April Fool?

We lived in the UK for a long time and were regular readers of the Guardian newspaper. I still remember their wonderfully elaborate April Fools joke in 1977 when they published an entire lift-out supplement on the fictional islands of San Serif.  

This hoax was so successful, it has been reused a number of time over for other April Fool’s jokes. See the Museum of Hoaxes article for details,

I (like many others) assume that the IKEA car, the Leko which is due for unveiling on the 1st of April is also an April Fool’s hoax.  Let’s hope it is memorable.

 

In passing, I have been introduced to an extraordinary man – Donald Knuth. Knuth is clearly a brilliant mathematician and computer scientist. I had vaguely heard of him in connection with computer publishing and typesetting but hadn’t realised the full extent of his interests. Relevant to the San Serif hoax, Knuth is responsible for the Bank of San Serif which lists the fictional credits made to people who spot typographical errors in his books. He used to pay a finders fee of a hexadecimal dollar (256 cents) but has stopped doing so to protect his bank account details.

Aside from books and papers on serious computer topics,  Knuth has also written an article on the complexity of song. Deriving mathematical formulae for the degree of repetition of words and refrains in popular song. He writes “It is known that almost all songs of length n require a text of length ~ n. But this puts a considerable space requirement on one’s memory if many songs are to be learned; hence, our ancient ancestors invented the concept of a refrain. When the song has a refrain, its space complexity can be reduced to cn, where c < 1″. He then goes on to derive formula for songs with repetition such as Old Macdonald Had a Farm and  The Twelve Days of Christmas.

The full article can be found at The Complexity of Song

This is a slightly more academic approach to the subject of mathematics and music than my previous post and probably worthy of Tom Lehrer.

Graphing song titles

These graphed song titles appeal to the mathematician and musician in me.  Inevitably, some are cleverer than others. (Mostly from Graphic Jam.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Graph Jam also has a wonderful set of other funny graphs. Such as -

 

 

and my personal favourite

Her Morning Elegance

Just because I like it.  Lovely animation.

From the album ‘The Opposite Side of the Sea” by Israeli born Oren Lavie who seems to be living in Berlin.

Jazz in B&W

Watching, and more importantly listening, to the wonderful jazz short Jammin’ The Blues I was struck by how beautifully jazz and black and white photography go together. This1944 film is particularly stylish to look at on top of the sensational jam session it records. It turns out that the film was directed by the Albanian born American photographer Gjon Mili. Mili spent most of his career as a photographer for Life magazine, including taking many cover shots.

Mili was an innovator and had a great ability to capture movement, sometimes enhanced by multiple exposures – a technique he also used in Jammin’ The Blues. The film, which features Lester Young, begins on a top view of Young’s hat. A similar image to one used a few years later by Herman Leonard in his 1948 photograph of Lester Young’s hat.

I have a number of Herman Leonard’s photographs on my living room wall. Deep blacks, stark shadows, whips of smoke. They fill the room with music – complex , moody jazz.

To me, Herman Leonard is the great jazz photographer. His pictures are all atmosphere and music and of course could only be seen in black and white.

Compare those photographs of Dizzy, Duke and Billie with the better-known but more formal photographs by William Gottlieb.

No contest.

Incidentally, although many thousands of Leonard’s photographs were lost in Hurricane Katrina, fortunately for fans of these wonderful photographs, the negatives were saved.

Tom Lehrer

I have always been a huge fan of mathematician and musical satirist Tom Lehrer. In fact I had a precious autograph, dating back to the late 50’s, on a scrap of paper taped to my piano until it got lost in one of many house moves only a few years ago. His irreverent, clever and somewhat anarchic songs appealed to my particular sense of humour and I learned many of them. My mother laughingly regarded allowing letting her children listen to Tom Lehrer and read Mad Magazine as amongst her greatest failures as a parent.

I was delighted to have stumbled upon a site which features some new (to me) Tom Lehrer songs. It seems that young Harvard physics professor and later Nobel Prize winner, Norman Ramsey recorded (for those technically minded – on a wire recorder) a 1951/2 physics department review written by Tom Lehrer called The Physical Review.   

Some familiar songs such as ‘The Elements’ and ‘Fight Fiercely Harvard’ originate with that show but a number of them never made it to record. Fortunately the recording of most of those unreleased songs are available on the website.

It is worth noting the CVs of Lehrer’s fellow performers. These were not young students in an undergraduate review. These were already a very distinguished bunch of post doctoral physicists.

I hope that even though these are tight times for universities, there are still groups of high-flying PhD’s treading the boards.   

Rock photos

Rock music fans in Melbourne in the 1960s were well served by local bands. Dance venues always had live bands (or half-live if you count Tony Barber and tape-recorded backings), record shop appearances were reasonably frequent and there were live concerts at universities every week. What we didn’t have was access to the bands and artists from the rest of the world. Remember that this was before rock videos became ubiquitous and no specialist TV show to feature visiting bands. Except for a few bands brave enough to travel the vast distance to Australia, we had to largely depend on records and the radio to keep up with music from the UK and USA (forget the rest of the world, they didn’t count. I’m talking pre-ABBA afterall). The concerts were a big deal, even if they were held in that huge uncomfortable barn called Festival Hall. And the Stadium in Sydney wasn’t any better. They were great events – The Who and The Yardbirds stand out in my memory particularly.

There were occasional snippets from overseas that added a little joy. A friend used to send the New Musical Express from London, the ads in which made me incredible jealous. UK and US television variety shows sometimes featured bands and every now and then an Australian TV show included a visiting artist or band. Thankfully ‘Go-Set’ magazine had stories and pictures from overseas to keep the enthusiast informed.

With so little exposure to the world’s best music, it is no wonder that D A Pennibaker’s film of the Monterey Pop Festival – Monterey Pop made such a strong impression on me. I saw it several times when it came out and although the line-up of acts was incredible and included many of my favorite bands, the one that stands out in my memory is Janis Joplin.

How extraordinary then to discover Colin Beard 40 years later in a market in Maleny in the Glasshouse Mountains. Colin is a photographer, now taking beautiful nature pictures, but in the 60’s was one of the founders and the photographer for the aforementioned ‘Go-Set’. Colin, with writer Lily Brett spent several months travelling to the UK and the USA including the Monterey Pop Festival, returning stories from both places. Colin’s wonderful photographs from there were on show last year at the Nikon Gallery in Sydney and can also be seen online.

I bought a copy of the photo of Janis Joplin at the top of this page and it now sits on the wall above my computer. How wonderfully entangled to look at the clip from Monterey Pop and see Colin Beard in the reverse-angle shots, standing at the front of the stage taking the photo that is in front of me here.

Incidentally, a great resource for information about Australian music is the almanac section of Milesago – though they need a better search engine. The one they have does not work, but the pages themselves make a good nostalgic read and you can always use your browser’s search facility to search each year’s entry.

Musical food

Stumbling around the web this morning turned up this photo of a drum kit made of cheese – Gouda to be precise.

That got me wondering what other food based musical instruments I might find. I know about gourds being used to make musical instruments but what else could I find? Before long I was visiting the Vienna Vegetable Orchestra;

Perth based Flutenveg;

Fellow Australian Lindsey Pollak via the wonderful World Carrot Museum;

And finally to prove that you don’t have to be a vegetarian to enjoy making music – the charango – a guitar made out of armadillo shell;

All Time 100

Time magazine has just published their All-Time100 list of albums, an exercise always bound to provoke discussion about what should and shouldn’t be included. They have hedged their bets by calling it the ‘All-time 100’ rather than using words like ‘best albums’ or ‘favourite albums’ or even most ‘influential albums’. They give no indication of their selection criteria though interestingly the list is not a bad one. Perhaps they chose the name for the list simply to get the name of their publication in the title.

Naturally there are some personal favourites that are not there, which got me thinking about my own criteria for my all-time 100. I can come up with several factors that would get a record onto the list – those which are unquestionably great contributions to the world of music recording; those which hit the personal nostalgia button but may not have stood the test of time; and those which influenced my own musical development as a young musician. These are not mutually exclusive and any record that hits all three buttons should be first on my list. Interestingly several of those are on Time’s list.

I won’t try to construct a full list here, but here are some thoughts a few on albums from the 60’s and 70’s on the Time magazine list – and a few that are not.

I never owned a Beach Boys record and never sang a Beach Boys song in public, but I would probably now note Pet Sounds in my list, simply for its place in history and the generally held view that it was a musical milestone. Although Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is regarded as being heavily influence by the earlier Pet Sounds, it rates more highly for me as I owned it, sang it and have many splendid memories of listening to it.

The Velvet Underground And Nico would be there (as would Freak Out and The Fugs, although unsurprisingly no The Mothers of Invention or Fugs LP makes the list) as I have such strong memories of huddling around a portable record player in the 6^th form common room listening to them and being blown away by the raw sexual power of modern music combined with the references to the newly intriguing drugs. Sure I had already had my mind opened by both The Who and the Rolling Stones (both on Time’s list), but they were obviously tame because they were played on the radio. Listening to Velvet Underground or the Mothers or the Fugs now is not a great pleasure but the memory of where they stand in musical history is.

I can remember where I was when I first heard Blonde on Blonde and Abbey Road, both for me have also stood the test of time and both have provided songs for my own repertoire.

The main contributors to my list though, are those that either provided songs for me to sing or which influenced my musical style.

 

 

 

 

Simon and Garfunkle’s Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme – the bridge over which I travelled from folk music to rock.

From The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan to Nashville Skyline – great songs, great teenage memories

Songs of Leonard Cohen and Songs from a Room – folk music that was personal and sophisticated.

 Song to a Seagull, Clouds, Ladies of the Canyon and onwards to the best of all, Blue – Joni Mitchell’s beautiful songs, intriguing stories, and challenging chords for the young guitarist.

   

I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You and Lady Soul – Aretha Franklin introduced Soul to this white man.(though Otis Redding singing Try a Little Tenderness must share some credit too)

My Generation and A Quick One from the Who and Jimi Hendrix’s Are You Experienced – gave our band courage to believe that all you needed was one guitar, bass and drums to play truly great rock.

 

Getz/Gilberto – led me to a lifelong love of Brazilian music and of jazz, though it wasn’t too cool for a teenager to admit to being able to play Girl From Ipanema.

Similarly with Time Out and Time Further Out – not too cool to admit at the time but Dave Brubeck’s experiments with odd time signatures captured the mathematician in me.

The Broadway Cast Recording of Hair – they don’t write musicals where every song is memorable any more.

It wouldn’t be hard to make it to 100. I haven’t mentioned Fred Neil and Bert Jansch, Joe Cocker and The Band, Blood Sweat and Tears and The Doors, Luis Bonfa and Baden Powell – an eclectic mix which forms part of my personal story and all of whom had albums which would need to be considered for my list. And I haven’t left the 70’s yet. I’d want Graceland and Songs in the Key of Life on the list for a start. Maybe I need to be allowed more than 100!

Looking at these albums I realise how individual each of them are. The songs on Freewheelin’ are so different from those on Nashville Skyline that each record has a clear personality. The LP was a natural extension of the musical suite. Styles, motifs, moods all linked together. What happens when all music consists of individual tracks gleamed from various places and stuck together on an MP3 player or a burned CD? I can’t believe that is not a lesser experience. Surly the great album is greater than it’s parts?