Old Ex Cathedra

There’s no need either for music to make people think! … It would be enough if music could make people listen….”

Debussy to Paul Dukas.

I found it here

The 27th anniversary of the death of this titan of Jazz occurred a little over a month ago, and to this day, words simply cannot describe the depth of his artistry.  His music has always been the best representation, as evidenced by a video clip I recently was made aware of, recorded a month before his death in 1980.  The composition is entitled “Your Story.”

Listening to this for the first time, I was reminded of my astonishment during my initial viewing of Ken Burns’ landmark documentary on Jazz, in which Evans, though clearly in the Top 10 all-time in terms of musical influence, was only mentioned for his role as a sideman on Miles Davis’ “Kind Of Blue” album.  I know this is the best-selling jazz album ever, but one only has to listen to the interview Bill Evans gave after the 1980 concert to understand the depth to which this album, even in 1980, had become a musical cliché.

And since the kindly Rev recently mentioned Stan Kenton, Burns also ignored the tremendous contributions of both Stan and Woody Herman to the big band evolution of jazz.  Why would he do this?  Mostly due to the fatal flaw of using Wynton Marsalis as his primary musical consultant, a man whose arrogance is only exceeded by his ignorance of the essence of this music.  The other fatal flaw is attributable to Burns himself, who chose to frame his entire film around the same theme he used for his films on the Civil War and Baseball: Race.

Ironically, it was Race that led Burns to concoct the fictional story of Jazz essentially dying after the passings of Armstrong and Ellington, only to be heroically resuscitated in the early 1980’s by . . . wait for it . . . Wynton Marsalis.  This account allowed Burns to ignore every prominent jazz artist of the last forty years, because his major theme no longer applied nearly as powerfully as it did describing the heydays of the music’s early pioneers.  Meanwhile, the Michael Brecker’s, the Pat Metheny’s, and the Maria Schneider’s didn’t exist in the highly ethnocentric world created for Burns by Marsalis.

But this is not the real reason I chose to create this blog entry.  Getting back to Evans, I am reminded of the huge differences even among jazz fans concerning what elements are linked to a favorable listening impression.  I have met some people with encyclopedic knowledge of Jazz, who only respond to those performers who demonstrate either an unearthly facility on their instrument, or play their instrument with a mechanical perfection.  Others enjoy being hit over the head with their Jazz, responding to anything that is high, fast and loud.  Still others have a myopic sense as to what is truly Jazz, concentrating their affections on one facet of the evolution, and ignoring all others.  And finally, and most sadly, there are those who are convinced that what they enjoy is Jazz, but have been duped by the often financially successful genre known as Smooth Jazz.

There can be no dispute that Bill Evans was magnificent.  His completely original style of playing and composing, along with his no-nonsense commitment to exploring the maximum potential for expression in Jazz, clearly make him a member of a club Duke Ellington was a charter member of: Beyond Category.

For more info on all things Bill Evans, here’s a link to a suitable repository on the web.

I’ve mentioned Terry Vosbein before. Besides being a classical composer and Stan Kenton scholar, he’s accumulated his share of street cred by playing on the Glenn Miller band.

On a Stan Kenton list we both belong to, the discussion turned to Stan’s provision in his will that no Kenton “Ghost Band” ever be permitted. And some of the list members noted that occasionally ghost bands would play newer works, but always in the style of the original.

Terry picked that moment to reveal what I’d have to say was a true musical horror:

Indeed. When i was on the band the ones that slipped through were: You Light Up My Life, along with disco versions of In The Mood and String Of Pearls and a polka version of Stars and Stripes Forever.

Eeeewwwwwww! But I brought myself up short. Terry had in fact played on a well known professional band and had earned that position. So I could curl my lip all I wanted; Terry could just smile.

And it reminded me of the story Mike Vax told about his first gig as a member of the Kenton band. Larry Welk, it seems, was a stone Kenton fan. Mind you, he knew he couldn’t play Stan’s music in his own band; he had a strong enough sense of economic self preservation to know that the musical world could afford at most one band playing Stan’s music. But he sure did love to listen. And every now and then Larry and Stan would book a joint performance together.

And so when Mike joined the band, it turned out his first performance was on one of those gigs.

The gig was a summertime dance at a country club, where they’d built a stage over the pool. The two bands shared a drum set and alternated playing, 45 minutes or so per band. It was a good deal for the audience, who got nearly continuous music, and it was an even better deal for the country club staff, who didn’t have to chase drunks out of the pool.

Unfortunately, the quality of construction for their platform wasn’t all it might have been, so about the third set, the stage wasn’t just feeling a little unstable. It was sinking. Stan, with his customary elegance, led the “abandon ship”.

And as the musicians squished off stage, Stan looked over at Mike, grinned, and said, “Welcome to the big time, kid.”

Because it’s time, and time won’t let me wait that long:

• First up, you remember the Village People’s approach to their music: very butch. A Finnish band, Gregorius, has an entirely different approach to “YMCA” [YouTube]. For once the YouTube comments are funny. One poster notes the heaven-sent coincidence of the last 2 letters of “YMCA” in Finnish, and another asks, “are any of those dudes single?” Tip of the hat to Patrick.
• You know how I’m no fan of Buddy Rich. But this live performance of “Love For Sale” [YouTube] from the 1988 band kicks so much ass, it shoved all my objections aside.
• The mighty Coleman Hawkins gives a forgettable tune “I Wish I Were Twins” [Dailymotion] an unforgettable performance. From a Jazz in the Netherlands film from 1935.
• A Vitaphone recording from 1929 of Tal Henry’s North Carolinians playing “Come On Baby” [Dailymotion]. I hadn’t heard of the band or the song, but this is just terrific.
• Jim Self introduces the Fluba!
• The current featured arrangement by Paul Villepigue. Currently it’s a chart he wrote for Johnny Bothwell in 1946, “From the Land of the Sky Blue Water”, but it’ll change as time goes by, and you’ll get to hear more from this underappreciated arranger. If you like, you can go to the archive and get caught up on the arrangements that have already appeared.
• Another find from my friend the talent scout’s pile of unsolicited demo tapes. This time it’s the inimitable Latilia Warren singing some contemporary Christian song [mp3] that sounds sorta like Prince. You have to wonder, why don’t we hear more music like this on the radio?

—————-
Now playing: Robert Glasper – Portrait Of An Angel

Maria, Maria, Maria, Maria!

Maria Schneider’s new CD went straight from the mailbox to the player and hasn’t left yet.

There’s two things that might help you into the world of this recording. First, the band was back from the premiere of “Cerulean Skies” less than a month when they went into the studio, so they had birds on the brain, and it shows up in solos on all the songs, not just the “bird song.” That’s a pretty good thing, actually. It suggests some new places the soloists might dig in their bag of tricks. Some of us may need to hear another reprise of Bird playing “Cherokee”, but most of us don’t. Well, not now, anyhow.

The second thing you might want to understand starts with the first song, “The ‘Pretty’ Road”, with the second word emphasized, as in “Daddy, can we drive back on the pretty road?”

The first 6 minutes were gorgeous; I put the CD in the player and big old tears started running down my cheeks. But then it got different. Why screw that lovely song up with all the effects and the other instruments not playing a chorus, but muttering in the background and improvising along with Ingrid Jensen? And sometimes they’d run the dry trumpet sound through a delay, so you’d hear the echoes first, so you have to listen to everything.

And that’s when it hit me. The first 6 minutes are good, but they’re the old way. Schneider is a brilliant composer, but the reason she’s writing for a jazz orchestra and not a symphony orchestra is that she’s writing living music.

Living music is about improvisation. But it’s also about that will-o’-the-wisp simultaneous improvisation and whole-band improvisation. Bill Russo tried it. Willie Maiden took some steps forward. [Later: I must be too old to be a music critic. I missed Gil Evans, Carla Bley...] Recently Kim Richmond has had the most success with it. Now there’s a new master in town: Maria Schneider.

And that’s what the last 7 minutes of “The ‘Pretty’ Road” is about. Does that mean the last 7 minutes is an amorphous hodgepodge? People, pay attention, this is Maria Schneider we’re talking about. The fade out at the end (perhaps the swarm of fireflies breaking up for the night, perhaps the child going to sleep) remains true to the living nature of the music; it doesn’t stick the solo into a box, put it up on the shelf, and forget about it.

That’s what the whole album is about. Gil Evans wrote about half of what appeared on his albums (toward the end, even less) and figured the band would come up with the rest. Schneider is doing the same thing, but with music that has a symphonic sweep and range. Don Ellis used to rewrite arrangements live on the stand. And you remember Milt Bernhart’s famous story about Duke Ellington. But this is larger scale. Maria has all the tools in hand to do it except maybe a band that works every night; in the 21st century that may be impossible, but she’s kept her band together a remarkably long time with very few personnel changes. And so she’s started down that road anyway. What a ride it’s going to be.

Just a few words about the rest of the album. “Aires de Lando” is one of those rhumba-like things of hers that I always treat as routine and ignore, until I find it sneaking up on me, and then it becomes one of my favorites. There’s some crunchier time signatures here than she’s used before, and it’s already started to worm its way past my inattention.

Flying pace now: “Rich’s Piece” — how low can you go? My God! those low chords! “Cerulean Skies” — on a trumpet players’ board, one of the writers said it changed his life. I think he’s right. Lots more tears, lots of living music to listen to. This will take a while before I even figure out where everything is. I won’t mind. And “Sky Blue”: she says in the notes that it’s almost a pop song, but once again, living music. And even more tears.

You’ve probably figured this out: this is music so beautiful that you’re gonna cry a lot listening to it. Get ready. And get ready to remember years from now what you were doing when you first heard this album.

Get it at ArtistShare.

15. God, what a kick playing all those great Glenn Miller stock arrangements.
14. I love it when the trumpet players lay back like that…it makes playing drums so easy.
13. Wow, everyone played perfectly in tune all night long, again.
12. The leader got all the tempos exactly right, again!
11. Why is that cigarette shaped so funny?
10. Should we go back for the drummer?
9. Checkmate!
8. Go roll ‘em down the aisle all you want. They’re only cymbals.
7. So, I just walked her home, kissed her goodnight, and came back to the bus.
6. No, the monitor mix was perfect. I just screwed up.
5. Why is there porno in the VCR?
4. Can you believe all the money we’re getting?
3. Boy, I can’t wait till we get to Omaha!
2. No thanks, I don’t want another beer.
1. Ladies, I need to see some proof of age please.

I’ll be staying off the Intarwebs for the next couple of days, until the Harry Potter book arrives, just in case there’s some spoilers out there that I’d see by mistake.

Q: What’s the difference between a blues musician and a jazz musician?

A: A blues musician plays three chords in front of 1000 people. A jazz musician plays 1000 chords in front of three people.

But I like 1000 chords.

If you want to take a step away from the present world of ultra capitalism and globalization, take an easy step into the world of jazz in which unlike the rarefied worlds of classical and pop music, or the cynical worlds of banking, commerce and misdirected funds by means of “democratic” politics, the musicians respect each other and their audience as equals-belonging to and contributing to the community, showing that another type of world is possible. – Nigel Kennedy

A little while ago I wrote

if I had some catchy tunes and interesting harmonies and wrote lines that people would like to sing, choral writing might not be so hard after all. There’s one more secret, but I’m keeping that to myself.

In response to no demand at all, I’ll reveal that secret now. Well, not right now. First I’d like to say a few words about giving singers lines they want to sing.

For one thing, keep an eye on the tessitura. Tessitura is different from range. An average church choir soprano can sing comfortably between a middle C and the A just above the staff. But that doesn’t mean you can give her 10 minutes of unrelieved notes between that top A and the E a 4th lower. That qualifies in most states as soprano abuse. If you want to stretch your choir’s vocal limits, singing a few notes higher than the top A is much easier on the voice than a high tessitura. Even distinguished composers wrote parts with tessituras that tortured their singers, so don’t assume you’re immune. Sopranos sing the Beethoven 9th because it’s the Beethoven 9th; tenors sing the Messiah because it’s the Messiah. Chances are, they aren’t going to cut your piece that much slack.

Another problem is that altos and tenor parts are given the middle notes of chords, too often without much regard for what the lines are like to sing. There’s a reason why so much choral music is contrapuntal, you know. If you’re doing too much vertical writing, you’re probably doing it wrong. Just trying to sing from the parts you’ve written will correct the worst offenses against singability and musicality. You can also throw in a unison with the melody after long passages of chord middles and let the middle voices carry the melody when it gets into their territory. Do that and write contrapuntally when you can, and you’ll end up with a piece people want to sing.

And now to the secret: never, never, never end a phrase at the end of a measure.

Here’s what I mean. Example A shows the lazy way to end a phrase:

But you never want that! Either your phrase ends on the last beat of the measure, as in example B:

or the phrase carries over into the next measure, as in example C:

If you end the phrase as in example A, half your singers will end it as in B and the other half end it as in C.

Ask yourself: what’s happening exactly at the start of the next bar? Is the previous phrase done? Can the singers breathe, shuffle around, talk amongst themselves? Then end it as in example B. Or does the previous phrase carry over into the current bar? Then end it as in example C.

When you end a phrase as in example A, you’re telling the singers (or players — this is equally true for instrumental parts) that you don’t care when the phrase ends. Or worse, that you don’t know when it ends! When you end it as in example B or C, you’re telling the performers you know what you want.

One more tip from the trenches: the piece in the examples above isn’t finished. How do I know? Simple. Your piece isn’t done until you’ve written all the phrase markings. Phrase markings tell the singers and players that you had some intention, however badly it might miscarry, of making the piece musical.

And if there’s a place you absolutely don’t want your singers to breathe, I’ve found that singers respect a phrase mark over the bar line much more than they respect “N.B.!!!” Although occasionally I have to write above the barline, “I have a kitten in my pocket, and if you breathe here, I will strangle the kitten and it will be your fault.” Of course, if the singers really want to breathe at a particular place, you might want to consider whether they’re right and you’re wrong. One thing that can prevent unnecessary disgruntlement with phrases that are too long is to conduct the piece at tempo pretty early on.

What are your top musical experiences?

Here’s mine, in ascending order:

• Mike Vax, at the time the lead trumpet player for the Stan Kenton Orchestra, was visiting in our apartment after a gig. We were listening to a Don Ellis record, and when we got to a feature for Glenn Stuart, “Child of Ecstasy,” I said how I thought he was pretty good hitting a double-high D there. Mike said, that’s only a double-high C. I raised an eyebrow. He opened his case, pulled out his trumpet, played a double-high C (actually the last 3 notes of “Child of Ecstasy”, A, C, B), and put his trumpet back in its case.
• I once stood on the same stage as Norman Treigle. Beverly Sills called him the greatest singer she’d ever seen. He certainly was to me. I was in the chorus for Gounod’s Faust at Baltimore’s Lyric Opera. In fact, I wasn’t even in the chorus, I was in for one number, the Soldier’s Chorus. Treigle had a somewhat larger part. He was a little bitty guy, smoked like a chimney, and that voice! I don’t know where he kept it, but it certainly wasn’t inside that scrawny little body. Maybe he kept it in the tenor; he certainly had some room to spare, being not only beefy but dopey. Treigle’s voice commanded your attention. And his presence on stage as the evil Mephistopheles was absolutely spellbinding. When he did that part that sounds like “Angels we have heard on high” and spun around with his sword, the principals and supers and chorus who were on the stage drew back in genuine fear. Had he folded the tenor in his cape and flown away in a puff of sulphurous smoke, nobody would have been surprised. He carried the whole opera, and even the tenor knew to keep an eye on Treigle and everything would be all right. Every note passionate, every note perfectly under control, every note a glorious testimony to what the human voice can accomplish.
• I’m actually in this story. I’d done a very simple arrangement for our church choir of “I’ll Be Home For Christmas.” It seemed to go down well enough, so the next year I tried a larger piece, a setting of five carols associated (some very loosely) with Gustav Holst. As I ran it down with the choir, I realized that maybe I could do this choral writing stuff after all. There were some good bits in there, and no awkward places to speak of, even with all the tempo changes and setting changes. I didn’t get to conduct it. My company sent me to Sweden for a long stretch. But when I got back I discovered that they’d kept the piece in the program! They’d videotaped it, and I saw the video. But the rehearsals were enough to give me a little confidence that if I had some catchy tunes and interesting harmonies and wrote lines that people would like to sing, choral writing might not be so hard after all. There’s one more secret, but I’m keeping that to myself.
• Tulsa Arts Musicale had a chorus, a smaller chamber singers, and a quartet of soloists who actually got paid. Alex Montgomery was the bass in that quartet and he had a magnificent voice. The first time we met, he moved into the bass section next to me. The two of us discovered right away that we were the loudest people in the bass section. Which we took as a challenge, or perhaps as a damn good idea. I followed him in the Mozart Solemn Vespers, but in the Chichester Psalms, I’d had a lot more rehearsal time to get used to the 7/8 and 5/4 times, so I was driving the pair of us battle tanks down the road. At one point during the rehearsal we got carried away and the conductor had to say, “Bob and Alex, you’re drowning out the rest of the choir.” We looked at each other and giggled.
• And here’s my number one musical experience. Julie Melman was a friend of my father’s, who he’d known for many years in the McKeesport Symphony and the Pittsburgh Civic Symphony. One night my dad invited me to come over to Julie’s house to play some trios. We started off sightreading an easy piece, and as we came to the end there was a place where I thought we might put in a little bit of business, maybe a luftpause, can’t remember now. Anyhow, I looked around as we were coming up to the place, caught her eye and my dad’s, and we all did that little thing together. Julie looked over at my dad and said, “He can play.” I don’t know if she was just being polite, and I’m not going to talk about how the Haydn trio we played next laid me low. I heard her say, “He can play,” and I’m keepin’ it.

How about yours?

…or not.

The latest news from the front, as reported in the Washington Post

Since dropping news and talk programming for classical music in January, the Arlington public station has seen its fortunes soar. Ratings have more than doubled since the switchover from BBC and NPR reports to Bach and Brahms concertos. And perhaps just as important to WETA (90.9 FM), pledge contributions from listeners have been gushing.
…
The station’s early success suggests that classical music isn’t dead as a radio format, despite its long decline on commercial stations across the country. According to a study last year by the National Endowment for the Arts, only 28 commercial stations nationwide had a classical-music format in 2005. Public stations have gradually cut back on classical, jazz and other musical forms to focus on news and talk — exactly the opposite path that WETA has taken this year.

The gains of that change are borne out by WETA’s audience totals during the January-March quarter. According to the ratings service Arbitron — which releases figures for public stations separately from those of commercial stations — WETA captured 4.9 percent of the radio audience in Washington during the first quarter, up from 2.1 percent in the preceding three months, when WETA was a news-talk station. WETA carried mostly news and talk for a two-year period starting in February 2005.

Those numbers make WETA the region’s fifth most popular station, behind traditional powerhouses WHUR-FM (which plays hip-hop), WTOP-FM (all news), WPGC-FM (urban contemporary) and WMMJ-FM (R&B hits).

WETA picked up classical music again by adopting the WGMS commercial classical station’s crew when that station gave up classical music. The programming so far reflects that. There are 60 works programmed for today. Of those works, 23 of them are from just Mozart, Bach, Vivaldi, Haydn, Beethoven, and Tchaikovsky. And while there are some less familiar names, there’s not very much 20th C music in the mix. I suppose it is better than nothing…..

I wonder how many things I’ve picked up just because they were cool and I wanted to look cool, only to discover later that these pieces were actually good, and now I love them for different reasons.

I know I picked up Bartok’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta in 8th grade or so because my best friend Bill Hulley played it for me. Bill thought it was cool and about as far out as anything we’d ever heard. There may have been a station in Pittsburgh that played Bartok before 1958, but I think it would have been a rare event. He certainly wasn’t in the standard repertoire. I went along with Bill. While I treasured the dissonance then, nowadays I prize the old-world Mitteleuropean (remember, sweetie, everything to the East of the Danube is Asia) ambiance.

On the other hand, I got Bitches Brew, and my first reaction was “WTF???” but I kept it around, even leaving it out on my desk where others would appreciate my coolness — or possibly steal it. But after giving it more than a fair chance, I decided I hated it, and I hated it because it sucked. But being a good pseud, if you’d asked me before I finally decided to hell with it, I’d have probably said how cool it was.

One of my own fundamental passions, which I thankfully discovered early in life, is the pursuit of beauty. Not beauty which has to do with my own vanity, but rather beauty which is expressed in some kind of artistic way. The kind of beauty that represents the best that humanity can contribute to the universe.

Duke Ellington contributed many examples of beauty to humanity’s repertoire, including a little song entitled “On A Turquoise Cloud” from 1947. It helps a bit that this song was written in my favorite key of D flat, but for me each listening has always had a deeper effect on my soul, despite the corniness of the song’s title.

I have included a piano reduction (OATCDH), played by the very capable Dick Hyman, and also the original recording (OATCDE), featuring the hushed trombone of Lawrence Brown, and the wordless vocal of Kay Davis.

I will have much more to say about the nature of beauty . . . later. Feel free to begin the discussion now, if you wish.

Agaaaaaaain!

Anybody old enough to remember Lou Christie’s smasheroo from 1966?

OK, that one was easy. And certainly the Regents’ greatest hit trips right off your tongue (for the mere children among us, it was the cover version that really made it big a few years later). Now here’s a real test: “Bread and Butter” was the Newbeats’ first hit — and if you’re as old as me, you’ll remember the shock at discovering that the lead singer was a white guy. OK, everybody knows “Bread and Butter.” But without googling, can you name the Newbeats’ second hit?

The real reason for the post is, Lightning is about to strike. As is Sunbird. At long last, the Mozilla calendar project is about to release version 0.5. Keep your eye on the Mozila Calendar Weblog for news.

We may actually run out by next week. Some of these go back to 2004, when del.icio.us started, but I’ve checked to see the sites are still there, and hey,

Other guys imitate us
But the original’s still the greatest.

Without further ado, but promises of future adieu, let’s woot! Musically!

• What’s an opera? What’s an aria? What’s a Fach? The Aria Database tells all.
• Pictures of Music, a presentation by the Block Museum at Northwestern University on graphical music notation.
• Viragelic, algorithmically composed music. Let it run for a while; they introduce the parts one by one.
• Ishkur’s guide to electronic music. Well, dance-oriented popular music. The place to go when you want to find out the difference between Darkwave and Ibiza Trance.
• Rob Grayson’s Beatles A-Z: every Beatles song in alphabetical order. Done around 1980 with that miracle of technology, tape. And probably scissors.
• I’ve had this in my music links for ages, but evidently I never mentioned it here: AllAboutJazz. If you aren’t getting your daily does of jazz, it’s not their fault.
• EyesWeb is a research project and associated toolkit for annotating expressive gestures. Make a Lenny Bernstein Bot? Italian, but lots of material is in English.
• Howard Besser’s work on creative misuse and abuse of musical tools. “More broadly, though, I am interested in the ‘wrong’ use of musical technology in the production of music, and the semiotics of ‘wrong’ sounds.”
• Indie Jazz, specializes in jazz on indie labels and music that may prompt you to say “that’s not jazz.”
• Chris Myden’s guide on making good MP3s. It’s been around for a while, but I don’t think it’s been superseded by anything else out there. For a little more information, try the alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.* FAQ.
• Can’t get enough Mouldy oldies? Then you probably want the Hüsker Dü database.
• April Winchell collects, mashes, and creates some of the best and funniest multimedia on the web. She makes the rest of us look like narcoleptics.
• Furthernoise [warning: embedded audio and player]. Some folks simply don’t get noise. My son Robert is one. Me, I like it fine, which is why you might think I’m strange for suggesting that Sugar sounds like Freddie and the Dreamers. Furthernoise is definitely for noiseophiles, not noiseophobes.
• I found another ear trainer: good-ear.com. Lots of ads, though.
• And finally, the video that’s taking the Intarwebs by storm, You’ve seen this video for the dreadful disco song Apache [YouTube] (if not, grab some Tums and give it a spin). Now see the remix [YouTube].

• 1 Million Free and Legal Music Tracks, or so they allege. And it could be true.
• I’ve blogged about Music Thing before, but this looks pretty cool: Build your own synth. Or make plans to make your next weekend a pawnshop pilgrimage. I got my Yamaha analog synth for under US$100 when nobody in the shop could figure out how to get a sound out of it. It worked fine, of course, once I thought about what the knobs did.
• When was the last time you heard a protest song? Free, or perhaps ripped off.
• Some MIT kids analyzed Christmas songs and came up with A Singular Christmas: sometimes a joyful noise, sometimes another kind. Unlike a good bit of electronic music in general and algorithmic music in particular, I find it fascinating. Maybe I’m just a sucker for Christmas.
• CoverPages has a great collection of articles on XML and Music.
• Mel Bay’s Creative Keyboard Webzine. Mel Bay? Keyboard? Yup.
• Chuck Taggart has a brief introduction to alt.country/cowpunk/rural contemporary, whatever.
• A podcast that specializes in cover songs, Coverville. It’s apparently been going on forever, and wonder of wonders, they didn’t wipe out their archives. That’s a real enthusiast.
• Pik-Ware Publishing publishes books for string players, mostly guitar and banjo. Their weekly workshop covers bite-sized advanced playing topics. I haven’t found archives yet, but their blog looks like they know what they’re talking about.
• Classical Live Online Radio is a real convenient way to get connected to a good portion of the live classical music broadcasts on the net.
• Interpunk.com – The Ultimate Punk Music Store. Or so they claim. It feels seedy enough and stuffed with things that seemed like a good idea when they bought a case of them a while back to convince me that it’s run by enthusiasts.
• I’ve kept the link to Larrys Improv Page around for years, promising myself that I’d go inside enough to see if it was worth the trouble. Now it’s your turn.
• The Register reports optimistically on The slow death of DRM. Maybe optimism is justified.
• The New Scientist reports on how a bunch of kids at a Finnish university came up with an air guitar that actually plays. The article’s a little old. By this time they should have air strings that break and an air whammy bar that throws you out of tune.
• Know how I’ve been blogging about places you can find free sheet music? I’ve just discovered I’m a mere dilettante. Behold the Free Sheet Music Guide.
• Slashdot reports on how they decoded music from 600-year-old carvings in Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland. I’m not convinced the carvings really were a musical vocabulary, but it’s cool to hear anyhow.
• Mike Schwartz reports on efforts to pass the trombone control laws. How many deafened violists will it take before Congress acts? Gene Abkarian of KRFC adds “Sound the alarm…Contibute now to B.O.N.E. (Better Overtones Necessitate Euphoniums).”
• Remember Nora the piano playing cat? She has a sequel [YouTube].
• The official Wing website. You have to poke around to find more than snippets, but for sheer blood-curdling horror, you’re in the right place.
• But is horribilitude really something whose depths can be plumbed? What about this performance of Amazing Grace gone terribly, terribly wrong [YouTube]? Children, when the flesh is weak and the preparation is weak, stick a cork in the spirit.

A friend on a big band jazz list I belong to posted this:

With more major record labels cutting back, consolidating or eliminating their jazz divisions, the necessity of thinking small is greater than ever. – Copley News Service

Whereupon the Rev. was enlightened. And lo I observed my fingers and they were typing a reply.

Before we get to it, you need to know two quick things that were making the news: The International Association of Jazz Educators meeting was in progress, and Universal Music Group, the parent company of famous jazz label Verve had just slashed Verve’s sales staff.

Here’s an expanded version of what I said:

Jazz in general and big band jazz in particular are on the “long tail”.

If you don’t know what “long tail” is, get up from your deck chair, lean over the rail, and look at what’s painted on the bow. It’s “Titanic” isn’t it?

Find out about the long tail now! Here’s a good introduction to the topic on Wikipedia with some basic links. Read at least that introduction and the Chris Anderson article at Wired.

This is the blurb on the Anderson article: “Forget squeezing millions from a few megahits at the top of the charts. The future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream.”

See what I mean? You need to know this.

We’re living in a long tail world, and the corporations in the media cartel are stuck with a short tail business model. They’re fucked.

If you didn’t skip over all the commercials on the NFL playoffs, you saw an acknowledgment by yet another classic short tail company, Blockbuster, of just how fucked they are. They’re trying to cope with the nut-punches Netflix has been giving them by getting into the Internet mail order business themselves.

A short tail company trying to adopt a long tail technology? Forget it. They’re dogfood. If you’re looking to set up a nice indie coffee shop or ice cream store, call up Blockbuster’s real estate department. You’ll find some real bargains.

But be sure you do it soon. You don’t want to have to be dealing through the bankruptcy court.

[back to the Copley News Service article]

“It’s a major paradigm shift,” said Bill McFarlin, IAJE’s [International Association of Jazz Educators] executive director.

“It may not be as huge as the shift from silent movies to talkies, but it’s a big turning point. What you’re seeing is the result of a shift in the way music is produced and consumed, and in the way people pay for it. One thing IAJE is trying to do is create a dialogue about where we’re going. The survival of the recording industry will be very important for jazz.”

Bzzzzzzt! Sorry, Bill. The survival of the “recording industry” is not only inimical to jazz, as we’ve seen so many times, it’s irrelevant to jazz. And it’s not like the shift from silent movies to talkies, it’s bigger!

Unfortunately for starry-eyed dupes who are still in love with the old system, the fall of the media corporations is going to be ugly.

Verve is the latest victim. The folks who acquired them are trying to squeeze a few more drops of blood out of the corpse before they cast it aside. Why slash the sales staff? Geez, people, think! They’re going to bury their catalog in a rat-infested warehouse someplace and take depreciation on it for the next however many years the law allows. This is business, people! If the previous owners cared a nickel’s worth about Verve’s legacy, they were thoroughly fooled.

But that’s what big corporations do, isn’t it? Fool people. Considering how much damage to the public good will be done by sequestering the back catalogs of Verve and the other labels, maybe it’s time to start thinking about ways within the legal and legislative systems that the public can ensure that these corporations live up to their obligation of stewardship.

Forget the media cartel. Build alternative distribution networks like ArtistShare and Friends of Big Band Jazz [warning: embedded audio]. Build fanbases on the model Creative World pioneered so many years ago. Build record companies on the model of Sub Pop and Wax Trax and the hundreds of others that carried the punk and grunge and alternative and ambient artists when the short-tail corporations didn’t want anything to do with them.

Hitch your wagons to nonprofits like public radio stations (in the world of the long tail, public radio stations are performing an increasingly essential public service). But start recording podcasts anyway. Play live and from the time the club opens till it closes, have somebody at the door to sell CDs (hint: jazz artists are totally neglecting the EP format) and collect names for your mailing list.

For years we’ve suffered the condescension of the media corporations (the major labels, the radio station cartels). They didn’t like us, and truth to tell, we don’t like them much. But we needed them.

Guess what — we don’t need them any more. They need us — but most of them are too stupid to figure it out.

Shhhhh. Let’s not tell them.

Ornette Coleman’s Pulitzer has caused quite a buzz in musical circles. The WSJ has gotten into the act as theater critic Terry Teachout asks the musical question,”did Ornette Coleman deserve the Pulitzer?“.

Let’s clear the decks. I think we can safely ignore Teachout’s jaw-dropping solecism “most jazz is improvised, not notated”. And while the vehicle is unreasonably tempting — the WSJ can always be counted on to step up to bat for the majority over the minority, the overprivileged over the underprivileged — perhaps we can hold our fire briefly, because Teachout does make an interesting point: classical music deserves all the help it can get.

The point is interesting under any circumstances. The point is valid if you accept the notion that there’s a place for everything (one place for each thing of everything) and everything in its place. Do you accept that notion?

Me neither. If the 20th century was the century of hierarchies and genres and nested subgenres, the 21st is the century of tags and genre bending.

That piece you just played — what is it really? Classical music? Jazz? Uhhh, really, it’s nothing. It’s just itself. It’s got some things in common with jazz (you can stick that tag on it) and some other things in common with classical (so you can stick that tag on it too), and the animals playing accordions and nude clog dancing plumbers are a lot like that weekend I spent in New Jersey.

Tag, Terry Teachout, you’re old.

We don’t like to pollute our visual space with animations — which in this case you won’t be able to see if you’re running Firefox and have adblock turned on: it’s savenetradio.org — but this is a cause worth making a little noise about. Go click through and see how you can help.

Now on to our regularly scheduled woot.

• Are you a music lover or a person who’s gazed at pictures of his guitar heroes so much that he can identify them from little snippets? Take the Guitar Icons Quiz and find out.
• My older son Patrick and his beloved Christine are making wedding arrangements. The ceremony is going to have two processionals and a recessional. The recessional is usually Mendelssohn’s and one of the processionals is obviously Wagner’s, but what about the other one? The wedding planner suggested Pachelbel’s Canon in D, but they think that’s a bad idea [YouTube]. I suggested The Queers’ “Ursula Finally Has Tits” and the Dead Kennedys’ “Too Drunk to Fuck”, but they didn’t seem too impressed. Suggestions anyone?
• While we’re on YouTube, let’s linger a while. Here’s the new Four Freshmen singing one of the original group’s trademark songs, “Day In, Day Out“. In case you hadn’t seen the Freshmen live, the original group accompanied themselves on those very instruments plus the Eb mellophone (from the trumpet player) and trombone (Bob Flanigan). So when they went on, the whole band could take a break.
• Bob Flanigan was nice enough to say this is the best Four Freshmen ever, but there’s one problem. Listen to “Angel Eyes“. You call that a portamento? Oh all right, the new kids are better in the middle and low voices. Back in the vinyl days we all longed for a fast-forward button to skip over Ross Barbour’s solos.
• From the kind of jazz your mom might find acceptable to destination-out.com, guaranteed to give her the quivering conniptions. Free MP3 music from the edge. Some of it’s great, some of it (like the Art Ensemble of Chicago, who they’re featuring now) I can’t abide. But I’m glad I heard it once, and some of it I’d like to hear twice.
• A freebie from the (king? No, that’s probably Hal Leonard, but certainly one of the dukes) of jazz book publishers: Jamey Aebersold’s free Jazz Handbook. It’s chopped up into several sections, but there’s a good bit of it there.
• Want to publish your own Monday Musical Mwoot and get ahead of the old Rev? Try the del.icio.us search for “jazz”. Actually, you won’t find much overlap; I’ve been squirreling some of these links away for years, and a good part of the rest I owe to the folks on the lists I belong to.
• One of the best things about having a workstation-type synth like my old (but still working) Yamaha V-50 is that you can record some sequences and practice playing while they loop. Don’t have a synth like that? No problem. Here’s Jazz Practice Loops, home of some wonderful music-minus-one accompaniments. They’re mostly jazz harmonies and standards, but that’s the kind of music I like. Btw, this may be an MSIE-only site. The images of the chord symbols are really squashed vertically on Firefox, although it still plays; on Opera, which I still haven’t finished getting the way I want it, it doesn’t show the chords or play the loop. If you have Opera well tuned, it may work fine for you.
• So next time you sing a Lied, are you gonna go with “Sonntag” or “Ich Grolle Nicht” or “Die Erlkönig”, or do you fear the audience might storm the stage if they hear “badada badada BUMP bump bump” one more time? If it’s the latter, check out this list of Contributions to the Lieder Repertoire 1900-1999. Maybe you can even give the royalty payment to somebody who isn’t dead.
• Or if you’d rather not pay royalties to anybody, dead or alive, here’s The Sheet Music Archive. Thanks to some music finally going out of copyright (remember those days?) it’s all free.
• Can’t tell your serpent from your zink? We can help! Here’s a great collection of good, clear pictures and sound files of early instruments, thanks to Musica Antiqua of Iowa State University.
• But if you want to see and hear a tromba marina, you’ve got to go to this link. But I beg you, don’t. Think of the children!
• You could probably pick Sonny Rollins or Jimmy Rushing out of a crowd, but how about Stuff Smith? Remember that photograph of the jazz musicians on the doorstep in Harlem?
• And finally, not the sublime this time, but the ridiculous. From the Classical CD Guide, Top 10 CDs to Start Your Classical Music Collection. Let’s see. The first classical records I bought were Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra (Reiner) and Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta (I forget, maybe Boult), Copland’s 3rd Symphony (Copland, on the Everest label), Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (Bernstein), and Shostakovich’s 1st Symphony (Kondrashin). Bill Hulley and I listened to his recording of The Planets dozens of times, but it was a long time before I bought a copy of my own. How about you?

When April’s dreams are over
And all her songs are sung,
When the years are old and the hills are old
And only our hearts are young,
Then ev’ry sweet small wonder
Will still more wond’rous be,
In the brave new light of a world grown bright
Under the sunset tree
- Yip Harburg

There’s more. Go see.

Just so all of us have a little time to enjoy being under that tree, go see EarthPortal. It opens today sometime, so I haven’t seen it yet, but who knows? It might turn out all right.