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We know that Mr. Zappa’s forte was staging amazing tours. In this excerpt from a recorded interview, he stresses the importance of holding your bandmates to high standards.

Today the world says goodbye to Slayer guitarist Jeff Hanneman.

Slayer are, as I mentioned in my History of Metal, the one group in thrash’s “Big Four” that seem to have maintained the highest level of credibility among listeners throughout the decades since their emergence. Their raw sound, disturbing lyrics, frantic tempos, and chaotic solos might keep all but the pathologically curious at bay, and I must admit my own appreciation for Slayer came rather late; but I for one eventually learned their sound is not raw as much as it is genuine, their lyrics are not disturbing as much as they are revealing, their tempos not frantic but exhilarating, and their solos…well, I can’t tell how calculated they are, but I cannot imagine that anything more polished sounding would seem appropriate in the context of their songs.

I was first exposed to Slayer when the bassist in my high school band suggested we learn “Skeletons of Society.” We rehearsed it, but never got to perform it. Many years later, I would suggest to the members of Avengers Assemble! that we prepare “Seasons in the Abyss” as a set-opener. Could there be any better song to open a club show? Hardly.

We must all rock considerably harder to fill the void left by Hanneman’s departure.

For whatever reasons, Dave Brubeck is often overlooked by purists when recounting the greatest artists of jazz. But his legacy is nearly as impactful as any artist of the last century, and his music easily as inspiring.

Brubeck, always smiling.

I first encountered him when I was 18 years old. He was a featured artist on VH1′s “New Visions Jazz,” hosted by Ben Sidran. Mr. Brubeck was performing a couple of standards (“I Hear a Rhapsody” and “These Foolish Things”) at a jazz festival in Florida; and even I, with my then limited capacity to understand the subtleties of jazz, was dazzled by they way he could evoke orchestral textures from a piano. In a subsequent interview, he was asked how he felt about playing the old fan favorites dozens of times per year, for years on end. Hardly a month goes by that I don’t recall his answer as one of the first lessons I learned about being a performer. He said that he was fortunate to be playing music for so many people, and for so long, and that if people wanted to hear “Take Five” for the 200th time, it remained his job to play it for them, and to do so with as much intent and fervor as he ever did.

Another of the several lessons I learned by listening to his music was that a style is represented by its distilled essence, not by its most frequently used techniques. To illustrate: “Blue Rondo a la Turk” is one of the greatest blues pieces ever written and performed, and without adhering strictly to the incessantly repeating twelve-bar form. Today, remember Dave Brubeck in hindsight the way countless students and fans enjoyed him in person — by taking delight in the impeccable structure, exhibited both on the page and in improvisation, in the music of Brubeck’s classic quartet, who were matchless both in their knack for craftsmanship and in their appeal to humanity’s basest feelings.

I would expect any jazz student to be familiar with the Charlie Parker Omnibook, a compendium of transcriptions of heads and solos by the seminal altoist. It is an essential tool for any performer interested in building a bebop vocabulary.

YouTube user dancohen has created a series of videos which follows the original recordings with note-by-note animations based on the Omnibook transcriptions. One hazard of learning solely from another person’s transcription is being unaware of the quirks of rhythm and accent that cannot easily be notated. I found these videos useful for learning how Bird’s phrasing might sound different than mine if I simply learned the transcriptions as written.

As I began watching this, I felt sorry for the guy. Maybe it’s his first show. Maybe he just replaced someone else and he was rushed into this gig without much time to learn the material. But the fact that he isn’t just making mistakes here and there, but has utterly lost the form, combined with the band’s reaction at the end, suggests that he might have other issues to deal with — things that he was probably warned about repeatedly.

Let’s ignore that the music is a throwback to the smooth 90′s. These guys can jam. And the bassist is apparently eleven years old.

I have seem some jaded reactions to this performance, along the lines of, “Let’s see what he can do in ten years;” but if you’re tempted down that road, forget yourself long enough to simply appreciate what this kid has done so far.

As I broke from my arranging for the night, I thought I might take inspiration from this video. I was not at all disappointed. I hope it touches you as it has me.

May I present this video of a performance of Erik Satie’s Vexations:

And here is the related Wikipedia article, a rather interesting read: Vexations (Wikipedia)

In The Time of Music: New Meanings, New Temporalities, New Listening Strategies, Jonathan Kramer writes the following reaction:

But then I found myself moving into a different listening mode. I was entering the vertical time of the piece. My present expanded, as I forgot about the music’s past and future. I was no longer bored. And I was no longer frustrated because I had given up expecting. I had left behind my habits of teleological listening. I found myself fascinated with what I was hearing…True, my attention did wander and return, but during the periods of attending I found the composition to hold great interest. I became incredibly sensitive to even the smallest performance nuance, to an extent impossible when confronting the high information content of traditional music. When pianists traded off at the end of their twenty-minute stints, the result was an enormous contrast that opened a whole new world, despite their attempt to play as much like each other as possible. What little information I found in the music was in the slight performance variability, not in the notes or rhythms.

It seems Kramer has echoed a more succinct statement by John Cage:

In Zen they say: If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, try it for eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so on. Eventually one discovers that it’s not boring at all, but very interesting.

When I first got into Meshuggah, I couldn’t figure out how to tag them. Progressive? Experimental? Their lead guitarist, Fredrik Thordendal, has given us a word for it: “Djent” is an onomatopoeia, referring to the crunchy, stabbing guitar sound that pervades Messhugah’s music. Since the introduction of the term, other bands have been described as djent.

The most impressive feature of Meshuggah’s music is its dizzying syncopation. Often, you hear a cymbal grinding out quarter notes while the rest of the rhythm section chugs through labyrinthine polymetric riffs:

Maryland band Periphery expand on Meshuggah’s formula with increased melodicism and flashier guitar work:

Hailing from the Netherlands, Textures offers a take on djent that is more atmospheric. I especially enjoy “Sanguine Draws the Oath,” partly because of the undeniably Mike Patton-esque vocals in the chorus (first heard at 1:29).

Several have criticized the use of “djent” as a genre label, arguing that it is merely a term meant to describe a guitar tone. However, once any nomenclature has been established within a certain context, it becomes a cultural habit that is nigh impossible to break.