beginnings of the internet

There is also some history of ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency), from which came the Arpanet and subsequently the internet.

“90 percent of all good things that I can think of that have been done in computer science have been done funded by that agency. Chances that they would have been funded elsewhere are very low.”

Some of today’s technology jargon was in use back then too – there is mention of users sitting down “on-line” with a computer, and the ARPA Network being “up” (working) or “down” (crashed).

The dream for the Net was that researchers at widely separated facilities could share special resources, dip into each other’s files, and even work on-line together on design problems too complex to solve alone.

 

“How Net usage will evolve is uncertain”

Also, they saw possible opportunities and risks when connecting machines together, echoing today’s debates over internet freedoms vs surveillance:

How Net usage will evolve is uncertain. There’s a curious mix of theoretical fascination and operational resistance around the scheme. The resistance may have something to do with reluctances about equipping a future Big Brother and his Central Computer. The fascination resides in the thorough rightness of computers as communications instruments, which implies some revolutions.

They were aware that the Net had the opportunity to disrupt industries and even back then they picked out the news industry and the music biz:

From anywhere on the Net you can log in and get the news that’s coming live over the wire … Project that to household terminals, and so much for newspapers (in present form).

Since huge quantities of information can be computer-digitalized and transmitted, music researchers could, for example, swap records over the Net with “essentially perfect fidelity.” So much for record stores (in present form).

 

Their ideas, our world

One aspect that came over very strongly – reading this with the benefit of hindsight – is how the ideas from this group of people have shaped the computing environment we have today. Some of the projects they were working on or discussing may not have had names back then but they do now. Examples? How about the paperless office or desktop publishing.

But it was the picture of the “Dynabook” that took my breath away.

dynabook

It looks like an iPad with the on-screen keyboard showing…

ipad_dynabook

It is described as:

a hand-held stand-alone interactive-graphic computer… It’ll have a graphics capability which’ll let you make sketches, make drawings… Working with a stylus on the display screen… incorporate music in it so you can use it for composing… It has the Smalltalk language capability which lets people program their own things very easily… And of course it plays Spacewar.”

That description sounds to me like the Apple Pencil, iTunes / Garageband, Swift Playgrounds and Apps.

Products from Apple – the biggest company in the world today by market capitalization.

(Addendum: Some product names from Apple include PowerBook, iBook, Macbook)

 

Ideas at the core of Apple?

Now having discovered this article I think that Steve Jobs’ ideas on the nature of computing could have been inspired by this kind of reporting. This article from Rolling Stone came out in December 1972, more than 3 years before the founding of Apple in 1976. He was 17 when this article came out.

One of the ideals that comes across throughout this article is what the impact could be once computers are accessible to everyone:

away from hugeness and centrality, toward the small and the personal, toward putting maximum computer power in the hands of every individual who wants it… They’ll reach millions when computer power becomes like telephone power…. I think it’s important to bring computing to the people… Far beyond borrowing some one else’s computer is having your own computer… Computing power to the people.

That sounds like the Macintosh – the computer for the rest of us.

 

Conclusion

There is so much here to enjoy. I heartily recommend you read this if you have any interest in computing. I just wonder how many more of these articles are out there in old general interest magazines.


The article in all its 1970’s glory:

Cover

Page1

Page2

Page3

Page4

Page4pt2

Page5

Page6

Four great new jazz albums (October 2017)

dreamsdaggers-COLLAGE

I’m not a big jazz fan, so this has come as a nice surprise.

A couple of nights ago I was flicking through the jazz section of Apple Music and I discovered the new album by Kamasi Washington, who I was lucky enough to see play live last year at the Royal Albert Hall in London as part of the Late Night Proms series.

Venturing further I came across Cécile McLorin Salvan’s new live album. She has a wonderful voice, total control and a delicious sense of humour.

That’s typically as far as my interest in jazz has taken me for a long time.

Then I took a punt on a couple of cool-looking albums – by Keyon Harrold and the Blue Note All Stars – and loved them both.

I’ve still got a lot of listening to do to appreciate them all fully but I highly recommend you check them out:

Kamasi Washington – Harmony of Difference
Cécile McLorin Salvant – Dreams and Daggers
Keyon Harrold – The Mugician
Blue Note All Stars – Our Point of View

Much Ado About Nothing (The Globe Theatre, London)

muchadopostcard

 

I’ve never had a particular interest in Shakespeare but earlier this year we did a family tour of the Globe Theatre, situated on London’s Southbank. We had an engaging guide and this led to taking my daughter to see a rather unconventional version of Romeo and Juliet. I had a rough idea of the plot, but in that moment the play came alive.

The one problem we had was that – despite paying for pretty expensive seats – we had an obscured view. A wooden pillar a couple of rows in front meant that I spent most of the time leaning to the right a bit to make sure I had a good view of the stage.  The person next to me was very obliging.

Still, in the afterglow of the performance I booked to see Much Ado About Nothing.  This time I wanted to be in the midst of things, in with the crowd, exposed to the elements, up close.  This meant a couple of things:

  • I got a ticket for £5 (!)
  • I went on my own as my daughter refused to stand for 3 hours

Anyway, I got my clear viewpoint:

muchado_closeup

Being that close is a fantastic experience, a visceral connection.  You get a face full of smoke.  The gunshots ring in your ears.  At times I had to shuffle forward as the cast passed through behind me to get to another stage in the crowd.

The performance was stunning, vibrant, poignant, funny.  The play is set in Mexico, 1914, and was performed with such energy I completely forgot that it was in Shakespearean English and just enjoyed the spectacle:

At the end you feel elated and with the sense that you must have just seen the best show in London.

At the time of writing (mid September 2017) there is still time to see the production.  If you can get tickets, I urge you to go even if you think that Shakespeare isn’t your thing.  After seeing this, it will be.

Next year I will be back, regardless of what is showing.

Concert: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, Etihad Stadium Manchester, 25 May 2016

bruce_ticket

I’d been waiting since the beginning of the year to see Bruce Springsteen in concert.  I kept an eye on his website and watched as he added extra shows in the US and then concerts in Portugal and Spain.  The UK had to be soon.

Too soon.

Of the four dates in the UK three were whilst I was out of the country, including the London gig at Wembley Stadium.  Damn.  I got the feeling that I was not meant to see this tour, but I really wanted to as The Boss is not getting any younger and I did not want to wait for the next time round when he would be pushing 70.

There was one solution, one show that I could make but it meant going to Manchester, some 200+ miles and 3+ hours on the train.

So I found a place on Airbnb that was within walking distance of the stadium and the journey (pilgrimage?) went without a hitch.  I was going to follow a map to get to the stadium but when I got to the main road it was simply a case of following the several thousand other fans walking in that direction.  The route from the main train station in Manchester (Piccadilly) to the Etihad stadium is an official route that is properly signposted, and I would recommend that people walk it if possible especially once I saw the situation after the concert with traffic jams and road closures.

The weather can go either way at the end of May and I was hoping that we were going to get a nice sunny, warm evening.  No chance.  Manchester was the only place in the country where it was raining and it kept it up all night.  It was soon forgotten once the band came onstage but it would have been good to just go in a t-shirt instead…

In the days before the concert I had been looking at the setlists for the recent shows and hoping he was not going to change too much – at a Bruce show you never know what you’re going to get but I liked the look of what he had been playing.  At the start of The River tour – in the US –  they were starting the concerts by playing the River double album in its entirety but by the time they got to Europe this was a thing of the past – we got a good number of the songs but broken up during the set.  I’m glad as it’s not my favourite Bruce album – I find it quite schizophrenic with its darker songs mixed with pretty simple rocking tunes.

The band had been playing a number of different first songs and we got Atlantic City – a good start.  Then they dropped Murder Incorporated.  This was going to be a good night.  A few more songs in and the rain eased up a bit.

And then things got a bit… festive.  This happened…

Looking out at the signs in the audience Bruce spotted a guy in a Father Christmas jacket with a sign saying “Santa Claus is Coming to Manchester”.  He was invited up on stage and soon the bells were ringing out, the band kicked in with “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” and the crowd was loving it.  It was a bizarre but beautiful moment, a highlight of the evening.

Things did get more serious for a while.  Bruce got into a more sombre character to tackle a few songs.  They went for a different interpretation of I Wanna Marry You.  It’s always good to see artists try new angles but on this occasion it was turned into something rather tepid and flat.  Shame.  The situation was rescued by The River followed by an intimate, almost conversational Point Blank – quite an achievement to pull off in a stadium.

I had mixed feelings when they played Darlington County / Working on the Highway.  It was great to hear the songs but Bruce went down to the front of the crowd and disappeared from the stage for a long time. You could see him on the big screens but by the end of the second song I was feeling a bit left out just watching it on video.

All was forgiven when a little later they did this…

The Rising > Thunder Road > Backstreets > Born to Run > Glory Days > Dancing in the Dark > Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out > Shout > Bobby Jean

Holy shit.  The place was rocking, rolling, dancing, singing.  I’m struggling to describe it but the next day I saw a tweet that summed it up:

Over the next few days I looked at the setlists of the shows that came after.  They got a number of songs from the first album which would have been great to hear. Coventry got Seven Nights to Rock and Dublin / London got Jungleland thrown into that last mix. Drool. But I was very happy with the setlist we got at Manchester.

I’ve seen Springsteen four times now and this was the best show yet.  They played over 3 hours and never stopped.  Any doubts that he is getting too old are ridiculous.  He is in the shape of his life.

A fantastic night. A stunning, well humoured performance.  Book me in again if he comes back any time soon.

Setlist: The River Tour 2016 Manchester Etihad Stadium

The Guardian: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band review – the magic and madness go on

The Manchester Evening News: Review: Bruce Springsteen @ The Etihad Stadium

Sunday Express: Bruce Springsteen shows Manchester who’s The Boss on The River Tour first night

The Independent: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, Etihad Stadium, review: Boss proves he is an enduring treasure

The Telegraph: ‘Bruce Springsteen is one of the last great showmen of his era’ – Etihad Stadium Manchester, review

The Financial Times: Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band, Etihad Stadium, Manchester — ‘High-octane’

The Mirror: Bruce Springsteen’s energy is unbeatable with marathon live performance in Manchester

 

Great albums I’ve found on Apple Music

Kamasi-Washington-The-Epic-COLLAGE

I’ve subscribed to Apple Music pretty much since the beginning and our family uses it on both iOS and Android.  It is not perfect, suffering from a number of little flaws on my old iPhone, but its recommendations have led me to discover some great music.  This tends to be in areas that I would not generally venture into such as jazz.

The radio stations are also getting better now that I am telling them what to play more (or less) of.  I never really expected to use the radio stations but I’m listening this way more and more.

It’s still very hard to link to songs / albums in Apple Music, so this is a simple list.  Try these out – you might like them…

Beth Hart – Better Than Home

Cécile McLorin Salvant – For One To Love / WomanChild

Diego Figueiredo – Broken Bossa

Joanne Shaw Taylor – The Dirty Truth

Kamasi Washington – The Epic

Mack Avenue SuperBand – Live from the Detroit Jazz Festival 2012 / 2013 / 2014 / 2015

Matthew Halsall & The Gondwana Orchestra – Into Forever / When the World Was One

Max Richter – From Sleep / Recomposed By Max Richter: Vivaldi, The Four Seasons

Nils Frahm – Wintermusik

The Souljazz Orchestra – Resistance / Inner Fire

 

 

Mini review: “The Race For Space” by Public Service Broadcasting

public-service-broadcasting-the-race-for-space-us-cover

I heard one of the band members talking on the radio about how they go about making their music and it sounded really interesting, so I checked this out.  They find old audio recordings and then make music around them.  This album is all about the early space race, so they are using snippets from NASA and the Russian space agency archives.

It can be vibrant and funky but also poignant, suspenseful and sad. These are reflections on real events and as such they showcase the full range of emotions involved in taking those first few steps towards one of mankind’s greatest endevours.

This is not something that I would have been aware of if I hadn’t heard it on the radio and I wondered at first why I like it so much.  Then it occurred to me that lately I have been drifting off to sleep listening to the soundtrack from the film Gravity and Jean Michel Jarre’s Equinoxe.  It fits right in.

A word about the cover art.  The cover of the album that you will normally see is the image above – the “USA” version.  However on the other side is the “Russian” version.  These are interchangeable.  Here’s the Russian version:

public-service-braodcasting-the-race-for-space-cccp

Article: We Are Alive – Bruce Spingsteen at sixty-two (The New Yorker)

This will become a definitive article on the Boss. A look at how age is taking its toll on the band, the impact of the deaths of Danny Federici and – in particular – Clarence Clemons on the dynamic of the band, Springsteen’s relationship with his father, the fate of the E Street Band’s first drummer, a portrait of Springsteen’s manager, Springsteen’s darker thoughts and life on the road.

It is mammoth 16,000 word piece, and one of my favourite articles ever. Full stop.

• The New Yorker:  We Are Alive – Bruce Spingsteen at sixty-two

Also see:

Bruce and Stevie rock the Underground Garage!

Springsteen on life and songs

Bruce Springsteen, Darkness Revisited

* R.I.P Clarence Clemons

…unlike the Rolling Stones, say, who have not written a great song since the disco era and come together only to pad their fortunes as their own cover band, Springsteen refuses to be a mercenary curator of his past. He continues to evolve as an artist, filling one spiral notebook after another with ideas, quotations, questions, clippings, and, ultimately, new songs.

His style in performance is joyously demonic, as close as a white man of Social Security age can get to James Brown circa 1962 without risking a herniated disk or a shattered pelvis.

So the display of exuberance is critical. “For an adult, the world is constantly trying to clamp down on itself,” he says. “Routine, responsibility, decay of institutions, corruption: this is all the world closing in. Music, when it’s really great, pries that shit back open and lets people back in, it lets light in, and air in, and energy in, and sends people home with that and sends me back to the hotel with it. People carry that with them sometimes for a very long period of time.”

The E Street Band members are not Springsteen’s equals. “This is not the Beatles,” as Weinberg puts it. They are salaried musicians; in 1989, they were fired en masse. They await his call to record, to tour, to rehearse. And so when Springsteen sprang out of his chair and said, “O.K., time to work,” they straightened up and watched for his cue.

Although more than half the show will be the same from night to night, the rest is up for grabs.

“The essence of the way this band moves is one of soul. It’s supposed to be overwhelming. You shouldn’t be able to catch your breath. That’s what being a front man is all about—the idea of having something supple underneath you, that machine that roars and can turn on a dime.”

Clemons was a colossus—six-four, a former football player… He was not a great improviser, but his solos, painstakingly scripted over long hours in the studio with Springsteen, were set pieces in every show…. Clemons gave Springsteen a mythic companion who embodied the fraternal spirit of the band. “Standing next to Clarence was like standing next to the baddest ass on the planet,” Springsteen said of him in tribute. “You felt like no matter what the day or the night brought, nothing was going to touch you.”… Clemons’s life style was considerably less disciplined than Springsteen’s, and, in recent years, his body had been breaking down, requiring hip replacements, knee replacements, back surgery…. “C lived a life where he did what he wanted to do, and he let the chips, human and otherwise, fall where they may.”… “Losing Clemons was like losing “the sea and the stars”

“The band is a little community up there,” Springsteen said, “and it gathers together, and we try to heal the parts that God broke and honor the parts that are no longer with us.”

“My dad was very nonverbal—you couldn’t really have a conversation with him,” Springsteen told me. “I had to make my peace with that, but I had to have a conversation with him, because I needed to have one.”

“T-Bone Burnett said that rock and roll is all about ‘Daaaaddy!’ It’s one embarrassing scream of ‘Daaaaddy!’ It’s just fathers and sons, and you’re out there proving something to somebody in the most intense way possible. It’s, like, ‘Hey, I was worth a little more attention than I got! You blew that one, big guy!’ ”

“Remember, we didn’t go into this life because we were courageous or brilliant,” Van Zandt said. “We were the last guys standing. Anyone with a choice to do something else—be a dentist, get a real job, whatever—took it!”

The Springsteen Lopez describes was a young man of uncommon ambition who was also prone to bouts of withdrawal.

…the new, seventeen-piece version of the E Street Band…

Springsteen has to do so much—lead the band, pace the show, sing, play guitar, command the audience, project to every corner of the hall, including the seats behind the stage—that to wing it completely is asking for disaster.

“We got some old friends, and we got some new friends, and we’ve got a story to tell you . . .”

Springsteen will never again have huge sellers like “Born in the U.S.A.,”…What makes Springsteen an economic power at this point is his status as a live performer.

Landau has been getting a healthy cut of the Springsteen business for more than thirty years.

I saw rock and roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen. And on a night when I needed to feel young, he made me feel like I was hearing music for the very first time. . . . He is a rock ’n’ roll punk, a Latin street poet, a ballet dancer, an actor, a joker, bar band leader, hot-shit rhythm guitar player, extraordinary singer, and a truly great rock ’n’ roll composer.

Springsteen started to think in larger terms than cars and highways; he began to look at his own story, his family’s story, in terms of class and American archetypes.

…both an artist and an entertainer on a large stage.

Springsteen “is the smartest person I’ve ever known—not the most informed or the most educated — but the smartest…”

As Springsteen grew more worldly, he became far more political… A political consciousness could be felt on “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” and it grew in the years that followed… Springsteen knew he had run out of things to say about desperate nights on the Turnpike; he wanted to write songs he could sing as an adult, about marriage, about being a father, and about larger social issues… He was singing now about Vietnam veterans, migrant workers, class, social divisions, deindustrialized cities, and forgotten American towns…

By the mid-eighties, Springsteen was the biggest rock star in the world, capable of selling out Giants Stadium ten shows in a row… With the “Born in the U.S.A.” album, Springsteen combined political virtue and popular appeal, protest and party time… “Born in the U.S.A.” went platinum and became the best-selling record of 1985 and of Springsteen’s career.

The E Street Band is an ensemble of characters…

“Now I see that two of the best days of my life were the day I picked up the guitar and the day that I learned how to put it down.”

Springsteen has been faulted for taking himself too seriously, and the microworld around him takes him so seriously that to an outsider it can occasionally seem like a cocoon of piety.

“A Springsteen show is a lot of things, and it’s partly a religious experience.”

“…you are driven by your needs out there—the raw hunger and the raw need of exciting people and exciting yourself into some higher state.”

“Remember, we’re also running a business here, so there is a commercial exchange, and that ticket is my handshake. That ticket is me promising you that it’s gonna be all the way every chance I get. That’s my contract. And ever since I was a young guy I took that seriously.”

“We hope to send people out of the building we play in with a slightly more enhanced sense of what their options might be, emotionally, maybe communally. You empower them a little bit, they empower you… That’s what we do for one another.”