It's just too much work for too little sound. | | | | Ace of bass: Jaco Pastorius in Rome, Italy, 1986.
(Luciano Viti/Hulton Archive/Getty Images) | | | | |  | “It's just too much work for too little sound.”
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| | rantnrave:// An Englishman named JAMES ERRINGTON has spent the past three years making mixtapes of music and recorded sound from (nearly) every year going back to 1853—the year that ÉDOUARD-LÉON SCOTT DE MARTINVILLE, a French printer and bookseller, built the first version of his phonoautogram, the earliest known device for capturing sound. The oldest sounds on Errington's first CENTURIES OF SOUND podcast (it's also a radio show), which covers the years 1853–60, are recordings of guitar notes and a human voice, which the combination of crude mid-19th century technology and the passage of time has rendered indecipherable. They sound like radio static or a previously undiscovered KARLHEINZ STOCKHAUSEN composition (at least for now; there's always the chance that, as our own technology improves, we'll eventually be able to recover the original sounds). The first recognizable sounds we have at the moment are notes played on a cornet in December 1857. They may not rival what LOUIS ARMSTRONG would eventually do but they are, in their own way, more thrilling. How often do you stop and think about the strange fact that someone can play a note on a musical instrument and someone else can hear that same note a minute later and 30 feet away (never mind a century later and 12,000 miles away)? And that there was a time, less than two centuries ago, when that wasn't possible? No singles, no albums, no MP3s, no podcasts, no SOUNDCLOUD, no recordings of JOHN COLTRANE, no DRAKE, no POST MALONE. No arguments about whether it makes more sense to drop albums continuously like GUCCI MANE or to wait years like FRANK OCEAN. After covering the years 1853–88 in three short mixes, with gaps because there's literally no sound available for some years, Errington began devoting his monthly podcasts to individual years starting with 1889. The pickings are still thin even then; the 11 minutes be recovers from the final year of the 1880s include JOHANNES BRAHMS playing piano and the first known recording of an American president, BENJAMIN HARRISON. And then, year by year in historical time and month by month in podcast time, CENTURIES OF SOUND shepherds our ears through the development of recording technology, the beginnings of a recorded music industry and a steady march of musical styles: opera, brass bands, ragtime, brass bands, Vaudeville, British music hall and, as we move our way through the 1910s, the jazz explosion and the roots of recorded blues. This month's mix, featuring music recorded exactly 100 years ago, features the final recordings of pioneering jazz bandleader JAMES REESE EUROPE, who died at age 39 that year when a bandmate stabbed him with a pen knife; the ORIGINAL DIXIELAND JAZZ BAND; the JOSEPH C. SMITH ORCHESTRA's astonishing recording of W.C. HANDY's "YELLOW DOG BLUES" (featuring the "laughing" trombone of HARRY RADERMAN), and much much more. As with all the mixes, there's also contemporary non-musical audio and well-researched notes that place the year and the audio in context. A phenomenal job of curation and research, and an A-plus use of this thing we call the internet... A huge kudos also to writer NATALIE WEINER, who's nearing the end of her 1959 PROJECT, a day-by-day diary of that year, blogged in real time. On Nov. 9, 1959, for example, WAYNE SHORTER recorded his debut album in New York; the next day he recorded with ART BLAKEY & THE JAZZ MESSENGERS for the first time. Another heroic feat of research and context... DRAKE booed at TYLER, THE CREATOR's CAMP FLOG GNAW fest in Los Angeles, presumably for the crime of noit being FRANK OCEAN, and Tyler is NOT HAVING IT... Chicago rapper LIL REESE in critical condition after a shooting Monday afternoon... RIP BAD AZZ. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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