If you haven’t had the pleasure, Doctor Who is an extremely long-running, low-budget British science fiction show about a time-traveling alien being who looks like a flamboyant Oxford don. Or actually a series of flamboyant Oxford dons. The original actor playing Doctor Who was elderly and became ill while the show was just getting to be popular. When he couldn’t continue, the BBC ingeniously decided to have the Doctor’s species periodically reincarnate as a routine part of their life cycle. They were thus able to keep the show going through many changes of lead actor. Doctor Who has been on the air for most of the past forty-five years with no signs of stopping anytime soon.

Here’s the original 1963 title sequence, with music composed by Ron Grainer and arranged, produced and recorded by Delia Derbyshire:

Let’s talk for a second about Delia Derbyshire.

She produced the Doctor Who theme music using analog oscillators and tape loops, laboriously, over a period of many weeks. Here she talks about her process.

Her name suggests that she might have been a professor at Hogwarts, but Delia Derbyshire was a genuine hipster ambient techno producer, decades before such a thing existed. She was buddies with Paul McCartney, Yoko Ono, Brian Jones and the guys in Pink Floyd. In addition to the Doctor Who theme, she produced a bunch of other tripped-out electronica. Hear a sample:

Delia Derbyshire – “Planetarium”

The Doctor Who theme I was hearing in the eighties as a third grader was a newer arrangement by Peter Howell:

The Delia Derbyshire version broke a lot of new ground, but the eighties version is the one that really works for me musically. The groove is tighter because the bass was recorded to a click track. The main melody is played on an Arp Odyssey, a more sophisticated version of the synth they used for R2D2′s voice. Peter Howell sings the B section melody wordlessly through a vocoder. Here’s a behind-the-scenes video if you want to really geek all the way out. Dude isn’t the world’s most dynamic camera presence, but he demonstrates all the different retrofuture gear one piece at a time.

In 1988, The KLF had a number one pop hit in the UK with “Doctorin’ The Tardis” which includes a sample of the Peter Howell theme.

What I like about electronic music is how it makes the strange familiar, and the familiar strange. The best science fiction does that too. Nothing could have sounded more futuristic or otherworldly to me as a kid than those synths and that vocoder. Now they’re museum pieces.

People have been experimenting with recording playback devices as musical instruments for a hundred years. But the concept didn’t cross into mass consciousness until the rise of hip-hop turntablism in the early 1980s. The breakthrough moment for a lot of people was Herbie’s song “Rockit” from his 1983 album Future Shock. The song includes turntable scratching over a blend of live and programmed drums and synths, along with some heavily processed robo-vocals. Future Shock is named for the Curtis Mayfield song, which is itself named for the Alvin Toffler book. The basic gist is, “Too much change too fast is stressful for people.” Herbie, at least, has managed to get some pleasure from his future shock.

Many fans of Herbie’s acoustic jazz work were distraught when he crossed over into the land of synths and other high tech. Herbie himself was ambivalent about electronics at first. In interviews, he says he was reluctant to try electric piano, and only relented when his then boss Miles Davis insisted. Herbie was convinced and then some. Here’s what his studio looked like at the time of Future Shock’s recording.

In the early eighties, Herbie started collaborating with Bill Laswell, another electronic adventurer. They wrote and constructed “Rockit” together with keyboardist and drum programmer Michael Beinhorn. The track includes turntable scratching by Grand Mixer DST.

The record DST is scratching is “Change Le Beat” by Fab Five Freddy, featuring B-Side. It’s an oddity among old-school hip-hop records because it’s mostly in French. Fab Five Freddy laces the track with heavily vocoded interjections, and it ends with his robotic voice saying “This stuff is really fresh.”

This phrase has been scratched and sampled a zillion times. It’s in four different tracks each by Eric B & Rakim and the Beastie Boys. On “Rockit,” Herbie answers DST’s scratched vocal with some vocoded speech of his own.

Here’s a live performance of “Rockit” from the 1984 Grammy Awards. I love the breakdancing robots.

Since Herbie loves electronic music and hip-hop, it’s no surprise that they love him right back. He’s been sampled by musicians ranging from Tupac Shakur to Deee-Lite.

Jazz is in a tough spot right now. It’s been the worst-selling genre of music for years. A lot of jazz musicians and fans loathe electronic music, especially hip-hop. This makes me sad. My formal music background is in jazz, and I absorbed plenty of prejudice along with all the music theory. When I started meeting and working with some hip-hop musicians, I discovered that they mostly love jazz and are deeply reverent towards it. Some of the best hip-hop musicians come from jazz training. For instance, Rakim Allah trained as a bebop saxophone player; you can hear its impact on his linear, intricate flow.

Many jazz cats have a hard time returning the affection. A lot of jazz musicians don’t like the extreme harmonic and rhythmic minimalism of hip-hop and other electronic forms. I’ve heard jazzers deride repetitive dance music as “dumb” or “unmusical.” What’s ironic is that classical musicians used to say exactly the same thing about jazz. For its first few decades, jazz was dance music.

In my own music-making experience, hip-hop is every bit as challenging to create as jazz. Simpler, highly repetitive music has its own discipline. You have to mercilessly reject most of your ideas in order to identify the most intense and compelling ones, the ones you want to hear repeated sixteen or thirty-two or sixty-four times. Such strict editing can be uncomfortable after the relaxed effusions of post-bebop jazz soloing. It’s easier to deride new music as dumb than to admit that it’s evolving past the limits of your skill set. I admire Herbie for having the humility to being willing to keep learning, to keep subjecting himself to new constraints.

I believe in practicing what I preach, so here’s my remix of “Rockit.” It includes some samples of Herbie’s Chameleon and the movie Scratch.

This stuff is really fresh!

See a followup post about Herbie’s relationship with synthesizers.