At the request of Wenatchee the Hatchet, and also following my own long-standing interest, I took a dive into the opening track from Björk’s exquisite album Vespertine: I love Björk for so many reasons. A big one is her ability to make weird ideas sound approachable, which is closely related to her ability to make …
Category Archives: Key Musicians
The Anchor Song
Is there a difference between Ionian mode and the major scale? C Ionian mode and the C major scale are the same collection of pitches. Does that mean that they are the same thing? There is a lot of confusion about this. Classic FM says that C Ionian and C major are interchangeable. This Stack …
Hear J Dilla flip a Gary Burton sample three different ways
While I await my copy of Dan Charnas’ book Dilla Time, I’m listening to lots and lots of James Dewitt Yancey. As I was poking around WhoSampled.com, I noticed that Dilla used a sample of Gary Burton in three different tracks in three consecutive years. It’s five seconds into Burton’s 1967 recording of Carla Bley’s …
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Living for the City
This Stevie Wonder classic is an iconic blues-based groove combined with some very non-blues-based harmony. Stevie sang all the parts and played all the instruments, including the sumptuous analog synth sounds designed with Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff. Stevie’s brother Calvin Hardaway is the main character in the spoken interlude. Ira Tucker Jr of the …
Remixing David Bowie’s “Starman”
In Electronic Music School: a Contemporary Approach to Teaching Musical Creativity, we include a series of project plans that are designed to scaffold student creativity. If you sit someone down in front of an empty DAW session and tell them to be creative, they are likely to be paralyzed by uncertainty or anxiety. It works …
The Kronos Quartet play Jimi Hendrix
I have mixed feelings about the Kronos Quartet arrangement of “Purple Haze” by Jimi Hendrix. On the one hand, it’s cool that they even attempted it. On the other hand, is the attempt successful? It’s great that they’re taking advantage of the violin’s pitch continuum to do all the blue notes and guitaristic bends and …
Waiting For Benny
The Genius of the Electric Guitar is an aptly-named compilation of studio recordings that Charlie Christian made with Benny Goodman between 1939 and 1941. The album includes a couple of informal studio jams recorded while Goodman’s band was waiting for their leader to show up. Both jams have self-explanatory titles: “Blues in B” and “Waiting …
Spoonful
One of the most intense and arresting recordings I have ever heard is Howlin’ Wolf’s recording of “Spoonful” by Willie Dixon. This is on my list of classic songs with no chord changes, along with “Chain of Fools” by Aretha Franklin, “India” by John Coltrane, “I’m Bad Like Jesse James” by John Lee Hooker, “Papa Was …
Lightnin’ Hopkins – “My California”
I’m spending this month in California with my in-laws, and so naturally I went searching my iTunes for thematically appropriate songs. One of the results was this exquisite Lightnin’ Hopkins recording. Here’s my visualization using Ableton Live. I tuned the recording up a half step so that it’s in A rather than A-flat, which makes …
Nature Boy
There was a boy, a very strange enchanted boy. His name was eden ahbez, he was a hippie decades before that was a common thing to be, and he wrote “Nature Boy“, which Nat King Cole turned into a major hit. The tune has become a jazz and pop standard, and has been recorded uncountably …