This is my favorite song by the Roots, and one of my favorite songs by anyone ever. I got curious about it the last time it came up in iTunes shuffle, and did some searching. I was surprised to find out that, so far as I can tell, no one has ever written anything about …
Continue reading “The Roots – “The Lesson Part III (It’s Over Now)””
If, like me, you are a Thelonious Monk fan, you will be sad to learn that this song has very little to do with Thelonious Monk. J Dilla compares his greatness as an emcee to Monk’s greatness as a pianist, and “Thelonious” kind of rhymes with “microphonist.” That’s the extent of the connection. Regardless, “Thelonius” …
After doing “Straight, No Chaser,” I’m now diving into another one of Monk’s greatest hits, “Rhythm-a-Ning,” at the request of Christian Gentry. Monk’s take on the ubiquitous “I Got Rhythm” chord progression has a lot in common with “Straight, No Chaser.” They both use the most generic materials possible to produce something that still sounds …
Thelonious Monk wrote a lot of excellent blues tunes. “Straight, No Chaser” is the weirdest and coolest one. Here’s his first recording of it, from 1951: Here’s another good one, from his 1967 record of the same name:
Anne Danielsen’s book Presence and Pleasure: The Funk Grooves of James Brown and Parliament is one of my favorite works of musicology. In the book, Danielsen distinguishes between songs and grooves. “Yesterday” by the Beatles is a song. “The Payback” by James Brown is a groove. In structural terms, a groove is a small musical …
The BBC is doing a Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony remix contest. You have to be a UK resident to enter, but anyone can download the samples and stems. They are pretty interesting! The producers recorded the orchestra’s instrument groups in isolation to create the stems, and they apparently tempo-mapped the whole thing to 108 BPM so …
Over the summer, with the BLM protests raging, my fellow music educators were doing a lot of soul-searching about the more problematic items in the traditional repertoire. The conversation inevitably turned toward “The Star-Spangled Banner,” with some questions about its appropriateness as a national anthem. Francis Scott Key owned slaves, and the third verse of …
Like most piano students at his level, my kid is now learning Beethoven’s Bagatelle No. 25 in A minor for solo piano, better known to the world as “Für Elise.” Or more accurately, he’s learning part of it. There turn out to be more sections than the iconic minor-key hook we’re all familiar with. These …
This morning I saw this tweet: Lonely Woman but it's Gregorian chant — wayne&wax (@wayneandwax) October 30, 2020 I read it and thought, huh, that’s interesting. So I opened an Ableton session and put “Lonely Woman” by Ornette Coleman on a track. I have a few Hildegard von Bingen pieces in my iTunes, and I …
There is a lot going on in “DUCKWORTH”, between the story, the samples, and the production. I’m just focused on Kendrick’s flow for now, but there is a mountain of musicological study to be done with the other aspects of the song, and how the song relates to the rest of the album. Check out …
