The Beach Boys - "SMiLE"

In the wake of Pet Sounds, as The Beatles released Revolver and popular music began to move irretrievably beyond its humble origins, Beach Boy Brian Wilson planned a follow-up album that would match and even surpass its already legendary predecessor. The album was to be called SMiLE, and famously, though the band and an incredible assortment of musicians would spend two years in the studio, what was finished of the album would be shelved. (The famous exception was "Good Vibrations," released while the sessions were ongoing and considered one of the greatest songs ever recorded.) Rumors circulated about Wilson's increasingly erratic behavior; nearly all of them, from having his musicians wear fire hats to building a giant sandbox in his dining room to house his grand piano, turned out to be true. Decades passed, and as innumerable rumored at-long-last releases of the album came and went uneventfully, both SMiLE and its creator assumed mythic statures. For years after, the Beach Boys continued to release material, with or without a dazed Wilson on board. Some of it was good, some of it appalling, but with the exception of a handful of intermittently released, retouched tracks, none of it was SMiLE. Throughout, fans rabidly traded session bootlegs and raved about the quality of the music, yet it appeared the vault was nonetheless sealed for good.

After years of reclusive behavior and the deaths of his brothers and bandmates, Dennis and Carl, with the help of friends, Wilson recorded a solo version of SMiLE in 2004. Though the release and accompanying tour were widely acclaimed, there remained no word on the original recordings - neither news of a future release nor an explanation of why they'd never been issued from Wilson, who despite his resurgance remained notoriously uncomfortable with interviews. Finally and suddenly, in March 2011, the band and its label confirmed the release of SMiLE and a wide selection of the studio sessions that went into its production. Appropriately enough, the announced release date was further pushed back three times, but on November 1, the album known for 45 years as the most famous one never released finally hit stores, lovingly remastered and ready for posterity.

To say that the expectations for the album were impossibly high could only be an understatement: SMiLE's tortured history notwithstanding, as early as 1966 Dennis Wilson had said the new recordings "[made] Pet Sounds stink," and he was hardly alone among insiders. Almost inconceivably, even if the youngest Wilson was somewhat exaggerated, SMiLE fails to disappoint. The album, which until recently existed only in fragments and without a tracklist, sounds, if anything, more cohesive than Pet Sounds. To create his music, Brian Wilson sketched out modules he called "feels," fragments he would then interweave into a cohesive whole. The result is exactly what he intended to achieve: the multiple movements of "Good Vibrations" expanded to an entire album, ingeniously peppered with recurring leitmotifs that lend the work a unity even more remarkable given the circumstances. The album's lyrics, penned by Van Dyke Parks (a friend of Wilson's and songwriter in his own right), are fittingly concerned with sweep, grandiosely attempting to encompass the American saga down to the plights of Native Americans and the environment. The undeniable flow of Parks' words generally outweighs their obscurity (and equally undeniable pretension), and results in a number of songs that qualify as great on those grounds alone.

Yet SMiLE is unquestionably about the music, and as Pet Sounds suggested it could, it entirely transcends the confines of rock (even by retrospective standards, much less those of its day), staking a claim on Wilson's behalf for the title of greatest American composer - fully deserving of comparison to Bernstein and Copland, Mingus and Ellington. Beginning with the soaring a capella chorale "Our Prayer," the album promptly gives way to an astounding variety of musical styles. In keeping with the album's Americana fixation, it draws from every corner of American music, and in so doing employs instuments ranging from the simple musical jug to the electro-theremin, tenor ukelele, and Beach Boy favorite bass harmonica. Then of course, there are the harmonies that made the group famous to begin with. As in all other facets of his composition, Wilson here pulled out all the stops on vocal arrangements, matching "Our Prayer" on the driving chorus of "Cabin Essence" (mirroring the Iron Horse being sung about) and the undulating "Good Vibrations." The centerpiece of SMiLE is "Surf's Up," which was first released in 1971 on the album bearing its name. That version is a classic itself, and indeed, has always been recognized as one of the band's greatest accomplishments. It was compliled, though - in parts, newly recorded - without the input of Brian Wilson, and it suffers by comparison. The 1971 arrangements were more than competently overseen by Carl Wilson, yet Brian's mastery as a producer reveals itself in the minor details: for instance, the punchier bass was undoubtedly due to Wilson's insistance that it be played with a pick (a recurring trend in the bonus discs), and it noticably strengthens the arrangement of the first section of the song. More importantly, Brian's 1966 vocal for once trumps his brother's angelic alto, imbuing the song with a raw emotion that years later Brian would reveal he worried about exposing to the public. The song is emblematic of the importance SMiLE's official release: any faithful recording of this material would qualify as great, but only here do we find it as conceived and personally directed by the era's most singularly visionary composer in popular music, and sung by those six golden voices in their prime. It's simply one of the greatest albums ever released.

The SMiLE Sessions box set contains 4+ discs of music from the studios, recorded between 1966 and '67; they offer more enlightenment than enjoyment on their own grounds. What's clear from the outset is the vision and purpose of Brian Wilson, and it's evidence that dispels the notion of an acid freak slowly losing his mind in a studio (though it wasn't for lack of acid). As he drives through take after take, either singing with the other 5 Beach Boys crowded around one mic or directing studio musicans from the booth, he displays an uncanny understanding of how the disparate parts being recorded are going to mesh with one another and an equally impressive ability to pick out the one clarinet in the ensemble who sounds a little flat. Though the extensive liner notes admit the same thing, these 4 discs - which constitute only a small fraction of the music actually recorded during these sessions - show exactly why SMiLE could probably never have been released in the 60s, or really, ever before the last decade. In addition to the strains of satifying both public and label, Wilson and co. would have had to assemble a literal mountain of tape into a cohesive sound collage using nothing but razors and glue. As the digital revolution enabled the delayed compilation of these marvelous recordings, so too did it make it possible to feasibly release enough studio takes to demonstrate exactly how hard it was to translate Brian Wilson's vision to wax. It's often astounding to hear elements of the music in the context of its creation -  especially the vocals, and especially to find that something so moving was most often directly preceded by strategizing or plain joking around. The special edition can nonetheless be easily skipped by all but the most interested: the music itself hardly requires any external proof to enhance its appreciation.

Jelly Roll Morton - "Ganjam"

To the extent that he's remembered at all, jazz pioneer Jelly Roll Morton's legacy lies in his oft-quoted (and misunderstood) claim to have invented jazz in 1902 and in his immortal 1926/7 recordings with his Red Hot Peppers (including such masterpieces as "Black Bottom Stomp" and "Grandpa's Spells"). Morton spent most of the years after 1927 nearly broke, struggling to scrape by in various setups around the country. His career experienced a minor resurgance in the last 3 years of his life, beginning with an 8-hour series of recorded interviews for the Library of Congress with musicologist Alan Lomax in 1938 and followed by a final spate of recording sessions that would produce some mostly middling bandwork (with some exceptions, marred by musicians that couldn't match their elite Red Hot Pepper counterparts) and some of the finest solo sides of his career. He nonetheless died broke in 1941, remembered by Down Beat (see above) but already forgotten by most of the record-buying populace, who had moved over to swing at least a decade earlier and subsequently dismissed him as an artifact of what was then mostly referred to as Hot Jazz.

To his dying day, however, Morton continued planning for a resurgance, and unbeknowst to them - and to virtually anyone for decades after - he had, in fact, been absorbing the musical changes to which he appeared to so stubbornly be refusing to adapt. In fact, one of his last compositions, the cryptically-titled "Ganjam," not only is arranged for an adapted big band, but even looks past swing, presaging the swirling haze and carefully-measured dissonance that would characterize some of the finest work of Duke Ellington, and in particular, Morton acolyte Charles Mingus, even more than 20 years later. In their excellent biography Jelly's Blues, Howard Reich and William Gaines describe the piece as unfolding "like the first movement of a symphony - complete with primary and secondary themes, a development section, and a recapitulation." To their thinking, had "Ganjam" - with its "astringent chords, bizarre key changes, and exotic scales of a sort that would not be heard in jazz until at least the early 1950s" - been heard in Morton's lifetime, contemporary musicians would have had to acknowledge him as "the most forward-thinking and accomplished composer in jazz."

"Ganjam" wasn't heard then, though, nor at any point until six years after its discovery in the archives of Morton archivist William Russell following his death in 1992, when it received its inaugural performance in May 1998. With the exception of a handful of subsequent live performances, it would not be heard again for 7 years, after which the piece was finally recorded by trumpeter Randy Sandke for his 2005 album Outside In. The album is actually bookended by two versions of "Ganjam," the first a wonderful arrangement by Sandke, and the closer, "Ganjam" as written down by Morton himself. It's an astounding piece for anyone familiar with his work, containing plenty of Morton hallmarks that help with orientation - for instance, the famous Spanish Tinge or The Roll's beloved breaks - but otherwise bearing little resemblance to anything else in his catalog. (One truly wonders what he could have done had his highly preventable death been postponed even a few years.) Sandke's recording of Morton's arrangement can be heard below, available online in its entirety for the first time; interested parties are encouraged to support the artist by picking up the track (or the entire album) here.

9/11/11

Ballpoint pen, markers, pencil,

newspaper, newspaper ash

September 11, 2001 was in many ways a nightmarish initiation into adulthood - a demonstration of mankind's oxymoronic capacity for inhumanity on an inconceivable scale, experienced transcontinentally as though it were occurring in view of my family's front door. A decade later, words remain hard to come by, and in any event inadequate (as, lamentably, do drawings, though the example reproduced above - drawn in my annual state of abstract sadness and anger after a night of little sleep - was certainly heartfelt). I'll certainly never forget that awful day, and can never forgive those hateful cowards who then did and will continue to deliberately and specifically target innocent civilians. More powerfully than I can express in prose, this photo of Robert Peraza embodies what evil leaves in its wake.

In loving memory of the 2977 lives lost and the countless others torn asunder on September 11, 2001

Out of Print Gems: The Genius of Ravi Shankar

Though Ravi Shankar's recording career in the West began in the mid-1950s, it wasn't until after his introduction to George Harrison in the mid-60s that his fame (and the profile of Indian classical music as a whole) transcended the fringes of Western cultural consciousness. Within three years of Harrison's inclusion of the sitar on "Norwegian Wood," Indian instrumentation on pop records had already become something of a successful cliche, used to lend psychedelic ambience to the work of derivative songwriters unable to create something genuinely trippy on their own. An unintended consequence - and an unwelcome one for Harrison, whose obsessed admiration for the music was genuine - was that sitar music began to sell, primarily as an exotic soundtrack for journeys to altered states of consciousness. Record labels proved shameless in their exploitation of their unexpected target audience for music previously considered genuinely unmarketable, and though their classically trained musicians declined to adapt their art to contemporary tastes, their marketing departments showed no such compunction. Predictably, the anonymous liner notes to The Genius of Ravi Shankar describe the music the album contains as "more of [Shankar's] enthralling psychedelicacies," "as fresh and impelling and new as tomorrow night's dreams." Luckily, as the era in which record labels lost the audacity to publicly suggest that their customers "tune in and turn on" faded, the music endured, meaning large discographies, especially for Shankar and his most frequent collaborators. Liner notes aside, The Genius is something of an anomaly in that it's faded from print. Though most of Shankar's albums have been multiply reissued, and though Genius was issued on Columbia - perhaps the king among labels of quality rereleases of its back catalog - it has appeared only once on CD as it was originally issued. The music itself, if perhaps not quite as memorable as some of his astounding duets with Ali Akbar Khan, is nonetheless up to Shankar's formidable technical standard, and the album also features an excellent tabla solo from an uncredited Alla Rakha. It's a worthy addition to his legendary discography, one that deserves to be detached from its historical pigeonhole and enjoyed on its own terms. Interested parties can download it here.

Out of Print Gems: Beethoven

London Records - most widely known for having issued the Rolling Stones' albums through Sticky Fingers - was a pioneering classical label throughout the 1950s and 60s, whose output helped to standardize the 12" 33⅓ RPM format and remains remarkable to this day for its consistently outstanding quality. The 1966 recording of Beethoven's immortal Ninth symphony done by Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt for London fits the template perfectly. The engineering is immaculate, and the music is warm and clear. The performances, featuring the famous soprano Joan Sutherland, are terrific across the board; the vocal soloists in particular are strong, managing to be expressive without succumbing to the vaguely strained frenzy that often characterizes the last movement. The recording was issued once on CD (in 1988) but has since fallen sadly out of print. It's nonetheless a worthy candidate in the eternal search for the best recording of one of history's most famous pieces of music. Interested parties can download it here.

Out of Print Gems: The Four Lads - "Dry Bones"

The 1950s and early 60s constituted an era of vocal quartets, and the only thing separating The Four Lads from any other group whose name began with The Four - Freshmen, Tops, what have you - was the ensemble's Canadian citizenship and the hit it scored with "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)." In early 1968, an obscure spiritual adaptation the group had recorded for a 1961 Dixieland-inspired album served as a memorable leitmotif in the final episode of the landmark TV series The Prisoner ("Fall Out" - see video below), and was thus ensured unlikely immortality.

The spiritual itself is "Dem Bones," one familiar for its "knee bone's connected to your thigh bone" refrain, but whose biblical content tends to be overlooked. In fact, the opening line, "Ezekiel cried dem dry bones," refers to Ezekiel 37, where the prophet, set down by god in a valley of full of long-dry bones, causes them to reanimate and form a vast army. Given series creator and star Patrick McGoohan's attention to detail, it's safe to assume the choice was intentional, meant to reflect his character's struggle to rouse his fellow prisoners against their repressive captors - and, presumably, McGoohan's own desire to rally support against a world he saw as repressive, soulless, and dangerously overautomated. Of course, the woozy effect of the song's modulating structure also perfectly mirrored his intentionally confusing and open-ended finale to the series. Interestingly, the liner notes to Dixieland Doin's indicate that the album's songs were meant to demonstrate the "happy, humor side of the Four Lads," and indeed, the song's effect is radically different when it's enjoyed outside the context of "Fall Out." This makes it all the more unfortunate that the track is almost impossible to find, having been omitted (possibly for copyright reasons) from the otherwise extensive 3 volume soundtrack to The Prisoner, as well the various Four Lads compilations on the market (for no discernable reason). Used vinyl copies of Dixieland Doin's are said to appear on eBay every few months. Meanwhile, the mp3 of "Dry Bones" is available here.

Chromosomes and Cell Division

The internet (along with textbooks and teachers) demonstrates an appalling unwillingness to explain simply how many chromosomes there are at any given point in a cell - or for that matter, what chromosomes are! (A pair of squiggly lines? Just one?) For all you Google searchers looking for what I couldn't find, here's the answer in plain terms. Chromosomes are what you find illustrated as a squiggly line. A somatic (body) cell has 23 kinds of them, and 2 copies of each - a total of 46. Before mitosis or meiosis, each squiggly line replicates, producing 46 of the structures we generally associate with the term "chromosome": 2 squiggly lines joined in the middle. In mitosis, these 46 replicated chromosomes are broken back down into their unreplicated predecessors and split amongst two cells.

(In explaining meiosis we'll ignore crossing over, which is explained adequately in many other places.) In Meiosis I, the 46 replicated chromosomes are not split as they are in mitosis, but rather divied up. That is to say, instead of each daughter cell having one copy of both homologous chromosomes, the daughter cell has a replicated set of only one. Even after Meiosis I, then, the daughter cells are already haploid, containing only 23 chromosomes, rather than the normal 46. In Meiosis II, the replicated chromosomes in each daughter cell are split (as in Mitosis) and divided amongst 4 final daughter cells, giving a final product of 4 cells with only one copy apiece of the 23 human chromosomes. These are gamete cells, which combine to form a brand new cell with a full, double set of these 23 chromosomes - half from one parent, and half from the other. The entire process is drawn out below. Enjoy.

And to any teachers or (especially) textbook writers out there: spend the extra four minutes/1 page and draw the whole thing out. It makes everything make sense. Fight the conventional idiocy - if not for our sake, then for that of the poor, defamed chromosomes you've made us resent.