The bad news is that Rick Warren, author of The Purpose-Driven Life, will be giving the invocation at Obama’s inauguration. A terrible choice; reaching out to evangelicals is fine, but honoring bigoted homophobes is a bad strategy.

The good news is that pianist Gabriela Montero will be performing at the inauguration! (Along with some other jokers: Aretha Franklin, Yo-Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman, and Anthony McGill.) Hopefully this prestigious venue will bring an incredibly talented performer to much-deserved wider recognition.

If you tend not to click on YouTube clips of musicians, you might want to make an exception this time. Here is Montero at a concert in Germany. She asks the audience to suggest a German song for her — “Mer losse de Dom in Kölle,” if commenters are to be believed — and gets them to sing it. She catches the tune (which apparently she’s never heard before), and starts improvising based on it. (There’s not nearly enough improvisation in modern classical music, in my jazz-inflected opinion.) It’s a throwaway, but quite joyous and beautiful. And most of all, fun.

The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) is one of the most amazing instruments ever built. It was constructed (and is now being upgraded) to search for gravitational waves. I’ll wax poetic about it soon enough. In the interim, readers can whet their appetites with Einstein’s cosmic messengers, a collaboration between Andrea Centazzo (a multimedia artist) and Michele Vallisneri (a physicist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory). They will be performing a world premiere of their work on the Caltech campus tomorrow evening (Oct. 30); the event is free, and open to the public. The concert will be preceded by public talks by Kip Thorne and Jay Marx, two of the most knowledgeable people alive when it comes to gravitational-wave theory and observation. The evening promises to be an interesting melding of science and art. Centazzo will perform the music live, synchronized with the video. The concert attempts to capture the grandeur of LIGO, as well as shed light (and sound) on the nature of gravitational waves. For those of us poor souls unfortunate enough not to live near Pasadena, we will have to satisfy ourselves with video:

For those of you that are able to make it to the concert, please let us know your thoughts on the event!

I must not be a very good atheist, because I love gospel music. Here are the Blind Boys of Alabama, with “Run On.”

The Boys first got together in 1939. And they’re not some ongoing concern whose membership turns over, like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir; their current lead singer, Jimmy Lee Carter, was a founding member of the group. Other charter members were active until recently: vocalist Clarence Fountain cut down on touring in 2006, and George Scott (singing lead in this track) passed away in 2005. They gained a bit of late-career notoriety when their cover of Tom Waits’ “Way Down in the Hole” was used as the theme song for the first season of The Wire.

Sorry for the lack of substantive blogging of late. Science comes first.

Today would have been John Coltrane’s 82nd birthday. Here he is playing Naima.

And here is an interview from 1960. “The reason I play so many — maybe it sounds angry, because I’m trying so many things at one time, you see — I haven’t sorted them out. I have a whole bag of things that I’m trying to work through and get the one essential, you know?”

Here is a computer animation, to the tune of Giant Steps.

And here is a robot playing the Giant Steps solo. Not as good as the original.

Coltrane died in 1967, at the age of 40.

Wednesday night we walked over to the Orpheum — a wonderful theater from the 1920′s, recently refurbished to its former glory — to catch a concert by Squeeze — one of my favorite bands from high school, who have recently been refurbished to something like their former glory. Which is to say, they put on a great show of classic tunes played with crowd-pleasing gusto. And we had the unexpected pleasure of being recognized by CV reader David and his wife (Sarah? I didn’t catch her name, sorry). Scientists are kind of a big deal in this town.

So here is Up the Junction.

Note how the lyrics play with the notion of chronology. The temporal point of view shifts gradually throughout the narrative.

This morning at 4:50
I took her rather nifty
Down to an incubator
Where thirty minutes later
She gave birth to a daughter
Within a year a walker
She looked just like her mother
If there could be another

Sadly, I couldn’t find a decent video of Slaughtered, Gutted and Heartbroken.

The addition of The Bad Plus to our blogroll got a positive review. Here they are, recorded by some guy in the back of the room with a hand-held camera, playing Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” (Here is the original, and here is Paul Anka.)

Usually I like my jazz a little less adulterated — and the Bad Plus have stirred up considerable controversy by mixing in frequent pop covers along with their straight-ahead tunes. But these guys are playful, intelligent, and infectious, as well as accomplished musicians. The blog is worth reading, too — here’s a thoughtful commentary on Barack Obama and discrimination in jazz. Besides, it’s named “Do the Math”!

The Barenaked Ladies’ “Snacktime” is on very heavy rotation in my house these days. It’s officially an album for children (which explains the heavy rotation, because if kids like something once, they like it for approximately the next billion times). However, a lot of it is laugh-out-loud funny for adults. For example, from the alternate alphabet song:

D is for djinn, E for Euphrates,
F is for fohn, but not like when I call the ladies.

But I digress.

The first song on the album is “789″, about the nefarious dealings of the number 7.

1, 2, 3, 4 and more makes 7
Why is six afraid of 7?
Cause 7 ate 9

Recently the eldest kid piped up: “Seven eats all the numbers. There are no more numbers after 8.” I asked why. “Well, seven ate nine, so it’s 7-8-10, so then seven ate ten, so it’s 7-8-11, so then seven ate 11, and then it just keeps going.”

So, the Barenaked Ladies just inspired my seven-year old to discover the principle of mathematical induction, which is one of the first techniques you learn when you venture into the land of advanced mathematics. The idea is that if you can prove that something is true for some integer n, and that it is also true for n+1, then it has to be true for all integers greater than n. So, for a simple (and somewhat silly) example, if you can first prove that if n>0 then n+1>0, and then you also prove that 1>0, then all positive integers are greater than zero. I remember having a hard time wrapping my head around this idea when I first bumped into it in high school (though I got over it in college after enough algebra classes with Michael Artin). I just find it pretty nifty that you can get the idea from a kid’s song.

I suspect the LHC must be close to ready — they’re coming out with rap videos now.

Via Adam at US/LHC Blogs, although the video was posted by writer/rapper Katherine McAlpine, formerly of Physics Buzz.

In honor of the holiday, I offer you a Muppet-ized version of “Danny Boy”:

And he will inform you of this desire … in song!

Via Cynical-C.