Rocket Bomber - music documentaries

This is another in-fill post, as the links and embeds below were shared on my Twitter ages ago (…it was January) but I was reminded of very important PBS documentary because—like two of the videos I linked to on Sunday—the video is not on YouTube, not for free, anyway.

Wikipedia Wisdom:

“In the summer of 2007, Journey began searching for a new lead singer. After Jonathan Cain and Neal Schon found videos of Jeremey Hunsicker performing with his Journey tribute band Frontiers on YouTube, they made a last minute decision to fly across the country to Charlotte, North Carolina to watch Hunsicker perform. After the show, Schon and Cain approached Hunsicker and invited him to fly out to California and audition for the position as lead vocalist for Journey. Hunsicker rehearsed with the band and they wrote songs together for the band’s upcoming album Revelation. Ultimately things did not work out between Journey and Hunsicker. Although he did not become the new singer for the band Hunsicker did receive credit for helping to write the song ‘Never Walk Away’ which was the leading track on the album Revelation.

“In December 2007, Journey hired Filipino singer Arnel Pineda of the cover band The Zoo after Neal Schon saw him on YouTube singing covers of Journey songs. Their next album, Revelation, debuted at No.5 on the Billboard charts, selling more than 196,000 units in its first two weeks and staying in the top 20 for 6 weeks. Journey also found success on billboard’s adult contemporary chart where the single ‘After All These Years’ spent over 23 weeks, peaking at number 9. Receipts from the 2008 tour made Journey one of the top grossing concert tours of the year, bringing in over $35,000,000. On December 18, 2008, Revelation was certified platinum by RIAA. The band’s second album with Pineda, Eclipse, was released on May 24, 2011, and debuted at No.13 on the Billboard 200 chart. In November, 2011, Journey released their second greatest hits compilation titled Journey: Greatest Hits: Volume 2 which features songs picked by former frontman Steve Perry.

“Although Pineda was not the first foreign national to become a member of Journey (former drummer Aynsley Dunbar is British), nor even the first non-white (former bass player Randy Jackson is black), the transition resulted in what Marin Independent Journal writer Paul Liberatore called ‘an undercurrent of racism among some Journey fans.’ Keyboardist Jonathan Cain responded to such sentiments: ‘We’ve become a world band. We’re international now. We’re not about one color.’

“In 2012 the TriBeCa Film Festival premiered a Documentary titled Don’t Stop Believin’: Everyman’s Journey, directed by Ramona A. Diaz. The documentary tells the story of how Journey found lead singer, Arnel Pineda, and follows the band on the road for a year.”
[/wikipedia]

Trailer:

see also: clip 1 | clip 2 | clip 3

The actual film is not on YouTube (except as a rental/purchase) but I’m sure you can find the links to your retailer-slash-internet-overlord-of-choice so I won’t bother — what is on YouTube is the filmmaker Q&A that followed the screening at the TriBeCa Film Festival [in two parts] and the band’s appearances on CBS Sunday Morning:

The Southern sound of Sixties R&B became the template for both 1970s Funk *and* Southern Rock; Muscle Shoals famously hosted the Rolling Stones in 1969, punctuating a decades-long trans-Atlantic conversation that saw Delta Blues becoming Seventies Rock ‘n’ Roll: not just the Stones, but Led Zeppelin, The Yardbirds, Cream, Jethro Tull (yes, even with the flute), The Animals, and way-way beyond. Led Zeppelin informed Heavy Metal; the three chords of the blues, G-C-D, are the only three chords punk rockers know.

It all ties together. The sound of the American south became Jazz, Blues, and Rock. Jazz became Funk. Blues by way of Gospel became R&B — R&B and Funk both informed Hip Hop. Rock became Punk, and New Wave, and Metal — but the roots are still there. I previously linked to ‘southern rock’ as a by-the-way reference on another music post; but Southern rock isn’t a separate thing, necessarily: “calling it Southern Rock is like calling it Rock Rock; Rock is Southern”. Elvis is a country star, a gospel singer, and an early cross-over R&B artist — what Elvis isn’t is Rock, as we now understand it, and yet: who is “The King” of Rock?

I find it amazing that both the Swampers of Muscle Shoals and Booker T and the MGs at Stax were racially integrated bands — in the Sixties, in the American South — because the music was more important then, and no one can hear what color you are through the radio.

By 1976, the Southern Soul Sound experienced a revival that skirts self-parody, and while I love me some Blues Brothers (both the albums and the movie) (movie, singular, as there was only the 1980 film and you can’t convince me otherwise) and the music is awesome, ‘Blues Brothers’ as a concept, as heart-felt as it is, is still an appropriation of black music by white artists. Color shouldn’t matter, doesn’t matter I guess, but now I find it interesting that ‘soul’ music didn’t find currency in the suburbs until it was fronted by a pair of white comedians.

For some clueless teen in the 1990s, the sound of Memphis became “chicago” blues and they only know the classic tracks from the 80s cover version. This is fantastic if it is the minting of a new fan and the start of a much longer, lifetime love combined with research and digging for the old tracks, but kind of tragic if the purchase of a single 1980 soundtrack CD is where the music ends.

Learning about Stax, Motown, and Muscle Shoals is as important as knowing about the Beatles, if you ask me — maybe more important, when you realize how many tracks on the early Beatles CDs were covers.

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If you didn’t already know, YouTube sells and rents video now. So there are two documentaries that get teased on YouTube (I think the rest of the world calls them ‘trailers’, I call it a tease) but Google has been quite thorough in making sure the whole video isn’t on YouTube in these cases. [also, while I’m sure this is likely related-and-or-directly-tied-into Google Play on some level, the buy links on YouTube direct you to your Google Wallet account — or to set one up if you don’t have one — so YouTube is a stand-alone store. It’s not just about the ad revenue anymore.]

These two excellent documentaries are recommended:

Standing in the Shadows of Motown, 2002 [imdb], features interviews, classic tracks, and a 40-year-reunion live performance by the Funk Brothers; “Over a fourteen year period they were the heartbeat on every hit from Motown’s Detroit era. By the end of their phenomenal run, this unheralded group of musicians had played on more number ones hits than the Beach Boys, the Rolling Stones, Elvis and the Beatles combined”

Trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=—1Rbo3EWhM

Muscle Shoals, 2013 [imdb] — I hate to sound like a broken record, but once again: many, many classic tracks and also interviews with the artist who recorded there, from Aretha Franklin and Jimmy Cliff to Mick Jagger, Alicia Keys, and Bono. “Overcoming crushing poverty and staggering tragedies, he brought black and white together in Alabama’s cauldron of racial hostility to create music for the generations while giving birth to the ‘Muscle Shoals Sound’ and ‘The Swampers’.”

Trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNGtfpim0OM

If you’d care to make a purchase through YouTube, you’ll find the links I’m sure. Each is also available on DVD.

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There is a third excellent documentary, about Memphis-based Stax Records — and this one *is* available on YouTube (in parts), either through an unintentional oversight of Google’s or (much more likely) just because video piracy is so easy — needless to say, you can also purchase the DVD (search for “Respect Yourself: The Stax Records Story, 2007”) and if you like the music, there are a number of CDs and box sets (a two-disc 50th anniversary collection was also released in 2007; I also recommend “Top of the Stax”) available for collectors and aficionados.

The Story Of Stax Records (part 1)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmIzNX0Cr7k

I won’t embed it all here; I trust you know what to do with a hyperlink: part 2 : part 3 : part 4 : part 5 : part 6 : part 7 : part 8

Wattstax 1972 [imdb]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwuAwSbxbNk

[aside, before we get into it: After overdosing on the 1960s last week, and revisiting this Peter Gabriel interview, I’m thinking I might need to do a write-up or five of The Old Grey Whistle Test]
[extended aside: I’ll likely also revisit WOMAD in some later post]

“What sort of show was it, for the people that didn’t go? Was it a Genesis show, or a Peter Gabriel show…”

↑ Peter Gabriel interview (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Shb-bkr8oM4) on the Old Grey Whistle Test, 1982. ‘Last Saturday’ as referenced in the interview was 2 October 1982, a one-off Genesis reunion concert billed in some places as Six of the Best.

This is a pre-MTV-Sledgehammer Gabriel, but also a post-Genesis Gabriel. It is also an interview post-WOMAD, a 1982 experiment that might be called a failure. The interview above covers this—and partly glosses over it—but the really interesting bit is that Gabriel’s former band mates (burned? just 7 years prior when Gabriel left the group) set any animosity (real or imagined) aside, played a benefit-concert-to-pay-for-the-benefit-concert and basically, pulled Pete’s nuts out of the fire. This not only ensured the future of WOMAD as a travelling tour and institution, but also meant Gabriel could continue in his course as a solo artist without the albatross of crippling debt and the lingering miasma of failure.

— The Music Biz (such as it was) was amazing for its leaps-of-faith and constant innovation, supporting new acts, though of course the flipside of that is the near-instant revocation of trust and support as soon as you are old, busted, or done. (…until the near-inevitable comeback tour, of course, but that takes time.)

Here is a moment, in an 1982 interview, 5 whole minutes long, where we get a glimpse of a whole career arc.

Gabriel dodged a bullet, though of course that was likely helped by the fact that his 4th solo album had already been recorded and released (“Security”, Sept. 1982) and ‘Shock the Monkey’ — the closest thing to a hit single he’d have* — was Security’s solid B-side intro.

*Solsbury Hill, 1977 and Games without Frontiers, 1980 not withstanding.

WOMAD was and is an amazing contribution to collective culture – though anyone who’d been listening to Pete through his solo career would hardly be surprised. Here, have some more YouTube:

Peter Gabriel on The South Bank Show, The Making of Security (1983) (49min)

Sources, process, equipment, inspirations — and kindly note his use of both drum machines and looping way back in the early 80s. Listening to Gabriel cite Jung is a special bonus.

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I’m a prog rock fan, so while I love solo Peter Gabriel, and can understand the enthusiasm for 80s Genesis (even if I don’t share it) I have to say that early Genesis is the shit, on a short list that also includes Pink Floyd and The Moody Blues.

Inside Genesis 1970 – 1975 (57min)

Pretentious? Yes. Over the top, theatrical? Yes.

More theatre than music? well, that’s a hard one… YouTube evidence (live performance, for the most part) differs from studio albums. Alice Cooper was doing the same thing at the same time (and doing it better). Genesis, for all their musical chops, lacked energy — the Punks in England could be seen as a direct challenge to progs like Genesis — but like the later Punk Rock, Genesis was also challenging the music establishment and their audience.

Genesis: A History (1991) (1hr29min)

Some see extended solos and baroque arrangements as useless musical excess; from the other side, these long ‘jam band’ sets are a response to decades of 3 minute pop singles, and a return to music — and this puts Genesis, The Grateful Dead, Led Zeppelin, ELP, and ELO all on the same team.

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Pete, man, he’s done quite a bit.

He always seems to be on the fringes, but his impact is oversized for his output — WOMAD pre-dates Live Aid by 3 years Grammy-winning Graceland by 4. The drum machines and loops of ’82s Security seem years too early when compared to the rest of British New Wave – by 1986, So became not only an instant classic, it gave us the soundtrack to the defining GenX moment. And yet, in interviews, he always combines the bravura and bravado of the musical genius (that he is) with a healthy dose of self-deprecation and humor (often, humor at his own expense) as well as grounded context.

Peter Gabriel talks about WOMAD “A Bunch of Idealistic Amateurs” (7min)

DNA: The Evolution of the Songs from ‘So’ (8min)

Peter Gabriel: “Back to Front”, Talks at Google (43min)

1977: still and all, maybe his most accessible hit.

1982: and five years later, following the success of Sledgehammer (‘86), I remember this video in rotation on MTV

1989: Say Anything
‘

** for those following along on twitter, a sub-set of these videos was initially shared on Sunday, 16 March 2014 as part of the usual weekly nonsense; it just took a while for me to actually get around to a write-up.

the tl;dr – Just go watch Forever Young: How Rock n Roll Grew Up on YouTube (it’s an hour) and then come back if you want to see and hear a little more

Even though I set up a YouTube playlist for this batch, this is much more of a ‘choose your own adventure’ set of documentaries — and quite a bit is only tangential to the music. There is no need to watch all of the videos, and I fully encourage you to check out the whole list (reading this post to the end) before you start clicking on any of the embeds or links. You can easily pick a 2 hour or 3 hour block and save the rest for a rainy day when nothing good is on TV.

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When we’re talking about the 1960s, it can be difficult (even for historians) to separate the times from the music. Even after an 8 hour slog through the 60s (mostly by way of the BBC – thanks, Auntie Beeb!) I found myself chasing loose ends on Wikipedia and attempting to digest the whole so I could go back to just enjoying the music again. The 1960s bring a lot of baggage, especially the way the decade has been mythologized in the 40 to 50 years since.

The revolution didn’t start in the 1960s — the hippies’ grandmothers were the first, in the era of flappers, speakeasies, and Jazz (free thesis there, for you grad students). And the music (while fantastic) wasn’t a revolution either: The early Beatles were covering Motown and Chuck Berry; The Rolling Stones played the blues and R&B. [note, note]

The music didn’t magically spring into being in the summer of 1960 when the first of the baby boomers turned 14, the threads (and in many cases, also the musicians) came from the generation before. The music was more evolutionary than revolutionary*, though I appreciate the process and love the eventual outcomes: by the late 60s, we see Lennon/McCartney come into their own as songsmiths, and scores of bands that were inspired by the Beatles, Stones, et al. would go on to record many of my favorite rock albums of the 70s. (It would be negligent as well to ignore the parallel line of Folk music and the singer-songwriters that followed Woodie Guthrie and Pete Seeger; Dylan was playing in Greenwich Village at the same time the Beatles were playing the Cavern Club in Liverpool and taking jaunts to Hamburg.)

(* The music revolution began on 16 May 1966)

What did change by the 1960s? The new media of Television played a role – and the huge record companies that didn’t even exist until the 50s (the LP was introduced in 1948, the 45 in 1949, the transistor radio in 1954) – and a record number of teenagers (“teenager” as a concept comes from the early 1940s) – the weight and long hangover of the Depression and War finally lifted – and the corrupting influence of the almighty dollar (and pound sterling) as consumer culture firmly took root.

Socially? A large youth bulge poisoned by decades of huffing leaded gasoline exhaust (especially in the cities) is likely enough to explain the revolutionaries. I don’t mean to hand-wave away the 60s: when faced with a collective and international insanity, maybe the only response is a little insanity of one’s own. I also don’t mean to discount the real social change that took place, starting in 1955** and continuing throughout the 60s, but the answer to these large-scale problems needed large scale solutions — solutions often precipitated by protest — but the protests are not the solution. After the (inevitable?) crackdown turns the sit-ins into riots, both sides have lost.

** depending on how you define it; we could argue the 60s began in 1918 with Gandhi.

There is no way to concisely describe any decade and it is folly to try; at best we can fall back on stereotypes and cliché as a sort of universally-understood shorthand for a decade — at worst, we bury the history and real meaning of the times under stereotypes and clichés.

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I’m sure this is why the documentary playlist inflated to 8 hours — because there is no easy way to summarize the 60s.

For folks who are much more interested in the Music, I’d stick to watching the first and last videos — the time commitment is only a couple of hours and these two are music documentaries, not documentaries that cover the history that was tied into the music.

The YouTube playlist for the documentaries (in this order): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkoXqXAGvkE&list=PLT6vaQUDmjIKO2×04aSYCoW10pQ6xc93v

Born To Be Wild – The Golden Age of American Rock | 1960s
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkoXqXAGvkE

(the video above is the first of three parts: if you want to finish that story check out the 1970s and 1980s chapters as well. Each is about an hour.)

“The 60s, The Beatles Decade” from the BBC. Each of the 5 episodes is 45 minutes.

The 60s, The Beatles Decade – Episode 1: Teenage Rebels
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6_Qm7aX3kw

The 60s, The Beatles Decade – Episode 2: Sex, Spies and Rock and Roll
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btQzNak8ZMM

The 60s, The Beatles Decade – Episode 3: Swinging Britain
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ke3RtWdKvM

The 60s, The Beatles Decade – Episode 4: Street Fighting Years
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04nZHGqnre8

The 60s, The Beatles Decade – Episode 5: The Party Is Over
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_v8Z2aUIqh4

Counterpoint, also from the BBC –
Why I Hate The Sixties (59min)
Embedding is disabled on this one, so you’ll have to click the link to watch it on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJM-xA8PcQ8

The Sixties – The Years That Shaped a Generation (2hrs)
This video can and likely will be taken down at some point for blatant copyright infringement; the DVD rip that was uploaded even includes the piracy warning. Until such time as it disappears: enjoy. To be fair to PBS, I won’t embed the video here.
link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJM-xA8PcQ8

Last one — and as I noted at the top of the post, if you only have time for one this might be the most accessible (and will only tie up one hour of your day).
Forever Young: How Rock n Roll Grew Up (BBC) (59min)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ls6V4v6wMxo

To me, there is no more faithful “documentary” of music than the live performance. I love the behind-the-scenes stuff, too — and the interviews, people who love music talking about music — but the actual concerts? There is nothing like a live show. If you stop and consider classics like The Last Waltz or Stop Making Sense, the strength of these feature-length, film documentaries is that they point the camera at the stage and don’t look away. The concert is the document.

While the category I file these posts under for the blog is ‘music documentaries’, the draft folder I use is actually titled “Sunday Long” — long clips to share with friends on twitter, which includes both the excellent behind-the-scenes documentaries and also these concerts.

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The first video (that led to the search for the others included below) was either James Carter or Medeski, Martin, & Wood. I can’t recall now (6 weeks later) (yes, I have a pretty big buffer for these posts) which of the two I bookmarked first. Each was a pretty solid clip, but there wasn’t quite enough there to hang a whole post on. When I later tripped over the Ray Brown Trio, then I knew I was onto something. I started to assemble a Jazz Fest — not an all-time best-of or top-ten, because honestly I wouldn’t know where to start — but instead a batch of contrasting and complementary live performances that’d fill a whole-day-long playlist and scratch a jazz itch.

If that sounds as good to you as it did to me: all the clips below are in a YouTube playlist — you can have it play in a background tab all day today.

While obviously there are many great jazz albums out there (and we’re all richer for that) jazz is a performance art, meant to be seen and heard live. There is skill is mixing an album, too, don’t get me wrong, and there are many fine albums that one could say were assembled in studio, the whole becoming more than just the sum of each player’s part. The producer is part of the creative process, in addition to the band — if there was a band, and it wasn’t just session musicians working for scale, along with machines, samples, and loops. Good music is good music, regardless of how it was made — the old Duke Ellington quote applies, “If it sounds good, then it is good.”

Much more so than nearly any other form of music, though, Jazz is often a conversation, a form defined in part by improvisation. Not that taking a solo and going off the chart is new — organists have been doing so since at least Bach’s time, and the highlight and one defining characteristic of the concerto is the cadenza — but pipe organ improvisation is almost always the organ in solo performance, and for a concerto cadenza the orchestra gets out of the way, often literally sitting with their instruments in their laps.

A really solid small jazz group, a bass-piano-drums trio for example, might feature all three musicians improvising or otherwise riffing on the chart — not just a feature performer taking a single solo but the whole song, spontaneously generated, live. This can be hard to listen to; some fans of jazz aren’t really fans of 50s bebop for this reason, and later mutations like “smooth jazz” chuck this idea right out the window. But for many bebop is the real jazz, or at least the one branch of modern jazz that has to be confronted and digested, if not accepted.

I’m not a purist – I like a lot of different forms, from ragtime to funk. If you pushed me into a corner, I’d pick the post-war 1940s sound as my favorite, but I also love the stuff coming out of the late 60s and early 70s, as “hard bop” combined the stronger rhythmic feel of R&B with free-rolling bebop and eventually got real funky. Kenny G can go die in a fire.

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That’s it for the lecture: lets get down to some music.

[btw – if you get 20 minutes into a set and go, “woah, that’s too weird for me” – just skip ahead 5 minutes. Odds are good the band’ll be back on track. Or just skip on to the next video in the playlist. I won’t be offended. heck, I won’t even know. Not all jazz is the same, and even if you like some of it, not everything will be to your taste. That’s cool, and you learned something, so it’s good all ‘round]

Ray Brown Trio + James Morrison – Umbria Jazz 1993 (53min)
http://youtu.be/tuxNWkHsmYQ7

James Carter Organ Trio – Montreux Jazz Festival 2012 (55min)
http://youtu.be/TEa4WGMVo8A?t=24s

Medeski, Scofield, Martin & Wood – Estival Jazz Lugano 2007 (1hr16min) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAr8nTePQso

Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers – Sanremo, Italy 1963 (50min)
http://youtu.be/dwpph2h8jD8?t=4m29s
[if you want to skip the musician introductions in Italian, cue the video to 4:30]

Chucho Valdes & The Afro-Cuban Messengers – Jazz à Vienne Live 2010 (1hr56min)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJi0KwXs6tE

Soft Machine & Allan Holdsworth – Montreux Jazz Festival 1974 (58min)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdYB8FU2p4Y

Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, & The Giants Of Jazz – Copenhagen 1971 (54min)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUVuX3lLrdg

Miles Davis – Montreux Jazz Festival 1986 (1hr49min)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wc_Gjndpk_0
- By 1986, the “Miles Davis Quintet” was at least an octet, and Davis had long since gone electric (for his backing band) and his style was jazz fusion (and funky). Definitely a different Miles than the one you might be familiar with.

Miles Davis & Quincy Jones – Montreux Jazz Festival 1991 (55min)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3zbcoNjeuw
…when Miles came back to Montreaux in 1991, he was also back to playing more classic material — a return to the songs and his sound from the 1950s. He died less than 3 months later; a recording of the concert performance was released posthumously as his final album.

Behind Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here (59min)

…Lots of interviews, and covering the recording, the circumstances, the pressure, and even the cover art. Wish You Were Here was both a follow-up to the classic Dark Side of the Moon, and also a postcard of sorts (that’s the title of the album, after all) to former band member Syd Barrett, who had left the band in 1968 amid creative disputes and who also became seriously withdrawn from the world-at-large by 1974.

I personally think Wish You Were Here is very much the equal to Dark Side, and in fact (when given a preference) I usually listen to the two albums back-to-back.

This feature comes to us via TYWKIWDBI (“Things You Wouldn’t Know If We Didn’t Blog Intermittently”, a lovely little corner of the internet) — http://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com/2014/01/pink-floyds-wish-you-were-here-backstory.html — do yourself a favor and add Tai-wiki-widbee to your bookmarks or rss feeds.

For those looking for more Floyd after watching the documentary, iTunes awaits, or your local record store if you have one (I need to add more of Floyd’s early, Syd Barrett stuff to my personal collection, and was hard pressed not to drop $50 on this right away) but there is also this largely-unknown gem, Dub Side of the Moon.

“Dub Side of the Moon is a dub reggae tribute to the Pink Floyd album, The Dark Side of the Moon, co-produced by Easy Star All-Stars founder’s Michael G (Michael Goldwasser) and Ticklah (Victor Axelrod).”

The YouTube poster is not the rights holder, and has a lot of balls posting the album in full, so if the video gets taken down at some later date we all know why – but enjoy it for now and consider buying that album, too.

I’m not sure exactly where or why I came across Almost Famous again this week — the click trail on that one has to be convoluted, because for the most part I was researching bland mass-consumption European Pop of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s.

Having happened upon the movie again, though, it seemed like an excellent topic for an extended YouTube excursion, especially with the Academy Awards tie-in:

Cameron Crowe accepts the Oscar® for “Almost Famous”

The moment we all remember is the solo-slow-clapper of music videos, Tiny Dancer

Cameron Crowe interview (ignore the French subtitles)

The great thing about “Almost Famous” is that it’s based on a true story, which you might have heard once or twice a dozen years ago and then promptly forgot. The band ‘Stillwater’ in the movie is a fictionalized composite, I’m sure, or at least will always be presented as such for legal reasons, but the band I think Crowe used as his primary inspiration when writing the script has to be the Allman Brothers. Here, read the article yourself, from the December 6, 1973 issue of Rolling Stone, The Allman Brothers Story

Allman Brothers Band – Live- 2-11-70 Fillmore East (audio only) (1hr11min)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1XfYC9Dq1I

Allman Brothers – Live – 9-23-70 Fillmore East (33.8min)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eqSFMOZxeY

Since the point of the exercise is to feature some great music documentaries, here’s the great music documentary: History of Southern Rock (1hr4min)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_E1I-ERdJYU

If you only have enough time to watch one video, I’d make it that last one.

This “Sunday Morning Music Docs” mini-feature (Yes, I know it’s Thursday, but I’m playing a bit of catch-up here) was posted to my twitter a few weeks back — it’s not a long, multiple-video slogfest with commentary like the last two outings I reblogged here for your enjoyment, but it is 126 minutes of shop talk and piano jazz featuring Donald Fagan (of Steely Dan).

Not everyone’s cup of tea (or slug of whiskey) but for those who like this sort of thing: well, we like this sort of thing -

Donald Fagen Concepts For Jazz/Rock Piano

Steely Dan & Marian McPartland – Piano Jazz (audio only)

[This batch features creative personalities & modern music, so fair warning: occasional bits of NSFW language are lurking in the links ahead. Don’t play YouTube videos at work.]

Once upon a time, I was a snob — still am in some ways, about some things — but the starting point for today’s excursion is the bias I used to have for “real” music, over electronics and sampling.

From the age of seven, I studied music. I wasn’t all that serious about it, and I wasn’t overjoyed about practicing, but I took lessons for 4 years until I was old enough for the school’s band program, and then I was a band geek for 14 years (yes, that includes 5 years of college). I play saxophone (I started on violin, but that’s a different story) and from jr. high on I played in jazz band and started a parallel ‘education’ by listening to the original versions of the swing hits and jazz standards we were murdering in class. Once you start digging, Jazz is deep – and Jazz also didn’t stop in 1958 or 1962 or whatever, it kept going (and keeps going). Jazz left the small smoky clubs, went back to the dance floor, responded to the rock-music-thing, picked up some R&B, and became Funk.

You can argue with me on that one, I guess, but it’s true. Free doctoral thesis here kids: Listen to anything with a horn line, and that music is a direct descendant of 30s swing – the instrumentation is the same, the only thing that changed was the definition of ‘popular dance music’.

Anyway – I was a musician, and kinda proud of it even though I’d never be a professional, and I like the output of other musicians. I listened to a lot of Soul, and Funk, and when some of the first Hip Hop albums came out, with the scratching and snipped-bits and ‘recycling’ and I thought, “Hell, there are a lot of session musicians out there, why don’t they hire some already? It can’t be that hard to get some guys into the studio for an hour to lay down some tracks to rap over.”

I was so wrong about the music, and where it was coming from. I feel so white.

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In the 30s, there wasn’t recorded music in clubs, they needed live music. So you could pick up a cheap horn in a pawn shop and get some gigs (no matter how bad you were) and learn on the job and if you were good enough, you could eke out a living.

In the 50s and 60s, you could pick up a cheap guitar in a pawn shop, learn 4 chords and fool around, maybe fool around with friends in your garage and form a band and try playing the tracks you heard on the radio.

Imagine being so poor you can’t afford a guitar. Imagine living in a highrise or brownstone and not having a garage to practice in. Imagine living in a neighborhood so poor your schools don’t have music programs, and in 80s Reagan America where no one gives a flip about how poor your schools are. Imagine loving music and not having an outlet for it.

All you have is excellent taste, a huge stack of your parents’ 60s soul and 70s funk records, and a turntable. You become a DJ, spinning the old tracks of other people — because the clubs still need ‘live’ music even if they don’t need the big band anymore. And then, over time, and with the introduction of the crossfader — we see the invention of a new ‘musical’ instrument.

Even if you’re biased for ‘real’ music from ‘real’ instruments and see Hip Hop as derivative, merely recycling the best bits of older, ‘better’ music — the best bits of the music are still there and if you open your ears and listen you’ll find the art in the transformation. If you go see a live DJ, there’s no mistaking that what these musicians are doing on the turntables is a performance.

Add in some new electronic tools and digital sampling technology to automate some of the ‘loops’ and now we can really stack and rock it: Two turntables and a drum machine become a freakin’ orchestra. Layering tracks in a studio or on a laptop may be more like composing music, as opposed to playing it, but there’s no denying the music part.

I used to be a snob. I came back around. Enough of me talking about me, though: Let’s check out the music.

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I’m going to ramp you into this slowly

Early, 1988 Documentary about Sampling (8.6min) – YouTube source is apparently Aussie TV, but I hear Kurt Loder so we can be pretty sure this was originally produced for MTV News and might predate ’88 by a year or two:

If there is such a thing as ‘Sampling 101’ the first class of the course is on the Amen Break, “the world’s most important 6-sec drum loop” (18min)

A short track (3.5min), Eclectic Method’s Brief History of Sampling, with plenty more examples — inputs and outputs from several decades and genres

Still up for more?

Scratch, “A feature-length documentary film about hip-hop DJing, otherwise known as turntablism. From the South Bronx in the 1970s to San Francisco now, the world’s best scratchers, beat-diggers, party-rockers, and producers wax poetic on beats, breaks, battles, and the infinite possibilities of vinyl.” (1hr28min) — it’s the longest documentary in this post but if you only have time to watch one, watch this one:

The skills of the DJ are more than just scratching, something that gets glossed in the Scratch doc; it actually starts with beatmatching, syncing two tracks (adjusting speeds/tempos and matching bar patterns) so one can be played seamlessly into another, or in the case of a mashup, one played over another (which, with skill, can be done live — the mashup was born in the dance club, not on YouTube).

Quick Beatmatching – DJing For Dummies (5min)

The Scratch doc led me to a new appreciation for what the DJs and turntables can do, and the amount of work, preparation, and music education required — oh, it’s not about reading music anymore, you have to know the music. Following a few more links, I found a YouTube show called Crate Diggers — the folks from Fuse get a DJ, get them talking about the music, get them talking about the records, and follow them around inside their vinyl collection.

I couldn’t pick just one. Have five:

Evidence (12min)

DJ Babu (12min)

DJ Toomp (13min)

RJD2 (17.5min)

DJ Jazzy Jay (15min)

Thanks for reading. Hope you liked. One more video to play us out — Eclectic Method again — this track is called Cultural Funking Overload