Category: Music

Enlarge John Cohen/Getty Images

From left, poet Gregory Corso (1930-2001), painter and musician Larry Rivers (1923-2002), writer Jack Kerouac (1922-1967), and musician and photographer John Cohen (in mirror) in New York, late 1950s.

John Cohen/Getty Images

From left, poet Gregory Corso (1930-2001), painter and musician Larry Rivers (1923-2002), writer Jack Kerouac (1922-1967), and musician and photographer John Cohen (in mirror) in New York, late 1950s.

January 23, 2011

For more than half a century, John Cohen has been taking photographs, making films, recording rural musicians and creating his own music. He’s a co-founder of The New Lost City Ramblers, a string band that set the standard for authenticity in the 1950s’ “folk boom,” and at the age of 78, Cohen is still at it.

A seminal figure in the folk revival of the 1950s, Cohen grew up in New York City. Now he lives in a snug, wood-heated home, about an hour north of the city.

“I live up here in Putnam County on an old farm, like I’m supposed to,” Cohen says, as he shuffles toward an old staircase. “This apparently was an old smoke house and now it’s my music library.”

It’s here, in what Cohen calls his “inner sanctum,” that he keeps the relics and results of his more than 50 years of exploring the stories and lives of others, as a still photographer, filmmaker and sound recorder.

In 1954, while still a student at Yale, Cohen went to Peru, knowing only two words of Quechua. Three years later, he headed for Kentucky, where he met banjoist and singer Roscoe Holcomb.

Holcomb became the subject of a classic Cohen film, The High Lonesome Sound. Sometime after he finished it, Cohen took the film back to the village of Daisy, Ky.

“I was anxious to hear the comments,” he says, “[Then someone said,] ‘Look, Aunt Jane painted her porch!’ That’s all I got from all that political correctness.”

Between visits to Kentucky and Peru, Cohen lived in a downtown New York City apartment, next door to photographer Robert Frank. When Frank shot the iconic beat film, Pull My Daisy, Cohen took the still photographs. When young Bob Dylan came to Greenwich Village, Cohen took photos of him, too, on the roof of the building.

There’s a famous shot of Woody Guthrie, curly hair sprouting from the top of his narrow head, framed by the hulking backs of two acoustic guitarists. That picture was the image used for a show of Cohen’s still photos, films and music at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., in 1997.

Cohen was a musician himself. A banjo player since high school, he began learning the music of the old-timers while he was at Yale, and soon after, he formed the New Lost City Ramblers.

“In the very first notes I wrote for the very first New Lost City Ramblers album, I said there’s a side of ourselves that goes out trying to change the world to our own image, and there’s another side of ourselves trying to find our image in the outside world,” he says. “I think it’s that second one that’s forced me to become who I am.”

It’s through the Ramblers that Tom Rankin, director of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, was first exposed to Cohen’s multifaceted work.

“One of the things you can really see from John Cohen is that you don’t have to pigeonhole yourself,” Rankin says. “You can follow that naive passion of interest, be a participant and be an observer.”

Cohen says, “I’m an artist rather than a documentarian.”

But back in his barn a few years ago, Cohen put the lie to that. Rummaging around, he found footage for his most recent film, a follow-up on Roscoe Holcomb.

“About 20 years ago I made my last film in Peru, and I said I’ve done 15 films, that’s enough. Then I remembered, out in the barn I had all of this footage that didn’t make it into my first film,” he says. “I found some beautiful music and devastating stories from Roscoe, and that what gave me the impetus to make the new movie.”

That film, Roscoe Holcomb From Daisy, Kentucky, has just come out on DVD, along with the original Holcomb documentary. Also out are John Cohen, Past, Present, Peru: A Collection of CDs, DVDs, Photos and Text and a new book about The New Lost City Ramblers.

“I’m 78 years old and I didn’t expect to have this much attention come to my work,” Cohen says. “I’m very happy it’s happening and I’d like people to see it, because it should be seen.”

Johann Sebastian Bach – Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D major, BWV 1068
1. Overture
2.Air*
3.Gavotte I/II
4.Bourrée
5.Gigue

Instrumentation: Trumpet I/II/III, timpani, oboe I/II, violin I/II, viola, basso continuo.

*The Air is one of the most famous pieces of classical music. An arrangement of the piece by German violinist August Wilhelm (1845 – 1908) has come to be known as Air on the G String.

NEW YORK — Whether it’s the Beatles or Beethoven, people like music for the same reason they like eating or having sex: It makes the brain release a chemical that gives pleasure, a new study says.

The brain substance is involved both in anticipating a particularly thrilling musical moment and in feeling the rush from it, researchers found.

Previous work had already suggested a role for dopamine, a substance brain cells release to communicate with each other. But the new work, which scanned people’s brains as they listened to music, shows it happening directly.

While dopamine normally helps us feel the pleasure of eating or having sex, it also helps produce euphoria from illegal drugs. It’s active in particular circuits of the brain.

The tie to dopamine helps explain why music is so widely popular across cultures, Robert Zatorre and Valorie Salimpoor of McGill University in Montreal write in an article posted online Sunday by the journal Nature Neuroscience.

The study used only instrumental music, showing that voices aren’t necessary to produce the dopamine response, Salimpoor said. It will take further work to study how voices might contribute to the pleasure effect, she said.

The researchers described brain-scanning experiments with eight volunteers who were chosen because they reliably felt chills from particular moments in some favorite pieces of music. That characteristic let the experimenters study how the brain handles both anticipation and arrival of a musical rush.

Results suggested that people who enjoy music but don’t feel chills are also experiencing dopamine’s effects, Zatorre said.

PET scans showed the participants’ brains pumped out more dopamine in a region called the striatum when listening to favorite pieces of music than when hearing other pieces. Functional MRI scans showed where and when those releases happened.

Dopamine surged in one part of the striatum during the 15 seconds leading up to a thrilling moment, and a different part when that musical highlight finally arrived.

Zatorre said that makes sense: The area linked to anticipation connects with parts of the brain involved with making predictions and responding to the environment, while the area reacting to the peak moment itself is linked to the brain’s limbic system, which is involved in emotion.

The study volunteers chose a wide range of music – from classical and jazz to punk, tango and even bagpipes. The most popular were Barber’s Adagio for Strings, the second movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and Debussy’s Claire de Lune.

Since they already knew the musical pieces they listened to, it wasn’t possible to tell whether the anticipation reaction came from memory or the natural feel people develop for how music unfolds, Zatorre said. That question is under study, too.

Dr. Gottfried Schlaug, an expert on music and the brain at Harvard Medical School, called the study “remarkable” for the combination of techniques it used.

While experts had indirect indications that music taps into the dopamine system, he said, the new work “really nails it.”

Music isn’t the only cultural experience that affects the brain’s reward circuitry. Other researchers recently showed a link when people studied artwork.

—

Online:

http://www.nature.com/neuro

Dopamine, people!

I’ve been listening to too much CBC radio, and it seems like this one is permanently on their playlist at least once a day!

Sublime!

Refreshing contemporary rendition of one of the oldest and most traditional of christmas hymns.

Timeless, esp. this time of year! I heard a lovely rendition of this on strings yesterday in church.