This wasn’t a concert film.
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Wednesday February 09, 2022
REDEF
Sly Stone in "Summer of Soul," nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
(Searchlight Pictures)
quote of the day
This wasn’t a concert film.
- Questlove, director, "Summer of Soul Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)"
rantnrave://
It's Been a Change

I love this story QUESTLOVE tells about SUMMER OF SOUL, the best music movie of 2021, which was nominated Monday for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. When he was absorbing the 40 hours of footage of the 1969 HARLEM CULTURAL FESTIVAL on which his film is based and came across an astonishing MAHALIA JACKSON and MAVIS STAPLES performance of "PRECIOUS LORD TAKE MY HAND," he immediately understood, "This is my ending." It's a feverish gospel duet that builds and builds and climbs higher and higher until you feel the Lord may in fact swoop down and take your hand while you listen. It answered the director's question, "What do you want the audience walking away with, like in their stomachs? What’s going to floor them in the last 15 minutes?” And it *was* the ending of "Summer of Soul" until Questlove started sharing his first, three-and-a-half-hour draft of the film. Everyone liked it. No one loved it. No one was left with that feeling in their stomach. His girlfriend was the one who explained it for him.

"The Hollywood ending, you know, the kind of 'Kumbaya' safe plan landing ending would have been Mahalia [and Mavis Staples]," Questlove tells the LA Times' "The Envelope" podcast. "But what’s happening right now in the world is more like NINA SIMONE. [My girlfriend] said, 'I guarantee you, your film’s going to feel way different if you make that switch.'"

And then, boom. It's the Real World you now feel taking your hand.

"Summer of Soul," which opens on a STEVIE WONDER drum solo, features Mahalia and Mavis about halfway through and leaves you with Nina Simone, is the kind of documentary that doesn't need current musicians and celebrities butting in every few minutes to put the onscreen events into context and make you comfortable and tell you why you should care. The very existence of the world circa 2020-21 is all the context the film needs and making you feel comfortable isn't necessarily the goal (although Questlove allows that there's an element of escape). It's a film about the present day, set in 1969. Civil rights. Protests. Anger. Nina Simone. GEORGE FLOYD was murdered eight months before the movie premiered at SUNDANCE. "Once George Floyd comes to the conversation," Questlove tells the Times, "I’ll just say that you really, truly couldn’t tell what was real on television and what was our film footage. It was interchangeable."

"Summer of Soul" is, in essence, a document of a major Black music festival held in Harlem the same summer as Woodstock and the moon landing which had been all but forgotten to history by the time Questlove signed on to jog the universe's collective memory. It isn't a concert film, according to him. Stevie and Mahalia and Mavis and Nina are there. And SLY & THE FAMILY STONE and GLADYS KNIGHT & THE PIPS and MAX ROACH and ABBEY LINCOLN and and and (the performances are truly incredible). And a world going through a cultural upheaval that casts both a shadow and a light on every performance. It's a movie about reality and reckoning and joy and possibility. It's a movie about George Floyd, who's exactly what B.B. KING and DAVID RUFFIN and the 5TH DIMENSION were singing for, and about, a little over 50 years ago.

Also nominated for Oscars: BEYONCÉ and DIXSON; BILLIE EILISH and FINNEAS O'CONNELL; LIN-MANUEL MIRANDA; VAN MORRISON, and Oscar's favorite bridesmaid, DIANE WARREN (13 nominations, no wins), for Best Original Song... NICHOLAS BRITTELL, GERMAINE FRANCO, JONNY GREENWOOD, ALBERTO IGLESIAS and HANS ZIMMER for Best Original Score... And WEST SIDE STORY provides a musical lift to the Best Picture field; its seven nominations also include a Supporting Actress nod for musical actress ARIANA DEBOSE.

(And shoutout my friend JOSEPH PATEL, nominated for "Summer of Soul.")

Plus Also Too

"I really love being a woman. I really love being a female artist," said ADELE, the big winner at Tuesday's BRIT AWARDS, the first ceremony since the Brits dropped gendered categories. In a night dominated by women, she walked home with the awards for Artist, Album and Song of the Year. LITTLE SIMZ was named Best New Artist half a year after releasing her fourth album, SOMETIMES I MIGHT BE INTROVERT, which is one of the ways the show earns its reputation as the British Grammys. The ceremony wrapped in a cool two and a half hours, which is one of the ways it does not. That still allowed enough time for two, count 'em, two, ED SHEERAN performances... "Herb, do me a favor. Go across the street to the hardware store. I need to have a doorbell button." The first episode of MOOG MUSIC's mini-documentary series GIANTS focuses on composer HERB DEUTSCH, co-inventor of the Moog synthesizer and the man who got that doorbell button for BOB MOOG, who needed it to create his first envelope generator, which he needed to create because Deutsch told him music is meaningless without articulation. A cool window into the life and work of an electronic music innovator and educator who turns 90 today... The first proper SXSW since 2019 is still on for next month but, not surprisingly, the day party lineup is looking a little thin. The city of Austin has received about half the number of applications for special event permits it usually gets for March. "The most glaring absence," the American-Statesman reports, is the FADER FORT.

Rest in Peace

CHII WVTTZ, an 18-year-old Bronx rapper who was short shortly after leaving a Brooklyn recording studio early Sunday morning. He's at least the fourth rapper murdered in the US in 2022. It's the second week of February... Metal guitarist BRUCE GREIG, who played in Misery Index and Dying Fetus.

- Matty Karas (@troubledoll), curator
chambers brothers
Los Angeles Times
How Questlove resurfaced the forgotten 'Black Woodstock' in 'Summer of Soul'
By Mark Olsen, Asal Ehsanipour and Alex Higgens
Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson on how sifting through 40 hours of archival footage of the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival led to his directorial debut, ‘Summer of Soul.”
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Music Business Worldwide crunches the 2021 numbers, and discovers a banner year for music’s biggest players.
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Sound alters our environment. Ambient music might be an extreme example, designed to be heard as a part of everything else we hear or do. But all audio information is, in part, ambient. It colors our perceptions of the space we occupy.
Bloomberg
Apple Buys Startup That Makes Music With Artificial Intelligence
By Mark Gurman
Apple acquired a startup called AI Music that uses artificial intelligence to generate tailor-made music, adding technology that could be used across its slate of audio offerings.
The Guardian
Adele sweeps gender-neutral Brit awards dominated by female acts
By Laura Snapes
In the first Brits ceremony to do away with gendered categories, women or female-fronted acts won 10 out of 15 overall awards.
Vulture
The Highs, Lows, and Whoas of the 2022 Brit Awards
By Justin Curto
HIGH: Adele adds to the trophy case. LOW: More Ed Sheeran?!
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We’re at a unique moment for innovation in music. This moment stands shoulder to shoulder with the Napster moment and the early web2 moment that gave rise to Music Hack Days, Spotify, SoundCloud and pushed into prominence music distributors as startups.
Variety
Oscar Music Snubs and Surprises
By Jazz Tangcay, Jon Burlingame and Chris Willman
Jay-Z is out, Beyonce is in and Diane Warren runs up her historic tally.
5th dimension
Los Angeles Times
'Patriotism is inclusion': Mickey Guyton on performing the national anthem at Super Bowl 2022
By Marissa R. Moss
It was watching LeAnn Rimes belt the song, as a little girl at a baseball game, that hooked Guyton into country music, and it was listening to Whitney Houston’s famous interpretation that showed her that Black women could not only succeed in entertainment but be the best in the game.
CBC Arts
Growing up in a segregated Montreal set the tone for Oscar Peterson's complex relationship to Canada
By Huda Hassan
Black jazz musicians "coloured south of Montreal as Black as they could" -- but it wasn't easy.
Billboard
Jam Master Jay’s Alleged Killers Set to Stand Trial for Murder, Two Decades After His Death
By Bill Donahue
Two Queens men stand accused of killing the hip-hop legend over a cocaine deal gone bad.
Variety
SiriusXM’s Artist Channel Programming Is an Exercise in Male Privilege
By Lily Moayeri
SiriusXM's so-called “artist channels” have given little real estate to female performers.
The New York Times
John Williams, Hollywood’s Maestro, Looks Beyond the Movies
By Javier C. Hernández
The composer of “Star Wars” and “Jaws,” who turned 90 this week, says he will soon step away from film. But he has no intention of slowing down.
The Washington Post
In the extraordinary scores of George Crumb, the mind of a composer and the hand of a poet
By Michael Andor Brodeur
I would love to tell you what the music of George Crumb sounds like, but you'd save some time just by opening a window.
Money 4 Nothing
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By Saxon Baird, Sam Backer and David Turner
While the boom and bust have come and gone, NFTs haven't disappeared. A set of crypto based technologies and speculatively disruptive companies are still out there, working to create a new, on-chain future. We have thoughts. 
JazzTimes
Henry Threadgill Continues Challenging Colleagues, Listeners and Himself
By Michael J. West
The NEA Jazz Master and Pulitzer Prize winner has a new album with the Zooid quintet, a plethora of new multimedia projects, and two books.
The Sydney Morning Herald
History made as Indigenous conductor takes the stage
By Nick Miller
When Aaron Wyatt picks up the conductor’s baton for the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra on Wednesday night, he will take a deep breath and set the beat for a moment in history: what is believed to be the first time an Aboriginal man conducts an Australian state orchestra in a public performance.
Kulture Hub
Ray Da Yungin: The visionary rapping to save his community
By Sophie McNally
Eleven-year-old rapper Ray Da Yungin creates fire lyrics with vibe and flow but doesn’t miss his shot to speak on gun violence in his community.
what we're into
Music of the day
“Backlash Blues (live, 1969)”
Nina Simone
Video of the day
“Summer of Soul”
Questlove
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