Musical Instruments
Behind the Scenes With Janis Joplin and Big Brother, Rehearsing for the Summer of Love
By Ben Marks — A few months from now, millions of Baby Boomers will be seized by the same disorienting flashback, in which they’ll be hurtled through time and space to San Francisco in 1967, at the height of the Summer of Love. The trigger will lurk in the coverage of this cultural watershed by news organizations, magazines, and websites, all of whom will to be tripping over themselves to celebrate the 50th anniversary of what was, in fact, a marketing gimmick designed to capitalize on a scene that was...
Pulling Out All the Stops to Save a 40-Ton, 100-Year-Old World's Fair Pipe Organ
By Ben Marks — Deep beneath San Francisco’s Civic Center Plaza, in a windowless bunker called Brooks Hall, a 40-ton pipe organ gathers dust. Known variously as the Exposition Organ and Opus 500, the century-old instrument was a mechanical and musical wonder when it was unveiled in 1915, the seventh-largest organ in the world. "The city of San Francisco, this pretentious fishing village, has never respected its own heritage or history." Back then, thousands of people a day attending the Panama-Pacific...
A Frenzy of Trumpets: Why Brass Musicians Can't Resist Serbia's Wildest Festival
By Lisa Hix — Aside from a certain subset of musicians, most Americans live a day-to-day life that is sadly free of brass music. In Serbia, however, any occasion is an excuse to bring out the horns. The joyous, off-kilter sounds of Balkan brass bands fill the air during weddings, births, housewarmings, funerals, and patron saint days. And every August, even in times of war and strife, Serbians celebrate the trumpet—or, more accurately, the flugelhorn—at the Dragačevo Sabor Trubaca, commonly known as the...
How a Gang of Harmonica Geeks Saved the Soul of the Blues Harp
By Ben Marks — Harmonica players will suck and harmonica players will blow, but mastering the harmonica is tougher than its diminutive size and simple mechanics suggest. “The harmonica is actually pretty hard to play well,” says harmonica virtuoso Mickey Raphael, who has shared the stage with Willie Nelson for the better part of 40 years. “If you have a harmonica in the right key for a song, you can play any note and it’ll sound good. But to be able play melody on it is a whole different skill...
The iPod's 4,000-Pound Grandfather
By Lisa Hix — These days, music lovers are spoiled. With one small handheld device, you can flick your thumb and hear anything you want—from Jay-Z or Lady Gaga to a postwar blues rag or a Bach concerto. Some of us remember when you had to get up and turn over the vinyl record to hear the "B side" of an album, or when you'd put foil on your antenna to pick up the best radio station from a sea of static. Yet we were spoiled then, too—back in the Dark Ages, you had to actually make the music you wanted to...