Monday, March 31, 2014

BaRock style Cellos



Luka Sulic and Stjepan Hauser playing their arrangement of Thunderstruck by AC/DC BaRock style





Tuesday, March 25, 2014

Pad Trio at TEDxAthens 2013


Οι Pad Trio, το μουσικό τρίο της ελληνικής ηλεκτρονικής σκηνής έκανε την είσοδο του στη σκηνή του TEDx Athens αξιοποιώντας και μιξάροντας τον φυσικό ήχο του διαστήματος που μας παραχώρησε ο Δρ. Σταμάτης Κριμιζής.
Ο αστροφυσικός δηλαδή που συμμετείχε σε σημαντικές αποστολές της NASA, αφιερώνοντας τη ζωή του ολόκληρη στη μελέτη του σύμπαντος.

Συνέχισαν όμως στα δικά τους μονοπάτια χρησιμοποιώντας τα αγαπημένα τους pad σε ένα performance με δυνατο και σύγχρονο και ρυθμό. 

Pad Trio Are: Kill Emil,Billa Qause and J.Melik

TEDxAthens is a world-class conference about Innovation, Creativity and Ideas based in Athens, Greece. TEDxAthens is one of the first TEDx events worldwide and the first ever TEDx event in Greece - started in May 2009. Its main goal is to develop and leverage the TED experience at a regional level, uniting innovators, thinkers, inspirational speakers, shakers, makers and breakers. TEDxAthens is curated by Dimitris Kalavros-Gousiou and organized by a team of 40 volunteers.














Sunday, March 23, 2014

What Can Jazz Teach Us about Business?


You might not think that jazz and business have much in common, but a business professor who moonlights as a jazz pianist begs to differ.
Frank Barrett, author of “Yes to the Mess: Surprising Leadership Lessons from Jazz,” makes a convincing case that the ability to improvise and collaborate in the face of constant change is as important to business people as it is to jazz musicians. So sit back, listen to “Kind of Blue” by Miles Davis or another jazz favorite and contemplate some tips gleaned from Barrett’s work:

Deviate from routines. Rote activity doesn’t lead to the path of innovation or disruptive technology.

Make plans flexible. Written strategies must allow room for flexibility to ensure freedom to collaborate and discover.

Don’t seek linear growth. A jazz-driven approach requires the constant revision of assumptions and lessons learned from failure.

Anticipate change. If you’re ready for change, you can respond more effectively when it comes.

Maintain baseline expectations. Even while embracing unconventional approaches, standards still apply.











Adapted from Ten Leadership Traits Learned from Jazz at CIO Insight.



Wednesday, March 19, 2014

Juno spacecraft records the sound of space on its way to Jupiter


The Waves instrument aboard NASA's Juno spacecraft recorded amateur radio signals from ham radio operators from around the world.

Here you can check out the sounds of Earth's magnetosphere that Juno recoded as it was passing Earth to speed up on its way to Jupiter.



The radio signals were recorded by Juno's Waves instrument trying to catch the "Hi" sent in morse code by 1,400 radio amateurs throughout the world.

You can learn more about this experiment in this video:









Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Swing Era Paintings > Blues (1929)


Archibald J. Motley Jr, Blues (1929), Oil on canvas, 80 x 100.3 cm, Collection of Archie Motley and Valerie Gerrard Browne © Archie Motley

Archibald J. Motley Jr
(1891-1981)
Archibald J. Motley Jr was one of the first of several artists to concentrate on African American life in his paintings. Even though he never worked or lived in Harlem, his work provided a foundations for much of the work that became identified with the Harlem Renaissance. Motley is best-known for his portraits and genre scenes of Chicago's Black Belt.

"In his painting Blues, Archibald J. Motley Jr. placed this notion of an enticing, performance based black agency into immediate visual action. Set in Parisian 'Black and Tan' club (where a clientele comprised mostly of blacks from South Africa, the Caribbean and the US would fraternize, dance, and listen to the latest black American music), Blues gives form, colour, and meaning to the Harlem Renaissance idea of a part aural, part performative act of black enchantment. Motley's dense composition of cabaret patrons, wine bottles, musicians, instruments, and seemingly disembodied arms and legs all add up to a pictorial gumbo of black creativity: a painted space where musical layering and sexual partnering parallel a fractured, cubistic approach to art and representation. But unlike the emotional and cultural distance to artistic subject matter found in the circa 1920s cubist paintings of Picasso and Braque, Motley's Blues is bold in its racial and cultural locus for modernism, and assertive in its aesthetic privileging of black performers."

Paul Gilroy,'Modern Tones',
Rhapsodies in Black: Art of the Harlem Renaissance







Tuesday, March 11, 2014

Round Midnight Pt.1



'Round Midnight" is a 1944 jazz standard by pianist Thelonious Monk. Jazz artists Cootie Williams, Dizzy Gillespie, Art Pepper, and Miles Davis have further embellished the song, with songwriter Bernie Hanighen adding lyrics. Both Williams and Hanighen have received co-credits for their contributions.
It is thought that Monk originally composed the song sometime in 1940 or 1941. However, Harry Colomby claims that Monk may have written an early version around 1936 (at the age of 19) with the title "Grand Finale".
Monk recorded the song several times throughout his career; it appears on the albums Genius of Modern Music: Volume 1 (first recording of the song by Monk), Thelonious Himself, Mulligan Meets Monk, Misterioso, Thelonious Monk at the Blackhawk, and Monk's Blues (bonus track).
"'Round Midnight" is the most-recorded jazz standard composed by a jazz musician. In allmusic.com it appears in over 1000 albums. The song is also called "'Round About Midnight", as Miles Davis used this title for his Columbia Records album 'Round About Midnight (1957) that included a cover of the song based on Dizzy Gillespie's interpretation. The song became a signature song for Miles Davis, as his performance of the song with Monk at the 1955 Newport Jazz Festival is said to have gotten him a record deal at Columbia Records. He recorded the song in the studio two other times, once for Prestige in 1953 and again in 1956 as released on Miles Davis and the Modern Jazz Giants.
In 1971, Ron Grainer used a down-tempo variation by Cootie Williams to accompany a memorable scene from The Omega Man. The song later appeared on a 2004 Gotan Project CD, Inspiración Espiración, featuring Chet Baker.
In 1986, the song was used as the title for the film Round Midnight which starred veteran saxophonist Dexter Gordon in a fictional story about an expatriate American jazz musician living in Paris. The soundtrack by Herbie Hancock prominently features the song 'Round Midnight along with a number of other jazz standards and a handful of original pieces written by Hancock.
In 2002, Italian pianist Emanuele Arciuli commissioned a number of composers to create the Round Midnight Variations. The composers included Milton Babbitt, William Bolcom, David Crumb, George Crumb, Michael Daugherty, John Harbison, Joel Hoffman, Aaron Jay Kernis, Gerald Levinson, Tobias Picker, Frederic Rzewski, Augusta Read Thomas, Michael Torke, Andy Williams, and Amy Winehouse.


































Monday, March 10, 2014

This is your brain on music


Why music makes us feel the way it does is on par with questions about the nature of divinity or the origin of love. In This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession, Daniel Levitin sets out to answer it — an ambitious task he tackles through a range of lenses, from a digestible explanation of key technical constructs like scale, tone and timbre to compelling cross-disciplinary reflections spanning neurobiology, philosophy, cognitive psychology, memory theory, behavioral science, Gestalt psychology and more. He illuminates diverse subjects like what accounts for the diversity of musical tastes and what makes a music expert, framing music processing as a fundamental cognitive function embedded in human nature. Most impressively, however, Levitin manages to do this while preserving the without subtracting from the intuitive, intangible magic of powerful music, dissecting its elements with the rigor of a researcher while preserving its magnetism with the tenderness of a music lover.

Never ones to pass up a good ol’ fashioned erudite throw-down, we can’t resist pointing out that the book’s final chapter, The Music Instinct, may be the juciest: It’s a direct response to Harvard psycholinguist Steven Pinker, who in a 1997 talk famously called music “auditory cheesecake” and dismissed it as evolutionarily useless, displacing demands from areas of the brain that should be handling more “important” functions like language. (Obviously, as much as we love Pinker, we think he’s dead wrong.) Levitin debunks this contention with a mighty arsenal of research across anthropology, history and cognitive science, alongside chuckle-worthy pop culture examples. (It’s safe to assume that it was musical talent, rather than any other, erm, evolutionary advantage, that helped Mick Jagger propagate his genes.)