Ted Gioia shares the latest installment in his series of essays on “Visionaries of Sound”, this time around about Leo Kofler, a man who Gioia says cured himself with music. At 23 years old, Kofler had been diagnosed with tuberculosis, a disease that killed most of his family. Kofler wasn't really much of singer, is appears, but what he did well was a breathing technique he developed. Kofler would live well into his seventies. Read the interesting story.

Music writer Ted Gioia has made a selection of the best online articles and essays published in 2023, including ones on music topics. Goia, among others, recommends “I Started Playing My Sax Outdoors. Then the Fans Came” by Harvey Dickson from the New York Times, “The Origins of Creativity” by Louis Menand from The New Yorker, as well as “How Alice Cooper Cleaned Up and Became a Pop Star All Over Again” by Dave Everley from the Louder Sound.

Music writer Ted Gioia recalls singer-songwriter Nick Drake who would have turned 75 today. "Drake is now more than a music star, almost an emblematic figure. And I say with some sorrow, but with complete conviction, that his life and times remind me of so many people nowadays who have been cast adrift in our society—suffering in ways spookily reminiscent of what he experienced fifty years ago."

"When I first studied philosophy, the course began with Socrates—he was the originator of Western rationalist thinking, or so I was told. You can draw a direct line from him to analytic logic and the codification of a scientific worldview. But where did Socrates get the idea of philosophizing? Strange to say, he got it from music" - music writer Ted Gioia argues in his new book 'Music to Raise the Dead'.

The season of summer festivals is fast approaching with all the great music, and the pollution it produces, Consequence spoke with a number of experts in the festival and environmental fields looking into the possibilities of carbon neutral activities and solutions:

A host city with a large and interested population - reduces the need for distant travel

Public transit options - the most effective travel option

Access to a clean-energy municipal grid - avoiding big diesel generators

Camping can help reduce electricity usage and transportation emissions from commuters

Cutting out meat and other animal products

Plentiful water refill stations are also a must, to stave off dehydration and the use of disposable bottles

Rethinking festival hours - a festival that runs from 11:00 am to sundown could do away with lighting entirely

Music writer Ted Gioia remembers one essential bit of advice saxophonist Jimmy Giuffre gave him on organizational theory. "He explained that musicians played better when they were happier. Now that was a word I’d never heard in organizational theory class. Giuffre continued to spell it out for me—surprised that I couldn’t figure this out for myself. Didn’t I know that people are always happier when they were with their friends? So group productivity is an easy problem to solve. In other words, if my three best buddies played bongos, kazoo, and bagpipe, that should be my group."

Online music school Soundfly shares an interesting article about birds' singing and why they do it. Soundfly is looking for reasons for the beautiful bird habit, such as trying to draw attention, communicating, avoiding troubles, or just having pure fun.

Music writer Ted Gioia shares a news section from his new book 'Music to Raise the Dead' about musicians being the first heroes, and songs as their superpower. He based his theory on ancient texts from Mahābhārata, the Bible, and others. How did it come to this? "Songs tap into a power that transcends representation... For many individuals, music is their only pathway into ecstatic mindstates. And even for the adept who has mastered the journey, the song is often the most important thing brought back from the trip—or, in many cases, music served as the engine that propelled it forward in the first place."

4/20 - the international counterculture holiday based on the celebration and consumption of cannabis - is coming, so Consequence marijuana lovers have put together "an essential list of the 50 Best Stoner Albums from the worlds of pop, hip-hop, electronic, rock, and heavy metal". The list starts with Black Sabbath's 'Master of Reality', and finishes with Tame Impala's 'Lonerism'.

The music writer and romance expert is trying to understand and/or explain why do young people see jazz as romantic: "Romance has been rationalized in our lives, much like a factory process. All the unnecessary steps get bypassed. And from a purely pragmatic point of view, swiping through profiles on a phone app seems far more efficient than a slow, ritualized process of courtship and romantic bonding... There’s a death of enchantment in our culture—that’s the best term I can come up with for this phenomenon... In this situation, jazz starts to play an unusual role. It gets associated with the last generation that did romantic body-contact dancing on a regular basis. It’s perceived as the soundtrack for the ritualized apparatus of courtship. Just hearing it magically summons a nostalgic longing for a more romantic age".