In 1961, Julian “Cannonball” Adderley, the jazz saxophonist best known for his work on Miles Davis’ epic album Kind of Blue (listen here), narrated a children’s introduction to jazz music. Part of a larger series of educational albums for children, this 12-inch LP offered an “easy-going, conversational discussion of the highlights of the jazz story,” highlighting the “major styles and great performers” that began in New Orleans and spread beyond. Included on the album are some legendary jazz figures — Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller, Jelly Roll Morton, Duke Ellington, Coleman Hawkins, Sidney Bechet, Thelonious Monk, and, of course, Cannonball himself. The album, A Child’s Introduction to Jazz, has long been out of circulation. But you can catch it on YouTube, or above.

Thanks to James for telling us about this album on our Facebook page. Feel free to message us good ideas for posts at Facebook or cc: us on Twitter (cc: @openculture). And then there’s always old-fashioned email.

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A Child’s Introduction to Jazz by Cannonball Adderley (with Louis Armstrong & Thelonious Monk) is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and by Email.

“When your life is half over,” Carlos Fuentes said in his 1981 Paris Review interview, “I think you have to see the face of death in order to start writing seriously. There are people who see the end quickly, like Rimbaud. When you start seeing it, you feel you have to rescue these things. Death is the great Maecenas, Death is the great angel of writing. You must write because you are not going to live any more.”

Fuentes died Tuesday at the age of 83. He wrote seriously right up to the end, publishing more than 50 books in his lifetime, including Where the Air is Clear, The Death of Artemio Cruz and Terra Nostra. He was one of Latin America’s leading voices of the past half century, and Mexico’s most renowned novelist. Despite his deep connection with his native country, Fuentes lived a significant part of his life abroad. As the son of a Mexican diplomat he was born in Panama and began his schooling in Washington D.C.. Later he accepted his own diplomatic and academic postings abroad. As he told the Paris Review, the separation helped him as a writer:

I am grateful for my sense of detachment because I can say things about my country other people don’t say. I offer Mexicans a mirror in which they can see how they look, how they talk, how they act, in a country which is a masked country. Of course, I realize that my writings are my masks as well, verbal masks I offer my country as mirrors. Mexico is defined in the legend of Quetzalcoatl, the Plumed Serpent, the god who creates man and is destroyed by a demon who offers him a mirror. The demon shows him he has a face when he thought he had no face. This is the essense of Mexico: to discover you have a face when you thought you only had a mask.

To learn more about Fuentes, you can watch the brief video above from AARP Viva, which is in Spanish with English subtitles, and a 19-minute interview below with Charlie Rose. Both were recorded last year. In 1981, when the Paris Review interviewer asked Fuentes what hooked him and made him want to begin writing, he said: “That wonderful thing Hamlet says about ‘a fiction, a dream of passion.’ My fiction is a dream of passion, born of a cry that says ‘I am incomplete.’ I want to be complete, to be enclosed. I want to add something.”

Carlos Fuentes: “You Have to See the Face of Death in Order to Start Writing Seriously” is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and by Email.

The archive gives visitors plenty to explore, including commentary about the novelist’s early assignments and embedded annotations to help put the work in context.  Hemingway developed his famously terse, hard-boiled style at the Star and reworked much of his reportage into his fiction. Readers of his short stories and novels will see seeds of Hemingway’s fiction in articles like “Tancredo is Dead,” about the death of a man whose job was to tease the bull by standing as still as a statue in the ring:

“No. He was neither an opera singer nor a five-cent cigar. He was once known as the bravest man in the world. And he died in a dingy, sordid room in Madrid, the city where he had enjoyed his greatest triumphs.”

Reading through Hemingway’s journalism is to witness a fiction writer in the making.

Kate Rix writes about k-12 instruction and higher ed. Visit more of her work at katerixwriter.com.

Archive of Hemingway’s Newspaper Reporting Reveals Novelist in the Making is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and by Email.

Among his countless occupations, Stephen Fry acts, writes scripts, performs comedy, writes books, broadcasts on the radio, writes plays, presents television programs, and writes poetry. Words, it seems, have served him well, or, rather, he’s made industrious use of them. Anyone involved with such a wide range of the verbal arts must give quite a bit of thought to how language works, but Fry has acted directly on this interest. His and Hugh Laurie’s comedy show A Bit of Fry and Laurie featured linguistically themed sketches; more recently, his podcast Stephen Fry’s Podgrams offered commentaries on language. He even went so far as to host Fry’s Planet Word, a five-part BBC television series on language, “how we learn it, write it and sometimes lose it, and why it defines us.”

Given Fry’s position as a bastion of modern British wit who cares deeply about the words we speak and write, you might assume he uses only the highest, most refined kind of English. Not so, it seems; Fry can get down into the verbal gutter with the best of them, and the interview clip above contains his defense — or, to be more precise, his endorsement — of swearing. “It would be impossible to imagine going through life without swearing, and without enjoying swearing,” he attests. Some would call swearing unnecessary, and Fry recontextualizes their argument like so: “It’s not necessary to have colored socks. It’s not necessary for this cushion to be here. But is anyone going to write in and say, ‘I was shocked to see that cushion there! It really wasn’t necessary’? No. Things not being necessary is what makes life interesting.”

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Stephen Fry, Language Enthusiast, Defends The “Unnecessary” Art Of Swearing is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and by Email.

Usually the young cover songs by the old. But these days, it’s often the other way around. Perhaps you remember Johnny Cash covering U2′s song “One.” Now, we have the great Willie Nelson singing a version of Pearl Jam’s “Just Breathe” with his sons Lukas and Micah. The tune also happens to appear on his new album Heroes.

“Just Breathe” isn’t a zen commandment, at least that’s not what Pearl Jam meant by the phrase here. But “Just Breathe” has been our mantra during the past two days as we’ve experienced some downright hideous hosting problems. Hopefully things are now stable, and, with a little luck, we’ll be in a much better position to recover in the future. We really appreciate your patience and support during this bad hiccup. H/T @webacion

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Willie Nelson Sings Pearl Jam’s “Just Breathe” (And We’re Taking a Deep Breath Too) is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and by Email.

How to explain a performer like Freddie Mercury? First you’d have to describe, in conventional terms, the thoroughly unconventional musical persona he developed as the frontman of the glam rock band Queen. Then you’d have to explain how he got there from his birth as Farrokh Bolsara, his childhood in Zanzibar — yes, Zanzibar — and his schooling in the strict, traditional British Indian environment of St. Peter’s Boarding School. In 2000′s Freddie Mercury: The Untold Story, directors Rudi Dolezal and Hannes Rossacher attempt just this, talking to those who knew Mercury well in the many ways one could know him: family members, teachers, collaborators, lovers. This in addition to dozens of brief, highly admiring comments from Mercury’s famous colleagues in both rock and flamboyance: Phil Collins, Mick Jagger, Elton John, Liza Minnelli.

By 2000, Mercury had already been dead of AIDS for nearly a decade. At the time he acquired it, the disease remained poorly understood, and anyone living as far out on the social, physical, and sexual edge as he did must have run a great risk of it. But the provocative, uncompromising Freddie Mercury of The Untold Story could never have existed without great risk, especially of the aesthetic and performative varieties. The film spends time gazing upon the drawings the young Fred Bolsara, as he was then known, made as a visual art student. Who could resist thinking of him as a kind of a visual artist all his life, one who crafted the image of Freddie Mercury, embodied this image, and ultimately became it? Only a man daring enough to create himself, after all, could possibly have been daring enough to stage the Fellini-esque birthday party we see pieces of and hear hazily remembered. Who among us feels bold enough to celebrate our own 39th with dwarfs covered in liver?

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.

Freddie Mercury: The Untold Story of the Singer’s Journey From Zanzibar to Stardom is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and by Email.

During the late 1980s, two short films – Luxo Jr. and Tin Toy – saved Pixar from bankruptcy. During the late 1990s, another film, Toy Story 2, almost created a financial catastrophe for the company. In this clip excerpted from the Blu-ray version of the film, Oren Jacob (former CTO of Pixar) and Galyn Susman (Pixar producer) remember the time when Toy Story 2 nearly became the victim of the computers that generated it. One command — RM* — almost deleted an award-winning film that went on to make $485 million at the box office. via Kottke

True Story: The Time Pixar Almost Deleted Toy Story 2 is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and by Email.

Like the Beatles, Canadian piano virtuoso Glenn Gould gave up live performance in the mid-1960s and focused his creative energies on recording. “At live concerts,” he told an interviewer, “I feel demeaned, like a vaudevillian.” Gould ruffled quite a few feathers in the classical music establishment when he publicly embraced the practice of splicing together pieces of tape from different recordings to create a new performance. In effect, he provoked a re-evaluation of the word “performance.” In this short 1969 documentary from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Telescope series, Gould talks about the reasons for his dislike of playing concerts and his philosophy of art in the age of electronic recording. In the prologue, he more or less predicts today’s mash-up culture:

I have a feeling that the end result of all our labors in the recording studio is not going to become some kind of autocratic finished product such as we turn out now with relative ease, with the help of splice-making which we do or which engineers do for us, but is going to be a rather more democratic assemblage. I think we’re going to make kits, and I think we’re going to send out these kits to listeners, perhaps to viewers also, as videotape cartridge gets into the act, as I think it will, and we’re going to say, Do it yourself. Take the assembled components and make of those components something that you genuinely appreciate. If you don’t like the result as you put together the first time, put it together a second time. Be in fact your own editor. Be, in a sense, your own performer.

Variations on Glenn Gould offers a fascinating take–or, as the title suggests, several different takes–on Gould’s world-view. There is a short musical interlude, in which he plays an excerpt from the first movement, “Allegro ma non troppo,” of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 in F Major. And within the 24-minute time frame, the filmmakers allow Gould to develop his idiosyncratic thoughts on several subjects, including his “contrapuntal radio documentaries’ and his sense of isolation from society. “I absolutely enjoy being surrounded by a sort of electronic wallpaper, having music everywhere about me,” says Gould. “I think that it gives a certain shelter, and sets you apart. And I think that the only value I have as an artist–the only value most artists have, whether they realize it or not– is their particular isolation from the world about which they write, and to which they hope to contribute.”

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Glenn Gould Predicts Mash-up Culture in 1969 Documentary is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and by Email.

It’s easy to sell books and other commodities on the web. It’s not easy to deliver a quality education. But two converging trends point toward a future when we will see the traditional university give way to an online alternative — something I wasn’t willing to bank on two years ago. First, Silicon Valley is finally focusing on e-learning. Udacity, Coursera, Kahn Academy, EdX — they’re all looking to lift e-learning out of a long period of stagnation. And, second, times are tough, and the traditional university system doesn’t care enough about managing costs, while wrongly assuming that it has a captive audience.

This weekend, The New York Times took a good look at the financing of a college education and highlighted a few staggering data points.

• The U.S. has racked up more than $1 trillion in student loans.
• Today 94 percent of students earning a bachelor’s degree take out loans — up from 45 percent in 1993.
• It’s estimated that the “average debt [per student] in 2011 was $23,300, with 10 percent owing more than $54,000 and 3 percent more than $100,000.”
• “Payments are being made on just 38 percent of the balance of federal student loans, down from 46 percent five years ago.”
• Finally, state funding of education is going down, and tuition is going up, which means that the figures above will just get worse.

You don’t need me to spell things out. Paying for a college education is getting unsustainable, so much so that many expect a crisis in the college loan market in the coming years. And then you consider this. Many universities seem indifferent to the difficulties students face, if they’re not intentionally exacerbating the problem. At one point in the Times article, E. Gordon Gee, the president of Ohio State University, goes on record saying, “I readily admit it … I didn’t think a lot about costs. I do not think we have given significant thought to the impact of college costs on families.” Now listen to the latest episode of Planet Money, The Real Price of College (audio), which underscores a more galling fact — many colleges think that they gain a competitive advantage if they have a high sticker price. For many schools, lower tuition is a sign of weakness, not strength.

Universities can behave this way because they think they have a captive audience. Because college grads still earn considerably more than high school grads, colleges assume that students will keep enrolling. But what will happen when cash-strapped students are presented with a viable alternative? It may take 10 to 20 years, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a new breed of school emerges, schools that throw away the four year model (and the humanities too) and offer students a very targeted online education in “practical” fields — from accounting to coding to nursing to law and business — at a dramatically lower cost. Here, the education cycle gets shortened to perhaps two years, and then students get credentialed (maybe by a trusted third-party provider) and go to work, only to return later in their careers to take more courses in specialized areas. This model will require the right technology platform (something that will get worked out fairly soon) and a change in the expectations of employers and society more broadly (something that will take time to develop, but less time than complacent colleges think).

The new system won’t be better than the current one in many respects. It won’t offer a rounded education. The teaching will be less personal. Long-lasting social bonds won’t be made as easily. (You’ll need to pay the big bucks at a traditional school for that. No, they won’t all go away.) And the teaching jobs created by these universities won’t be terribly fulfilling or lucrative. But the new system will offer a more focused and affordable education to students on a mass scale. And when students graduate mostly debt free, they won’t complain. Nor will they be forced to forego college altogether, as some would now advocate. There’s perhaps something inevitable about this shift. But the insouciance of administrators and faculty inhabiting the current system won’t do anything to delay it. Stick around, and you’ll probably see that I’m right. And if you think my look into the crystal ball is wrong, let me know.

In the meantime, we give you another take on how to solve our world’s educational problems — Father Guido Sarducci’s Five Minute University:

For oodles of free courses, don’t forget to visit our collection of 450 Free Courses from Top Universities.

Why the University System, as We Know It, Won’t Last …. and What’s Coming Next is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and by Email.

Whenever you bring together Neil deGrasse Tyson and Richard Dawkins — one the public face of astrophysics, the other the public face of biology — you’re pretty much guaranteed a good crowd and a spirited conversation. And that’s what students got in September 2010, when the scientists shared the stage at Howard University and considered some big enchilada questions. For example: Why did our mind — from an evolutionary point of view — lead us to abstract mathematics, which drives the major discoveries in physics? What are the chances that we’ll discover intelligent life in the universe, and, if they discover us (rather than the other way around), could we, as a civilization, be in big trouble? Is natural selection operative throughout the universe and would aliens look anything like us? And why is The Blob a much better alien than ET? In short, they’re considering just the kinds of mind-bending questions that college students love to entertain — and hopefully you do to. Their conversation runs about 50 minutes and a Q&A follows.

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Neil deGrasse Tyson & Richard Dawkins Ponder the Big Enchilada Questions of Science is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and by Email.