Finally, the two musicians, the two musical worlds, meet in 2009. Performing at the Royal Albert Hall in London, along with the Philharmonia Orchestra, Hancock and Lang Lang work their way through Debussy, Ravel and then, appropriately enough, George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue.
The jazz concerto. Jazz inflections layered onto a classical composition. A perfect meeting in the middle.
Dan Colman edits Open Culture, which brings you the best free educational media available on the web — free online courses, audio books, movies and more. By day, he directs the Continuing Studies Program at Stanford University, and you can also find him on Twitter.
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An elegant finish on the unfinished, or what the Gatsby era has to do with surfer culture.
In the 1920’s, George Gershwin engendered America’s love affair with popular jazz, composing some of the most prolifically covered and memorable melodies of all time. In the 1960’s, The Beach Boys cemented the nation’s matrimony to rock music, providing a soundtrack for the era and carving their way into popular culture as “America’s band.” Spearheaded by singer-musician-composer Brian Wilson, The Beach Boys suffered a tragic demise as Wilson’s mental illness and drug abuse led him to withdraw from the band, shortly followed by the death of two of the other band members, but their legacy of summertime rock and close vocal harmonies inspired generations of musicians to come. (Wilco, The Flaming Lips and Fleet Foxes, we’re looking at you.)
Brian Wilson Reimagines Gershwin is both an epic comeback for the iconic Beach Boy and a beautifully executed homage to the legendary jazz composer. The album reinvents twelve of the Gershwin Brothers’ most timeless classics in the signature style of The Beach Boys, a remarkable ripple in the space-time continuum as two music culture titans converge.
The most priceless part of the album are the two rare, unfinished Gershwin pieces, which Wilson crafted into incredible collaborative compositions — The Like in I Love You and Nothing But Love. (On a marginally curmudgeonly aside, why is virtually all music about love? Don’t people have better things to do with their life of the mind? Humph.)
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Shadow art is a unique form of sculptural art that exploits the fact that we can recognize objects from their shadows or silhouettes. Improvisation, a key ingredient of jazz music, is mirrored in the ambiguity of a shadow sculpture: many different 3D shapes can cast the same 2D shadow.
The film focuses on five milestone eras in the evolution of jazz — the early music of field workers, ragtime, New Orleans jazz, swing, and bebop — each represented by a separate room, in which 3D sculptures cast complex shadow images in different directions simultaneously, making each form interpretable as multiple symbolic objects.
The animators used a novel computational method, building 3D shadow volumes through global geometric optimization that allows the artist to later edit the silhouette using 3D modeling tools.
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Wired lofts, 1,447 rolls of film, and what pimps and Salvador Dalí have in common.
In 1957, 38-year-old magazine photographer W. Eugene Smith, most likely undergoing a creative midlife crisis, left his well-paying job at Life, his comfortable home, his wife and four children, and moved into a 4th-floor loft in a run-down 45-story building at 821 Sixth Avenue, between 38th and 39th streets, in the wholesale flower district of New York.
Why? Smith had been struck with the inspiration for his life’s most aspirational project — to create a monumental photo-essay about the city of Pittsburgh.
But 821 Sixth Avenue was a peculiar place to work. Late at night, the dilapidated building blossomed into a thriving epicenter of the jazz music scene, with underground legends and mainstream greats alike — from Zoot Sims to Bill Evans to Thelonious Monk — roaming the decaying halls. At the heart of this chaos and glory, Smith’s ambitions for the Pittsburgh project dissolved into his fascination with the loft’s secret life and he redirected his artistic focus towards this newfound inspiration.
Thelonious Monk and his Town Hall band in rehearsal, February 1959
For the following 8 years, Smith went through 1,447 rolls of film, resulting in some 40,000 photographs of everything from the nocturnal jazz scene to street life in the flower district outside, observed Hitchcock-style from his loft window. And he didn’t stop at image — he secretly wired the building with recording equipment, producing over 4,000 hours of stereo and mono audiotapes on 1,740 reels. The recordings captured more than 300 of the era’s greatest musicians, from Alice Coltrane to Roy Haynes to Sonny Rollins, as well as piano masters like Eddie Costa, legendary drummers like Ronnie Free and Edgar Bateman, saxophonist Lin Hallday, and multi-instrumentalist Eddie Listengart.
The cultural landscape Smith documented spread far beyond the immediate circles of jazz, spanning icons like Salvador Dalí, Robert Frank, Doris Duke and Henri Cartier-Bresson, as well as local cops, photography students and a vibrant array of the city’s less reputable practitioners — pimps, prostitutes, junkies and drug dealers.
White Rose Bar sign from the 4th floor window of 821 Sixth Avenue (ca. 1957-1964)
Here, Stephenson speaks about the project and the cultural import of Smith’s endeavor.
The book’s eclectic mix of characters and callings, of cultural icons and little details of daily life, offers the colorful threads that weave the fabric of an era. With its superb photography and vintage enigma, The Jazz Loft Project is a slice of life from a time long gone but never forgotten, an epoch that left a permanent mark on the culture of music, celebrity and New-Yorkism.
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Brain Pickings remains free (and ad-free) and takes me hundreds of hours a month to research and write, and thousands of dollars to sustain. If you find any joy and value in what I do, please consider becoming a Member and supporting with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner:
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Dan Colman edits Open Culture, which brings you the best free educational media available on the web — free online courses, audio books, movies and more. By day, he directs the Continuing Studies Program at Stanford University, and you can also find him on Twitter.
Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.
In 1998, Sam Stephenson discovered Smith’s jazz loft photographs and tapes, which had remained unseen for 40 years, and spent the following seven years cataloging, archiving, selecting, and editing Smith’s materials for a brilliantly ambitious book, 
