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How Jazzman Robert Glasper Won Over the Hip-Hop Heads

by RachellPollak Posted on June 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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Robert Glasper Jacob Blickenstaff

Pianist Robert Glasper is a leading figure in the contemporary jazz scene, but he has never been far from his diverse influences. And while he possesses a deep gift for invention and improvisation, his music often incorporates the chords and sequences fundamental to hip-hop, R&B, and modern gospel.

With his fourth album, Double Booked, Glasper introduced a new band, the Robert Glasper Experiment, that pivoted further from traditional jazz to explore elements of the latter genres. Two albums with the Experiment followed, Black Radio and Black Radio 2, featuring an impressive roster of guest vocalists—among others, Erykah Badu, Musiq Soulchild, Lalah Hathaway, and Yasin Bey. The albums netted Glasper two Grammys—one in 2013 for Best R&B album, the second this year for Best traditional R&B performance.

On his latest album, Covered, out earlier this month, Glasper features his original trio with bassist Vicente Archer and drummer Damion Reid. Recorded in front of a small audience at Capitol Studios, it reinterprets a wide variety of songs, including cuts from the Black Radio albums and alumni, as well as Joni Mitchell, John Legend, Jhené Aiko, Radiohead, and Kendrick Lamar—with the Victor Young standard “Stella By Starlight” for good measure. I caught up with Glasper as his trio kicked off a week-long run at the Village Vanguard, the famed New York City jazz venue. He is currently on tour.

Mother Jones: After two well-received Black Radio albums, you’re going back to piano trio format. What’s new this time around?

Robert Glasper: I’ve acquired a new audience. Around 2009, my audience started getting a lot more mainstream; younger people, R&B and hip-hop fans, mixed in with the jazz audience. Since those two albums, my audience has grown a lot bigger. I didn’t want to just go back to doing straight-up jazz standards or trio songs. We purposely did cover songs to make everyone happy. And it makes me happy too. The kind of “jazz way” is just doing another album the same way with different songs. But I like to wait until I have a nice concept. Now I have another avenue that I can go down, that I have to go down, because of the audience I’ve acquired.

MJ: Is there any common element to the songs on Covered?

RG: Nope.

MJ: Where do they come from then?

RG: I wanted to do a mix of old songs that I love and some new songs that I love to keep it modern. I’m pretty eclectic, so that’s why I was like, Joni Mitchell, Kendrick Lamar, Radiohead, Musiq Soulchild, Jhené Aiko—I love that! That’s literally what my iPod looks like.

MJ: In past interviews, you’ve talked about using personal honesty—about the music you like and who you are—to navigate between genres and move your career forward. Where does that come from?

RG: It came from my mother. She passed away in 2004. She was a singer, and literally, every day of the week she sang at a different club in a different genre of music: country, R&B clubs, jazz clubs, church on Sunday morning where she was the music director, pop hits, soft rock, she loved Broadway, Liza Minelli. I grew up listening to all this music, so it was never one thing for me. When my friends were listening to hip-hop or R&B, I was in the crib listening to Billy Joel and Michael Bolton, Luther Vandross, and Oscar Peterson. And she was always, “Yes, that’s who you are. It’s everything.” So I got that confidence to stick with that and not be ashamed of it from super early.

MJ: When you play a place like the Village Vanguard, which is a shrine to jazz, especially to jazz trios, do you find there’s still new territory to explore?

RG: What I’m doing now is kind of open territory. I don’t feel like it’s really been done the way that I’m doing it without it being smooth jazz. I think I’m walking a pretty fine line. There are a few specific things that I pay attention to that if you don’t, you’re gonna be in the smooth jazz lane.

MJ: Like what?

RG: When it came to the Experiment band, it was the amount of solos you take. Once I started getting mainstream people to my shows, I realized we were taking too many solos, and they were too long. I started gauging when people were going on their iPhones. So we narrowed it down. Over the course of the whole night Casey Benjamin and I might only take one, maybe another in the encore. But we’re improvising at the same time, we’re grooving, and peoples’ heads are nodding, so you leave full. It’s just enough soloing for the mainstream person to be enlightened by that, but it’s not beating them over the head.

A lot of times, jazz musicians try to educate people. What other genre does that? When Cannonball Adderley did shows, he said, “First 20 minutes we’ll jazz out, then the last hour it’s gonna be songs that people paid to see.” Which is why he was driving a Rolls-Royce and everybody else was driving whatever. Miles Davis, too. I asked Herbie Hancock a few days ago, “When I hear bootlegs of Miles Davis with the ’60s Quintet, I never hear like, “Pinocchio,” or “Fall,” or “Nefertiti,” or any of those dope songs that y’all recorded. Why not?” Herbie said, “Miles wanted to play songs that people knew.” Jazz was struggling back then, too. But people knew standards. So that’s why they were going to play “Autumn Leaves.”

MJ: Besides the trio and the Experiment, is there a third approach you have been considering?

RG: I’m gonna do a gospel record, Black Radio-style, kind of. I grew up in church. That’s how most young African-American musicians learn how to perform. You could be six years old and playing organ or drums in front of thousands or hundreds of people. You’re performing every week. People don’t think about it like that, but that’s what it is. You’re in charge of emotion, and bringing certain things to fruition, and bringing all the spirit in. And it’s a real thing. I was playing drums in church when I was six. Then I picked up the piano when I was 11 or 12. A lot of the mainstream R&B people or hip-hop or whatever, the whole urban world, are from the church. So this would be an album that everyone would love.

Robert Glasper back stage at the Village Vanguard Jacob Blickenstaff

MJ: Both in your trio and the Experiment, I hear a central element of repetition, similar to a sample or loop. Is there a feeling you get from that; is it something hypnotic?

RG: That’s exactly what it is. I think there’s beauty in repetition. And that’s part of my culture and African culture as well: repeated things, mantra. It’s spiritual, it’s meditation, it’s Buddhism, it’s praying, it’s all these things. It’s the repetitive thing that brings space. That’s one of the things I love secretly about hip-hop. Jazz doesn’t have that element. It changes every bar, nothing is ever the same. Most jazz musicians get off on making it different every time. But that approach is not as spiritual. Coltrane would stay on one chord, and you’d keep hearing that one sound, over and over. He would play all kinds of stuff over it, but you just hear this one chord.

MJ: As Coltrane got more advanced, his music became simpler.

RG: Exactly. It became more about spirituality versus how many chord changes you can play over. That’s one of the things that I think a lot of people like about hip-hop, but they don’t even realize. Normally hip-hop repeats every four bars—it’s a very small chunk. And it’s about the head nod. I almost feel like it’s like full circle when I play with my trio. A lot of the origins of hip-hop are the sampling of jazz records, especially jazz trios. So I think, “Let’s mimic the producer who is sampling the jazz trio.” You see people close their eyes, and it takes them to another place. I almost think of it like we’re supplying the house, and the listener can move their own furniture in. Whatever you’re going through, we’re the soundtrack to your thoughts, and we’ll just leave space for you to move your shit in. I think people leave my shows feeling good. Instead of hearing, “Oh, he’s good,” I’d rather hear, “Wow, you changed my feelings today, you made me feel different.”

MJ: What’s hard for you?

RG: The hard part is balancing. I have a family, a five-year-old son—you know, life. That is probably the hardest part. The music is not hard to me. What is hard also is getting the respect of the mainstream. I won two R&B Grammys. If I was a singer who won those Grammys, I’d be gracing all the magazine covers—all the urban magazine covers—something. I barely got asked to do an interview. When we won the first Grammy, and we went backstage to do all the interviews after you win, holding the award and talking, people were like looking at their sheets going, “So, do you guys…sing?” “No, we’re an instrumental band.” “Oh, umm…” You know, it’s confusing! But if you ask people they say, “Oh! I love the music, Oh! I love that album.” Okay, well, give me those same opportunities. I’m trying to break down that barrier. I want to get that kind of love.

This profile is part of In Close Contact, an independent documentary project on music, musicians, and creativity.

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How Jazzman Robert Glasper Won Over the Hip-Hop Heads

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Yep, Obama Said the N-Word. Here Are the Other Candid Things He Said.

by RenaR37tqbryn Posted on June 22, 2015

Mother Jones

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Appearing on comedian Marc Maron’s WTF podcast on Friday, President Obama shared his views on gun violence and racism in America—two topics that have been thrust to the forefront of a national conversation following the massacre in Charleston, South Carolina last week. The interview, which was posted online today, featured a number of candid moments for the president, including a rare moment in which he said “nigger” to underscore the reality that the country’s enduring legacy of racism is far from over.

“The legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination in almost every institution of our lives, you know, that casts a long shadow, and that’s still part of our DNA that’s passed on,” Obama said. “We are not cured of it and it’s not just a matter of it not being polite to say nigger in public. That’s not the measure of whether racism still exists or not. It’s not just a matter of overt discrimination.”

On the issue of gun violence, he expressed his continued frustration with how little legislative action has been taken on gun control.

“I have done this way too often,” he said. “During the course of my presidency, it feels as if a couple times a year, I end up having to speak to the country and to speak to a particular community about a devastating loss. The grieving that the country feels is real, the sympathy, the prioritizing, the comforting of the families, all that’s important. But I think part of the point that I wanted to make was that it’s not enough just to feel bad. There are actions that could be taken to make events like this less likely. And one of those actions we could take would be to enhance some basic, common sense gun safety laws—that by the way, the majority of gun owners support.”

In his remarks shortly after Dylann Storm, the suspected gunman who killed nine people in the Charleston church, was captured Thursday, the president said that most other advanced countries don’t see the kind of mass killings that have become all too familiar in America. He reiterated this point to Maron on Friday, telling him gun violence is “unique to our country.”

Listen to the incredible hour-long interview here.

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Yep, Obama Said the N-Word. Here Are the Other Candid Things He Said.

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We’ll All Eat Less Meat Soon—Like It or Not

by VedaChapman7 Posted on June 10, 2015

Mother Jones

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The great bulk of American beef comes from cows that have been fattened in confined yards with thousands of of their peers, munching a diet of corn, soybeans, and chemical additives. Should the feedlot model, innovated in the United States in the middle of the 20th century, continue its global spread—or is it better to raise cows on pasture, eating grass?

The question is critical, because global demand for animal flesh is on the rise, driven by growing appetites for meat in developing countries, where per capita meat consumption stands at about a third of developed-world levels.

In a much-shared interview on the website of the Breakthrough Institute, Washington State University researcher Judith Capper informs us that the US status quo is the way forward. “If we switched to all grass-fed beef in the United States, it would require an additional 64.6 million cows, 131 million acres more land, and 135 million more tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions,” she said. “We’d have the same amount of beef, but with a huge environmental cost.”

I agree with Capper that it would be a disaster to empty the feedlots and put all of the hungry cows out to pasture—that, at current levels of beef production, finding enough grass to feed every cow that now relies on copious supplies of corn would likely prove impossible.

But there’s a deeper question that Capper doesn’t look at: Is the feedlot system itself sustainable? That is, can we keep stuffing animals—not just cows but also chickens and pigs—into confinements and feeding them gargantuan amounts of corn and soybeans? And can other countries mimic that path, as China is currently?

The answer, plainly, is no, according to the eminent ecologist Vaclav Smil in a 2014 paper. Smil notes that global meat production has risen from less than 55 million tons in 1950 to more than 300 million tons in 2010—a nearly six-fold increase in 60 years. “But this has been a rather costly achievement because mass-scale meat production is one of the most environmentally burdensome activities,” he writes, and then proceeds to list off the problems: it requires a large-scale shift from diversified farmland and rainforests to “monocultures of animal feed,” which triggered massive soil erosion, carbon emissions, and coastal “dead zones” fed by fertilizer runoff. Also, concentrating animals tightly together produces “huge volumes of waste,” more than can be recycled into nearby farmland, creating noxious air and water pollution. Moreover, it’s “inherently inefficient” to feed edible grains to farm animals, when we could just eat the grain, Smil adds.

This ruinous system would have to be scaled up to if present trends in global meat demand continue, Smil writes—reaching 412 million tons of meat in 2030, 500 million tons in 2050, and 577 million tons in 2080, according to projections from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization. Such a carnivorous future is “possible but it is neither rational nor sustainable”—it will ultimately destroy the ecosystems on which it relies.

Smil is no anti-meat crusader. He acknowledges that “human evolution has been closely linked in many fundamental ways to the killing of animals and eating their meat.” But the rise of the feedlot has provided much more meat than is necessary nutritionally—Americans consume on average about 209 pounds of meat per year, while a “wealth of evidence confirms” that bit less than 100 pounds is “compatible with good health and high longevity.”

He calculates that such a level could be achieved globally, without the ecosystem destruction built into the status quo meat production model. Rather than gobble up stuff we could eat like corn and soybeans, farm animals should be fed solely crop residues and food waste. And rather than be crammed into concentrated feedlots, they should be kept on pasture in rotation with food crops. Managing meet production that way, he calculates, would generate more 200 million tons of meat per year—about enough, he calculates, to provide the globe with sufficient meat for optimal health.

Of course, massive challenges stand between Smil’s vision and reality. For one, it would require people in industrialized countries like the United States to cut their meat consumption by half or more, even as consumption in Asia and Africa rises to roughly equal levels. Then, of course, there are the massive globe-spanning meat companies like US-owned Tyson, Brazil-owned JBS, and China’s Smithfield that have a huge stake in defending the status quo.

But ramping up the current system to provide the entire globe with US levels carnivory is hard to fathom, too. If it happens, “there is no realistic possibility of limiting the combustion of fossil fuels and moderating the rate of global climate change,” Smil writes. In other words, like it or not, it’s probably time to get used to eating less meat—pushed by the climate crisis, industrialized societies may have little choice but to ramp down meat production along lines suggested by Smil.

Meanwhile, US meat consumption, long among the very highest in the world, is waning, if slowly. The total annual slaughter peaked at 9.5 billion animals in 2009, and dropped to 9.1 billion by 2013. Interestingly, Paul Shapiro, vice president of farm-animal protection of the the Humane Society of the United States, told me that that the decrease reflects meat eaters’ cutting back, not any turn to abstention—the percentage of vegetarians and vegans among the population has “remained relatively stable” in recent years, he said. (See my colleague Gabrielle Canon’s list of the most common ways in which meat eaters justify their diet here.)

If we can continue this trend, the feedlot, which looks hyper-efficient at mass-producing meat only if you ignore a host of environmental liabilities, may yet prove to be a passing fad.

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We’ll All Eat Less Meat Soon—Like It or Not

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Donald Rumsfeld Apparently Forgot the Times He Said the Iraq War Was Good for Democracy

by LatriceHarrhy Posted on June 9, 2015

Mother Jones

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A few days ago, Donald Rumsfeld tried to distance himself from former President George W. Bush on the Iraq War, noting that he never bought into the Bush-Cheney argument that a US invasion of Iraq would lead to democracy there.

“I’m not one who thinks that our particular template of democracy is appropriate for other countries at every moment of their histories,” the former defense secretary told the Times, a British newspaper, in a piece published last week. “The idea that we could fashion a democracy in Iraq seemed to me unrealistic. I was concerned about it when I first heard those words.”

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Donald Rumsfeld Apparently Forgot the Times He Said the Iraq War Was Good for Democracy

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Toni Morrison Knows All About the "Little Drop of Poison" in Your Childhood

by DewayneScheffel Posted on April 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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Photo: Timothy Greenfield-Sanders

Toni Morrison is no stranger to historical fiction. Her last novel, Home, whisked readers into the shoes of a struggling Korean War veteran. A Mercy, the one before that, pictured life through the eyes of teenage bondswomen on a 17th-century Anglo-Dutch farm. And who could forget Beloved, her wrenching tale of a mother’s radical attempt to save her child from slavery in the mid-1800s?

But when the octogenarian author sat down to compose her 11th and latest novel, God Help the Child, she faced a new challenge. “I was nervous because I didn’t have a handle on the contemporary,” she told me. “It’s very fluid.” Leave it to Morrison, a recipient of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, to find a way. Through Bride, her “blue-black” protagonist—who shines in the beauty industry but flails in her relationships—Morrison boldly examines the ways in which a hellish childhood undermines a person’s sense of self.

Mother Jones: How did the Bride character come to you?

Toni Morrison: I started the book before I wrote Home, but I was unsure of how to do it. And then I began to just look around at what people were doing and saying about themselves: You know, everybody’s naked, everybody’s gorgeous. I was very keenly aware of the new, wide-open, in many cases very healthy but certainly very aggressive sexuality. That becomes the success, particularly of a woman. Having looked at part of the Oscars, it was even more obvious. Laughs.

MJ: What about them?

TM: The clothes. The slits are higher, the breasts are prominent, which they always were, but now it’s just about nipples—the only part you cannot show. It just seems hysterical, because that’s the first thing any human gets in his mouth! I don’t know. I’m 84, so you can imagine how many phases of this I have witnessed.

MJ: Bride capitalizes on her unique looks to get ahead, but under the surface something’s not right.

TM: She’s very successful—you know, the “panther in snow.” But in her brain, she’s returning to that despised little black girl her mother didn’t even like.

MJ: Her “You Girl” makeup line is marketed for “girls and women of all complexions, from ebony to lemonade to milk.” Which seems empowering, and yet people fetishize Bride’s blackness. Was this an intentional jab at the beauty industry?

TM: In a way, but the interesting thing for me was that she was instructed by an industry mentor to never wear makeup. Her beauty is beyond makeup—and so she feels perfect. That’s not enough for me. You have to be a complete human being, and that has to do with your generosity. That’s what I wanted for her to encounter.

MJ: Bride’s mother thinks her daughter’s dark skin will be her doom. But didn’t your own dark great-grandmother view herself as purer than you light-skinned kids?

TM: She was very, very black. What she said was we were impure and tampered with. And we were little girls! The only other time I noticed what we call skin privileges was at Howard University. It’s a brilliant school. However, there was something called the “paper bag test”—whether your skin is darker or lighter than a paper bag. There were whole sororities that were proud that they had the lightest skin color. It was shocking to me. I wanted Bride’s mother Sweetness to make explicit the advantages of being a light-skinned Negro. She was under the impression that she had to protect her very black child from these insults. But inside, she shared that kind of revulsion.

MJ: Sweetness says: “Nowadays blue blacks are all over TV and fashion magazines, commercials, even starring in movies.” Do you see Hollywood growing up, featuring more dark-skinned women?

TM: I think the audiences have grown up in making demands, so Hollywood has followed. They don’t much care, so long as it works.

MJ: The new book contains moments of magical realism. What inspired your literary fondness for the magical and the supernatural?

TM: My childhood was full of ghost stories, and I was very taken with Gabriel García Márquez’s first book, One Hundred Years of Solitude. It was a revelation that you can do those things—that you could have ghosts. That made a big difference in the way I could conceive of characters, so that it was perfectly logical for the dead girl in Beloved to come back. She was the only one who could judge her mother. None of us could.

MJ: I’m curious whether the title of your new book is an allusion to Billie Holiday’s “God Bless the Child”?

TM: No. I had an entirely different title, which everyone hated. I’m not even gonna tell you what it was.

MJ: What was it?

TM: Laughs. No, I’m not going to tell you! I ended up with God Help the Child because Sweetness has the last word, which is, “You’re gonna be parents? Uh-huh, okay.” Parenting changes you. You have different concerns. It’s not all kitchy-kitchy-koo.

MJ: Why did you decide to focus on childhood trauma?

TM: The ideas come to me, I don’t search for them. In the process of putting together characters and their language and their interior lives, it shapes itself. I just began with a vague notion of what it must be like to be traumatized for something that has nothing to do with you. I mean, you didn’t kill anybody. You didn’t drop somebody on their head. You’re innocent. But you still have to deal with it—and how do you deal with it?

Even when you think you’ve had a wonderful childhood, I suspect there’s always some little drop of poison—that you can get rid of, but sometimes it just trails in the blood and it determines how you react to other people and how you think.

MJ: You evoke some disturbing, violent, sexual crimes in this novel and others. Does writing about such things affect you emotionally?

TM: It does, but I have the wonderful pleasure of finishing the book and closing it. And I don’t read them later.

MJ: Have you ever wanted to write more about your own life?

TM: My editor suggested that I change a two-book contract to one novel and a memoir. And I said okay, and then I thought, “I don’t think so.” A memoir? What’s interesting is the invention, the creative thing. Writing about myself was a yawn.

MJ: You’ve worked on operas, children’s books, lyrics, and plays. Is there any other form you’re eager to try?

TM: When you say it like that, I get suddenly exhausted! Laughs. I don’t think so. I think I’ll do what pleases me most, and what most challenges me, which is the novel.

MJ: How about a novel set in the future?

TM: No. I can barely deal with now.

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Toni Morrison Knows All About the "Little Drop of Poison" in Your Childhood

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Bernie Sanders Goes Biblical on Income Inequality

by JoellenSaxton Posted on April 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the longest-serving independent in Congress and its only self-described democratic socialist, is best known for his stands against wealthy special interests and in favor of government programs that help the poor and the middle class. Now 73, Sanders announced last year that he may run for president in 2016. During a swing through San Francisco this week, he stopped by Mother Jones HQ to talk to us about America’s greed problem, the fecklessness of Democrats, and how to catalyze the progressive movement.

Mother Jones: What have you been up to lately?

Bernie Sanders: I’m going around the country talking about what I believe is the most important issue facing the American people: the grotesque level of income and wealth inequality. The Koch brothers and a few others are attempting to buy the United States government, and that should be of concern to everybody.

MJ: How bad is inequality now, in your view?

BS: Between 2013 and 2015, the wealthiest 14 people saw their wealth increase by $157 billion. This is their wealth increase, got it? Not what they are worth. Increase. That $157 billion is more wealth than is owned by the bottom 40 percent of the American people. One family, the Walton family, owns more wealth than the bottom 40 percent.

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Bernie Sanders Goes Biblical on Income Inequality

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British Jazzman Jamie Cullum Is Not Your Grandfather’s Crooner

by EmoryPerry Posted on March 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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The British jazz pianist, singer, and songwriter Jamie Cullum rose to fame in 2003 with his major-label debut, Twentysomething, which sold more than 2.5 million copies. With successful follow-up albums, he has earned the distinction, at age 35, of being the highest selling UK jazz artist ever. On his BBC Radio 2 show—modeled on the work of British radio greats Gilles Peterson and John Peel—Cullum passionately curates a wide spectrum of jazz and improvisational music. His charm and energy, both on the air and as a stage entertainer, has earned him a lot of loyal fans, and opening slots for Billy Joel’s recent shows at Madison Square Garden.

Against a traditional big band set-up, his recent performance at the New York City’s Beacon Theater involved pogo dancing, beat-boxing, a flying leap off the piano and entreaties to the audience to take more cell-phone videos. He was touring in support of his seventh studio album, Interlude, produced by fellow old-soul-with-youthful spirit Benedic Lamdin—also known as Nostalgia 77. Interlude was recorded straight to tape with a live orchestra. It features a mostly-classic jazz repertoire, with covers of Sufjan Stevens and Randy Newman thrown in for good measure.

I photographed Cullum at the Beacon Theater. We spoke on the phone later about the freedom of limitations, the predictability of rock, and Billy Joel‘s staying power.

Mother Jones: In your musical arrangements, I hear a lot of connections back and forth between jazz, modern rock, and R&B.

Jamie Cullum: I look at it a bit like joining the dots. Gilles Peterson has had as much influence on me as any musician. He has helped form my tastes through years of listening to his radio show. He does this thing where he kind of joins the dots between styles. Getting into heavy metal got me into Jimi Hendrix eventually, and as I was getting into Hendrix, I discovered Frank Zappa, and as I was getting into Zappa, I heard him referencing quite a lot of jazz things, prog-rock and improvisation. Before you know it, I’d found Herbie Hancock, Art Tatum, Thelonius Monk, and Nat King Cole. A lot of my musical ideas come from being a music geek. I think a bit like a radio DJ might.

MJ: You’ve opened for Billy Joel at several recent Madison Square Garden shows. Did you gain any insights that you might want to apply to your own approach?

JC: You see the power of having such a catalog of hit songs. His songs really live in people’s bones and when you see 20,000 people singing to “New York State of Mind” or “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” or any of his millions of hits, you get a sense of the community that creates. Very few people can make Madison Square Garden feel small. He doesn’t amplify his gestures with big stage production. He walks onto the stage and goes, “Welcome to the Garden. What songs do you wanna hear? Hey, let’s play that.” He is himself. He’s naturally funny, a bit of a joker, a wise guy kind of vibe. He’s lovely, he’s a human being, he’s well aware of his own faults and his own flaws. He seems like one of us, you know? Everyone feels like they’re standing next to the piano with him. That is very much a gift.

MJ: You cover a lot of rock and R&B, and are influenced by it, but you also have a pretty traditional approach to jazz, especially on this album.

JC: I think I fell in love romantically with the idea of the jazz musician before I became a jazz musician. You know, reading Kerouac as young teenager and looking at the photos of Chet Baker and Count Basie by William Claxton—the iconography of it and how different it was to where I grew up—got to my young soul. But the level of mastery you need to be a jazz musician—incidentally, I feel I’m only 10 percent of the way there—is very appealing. Improvisation means not having to do the same thing twice, which very much appeals to my personality. I’m an improviser at life, anyway. I don’t do well with really set plans; I thrive on unpredictability. I love the language of jazz, the fact that you can take interesting musical turns and twists that are informed by some musical mastery and education.

When I was in rock bands, I loved the image of the rock star and carrying the guitar, being on the road and wearing a leather jacket, and that kind of thing. I was in a band that supported Paul Weller on tour; we were having an amazing time. But it became to me a little bit predictable: After you’ve done 10 shows, you’ve done it the same way musically every time.

MJ: With Interlude, you’ve removed your own songwriting and some of the modern instrumentation you’ve had in the past from the equation. What were you going for?

JC: Interlude is very much a collaborative album between myself and the producer, Ben Lamdin. I was in love with the way his records sounded. We booked three days in the studio with him and his band; my label didn’t know anything about it. I said, “Look, I want to live in your world for three days.” We didn’t know if it was going to be an album, maybe just a couple of EPs or something we put out on his small record label under a different name. I didn’t have the chance to think about it.

But the truth of it is that limitation, and giving ourselves less options, is the most freeing thing ever. You sit there and you go, right, we’ve got these instruments, we’ve got this amount of time, we’re not even going to be able to mix the album because we’re all playing in the same room, so this is how it’s gonna sound. But let’s get this incredible repertoire, we’ll get great performances, and it’s gonna be imperfect, you’re gonna hear what the room sounds like, you’re gonna here the count-off, you’re gonna hear the beer being drunk between solos. I’ve learned a lot about what I want to do on my next record by doing things that way; giving yourself certain limitations gives you the freedom to do something really special.

MJ: You recorded with all live takes. How did that affect the process?

JC: We did it in two and a half days. We weren’t even listening back to takes after we did them. If it felt good, we would move on. So rather than kind of picking through it and going, “Well, I don’t like that,” we’d all kind of look around and say, “You know, that was good.” We’d trust the feeling. And it keeps the energy going, it keeps an excitement in the room, because you’re always moving forward.

MJ: At your Beacon Theater show, after you encouraged people to come up closer, I really got a sense of the communal nature of your performance. Not to diminish it, but there was a sing-along element.

JC: Obviously there are some of my originals that the audience knows really well and will literally sing along to. But one of the things that I think makes it communal is that on stage, I’m also a fan. I wasn’t the kid who stood in front of the mirror with a hairbrush for a microphone wanting to be famous. And when I’m on stage I don’t feel a big audience-performer divide. I’m enjoying watching my musicians play, and we often have guest musicians, so I’m enjoying them too. And I think the audience can feel my passion for what is going on. I couldn’t be aloof if I tried. Being aloof seems very cool—I would love to be a bit aloof, but I’m shit at it.

MJ: So, has your manager been pushing to get you a movie role as a heartthrob vampire or anything like that?

JC: Laughs. I don’t think so. I’m not really quite dark in the spirit enough. Not yet.

In Close Contact is an independent documentary project on music, musicians, and creativity.

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British Jazzman Jamie Cullum Is Not Your Grandfather’s Crooner

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5 Ways You Can Live Forever

by PNTImogengbpfbf Posted on March 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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Last summer, at the Googleplex in Mountain View, California, I sat in a room full of scientists, innovators, and thought leaders. Someone asked how long everyone would like to live. To my great surprise, most people agreed that somewhere in one’s 90s was a good time to kick the bucket. Given that this was a collection of curious and optimistic people whose religion is science, I was shocked that—unlike me—more of them didn’t want to live forever.

I later found out that this reaction is actually representative of the general population: Among the attendees was fellow science writer David Ewing Duncan, who has asked this question online and at the beginning of numerous talks, collecting more than 30,000 responses. The consensus? About 85 percent of people wouldn’t want to live past 120, and more than half agreed that 80 years was about how long they’d like to live. The number of people who would like to live forever? Less than 5 percent.

Bill Gifford is in that mortal majority, despite the title of his most recent book, Spring Chicken: Stay Young Forever (or Die Trying). Aging, explained Gifford on the latest episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast, “kind of sucks.”

In his book, Gifford points out that the quest to find a cure for aging has permeated our thoughts for as long as there’s been a written record. “The oldest existing great work of literature,” writes Gifford, “the nearly four-thousand-year-old Epic of Gilgamesh, in part chronicles a man’s quest for the elixir of eternal life.”

And, given the fact that—according to Gifford—we spend some “eleventy bajillion dollars” on anti-aging creams alone, surely we must be close to discovering the formula for age-reversal. Well not quite yet. But here are some promising lines of research that might eventually lead to a hack that works forever. Or at least for a few extra decades.

1. Follow Michael Pollan’s advice to eat real food, not too much, and mostly plants: In the 1930s, a nutritionist at Cornell named Clive McCay discovered the writings of a 16th-century diabetic who, at a time when diabetes was poorly understood, voluntarily put himself on a strict diet and within a week began to feel much better. Nearly dead in his 40s, the man experienced a complete turnaround. “Even in his eighties, he was still bounding up and down the stairs of his estate,” writes Gifford. McCay read his treatise with fascination, noting that the Italian’s secret to a long life—he ultimately lived to 98—seemed to be contained in a simple message: Don’t eat so much.

For a nutritionist like McCay, this message was intriguing to say the least. So he decided to test it—by underfeeding a group of baby rats. And sure enough, his scrawny, half-starved experimental group lived almost twice as long as the portly but satisfied control group—in some cases, up to four years. Caloric restriction, as it came to be called, has been shown to increase the life spans of mice, rats, and monkeys, and to decrease the incidence of age-related diseases.

There’s still some controversy, however, as to whether the beneficial effects of caloric restriction result from fewer calories total or just fewer “bad” calories coming from junk food. A 2012 study from the National Institutes of Aging compared groups of rhesus monkeys who were fed healthy diets—similar to what Pollan might recommend—and in this case, a 30 percent reduction in calories did not seem to have much of an effect. So some scientists have suggested that in earlier studies, the experimenters were comparing animals fed what we humans would consider junk food with those whose diets included less sugar and fat. But the NIA study is still ongoing, and there’s some new evidence that even if the monkeys ate healthy food, there still might be a benefit in showing some restraint.

So what’s going on? Are the hungry animals simply less likely to get diabetes? “When you’re not eating, your cells actually do go into a different state,” explains Gifford. “It’s like they have a different engine.” Eating less puts your body into a “conservation” mode, in which you’re not growing and metabolizing food in the same way. And—if scientists like McCay are correct—animals in this mode can live longer.

An important note of caution, though. Eating too little can of course lead to malnutrition, which has its own negative side effects and is quite common in the elderly. And restricting calories in children is particularly dangerous, as development stalls in the conservation mode.

2. Metformin: There’s actually a treatment for diabetes that also shows promise in terms of increasing our longevity. Metformin, a drug commonly prescribed to treat patients with type 2 diabetes, has been shown to extend the health span—that is, how long someone remains healthy—and the life span of male mice. “Diabetics who are on metformin actually seem to be living longer than nondiabetics who are not on it,” says Gifford, “when in fact the reverse should be true. The diabetics should be dying sooner.” It turns out that taking metformin provides some of the benefits of caloric restriction, such as improved physical performance and better cholesterol levels. In your cells, metformin increases antioxidant protection and reduces chronic inflammation, one of the mechanisms by which aging ravages our bodies.

3. Exchange your old blood for young blood: The vampires were on to something: The fountain of “youthiness,” as Gifford calls it, might be found in our circulatory system. One of the things that sucks about aging is the way in which our ability to recover from injury and fend off illness declines. Blood has long been a candidate for élan vital—or the essence of life—and even back in the 16th century, Sir Francis Bacon transfused blood from a young dog to an old one, which seemed to rejuvenate him. In the 1970s, a scientist at the University of California-Irvine cut open young rats and sewed them to old rats, a method called parabiosis, essentially combining their circulatory systems. These rats lived much longer than those who were paired with rats of the same age—four to five months longer, which, given that the average life span for a lab rat is about two years, is an enormous difference.

Even more exciting is research coming from the lab of Tony Wyss-Coray and his colleagues at Stanford University, who infused older mice with the blood of younger animals and found that the older mice were indeed rejuvenated. Their brains became more plastic and malleable—a hallmark of youth. The procedure enabled them to learn and remember information like their younger donors and helped them perform much better on tests of mouse cognition. Below, you can watch an older mouse show improvement on a maze test after being infused with young blood.

4. Train for the Senior Olympics: If someone told you that there was an absolutely free treatment that hundreds of studies had shown to be effective in combating many different age-related diseases, you probably wouldn’t believe them. But this miracle drug really does exist—in the form of exercise. “Between 50 and 70, we say goodbye to about 15 percent of our lean muscle,” says Simon Melov, a professor at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, who is quoted in Gifford’s book. “After that, it jumps to 30 percent per decade. You could make the case that aging starts in muscle.” As we age, this muscle turns to fat. And because muscles burn more calories than fat, your metabolism—the process by which your cells turn food into fuel—slows down, leaving more sugar in your blood and making you more vulnerable to diabetes. Staving off the metabolic changes that accompany this shift from muscle to fat will help keep your body young. Many pharmaceutical companies are developing drugs to promote muscle growth, but thus far, staying active seems to be just as effective.

Part of the effect that exercise has on our metabolism has to do with how our genes are expressed. Throughout your lifetime, different genes are turned on and off depending on things like your age, your behavior, and your environment. So although you might have a genetic predisposition for smoking-related cancers, for example, you might be able to stave off the disease by not smoking. (Even if you’ve never smoked, however, it’s still possible to get lung cancer.)

Similarly, exercising seems to turn off some genes while turning on others. In a remarkable study from 2007, a bunch of Canadians were placed on a strict exercise regimen for six months. Half of them were old, and half were young. Scientists then compared biopsies of their muscles taken before and after the regimen. And they found that the older Canadians had activated many of the genes that were active in their younger counterparts but that had been inactive before they began to exercise. Exercise seemed to have switched on young genes, and switched off older ones—particularly genes that were involved in metabolism.

Think you’re already too old to start exercising? Many medal winners in the Senior Olympics start training after retiring from their jobs, like 89-year-old Dr. Granville Coggs, who ran his first race when he was 77. For some more inspiration, watch the women’s 400-meter sprint from the 76-80 age group at the 2013 Senior Olympics, complete with commentary by the friends of the competitors in this video.

5. Be small: While height might give you many advantages during your working years, it may also contribute to your early demise. The taller you are, the more likely you are to develop cancer, among other problems. Why height is a risk factor for cancer remains unclear, but it might have to do with the fact that the taller you are, the more cells you have and the higher your likelihood of developing a cancer-causing mutation in them. In fact, people who live past 100 aren’t just small because they’ve shrunk with age—they actually tend to have started out on the smaller side. Just like for dogs, whose life span negatively correlates with size—that is, the smaller the dog, the longer its life expectancy—being short has its advantages.

To listen to my full interview with Bill Gifford, stream below:

Inquiring Minds is a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and Kishore Hari, the director of the Bay Area Science Festival. To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook.

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5 Ways You Can Live Forever

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Now you can track just how crazy spring is in your region

by PEACarinzhpby Posted on March 19, 2015

Hot N Cold

Now you can track just how crazy spring is in your region

By on 18 Mar 2015commentsShare

Officially, the first day of spring is whatever Google says it is when one searches “first day of spring.” Scientifically (at least in the U.S.), it’s the day when the center of the sun passes over the equator. And to meteorologists, it’s always March 1 — but that makes everything confusing, so get out of here, meteorologists!

Regardless of the calendar date, the start of spring is that magical time of year when flowers bloom and the sun shines and birds chirp and blah blah blah — except it’s not due to magic at all. Leaves come out and flowers bloom in spring because weather conditions are right. And if weather conditions are altered due to climate change, that means the start of spring could come earlier or later than we’re used to — which could cause problems for, say, the agriculture industry or wildlife management.

Enter “springcasting,”which predicts when spring will start in a given area based on local, real-time weather data. The concept is based on research from University of Wisconsin-Madison geologist Mark D. Schwartz, who studies the correlation between weather conditions and the timing of “leaf-out” (which is exactly what it sounds like) and bloom in certain plants.

This year’s map shows that spring already starting in the South and on the West Coast (stay strong, Northeast!).

Here’s last year’s map:

Ault et. al

If so inclined, citizen scientists can get involved by reporting on the accuracy of the model. Were you told you’d have spring by now, but all you see outside your window is a barren wasteland? Say something! Your feedback could help the scientists improve the model.

Beyond practical applications like helping farmers figure out when to plant their crops, springcasting can also help scientists track climate change and understand its effects on vegetation. In an interview with the University of Wisconsin-Madison news service, Schwartz said that it’s also useful for communicating with the public about climate change:

When I talk to people about change, I can say, for example, that over the Northern hemisphere from the mid-1950s to the early 2000s, the timing of the beginning of spring using my models has gotten earlier by about a week. It’s a very easy thing to explain. It’s something that most people can readily understand.

In case you haven’t Googled it yet, the first day of spring this year is technically Friday. But remember, there’s nothing magical about blooming flowers, so don’t be too jealous of the already-blossoming West Coast (sorry!) if your forecast remains depressing as hell for a while.

Source:
New online tracker allows you to watch spring start

, UWM News.

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Now you can track just how crazy spring is in your region

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Instead of Tackling Its Rape Problem, India Just Banned a Documentary About It

by KlaudiaLBWL Posted on March 4, 2015

Mother Jones

Citing fears its broadcast would lead to “public outcry,” an Indian court issued an order yesterday blocking the country’s media from airing a documentary centering on the 2012 gang-rape and murder of a 23-year-old woman that occurred on a New Delhi bus.

The BBC documentary, titled India’s Daughter, features an interview with one of the six men accused of the crime, in which he repeatedly blames the victim for fighting back while she was raped. Mukesh Singh spoke to British filmmaker Leslee Udwin from prison, where Udwin says he appeared like “a robot” during the 16 hours the interview was conducted.

“You can’t clap with one hand,” Singh says in the film. “It takes two hands. A decent girl won’t roam around at 9 o’clock at night. A girl is far more responsible for rape than a boy. Boy and girl are not equal. Housework and housekeeping is for girls, not roaming in discos and bars at night doing wrong things, wearing wrong clothes. About 20 percent of girls are good.”

Rajan Bhagat, a spokesperson for the New Delhi police, told AFP that police officials were concerned the “very objectionable interview” could incite violence.

“We have only seen the promotional parts of the film. Based on that we took the matter to court because we felt that it will cause likely apprehension of public disorder,” Bhagat said.

The brutal 2012 incident shocked the international community and prompted mass demonstrations in India. Over weeks of protests, advocates called for reform and increased protections for women in a country where sexual assault is perceived as a source of shame and often leads to more restrictions for women.

But the controversy over India’s Daughter demonstrates the country remains divided over the issue of sexual assault and how to move forward. India’s parliamentary affairs minister M. Venkaiah Naidu slammed the documentary as an “international conspiracy to defame India.” In its Tuesday order, the court echoed these concerns and said the film violated Indian law preventing “intent to cause alarm in the public.”

Udwin has asked the Indian prime minister to lift the ban. The film premieres on BBC Wednesday evening.

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Instead of Tackling Its Rape Problem, India Just Banned a Documentary About It

Posted in Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Instead of Tackling Its Rape Problem, India Just Banned a Documentary About It