If you don’t already know about this, click here, and just type names of your favourite musicians into the search engine. Tons of video of various sorts… bits of musicians on lost TV show appearances, amatuer video, etc. Just random video clips that have been submitted by random people. Wonderful resource…..
(It is old news for some, but I heard about it last week on NPR, being well on the other side of hip these days.)
Random finds in my first minutes of visiting:
Thelonius Monk, with Charlie Rouse, Ben Riley and Larry Gales playing “Blue Monk”. Oslo, 1966. (Link here.) I always love watching his tapping foot, and his wonderful fingering choices which are pure genius…. as do several cameramen who’ve filmed his performances. This unfortunately isn’t one of those times when Monk gets up and does a little dance… I love it when he does that!
Bizarrely camp and ridiculously cutesy (but beautifully sung) version of “Rocket Man”, by Kate Bush and her band, on MTV. (Link here.) Just excellent, despite being amusingly 80s in style (but actually early 90s).
[Update: Oh.. and one of my favourite recordings of "So What", with John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Paul Chambers (bass), Jimmy Cobb (drums) and I'm guessing Wynton Kelly on piano (from the style, the back of his head, and the time, '58 or '59) ....(Link here.)]
[Update: I forgot to mention that I was hoping that I might find a video clip of Strings 98's perfomance of "The Maldacena", by 400 string theorists in unison (to the tune of "The Macarena"), but that seems to be lost forever... see here, and here, for more on that, by the way.]
-cvj
February 21st, 2006 at 6:57 pm
I also highly recommend searching for “john stewart dick cheney”. It is an amazing short from the daily show regarding Cheney’s recent misfire.
February 21st, 2006 at 7:30 pm
Monk is a brilliant original. That hat, however, was not one of his better ideas.
February 21st, 2006 at 7:32 pm
Just wonderful. Watching Monk is very humbling. Ill bet there are hundreds of young pianists in college jazz programs around the world who have better technique. But few who have the genius or whose playing will change music as much as Monk did. Or who have as much swing!
February 21st, 2006 at 8:11 pm
If you want to catch some vintage rare Miles and Mahavishnu Orchestra, as well as most of the greatest music of the 60’s all recorded live at various Bill Graham venues try this site:
http://www.wolfgangsvault.com/Static.aspx?Type=Audio/Radio.htm&CategoryID=RA&LeftNav=Audio/RadioNav.htm
February 21st, 2006 at 8:25 pm
Ornette Coleman with Cecil Taylor on Saturday Night Live, of all places, how times have changed…
February 21st, 2006 at 8:43 pm
You Tube’s greatest offering is without a doubt:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TE0sOfcWVqQ&search=Tool
It’s nice to know that the kids are turning out OK. =)
February 21st, 2006 at 8:47 pm
Lee:- Yes. Don’t forget his compositions…it was not just his playing (and for those who don’t know.. those double key presses are deliberate, not accidental), but his ear and consequent approach to harmony had few peers, if any. Even now his compositions sounds as fresh and ahead of the times as they ever did.
-cvj
February 21st, 2006 at 8:54 pm
Sean…. the hat’s fine. Just fine.
-cvj
February 22nd, 2006 at 11:16 am
Are people really so in love with TV that they think a site as pathetic as YouTube is worth praising? Here are people providing an extraordinarily lame search interface to an even lamer playback technology using a proprietary playback engine that provides performance inferior to QuickTime 1.0. (The audio/video sync is bad under the best of conditions and can easily get 30 second seconds to a minute out of sync because the video engine seems to have no awareness of the need to drop frames if either the network or the CPU cannot keep up.)
To top it all, they refuse to provide a download ability so that you can use a better playback engine on your desktop.
(Yeah, yeah, you can jump through various hoops to rig a download by typing in a special URL. At the end of that you then have a .flv file which is still useless unless you have an flv converter app, and those are all pretty pathetic.)
I though (and still think) Google video was pretty lame (and likewise completely clueless about modern computer video technology), but compared to the competion they are absolute geniuses.
And don’t get me started on that PoC Democracy released in 0.8 version yesterday. This thing deserves to be shown to everyone as the dumb blomb of software — gorgeous looking and completely idiotic.
One of the reasons I left the computer video business after ten years working on QuickTime was because it appeared that no matter what one tried to do, sooner or later the stupidity of the people who populate TV land would infect what you were doing, and it seems that this rule is now holding up for TV on the web.
February 22nd, 2006 at 1:03 pm
People love it because of the content, and are not so bothered by the software issues. Hurrah for content!
-cvj
February 22nd, 2006 at 5:35 pm
Clifford,
A wise man once said “The medium is the message”. A medium that severely (and artificially) limits what you can do is something we should all be aware of and should protest.
You may think I’m stupid. People thought it was stupid to worry much about TV supplying news, and televised presidential debates in the late 50’s. I think, with 50 yrs of history behind, we can see that they were wrong, there was real cause for concern.
The hope, of course, is that the medium will improve, that competition between Google video, YouTube, iTunes music store and so on will correct things.
Maybe so, but it won’t happen if people don’t complain.
(I’m not much convinced things will change in the appropriate direction even if we do complain, but we can at least try.)
February 22nd, 2006 at 6:47 pm
You’re looking into this very wisely and deeply. I just think of it as a fun site where people upload all sorts of random bits of video that everyone can look at using a live stream. It is not ideal, but it is simply fun!
I don’t think you’re stupid. Things only change when people go “that’s fine, but….”, to some extent. Yes, you have every right to complain and ask for it to be improved to suit your needs, and I am sure that everyone will benefit from the pressure you put on them. Thanks! In the meantime, I’ve just been having fun occasionally looking into it and finding some lost bit of video treasure and going “wow”…. but then I’m just a big wide-eyed kid, really.
Cheers,
-cvj
February 22nd, 2006 at 9:54 pm
[...] …. I gave the midterm for my Electromagnetism class today. Stayed up until 1:30am putting the finishing touches on it, and then up again four and a half hours later to go in early and get it and its accompanying formula sheet (yeah, yeah, I’m getting soft, I know) photocopied, and ready to give to them at 8:45am in class. They had one hour of furious computing -and a bit of thinking- to do. These ones are hard to get right since you’ve got to gauge their ability to do enough in the short time allowed. Get it wrong (like I did with the equivalent mid term last year) and they just can require way longer to do it than they have time for. It is really important to recall that they are still young and don’t take all the same computational shortcuts that one does later in life. And recall that for upper-level courses I like to have a bit of fun new stuff in there too, so I had to think carefully about how to do that in one hour too. (The plan was to do this all with the aid of the atmostphere at the Cat and Fiddle, like last week’s midterm prep session, but in the end I got sucked in by tons of incredibly campy Queen videos -how come we never saw that aspect so clearly as kids?- on You Tube…., which made for a background which is more relevant than you think… more on that later.) [...]
February 23rd, 2006 at 11:14 pm
Spyder, Sakura-chan, and Clifford,
Thanks. I bookmarked each of those.
February 24th, 2006 at 1:55 am
Whatever the technical failings of YouTube, it has made my day by throwing up three absolute gems – Prince playing like a demon on a tribute version of ‘while my guitar gently weeps’, with George Harrison’s son on rhythm guitar, Frank Zappa, young and besuited, on the Steve Allen Show in1963, demonstrating the musical potential of the bicycle and an amazing drum solo (really) by Terry Bozzio at Montreaux – all in the space of a few minutes. To an illiberal non-cosmologist, with a soft spot for virtuoso rock musicians, perhaps the best thing yet to come out of Cosmic Variance. And the Kate Bush RocketMan video was quite as sweet as I remember its being.
March 21st, 2006 at 4:45 pm
liked the rerence to ZAPPA one of the innovators of the base of all music ps wish cheney would take tony blair out for the day lol
March 22nd, 2006 at 3:05 pm
I seem to recall seeing some cool parkour on youtube. And a lot of really sucky parkour. Such is the nature of this internerd of Gore’s.