How Stevie got groovy
QUESTION Stevie Wonder used a clavinet to produce the groove on his record Superstition. What other tracks have used this musical instrument? STEVIE Wonder’s Superstition is one of the catchiest jam tunes of all time, and for good reason.
It’s a simple progression with a catchy hook and a supremely funky groove – all courtesy of his beloved D6 clavinet.
In the late Fifties and Sixties, Hohner, the German manufacturer of musical instruments, famous for its harmonicas and accordions, began experimenting with portable keyboards.
Its first effort was the cembalet. Inspired by the harpsichord, it had strings that were plucked. This was followed by the painet, in which keys activated a sticky pad that, on release, vibrated a reed.
The cembalet was designed by Ernst Zacharias who, in 1964, produced his first clavinet. It was based on the late 14th-century clavichord, which produced sound by striking brass or iron strings with small metal blades called tangents. Clavichords were impractically quiet; the clavinet got round this by replacing the tangents with hammers that hit the string when a key was depressed. The string vibration reached magnetic pick-ups for a sound that could be amplified.
Not only did it produce a magical percussive twang across five octaves of 60 keys, but notes could be sustained and the volume could be varied depending on how much pressure was applied.
The clavinet’s hammered strings produced an unmistakably funky sound. Stevie Wonder also used it to great effect on tracks such as Higher Ground and You Haven’t Done Nothin’. If you listen closely to Sweet Little Girl from Stevie Wonder’s Music Of My Mind album, you can hear him mumble: ‘You know your baby loves you more than I love my clavinet.’
The Isley Brothers, Parliament/ Funkadelic, Bill Withers, Marvin Gaye, Bobby Womack, Earth, Wind & Fire, Billy Preston, The Commodores and countless other funk artists have used the ‘clav’. The pulse of the clavinet was also used in reggae, for example on Bob Marley’s breakthrough Catch A Fire album in 1973, and featured on classic tracks from I Shot The Sheriff to Could You Be Loved.
In the Seventies, it crossed into many genres, including prog rock (Pink Floyd’s Have A Cigar and Gentle Giant’s Free Hand); jazz fusion (Steely Dan’s Kid Charlemagne); and soul (Chaka Khan’s Tell Me Something Good, which was composed by Steve Wonder). Jack Holmes, York. QUESTION Has anyone calculated how far a hamster runs at night on a wheel? THIS has been studied in some depth. The 1998 article Voluntary Wheel Running: A Review And Novel Interpretation, in the journal Animal Behaviour, states that a hamster will run as far as 5.6miles in a night.
Other rodents are highly motivated to run in wheels.
Twenty-four-hour records include 27miles for rats, 19miles for wild mice, 12miles for lemmings, 9.9miles for laboratory mice and five miles for gerbils. Just why they do this has yet to be fully explained. Historically, it was thought to be abnormal repetitive behaviour caused by the boredom of captivity.
However, scientists found rodents exhibit this behaviour on wheels installed in open fields. Current research suggests wheel running releases feelgood chemicals such as endorphins or endocannabinoids, chemicals associated with the runner’s high. Dr Ian Smith, Cambridge. QUESTION I’ve seen a T-shirt with the slogan: ‘The future is intersectional.’ What does this mean? INTERSECTIONALITY is a sociological theory describing multiple discrimination when an individual’s identity overlaps with a number of minority classes, such as race, gender, age, ethnicity and health. The term ‘intersectionality’ was coined in 1989 by Kimberle Crenshaw, a civil rights activist and legal scholar.
In a paper for the University of Chicago Legal Forum, she claimed that traditional feminist ideas and anti-racist policies exclude black women who face overlapping discrimination unique to them. The intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism. The theory has been criticised for promoting a culture of victimhood and described as ‘identity politics on steroids’, where every aspect of modern life is filtered through discrimination.
US political commentator David A. French described it thus: ‘While there’s not yet an apostle’s creed of intersectionality, it can roughly be defined as the belief that oppression operates in complicated, interlocking ways.
‘So the experience of, say, a white trans woman is different in important ways from the experience of a black lesbian.’ Nancy Johnson, Hampshire. QUESTION George W. Bush’s moving eulogy to his father ended with: ‘Dad is hugging Robin and holding Mom’s hand again.’ Who was Robin? PAULINE Robinson (‘Robin’) Bush was the second child of George and Barbara Bush. Born in California on December 20, 1949, she was named after her late grandmother, who had been killed in a car crash a few weeks earlier.
Aged three, she was diagnosed with leukaemia. The family moved to New York for treatment, but to no avail. Robin died on October 11, 1953, aged three.
After her death the Bush family established the Bright Star Foundation for leukaemia research. Robin’s grave is in the grounds of the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library, and her parents have been interred next to her. Christopher Horne, Watford. QUESTION The hole in the top of a ballpoint pen is, in fact, a safety feature. What other items have a purpose we are not aware of? WEARERS of Converse trainers may have noticed two extra lace holes on each side of the shoe.
While they allow air to circulate, they were designed to enable secure or creative lacing, which is useful when playing basketball. Ian Fuller, Shropshire.
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