The most recent abduction-worthy film that must not be missed nor go un-evangelized is the documentary Searching for Sugar Man, which chronicles the life and career of the musician known as Rodriguez. A singer-guitarist from Detroit in the early 1970s, Rodriguez is the most talented songwriter you’ve never heard of. He recorded two albums, which tanked, and then was largely forgotten by the American public, even though he was championed by major-league producers Mike Theodore and Dennis Coffey (The Temptations, Diana Ross, George Clinton). Respected critics at the time compared him to Bob Dylan.

But in South Africa, it was an entirely different story. Rodriguez was huge—bigger than Elvis, say the journalists and music producers interviewed in the film. In this closed but large and well-educated society, Rodriguez’s songs inspired a whole youth culture rising up against an oppressive government and its apartheid policies. As one South African journalist put it, “If you came of age in South Africa in the ’70s, you owned at least these three albums: Bridge Over Troubled Water, Abbey Road, and Cold Fact by Rodriguez.”

And so begins a great detective story, masterfully spun by Swedish filmmaker Malik Bendjelloul, about a South African journalist seeking to find out why such a major artist—a hero and an icon of pop culture—disappeared off the face of the earth.

The leads weren’t promising. Not only was there virtually no paper trail on him (and part of the fun is to watch the journalist, Craig Bartholomew, look for clues in lyrics and album notes), but at least two different rumors were circulating that Rodriguez—already known as a quirky performer who might turn his back on the audience while playing—had committed suicide on stage (one version had him shooting himself, the other described a grisly scene of self-immolation). Clearly he was dead; the only question remained how and when. Or was he in fact not dead and just locked up in a mental institution somewhere?

Searching for Sugar Man is not just an intriguing tale of an obscure musician who had a fleeting brush with fame and then fell into obscurity (or worse). It is a great film, complete with a compelling plot, a dramatic arc, and beautiful visual and musical production values. It is also a trenchant commentary on music and the music business, and a probing examination of an important period in history and pop music culture. The soundtrack that underpins the film is first-rate stuff, and you can clearly hear why Rodriguez was on track to be a star. He was not only a world-class songwriter, he was backed by the best music talent Detroit had to offer.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of Sugar Man is the portrait of the artist himself. Rodriguez was the genuine article, we find out through the course of the film, and lived as an artist, placing his music above all. He may have been eccentric and misunderstood, but he maintained laser focus and level head when it came to creating music. His music continued to grow and thrive, even as his career went in the opposite direction.

Searching for Sugar Man is a triumph of a film and a vindication of the talent, character, and life story of a largely forgotten, but no less worthy, musician named Rodriguez. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that this film will leave you with a sense of hope, either. See it and spread the word.

— Jon Chappell

The landlady eyes them warily. “Are you the police?”

“No, ma’am. We’re musicians,” says Elwood.

It’s a very funny moment, especially for musicians, because actor Dan Aykroyd delivers the line crisply and succinctly, as if this were not a non-sequitur, but coming from a place of even higher authority than if they were just cops. He might as well have said, “No ma’m. We’re the F.B.I.”

As musicians, we’re often looked to as the resident authority figure on all matters involving music, audio, or acoustics—even in areas where we may be a little out of our depth. For example, someone might ask you to recommend a home stereo system, about which you may know very little. But you can still answer thoughtfully. Think about how you would shop for a home stereo system. Certainly your approach would be different from someone who didn’t know music, gear, or audio at all. And you can relate that to help people sort out their own thoughts, even if you can’t tell school them on receiver brands or total harmonic distortion percentages.

In my untrained youth, I worked as a salesman at a stereo store, and would watch people come in, approach the wall of hi-fi amplifiers and immediately turn up the bass on whatever was playing at the time to “audition” the system. These tire-kickers would then simply stand at the receiver and start moving to the beat—as opposed to backing up, finding the sweet spot in the equilateral triangle formed by speakers and listener, and standing still for a careful listen. That’s how I could tell these people knew nothing about audio.

From that experience, I formulated my own plan on how I would forevermore audition audio systems. I would listen to them with their EQ settings flat; I would bring my own CDs of familiar and varied listening material; and I would always triangulate the sweet spot between myself and the speakers. Lo and behold, that’s how I evaluate audio gear to this day.

I never presumed to have specific technical expertise, just some basic musician-sense. But it came in handy recently when I attended a lecture a friend was giving at a local university. (The subject was screenwriting, and had nothing to do with music.) Once inside the lecture hall, I could see there was a problem up on the stage. Several people were gathered around a small portable sound system, looking worried. I approached the stage and asked if I could help.

“We can’t get the sound working,” said my friend, speaking for the group of presenters.

“I’m a musician,” I asserted. “Let me see what I can do.” And I hopped up onto the stage.

It was a simple matter to solve. They were using a wireless handheld mic whose receiver was plugged into a powered speaker. But they couldn’t figure out the relationship between the output of the receiver versus the volume on the powered speaker. The sound was either inaudible or feedback-squealing loud, and they were flustered. To me it was as natural as setting up a sound on my amp. I first turned both volumes all the way down. Then I cranked the speaker volume three-quarters of the way up and slowly brought up the output on the wireless receiver. The meter on the receiver looked good and the sound rang out clear and loud. I had my friend do a mic check, but her voice was softer than mine, so I momentarily took the mic from her and figured out how to boost the gain on the handheld transmitter. Now all the levels were good. Everyone smiled.

But I didn’t stop there. The powered speaker was on the floor, off the stage and behind a lectern. I lifted the speaker up, put it on the lectern itself, and moved the whole arrangement to the front edge of the stage so that the presenter wouldn’t pass the mic in front of the speaker, potentially creating feedback. I explained to the group that although it sounded good to us on stage, when the room filled up with people, this would guarantee a better sound for the house. Again, approving smiles all around.

Later, my friend commented that she thought I was “just a guitar player” and not an “audio genius.” I explained that all “mere guitar players” could do what I had done, and that “genius” was a strong word for my quick bit of stagecraft. And then she laughed, recalling the way I had said “I’m a musician” when I approached the stage.

“It was like you were saying, ‘Stand back, people, I’m a doctor!’” she said.

 “No ma’am. I’m a musician,” I thought to myself silently, while enjoying a laugh with my friend.

Recently, I found musically useful material in three common, everyday, and seemingly non-musical objects: a child’s whistle (the wooden Thomas the Tank Engine train whistle), the tea kettle on my stove, and the wind chimes that do their thing just outside my front door. Unlike, say, a doorbell, which uses a very definite musical device (singing out the melodic interval of a descending major second), these three devices don’t emphasize their musical origins. But they definitely draw on music to bring about their psychologically desired effects, however different those may be.

Anyone Can Whistle

The toy whistle sounds just like a steam-powered train whistle it’s emulating, especially when I enhanced it with a little reverb (hear it here: TrainWhistle.mp3). When I first heard this, I thought, “This is a child’s toy?! I’d use it in a film score in a heartbeat!” But upon closer inspection, it’s just a straight-up Cm7b5 chord (C Eb Gb Bb). I recognized the chord-quality immediately, and then (surreptitiously wresting the whistle from the vise-like grip of my sleeping nephew) checked the individual valves by blowing through them one at a time. Not only were the intervals perfectly in tune with the equal temperament scale, the pitches were referenced to A440. This can’t be an accident. Yet when you hear it in context (that is, from the mouth of a child sitting amongst toy trains), you don’t think music, you simply think, “Wow, how realistic that whistle is!”

Polly, Put the Kettle On

The tea kettle also emits a whistle, but not to evoke an image of “the real thing.” Instead, its job is to loudly call attention to itself and let you know the water’s boiling. And how do you best do that, if you’re a kettle? By cooing out a harmonious perfect 5th? Not bloody likely. Rather, the tea kettle screeches out the most annoying interval possible: a minor second (hear it here: TeaKettle.mp3). This is music’s equivalent to a crying baby: You can’t ignore it. A minor second, from a musical perspective, is dissonant and harmonically active. It makes a spectacle of itself in any situation, whether musical or not. The tea kettle’s designer may have been an acoustician, a musician, or both.

Wind Beneath My Chimes

Wind chimes have the opposite mission of a tea kettle: they want to provide soothing sounds, fueled not by angry, boiling steam, but by the gentle nudging of the wind. On my dog walks and any time I’m in a residential neighborhood, I always keep an ear out for wind chimes. Why? Because it’s a fun and challenging exercise to identify the collective quality of their clanging pipes. You don’t need perfect pitch to do this; you just have to be able to identify intervals delivered in a random sequence, because that’s how chimes play. (The wind never learned to play its scales from low to high as music students throughout history have.)

In my sampling, I have noticed that most wind chimes use the pentatonic major scale (1, 2, 3, 5, 6 in any major key) for the same reasons guitarists do: You can’t play a wrong note. Because a major pentatonic scale contains no half steps (provided by the 4th and the 7th of the major scale, which are missing in the pentatonic version), you never hear a minor second—a dissonant interval, and the same one played by my tea kettle. (Hmm. Are my wind chimes talking to my tea kettle? This “smart house” concept may be going further than they’re telling me!) Not all wind chimes use the pentatonic scale (though my next door neighbors’ do): the ones on my porch (heard here: WindChimes.mp3) play another soothing sequence: the whole-tone scale. This has been used to great, gauzy effect by Debussy—usually as a harp glissando—and it works on chimes because, again, it avoids the minor second interval. You may not be expecting such “harmonically educated” thought from a device that makes no claim to produce music (only “pleasant noise”), but careful musical thought is at the very core of its makeup.

It’s a fun exercise to use your musical chops when you don’t have an instrument in your hand, when your eardrums are getting a break from the ’buds, and when you’re not even listening to “actual music.” Music exists in life, and sorting it out keeps you thinking and helps you understand all the sounds in your environment. You just have to listen for clues and possibly apply a little musical deduction. Staying attentive to all the music that wafts and zips in and out of daily life keeps our ears oiled and our musical brains active.

— Jon Chappell

The second speaker, a newcomer to all this, thinks, “Wow, this is easy.” When it’s his turn, he strides onto the stage and in his best stage voice proclaims, “Twenty-six!” Silence. Undaunted, he tries again: “Eighty-four!” Silence again, and the audience is now shifting uncomfortably in its seats. With a mighty roar the newbie lets loose with his finale, “One hundred and thirty-five!!” Crickets. After his ordeal, the shaken comic approaches a veteran and asks, “What happened? I did everything the guy ahead of me did. But I bombed. Why?” The old comedian puts his hand on the younger man’s shoulder and says gently, “Kid, you just didn’t have the timing.”

Music, like comedy, is all about the timing. And it’s just as hard to master when playing a minuet as it is to entertain an audience of seasoned showbiz types. A student can memorize the pitches and rhythms of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 in G major, but it takes a concert-level artist to bring out the special musical expressiveness of the piece that makes it a transcendent listening experience. To do that requires a command of timing. Everyone has seen amazing videos on YouTube of young children executing incredibly difficult pieces with technical mastery. But the common complaint that fills up the comment spaces is that the performance lacks feeling and emotion. What they’re talking about is “expressiveness,” and that, it turns out, is closely related to timing.

At least that’s what new scientific research asserts. In a project conducted at McGill University, a scientist has determined that timing, and to a lesser extent volume changes, are the key ingredients listeners use to determine whether a piece of music is expressive. In other words, after working hard your whole life to a metronome to develop your timing, you may have to abandon it to become more expressive.

Dr. Daniel Levitin, Director of the Laboratory for Music Perception, Cognition, and Expertise at McGill University, devised a series of experiments to test how humans measure expressiveness in music. In one of them, he uses a set of Chopin Nocturnes, first played by a pianist with timing variations according to his taste, and then programmed as a MIDI file with no variation in timing or duration (all notes were quantized to their written, sheet-music value). Then a third track was created, which was quantized exactly halfway between the human and fully quantized versions. Not surprisingly, musicians and non-musicians ranked the original, musician-performed version as the most expressive of the three.

That by itself may not seem that revelatory, but that was just the first question in the experiment. In subsequent tests, percentages were changed, and factors other than timing were brought into the mix. In one listening test, expressive factors in the human performance were amplified by 150%, with volume and tempo variations exaggerated from the original human rendering. Interestingly, listeners found that too much expression had a counterproductive result—losing effectiveness if you take it too far. Human players, it seems, know how to appeal to human listeners in a way that machines can’t replicate. At least not yet.

Dr. Levitin gave his listening subjects music examples where only the volume was changed while the timing was maintained as it was in the original, and then the converse—where the timing was altered while the volume was kept constant. These comparisons are more difficult to hear, but listeners still came down on the side of timing as being the expressive factor in the majority of the results. In other words, of the two principal factors involved in conveying expression—volume changes and timing alterations—it is timing that humans find has the more expressive power.

In these experiments, all the listener had to do was pick the more expressive example of three. But since we’re all musicians here, let’s raise the bar. Take the test yourself, but instead of just choosing, say, answer A as the most expressive, go ahead and identify the other two choices, according to the info in the experiment’s introduction. Try to identify not just the most expressive of the three, but which is the straight MIDI rendition and the other the “150% humanized” (or exaggerated) version, or which track has only volume changes and which one has timing changes. The differences are sometimes subtle, so to make it challenging, see if you can do it on one pass. It gets more difficult when the choices involve not just timing or volume, but timing and volume together, in various combinations. (The tests also included randomness in addition to uniform percentages.)

Go to the New York Times website and take the test. The article thoughtfully includes pdfs of the sheet music for further study. After you run through the experiments, try a different approach to your music. If you’ve been running scales to a metronome, working out with drum machines, or invoking your synchronized arpeggiator to quantized grooves, try injecting some rubato into your music. It will give you a new take on expressiveness, and it might even improve your ability to tell a joke.

For example, in the second week of April 2010, my family wanted to do something nice for me: surprise me with a new Apple laptop. I hadn’t had a new Mac in years, preferring to staple on upgrades to my ancient G5 until it was a computational Frankenstein, wheezing and belching just to keep up with simple tasks. A new MacBook Pro was certainly in order. And my birthday was in mid-April.

But my tone-deaf reaction to my new, surprise gift was that my loving family had exhibited spectacularly bad timing in buying this “new old stock” laptop. As gently as I could, I pointed out that if they had waited three days, they could have chosen from the new crop of laptops that featured the faster i5 and i7 processors and the extended-capacity battery technology. Off we went to the Apple Store for a full refund. I returned four days later and was one of the first in line. And, in time, they forgave my ingratitude.

But really, how could a normal (i.e., not technology-obsessed) person possibly know about “expected releases” if he didn’t spend way too much time lurking on blogs and message boards to glean—with no firm evidence—that Apple always releases a new computer in the spring and a new iPhone in the summer? One can’t; one just “has to know.” But even if you don’t need the latest and greatest, it still makes sense to wait for the new releases, as the price for last year’s model will drop significantly. If you’re OK with a used or eBay-purchase, your buying leverage goes up significantly.

So here we are in Q1 of 2011, and the frenzy of new tech is upon us. If you’re looking to buy a new tablet and consider one running Honeycomb (Android’s tablet-specific operating system) as a worthy competitor to the Apple iPad, boy, do you have your work cut out for you! You will be spending a lot of time reading through reviews and sorting hype from reality. Be consoled knowing that much the same fate awaits phone and computer buyers of course.

In fact, so chaotic is this spring season of new tech that we actually have two announced technologies with the same name: Thunderbolt. To smartphone shoppers, the name refers to HTC’s latest flagship Android-based model, due out in mid-March. To computer users, Thunderbolt is the new communications protocol invented by Intel and that will appear on new Apple MacBook Pro laptops.

If you haven’t heard of Thunderbolt (the computer-related one, that is) until this editorial, you need to read up on it at Apple’s website, as well as your favorite message boards, including this informative thread in the Harmony Central forums. It will significantly change how you move data and signals to your peripherals, and has profound potential for high-bandwidth pursuits like high-def video, high-resolution and surround audio, and large-project and system backups. Thunderbolt has some compelling specs besides superior I/O throughput speed (20 times faster than USB 2.0, 12 times faster than FireWire 800, and twice as fast as USB 3.0) too. Of course, it will backwardly accommodate USB and FireWire for now, but T-Bolt champions hope to ultimately replace those two aging technologies. That’s by no means inevitable, however. Remember, we still have USB 3.0, which is less than a year old and is an upgrade to a proven platform. Plus, you already own the cables for it. We will just have to live through it to see how it all shakes out.

One thing is for sure though: A year from now, you won’t even consider a device that doesn’t supersede Thunderbolt (if it’s a smartphone), or—if it’s a computer—includes it or offers an alternative, whether that’s USB 3.0 or something else. Either way, your vocabulary must now include this stormy compound word. And like some technological Thor, you will need to wield it with authority in order to prevail.

One of the most interesting things I discovered in researching the book was just how much the blues has been ignored by instrument manufacturers, record lablels, and even listening audiences over its history. Most of the blues knowledge we have is due to the resurrection of the genre beginning in the mid- to late-1960′s (during the Great Folk Scare). Many of the primary, first-generation blues artists (Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf) were middle-aged or elderly by the time they were rediscovered, having spent the prime of their careers (and lives) in obscurity. So the information before this period is scant, and scholars vigorously disagree on even the most basic issues, like the spelling of artist’s names (Charlie vs. Charley Patton, etc.) and birth data (year and location). Even the living artists themselves gave conflicting accounts of events.

Then there’s the collective ignorance of the public. Most people don’t even know where the Mississippi Delta is (it’s not at the mouth of the River; it’s 200 miles north), and are hazy about what is history and what is lore.

When I was researching early electric instruments, there was plenty of available material on popular and jazz players of the day, but relatively little on blues players, despite blues preceding jazz (and in many cases influencing it). You can find celebrity endorsements by Nick Lucas, Jonny Smith, and even Trini Lopez (!), but not T-Bone Walker.