Here we are again, and it’s time for me to throw down another mind-blowing, universe-alternating fact. Polka music is not German. Not even Bavarian. It originates from the Kingdom of Bohemia. So much for stereotypes.

Bohemia is the original name for what is now the Czech Republic. The lively dance music originated there around 1850. For the time it was a pretty serious dance craze that swept across the globe. The polka influenced musical cultures from Poland to Peru and gave birth to many new hybrid genres still alive today.

Now let’s get to the primary matter of the polka dot, which is a design pattern usually seen as large solid coloured circles on a white background. How did this rather plain circle become assiciated with the polka? Well, it seems to be purely a marketing ploy.

As the polka craze was conquering the hearts and toes of the people, many merchants were jumping on board selling “polka hats” and “polka curtain ties”. The new fabric design got dubbed
“polka dots” and the name has stuck for no good reason at all.

The word polka seems to come from the Czech word půlka, meaning “little half”. That accurately describes the baby steps that are the signature of the polka dance.

• Source: The Word Detective (almost halfway down the page)

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Should I find myself at a fancy dinner party I cannot resist the urge to wet my finger and slide it around the rim of my wine glass. At least I would have trouble resisting the urge, if I were ever invited to such fancy dinner parties. The sound of a resonating wine glass is rather unique. If you could gather your friends around, each glass with varying amounts of liquid would produce different tones, resulting in an impromptu wine chorus. Again, I have to assume this would be a dinner party faux pas. However, at one time it was all the rage.

In 1761 the restless mind of Benjamin Franklin was attending a London concert featuring a wine glass soloist. The musician would have a large table of glasses in front of him arranged from low (empty) to high notes (nearly full of water). Franklin was an amateur musician himself (and in fact, believed full time professional musicians to be a parasite on society) so he put his engineering mind to work on solving the many practical problems of this wine glass arrangement.

First was the problem of tuning. As water evaporated, the notes from each glass would change. So he replaced the water glasses with crystal bowls. They would be permanently tuned like bells by their size and thickness. Next he collapsed the expansive table full of glass to something much more compact. All the crystal bowls were threaded on a long pole, the smaller bowls nesting inside the larger (not quite touching) to create an icicle-like arrangement.

Now the whole stack of bowls was made to rotate much like an antique foot-powered sewing machine. If a moistened finger were to rest along the edge of a bowl, the lovely tone would ease its way out with hardly any effort. It allowed for the uniquely soothing sound of the crystal glasses, with the practicality of a harpsichord keyboard. In fact, that’s what it was first called… the glassychord.

Soon after in his letters, Benjamin Franklin officially dubbed his creation the armonica, borrowing from the Italian word for harmony, and it is that name that stuck. (sometimes anglicised as “glass harmonica“)

There was nothing else that sounded like the armonica. It caught the fancy of Amadeus Mozart, who composed multiple pieces for the instrument. Alas, the only reason the armonica was largely lost to history was the matter of volume. As concert halls replaced parlours, instrument builders had to squeeze out more volume. Harpsichords became pianos, lutes turned into guitars, but the armonica could not get any louder.

According to the author of my source, there are only about a dozen armonica players in the world today. He should know. He’s one of them.

Bonus non-fact: I don’t know if it still counts as new-age hokum when we’re talking 18th century, but the sound of the glass armonica was (still is?) believed to have healing powers. One account tells how Franklin was able to cure a Polish Princess (she had “melancholia”… a.k.a. “grumpy pants”) simply by hearing him play the armonica. Of course, modern doctors would probably prescribe the banjo.

• Source: The website of William Zietler – GlassArmonica.com – to see and hear the armonica in action be sure to check out his page of videos

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When I visited Buffalo, NY I was given a souvenir kazoo. Since 1912, they’ve been the promised land of kazoo making. Well, technically it’s the tiny town of Eden, just south of Buffalo, that is home to the Original American Kazoo Company.

Just to be safe, I will back it up here and explain what a kazoo is. (they don’t always teach this important stuff in schools, ya know) It’s an instrument. About four inches long. Looks kinda like a submarine. You hum (don’t blow) in one end so a little piece of wax paper will buzz.

Interesting to note, it’s technically classified as a membranophone, which other than the kazoo is a group entirely made up of drums. The fact is the kazoo is really a wax paper drum, but instead of hitting it the vibration is produced by your humming.

While the kazoo as we know it is an American invention (circa 1840s in Georgia) the concept goes back much, much further. The ancient ancestor of the kazoo, called a mirliton, goes back to the dawn of human kind.

A hollowed bone or horn with a hole in the middle would replace the plastic tube, and a skin or… get this… spider egg sac membrane(!) would take the place of wax paper. It’s original use was for special effects. The shaman would use it to create the unusual sound of other-worldly voices in religious ceremonies.

We’ve come a long way from that to this…

This recording by The Mound City Blowers from 1923 was the first ever to include a kazoo, and it sold a million copies.

Since the 20s, nobody has given the kazoo much credit. Despite it’s mystical roots, it’s now relegated to the realm of a toy. The most action it’s seen in the last century was with a special appearance on Eric Clapton’s “Unplugged” album.

• Source: The Kazoo – Physics, History, and Musical Importance

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I’d like to start off by saying that a CD (compact disc) works very much like a vinyl record, but I’m afraid it would be almost as current to say a CD works much like a telegraph machine. Still, I’ll soldier on with my record analogy, since they both store music (data) in a very similar fashion.

The music on a CD is recorded onto a path (a “groove” in vinyl-speak) that spirals around the disc for about five kilometers. Opposite to a record, the spiral starts in the center of the disc and winds it’s way out. In order to keep things moving at a steady pace, the disc spins at 500 RPM when it’s reading near the center, and slowly decreases to 200 RPM as it gets to the outer edge. The stream of data on the path remains constant.

The groove on a vinyl record is analog; a series of detailed bumps wherein the larger the bump the louder the noise. On a CD, the digital data is recorded in a binary form, meaning a series of zeros and ones, either off or on. A laser beam is focused onto the track, which reflects back from the shiny aluminum surface of the disc. Reflecting back is a one… “on”. To record data, a stronger laser has burned a little pit onto the shiny surface. When the reading laser passes that pit, it does not reflect back, indicating a zero or “off”.

So the factually correct response to “Hey what do you think of this new Vanilla Ice album?” was indeed “It’s the pits“.

If you speed the process up to 44,100 of these reflection tests per second, we can start to hear the music. The binary signal of zeros and ones is read and translated back into analog music for our speakers to rock out.

Another interesting fact for those wanting to take good care of your CDs and DVDs… the shiny side of the disc is actually better protected than the label side. There’s more plastic protecting the shinyand fragile aluminum surface. So you’re better off to set the discs shiny-side down.

• Source: http://www.copy-cd.biz/technical-area/compact-discs-explained.jsp

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This week there was a lot of hub-bub about “unfriend” becoming the new word of the year. I’ve got nothing against new words, but I do think about all the good old words that are getting pushed out. For example, I’m going to make an effort to this week to pay homage to the great word of the past… hunky-dory.

Hunky-dory is a slang phrase that basically means that something is good, in a safe, reliable way. So when “everything is hunky-dory” it means things are going well, but let’s not make a big fuss about it. It’s quite certain that the word is an American made term which popped up in the 1850s, however the original inspiration is still fuzzy.

A vaudeville entertainer by the name of Japanese Tommy took credit for introducing the term through his performances, but as the word became popular so quickly, it’s tough to nail down. He was definitely not Japanese, though… he was a black dwarf billed as being “three feet broad and three feet long”. He performed as a songster and contortionist, and generally made appearances as a “novelty”.

The word hunky is certainly of Dutch origin, as it started from honk meaning home or goal in a game of tag. (the equivalent of “home-free”) Eventually the it evolved to mean safe and good. The term hunker down comes form the same lineage, and in fact a couple decades before hunky-dory, the saying hunkem-bunkem was used to mean “okay”.

There may truly be a Japanese connection from the word dori to mean a main street. In Yokohama there is a main thoroughfare called Honcho-dori that runs through the center of town down to the port. As sailors arrived, they’d be able to find all the good stuff on this strip. These American sailors, who first started arriving in Japan around 1850, would have known the word hunky already, so it’s not a big stretch to turn Honcho-dori into hunky-dori… “the good street”.

Wherever it started, the word was in popular use by 1868 when the hit-song “Josiphus Orange Blossom” was published. This was the day when a hit-song was measured by the sale of sheet music. It was a novelty song about a black man (a newly liberated slave at the time) who thought himself quite the ladies man.

My name it is Josiphus Orange Blossom,
I’m the gayest colored ge’man in the land.
With the pretty girls I always plays the possum.
I’m a red-hot hunky-dory contraband.

• Source: http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-hun2.htm

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If you haven’t heard the name Django Reinhardt in the last 70 years, it’s about time you do. It’s not everyday an artist is able to create and define an entire genre with such mastery that now, over 60 years after his death, jazz guitarists are still trying to sound like him. Gypsy jazz, or in French, jazz manouche, has stayed with us and for the most part still lives in the 1920 – 1940 period in which it thrived.

And now, for your listening pleasure while you read, I present “Old Man River” played by Django Reinhardt, Stephane Grappelli, and the Hot Club de France!

When Django was 18 he was caught up in a fire that took away his left pinky and ring finger. They ended up permanently curled and unable to move. Despite this obvious handicap for a guitar player, who normally rely on their dexterous flying fingers to make the right notes in the right places, he spent his recovery time in the hospital with his guitar learning how to compensate. He managed just fine, resulting in a unique style that most four-fingered musicians cannot match.

His style of jazz played many “old standards” (even in the 1930s) with a quintet of only strings. He played lead guitar. There was usually two rhythm guitars, who essentially replaced the job of a drummer, and a stand-up bass. The other defining character of gypsy jazz, and equally talented, was the violinist Stephane Grappelli. The melodies were tossed back and forth between the violin and lead guitar, driven by la pompe (the pump) of the steady rhythm section.

It was called “gypsy jazz” because Django was indeed a gypsy living in France. That is, the Romani people more commonly known as gypsies. While they are usually on the pointy end of many negative stereotypes, they do accept the Gypsy moniker. (which originated from the inaccurate belief their ancestry came from Egypt) The musical influence of the Romani culture is very pervasive throughout Europe, not just in jazz, but the traditional music of Bulgaria and many other Slavic nations.

With the popularity of gypsy jazz, that influence has spread across the world with many, many imitators. You’ll find many inspired musicians performing as the “Hot Club of (insert town)”, and many groups and albums such as “Pearl Django”, “Django Lives” and the christmas album “Django Bells”.

• Source: http://www.dougmartinguitar.com/gypsy_jazz.html
• Music: courtesy of http://www.archive.org/details/DjangoReinhardt-51-60
• More about the Gypsy people: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romani_people

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Yankee Doodle is probably the most famous song from American history. Sing along with me now… let me hear you in the back!

Yankee Doodle went to town
Riding on a pony,
Stuck a feather in his cap
And called it macaroni.

Yankee Doodle keep it up,
Yankee Doodle dandy,
Mind the music and the step,
And with the girls be handy.

Although this song is revered as a part of American culture, its original intent was to make fun of Americans! If we dissect the words it reveals some interesting facts about the origin of this song.

The word Yankee may have come from Dutch colonists in the new world, referring to their colonial British neighbours. The Dutch nickname Janneke (the J is pronounced as a Y), translates to “Johnny” and would have been used in the same respect as “Jack”, or “Buster” when talking to a stranger. Another theory suggests it originates with the Cherokee word eankke, meaning coward. Either way… not very nice.

Doodle is another not-so-nice term, meaning the same thing as country bumpkin, hillbilly, or hick. So we have this Johnny guy who has the nerve to ride into town on a donkey. What an un-cultured oaf! But wait, there’s more… This Yankee Doodle fellow is soooo un-cultured… (how un-cultured is he?) …He dares stick a feather in his cap and call that macaroni? Oh, this is ripe for parody.

The macaroni in question has nothing to do with pasta. Rather, macaroni was a popular British term of the era used to describe men who took fashion to ridiculous heights. Also known as fops, popinjays, or dandies (which comes into our song in the chorus), they would typically be known for their extravagant dress and comically tall powdered wigs. (they often required a stick to remove their hats) The modern day equivalent, though not near as extreme, would be called a metrosexual.

The song dates back to the Seven Years’ War between France and Britain in North America, where American colonists (who technically weren’t quite Americans yet) fought alongside British soldiers. This song was originally sung by the British to poke fun at their colonial counterparts who were seen as scruffy, disorganized and generally not near as culturally sophisticated as the Europeans.

Throughout the years the specific verses changed to meet the needs of the singer, often becoming a parody of a specific event. In the American Revolutionary war, the song was changed by the British to become more aggressive and taunting against the Americans, but was soon flipped around and used to taunt right back.

One things is for sure, guys. Feathers in caps equals fashion faux-pas.

• Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yankee_Doodle

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