Dec 17, 2024 9:58 AM
Tabla Master Zakir Hussain, 73, Succumbs to Illness
Tabla master Ustad Zakir Hussain, one of India’s reigning cultural ambassadors and a revered figure worldwide…
To mark the 50th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing, Roger Eno (shown here), his brother Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois revisit and expand upon their 1983 soundtrack, Apollo: Atmosphere and Soundtracks.
(Photo: Cecily Eno)Why do you think ambient and electronic music have continued to sonically symbolize stories about space travel?
There are two main reasons for that, and I don’t think either of them are particularly positive.
One is that so-called ambient music is apparently—and I use the word apparently with a grain of salt—easy to make. People think, “Well there’s not much in this. There’s not much I have to prepare,” if you like. Plus of course, iMacs are available, Logic is prevalent. So, you get these beautiful sounds and a very easy way to edit and form them. What I’m saying is that you don’t actually have to be very good to make something that sounds kind of reasonable. And the other not particularly positive point is in the world of advertising and consumerism. When you look at what’s popular ... ambient music is a current favorite, so it’s going to be a go-to.
How did you all decide who would compose what, and what helped determine the order of the compositions?
We had the idea that we didn’t want to copy the first album. On the other hand, [the new album] did have to have some kind of links to it. It couldn’t have just been a random event. So, there were a number of ideas that Dan and I had, and Brian—it was very simple actually—he had the last choice in it, which I think is perfectly right. If you look at the first album, it’s Brian Eno with Dan and myself. So, I had no trouble with Brian having the final choice on what we had sent him.
“Under The Moon,” a song on the second disc of the new release, exudes a somber and unnerving disposition with its long silences and minor intervals. What steered you to write about the moon from that emotional place?
Well, there’s a scene in [For All Mankind] that really struck us when we were working on the original album, and it’s a scene that’s never left me: It’s when the landing craft is approaching the moon. Now, childishly, you think when you’re approaching a planet, you just land on top of it. But the approach to it––the planet was above the landing craft. So, as [the moon] gets closer, it starts off white, then it changes to a very light blue, darker blue, and darker and darker, until it’s very dark blue and then it goes to black, just as you get under this huge object. Now, that didn’t strike me as being a particularly comfortable thought, because you’re entering the darkness—literally a symbol of the unknown. So, that for me was an extraordinarily strong image.
If you could play one instrument in space, what would it be?
For my 50th birthday, my brother bought me a Martin 1951 00-17—a fantastic guitar. It’d be an accordion or that. Or maybe a melodion. One of the three. DB
“Watching people like Max Roach or Elvin Jones and seeing how they utilize the whole drum kit in a very rhythmic and melodic way and how they stretched time — that was a huge inspiration to me,” Hussain said in DownBeat.
Dec 17, 2024 9:58 AM
Tabla master Ustad Zakir Hussain, one of India’s reigning cultural ambassadors and a revered figure worldwide…
“I love doing ballads,” Mike Stern says. “It’s just a part of me, some part of emotionally how I feel sometimes.”
Dec 3, 2024 12:52 PM
Stories of major shifts and rebirths among musicians during the past five years are common, from weathering the…
Queen Latifah extols Harlem and the Apollo Theater at this year’s Kennedy Center Honors.
Dec 12, 2024 1:58 AM
Cuban-American jazz trumpet legend Arturo Sandoval and Harlem’s Apollo Theater were among the honorees at the 2024…
“With jazz I thought it must be OK to be Black, for the first time,” says singer Sofia Jernberg.
Jan 2, 2025 10:50 AM
On Musho (Intakt), her recent duo album with pianist Alexander Hawkins, singer Sofia Jernberg interprets traditional…
Robertson had a penetrating, pliant sound with a remarkable softness at its center.
Dec 11, 2024 10:34 AM
Herb Robertson, a trumpeter and flugelhornist known for his wide-lens explorations of the avant-garde, died Dec. 10. He…
