Monthly Archives: October 2017

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Laurie Anderson’s Farewell to Lou Reed


“You need to try to master the ability to feel sad without actually being sad.”

– he didn’t give up until the last half-hour of his life, when he suddenly accepted it – all at once and completely.

 

via: Laurie Anderson’s Farewell to Lou Reed | Rolling Stone

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Coltrane Circle


Physicist and saxophonist Stephon Alexander has argued in his many public lectures and his book The Jazz of Physics that Albert Einstein and John Coltrane had quite a lot in common. Alexander in particular draws our attention to the so-called “Coltrane circle,” which resembles what any musician will recognize as the “Circle of Fifths,” but incorporates Coltrane’s own innovations. Coltrane gave the drawing to saxophonist and professor Yusef Lateef in 1967, who included it in his seminal text, Repository of Scales and Melodic Patterns. Where Lateef, as he writes in his autobiography, sees Coltrane’s music as a “spiritual journey” that “embraced the concerns of a rich tradition of autophysiopsychic music,” Alexander sees “the same geometric principle that motivated Einstein’s” quantum theory.

via: John Coltrane Draws a Picture Illustrating the Mathematics of Music | Open Culture