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Monday, March 24th, 2025
| Time | Event |
| 8:00a | Every Hidden Detail of New York’s Classic Skyscrapers: The Chrysler, Empire State & Woolworth Buildings
Currently, the tallest buildings in New York City are One World Trade Center, Central Park Tower, and 111 West 57th Street. All of them were completed in the twenty-twenties, and all of them have attracted comment, sometimes admiring, sometimes bewildered. But none of them, fair to say, yet exude the romance of the Woolworth Building, the Chrysler Building, and the Empire State Building, all of which opened before World War II, and each of which once had its day as the tallest building in the world. Here to explain these enduring “big stars of the New York City skyline” is architectural historian Tony Robins, who in the half-hour video above tells the story of all their important details, inside and out. In fact, this video comes as the pilot episode of “Obsession to Detail,” a new series from Daily Mail Business YouTube channel. The Mail may not come right to mind as a source of architectural commentary, but in this case, they’ve found the right man for the job. He knows that the Woolworth Building’s lobby contains gargoyle-like caricatures of its architect and client; that the Chrysler Building once had a private club on its 66th, 67th, and 68th floors whose bar had both a painting of the New York skyline and a view of the real thing; that the 86-story Empire State Building is promoted as having 102 stories only by including its unused dirigible mooring mast and sub-basements; and that what we now call Art Deco was, in its day, referred to as “the vertical style,” in reference to the proportions its buildings were rapidly gaining. An experienced New York tour guide, Robins would be remiss if he didn’t tell you all these facts and many more besides. It’s presumably also part of his job to frame the processes that gave rise (or indeed, high rise) to these skyscrapers as in keeping with the ceaseless one-upmanship and self-promotion that is the spirit of his city. A particularly illustrative episode occurred when Minoru Yamasaki’s original World Trade Center went up in the early seventies, which provoked a response from the Empire State Building in the form of a rectangular addition on top that would preserve its status as the world’s tallest building. Robins has been in the game long enough to have had the chance to ask the architect who designed that proposal if he was serious. “Of course not,” came the reply. “This was all for public relations. This is New York. This is who we are. This is what we do.” Related content: An Architect Demystifies the Art Deco Design of the Iconic Chrysler Building (1930) The Story of the Flatiron Building, “New York’s Strangest Tower” An Immersive, Architectural Tour of New York City’s Iconic Grand Central Terminal New York’s Lost Skyscraper: The Rise and Fall of the Singer Tower How the World Trade Center Was Rebuilt: A Visual Exploration of a 20-Year Project Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall. |
| 9:00a | How Dave Brubeck’s Time Out Changed Jazz
Music video essay maestro Polyphonic is back. What I dig about his videos is that he takes on some of the true warhorses of modern popular music and manages to find something new to say. Or at least he presents familiar stories in a new and modern way to an audience who may be hearing ELO, Queen, or Neil Young for the first time. His upload explores Dave Brubeck’s groundbreaking jazz album Time Out. This is an album that regularly tops best-of lists, gets reissued constantly, and is so ubiquitous in some circles that it’s hard, like Led Zeppelin’s fourth album, to hear the album with fresh ears. Polyphonic touches on something right at the beginning of the video that deserves a full video essay of its own–the State Department’s mission to send American jazz musicians around the world as cultural ambassadors. This is a part of history that has receded from memory, but had a major influence not just on Brubeck, but so many records at that time. Brubeck joined Benny Goodman, Louis Armstrong, and Dizzy Gillespie on a musical tour that reached many countries behind the Iron Curtain, and were able to critique America’s racist history while also promoting its musical culture. (PBS made a fine documentary on the mission in 2018.) But for the purposes of this video essay, and regarding Brubeck’s career, it was the polyrhythms and folk music that he heard while traveling through countries like Turkey (from which he developed “Blue Rondo a la Turk”) that remained with him on his return.
Time Out was Brubeck’s fourteenth album for Columbia Records, but his breakthrough. Up to that point he and his quartet had released a number of live albums recorded at colleges (which promoted a safe but hip studious kind of jazz) and several albums of jazz covers, such as Dave Digs Disney. But Time Out was a fully formed concept album of sorts: an exploration into time signatures that jazz hadn’t really touched yet. As Polyphonic points out, Joe Morello, Brubeck’s drummer, was indeed well versed in complicated time signatures from his classical background as a violinist. It was Morello who experimented with a groove in 5/4 time that became the backbone of “Take Five.” Brubeck knew a good thing when he heard it and gives Morello one of the best solos of the entire LP.
Best of all, Time Out is one those classic albums because of how it mixes the experimental with the commercial, a hard feat in any era, but even more impressive in that best of all jazz years, 1959. Brubeck continued to explore time signatures on this album’s sequel Time Further Out, which is also recommended. Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2019. Related Content: Pakistani Musicians Play an Enchanting Version of Dave Brubeck’s Jazz Classic, “Take Five” Louis Armstrong Plays Historic Cold War Concerts in East Berlin & Budapest (1965) Dave Brubeck’s Surprise Duet: A Magical Moment at the Moscow Conservatory (1997) Watch an Incredible Performance of “Take Five” by the Dave Brubeck Quartet (1964) Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts. |
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