Les Paul, the guitar virtuoso and inventor who revolutionized music and created rock 'n' roll as surely as Elvis Presley and the Beatles by developing the solid-body electric guitar and multitrack recording, died Thursday at age 94. (LA Times)

Les pioneered sound recording technology and simultaneously fathered the sound of the "electric guitar" that made rock & roll possible. And what an epistemic rupture that triggered!!!    more »

Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, the foremost virtuoso of the lutelike sarod, whose dazzling technique and gift for melodic invention, often on display in concert with his brother-in-law Ravi Shankar, helped popularize North Indian classical music in the West, died on Thursday at his home in San Anselmo, Calif. He was 87. In this obituary from the New York Times, William Grimes provides an outline of this most extraordinary musician.   more »

The YouTube clip of Susan's angel voice soaring from the unkissed mouth of that scrunchy-faced, eyebrow-enforested, unprepossessingly dumpy representative of anonymous humanity was the third irresistible message to us all to get over ourselves.   more »

So What: equanimity?   more »

As 2008 closes a farewell song that pays homage to a true evolution of consciousness. Given the historic election of Barack Obama as the first African American president this piece represents just how far we have come in the past 45 years. Alabama represents the sordid history of racism in America and the promise of deliverance from it through the sheer will of perseverance. The songs particular history is told as follows:

"In the early morning of Sunday, September 15, 1963, a gaggle of malcontents planted 12 sticks of dynamite in a window well outside the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. The dynamite exploded eight hours later killing Denise McNair, 11, and Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Addie Mae Collins, all 14, in the process galvanizing the Civil Rights Movement. Three months later, on November 18, 1963, John Coltrane stepped up to the microphone in fabled Englewood, NJ studio of one Rudy Van Gelder and over a McCoy Tyner Tremolo, blew his searing and definitive statement on the subject of the bombing-- "Alabama."

The song itself is a meditation on loss and spiritual longing.

Its an especially cathartic song on this last day of 2008 with children, in other places, still perishing in bombings, when one begins to interrogate the evolution of consciousness in terms of the mere shifting of contexts....   more »

I wanted to provide a video of Kirk's performance to compliment this article and demonstrate some of the techniques and music described in it

Roland Kirk died 31 years ago on Dec 5th 1977, I believe his life illustrates what in the Isha and Kena Upanishad is referred to as the workings of Prana and Kratu . Following Sri Aurobindo's excellent commentary on these two Upanishads in this article - that has been recently updated - I trace the self-formulation of prana and kratu in the biography of this amazing musician

Prana, Kratu, Jazz
(the life and will of Rashaan Roland Kirk)

  By whom yoked moves the first life-breath forward on its path? By whom impelled is this word that men speak? What god set eye and ear to their workings?....  

- Kena Upanishad     more »

Thanks to Rich for a taste of pure jihadi heaven with Madhubala: Teri Mehfil Mein Qismat Aazmakar from Mughal-e-Azam. But if the jihadis fail, this is where they may find themselves.   more »

Madhubala: Teri Mehfil Mein Qismat Aazmakar from Mughal-e-Azam:

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In honor of this date when G.W. Bush will finally return to his ranch/compound outside of Waco Texas, where he will await the Rapture with his millennialist Christian neighbors.... The thought of him soon departing keeps me humming this tune. If you never saw Pops perform then watch closely, he's the real thing!    more »

Despite its obvious legs, Kind of Blue exists in many ways as a mysterious, transitory moment in time. By its official release in August of 1959, Coltrane had recorded his own groundbreaking Giant Steps (another album with a Jimmy Cobb credit); Chambers and Adderley had quit the band over monetary disputes (a recurring theme with Davis); and Bill Evans, already on the outs, would soon be completely gone as well, upset (with good reason, it appears) over not receiving songwriting credit on "Blue in Green" and "Flamenco Sketches." Though Cobb remained in Davis's employ until just prior to 1963's Seven Steps to Heaven, the constant personnel changes may very well have contributed to Kind of Blue's seemingly atemporal state, transcending a mere two days spent within an Eastern European cathedral turned recording studio. "I don't know if he ever played all of those tunes off of that record live like that," Cobb says.   more »

Happy Summer Solstice to all and who better to celebrate the solstice with than Louis and Ella and their recording of Gershwin's Summertime...   more »

Like Coltrane's Psalm on the record A Love Supreme, I penned this one for tenor sax, ...    more »

...at 7 p.m. Eastern time on Monday, Feb. 4...NASA will be celebrating the 50th anniversary of its first space mission — the launch of the Explorer 1 satellite — by using the system of huge antennas that usually listen for inbound signals from space to send one outbound instead: the Beatles’ song “Across the Universe,” which as it happens was mostly recorded exactly 40 years earlier, on Feb. 4, 1968.

Reception will be best in the general direction of Polaris, 431 lightyears away, which is where NASA is aiming the signal. (That would be the North Star to us laymen.) But it ought to be audible in plenty of places on Earth as well, at least by imitation: NASA is encouraging space fans and Beatle fans alike to play the song themselves at the same time.

NASA’s press release includes some perfectly in-character comments from Sir Paul McCartney (”Amazing! Well done, NASA! Send my love to the aliens. All the best, Paul.”) and from Yoko Ono, widow of John Lennon, the song’s main author (”I see that this is the beginning of the new age in which we will communicate with billions of planets across the universe.”). ...   more »

The new IMAGINE PEACE TOWER in Iceland

I dedicate this light tower to John Lennon
my love for you is forever

Yoko Ono
Videy Island, Reykjavik, Iceland
October 9th 2007   more »