Five Bullets 3.10.23
This week: Somethin' Else, Cathedral of Sound, MH370 & more
Hello and welcome back to Circles In Space for Five Bullet Friday, where each Friday I share some interesting stuff I collected during the week.
“Back in New York, Cannonball, who had signed a deal to do a record, asked me to play on the date, which I did as a favor. The record was called Somethin’ Else and was very nice.”
- Miles Davis in his autobiography.
Somethin’ Else is one of my favorite albums, of any genre, and one I keep coming back to, so when I saw that yesterday was the anniversary of it’s recording, I had to include it in today’s newsletter. The album has a bit of everything - bluesy sax, delicate trumpet, harmonic piano solos, and steady, driving bass and drums. It’s a classic and I’m excited to share with those of you who haven’t heard it yet. I’ll have to do a full write-up on the album in the future.
This week’s bullets:
On March 9th, 1958, saxophonist Cannonball Adderley’s Quintet of Miles Davis (in a rare sideman role) on trumpet, Hank Jones on piano, Sam Jones on bass and Art Blakey on drums recorded the hard bop classic Somethin’ Else at Rudy Van Gelder’s studio. Davis composed the title track which features a bluesy exchange between Davis and Adderley. The album is tight, deliberate, and covers a gamut of dynamics and emotions with masterfully beautiful playing from the group. At the time, Adderley was part of Davis’s Septet, which had recently recorded Milestones and in 1959 Adderley would join Davis on Kind of Blue.
While architectural history rarely takes into account the sound of a location, researchers are hoping to recreate and improve the sound of Notre Dame Cathedral following a 2019 fire. A Cathedral of Sound details the process of recreating the cathedral’s signature resonances using a 2015 acoustic model, allowing researchers to compare the cathedral’s current reverberation with how the space sounded before the fire.
In my 10.21.22 newsletter, I shared a video from writer Ryan Holiday where he details his writing process, starting with a stack of notecards. While reading, Holiday writes down notes, passages and quotes on notecards and stores them away, then sorts the cards into categories to be used as research material for future books. Other writers have used a similar system, also known as a commonplace book. This week I decided to give it a try and started my own box of notecards. Updates to follow.
On March 8, 2014, Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 took off from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing. Nine years later, the plane and all aboard are still missing. Netflix has a new docuseries out which explores the mystery.
Zoe Anderson Norris was a writer and journalist who called herself the “Queen of Bohemia”. Hellgate dives into Norris’s life as ‘the Nellie Bly you’ve never heard of’. Norris lived in the slums of the East Village where she published The East Side. Norris wrote about the injustices and poverty facing immigrants and went undercover to highlight the divide between New York City’s rich and poor.
Got something to share? Leave me a comment! I’m always on the lookout for something new to dive into.
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That's all for this week!
As always, thanks for reading and have a great weekend.
The New Yorker met with historian Eve Kahn to discuss her upcoming Zoe Anderson Norris exhibit. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/04/24/the-nellie-bly-youve-never-heard-of