Isaiah Berlin Interview

The Voice of Guillaume Apollinaire

Listen to a recording of Guillaume Apollinaire here.

Roy Lichtenstein and Benny Goodman

According to this article, by Martin Filler, at the age of fourteen Roy Lichtenstein attended Benny Goodman's Carnegie Hall concert in January, 1938.

A book about Goodman's concert will be published later this year...

Benoit Mandelbrot

Tyondai Braxton's Dead Strings

Georges Méliès: Le Mélomane

This is brilliant...

50,000-Watt Radio Broadcasting? Bah!

"Some ... may recall Top 40 deejays in America boasting of their stations' powerful fifty-thousand-watt signals.  Consider, then, that Radio Luxembourg was seven times more powerful than that, and the [Voice of America], in Munich, twenty times more powerful, aiming to reach Soviet territory."

—From Barry Kernfeld's recent book, Pop Song Piracy

...and here it says 1.3 million Watts:

A short feature on Willis Conover's VOA jazz broadcasts:

N.H.O.P.

Peter Ablinger's "Cecil Taylor"

...from Voices and Piano (1998)

B.B King and Ray Charles

Wifi Networks with Attention-Getting Names...

Lauren Collins mentions some in this New Yorker piece (not available free online).  For instance, "Stop Cooking Indian!!!," "We Can Hear You Having Sex," and "DieTrustfundersDie."

In other news, the New Yorker seems to have pretty much turned into a slightly more thoughtful version of Time Magazine (or at least what Time was a few decades ago).  These days they most just publish fairly short articles on public events.  The lead pieces in the last two issues have been about "Occupy Wall Street."

Sonny Rollins Interview for the PBS Newshour

(Transcript here).  Rollins is in Washington, DC, to receive a Kennedy Center Honor this weekend.  Here are some out-takes that weren't included in the Newshour T.V. broadcast:

His description of Charlie Parker's musical contribution at 4:00 is interesting... seems like he thinks it was about unifying the music with long-range structural connections.

More on Rollins here, here, here, and here.

Joseph Cornell's "A Legend for Fountains"

Dziga Vertov's "Man with a Movie Camera"

Possible Summer Reading for Rioting Penn State Students?

These studious folks could warm up with Katha Pollitt's recent column, in which she politely suggests that Penn State Officials "Cancel the season. Fire everybody involved in the child abuse scandal," and then goes a step further:

Maybe cancel college football too. In no other country’s university system, after all, does sports play anything like the central role it does in American academic life. Men do not go to Oxford to play cricket; the Sorbonne does not field a nationally celebrated soccer team. Even in the most sports-mad countries, sports is sports and education is education. That’s a better system. 

...and then perhaps they could spend some time perusing Taylor Branch's widely publicized piece for The Atlantic, which includes the following anecdote involving a former Penn State president:

"I'm not hiding,"  Sonny Vaccaro told a closed hearing at the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C., in 2001. “We want to put our materials on the bodies of your athletes, and the best way to do that is buy your school. Or buy your coach.” ... [S]ince signing his pioneering shoe contract with Michael Jordan in 1984, [Vaccaro] had built sponsorship empires successively at Nike, Adidas, and Reebok. ...

 “Why,” asked Bryce Jordan, the president emeritus of Penn State, “should a university be an advertising medium for your industry?”

Vaccaro did not blink. “They shouldn’t, sir,” he replied. “You sold your souls, and you’re going to continue selling them. You can be very moral and righteous in asking me that question, sir,” Vaccaro added with irrepressible good cheer, “but there’s not one of you in this room that’s going to turn down any of our money. You’re going to take it. I can only offer it.”

...and finally they could dip into Murray Sperber's Beer and Circus.

Through the Grapevine...

Hendrik Hertzberg at the 1963 Newport Jazz Festival

While he was in college, New Yorker political commentator Hendrik Hertzberg reported on the 1963 Newport Jazz Festival for the Harvard Crimson.  (The review was co-authored by someone identified only as R.K.I.).  Read the entire review here.

Among the performances Hertzberg heard were Thelonious Monk with Pee Wee Russell (download the full set here):

...and the Martial Solal trio (listen on Grooveshark here).  He also heard the Duke Ellington Orchestra, Cannonball Adderley, Nina Simone, and Sonny Rollins with Coleman Hawkins.  But evidently he left after Jimmy Smith's set on the final night and consequently didn't catch the John Coltrane Quartet, who closed out the weekend:

The Newport festival line-up that year was:

It's Official: Publishers Hate Libraries

Penguin is the latest publisher to suspend e-book availability for library users.  According to this report: 

Publishers have become increasingly nervous about the growing use of e-books by library users, who can check out the books remotely without ever entering a library. The concern is that consumers who own e-readers will stop buying e-books and begin borrowing them for free instead.

Naturally, publishers have always wished that people would buy their books instead of borrowing them from libraries or purchasing them second-hand.  But until now, owing to the "first-sale doctrine" (without which libraries as we know them couldn't exist), they haven't found a technological or legal means of preventing this practice (although they have been able to charge libraries much higher fees for periodical subscriptions than what they charge individual subscribers).  Now, with e-books, they can do what they've always wanted to do, because when you purchase an e-book you don't receive anything but a license to use the content subject to various conditions.  Next time you buy a $9.99 e-book for your Kindle or iPad, bear in mind that you might be able to borrow a print copy from your local library for free.


Interestingly, the "first-sale doctrine" has recently been cited as legal grounds for re-selling digital music files...  

Hatchet Jobs on Jobs?

So now, after all the understandable adulation in the wake of the sad, premature death of Steve Jobs, come the contrarians, such as Malcolm Gladwell, who argues in this article that, rather than being a visionary innovator, "Jobs was someone who took other people’s ideas and changed them [and] he did not like it when the same thing was done to him."  And then there's Eric Alterman, who charges in this column that Jobs "treated the people who actually manufacture Apple products like serfs and hoarded his $8.3 billion fortune to no apparent purpose."  I guess Gladwell and Alterman are taking to heart the 1990s Apple slogan: "Think Different."

New Mosaic Boxed Set... and a Thought on Coleman Hawkins's Dark Ages

Mosaic records will soon be releasing an eight-disk boxed set of Coleman Hawkins recordings spanning the years from 1922–47.  Interestingly, the collection contains none of the sides that Hawkins made while he lived in Europe from 1934–39.  Perhaps there were licensing issues that prevented Mosaic from releasing any tracks from this period, when the saxophonist was in his prime; he made about fifty of them, according to this and this.  Unfortunately, this omission is likely to reinforce the rather closed-minded misperception in American circles that comparatively little of significance occurred in the jazz world outside of the U.S. before the end of World War II.  From reading a lot of jazz history texts, you could be forgiven for thinking that Hawkins vanished from the face of the earth for five years only to reappear out of the blue in New York in 1939 to record "Body and Soul."  Meanwhile, he was happily playing things like this, filmed in the Netherlands in 1935: