Timbaland Shops His Wares 97
I sometimes hear Dre compared to Phil Spector, but for distinctiveness of sound and all-around eccentricity, Timbaland seems to me a better analogy. The Chronic and Doggystyle definitely have a recognizable sound, but since then Dre’s approach has been much more catholic. With Timbo you can trace his style all the way back to Ginuwine and it still sounds pretty much just like that. All four beats he plays for Jay Z here are so good, I really don’t know how he could choose between them. He clearly loves that Dirt Off Your Shoulder beat though; look at the expression on his face when he hears it for the first time!
Would You Say He's a Cheesedick or a Dickpants? 1
The first English word I ever learned was cat. Later when I came across the word city for the first time, I pronounced it kitty. This sort of orthographic ambiguity is a real pain for native Korean speakers learning English: there’s a very dirty Korean joke that revolves around a certain doofus politician’s inability to master the distinction between the soft G and the hard G.
I was a pretty serious logophile as a kid and spent a lot of time reading dictionaries and trying out words. I went through a phase in fourth grade when I was enamored with wonderful and stuck it anywhere I could, like “French fry is wonderful” or “Homeworks are not wonderful” and so forth. I always had teachers who would say that you shouldn’t use a word unless you’re sure of the meaning, but is this really practicable? I once heard Aidan, Mathematician Will and Noodletown Shannon parse the distinction between dickpants and cheesedick. I still don’t really know how to define dickpants, but I like it as a word.
An early attempt at application:
School is bitches. Daily I see the North American Dickpants in his natural habitat.
Aidan’s response:
In Boston too we enjoy the splendor of the North American Dickpants, of the especial Northeast variety; though, here at UMass, I am more privy to intimate glances of the South Shore Retard and the Feathered New England Ball Washer.
Are we communicating? Music is often like this - you just sort of have to assume a basic level of shared experience and trust that something will get across. I’ve always been suspicious of claims of universality in music; to me it just seems like thinly veiled chauvinism. You never hear claims of universality made for West African drumming or Chinese opera. I like Paul Celan’s more modest view - that a poem (or a piece of music) is like a message in a bottle that you float in the hopes it will reach shore sometime somewhere. Odds are it’ll simply break or sink, but it’s good to be hopeful.
Eight Different Limbs, Two Different Drummers 120
Once while I was wandering around the music building I happened upon a masterclass being given by drummer Carl Allen. He was talking about different ways to play the ride cymbal, and demonstrated with the most uncanny imitations of famous drummers’ ride styles: “So you have Philly Joe Jones’s ride pattern … or Tony Williams’s ride … or Art Blakey’s… or Max Roach’s….”
In Miles’s book he says that Max never got over Clifford Brown’s death, and that he never played as well afterwards. I have two records worth of music by the Roach-Brown quintet and it’s a miracle that neither record has worn out yet, I listen to them so much.
Max’s playing is so clear, each piece of his kit distinct and independent. I think this is what led people to say that his solos sounded like they were played by an entire percussion section; there’s a real sense of polyphony that imparts a different sort of swing from say Elvin, whose kit always sounds to me like one massive elemental organism no matter how complicated the polyrhythms.
Max:
Elvin:
The Price of Survival Is Not to Feel 135
Gyorgy Sebok was Professor of Music at Indiana University for forty years until his death in 1999. His friend, compatriot and fellow Indiana professor Janos Starker claimed that Sebok was the best pianist he’d ever heard. Sebok was Jewish and spent time in a forced labor camp during the Nazi occupation of his native Hungary. Here he talks about how his war experience aftected his musicmaking, and how this Bach Adagio helped restore his connection to music - “…some strings, they were not functioning, started to vibrate.”