Get a free Glendale Library, Arts & Culture Library eCard instantaneously. It can be used to access online resources including eBooks, eAudiobooks, eNewspapers, eMagazines, online classes, online tutoring, and learning games, as well as streaming movies and music, and more!
Music Playlists
Listen to a streaming playlist from Freegal Music, Naxos Music Library, Naxos Jazz Music Library, Hoopla or Music Online from Alexander Street free with your library card. Alexander Street will ask for an academic institution, use Glendale Public Library.
Today's recommending listening is Camila Cabello, Bob Marley, violin sonatas by Prokofiev, and Miles Davis.
Document Records is a record label based in Scotland that reissues old blues, jazz, gospel, bluegrass and other American Roots recordings. Their catalog is massive and Alexander Street's Music Online has 800 titles from their catalog. To listen, log-in with your library card.
Music Podcasts
Sounds To Grow On is a podcast from Michael Asch of Smithsonian Folkways featuring recordings from the original Folkways catalog. The record company was founded in New York by Michael’s father Moses Asch in 1948 and focused on folk, world and children’s music. The label was acquired by the Smithsonian Institution in 1987. Folkways Recordings and Smithsonian Folkways recordings are on Alexander Street’s Music Online.
Switched on Pop is a podcast hosted by Musicologist Nate Sloan and songwriter Charlie Harding. To quote them “We break down pop songs to figure out what makes a hit and what is its place in culture. We help listeners find “a-ha” moments in the music.” Recent episodes have included Korean Hip Hop, power ballads, death of the chorus and the women’s rap renaissance.
Learn About Music
Let’s go on a world percussion journey. Join Delton Davis on a World Percussion Journey Monday February 8, 4:30pm, as he shares all different types of drums and how to play them. You can ask him questions and drum along. Explore more through our Be the Change series.
Streaming Music
The Chamber Music Newsletter for Southern California is weekly and includes lots of local classical concerts you can view online. You can also subscribe via email and it is free.
Add some tropical coral reef vibes to your screens and warm up your day with 12 hours of Indo-Pacific fishes, soft corals, and anemones from the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Splash Zone gallery! Want more long - form content to relax to? The Littoral Relaxocean playlist is for you. Looking for Krill Waves Radio with lofi hip hop beats? Here you go. Or try Morning MeditOceans, guided meditations with the ocean.
Online Exhibit
Reckoning: Racism & Resistance in Glendale unfolds through six weekly episodes. A multi-dimensional and multi-faceted virtual exhibition, public art installation and community engagement project that examines and responds to Glendale’s racist history, the resistance to that racism and our current moment of reckoning.
Learn About Art
Explore a wide range of events from the Smithsonian Institute in celebration of Black History Month. Try Art AfterWords: A Book Discussion Group, do some crafts with the African American History and Culture Museum Kids: Joyful Fridays, or try a live, interactive docent tour.
Letter Art
How to be a Street Artist with Apexer. San Francisco-based artist Apexer, aka Ricardo Richey, shares how letters from your signature can transform into “writing in a tag style, to a more three-dimensional form, to fully abstracting letterforms. He also explains the connection between street art sketching and spray painting” in this 2016 KQED Art School video. Watch it as a prompt for creating your own lettering styles.
Check out W. A. Dwiggins: A life in Design from the Letterform Archive. Often credited with inventing the term "graphic design," W. A. Dwiggins was a quintessential maker — fabricating his own tools, inventing techniques, and experimenting with design in areas as wide-ranging as modular ornament, stamps, currency, books, kites, marionettes, and theatrical sets and lighting.
Large Scale Art Dance
Change, follows the artists who traveled to Ferizaj in September 2020 for Mural Fest Kosovo, as they immerse themselves in local life and engage with the city’s youngest residents through workshops and school initiatives that directly involved the children and teens in the creative process. Their resulting artworks are a reflection of these interactions and large-scale depictions of the area’s ecology, citizens, and cultural milieu.
Artist Shantell Martin draws stream-of-consciousness drawings on walls, cars, shoes, shirts, motorcycle helmets, pianos and more, often in front of live audiences. Martin explains her process and her visual language of line drawings, influenced by her experience as an avant-garde live-performance artist in Japan, in the 2013 profile by The New Yorker, Follow the Pen.
Brand Library Staff Reviews
Spider-Man: Miles Morales Vol. 1. Comic book aficionados already know who Miles Morales is, but this collected volume is the perfect introduction for the rest of us. Miles has taken up the mantle of Spiderman, and when he's not busy palling around with the Avengers and saving the universe, he keeps it local and fights crime in New York. He spends his weekdays boarding at the prestigious Brooklyn Visions Academy with his best friends/roommates Judge and Ganke and hanging with his gal Barbara; weekends are spent with his supportive parents, who know his superhero secret. This collection of adventures has all the typical fun comic book stuff you would expect: glorious action spreads, amusing smack talk, shady conspiracies, references to other comics, outstanding artwork, etc. But what really sells this, aside from Miles, who is immediately likeable and relatable, is the showcasing of currency and place. The way Brooklyn is drawn feels like Brooklyn, and the crisis at the US-Mexico border is a big thematic reference point in one of the stories. The series features lovely character work; one stand-out bit sees Miles finding a surprising connection with a "supervillain" and then helping a befuddled Captain America with an app on his phone. It is also outstanding in its representations of people of color. There isn't a single white main character, which is incredibly refreshing. And no, the slightly deranged assistant principal of Visions Academy and his sweet, motherly secretary, walking nods to equivalent characters in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, don't count. Miles Morales (Volumes 1 AND 2!) are available on Hoopla. -LD
Attica Blues. In 1972, tenor saxophonist Archie Shepp, a major figure in the development of avant-garde jazz, created the black protest album Attica Blues as a musical response to the 1971 Attica Prison riot. The riot at the Attica Correctional Facility in Attica, NY ended with the massacre of 43 inmates and hostages by state authorities. It was the peak of the black power movement, and Afrocentric jazz captured the racial unrest of the time. Performed by singers and jazz orchestra, the opening track is a psychedelic power funk jam that grabs the listeners by the ears as it cries out for black liberation. The opening lyric, “I got the feeling that's something's goin' wrong and I'm worried ‘bout the human soul” sets the tone for this musically complex, multi-dimensional masterpiece of Afro-American artistry. Incorporating jazz, blues, funk, soul, R&B and big band elements, the album transitions seamlessly from agitating power jam to spoken word poetry to melodic ballad. From the moving urban funk opening track to the haunting, soulful ballad that closes this underappreciated jazz tour de force, Attica Blues is a passionate, effortlessly flowing work of art. An excellent, in-depth review of the album can be found at Pitchfork. -PR
Carolina Chocolate Drops - Leaving Eden (2012, deluxe edition). This 2012 album was the last release by this Grammy winning old time string band from North Carolina. The individual members continue to perform and record but as a band they have since been mostly inactive. I reviewed Rhiannon Giddens 2019 album There is No Other in a previous issue and she was recently named artistic director of the Silkroad Project. If you saw the movie Give Me The Banjo you will see Giddens and former member Dom Flemons in the film. When this album was recorded, the core of the group consisted of the trio of Giddens (vocals, 5-string banjo, 5-string cello banjo, fiddle), Flemons (vocals, 4-string banjo, guitar, various percussion) and Hubby Jenkins (vocals, mandolin, 5-string banjo, guitar, percussion) with guest musicians. A lot of traditional tunes arranged by band members but also songs by Ethel Waters, Etta Baker, Hazel Dickens, and Cousin Emmy with a couple of original tunes. Hubby’s whistling on No Man’s Mama is fun with Rhiannon singing about the joys of divorce. Read ‘Em, John is traditional from the South Carolina Sea Islands with call and response. There is so much infectious energy on this album and it covers a lot of musical history. The booklet is very helpful and includes notes. This deluxe edition has 4 additional pieces and their version of Run-D.M.C.’s You Be Illin’ is just a blast. -BW
Covid-19 Resources
Reliable information about the coronavirus (COVID-19) is available from the World Health Organization, the California Department of Public Health, the Los Angeles County Public Health Department, the City of Glendale, and the Library, Arts & Culture department.
Resources for Music Businesses And Industry Workers, Playing for Change, Sounding Point LA
Resources for Freelance Artists, California Arts Council, Americans for the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts
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