This Makes Me So Inexplicably Happy

in , ,

The video features so many wonderful locations around DC that any local will recognize easily. I attempted to list all of the locations I recognized from the truck shots in the background. My list: * Metro Center * Chinatown * Union Station * National Portrait Gallery * The National Mall Also, pay attention to the folks in the background. Ari Shapiro plays the bells once at the old building and again at the new. Scott Simon is in the background of the elevator in the lobby in the old building wearing a coat. Carl Kassell is the older gentlemen who scowls at them at the new building that they go quiet for. Bob Boilen, at NPR Music writes:

The Tiny Desk has moved, and OK Go has helped make it so. Earlier this year, we needed to figure out the best possible way to move my Tiny Desk from NPR's old headquarters to our new facility just north of the U.S. Capitol. We wanted to go out with a bang and arrive at our new space in style, so our thoughts naturally turned to a catchy pop band we love: OK Go, whose unforgettable videos have been viewed tens of millions of times on YouTube. Bandleader Damian Kulash used to be an engineer at an NPR member station in Chicago, so we figured he'd be up for helping us execute a simple idea: Have OK Go start performing a Tiny Desk Concert at our old location, continue playing the same song while the furniture and shelving is loaded onto a truck, and finish the performance at our new home. In addition to cameos by many of our NPR colleagues — Ari Shapiro, Audie Cornish, David Greene, Guy Raz, Scott Simon, Alix Spiegel, Susan Stamberg and more — this required a few ingredients: * Number of video takes: 223 * Percent used in final version: 50 * Number of raw audio channels: 2,007 * Percent used in final version: 50 * Number of microphones: 5 * Number of hard-boiled eggs consumed: 8, mostly by bassist Tim Nordwind * Number of seconds Carl Kasell spent in the elevator with OK Go: 98 * Number of times Ari Shapiro played the tubular bells: 15 * Number of pounds the tubular bells weighed: 300 * Number of times the shelves were taken down and put back up: 6 * Number of days it took to shoot: 2 * Number of cameras: 1 OK Go played "All Is Not Lost" from Of the Blue Colour of the Sky, with words tweaked by the All Songs Considered team. And so begins a new era for the Tiny Desk, after 277 concerts (counting this one) in our old home.

Dave Brubeck Passes Away At 91

in , ,

Dave Brubeck passed away today. He was born on December 6, 1920. He would have been 92 years old, had he lived until tomorrow, his birthday. One of the greatest Jazz composers & piano players who ever lived. From 1951 - 1967 the Dave Brubeck Quartet performed some of the best Jazz ever played. The New York Times has posted his obituary. Dave Brubeck was my favorite jazz musician & composer of them all. My three favorite pieces by him are "Take Five" (listen), "Pick Up Sticks" (listen) and "Blue Rondo à la Turk" (listen). Brubeck was notable for experimenting with uncommon time signatures throughout his career, writing notable songs 6/4, 5/4, 7/4, 13/4 and 9/8 times. Here's the video The White House produced when he was a 2009 Kennedy Center Honoree. Brubeck was widely recognized due to his long career. From his Wikipedia entry:

On April 8, 2008, United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice presented Brubeck with a "Benjamin Franklin Award for Public Diplomacy" for offering an American "vision of hope, opportunity and freedom" through his music. "As a little girl I grew up on the sounds of Dave Brubeck because my dad was your biggest fan," said Rice. The State Department said in a statement that "as a pianist, composer, cultural emissary and educator, Dave Brubeck's life's work exemplifies the best of America's cultural diplomacy." At the ceremony Brubeck played a brief recital for the audience at the State Department. "I want to thank all of you because this honor is something that I never expected. Now I am going to play a cold piano with cold hands," Brubeck stated. California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and First Lady Maria Shriver announced on May 28, 2008 that Brubeck would be inducted into the California Hall of Fame, located at The California Museum for History, Women and the Arts. The induction ceremony occurred December 10, and he was inducted alongside eleven other legendary Californians. In September 2009, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts announced Brubeck as a Kennedy Center Honoree for exhibiting excellence in performance arts. The Kennedy Center Honors Gala took place on Sunday, December 6 (Brubeck's 89th birthday) and was broadcast nationwide on CBS on December 29 at 9:00 pm EST. On September 20, 2009, at Monterey Jazz Festival, Brubeck was awarded an honorary Doctor of Music degree (D.Mus. honoris causa) from Berklee College of Music. On May 16, 2010, Brubeck was awarded an honorary Doctor of Music degree (honoris causa) from The George Washington University in Washington, DC. The ceremony took place on the National Mall. On July 5, 2010, Brubeck was awarded the Miles-Davis Award at the Montreal International Jazz Festival. In 2010, Bruce Ricker and Clint Eastwood produced a documentary Dave Brubeck: In His Own Sweet Way about Brubeck for Turner Classic Movies (TCM) to commemorate his 90th birthday in December 2010. Brubeck has become a supporter of the Jazz Foundation of America in their mission to save the homes and the lives of elderly jazz and blues musicians, including musicians that survived Hurricane Katrina. Brubeck supported the Jazz Foundation by performing in their annual benefit concert "A Great Night in Harlem" in 2006. Awards - Connecticut Arts Award (1987) - National Medal of Arts, National Endowment for the Arts (1994) - DownBeat Hall of Fame (1994) - Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award (1996) - Doctorate honoris causa University of Fribourg, Switzerland (2004) - Laetare Medal (University of Notre Dame) (2006) - BBC Jazz Lifetime Achievement Award (2007) - Benjamin Franklin Award for Public Diplomacy (2008) - Inducted into California Hall of Fame (2008) - Kennedy Centre Honour (2009) - George Washington University Honorary Degree (2010)[31] - Honorary Fellow of Westminster Choir College, Princeton, New Jersey (2011) And for those of you who've been living under a rock, Take Five:

Apple Releases iTunes 10.5.1 with iTunes Match

in , , , ,

Lex Friedman, writing for Macworld:

If you have $25 to spend, you’re about to free up a lot of storage space on your iOS devices. On Monday, Apple officially released iTunes Match to the masses, with an update to iTunes for Mac and PC. The company missed its initial deadline of a late October release, but a note to developers last week indicated the feature’s launch was imminent. iTunes Match, part of the iCloud suite that launched earlier month, stores the entirety of your music library in the cloud, at a cost of $25 per year. Unlike competing cloud storage music services from Amazon and Google, iTunes Match saves a lot of bandwidth and time in your initial synchronization, because Apple can identify which songs in your iTunes library are already available in the iTunes Store. If Apple can positively match a song in your library with any of the 20 million tracks for sale in the iTunes Store, it won’t bother uploading that song; only unmatched songs get uploaded to the cloud. Once iTunes Match is finished indexing your library, you can connect to your music from other computers, along with your iOS devices. Any matched music you stream from iCloud plays back at 256-Kbps quality—even if your original copy was encoded at a lower quality. As an Apple Developer, I've had access to and have been using iTunes Match for about 3 months now. There were some bugs early on that were duplicating my playlists - but it looks as if they've fixed those. I haven't seen any problems like that for weeks now. Still though, with the sometimes shaky stability that iCloud has had so far, I wouldn't be surprised if the initial rush of users doesn't create problems of some type for the short term. Long term though, I see this service as being a winner. You need to download the new version of iTunes in order to use iTunes Match. I recommend you do so.