If you possess something but you can’t give it away, then you don’t possess it… it possesses you.– Frank Sinatra In 1967, Frank Sinatra teamed up with Brazilian singer, pianist, guitarist, composer and songwriter Antonio Carlos Jobim to record an album that married the Chairman’s signature vocals with rhythms from the master of bossa nova. [...]
Books &Music Entropy | 11 May 2010
The Blue Moment Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue and the Remaking of Modern Music.. The critics and jazz fans alike consider Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue an improvisational tour de force. Davis cultivated an atmosphere of creative instability by rolling tape on his ensemble’s first takes and refusing to rehearse. They turned out a collection [...]
Nat King Cole: An Incandescent Voice. Everyone knows about Nat King Cole the magisterial singer, but the popular vocalist first came to prominence in the jazz community as an inventive pianist and group stylist. Possessing a gorgeous touch, unerring taste, melodic imagination and a harmonic and rhythmic approach that hinted at the forthcoming innovations of [...]
Violinist Robert Vijay Gupta joined the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the age of 19. He made his solo debut, at age 11, with the Israel Philharmonic under Zubin Mehta. He’s got a master’s in music from Yale. But his undergraduate degree? Pre-med. As an undergrad, Gupta was part of several research projects in neuro- and [...]
Books &Music &Photography Entropy | 20 Mar 2010
The Jazz Loft Project: Photographs and Tapes of W. Eugene Smith from 821 Sixth Avenue, 1957-1965 From 1957 to 1965 legendary photographer W. Eugene Smith 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 [...]
Books &Music Entropy | 18 Dec 2009
The music is a bridge across the abyss, it is often the final means of human connection, our closing form of comfort. It is what we have when we have nothing else. In this brief video the writer-doctor/ Neurologist Dr. Oliver Sacks discusses his book, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain an investigation into [...]