Category Archives: music

Blue Monk, Birthday Monk

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Hey, it’s also the 90th birthday of Thelonius Monk, one of my favourite musicians for sheer character, originality, electricity and overall brilliance. I noted the day not because I have committed to memory the birthdays of my favourite musicians (I barely remember mine each year) but because there was a nice NPR piece on him just now. Have a listen if you like (here).

I’m going to celebrate with a treat. Wall to wall Monk on my iTunes for the next couple of hours while I work, and here on the blog, two of my favourite videos of Monk in action playing the wonderful “Blue Monk”. The first one (look who’s watching on while he plays!) is shorter, sparser, and is sort of cooler (in a way I can’t define – his movements have a lot to do with it) while the second one is longer, denser, (it has other soloists) but has more in the way of fascinating harmonies popping out from under his fingers, along with more of his unusual and highly effective percussive playing style. Note by the way that the first is from the amazing 1957 video/film recording “The Sound of Jazz” that has so many musical giants playing and walking around the studio that it’s almost overwhelming. Get it if you want a simply sublime musical experience. (You can find clips on YouTube, like this one of Billie Holiday (surrounded by other greats on sax, trumpet, trombone…), which brings me to tears of both joy and sadness every time.)

Ok… the Monk recordings follow. Enjoy… Watch the feet! I love the feet!
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Categorically Not! – Small Differences

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Edward Murray on Harpsichord at Categorically Not!The next Categorically Not! is Sunday October 7th. The Categorically Not! series of events that are held at the Santa Monica Art Studios, (with occasional exceptions). It’s a series – started and run by science writer K. C. Cole – of fun and informative conversations deliberately ignoring the traditional boundaries between art, science, humanities, and other subjects. I strongly encourage you to come to them if you’re in the area.

Here is the website that describes past ones, and upcoming ones. See also the links at the end of the post for some announcements and descriptions (and even video) of previous events. (Above right: Edward Murray performing on the harpsichord, in the event with the theme “Strings”.)

The theme this month is Small Differences Here’s the description from K C Cole: […] Click to continue reading this post →

MacArthur Mashup

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The MacArthur Fellowships were announced today. These are particularly great, as it’s awarded across so many different fields, and I always learn about interesting work going on by reading the synopses at the website. Congratulations to all recipients!! Before I point to the list, I’d like to make a plea that will, of course, go unheeded.

Please please, people of the media, stop calling them “genius grants”. Just stop. By way of explanation, I can’t quite put my finger on it, but the term just seems to strike the wrong tone about what these things should be about. It seems to me to push the recipients away as being “other” rather than encouraging us all to embrace the qualities that they are being encouraged to show by getting the fellowships. Ok, that’s the end of my plea.

Here’s a reminder of what the Fellowship is about (extract from their site): […] Click to continue reading this post →

Funky Hideaway

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lost souls cafeI love downtown Los Angeles. No two ways about it. It’s rapidly getting better, as you may have heard, and there are so many interesting things to find down there. I hope to do a report sometime on an extended walkabout I did down there last month, but that’s for another time. It is also great to cycle around, as I do quite a lot.

Today, still in the heatwave, I left campus to go and hide downtown, first stopping by the excellent Grand Central Market for a bit of shopping for ingredients for a special dish I am going to prepare for a Salon-style gathering at some friends’ on Saturday. More on that later. Then I went to work in one of my favourite cafes in the city. I shouldn’t give away my hideouts, but there’s only you and me reading, right? It’s the Lost Souls Cafe, hidden down an alleyway (Harlem Place Alley) off fourth street between Spring and Main. Perfect for the subway at Pershing Square, and one of the few non-bar type places open until 10:00pm downtown. (Wish it would go until 1:00am or so.)

It’s a fantastic place, as you can see from their website, but relatively few people that […] Click to continue reading this post →

Lookin’ For Some Hot Stuff

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___________________________________________________________________________________
Hot, hot, hot, hot stuff
hot, hot, hot
hot, hot, hot, hot stuff
hot, hot, hot

– from “Hot Stuff”, by Donna Summer (1979). I refer to not only the physics but the c. 100 oF temperatures we’ve been having here every day recently.
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On my way back from the conference, I spotted this book (left) last Saturday in Foyles (the booksellers) in London 1. Quark Gluon Plasma book It is a collection of reprints of a lot of the papers forming the foundations of the physics of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) idea, going back the early to mid 1970s with such papers as Collins and Perry (Gosh, I had no idea Malcolm was one of the early workers on this idea. He’s much more thought of as associated with black holes, gravity, strings and so forth, ideas which – ironically – have recently turned out to be relevant to the discussions of the physics too. See my recent post, and there are also various popular articles to be found2).

Putting aside the usual ridiculous price that Springer Elsevier charges for books, I found myself in two minds about this book, in view of the surprises being uncovered about the properties of this remarkable state of matter at the RHIC experiment. Is this collection of early papers a useful working tool, or is it now just of historical interest, since many of the basic expectations about the properties of the plasma seem now to be incorrect?

rhic collision of gold ionsWell, after a bit of thought, I decided that the latter view would be way too hasty. First and foremost, on a general level, even if some of the computations in some papers were done in the “wrong” light (it’s a strongly coupled liquid that flows, not a weakly coupled gas of quarks and gluons), much of their content will still be useful in many ways – good and correct calculations last for all time, it is the sense of the words decorating them that may crumble over time. More specifically, one can worry about whether there were assumptions (and approximations based on those) that went into the computations that will render […] Click to continue reading this post →

Congratulations Brian May!

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brian may receiving his phd from paul nandraFor what? The story is here. Ok. Full disclosure – I was quite a Brian May fan as a teenager, and as a physicist in training while at Imperial College, London. Now I was going to do a long post about playing electric guitars, building electric guitars (because I was into electronics, physics and music, not because Brian May did it too),, analyzing his guitar solos, endless listening to Queen, endless teenage arguing with anyone who would engage about why he was a much better guitarist than [pick the flashy guitarist from some other rock group], probably permanently diminishing my hearing a bit at two huge Queen concerts, and maybe best of all …practicing music with my friends in the same room (it was said) over in Beit Quad that Brian used to use for practice in the days before Queen began! That was quite a thing for me back then. Here’s a little interview with him about his Imperial College days from the IC student newspaper Felix.

There would have been pictures of the guitars and so forth, a clever post title playing […] Click to continue reading this post →

Joshua Redman on NPR

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joshua redman by michael wilsonThere was a nice piece on NPR (by John Ydstie) featuring Joshua Redman today (photo left by Michael Wilson). He’s one of my favourite of the young (relatively) saxophonists on the Jazz scene today. (Some Wiki info here.) When I was an East coaster I saw him a number of times in concert, and he was always very good indeed. His albums are very good too – fun and full of personality, very soulful, although not hugely ground-breaking (not that this is always necessary to make a great musician). By the way, Joshua Redman’s music is actually a good starter place for people who might want to start out in Jazz by listening to some […] Click to continue reading this post →

Benny Remembers Clifford and Lee

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There was a lovely piece on NPR about Benny Golson yesterday. You can hear the article again, and more audio clips that were not aired, by going to the website here.

I’m a big fan of Golson, not just because of his remarkable range of performing and especially compositional work (even if you don’t listen to jazz, you’ll know a lot of his work on lots of television shows such as MASH, Mission Impossible, etc.), but also because without him, the pyrotechnic young trumpeter Lee Morgan might never have teamed up with Art Blakey in the Jazz Messengers (Golson suggested him to Blakey, so the story goes).

People often don’t seem to know much about Jazz trumpeters beyond Miles Davis or Dizzy Gillespie, so I’m going to digress at this point. There is a line of trumpeters which you should know about, as it forms a huge part of the foundation of pure modern Jazz trumpet playing. Miles and Dizzy, important and influential as they were, form only a medium-sized part of that foundation.

lee morganIf you have not heard of Lee Morgan, please stop what you are doing right now and go out to the store and buy some of his work. This is an emergency! If you want to be totally blown away by the most audacious, powerful and raw trumpet playing you’ll probably ever hear, get (for example) John Coltrane’s 1957 album Blue Trane. Don’t focus on Coltrane for a change (who is of course transcendent)… Listen to Morgan, and remind yourself as you encounter the intense heat and urgency of his […] Click to continue reading this post →

Jazz and Women

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Passing near the Catalina Bar and Grill last night (on my way to the Cat and Fiddle) put me in mind of the Roy Hargrove concert there of a couple of weeks ago (see also here), which in turn put me in mind of a conversation I had a week later during which something slightly disturbing occurred to me. Let me explain. (A clickable picture of Roy Hargrove in action at the concert is below)

roy hargroveI was having dessert over at a friends house after a nice dinner in Pasadena, and three of us were kicking around thoughts, stories, and ideas. The subject of musical likes and dislikes came up – I think because someone put something on the CD player, and one of my friends said that she did not like Jazz. I was not quite sure what she meant by this, and since she’s a friend who I like a respect a lot, I probed further. I tried to ascertain how much she’d actually heard, since I my opinion Jazz is a very large and many-splendoured thing and to say you don’t like it after having heard a little is like trying sweet and sour pork, not liking it, and then deciding that you don’t like Chinese cuisine. I explained this opinion, and having established that she preferred “classical” music, (another large and encompassing term for a huge variety, of course) I tried to explain how she might find a way into Jazz by using that as an entry point.

My point was not that she was wrong to not like Jazz, but that she should keep an open mind about it until she’s given it a fair chance. I explained another key point that might help. It usually becomes clear at a point like this in a conversation of this sort that one of the key problems for the listener is that they’re not aware of a great deal of what is going on in the music, that there are often several layers of interesting […] Click to continue reading this post →

Saturday Scenes

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alonys red
(The striking central red piece above is by the artist called Alonys (as are the ones surrounding). You can see more things of hers at her myspace space.)

Well, it’s been a busy week here, and I had tons of things to tell you in about five or six extra posts (beyond the quick ones I did) that never made an appearance. I had several for last weekend too. I ought to start by catching up from there. Here goes a bit of recollection and reflection:

Saturday was interesting since I ended up cramming three different activities into the evening, after a day of gardening and errands (mostly the latter), if I recall correctly.

gatherd crowdThe evening began (as it did the Saturday before) with a trip to an opening at an art gallery. This time it was downtown, near Gallery Row, (it is called Crewest) and it was featuring the work of some up and coming female artists. Overall, I was not overwhelmed with things I thought were great, but the exhibition was not without some interesting pieces on the walls (see above – some of her 3d sculpture-meets-painting works were fun too) and sometimes interesting people milling around. There was even a DJ, but sadly no wine (I’d been spoiled by the last gallery reception, I suppose.) […] Click to continue reading this post →

Cyrus Chestnut Rocks and Rolls

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Sunday night, after a long afternoon of intense work in the garden (digging holes and improving soil for planting new budlea plants, standing on the tall ladder for trimming one of the tall palm trees, and more) I went to the Jazz Bakery to see the second set of pianist Cyrus Chestnut with his trio (Dezron Douglas on bass and Neal Smith on drums):

cyrus chestnut

They were excellent. As usual, there was hardly any audience for this extremely talented pianist (20 of us max?) – the triple whammy of (1) Los Angeles – people just seldom seem to make the effort, in great numbers (2) after 10:00pm in LA – see (1), and (3) Sunday night – see (1) again. The club would have been packed, were this taking place in New York, or London. Anyway, not my loss, I suppose, although it does take away a bit from such an event if the crowd is depleted like that. Musicians often feed off the crowd’s responses. In any case, it was an excellent show, as I said. Unexpectedly, they interspersed various standards with some recently reharmonized […] Click to continue reading this post →

Categorically Not! – Vulgarization

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The next Categorically Not! is Sunday 25th March. The Categorically Not! series of events that are held at the Santa Monica Art Studios, (with occasional exceptions). It’s a series – started and run by science writer K. C. Cole – of fun and informative conversations deliberately ignoring the traditional boundaries between art, science, humanities, and other subjects. I strongly encourage you to come to them if you’re in the area. There’s a new website showing past and upcoming events here. You can also have a look at some of the descriptions I did of some events in some earlier posts (such as here and here), and the description of some of the recent special ones on Point of View and Uncertainty that I organized with K. C. as USC campus events (here, here (with video) and here).

Here is a description from the poster for the upcoming programme: […]
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