For Dave Brubeck’s 100th Birthday, Watch Pakistani Musicians Play an Enchanting Version of “Take Five”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLF46JKkCNg How’s this for fusion? Here we have The Sachal Studios Orchestra, based in Lahore, Pakistan, playing an innovative cover of “Take Five,” the jazz standard written by Paul Desmond and originally performed by The Dave Brubeck Quartet in 1959. Brubeck–who would have celebrated his 100th birthday today–called it the “most interesting” version he had ever heard. Once you watch the performance above, you’ll know why. According to The Guardian, The Sachal Studios Orchestra was created by Izzat Majeed,...

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The Great Courses Offers Every Course for $40 Until Midnight Tonight

Here’s a holiday season deal worth mentioning. The Great Courses (formerly The Teaching Company) is offering every course for $40 in digital format (or $60 in DVD format). The deal lasts through midnight on Black Friday. If you’re not familiar with it, the Great Courses provides a very nice service. They travel across the U.S., recording great professors lecturing on great topics that will appeal to any lifelong learner. They then make the courses available to customers in different formats (DVD, CD, Video & Audio Downloads, etc.). The...

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Hear 11-Year-Old Björk Sing “I Love to Love”: Her First Recorded Song (1976)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rujxXOmYLUU Several years back, we featured an eleven-year-old Björk reading a nativity story in her native Icelandic, backed by unsmiling older kids from the Children’s Music School in Reykjavík. In this new find, also dating from 1976, you can hear that same eleven-year-old Björk singing in English, in what marks her first recording. Above, she sings the Tina Charles song “I Love to Love” for a school recital. According to Laughing Squid, the “teachers were so impressed with her voice, they sent the recording...

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An Animated Stan Lee Explains Why the F-Word Is “the Most Useful Word in the English Language” (NSFW)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DScnnorHEuw FYI. The language in this video is not safe for work. And, now, on with the show. In the last couple years of his life, Stan Lee was ill, his health failing, but he stayed engaged and remained his old wisecracking self. His handpicked successor for editor-in-chief at Marvel, Roy Thomas, tells the story of the last time he saw Lee and showed him his then-new biography of the comics legend, The Stan Lee Story. They talked about the Spider-Man comic strip they’d written together for two decades until...

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Watch Digital Dancers Electrify the Streets of Istanbul

Are you open to the idea of otherworldly beings moving amongst us, benign but unseen? Director Gökalp Gönen seems to be in the above video for jazz innovator Ilhan Ersahin’s “Hurri-Mitanni” (Good News). Things kick off in a decidedly low key manner—a young woman sets off for a nighttime stroll through the streets of Istanbul, her face deliberately obscured by a snugly tied black and white cloth. Turning a corner, she passes an anonymous figure, wrapped head to toe in similar stripes. Does this unexpected sight elicit...

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The Great Courses Offers Every Course on Sale for $60 or Less (Until December 1)

Here’s a holiday season deal worth mentioning. For Cyber Monday, The Great Courses (formerly The Teaching Company) is offering every course for $60 in digital format or less. The sale lasts through the end of December 1. If you’re not familiar with it, the Great Courses provides a very nice service. They travel across the U.S., recording great professors lecturing on great topics that will appeal to any lifelong learner. They then make the courses available to customers in different formats (DVD, CD, Video & Audio Downloads, etc.). The courses...

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Learn How to Play Chess Online: Free Chess Lessons for Beginners, Intermediate Players & Beyond

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SM2fcenx7KU The most desired Christmas gift of 2020? A chess set. It’s certainly desired, at any rate, by the rapt viewers of The Queen’s Gambit, the acclaimed Netflix miniseries that debuted in October. Created by screenwriter-producers Scott Frank and Allan Scott, its seven episodes tell the story of Beth Harmon, an orphan in 1950s Kentucky who turns out to be a chess prodigy, then goes on to become a world-class player. During the Cold War, the intellectual and geopolitical prospect of American and...

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