I’m currently sitting in my office eating a sandwich and girding my loins for three hours of appraisal training this afternoon. Just time, therefore, to post this musical gem I recently discovered on Youtube. It’s Bill Evans recorded in 1965
Miles Davis said of Bill Evans “He plays the piano the way it should be played”. I’m not going to disagree with that, because I think Bill Evans was wonderful, but keep an ear out for Chuck Israels fantastic work on bass too!
Follow @telescoperThe term “musical genius” is over-used to the point of absurdity these days, but if it ever applied to anyone at all then that man was Rahsaan Roland Kirk. I saw a version of his Serenade to a Cuckoo on TV last night and it made me realize I haven’t posted nearly enough of Kirk’s music on this blog, so here’s a different version; only a part of the one I saw last night is available on Youtube. This version, followed on this clip by an abrupt edit into another number, was recorded live at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1972.
Kirk was one of the few jazz musicians of the “modern” era to win wide acclaim outside his own genre: Jimi Hendrix idolized him, for example. And who wouldn’t? He could play umpteen instruments, often several of them at the same time, with a joyous creative energy that would have been wonderful to experience in a live performance. As well as playing just about every wind instrument under the Sun, he was also adept at the difficult art of circular breathing, i.e. in through the nose and out through the mouth in such a way that air is kept moving through the instrument continuously. Kirk could play for as long as 20 minutes without apparently pausing for breath. His extraordinary technique is almost enough to make any aspiring saxophonist give up altogether. But Kirk was never just a technician – he had a wonderful musical imaginative, peppered with originality and wit. And for those people who think modern jazz takes itself far too seriously, this is so obviously full of fun I hope you change your mind. Above all, just bask in the wonder that was Roland Kirk.
Follow @telescoperI’m up early to travel up to the Big Smoke where I’ll be all day todayday today so here’s something nice while I’m away. Music by George Gershwin, lyrics by Ira Gershwin, and vocals by Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald. Who could ask for anything more? Take it away, Ella & Louis!
Follow @telescoperOut of the office today so in lieu of a post from me here’s two minutes and twenty seconds of exquisite sadness delivered by the voice of the great Billie Holliday. No singer in history ever managed to express so much through such slender lyrics. The piano is played by Charlie Beal on this recording.
Follow @telescoperI noticed a news item this morning which explains that the Supernova Cosmology Project have found a supernova with a redshift of 1.71, which makes it the most distant one found so far (about 10 billion light-years away). That – and hopefully others at similar distances – should prove immensely useful for working out how the expansion rate of the Universe has changed over its history and hence yield important clues about the nature of its contents, particularly the mysterious dark energy.
Of particular relevance to this blog is the name given to this supernova, Mingus, after the jazz musician and composer Charles Mingus. Both the discovery and the great choice of name are grounds for celebration, so here’s one of my favourite Mingus tracks – the delightfully carefree and exuberant Eat that Chicken, from the Album Oh Yeah. Enjoy!
Follow @telescoperIt’s a cold and dreary Sunday and I’m definitely in need of a pick-me-up, so I thought I’d share this you. It was recorded live in 1981 by the Carla Bley Band and can be found on a superb album called, appropriately enough, Carla Bley Live! When this record came out I was an avid listener to Humphrey Lyttelton’s radio show The Best of Jazz and he chose this magnificent track featuring the trombonist Gary Valente as a taster for the album. It became one of the all-time favourites on his show and he played it a number of times over the years. It’s also one of the most-played tracks on my iPod, as I find it very uplifting on long and wearisome train journeys.
The trombone is usually described as a brass instrument, but Gary Valente makes his sound more like it’s made of wrought iron; Humph described the sound as as “like that of a wounded bison”. Anyway, ignore the rather dull pictures of churches used in the video, and just listen to one of the most overwhelming performances in all of Jazz; the immensity of Valente’s trombone sound is at times almost terrifying. And if you’re one of those people who dislikes Jazz that’s stylistically dated later than about 1945, give this a hearing because it’s absolutely drenched in the Blues and Gospel traditions. I’ll even let you call it awesome…
P.S. No, I haven’t gone religious, but this track disproves the old theory that the devil has the best music…
Follow @telescoperIt’s Sunday and once again I have to go into the office in order to get next week’s teaching sorted out, so no time for one of my long boring weekend specials. However, I thought I’d continue the theme of yesterday’s offering (?) with this clip of Jackson Jeffrey Jackson demonstrating his unique trumpet style after a short interview with the great Louis Balfour. Nice. Don’t ask me what the tune is though. After all, this is Jazz!
Follow @telescoperYesterday we hosted a seminar by João Magueijo from Imperial College. It was a really interesting talk but the visit also a number of staff and students, including myself, the chance to chat to João about various things. In my case that primarily meant catching up on one another’s news, since we haven’t talked since early summer and a lot has happened since then. Then we had drinks, more drinks, dinner, drinks and then cocktails, finishing about 2am. A fairly standard night out with João, actually.
Among the topics discussed in the course of an increasingly drunken conversation was the fact that physicist Stephon Alexander had recently moved to Dartmouth College, a prestigious Ivy League institution in New Hampshire. I don’t know Stephon very well at all as I don’t really work in the same area as him. In fact, we’ve only ever met once – at a Cosmology School in Morocco (in 1996 or thereabouts); he was a graduate student and I was giving some lectures. On the left you can see a snap of him I took at that time. Can that really have been so long ago?
Anyway, I’ll resist the temptation to bemoan the passage of time and all that and get back to the point which is the connection that formed in my head between Stephon, yesterday’s post about the trials and tribulations facing prospective PhD students, and an older post of mine about the importance of not forgetting to live a life while you do a PhD.
The point is that although there are many things that may deter or prevent an undergraduate from taking the plunge into graduate studies, one thing shouldn’t put you off and that is the belief that doing a PhD is like joining a monastery in that it requires you to give up a lot of other things and retreat from the outside world. Frankly, that’s bollocks. If I’m permitted to quote myself:
I had plenty of outside interests (including music, sport and nightlife) and took time out regularly to indulge them. I didn’t – and still don’t – feel any guilt about doing that. I’m not a robot. And neither are you.
In other words, doing a PhD does not require you to give up the things that make life worth living. Actually, if you’re doing a physics PhD then physics itself should be one of the things that make life worth living for you, so I should rephrase that as “giving up any of the other things that make life worth living”.
Having a wide range of experiences and interests to draw on can even help with your research:
In fact, I can think of many times during my graduate studies when I was completely stuck on a problem – to the extent that it was seriously bothering me. On such occasions I learned to take a break. I often found that going for a walk, doing a crossword, or just trying to think about something else for a while, allowed me to return to the problem fresher and with new ideas. I think the brain gets into a rut if you try to make it work in one mode all the time.
I’d say that to be a good research student by no means requires you to be a monomaniac. And this is where Stephon comes in. As well as being a Professor of Theoretical Physics, Stephon is an extremely talented Jazz musician. He’s even had saxophone lessons from the great Ornette Coleman. I have to admit he has a few technical problems with his instrument in this clip, but I’m using him as an example here because I also love Jazz and, although I have a negligible amount of talent as a musician, have rudimentary knowledge of how to play the saxophone. In fact, I remember chatting to him in a bar in Casablanca way back in ’96 and music was the sole topic of conversation.
Anyway, in the following clip Stephon talks about how music actually helped him solve a research problem. It’s basically an extended riff on the opening notes of the John Coltrane classic Giant Steps which, incidentally, I posted about here.
Follow @telescoperA late post this evening, as I’m just back from a short visit to Brighton. I travelled down there yesterday evening and stayed with an old friend in a house I lived in for a time about 25 years ago. I spent most of today meeting some of my future colleagues at the University of Sussex, who made me feel very welcome, and also catching up on some important things to be dealt with when I take over there in the new year. It’s all part of a gradual process of acclimatisation which I’ll need to do so I don’t take ages getting up to speed when I officially start. I didn’t get much time to wander about the town, but many Brighton memories have flooded back over the last couple of days. Cue an old favourite track that I listened to this evening on the train on the way home. It’s from a lovely album recorded by the unlikely combination of John Coltrane and Duke Ellington. They were men of different musical generations, but they admired each other enormously. It’s clear from the relaxed nature of this collaboration that neither felt he had any points to prove; each adapts his style to suit the other, with gorgeous results.
Follow @telescoperI’m a bit annoyed with myself for having forgotten to mark the centenary of the first performance of Arnold Schönberg’s extraordinary work Pierrot Lunaire, which took place on October 16th 1912, in Berlin. Here’s a hasty reworking of an old post to make up for my lapse.
It’s hard to know exactly what to call Pierrot Lunaire. It’s basically a musical setting of a series of poems (by Albert Giraud, but translated into German) so you might be tempted to call it a song cycle. However, it’s not quite that because the words are not exactly sung, but performed in a half-singing half-spoken style called Sprechstimme. Moreover, they’re not really performed in the usual kind of recital, but in a semi-staged setting rather like a cabaret. It’s not really an opera, either, because there’s only one character and it doesn’t really have the element of music drama.
The whole thing only lasts about 40 minutes so the 21 individual pirces are quite short, and they’re arranged as three groups of seven with the narrator Pierrot dealing with different themes in each group. The work was written in 1912 and is his Opus 21, so it’s a relatively early example of Schönberg’s atonal music but before he turned towards full-blown serialism. Atonalism isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but it can (and does in this case) allow a hugely varied musical landscape to be constructed by a small group of instruments.
I’ve heard this work before, on the radio, and found it very intriguing but then I saw a youtube clip of the film version made in 1997 with Christine Schäfer as Pierrot. This is not a film of a concert or a recital, but an extraordinary visual response to the remarkable music and words. The director, Oliver Hermann, creates a grotesque dreamlike urban setting through which Pierrot wanders like a ghost, with emotions alternating between desperate alienation and amused reflection. I think music and film together create a wonderful work of art, which has gone right to the top of my list of favourite music DVDs.
Atonal music is very good for communicating a sense of disorientation and loneliness, course. The lack of tonal centre (or key) means that the listener is denied the usual points of harmonic reference. Hum doh-ray-me-fah-soh-la-ti and you’re drawn very powerfully back to the tonic doh. Deny this framework and the listener feels discomforted, but also, at least in my case, gripped.
Miles Davis’ classic album Kind of Blue – arguably the greatest jazz record of all time – was the first record I heard in which jazz musicians experimented with atonalism, and it has the same effect on most listeners: a spreading sense of melancholia and introspection. Perhaps not great for party music, but, in its own way, extremely beautiful.
Here’s the clip I saw on youtube that started me off on this. It’s the eighth item of Pierrot Lunaire (or, more accurately, the first of the second group of seven; Schönberg was quite obsessed with the number 7, apparently). It’s quite short, so hopefully won’t upset those who can’t stand atonal music for more than a few seconds, but it nicely exemplifies the extraordinary surreal imagery conjured up by the director as a response to the equally extraordinary music. Fantastic.
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In the Dark 