I have a longstanding musical relationship with Michael Jackson. There’s nothing remarkable about that; many people do. Like the rest of my age cohort, Michael entered my consciousness with Thriller in the early 1980s. Aside from a period in my teens and young adulthood, he has rarely been out of my ears since. The relationship …
Category Archives: Key Musicians
Hip-hop teaches confidence lessons
I’m working on a paper about music education and hip-hop, and I’m going to use this post to work out some thoughts. My wife and I spent our rare date night going to see Black Panther at BAM. It was uplifting. Many (most?) black audience members came dressed in full Afrofuturistic splendor. A group of …
The happiest chord progression ever
See also: the saddest chord progression ever. And also check out this deep dive into the groove of “I Want You Back.” We customarily think of descending melodies and chord progressions as being sad–they call it the “lament bass” for a reason. You may be surprised to learn, then, that the happiest song of all …
Duke Ellington, Percy Grainger, and the status of jazz in the music academy
On October 25, 1932, Percy Grainger invited Duke Ellington and his orchestra to perform “Creole Love Call” as part of a music lecture at New York University. It was the first time any university had invited a jazz musician to perform in an academic context. I will argue that the meeting of Grainger and Ellington …
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In praise of the Reflex Re-Edit
The Reflex is a London-based French DJ and producer named Nicolas Laugier. He specializes in a particular kind of remix, the re-edit, in which you rework a song using only sounds found within the song itself. Some re-edits keep the original song more or less intact, and just give it a punchier mix, a more …
The fake and the real in Chance the Rapper’s “All We Got”
[I wrote this before Kanye went full MAGA; I have since lost some enthusiasm for him.] Every semester in Intro to Music Tech, we have Kanye West Day, when we listen analytically to some of Yeezy’s most sonically adventurous tracks (there are many to choose from.) The past few semesters, Kanye West Day has centered …
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Ableton Loop 2017
Last week I was Ableton’s guest for Loop, their delightful “summit for music makers.” I was on a panel about technology in music education, and I got to meet a lot of amazing people and hear some good music too. Here’s my live Twitter feed from the event if you want a fine-grained accounting. Otherwise, …
Happy 100th birthday to Thelonious Monk
Here’s Monk playing four Duke Ellington tunes, followed by his own “Crepuscule with Nellie” and a blues.
The vocoder and Auto-Tune
The vocoder is one of those mysterious technologies that’s far more widely used than understood. Here I explain what it is, how it works, and why you should care. Casual music listeners know the vocoder best as a way to make the robot voice effect that Daft Punk uses all the time. Here’s Huston Singletary …
Teaching myself the Bach Chaconne with Ableton Live
Recently someone posted this performance of the Chaconne from Bach’s violin partita in D minor on an eleven-string guitar by Moran Wasser. My favorite interpretation by an actual violinist is Viktoria Mullova’s. I appreciate her straightforward and unsentimental approach. I also enjoy the version from Morimur, and I’m not alone. It’s one of the most …
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