Words can't express how much I loved hearing Brian Eno on NPR this week offer his "This I Believe" essay about a capella singing. Eno is one of my heroes. I found his classic Music For Airports on vinyl at a yard sale this summer, and it's frequently made my studio sound better than any airport I've ever been in. But it turns out this pioneer of electronic music is at least as passionate about the oldest analog instrument we have. Money quotes:
I believe that singing is the key to long life, a good figure, a stable
temperament, increased intelligence, new friends, super
self-confidence, heightened sexual attractiveness and a better sense of
humor.
AND
When you sing with a group of people, you learn how to subsume yourself into a group consciousness because a capella
singing is all about the immersion of the self into the community.
That's one of the great feelings — to stop being me for a little while
and to become us. That way lies empathy, the great social virtue.
New this week on WPLN, part three of my radio documentary Music City Remixed, entitled "The Inadvertent Entrepreneurs." I visit with a boutique producer's school and a former major label maverick starting his own new era music company. Part four airs Monday at 6:34 and 8:34. Listen to the current episode HERE.
Cross disciplinary study of music and the brain is a
relatively new and long overdue pursuit, and I’ve written here before about
authors Robert Jourdain, Daniel Levitin and Oliver Sacks, whose books gave me
my first insights into this amazing realm. So I was fortunate to spent last
Thursday at a day-long “Music and the Brain” symposium at the Duke Institute
for Brain Sciences back in my hometown of Durham, NC. Some major figures in the
field offered a range of ideas, concepts and research that might not have held
together under one easy takeaway but that certainly glimpsed how rich and
mutually informing brain science and music theory are. Study one and you get
insight about the other. Summaries, thoughts and a dancing cockatoo after the jump.
My six-part series about how Nashville is adapting to massive change in the music business starts today on WPLN and will run every Monday for six weeks. We'll pull them all together into a podcast when it's done. Meantime, find Part One, "A System Shaken," HERE.
It has truly been a stunning couple of weeks. One might say colorful. The autumn days have been explosively orange, gold and sky blue. And we the people of every color elected a black man to be our president. And in so doing, by hearing his impressive voice and recognizing his commitment and leadership qualities, we've maybe turned a fraught, frustrating world down a better path.
Even as the economy dives, my friends and colleagues in the creative community here are glowing with pride and promise. Musicians seem especially attuned to Barack Obama because he seems attuned to them. We learned this summer that he had excellent, if uncontroversial, taste in music. I'm sure we've never before had even a serious candidate for the presidency who had a thing for Bob Dylan's "Maggie's Farm," and I can't understand why freedom-loving conservatives everywhere don't join the President-Elect and me in our love for Dylan's indelible portrait of a slave driver scumbag and his awful family.
Moreover, Obamba enlisted unassailably awesome artists like Bruce Springsteen and Stevie Wonder to sing at his rallies. The always searching and appealing will.i.am made Obama his muse when he produced one of the best pieces of media of the year, the famous Yes We Can video. And now, uploaded sometime last night, the new will.i.am anthem "It's A New Day." I was really, really hoping I'd like this, and I really, really do.
So many times in our history, musicians have shown us the folly of our times, envisioned a more harmonious way to live and written our most difficult conflicts into stories that made them easier to process. And they've been role models for racial harmony when all around them was a sea of hate. African Americans by all rights should have written America's angriest, fiercest music. And sometimes they did. But by and large, they've responded to oppression, segregation and discrimination with music so full of heart, love, redemption and healing that it staggers the imagination. It is one of our nation's most special legacies, right up there with the Constitution. The music of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Stevie Wonder and so many more is the very sound of beatitude, yet we tend to treat those bodies of work like pop songs for yesterday's people. It has long been my hope that our society would embrace the black music tradition from work songs through the blues, jazz, soul, R&B and hip hop and show it to our children and our teenagers not as entertainment but as a passport to history. Perhaps in these coming years, that will become easier - a natural and accessible way to reflect on and study the road that led to a black family in the White House.
Air Castle of the South
Craig's book "Air Castle of the South: WSM and the Making of Music City" chronicles the 80-year history of the broadcaster that turned Nashville into a music town.
