On This Day 07 July

 Honoring Bonzo on this day

1980 07 July On This Day  Led Zeppelin, Berlin  Final show

1980 07 July On This Day Led Zeppelin Berlin

• 1968 Yardbirds -Beds, England at Student Union, Luton College
• 1973 Led Zeppelin - Chicago at Chicago Stadium
• 1980 Led Zeppelin - Berlin, Germany at Eissporthalle Jafféstraße ^^^
• 1998 Page & Plant - Washington, DC at MCI Center
• 2001 Page & Plant - Montreux Festival, with Bill Jennings and Mike Watts 

Jimmy Page / Led Zeppelin  Chicago 1973

Led Zeppelin  Chicago 1973

2001 Page & Plant Montreux Jazz Festival

2001:
This night at Montreux was a tribute to Sun Records, founded by Sam Phillips.  Phillips was a DJ, radio engineer, producer, label owner, and talent scout throughout the 1940s and 1950s.  In 1950 he started up the Memphis Recording Service for amateurs (then!) such as B.B. King, Junior Parker, and Howlin' Wolf.  Phillips launched the Sun Records label in 1952.  The Memphis Recording Service became the Sun Recording Studio, which was the first to record Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison, Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash.  Phillips recorded what may be the first rock and roll record: "Rocket 88" (discussed previously in Mage Music).

At Montreux, Page & Plant were introduced by Claude Nobs and Ahmet Ertegun. The playlist below provides links to the original versions that Page & Plant covered, with the final link being the 2001 Montreux show.

2014 Jimmy Page (Ross Halfin Photo)

2014 July Guitar World cover (Ross Halfin Photo)

♪ Led Zeppelin (Chicago IL at Chicago Stadium, 07 July 1973)

♪ Led Zeppelin (Berlin Germany at Eissporthalle Jafféstraße, 07 July 1980)

Montreux 2001:
♪  Good Rockin' Tonight (Roy Brown) YouTube
♪  My Bucket's Got a Hole in It (Sonny Burgess) YouTube
♪  Heart in Your Hand (Page & Plant, Walking Into Clarksdale 1998) YouTube
♪  Candy Store Rock (Led Zeppelin, Presence 1976) YouTube
♪  Endless Sleep (Jody Reynolds) YouTube
♪  How Many More Years  (Howlin’ Wolf) YouTube
♪  My Baby Left Me  (Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup) YouTube
♪  Baby Let's Play House  (Arthur Gunter) YouTube

♪  Live at Montreux ( Page & Plant 2001) YouTube

On This Day 07 July

Honoring Bonzo on this day

1980 07 July On This Day  Led Zeppelin, Berlin  Final show

1980 07 July On This Day Led Zeppelin Berlin

• 1968 Yardbirds -Beds, England at Student Union, Luton College
• 1973 Led Zeppelin - Chicago at Chicago Stadium
• 1980 Led Zeppelin - Berlin, Germany at Eissporthalle Jafféstraße ^^^
• 1998 Page & Plant - Washington, DC at MCI Center
• 2001 Page & Plant - Montreux Festival, with Bill Jennings and Mike Watts 

Jimmy Page / Led Zeppelin  Chicago 1973

Led Zeppelin  Chicago 1973

2001 Page & Plant Montreux Jazz Festival

2001:
This night at Montreux was a tribute to Sun Records, founded by Sam Phillips.  Phillips was a DJ, radio engineer, producer, label owner, and talent scout throughout the 1940s and 1950s.  In 1950 he started up the Memphis Recording Service for amateurs (then!) such as B.B. King, Junior Parker, and Howlin' Wolf.  Phillips launched the Sun Records label in 1952.  The Memphis Recording Service became the Sun Recording Studio, which was the first to record Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison, Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash.  Phillips recorded what may be the first rock and roll record: "Rocket 88" (discussed previously in Mage Music).

At Montreux, Page & Plant were introduced by Claude Nobs and Ahmet Ertegun. The playlist below provides links to the original versions that Page & Plant covered, with the final link being the 2001 Montreux show.

2014 Jimmy Page (Ross Halfin Photo)

2014 July Guitar World cover (Ross Halfin Photo)

♪  Good Rockin' Tonight (Roy Brown) YouTube
♪  My Bucket's Got a Hole in It (Sonny Burgess) YouTube
♪  Heart in Your Hand (Page & Plant, Walking Into Clarksdale 1998) YouTube
♪  Candy Store Rock (Led Zeppelin, Presence 1976) YouTube
♪  Endless Sleep (Jody Reynolds) YouTube
♪  How Many More Years  (Howlin’ Wolf) YouTube
♪  My Baby Left Me  (Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup) YouTube
♪  Baby Let's Play House  (Arthur Gunter) YouTube

♪  Live at Montreux ( Page & Plant 2001) YouTube

Mage Music: Bolero, or, Haven’t I Heard This Before?

As a musician I think my greatest achievement has been to create unexpected melodies and harmonies within a rock and roll framework.
                                                                                    ~Jimmy Page, Guitar World 1993

Mage Music 14

Marcelle Lender Dancing the Bolero in "Chilpéric," 1895–96, by
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Who doesn’t love a bolero?  It can be clothing (a short jacket with long sleeves AKA a shrug), a dance, orchestral or rock or Latin music. Whatever its form, none of it is original and - depending on who is saying - if it's music, either all or none of it is stolen.

It started with a type of dance originating in the late 1700s in Spain.  Since then, from classical music to rock, the bolero form has been created by Ravel (originally as a ballet in 1928), Chopin, Debussy, Saint-Saëns, and in modern times by Frank Zappa, King Crimson, Emerson Lake & Palmer and Santana – not to mention Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page in the famous Beck’s Bolero.

Often imitated – of course!

Variations on a theme are a time-honored tradition in music and the other arts.  This is because everything in human culture is built on the past achievements of others, on the shoulders of not only the giants, like those mentioned above, but also on the everyday business of normal human life.  The doings of giants are just easier to notice.

Human culture – language, the arts, science, the whole of life – is extraordinarily different today from what it was back in the day of the caveman, but the changes that got us here are not unlike the kids’ game of crack the whip:  We hold hands, we spin around and the last person is shot like a spear off into the unknown.  

So, too, the dreamers and innovators of humanity are shot off into the unknown at the end of a long chain of what has gone before them.  That means that while there has always had to be a first person to make something, whatever was created was not created in a vacuum of human achievement.  Anything that so totally new as to be unrelated to anything else would be, essentially, unrecognized, since humans (like other species) are so heavily reliant on pattern recognition to interpret what they experience that if there is no pattern to recognize, then what has been produced is… nothing.


Tricky balance

Musical advances provide a good example:  New music that is not built on the tones, rhythms and other sound qualities we already know is simply perceived as noise.  We are incapable of recognizing music until we can identify the patterns of it, and we can’t recognize the patterns until we are familiar with them.

Jimmy Page, from his very first work, has been known for his musical innovation, yet even he cannot create unexpected melodies and harmonies that are too far outside the familiar musical framework.  Too far is just too far.

Thus there is no true ripping off of musicians by musicians:  The notion of total musical originality is a fantasy, and the idea that music must be that way is a concept developed by the economics of the music industry, not by the musicians.

Musicians must stand on the shoulders of the giants who have gone before them at the same time they create new music.  The successful incremental innovations are those that achieve the tricky balance between the familiarly old and the outrageously new.  We understand the world – and beyond – through creating new patterns, and it is the joy and embracing of the unexpected within familiar frameworks that leads us to personal and cultural transformation.

♪

Note: This is the post promised at the end of  Mage Music 12: Whence Magic and is a bonus post for August 5, 2012.

♫

YouTube Playlist -  Bolero

Individual songs:

Ravel Bolero 1928 London Symphony Orchestra
Roy Orbison  Running Scared 1961 Orbison fans claim Becks Bolero “stole” its distinctive sound - yet look at the transcript of Ravel's Bolero, below
Jeff Beck Group  Becks Bolero  1967
Beck's Bolero Rock & Roll Hall of Fame 2009