Whisper Not

When I was in college, I picked up a cassette of Legacy by Jon Faddis from the dollar bin at the record store. It’s a kind of greatest hits of jazz trumpet, and it was one of the best dollars I ever spent. The last three tunes were especially wonderful: “A Child Is Born” by Thad Jones, “Lil’ Darlin’” by Neal Hefti, and “Whisper Not” by Benny Golson. I have to give it up to the producer for that sequencing; the obvious move would have been to end the album on “Lil’ Darlin'”, but instead, just when you’ve been lulled into a peaceful slumber, “Whisper Not” opens up a whole new and unexpected atmosphere of nocturnal mystery. I rewound this part of the tape endlessly.

Here’s a live performance of Benny Golson playing “Whisper Not” with the Jazz Messengers in France in 1958, along with Art Blakey on drums, Lee Morgan on trumpet,  Bobby Timmons on piano and Jymie Merritt on bass.

Golson gives some insight into his compositional process in this Jazzwax interview with Marc Meyers. Continue reading “Whisper Not”

Things I wrote in 2023

This year I wrote a bunch of groove pedagogy, including a book proposal and related materials aimed at future publications and teaching. So far, the only published part of all that work is 5 Pop Grooves for Orff Ensembles, a collection of educational music that I composed with Heather Fortune. But lots more is coming, hopefully this year. More on that below.

The two most significant things that I actually completed this year were the syllabi for two New School classes, The Song Factory and Musical Borrowing from Plainchant to Sampling. Many of this year’s blog posts were motivated directly or indirectly by those classes.

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NYU Steinhardt is assigning this blog in its music theory and aural skills core classes

Last night I went to a holiday party for NYU Steinhardt’s music education program, where I got my PhD and where I have been teaching the Technology and Pop Practicum courses for several years now. Steinhardt has been overhauling its core music theory and aural skills curricula, and while I am highly interested in this process, I have not been involved in it. I have a lot of opinions about this, but not much credentialing in music theory pedagogy. At the party, a student told me that her theory and aural skills teachers are assigning her a lot of material from this blog. This was news to me. I’m flattered, of course, but also sad, because no one has talked to me about it, much less invited me to teach any of the classes. Like I said, I know my formal CV doesn’t really support that, but if the blog is good enough to assign…

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Love Rollercoaster, Genius of Love, and nonsensical chord loops

I have a hypothesis about harmony in loop-based music: if you have a good groove going, then any repeated chord progression at all will start to make sense and sound good after a few repetitions. In this post, I demonstrate the idea using two dance floor classics. “Love Rollercoaster” by Ohio Players (1975) is from the peak disco era, and “Genius of Love” by Tom Tom Club (1981) sits at the crossover point between disco, new wave and early hip-hop. Let’s start with “Love Rollercoaster”.

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The Beastie Boys, James Newton, and phonographic orality

One of the most complicated copyright situations covered in my Musical Borrowing class is the landmark sampling lawsuit Newton v. Diamond. “Newton” is jazz flutist and composer James Newton (not to be confused with the film composer). “Diamond” is Michael Diamond, aka Mike D of the Beastie Boys. The song at issue is the Beasties’ “Pass the Mic” (1992).

The flute sample in the intro and throughout comes from James Newton’s piece “Choir” (1982).

If you want to sample legally, you need two separate licenses: one from the owner of the audio recording (typically a record label) and one from the owner of the underlying song or composition (typically the songwriter or composer, or their publisher.) The Beastie Boys got permission to use the recording of “Choir” from James Newton’s label, ECM, and paid a license fee. They did not, however, seek permission from Newton himself. ECM didn’t ask Newton either, and he didn’t even find out about the sample until eight years later, at which point he sued the Beasties for copyright infringement.

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How Infrastructure Works

Deb Chachra, one of the smartest people I have ever had the pleasure to meet, has a new book out. You should read it!

It’s not directly related to the subject of this blog but, hey, it’s my blog, I can write about whatever I want. Besides, it’s Thanksgiving, and what better thing to be thankful for than functioning water, power, sewage, roads, transit and communication systems? (To the extent that those things function in the US – looking at you, public transit systems.) An alternate title for the book could be “What Infrastructure Means”. Another could be “move slow and fix things.” You can get a taste of it in this Guardian article that Deb wrote about Electric Mountain.

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Bemsha Swing

I have “Bemsha Swing” on the brain for no special reason. It’s one of Thelonious Monk’s most persistent earworms, and every once in a while it wakens from its dormant state to occupy my music circuitry for a week or two or three. When I am jamming on the guitar, my fingers constantly find their way into it, and I walk around humming or whistling it  too. I like to think of my relationship with the tune as more symbiotic than parasitic, but either way, the tune is well and truly embedded in me. I don’t know how it was able to take such firm root, but maybe over the course of writing the post, some ideas will suggest themselves.

Monk co-wrote “Bemsha Swing” with drummer Denzil Best. KUVO explains that they originally copyrighted it under the title “Bimsha Swing”, referring to “Bimshire”, a nickname for Denzil Best’s family home of Barbados. Monk first recorded it in 1952 with Gary Mapp on bass and Max Roach on drums. 

Shame on Prestige Records for not bothering to tune the piano! But this happened to Monk a lot in the early days. I wonder how much of his style was driven by the need to make out-of-tune pianos sound good? He always managed to make them sing. In a Yamaha showroom, I saw a demo of their Spirio system, where they had extracted the piano notes from a video of Monk playing live, and they were being played back on a Disklavier. It was uncanny to hear that distinctive Monk-ian touch on a perfectly in-tune brand new grand piano right there in the room with me.

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Nature Boy Megamegamix update

A while back, I made a mashup of many different versions of “Nature Boy”, one of the loveliest and weirdest jazz standards. Every so often I go back and add new versions to it. Here’s the latest update.

I added Jon Hassell’s recording of the tune over the beat from “B Boys Will B Boys” by Mos Def and Talib Kweli, and did some other general tightening up. Enjoy!

Can I Kick It?

In order to shop at the Park Slope Food Coop, you have to do a monthly work shift. I do two a month, one for me and one for my wife, who is much too busy earning most of our money to do her own shifts. I work early mornings on the Receiving squad. As produce gets unloaded from trucks outside, we break down the pallets, bring everything into the basement, and organize it into the various walk-in coolers. One of the Receiving coordinators plays music from a mammoth Spotify playlist called Sea of Liquid Love, over 1,900 tracks spanning hip-hop, electronic dance music, reggae and other groove-oriented styles from around the world. During my last shift, “Can I Kick It?” came up in the rotation, and in spite of the fact that we were schlepping boxes of vegetables around before dawn, everybody lit up. Why is that track so great? How did these guys, all of whom were younger than twenty years old, record such an all-time banger?

Before I try to answer the bigger questions, let’s take a look at the samples in the order of their appearance in the track.

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Scientist Rids the World of the Evil Curse of the Vampires

We are talking about Jamaica’s remix culture in Musical Borrowing class and how it challenges Western concepts of authorship and ownership. The class is reading the opening chapters of Rude Citizenship: Jamaican Popular Music, Copyright, and the Reverberations of Colonial Power by Larisa Kingston Mann, which connects Jamaica’s ethos of communal musical creativity to its postcolonial history. We spent today listening to this delightfully titled dub classic by Scientist to warm up for the discussion.

The album consists of remixed (versioned) reggae songs released in 1981. Many of these songs are sung over remixes (versions) of instrumentals from yet other reggae songs. Scientist created his versions by playing the multitrack tape of each song through a studio mixing desk and re-recording (dubbing) them down to two-track. During recording, he performed various manipulations on the mixing desk: changing the levels of the tracks, muting and unmuting them, and applying audio effects, most notably Roland Space Echo. He carried out these manipulations in real time, with an improvisational approach, giving his versions an unpredictable structure.

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