Carmen McRae was a good friend of Monk’s, and for my tastes, she sings this song better than anyone. Her tart, unsentimental intellect matches Monk’s own approach to music perfectly. Here she is performing “Round Midnight” in 1962.

Monk wrote his biggest hit back in the late 1930s, but he didn’t have a recording contract at the time and couldn’t get anyone else interested. A few years later, however, his luck changed. His friend Bud Powell was playing piano in a band led by former Ellington Orchestra trumpet star Cootie Williams. Powell convinced Williams to record “Round Midnight” in 1944.

The record made an impact, and “Round Midnight” became Cootie Williams’ theme song. Other musicians became interested in the tune as well. Dizzy Gillespie did a recording in 1947, for which he wrote his own distinctive intro and ending.

Monk himself liked Dizzy’s intro and ending so much that he promptly began including them in his own performances of his tune.

Later in 1947, Monk finally got to record his tune for the first time.

Much as I love Monk’s own playing, this recording is an awkward one, with a lame-sounding film noir arrangement in the horns. Fortunately, Monk recorded “Round Midnight” many more times over the course of his life. He tended to play it quite a bit faster and more abstractly than other interpreters. Here’s a live version from sometime in the sixties.

Monk’s best recordings of the tune were solo piano versions. My favorite is the one on The Composer, which sadly isn’t available on YouTube. The one on Thelonious Himself is good too.

The definitive version of “Round Midnight” is the one by Miles Davis, as recorded on his 1957 album ‘Round About Midnight (a widely used alternate name for the tune.)

Miles honed this arrangement in performances for years before finally recording it. He plays Dizzy’s intro on muted trumpet, in a severely stripped-down form. His take on the melody is similarly minimalist, using many fewer notes than the original. At the end of the head at 2:40, Miles inserts a whole new section of his own invention, a shout chorus that jumps unexpectedly into major tonality, played on unmuted trumpet. The shout chorus sets up John Coltrane’s assertive and energetic tenor sax solo. Then Miles brings the mood back down with his muted take on Dizzy’s ending. This recording was a jukebox hit in black neighborhoods, and it went a long way toward cementing Miles’ iconic status in the jazz world. If you had to explain jazz to a visitor from outer space, you could do worse than this recording.

Every jazz singer has attempted “Round Midnight” at one point or another. To pick one of many great versions, here’s Ella Fitzgerald, accompanied by Oscar Peterson.

As do most singers, Ella omits the intro and ending. The most complete vocal version, and maybe the most beautiful, is by Carmen McRae again, from her highly recommended 1988 album Carmen Sings Monk.

Everything’s here: all the sections, with the melody as written and also as interpreted by Dizzy Gillespie, all with lyrics. This, as far as I’m concerned, is the last word on “Round Midnight” — at least until the next evolution.

Hip-hop might point the way forward. The intro to Luchi De Jesus‘ recording of “Round Midnight” is sampled in “A Friend” by KRS-One.

Want to try playing “Round Midnight” yourself? It’s well worth it, you’ll learn a lot about music that way. The problem is finding a decent chart. Be warned that some of the chords in the infamous Real Book version are wrong, and it also omits Dizzy’s intro and ending. A more accurate transcription can be found in Hal Leonard’s lovingly rendered Thelonious Monk Fake Book, but that chart also leaves out the intro and ending. When I did the tune with my former jazz group, I decided to just transcribe the missing sections myself. Feel free to download my chart here.

Any crucial versions I missed? Leave them in the comments.

For hip-hop, sampling and everything related:

• Questlove
• Kevin Nottingham
• Whosampled
• Grown Folks Music
• Wayne Marshall
• Hank Shocklee
• Jeff Chang

For technology:

• Deb Chachra
• Tara Busch
• Paul Lamere

For the highbrow and avant-garde:

• Marc Weidenbaum
• Nick Seaver

Just generally:

• DJ Rupture
• Sasha Frere-Jones
• Sarah Badr

Happy reading.

Original question on Quora

Jazz was popular when it was intimately connected to popular culture. In the early-middle part of the twentieth century, jazz was popular culture. The last significant jazz work to really communicate with pop music was “Rockit” by Herbie Hancock.

That song was informed by hip-hop and electronica, but it also gave something back — a generation of hip-hop turntablists all point to it as a central inspiration. Jazz since then has mostly tried to ignore pop culture entirely, or comment on it condescendingly.

Most jazz being produced now isn’t popular because it isn’t that good. It’s plenty complex and intellectual, but complexity isn’t coextensive with quality. People don’t listen to music to be dazzled by technique unless they’re in music school. It’s a rare contemporary jazz musician who can write a melody you’d want to hear more than once, and listening to people run difficult changes is about as interesting as watching them play video games.

In order for jazz to be popular, it needs to humble itself before the major improvisational art form of this generation: hip-hop. Jazz snobs that belittle hip-hop’s simplicity are missing the point. What hip-hop loses in harmony and melody, it more than makes up for in sonic innovation, wordplay, social realism and a sense of fun. Remember when jazz was fun? Remember when you could dance to it? Remember when it spoke to the emotional reality that most people live in? Or any emotional reality? That’s what jazz needs.

Here are two suggested directions for the future:

Verve Remixed

This series produced some excellent electronic music in its own right, brought a bunch of classic recordings to a whole new set of years, and opened a lot of jazz fans’ ears to contemporary music. Quite an achievement! I wish every jazz label would fling the vaults open to remixers, and not just the pros. I remix jazz tunes anyway, but it would be nice to have the labels’ blessing, rather than having to watch my back for lawsuits.

Reggie Watts

Even though he’s supposedly a comedian, Reggie Watts comes closer to the real spirit of jazz than any contemporary jazz musician I can think of. His songs are completely improvised, but rather than sounding like free-jazz mush, they’re tightly structured, catchy and funny. Instead of trying to sound like it’s still 1959, I wish more jazz musicians could live in the present culture like Reggie does.

Original post on Quora

Here are my favorite basslines of the last fifty years, across genres.

John Coltrane – “My Favorite Things”

Simple, hypnotic, effective. Read more.

John Coltrane – “Equinox”

Another devastatingly simple groove.

Duke Ellington – “Half The Fun”

Paired with an incredible Sam Woodyard drum part. I love sampling it:

Nature Boy megamix by ethanhein

Duke Ellington – “Fleurette Africaine”

Charles Mingus’ strumming on the intro might be the most beautiful few bars he ever played. Hear a mashup I did of this tune and some other jazz classics:

Autumn Leaves by ethanhein

The Beatles – “Dear Prudence”

I could have chosen any of a dozen Beatles tunes here, I love those McCartney lines. But this one has the most emotional power for me. Here’s a blog post about it, and here’s a mashup I did of “Dear Prudence” with “Never Can Say Goodbye” by the Jackson 5:

Prudence Never Can Say Goodbye by ethanhein

Miles Davis – “It’s About That Time”

From my favorite of Miles’ funk albums. Read a blog post about it.

James Brown – “There Was A Time (I Got To Move)”

Pretty sure that’s Bootsy Collins playing bass, and he kills it.

Herbie Hancock – “Chameleon”

Here’s a visualization I made of this loop.

Talking Heads – “Once In A Lifetime”

Read more about this track, and check out the megamix:

Once In A Lifetime megamix by ethanhein

Michael Jackson – “Billie Jean”

Of course.

Janet Jackson – “What Have You Done For Me Lately”

The song that made the Latelybass sound famous.

Paul Simon and Ladysmith Black Mambazo – “Diamonds On The Souls Of Her Shoes”

Bakithi Kumalo on the fretless makes this tune for me.

Michael Jackson – “Remember The Time”

Love those Teddy Riley sequenced lines.

Digable Planets – “Rebirth Of Slick”

The bassline is sampled from “Searchin’” by Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, but the Digables flipped it into something new.

Black Sheep – “The Choice Is Yours”

Another creative flip of a jazz sample, from McCoy Tyner’s recording of “Impressions.”

Morphine – “Buena”

No embedding; click the image to hear the song:

Two-string slide bass and baritone sax!

Daft Punk – “Around The World”

Never get tired of this one.

Kanye West – “Love Lockdown”

Kanye has been using tuned 808 kick drums to play his basslines lately, which is a dazzlingly hip idea. The kick and the bass are supposed to be in tight sync anyway; why not just fuse them into a single part? I know he’s a ridiculous human being in a lot of ways but the man knows how to put a track together.

Let me know if I missed anything critical, I’m sure I did.

Original post on Quora

DJ BC also did a remarkable album-length mashup of Jay-Z and Brian Eno:

Speaking of Jay, it’s a cliche by now, but Danger Mouse’s Grey Album really is a remarkable piece of work.

For creative use of pop, you’ve got to love DJ Earworm’s United State Of Pop series.

Diplo and M.I.A. deserve props for Piracy Funds Terrorism, especially their reworking of “Walk Like An Egyptian.”

The Walsh brothers did the best Wu-Tang mashup I’ve ever heard: Wugazi!

Finally, I don’t know if I’m one of the best mashup artists, but I’m pretty darn good.

Mashups by ethanhein

Additional recommendations are welcome in the comments.

Original post on Quora

And here’s the full song — contains much explicit language.

The hook samples the line “Biggie Smalls is the illest” from “The What” on the same album. It’s twenty-three seconds in.

Sampling is a severely underappreciated songwriting tool. Even if you have moral or legal issues with sampling from others, sampling from yourself is still a good idea. Biggie’s line about himself being the illest is just part of a verse in “The What.” The producer on “Unbelievable,” the great DJ Premier, was smart enough to recognize that Biggie’s line could stand on its own as a hook. DJ Premier also produced “Nas Is Like,” and built its chorus through similar means.

The word “Unbelievable” itself comes from R Kelly, sped up a little and raised in pitch to sound female. Listen at 0:58.

Sampled vocals aside, the chopped-up keyboard part is the most musically sophisticated aspect of the track. Its original source is “Remind Me” by Patrice Rushen — I’m pretty sure it comes from the end of the solo section around 4:10.

Premier chopped up this little keyboard phrase and resequenced it beyond recognition. The result is a hip angularity that a normal keyboard player would probably not have arrived at organically.

The beat in “Unbelievable” is an old standby, “Impeach The President.”

The string ambiance in the background comes from the very odd Quincy Jones song “Kitty With The Bent Frame.” Listen at 1:08.

Quincy’s record is a favorite for hip-hop producers looking for an uneasy mood.

Here’s a diagram showing the sample genealogy of “Unbelievable.”

The meaning of self-sampling

Like I said above, self-sampling is so interesting to me because it’s recursive, self-referential. Most of the music we like is full of self-reference, and generally, the more self-referential it is, the more structured and meaningful it feels. Even simple-seeming nursery rhymes can be recursive and self-similar. Here’s a visualization by Lee Byron showing self-similarity in the nursery rhyme “Hickory Dickory Dock.”

Self-similarity makes for compelling visual art, too. One reason we find nature attractive is its rich fractal self-similarity. Here’s a leaf I photographed in my neighborhood; notice how the same veiny structure repeats itself at different size scales:

Even very simple recursive mathematical equations can produce stunningly complex, biological-looking forms, like the classic fractal known as the Mandelbrot set.

Recursion isn’t just attractive. It’s fundamental to computer science — self-reference is a key programming technique. Recursion may be essential to the very nature of consciousness itself. Some neuroscientists think that your entire sense of self emerges out of recursive self-referential loops as your brain represents different parts of itself to itself.

No wonder recursive music is so fascinating. Keep on sampling yourselves, musicians; let’s see what other recursive truths we can uncover.

While Girl Talk tracks have way too much information in them for my tastes, I could easily imagine having a rich musical life just unpacking their possibilities. Pop-oriented hip-hop over thrash metal! Gangsta rap over buttery piano ballads! Mixing prog and teeny bopper pop and classic rock! Teasing out the ideas suggested in these pairings could launch a thousand bands. In my own life as a musician, mashups have been the richest source of inspiration imaginable. Girl Talk lights the way with his fearless transgression of all boundaries of taste and style and copyright; it’s up to older and mellower musicians like me to pick up all the loose and tangled threads and knit them into something a little more coherent and structured.

Mashups by ethanhein

Why do some people like Girl Talk?

• De La Soul
• Biz Markie
• Eric B and Rakim
• DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince
• Everything before 1985 (Sugarhill Gang, Spoonie G, Treacherous 3, Grandmaster Flash, Fab Five Freddy)
• Current pop radio hits aimed at pre-teens are usually fine for little kids too, ie Willow Smith, Black Eyed Peas etc, though these may get on your nerves
• Instrumentals — I especially recommend J Dilla and 9th Wonder

Here are all the hip-hop tracks in my collection that I can certify to be kid-friendly, profanity-free, and most importantly, good music! (I made the executive decision that kids can handle some minimal exposure to “hell” and “damn.”)

Audio Two

• Top Billin’

Biz Markie

• Make the Music With Your Mouth, Biz
• Nobody Beats the Biz
• Just a Friend

Black Sheep

• The Choice Is Yours (Revisited)

Blahzay Blahzay

• Danger

Brand Nubian

• Wake Up (Reprise In the Sunshine)

Cut Chemist

• The Garden

Das EFX

• They Want EFX
• Klap Ya Handz
• Jussummen

De La Soul

• Ego Trippin’ (Part Two)
• The Magic Number
• Eye Know

Eric B. & Rakim

• What’s On Your Mind
• Follow the Leader
• Microphone Fiend
• Eric B. Never Scared
• I Ain’t No Joke
• Eric B. Is on the Cut
• My Melody
• I Know You Got Soul
• Move the Crowd
• Paid in Full
• As the Rhyme Goes On
• Eric B. Is President
• Extended Beat

The Fearless Four

• Rockin’ It

Funky Four Plus One

• That’s the Joint

Grandmaster Flash

• The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash On the Wheels of Steel
• Superappin

Jimmy Spicer

• Adventures Of Super Rhyme (Rap)

Jurassic 5

• Swing Set

Lauryn Hill

• Everything Is Everything

Lil Mama

• Lip Gloss

LL Cool J

• Jingling Baby (Remix)

Main Source

• Just Hangin’ Out

Mantronix

• King Of The Beats

MC Serch

• Here It Comes Again

Nice & Smooth

• Funky For You

OutKast

• Hey Ya!

Ozomatli

• Cut Chemist Suite

Prince Paul

• You Made Me (A.K.C.)

Rob Base & DJ E-Z Rock

• It Takes Two

Run-DMC

• My Adidas
• It’s Tricky
• You Be Illin’
• Sucker M.C.’S

Slick Rick

• Hey Young World

Spoonie Gee

• Spoonin´g rap

The Sugarhill Gang

• Apache
• Rapper’s Delight

Tiye Phoenix

• The Award

The Treacherous Three

• Body Rock
• Yes We Can-Can

A Tribe Called Quest

• Can I Kick It?

Us3

• Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia)

Webstar & Young B

• Chicken Noodle Soup

Young MC

• Bust a Move

Z Trip

• Rhythmic Metaphor
• U Can Get With Discs Or U Can Get With D.A.T.

Zion I

• Birds Eye View

Happy listening!

Original post on Quora

Here’s “Amen, Brother.” The famous drum break comes at 1:27.

“Amen, Brother” is an uptempo adaptation of “Amen” by Jester Hairston, written for the movie Lilies of the Field, and made famous by The Impressions (with Curtis Mayfield, before he went solo.)

“Amen, Brother” didn’t get much attention until crate-digging hip-hop producers started sampling the drum break in the 1980s. Breakbeat Lenny included it in the first volume of Ultimate Breaks and Beats. Since then, the break has become ubiquitous not just in hip-hop, but in every style of dance music. It almost single-handedly spawned entire genres of electronica, particularly especially drum ‘n’ bass and its various offshoots. The Amen shows up in rock and pop songs ranging from Oasis to Nine Inch Nails. It’s in TV theme songs and commercials. Casual music listeners have probably heard it in dozens if not hundreds of recordings. Here’s a family tree showing the most noteworthy usages.

As is so often the case in sample history, GC Coleman never got a dime from any of these uses beyond his union scale for the original recording session. He died in 2006, so there’s not much we can do for him now, but I think he at least deserves some recognition.

Inside the break

Here’s the Amen break, looped four times:

Amen break by ethanhein

Wikipedia has handy drum notation and drum machine tablature for the break.

Here’s how the break looks in the sampling program Recycle:

Each blue spiky blob is a drum hit. The vertical lines are slices I added using Recycle. Once you’ve sliced up the loop, you can play the slices back in any order and any combination using a MIDI keyboard or drum pads. You can generate an infinite variety of new loops this way.

Two documentaries on the Amen break

The usual reference for the Amen break is this twenty-minute video by Nate Harrison.

Here’s an hour-long podcast on the break by Crissy Criss:

Noteworthy Amen break samples

I’m not attempting anything resembling completeness here; these are just tracks I like or find interesting. Starting in the eighties with the old skool, here’s “King Of The Beats” by Mantronix.

In “I Desire,” Salt N Pepa mixes the Amen with drums from Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way” and the synth line from “Daisy Lady” by 7th Wonder.

Maybe the best-known hip-hop usage of the Amen is NWA’s “Straight Outta Compton” (very, very NSFW.)

The break appears in pitched-down form at the very beginning of “Informer” by Snow. What the heck is he saying in the chorus, anyway?

As I said above, the Amen is most closely associated with drum ‘n’ bass, for example “The Angels Fell” by Dillinja.

Luke Vibert did an album under the pseudonym Amen Andrews where just about every song uses a variation on the Amen break.

An artsier take on the Amen: “Girl/Boy” by Aphex Twin.

Even artsier: Amon Tobin’s “Nightlife.”

David Bowie uses the Amen for his foray into the world of drum ‘n’ bass, “Little Wonder.” It’s not one of his strongest tunes but he gets huge points for trying.

The most current hip-hop song I could find that uses the Amen is Lupe Fiasco’s “Streets On Fire.”

Many, many more examples can be found on the Amen Break Database and Whosampled.com.

The Amen break on TV

As the Nate Harrison documentary points out, the Amen pops up in quite a few TV commercials. It’s made its way into some theme songs, too, most notably the one from Futurama:

The Amen also shows up in the Powerpuff Girls theme song.

Do you still think that sampling is stealing? I don’t mean monetarily, I mean artistically. Do you think that there’s something unoriginal in all these uses of the Amen break? Do you think that the way Aphex Twin or Lupe Fiasco recontextualizes the break is somehow a lesser creative act than getting out a drum kit and playing something? You can probably guess where I stand.

Why is the Amen break so magical?

Producers talk about how funky and passionate the Amen is, how compressed and dirty the drum sounds are, how much hip syncopation it uses in its second half. But what if there’s a mathematical explanation for the break’s popularity? Michael Schneider has a theory that the Amen Break sounds so good because it’s structured around the golden ratio.

Is there anything to this theory? You be the judge.

Try it yourself

Here’s my mashup of many of the above tracks, with heavy processing of the Amen break in Recycle and Reason.

Amen Brother megamix by ethanhein

If you want to play too, the internet is full of resequenced and reshuffled variations on the Amen break available for your downloading pleasure. Here are a hundred fifty Amen loops. Here’s another forty and yet another twenty. Stick them in your favorite audio editor and have fun!

I learned the answer from Creative License: The Law And Culture Of Digital Sampling by Kembrew McLeod and Peter DiCola. It’s a companion book to the invaluable documentary Copyright Criminals. The story of Jay-Z and Alan Lomax isn’t quite as epic a copyright fail as the Biz Markie lawsuit or the story of “Bitter Sweet Symphony” but it’s still pretty absurd.

So here’s Jay-Z’s “Takeover.” As you might expect, it contains salty language.

For my tastes, “Takeover” isn’t one of the better Jay-Z songs, since all it does is make fun of Nas. It’s depressing when an artist of Jay’s caliber devotes his  considerable creativity to a diss track. Still, the production is pretty powerful. The main samples come from the Doors’ “Five To One.” Jay also quotes David Bowie’s “Fame,” along with various other rap songs. Finally, the sampled line “Watch out, we run New York!” comes from “Sound Of Da Police” by KRS-One.

KRS-One samples a riff from “Inside Looking Out” by Grand Funk Railroad — listen at 6:28.

Grand Funk didn’t write the song. It’s a cover of The Animals.

The Animals didn’t really write the song either. As was a common practice among their British rock peers at the time, they took a folk melody and wrote somewhat different lyrics. The tune they used is called “Rosie,” which they learned from a recording made by Alan Lomax of a chain gang at Parchman Farm.

“Rosie” can’t be said to have any particular author. But Lomax was the first person to record and publish it, so according to the peculiar norms of America’s property laws, he was able to copyright it. Not only does Lomax hold the copyright for “Rosie,” he’s also listed as a co-author of both versions of “Inside Looking Out.”

Here’s where the story gets truly silly. When KRS-One sampled Grand Funk Railroad’s cover of “Inside Looking Out,” he needed the permission of both the owner of the recording and the underlying composition. This is in spite of the fact that the sample is from an instrumental section that Grand Funk added, and that doesn’t reference the original melody at all. And even though Jay-Z sampled KRS-One’s unaccompanied vocal, he also needed to get copyright permission from everyone sampled in KRS-One’s track. Including Alan Lomax.

So that’s how a folk song collector wound up as the legal co-author of a Jay-Z diss track. I can’t think of a better illustration of the copyright system’s dysfunction than that.

The copyright maze is no obstacle to Jay-Z — he has the money, lawyers and connections to clear whatever he wants. But what about up-and-coming or unheard-of artists? What if they want to use samples? Should the most vital art form of our time be the exclusive province of forty-year-old multimillionaires? And grateful as I am to Alan Lomax for recording and disseminating so much great folk music, I remain baffled as to why he was allowed to copyright it. Our creative heritage deserves better stewardship than our current laws provide.

Update: I seem to have touched a nerve with this post. Jesse Walker posted it on the Reason Magazine blog, and since then it’s also been on Andrew Sullivan’s blog, Metafilter and Techdirt. There are some interesting discussions happening in the comments to those posts. Thanks for linking, everybody!