The story involves Bing Crosby in the final years of his life. He was invited to sing at an event, probably for a charity or cause, and the host enlisted some young progressive jazz musicians to accompany the famous singer. The band members weren’t impressed by this aging star, who had made his reputation back in the 1920s, and decided to throw Crosby off his game.
When Bing showed up, he greeted them in his typical laidback manner, and told them he would sing some familiar old songs. But when the performance started, these young jazz players threw in every arcane substitute chord change and rhythmic displacement they could think of, further spicing up their accompaniment with Coltrane modal fills and bits of polytonality.
Much to their frustration, nothing they did that evening disrupted Bing in the least. This old, balding pop singer navigated effortlessly through every one of their advanced harmonies, never faltering or showing the slightest degree of discomfort. Even more infuriating, Bing maintained the relaxed and unflappable delivery that was a Crosby trademark. As far as the audience could tell, he was just as happy-go-lucky as ever, and maybe he was — after all, Crosby had learned the ropes as a young man alongside Bix Beiderbecke, who was as unconventional and unpredictable as any musician from the early 20th century.
When the performance was all done, the musicians expected to get chewed out by Crosby backstage. Instead, Bing shook their hands, and thanked them with great warmth. He said how “cool it was to play with these young cats,” and expressed his sincere desire that they might do so again in the future.
Ted Gioia, “Four Perspectives on Bing Crosby”, The Honest Broker, 2022-12-23.
March 26, 2023
QotD: Bing Crosby meets the modern jazz musicians
March 21, 2023
The musical anomaly that was 2022 – when classical music suddenly became much more popular
Ted Gioia looks at some surprising numbers for the music industry showing that of all genres, classical music suddenly became much more popular in 2022:
Last year, I went viral with an article about the rising popularity of old music. But I focused on old rock songs. Many of these songs are 40 or 50 years old. And in the world of pop culture, that’s like ancient history.
But if you really want old music, you can dig back 200 or 300 years — or even more, if you want. But does anybody really do that?
Conventional wisdom tells us that only around 1% of the public cares about classical music. And it doesn’t change much from year to year.
For proof, just take a look at this chart:
If you love concerts at the philharmonic, you read these figures with much weeping and gnashing of teeth. If classical music were any smaller, it would be a rounding error. Or — even sadder — it would be like jazz.
But that data only covers the period up to 2021. And 2022 was different.
In fact, it was remarkably different.
Over the last 12 months, I’ve started to see surprising signs of a larger audience turning to classical music. Last year, I wrote about the amazing saga of WDAV, the first classical music radio station in US history to take the top spot in its city.
I analyzed the numbers, and tried to get to the bottom of this unexpected success story. At the time, I wrote:
Women are the key drivers here. The station boasts a double-digit share in the female 35-44 category. But this probably is tilted heavily toward mothers, at least if we factor in the next bit of evidence — which reveals that WDAV has a mind-boggling 38% share among young children.
But then a few weeks later, this research report was issued:
I need to point out that respondents were allowed to mention multiple genres — but even given that loophole, who would expect classical music to rank ahead of country music, hip-hop, or folk?
This can’t be true. The numbers must be wrong. Or, maybe, people are lying to pollsters.
But then a survey of holiday listening trends in the UK revealed the unprecedented popularity of orchestral music — especially among younger listeners.
March 7, 2023
“The First Soldier” – Albert Séverin Roche – Sabaton History 118
Sabaton History
Published 6 Mar 2023This song is the story of Albert Roche, who is very much forgotten today, but after the First World War was THE hero of France. He was hotheaded and tempestuous, but above all he was GOOD. His service — and his legend from that war — is just remarkable, and today we share the war stories of the First Soldier of France.
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March 5, 2023
“Natural Woman” – classic hit song or hate crime in progress?
Janice Fiamengo on the hoax “cancellation” attempt on the late Aretha Franklin’s hit song:
For at least a few hours, it looked as if the 1960s soul classic “(You Make Me Feel Like a) Natural Woman“, memorably performed by Aretha Franklin, was imperiled by woke attack. Various conservative and right-wing media reported in late January that a trans awareness group was demanding via Twitter that the song be canceled because of its exclusionary emphasis on “natural” womanhood. It was dutifully noted that this was the latest salvo in the trans “assault on women”, and a women’s activist was reported as saying, “I don’t think many women really know how much we’re hated”.
It turned out that the complaint about “Natural Woman”, which received well over one million views and provoked thousands of responses, had been made by a parody account. Aretha Franklin was safe — at least for now. But commentary on the song has a surprising history, as we’ll see, that complicates the standard claims about the trans erasure of women.
The Twitter account at the center of the faux controversy was TCMA, the Trans Cultural Mindfulness Alliance, which began tweeting in January of 2023 to highlight the lunatic fringe of trans advocacy. Many of the tweets by TCMA exaggerate actual trans activist positions so adroitly that even on a second or third reading, they seem plausible. On January 20, for example, TCMA tweeted that “Many children learn gender from their pets”, and advised parents that “Just because you bring home a ‘gendered’ pet, allow your child to choose the gender of the pet — don’t assign it one ‘at will’.”
A day later, TCMA tweeted that it would be petitioning the Norwegian government “to no longer include gender on birth certificates” and it condemned media, in another tweet, for emphasizing child abuse by same-sex couples while failing to cover the “wonton abuse” (steamed or deep fried?!) in the church.
The purpose of the account seems fairly clear: to show how dogmatic statements by activists are often hard to tell apart from parodies of the same. Something strange is going on when people in positions of cultural power not infrequently express themselves in a manner indistinguishable from parody.
March 3, 2023
Miles Davis – “So What” (Official Video)
Miles Davis
Published 19 Oct 2010Official music video for “So What” by Miles Davis
Listen to Miles Davis: https://MilesDavis.lnk.to/listenYD[Come for Miles Davis, stay for the John Coltrane solo]
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February 27, 2023
February 10, 2023
Hitler’s Jazz Band – WW2 Documentary Special
World War Two
Published 9 Feb 2023Does Adolf Hitler like Duke Ellington? No, and nor do many National Socialists. But the story of the music in the Third Reich is more complicated than you might think. What if we told you that Joseph Goebbels has tried to create a Nazi-approved swing band tasked with bringing the Jazz War to the Allies?
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February 4, 2023
“Ghost Riders In The Sky”
Audio Saurus
Published 30 Oct 2015Neil LeVang in 1961 on The Lawrence Welk Show.
February 3, 2023
“Lady of The Dark” – Milunka Savić – Sabaton History 117
Sabaton History
Published 2 Feb 2023One of the most badass and decorated soldiers of the Great War was a woman. Serving first in the Balkan Wars, this Serbian war heroin became a celebrity when she won the Karađorđe’s Star — the highest Serbian decoration — in 1914 and 1916. Those weren’t her only decorations either — watch to find out more.
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February 2, 2023
Gerry Rafferty’s “Baker Street” lyrics
When I first subscribed to Ted Gioia’s Honest Broker substack, I figured I’d find one or two posts a month that I found interesting enough to share on the blog … I have to be careful not to link to several of his posts every week. He writes a lot about the music industry, so when this popped up in my inbox, I assumed it was Ted and got to the point of scheduling it before I realized it was Jon Miltimore instead:
I was recently in a bar having dinner with a friend when Gerry Rafferty’s hit 1978 song “Baker Street” came on. When my friend mentioned that he loved the song, I agreed and noted the song’s powerful lyrics.
“Really?” he responded. “I never paid much attention to the lyrics.”
Most people, of course, remember “Baker Street” for its wailing saxophone, and my friend was no different. Nor was I, for many years. But at some point—I don’t know when—I began to pay attention to the song’s lyrics. They go like this:
Winding your way down on Baker Street
Light in your head and dead on your feet
Well, another crazy day
You’ll drink the night away
And forget about everythingThis city desert makes you feel so cold
It’s got so many people, but it’s got no soul
And it’s taken you so long
To find out you were wrong
When you thought it held everythingYou used to think that it was so easy
You used to say that it was so easy
But you’re trying, you’re trying now
Another year and then you’d be happy
Just one more year and then you’d be happy
But you’re crying, you’re crying nowWay down the street there’s a light in his place
He opens the door, he’s got that look on his face
And he asks you where you’ve been
You tell him who you’ve seen
And you talk about anythingHe’s got this dream about buying some land
He’s gonna give up the booze and the one-night stands
And then he’ll settle down
In some quiet little town
And forget about everythingBut you know he’ll always keep moving
You know he’s never gonna stop moving
‘Cause he’s rolling, he’s the rolling stone
And when you wake up, it’s a new morning
The sun is shining, it’s a new morning
And you’re going, you’re going homeThe lyrics — in contrast to the seductive sax and upbeat strings and keyboard — are rather dark. It’s not your typical rock/pop song about finding or losing love.
I’ve never heard “Baker Street” explained, but my take on the song is this: It’s about two lonely people in a city. They find comfort in booze, chemicals, and (occasionally) each other. The relationship is probably dysfunctional, but they are struggling to change. Struggling to grow. Struggling to find meaning.
“Baker Street” peaked at #3 in the UK and held the #2 spot in the U.S. for six consecutive weeks. I think part of the reason the song was such a success is because the lyrics touched on something a little deeper than most rock tunes, something that resonated with audiences. And though the song is 40 years old now, I have a hunch it resonates even more now than it did then.
February 1, 2023
It’s the job of the music critic to be loudly and confidently wrong as often as possible
Ted Gioia points out that a lot of musical criticism does not pass the test of time … and sometimes it’s shown to be wrong before the ink is dry:
When I was in my twenties, I embarked on writing an in-depth history of West Coast jazz. At that juncture in my life, it was the biggest project I’d ever tackled. Just gathering the research materials took several years.
There was no Internet back then, and so I had to spend weeks and months in various libraries going through old newspapers and magazines — sometimes on microfilm (a cursed format I hope has disappeared from the face of the earth), and occasionally with physical copies.
At one juncture, I went page-by-page through hundreds of old issues of Downbeat magazine, the leading American jazz periodical founded back in 1934. And I couldn’t believe what I was reading. Again and again, the most important jazz recordings — cherished classics nowadays — were savagely attacked or smugly dismissed at the time of their initial release.
The opinions not only were wrong-headed, but they repeatedly served up exactly the opposite opinion of posterity.
Back in my twenties, I was dumbfounded by this.
I considered music critics as experts, and hoped to learn from them. But now I saw how often they got things wrong — and not just by a wee bit. They were completely off the mark.
Nowadays, this doesn’t surprise me at all. I’m painfully aware of all the compromised agendas at work in reviews — writers trying to please an editor, or impress other critics, or take a fashionable pose, or curry favor with the tenure committee, or whatever. But there is also something deeper at play in these huge historical mistakes in critical judgments, and I want to get to the bottom of it.
Let’s consider the case of the Beatles.
When the Beatles went on the road, stories like this followed them everywhere
On the 50th anniversary of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the New York Times bravely reprinted the original review that ran in the newspaper on June 18, 1967. I commend the courage of the decision-makers who were willing to make Gray Lady look so silly. But it was a wise move — if only because readers deserve a reminder of how wrong critics can be.
“Like an over-attended child, ‘Sergeant Pepper’ is spoiled,” critic Richard Goldstein announced. And he had a long list of complaints. The album was just a pastiche, and “reeks of horns and harps, harmonica quartets, assorted animal noises and a 91-piece orchestra”. He mocks the lyrics as “dismal and dull”. Above all the album fails due to an “obsession with production, coupled with a surprising shoddiness in composition”. This flaw doesn’t just destroy the occasional song, but “permeates the entire album”.
Goldstein has many other criticisms — he gripes about dissonance, reverb, echo, electronic meandering, etc. He concludes by branding the entire record as an “undistinguished collection of work”, and even attacks the famous Sgt. Pepper’s cover — lauded today as one of the most creative album designs of all time — as “busy, hip, and cluttered”.
The bottom line, according to the newspaper of record: “There is nothing beautiful on ‘Sergeant Pepper’. Nothing is real and there is nothing to get hung about.”
How could he get it so wrong?
January 29, 2023
“That is what Westerners like about Dubai: the indentured servitude. And the weather.”
Tanya Gold at The Free Press:
“Royal Atlantis Resort hotel under construction, Palm Jumeirah, Dubai” by Jpbowen is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 
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I went to Dubai once. It is where tyranny meets hyper-capitalism, and it is as awful as it sounds.
I was helping a journalist friend research an article. I spent my days admiring an undersea bedroom in a lagoon and a ski slope inside a mall. At night I would meet trafficked maids, or a woman imprisoned for adultery. I asked an ancient British tourist why he came here for his holidays. He said, “The staff will hold your dick if you ask them.” That is what Westerners like about Dubai: the indentured servitude. And the weather.
Last week, at the grand opening of Atlantis The Royal, Dubai’s newest luxury hotel, Beyoncé gave her first live performance in five years. This gig featured a 48-person all-female orchestra — how feminist — a Lebanese dance troupe, and her daughter. She was reportedly paid $24 million for the occasion.
Her latest album, Renaissance, is, among other things, an homage to black queer culture. She performed no songs from it; how could she in a country where homosexuality is punishable by death? So she sang her back catalog for the equivalent of ten Bugatti Chirons. Oil-rich tyrannies have generous marketing budgets; they’re selling tyranny itself.
What Beyoncé does or doesn’t do for money wouldn’t matter but for the trend of celebrity activism, which insinuates that morality travels with a star like her wardrobe. Beyoncé acolytes say that just by arriving in Dubai she made the city gayer, a kind of subtle protest. Perhaps so subtle that even Dubai’s ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid — accused of abducting two of his daughters for noncompliance with his wishes, one from England, and another from a ship as she tried to flee Dubai — wouldn’t notice. Did his enforcers reconsider their stance on gayness as they sang along to “Drunk in Love”? Or are they laughing themselves stupid at the PR coup of persuading an until-now gay ally to perform at the opening of a hotel in a country that hates gays?
Dubai, along with Saudi Arabia, wants to reinvent itself as a tourist destination for when the oil runs out. There is nothing understated there — the Burj Khalifa, which is the tallest building in the world; the Palm Jumeirah, a man-made archipelago in the shape of a palm tree. Everything is vast and highly colored, a distraction. It has to be: To enjoy yourself in Dubai, you must close your eyes to suffering. Almost 90 percent of Dubai’s residents are migrant workers, and many of them live in conditions amounting to indentured slavery.
January 27, 2023
January 21, 2023
A club for autodidacts?
Ed West regrets the lacunae in his knowledge of many things, which I suspect also describes a lot of my blog visitors (given how often my own autodidactic web explorations end up here or on my social media accounts). His proposed solution is a club to study the western canon:
I’m ashamed of how little I know about a lot of things. Classical music, for instance, is a huge ocean of unknowns to me. I appreciate it, and I would like to know more, but it still feels like a language in which I have only the barest of vocabulary.
I’m so clueless and lightweight on that front that my favourite classical music LP when I still had a record player was a double album which told you which advert each piece was from (“The Hovis advert with the boy walking up the hill” for Dvorak, “the Hamlet cigar ad with Gregor Fisher” by Bach).
My knowledge of poetry is quite poor, too, and I wish I could recite more of it, rather than, say, the lyrics of the first seven Iron Maiden albums I learned off by heart at 13 (nothing against Iron Maiden, I still love them, but I’ve found this a slightly less useful skill down the years when trying to impress people).
Poetry has never been my thing. I enjoy hearing others read poetry, but there’s always something that prevents me from reading poetry on the printed page and “getting” the rhythm of it for more than a stanza or so. However, with song lyrics the underlying music provides sufficient support that I undoubtedly know far more lyrics by heart than any other kind of poet-created text.
YouTube is full of videos following in George Birkbeck’s tradition of adult learning. There are podcasts like Peter Adamson’s History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps or The Partially Examined Life. One of the most popular Twitter accounts at the moment is The Cultural Tutor, with over a million followers, producing threads on the art, architecture, music and literature you should know about. People really want to learn this stuff, and regret that they were never made to do so earlier.
Some of this is due to the education system, although I don’t want to be one of those tedious people who go on Twitter and blame the curriculum for the gaps in their knowledge of history: “why weren’t we taught about the Second Schleswig war in school? Why am I only learning this now?” as if their teachers had thousands of hours spare rather than a very limited amount of time. But it’s also true that most people leave the British state education system knowing very little about the western canon, and are afterwards playing catch-up with a less absorbent mind.
In my case, with a couple of exceptions, the way that history — especially Canadian history — was taught in school seemed to be deliberately made as bland and uninteresting as possible … we of course skipped over most of the battles and campaigns so we could concentrate on the diplomats and treaties. Steve Sailer noted a similar phenomenon in US schools:
In Europe, anthropologists have promoted the “pots not people” theory to argue that trade and changes in fashion must explain why Corded Ware pots suddenly showed up all over Europe about 4,900 years ago. (So did battle axes; indeed, early scientists called this the Battle Axe Culture. But that sounded too awesome. Hence, more recent academics renamed it after its pottery style to make these brutal barbarians sound dweebier and thus less interesting to boys.)
Oddly, we were at least given some minimal insight into the plight of First Nations children in the residential school system which was not true when my son went to school a generation later. I’m still puzzled about that change in the curriculum. But back to Ed’s proposal:
Perhaps the main reason is that there already aren’t enough people who know about these things to teach in the first place, and who are also willing to endure the strain of having to keep order among an unwilling audience. So the knowledge does not get passed on, and public culture becomes ever more lowbrow.
But while it’s a hopeful sign that so many people go online to learn these things, my take-away from lockdown is that in-person is always better — going to something live, meeting people face to face, allowing your sensory perception to aid the learning process. I also believe that the more clubs and institutions we have, the healthier and happier our society.
That is why I’m proposing an idea, for a sort of club where people come and listen to talks about a particular feature of the western canon — Virgil, Goethe, Milton, Van Eyck, whatever — and fill in all these enormous holes in our knowledge. It would be a bit like an old-fashioned salon, or a Lyceum club. Although there are local salons still running, this would ideally be national. This canon club — I’m open to suggestions for a different name — would initially start in one city, presumably London, but if there was further interest we could help set up branches across Britain (and then even maybe abroad). Each local club would run semi-independently, but the wider organisation would help with arranging speakers and so on.
I see his point, but in my experience a lot of autodidacts are also rather introverted by nature so a physical salon or club with a lot of strangers might be less appealing than some of the existing online options.
January 16, 2023
The music industry fails to capitalize on the vinyl revival
It’s kind of hard to believe, but the companies that control the pressing of music into vinyl appear to have no clue about the business they’re in:
“Framed Vinyl Album Art: America ‘Homecoming’; Nick Gilder (Studio Copy of Singles From ‘City Lights’ Chosen for AOR); Climax Blues Band ‘FM Live’)” by JoeInSouthernCA is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0
I’d heard so many grand claims for the vinyl resurgence, but the reality was tremendously disappointing. And I was a late adopter — the revival had been going on for a decade, but record labels still didn’t have their act together.
In my case, I ended up buying vinyl albums, but mostly used ones. I simply couldn’t find new pressings of the records I wanted. This was fine for me, but lousy for musicians and labels — who make no money on the sale of a secondhand vinyl album.
I have some experience in these matters — in my alternative career I worked with CEOs chasing after fast growth product categories. I know how they handle these situations. But, really, it’s no mystery. The strategies you use in this kind of business are very straightforward:
- You add manufacturing capacity aggressively — to make sure you have enough product to fuel growth.
- You bring down costs by getting scale advantages. But this only happens because unit costs drop as volume increases. So the single biggest goal is to grow sales as hard and fast as possible.
- You constantly reduce prices to keep demand building. In some cases, you even set prices below your costs to accelerate growth rates. When I originally saw companies do this I was skeptical — how can you make profits if you sell below your costs? But I soon learned that you eventually got a huge payback.
- You keep expanding the product line, so that you constantly have something new and exciting to sell to every potential buyer.
- You invest in R&D so that you eventually have a next generation technology to keep the growth going over the long haul.
None of this is easy to do, but it isn’t impossible. It just takes investment, focus, management commitment, and hard work. And later you reap the benefits. You turn a small business into a huge one, and enjoy a big payday.
The record labels could have done that with vinyl. It was taking off — unit sales doubled in just 5 years. And these sales were insanely profitable, because much of the demand was for old music. So labels didn’t even have to pay to sign artists, and cover the costs of recording sessions. The music was already there, with the fixed costs amortized long ago.
They just had to press the bloody album and ship it to the store. How hard is that?
But what did the music industry do?
- They hate running factories — which is hard work. So they tried to outsource manufacturing instead of building it themselves. Chronic shortages resulted.
- They refuse to spend money on R&D, so they stayed with the same vinyl technology from the 1950s. In other words, the record business became the only entertainment industry in the world with no plan for technological innovation. In the year 2023, even bowling alleys, bordellos, and bookies are more tech savvy than the major record labels.
- They want easy money, so they kept prices extremely high. That was bizarre because their R&D and catalog acquisition costs were essentially zero, and they could have priced vinyl aggressively. Instead they treated vinyl as a luxury product, even as they dreamed of it also becoming a mass market option. But you can’t do both without a careful market segmentation strategy — which the labels never even started thinking about.
- They love hype, so they focused on high visibility vinyl reissues, which look good in press releases, but couldn’t be bothered to make back catalog albums available. After a decade of the vinyl revival, they still hadn’t taken even basic steps in offering a wide product line.
This is a lazy strategy — and the exact opposite of what they should have done. And the results are, of course, predictable.
