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SongTrellis |
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Musical amazements on YouTube.com The YouTube video site has amazing music videos submerged inside of it. If you can guess that a video for a particular artist might have been posted there, you can search the site and find whatever videos that might have been tagged with that artist's name. Searching like this feels like sending a grappling hook into a shipwreck that's settled on the bottom to see what you can pull to the surface. I've been working for a few weeks and have accumulated 133 links that I think are musically interesting. Most of them are from YouTube. A few drummer-related videos that are hosted on drummersworld.com are also listed . To see what I found, follow the link entitled Video Links that now appears in the link bar at the top of most SongTrellis pages. Now that these are collected in one easy to locate place on a music related site, these links may decay, just as many salvaged items fall apart after they hit the air when lifted from a ship wreck. I recommend that you watch these before decay sets in. Why might they decay? Why can't I delay? The copyright holders for many of these links may feel that the posting of some of these YouTube videos was an act of piracy. The YouTube regulations say that folks who submit to the site must own the copyright for the videos they submit. Instead, it looks more like possesors of interesting videos have digitized their collections and repeatedly pressed the Submit button. YouTube does not go out of its way to locate possible copyright violations but will take down videos on demand when the copyright holder wishes for this to happen. What treasures are in there? Really important moments for jazzheads like me. The "So What" performance by Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Wynton Kelly from the 1959 CBS television program "The Sound Of Miles Davis". This was filmed a few months after "Kind Of Blue" was recorded. The filmed solos rival those on "Kind Of Blue". A live, in front of a studio audience performance by Miles's great 1960s quintet which is the earliest extant recording of that band after Wayne Shorter joined in 1964. This is also a "So What" performance, so it's very interesting to see and hear the difference between Coltrane's and Shorter's ideas. Very cool also to see an incredibly young Tony Williams, with Herbie Hancock and Ron Carter, create an entirely different rhythm feel for Miles' music. There are performances of this band doing Footprints and "Agitation" a few years later. Rare video sightings of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young and Dexter Gordon There's Art Tatum playing Yesterdays. I'd never seen Tatum play before I found this. John Coltrane's quartet playing Afro-Blue for Ralph Gleason on San Francisco public TVand Naima at the Juan Les Pins festival in Antibes in 1965. Coltrane played his only recorded live performance of "A Love Supreme" at this festival the night before. Is there any chance that they also recorded that for French TV? There are performances of Eric Dolphy with Charles Mingus and with his friend Coltrane. There's a video blog that Bret Primack produced about Sonny Rollins' music that shows Rollins doing one of his unaccompanied sax solos. The same program has a clip of Rollins with Jim Hall performing "The Bridge" at lightning speed. I'd never seen Lee Morgan perform. He was murdered on the bandstand a year or so after I started to listen to jazz in the late 1960s. There are three of his solo features with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers. Never had seen Booker Little either. He died when I was in kindergarten. He was in his early 20s. I had helped produce one of Woody Shaw's concerts back in Nebraska in the late 70's but had never seen him on video till I saw the clip of he and Freddie Hubbard playing Lee Morgan's "Desert Moonlight". I'd never seen video of Milton Nascimento or of Djavan, two of the great Barzilian singers, before I found clips on YouTube. I had not heard Elis Regina (I knew her reputation from comments that Wayne Shorter had made in interviews) until I found her performance with Antonio Carlos Jobim singing "The Waters of March (Aguas de Marco)". Pure joy! Four clips of Ellington's band in the 1940s, right from it's greatest period. Got to saw Ben Webster take his Cottontail solo. Got to see Jimmy Blanton, Tricky Sam Nanton, Sonny Greer, Ray Nance, Rex Stewart, all firsts for me. There are five performances by the Bill Evans Trio. Bill's doing some of his best vehicles: Gloria's Step, Elsa, Waltz For Debbie, If You Could See Me Now, Beautiful Love. There's the only video I've ever seen of Cecil Taylor performing. He's singing as he plays, which I hadn't expected. Fascinating to see how he plays those jagged, piano eruptions that he's known for and how he gets into a state where they can happen. Dinah Washington at Newport dressed like a wrapped package singing All of Me. Carmen McCrae doing Body And Soul, one of her last performances. Ella Fitzgerald doing a Summertime that can make you weep it's so beautiful. Ray Charles doing Georgia On My Mind. Some of the greatest thrills were seeing performances where the musicians were enjoying each others company tremedously. Stevie Ray Vaughan, Jody Watley and Stevie Wonder doing "Superstition". They nearly levitate from the energy they release together. John McLaughlin playing All Blues with Bireli Lagrene on a French interview show. John has a non-stop, wide as possible, grin the whole time. Tina Dico, moving when the rhythm loosens up, during her performance of "Home" with the Zero 7 band on Jimmy Kimmel's show. Pete Townsend and The Who doing "Pinball Wizard". Ravi Shankar with Allah Rahka and Ravi again with his daughter Anoushka. Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin doing "Two To Tango" A wonder I had no idea existed: a video of Magic Sam playing the blues. Other blues greats: Jimi Hendrix with "Red House" and "Machine Gun", Muddy Waters with "Long Distance Call", "Mannish Boy", "Got My Mojo Workin'", Reverend Gary Davis, Lightning Hopkins,Albert King, Albert Collins, Ali Farka Toure with Taj Mahal. Earl Scruggs and Doc Watson playing outdoors in someone's backyard Great Bob Marley reggae performances. Yehudi Menuhin playing Bach's "Chaconne in D minor". Jean-Pierre Rampal playing flute for bird muppets on "The Muppet Show". Other, mostly years out-of-rotation MTV clips that I had seen, that I can point to in the hope that I can pull your ears in a new direction. Erykah Badu doing "On and On". K-OS with his insane percussion track for "Superstar Pt. 2". The Aphex Twin videos for "Nannou" and "Alberto Balsam". Some other famous MTV product that does not require my recommendation: Pearl Jam's "Jeremy" and "Do The Evolution", Sting's "If I Ever", "Fields Of Gold", and "Brand New Day". Rock classics: The Grateful Dead on "Playboy After Hours"(?!). Jerry Garcia gleefully sasses Hefner. A rare live performance of "Dark Star". Led Zepplin's "Who Lotta Love" live, Crosby, Stills and Nash at Woodstock. Joni Mitchell with Jaco Pastorius and Pat Metheny, the last moment the record industry had any enthusiasm for her. I recommend this all to you with a sincere heart. Check it out! Why I hope the copyright plantation owners will be lenient First, MTV proved decades ago that music videos drive interest in artist's recordings and draw audiences to their live performances. Millions, perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars of production and promotion expense have gone towards acquiring a few weeks of air time for new music on MTV. Many of the artists I've linked to have been labelled as not adhering to format by MTV, and have never been seen on mainstream TV. Access that could not be bought at any price a decade ago, can be acquired easily and cheaply today. Just let me and a few thousand other enthusiasts wander through your wares and allow us to point at what we find to be most musically valuable. It's tragic that anyone still believes that central arbiters of taste must still exist. Entire cultures and musical subcultures of great worth are locked out when that kind of system is in place. Instead let self-appointed musical tour guides say what they find that's most important and let them pull as many sleeves as they can. The musical world is enormous and varied beyond belief. No one person and no single commercial structure can do it justice. Realize this: the YouTube clips are downsampled and streamed They are streamed in Flash format, so it's relatively difficult to make recordings of the original clip. The copyright holders own the master copies with the highest possible fidelity. Virtually everything I' ve linked to, I would pay hard cash to own in a full fidelity DVD format. If you already have one of these programs available in a commercial package, let me know about it so that I can link to it. The folks who post your stuff to YouTube are telling you that they believe you hold something of great importance that deserves a wider audience. You deserve payment. I believe you will receive greater returns if you let the YouTubers vote on your behalf and spread the word about your wares. Musicians: Submit your videos to YouTube When you do that, send a link to me or your favorite advocate. Better still, perhaps Verisign (or DaveWiner, if he wants to pioneer again) can cobble up a musicvlog modelled after weblogs.com. (The hard job will be to fend off the non-musical spam submissions.) If something like this were in place, you could ping the Musicvlog and your advocates could learn about what you've done and tell the rest of the world why it's important. Tag it! Come to think of it, maybe all that needs to happen is for musicians or their advocates to create a bookmark for their video submissions on del.icio.us and label it with the tag 'musicvideo', a genre tag (eg. "jazz", "rock", "reggae", etc) , a tag giving the artist's name (eg. "MilesDavis", "The Who", "RaviShankar", "DavidLuebbert") and the name of the performance (eg."SoWhat", "TwoToTango", "IfYouCouldSeeMeNow"). I first found YouTube because someone bothered to del.icio.us tag the Miles Davis "So What" performance that's available on YouTube. blog comments powered by Disqus
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Last update: Wednesday, April 26, 2006 at 1:03 AM. |
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