Blogs / Cosmic Variance

The Bad Plus have a blog! How cool is that? (Via Marginal Revolution.) The BP are a jazz trio consisting of pianist Ethan Iverson, bassist Reid Anderson, and drummer Dave King, known for an energetic and imaginative style that ranges from free jazz to playful pop. Their version of Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit became quite a hit as these things go, and rightfully so. The blog is called Do The Math, so perhaps they are trying to compete in the nerd-off. It’s fantastic that a working jazz combo (or musicians more generally) have their own blog; anyone know of any other examples?

I haven’t had a chance to explore the blog very closely, but I noticed that they link to a recent NYT article by Ben Ratliff on Jazz at Lincoln Center’s upcoming Coltrane series, in honor of what would have been his 80th birthday. One of the pieces being performed is Giant Steps, an especially interesting tune. Coltrane knew his music theory backwards and forwards, and he put a tremendous amount of thought into composing Giant Steps; rumor has it that it was meant as an exercise for students, but has since grown into a popular standard, in much the same way as Bach’s Goldberg Variations. (Apparently Trane himself decided that it was too mechanical, and didn’t play it very much after the record had appeared.) The solo is based on an extremely rapid series of a particular type of chord changes, now known as Coltrane changes. In the tune, Coltrane plays four notes in each chord (the root, second, third, and fifth) as a series of eighth notes, changing chords every two beats. For those of you keeping score at home, that means each note is played precisely once before moving on the the next chord, not leaving much time for ornamentation. You can buy a whole book of transcriptions of Trane’s different takes of the chorus.

I know you want me to link to an audio file of Giant Steps, don’t you? But I have something even better. Via Wikipedia, here is an animation of Giant Steps by Michal Levy. It’s extremely well done, and the visual representation tracks the music faithfully while adding its own imaginative dimension.

For your obligatory science content, MR also points to a very clever animation of different dimensions, all the way up to ten! (Okay, the mixing of quantum mechanics and the higher dimensions is a little bizzare; but the pictures are nice.) Those MR guys are pretty good linkers, for libertarians.

Regardless of how unhip I may be now (a matter for everyone to decide for themselves), it’s nothing compared to how unhip I was growing up, especially when it came to music. The first 45rpm single I ever purchased was by Kiss, and the first full-length LP was by the Electric Light Orchestra; let us say no more about that.

In particular, I didn’t know anything about punk rock, and certainly didn’t come close to appreciating the genius of the Clash. Sure, I knew Rock The Casbah from the video on MTV (although little did I suspect it would some day become a conservative rock anthem, the Clash being secret Republicans at heart). But I didn’t at all understand the skill and passion with which the band blended hard-core punk sensibilities with a disparate palate of musical influences.

Which is just as well, as my lack of familiarity allowed me to fall in love with frontman Joe Strummer on the basis of his solo work with backing band The Mescaleros. After the Clash broke up in 1986, Strummer’s output waned, while he appeared in a couple of films and contributed some soundtrack music. Then, starting in 1999, he released a series of three albums of astonishing range and beauty: Rock Art and the X-Ray Style, Global a Go-Go, and Streetcore. The last of these, sadly, was posthumous, as Strummer died unexpectedly of a heart attack in 2002. (I’m sure everyone else knows all this. Me, I never whould have discovered Strummer if Mondo Bongo hadn’t been prominently featured on the soundtrack for Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Thanks, Brad and Angelina!)

Reviews of Strummer’s solo work have been largely positive, but somewhat tempered by confusion due to a lack of obvious continuity with his punk roots. Personally, I think that if the albums are considered in their own right, rather than as “by the guy from the Clash” with all the preconceptions that implies, they are an amazing achievement. Strummer was always interested in different genres of music (and reggae was an important influence on the Clash), but here he mixes a mad panopoly of styles — from punk to folk to reggae to rockabilly to Middle Eastern to Latin to African and on — with equally eclectic instrumentation and colorful lyrics. (Where “colorful” should occasionally be taken to mean “surreal bordering on nonsensical,” unless I was patrolling a Pachinko / Nude noodle model parlor / in the Nefarious zone is more transparent to you than it is to me.) Along with drums/bass/guitar, a Mescaleros song might feature violin, whistle, mandolin, organ, conga, bells, bodhran, udu, accordion, saxophone, dulcimer, and/or whatever else was lying around. While he could still rock with the best of them, Strummer could also step back with an acoustic tune like Bob Marley’s Redemption Song (also recorded elsewhere in a duet with Johnny Cash).

You can get a good idea of the playful energy, at once exuberant and reflective, of Strummer’s later music from the lyrics to Bhindi Bhagee. It’s a song about eclectic food choices, but there is an explicit parallel (which the lyrics are happy to spell out) with eclectic musical choices. Of course, if you listen to a bit, the energy is even more obvious.

Well, I was walking down the High Road
And this guy stops me
He’d just got in from New Zealand
And he was looking for mushy peas
I said, no, we hadn’t really got ‘em round here
I said, but we do got

Balti, Bhindi, strictly Hindi
Dall, Halal and I’m walking down the road
We got rocksoul, okra, bombay duck-ra
Shrimp beansprout, comes with it or without – with it or without
Bagels soft or simply harder
Exotic avocado or toxic empenada
We got akee, lassi, Somali waccy baccy
I’m sure back home you know what tikka’s all about – what tikka’s all about

Welcome stranger to the humble neighborhoods
You can get inspiration along the highroad

Hommus, cous cous in the jus of octopus
Pastrami and salami and lasagne on the go
Welcome stranger, there’s no danger
Welcome to this humble neighborhood

There’s Balti, Bhindi, strictly Hindi
Dall, Halal and I’m walking down the road
Rocksoul, okra, bombay duck-ra
Shrimp beansprout, comes with it or without

So anyway, I told him I was in a band
He said, “Oh yeah, oh yeah – what’s your music like?”
I said, “It’s um, um, well, it’s kinda like
You know, it’s got a bit of, um, you know.”

Ragga, Bhangra, two-step Tanga
Mini-cab radio, music on the go
Um, surfbeat, backbeat, frontbeat, backseat
There’s a bunch of players and they’re really letting go
We got, Brit pop, hip hop, rockabilly, Lindy hop
Gaelic heavy metal fans fighting in the road
Ah, Sunday boozers for chewing gum users
They got a crazy D.J. and she’s really letting go

Oh, welcome stranger
Welcome stranger to the humble neighborhoods

Well, I say, there’s plenty of places to eat round here
He say, “Oh yeah, I’m pretty choosy.”

You got
Balti, Bhindi, strictly Hindi
Dall, Halal, walking down the road
Rocksoul, okra, bombay duck-ra
Shrimp beansprout, comes with it or without
Let’s check it out

Welcome stranger to the humble neighborhoods, neighborhoods
Check out all that

Por-da-sol, por-da-sol
Walking down the highroad

I know, it’s William Shatner. At a science fiction conference an awards show. From the Seventies. “Singing” an Elton John/Bernie Taupin hit.

But still. It can’t be for real, right? Like, irony? Please tell me it’s a joke. Seriously. (Via The Sports Guy, ultimately via Ed Brayton.)

Cate Blanchett to play Bob Dylan in biopic.

The resemblance is uncanny.

To be candid, Blanchett will not have to shoulder the burden all by herself; Heath Ledger, Christian Bale, and Richard Gere are among those who will portray different aspects of Dylan in the upcoming I’m Not There, due to be released next year.

It is that time of year again. Because I am insane, I am teaching -by choice- two classes this semester. One of them is quite small, having 12 students, the other is not. The small class is my electricity and magnetism class. With a class this small, it is nice sometimes to have a change of scenery, and -if the material can handle it- I show up one sunny Spring day (after the hard slog through rainy Winter days) and declare that we are going outside to sit under a tree. There are several lovely spaces on the USC campus perfectly suited to this, and so we go outside. Last year, when I first had the idea for doing this, eventually I thought to buy a little portable whiteboard in case I need to write or draw something. (I discovered that the board fits perfectly into my Brompton’s front carrier bag, sticking pleasantly out of the top as I cycle along!)

It’s just a perfect setup actually, since this time of year usually coincides with the last part of the class where we are doing Special Relativity. I can think of few physics topics which are better suited to sitting outside and discussing under a tree -with a few diagrams and equations- than the classic thought experiments of Special Relativity. Here’s everyone in the class (except Chris Cantwell, who unusually could not make it this time), and also the whiteboard, my coffee cup, and the Brompton (of course):
(L to R: Michael Crampon, Jeff Pennington, Michael Johnson, Douglas Mason, Omar Hussein, Aleksandr Rodin, Amanda Fournier, Christopher Winterowd, Christopher Palmer, Justin Seymour, Matthew Recker.)

You can see, if you look closely, the last remnants of the moment of confusion that appeared on their faces from just being told that a vector can have zero squared length while not itself being zero. (That’s a “null four-vector”, we were talking about, for the uninitiated. You need them for describing things that move at the speed of light, for example.)

I have to design them a final exam very soon. Time for a trip to the Cat and Fiddle then, some evening soon. I’m going to see if I can get in a “fun” question at the end again, like last year. During the exam last year, one student (Lauren Schenkman) raised her hand to ask a question. I thought there was a typo or something on the exam. No, there wasn’t. Her question – asked cautiously and respectfully, was, “Are you serious?”. I love that. Here was the question:

(more…)

As I’ve mentioned here before, one of the features that makes Los Angeles such a wonderful city is all the hidden gems that abound, teasing you to find them. When you do, the pleasure of having found them really glows inside you for a while. Typically, you’ll find that pretty much everybody who knows anything about the city (and has not already prejudged it by viewing it through the glasses of European or European-wannabe (read: East Coast) models of cities) shares this feeling. This is also why people often hate the city. They can’t find things immediately, they see it from the freeway, and they decide that it is just an awful place, and pretty quickly the stupid cliches about there being “no culture” (which always means “no European culture”, sigh) begin to be repeated.

So imagine my delight when there was an article on Thursday called “Stages of Discovery”, in the Weekend Calendar section of the LA Times. It talked about some of the places in the region you can go to see music concerts of the “classical” (in the broad sense) type, besides the excellent Music Center Downtown, housing among other things the Disney Hall, of which I’ve told you of events several times before. Have a read of the article, by Chris Pasles, here.

Well, I had other things to do on the bus the next morning (which is when I read the Calendar Weekend section…it gives me ideas about what extra activities I might get up to that weekend beyond things already planned) and so I did not read it as thoroughly as I should have. I skimmed through in that way that one does when one is happy to satisfy oneself smugly that one already knows of and had been to at least some of the “hidden gems” already, and then made a mental note to keep the article for later detailed analysis, to learn more about the places that I did not know about.

On the cover was a picture (by Genaro Molina) of a particularly interesting looking performance space, with the Janaki String Trio posing in it:

… and somehow I did not really consciously note where it was. I was to read the article later, of course.

Well, later that evening I was to meet a friend of mine to go to a concert. She’d got the tickets from a friend and I was going along as her guest. I’d agreed to this a long time ago without even knowing what exactly they were for. I knew it was music, and assumed that it was the Disney Hall. Turned out I was wrong. It was at the Doheny Mansion, which happens to be just North of (imho, right next to) the USC campus. Convincing my friend to walk over there from campus (via that wonderful hidden gem, La Taquiza, sampling some excellent mulitas, for dinner), we showed up there in good time for the pre-concert talk, and went inside. Well, of course, you’ve guessed. I went into the splendid historic mansion, walked to the performance space, and was treated to the view above! Without the Janaki, of course. It is called the Pompeian Room.

Here’s a nice link to the Doheny mansion, complete with some history and some pan-able photos of the interiors. Once upon a time, this part of LA was the place to be if you were part of the high-class crowd. You woud have had a well-appointed house here, etc. The Doheny family were as high-class as it gets in these parts: Oil money (La Brea tar pits, etc…). This also explains why there are all those fantastic craftsman houses all over the neighbourhood that people are now giving any amount of money for, but that’s another story. It was not until later that the Beverly Hills’ of this world began to rise in stature, and the high-class set moved away….but the remnants are still here, if you know where to look.

Turns out that there is a society/club whose mission in life is to arrange chamber (more…)

Ok. You are probably tired of me enthusing about how so many things in LA are just great. (Well, those things I say are true, it is great, blah, blah, blah). However, sometimes things are just annoying in that “if we all agreed to fix this it would easily not be this way” sort of way. Here’s one such example:

Tuesday night. I went with two friends, Carol and Ilaria, to see an excellent group called Brazilliando play at Vitello’s in Studio City. It was a reminder of one of the frustrating aspects of LA nightlife. Basically, it was raining a bit outside, and combined with the fact that it was after 9:30pm, this just wiped out the audience. People don’t stay out very late much here especially during the work week (there are several nightspots, some of which I’ve mentioned in previous posts, which are exceptions to this rule, but not nearly as many as you would imagine for a city this size) even when the weather is fine, and when you combine that with a slight chill in the air, or a bit of moisture on the road, people just scamper off to their homes. So we turned up there to catch the second set and maybe hang out for maybe an hour and a half. The people at the font desk looked at us like we were nuts as we came in so “late” (9:30pm), and were not even sure if there was anything going on upstairs (the performance space is above the main restaurant floor).

They let us go up anyway…. The band was beginning to pack up, and there was nobody -absolutely nobody- in the room (upstairs at the back). Just lots of empty tables with solitary candles. It was 9:35pm. Carol knew the percussionist (Ami Molinelli), and so after fond greetings and introductions all around, they agreed to play a bit more. Just for us. We sat at a table and tried to order food. Nope, kitchen closed early. At 9:45pm!!? (After Ilaria pressed a bit, they agreed to go and see if they could find a salad and some bread, which did materialize.) The bar was eventually convinced to produce me a gin and tonic, and we settled down for a personal performance. I tried to put out of my mind my memories of struggling through the snow to get to various Jazz clubs in New York and finding it pleasantly packed with other intrepid music-seekers willing to brave the weather. (Wonderful freezing cold snowbound trips up from Princeton to the Village Vanguard spring to mind….) I tried to put out of my mind memories of listening to excellent performances into the wee hours of the morning in any number of jazz clubs….. What on earth is wrong with these soft Los Angelenos? Sigh.

They ended up playing for us for at least 45 minutes, and they were really great! If you’re in town looking for a sweet, understated, swinging, small (Samba, Bossa Nova…. Brazillian flavoured) Jazz group, look out for Brazilliando, with Robert Kyle (Saxophones, flute), Kleber Jorge, (vocals, guitar) and Amy Molinelli (percussion…really making the whole thing swing). See Kyle’s website for dates. [Update: That night we had Mitchell Long on guitar and vocals, by the way, (see photo) and you can look at his website here.]

-cvj

I was at a particularly good dinner party on Saturday night over on the West Side. It had a little under a dozen people, from professionals in academia and surrounds (such as relativist Kip Thorne of Caltech, or Legal scholar and writer/broadcaster Jonathan Kirsch) to professionals in entertainment (such as writer/performer Julia Sweeney), and journalism (such as South African Journalist and Activist Zubeida Jaffer) and several other fields…. and a good time was had by all. I only had to explain string theory and the whole of particle physics three times (to three separate groups; and I was glad for the opportunity to do so) so I managed to get some food and wine down. I’m not sure if my biggest moment was convincing the razor-sharp Julia Sweeney that maybe she does not hate string theory quite so much any more, or whether it was just finding ourselves enthusiastically in agreement over public transport issues in LA (i.e., it exists, if only people would use it more! Well, you’ve heard me on this topic a lot…..)…this is a big deal to me since a lot of people never want to talk about this matter. We also spoke a lot about getting more science into the entertainment/media realm as well (you’ve heard me on that topic a lot too) a subject we agreed was worth pursuing…

It turned out that a couple at the party could not use their tickets for the Sunday afternoon concert at the Disney Hall, and they gave them to me. This was rather nice since I’d been thinking that it would have been nice to go to the concert. All I had to do was find someone in the short time available (Sunday morning; concert was at 2:00pm) to take with me to use the extra ticket. This was a challenge (combination of it being a sleep-in day with the time change, and me not being terribly flush with contacts who I can call on for that purpose at short notice…..people my age often come in bound states, and/or they’ve planned to do stuff on the precious Sunday afternoons that you only get once a week) but I succeeded. At 2:00pm, we were in our seats, waiting for the first half:

The concert was the last in the Los Angeles Philharmoic’s “Minimalist Jukebox” series. It was excellent, (although I beg to differ with the “minimalist” moniker for those particular pieces). The whole concert was conducted by John Adams, and the first part was a Phillip Glass piece (or set of pieces; selected scenes from his opera Akhnaten, in fact), while the part after the intermission was John Adams’ own Harmonielehre. It was an afternoon of wonderful music, overall. I particularly loved the opera (even with the rather silly words in places), which was beautifully orchestrated with a small configuration of the orchestra (it was in fuller configuration later for the second piece).

There was a great dramatic effect that the layout of the hall lends itself to very well. A person can stand right in the center of the wonderful explosion of wood that is the Organ (see above photo) and look out onto the assembled audience, and they look rather commanding from up there. Well, they had the actress Holland Taylor go up there, splendidly dressed and dramatically lit, to read the parts of the Narrator. She has a quite commanding voice, and so it worked very well indeed.

Ok, I admit that I did have a silly moment when I could not help but distract myself a bit when I heard things like this:
(more…)

I’ve been a fan of the Either/Orchestra for over ten years now, since first hearing them on a public radio station in Boston. This Cambridge-based jazz ensemble, a “little big band” in the tradition of the Mingus band, is one of my absolute favorite musical groups. (Whether the name is indebted to Kierkegaard is somewhat ambiguous.) Unfortunately, I moved away from Massachusetts soon after discovering their music, so I haven’t had a chance to hear them live. Until, that is, this last Friday, when they played Chicago’s historic Green Mill. Suffice to say, a decade’s worth of expectations were not disappointed.

The singular genius of the E/O is to simultaneously stimulate the pleasure centers of the right brain and left brain in equal measure. They are a ten-piece group at the moment — bass, piano, drums, six horns, and congas. Past configurations have varied, with personnel changing fairly frequently; distinguished alumni include John Medeski. But the spirit of the group has remained constant: sophisticated arrangements of eclectic music, played with an enthusiastic fervor that carries you along for the ride. Each of the band members is an accomplished soloist, and they work together in intricate configurations that certainly appeal to the intellectual side of one’s musical appreciation — but at no time could they be accused of being stuffy. Each song is generally constructed around a catchy hook, whose possibilities are thoroughly explored rhythmically and harmonically. These guys rock, groove, and swing.

The E/O’s repertoire has always been wide-ranging, from original tunes to classics by Monk and Ellington and Miles to quirky covers of pop songs from the Beatles and Dylan to — wait for it — King Crimson. In the last few years they have been heavily influenced by Ethiopian music, culminating in a recent live album from Addis Ababa. One of the songs performed Friday night will give you an idea of a “typical” E/O tune. It was a suite in two parts, both of which were influenced by the Azmari music of Ethiopia. The first movement originated when saxophonist/leader Russ Gershon became intrigued by the massinko, a kind of one-string violin played in Ethiopian clubs. He composed a Western-style string quartet (”of all things”) inspired by this music, with the playful idea of getting classical musicians with incredibly expensive instruments to try their best to sound like cheap one-string violins you might hear in Addis Ababa. He later arranged the quartet for ten-piece jazz ensemble (don’t ask me how you do that), to form the first movement. The second movement came from bass player Rick McLaughlin, who had taken Thelonious Monk’s classic Well You Needn’t and arranged it with a Azmari-style rhythm. And voila — a suite that only the Either/Orchestra could possibly come up with, or for that matter perform. And it was beautiful.

Besides getting the chance to hear the band play live, I finally had the opportunity to meet Russ Gershon, the founder of the group, in person. A few years ago I sent an email to their record label, asking to be put on the mailing list, and was pleasantly suprised to receive a personal reply from Russ himself. In my response I mentioned that he should let me know if he had any questions about cosmology; this led to a few back-and-forth emails, along these lines:

Date: Mon, 10 Sep 2001 13:00:25 -0700
To: Sean Carroll
From: Russ Gershon
Subject: Re:

So the dark matter is not atoms, protons, quarks – it’s something
else? That’s kind of alarming, what with it being 96% of the whole
thing!

Russ
–
Russ Gershon
Accurate Records
288 Norfolk St.
Cambridge MA 02139 USA

Well, yeah, it is kind of alarming, I have to admit. As you might guess from the date, our conversation was derailed by events. Still, jazz musicians with an interest in cosmology should be rewarded, don’t you think? Maybe someday we will get a Dark Energy Suite. So go buy the records already. My first discovery was The Calculus of Pleasure, so I have a soft spot for that one, but they’re all good.

I arrived a bit early to the show to grab a good seat, since the Green Mill is always crowded. Naturally I grabbed some napkins and started writing equations, as one is wont to do — six cocktail napkins were sacrificed, but for a good cause, as I figured out something important about auxilliary scalar fields. The bartender, Jill, noticed my scribblings and asked me what they were about. As it turns out, she is currently taking a class on differential equations, working toward her Master’s degree to someday be a high-school math teacher. And she gave me a free glass of wine to demonstrate solidarity between we equation-oriented types. The guys sitting next to me also noticed, and between sets I ended up explaining dark energy and the accelerating universe to a bunch of jazz fans. See, another good reason to go to grad school in physics — it opens doors in the most unlikely venues.

This famous 1958 photo by Art Kane, A Great Day in Harlem, brought together 57 jazz musicians for a group portrait. Luminaries range from Count Basie and Coleman Hawkins to Charles Mingus and Dizzie Gillespie and Sonny Rollins. Norbizness points to a helpful web page: harlem.org, which provides a clickable version of the photo! Point to any musician, and it will tell you who they are and provide a brief biography.

Years ago I saw a documentary by Jean Bach about the making of the portrait, which included many interviews with the surviving musicians (now available on DVD). My favorite part was seeing Thelonious Monk get ready for the shoot. You see him strategizing about how to stand out among all the other luminaries. First he decides to wear black, to look cool. Then he figures that everyone else will be wearing black, so he’s going to wear white. (As it turns out, everyone else had the same thought, so there’s a lot of white jackets in the photo.) Finally he realizes that the best thing to do will be to grab a spot next to the ladies, where everyone will be looking first. And lo and behold there he is, next to fellow pianists Mary Lou Williams and Marian McPartland (still going strong as host of NPR’s Piano Jazz). Monk needn’t have worried; he didn’t have any trouble standing out.