You / Light Up My Life

This is...just the coolest.

Dr. Charles Limb, an otolaryngologist from Johns Hopkins, is conducting experiments trying to get at the neurological basis of musical creativity. Specifically: he put jazz musicians and freestyle rappers in an fMRI machine to learn how activity in the brain changes when musicians improvise v. when they perform memorized material.

I know this TED talk is 17 min, but you can hack it: you're on spring break!
No? Okay fine, here are the results highlights: 10'30" and 15'40". (But it really is worth watching the whole thing. And besides: what a charismatic otolaryngologist!)




(via metafilter)

Tiny Dancer / In The Sand

Have you guys heard of NPR's Tiny Desk Concerts? And if so, why didn't you clue me in sooner?

They're mini-concerts video-recorded live in the perfectly cluttered office of "All Songs Considered" host Bob Boilen. Indie, gospel, hip-hop, jazz, classical, reggae, gypsy punk: there's something for everyone. Most artists play a set of three or four songs, every now and again there's a little talk, some bring friends along for the ride. What a lovely idea!

Recommended sampling:
Ana Tijoux
Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros
The Tallest Man On Earth

Swing 42

Joscho Stephan & Swing Manouche: sitting around in a café playing Gypsy jazz. This is very much how I imagine my life in sideways-world.

Bird of Prey

Poet Philip Larkin:

Charlie Parker wrecked jazz by - or so they tell me - using the chromatic rather than the diatonic scale. The diatonic scale is what you use if you want to write a national anthem, or a love song, or a lullaby. The chromatic scale is what you use to give the effect of drinking a quinine martini and having an enema simultaneously.

- The Paris Reivew Interviews, Vol. II (Ed. Philip Gourevitch)

(I'm still making my leisurely way through the series. I'd still recommend it! Where else are you going to learn special tidbits like: Dorothy Parker subscribed to undertaker magazines?)

Love Like Jazz

Canadian Brass plays a jazzed-up version of Bach's WTC1 Fugue2. I'm equal parts fascinated and horrified.



(via youtube)

It's A Good Time For A Photo

The Jazz Loft Project:

"From 1957 to 1965 legendary photographer W. Eugene Smith [that's him in the photo] made approximately 4,000 hours of recordings on 1,741 reel-to-reel tapes and nearly 40,000 photographs in a loft building in Manhattan's wholesale flower district where major jazz musicians of the day gathered and played their music. Smith's work has remained in archives until now. The Jazz Loft Project is dedicated to uncovering the stories behind this legendary moment in American cultural history."

Take Five

Mulgrew Miller talks about comping. YOU YOUNGSTERS, you don't even know.



(via The Collaborative Piano Blog)