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Terry Riley and La Monte Young in a documentary about their teacher, Pandit Pran Nath


Poster by Marian Zazeela for a raga cycle performance at St. John the Divine, 1991 (via The Hum)
 
William Farley’s In Between the Notes profiles the late Pandit Pran Nath, a singer and teacher in the Kirana school of Indian classical music. It features his most famous pupils, Terry Riley, La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, and the late, great music scholar Robert Palmer sticks his head in, too.

Kicked out of the house at the age of 13 because he insisted on becoming a musician, Pran Nath made friends with the outdoors, as this short documentary illustrates. In Delhi, he demonstrates his keen ear for bird songs; on his return to the Tapkeshwar Caves, where, on the advice of his guru, he had lived for five years as a renunciant, Pran Nath shows how the sound of rushing water can stand in for the drone of a tambura when you are a homeless sadhu.
 

Pandit Pran Nath with Ann and Terry Riley (via Complete Word)
 
But if it was to be a tambura instead of a babbling brook, it had better be a “Pandit Pran Nath-style tambura.” Except in the caves, Terry Riley has his arm around one of these distinctive-sounding instruments every time he appears in the movie. Pran Nath’s New York Times obituary describes his specifications for the drone axe:

He secured the instrument’s upper bridge, changed the rounding of the resonating gourd and had instruments made without paint or varnish that might clog the pores of the wood, all to give the tamboura a richer tone.

More after the jump…

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Posted by Oliver Hall
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07.18.2018
06:46 am
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John Coltrane meets Terry Riley in free jazz minimalist mashup
01.08.2016
02:28 pm
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Yesterday His Name Is Alive honcho Warren Defever posted an intriguing file to his Mixcloud account, a mashup lasting in excess of 35 minutes featuring the works of spiritual jazz icon John Coltrane and minimalist composer par excellence Terry Riley.

In a mix like this it’s practically inevitable that the Coltrane numbers would predominate and hence be more readily identifiable. The mix features three single-word “A” titles from Coltrane, those being “Alabama,” “Attaining,” and “Ascension.” On the Riley side I think the first number is “Journey from the Death of a Friend” but I’m not certain.

Allow this bracing dose of spirituality to usher in a splendid weekend!
 

John Coltrane and Terry Riley by Xoxowar on Mixcloud

 
via Detroit Metro Times

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
‘Impressions of John Coltrane’: 3 vintage TV performances
Live footage of Terry Riley and La Monte Young in the 70s

Posted by Martin Schneider
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01.08.2016
02:28 pm
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In C: Trip out to the psychedelic minimalism of Acid Mothers Temple’s monuMENTAL take on Terry Riley
11.06.2014
05:46 pm
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For almost twenty years, Japan’s avant-psych band Acid Mothers Temple have been expanding heads with a striking alloy of ideas grokked from acid, Kraut, and prog with notions gleaned from 20th Century classical music. So the idea of them remaking composer Terry Riley’s landmark of minimalism “In C”—which they did, in 2001—isn’t so out of character. If you want to get record-collector fussy about it, the remake was done by “Acid Mothers Temple & the Melting Paraiso U.F.O.” Not unlike Caroliner, AMT like to append different endings to their name, resulting in probably as many band names as lineups for them by now. As for Riley’s 1964 composition, I am powerless to describe it better than its Wiki entry:

In C consists of 53 short, numbered musical phrases, lasting from half a beat to 32 beats; each phrase may be repeated an arbitrary number of times. Each musician has control over which phrase he or she plays: players are encouraged to play the phrases starting at different times, even if they are playing the same phrase. In this way, although the melodic content of each part is predetermined, In C has elements of aleatoric music to it. The performance directions state that the musical ensemble should try to stay within two to three phrases of each other. The phrases must be played in order, although some may be skipped. As detailed in some editions of the score, it is customary for one musician (“traditionally… a beautiful girl,” Riley notes in the score) to play the note C in repeated eighth notes, typically on a piano or pitched-percussion instrument (e.g. marimba). This functions as a metronome and is referred to as “The Pulse”.

The Riley recording of “In C” was released in 1968 by Columbia Masterworks, but given the fluid nature of the composition, which can be performed by pretty much any number of musicians, on any variety of instruments, and for any duration, his needn’t be considered canonical, and it’s been performed and recorded in a multitude of surprising ways. There’s a solo trombone version on YouTube, even. But here’s the first half of Riley’s “original” version, for comparison’s sake.
 

 
And here’s Acid Mothers Temple’s recording, in all its luminous, lysergic, drop-dead gorgeous glory.
 

 

 

Posted by Ron Kretsch
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11.06.2014
05:46 pm
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Live footage of Terry Riley and La Monte Young in the 70s


 
It must be Terry Riley week. How else to explain the sudden emergence of this pristine footage, which I’m sure some smarty-pants will shortly point out to me is actually from some DVD or such, this week along with revelations about the fine composer’s questionable eating habits. Terry Riley’s all night organ and tape loops concerts are the stuff of legend and it’s pretty marvelous to finally have a bit of filmed evidence to gawk at.
 

 
Even more interesting is this sadly brief little clip of the quartet of Riley, La Monte Young, Pandit Pran Nath and Marian Zazeela playing live in Rome. Riley doing a respectable job on the tablas:

 
And just for good measure and because it sounds great to me at the moment, here is a portion of La Monte Young’s The Second Dream of the HighTension Line Stepdown Transformer for your listening pleasure:

 
With thanks to Lance Grabmiller

Posted by Brad Laner
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05.18.2011
11:32 pm
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Terry Riley and Big Boi spotted eating together at Burger King
05.16.2011
04:53 pm
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I’d truly like to hear a collaboration by these two. Why not ?
 
Previously on DM : Metzger on Terry Riley
 
Thanks Ned Raggett via Brassica

 

Posted by Brad Laner
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05.16.2011
04:53 pm
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A Rainbow in Curved Air: Terry Riley
03.26.2011
11:26 am
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The music of minimalist composer Terry Riley has always had a special place on my turntable and in my CD player. His 1967 album, A Rainbow in Curved Air is the perfect thing to put on when guests are over—it creates a great mood but never overpowers conversation—and you can bliss out on it like a meditation mantra (the composer’s intent, obviously). You can hear parts of it behind the narration of the original BBC radio broadcast of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe and it’s on the radio station in Grand Theft Auto IV. Chances are that even if you don’t know it by name, you’ve heard it many times.
 

 
In the 1960s Riley used to play all night concerts, with audience members showing up with sleeping bags. He’d use tape loops to accompany himself, letting them run by themselves when he had to take bathroom breaks. His 1964 piece “In C,” where the same series of notes are played over and over and over again by (at least) 35 musicians, with a single anchor melody of a “C” note played at octaves as eighth notes (serving as the metronome or “pulse” and played preferably by “a beautiful girl,” as the music’s notation instructs) is considered the very first minimalist composition. At a recital of “In C” at the Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, 124 musicians took part.
 

 
The repetitive synth section that leads off The Who’s “Baba O’Riley” was inspired by Riley’s signature sound and the title is a portmanteau of his name and that of Indian mystic Meher Baba. He also did a collaboration with John Cale—both of them heavily influenced by LaMonte Young—called Church of Anthrax, which is absolutely amazing and deserves a post of its own at a later date.

Posted by Richard Metzger
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03.26.2011
11:26 am
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