Dustin LindenSmith

Musical group "The Modern Men" performed selections from their recently-recorded CD in Halifax tonight. I was first turned onto the group by its lone female member, vocalist Lulu Healy. She sent me some unmixed tracks from the aforementioned CD which really blew me away, so I had to come out and see the group play live.

Their music is very modern, and heavily synth-laden (in a good way). Extensive use is made of vintage analog synthesizer sounds, MIDI-controlled patches and triggers, and the Vocoder sound processor which overlays a synthesizer patch on a human singing voice. The Vocoder is a production effect first mastered by artists and synth pioneers such as Herbie Hancock in the 1970s. It provides a tremendously warm, vintage character to any song to which it's added.

The repertoire sounds original, while retaining a recognizable position in the contemporary/pop idiom. The songs were comprised of simple, singable melodies nestled in rich arrangements and orchestrations using multiple synths, voices, and instruments. The bassist and the drummer were solid musicians, and the group's sound was firmly rooted in groove of the bass and the drums.

It would be remiss not to make mention of the declining state of this venue, however. Hell's Kitchen sits downstairs from The Marquee Club, which is one of Halifax's premiere music venues for club acts up to around 750 people. Its location at the base of Halifax's North End makes it central, yet gritty. And its owner, local restauranteur, entrepreneur and erstwhile mayoralty candidate Victor Syperek, has recently filed for creditor protection in the courts. Apparently The Marquee Club will be closed permanently in Jan 2009. You'd definitely know it when you see the place, too. Several areas are closed off, curtained off, and not staffed. Bar staff in general is at a bare minimum, along with security and door staff. The heating was conspicuously turned off, despite the extremely low temperature outside. And the kitchen, renowned for its excellent pizza, was shuttered and dark for the whole night. It was not unlike walking through a ghost town, of sorts.

This disheveled state of affairs at The Marquee Club also extended to its smaller, country-cousin downstairs venue, Hell's Kitchen. Hell's low ceilings were as gloomy as ever, and the amateur sound technician on loan from upstairs was functionally unable to create a suitable monitor mix for the band even after two and a half hours of sound check. To the seasoned listener, certain hiccups, delays, and sloppy endings were audible at times. But I don't doubt that these would have been reduced by at least half, had the musicians been able to hear each other properly.

It's difficult to know what's in store for The Marquee Club, or what venues will remain for that size of show in the future. I imagine that Robert Risley will be trying to get certain groups to book in at his Cunard Centre, but unfortunately that venue isn't appropriate for every type of act that routinely appears at The Marquee. Hopefully other venues will step up to fill the void, or that somebody else with additional funds will be willing to help run The Marquee Club under a new mantle of some sort. Perhaps some sort of local cultural collective or something? Somebody should invite Victor Syperek to lunch sometime to discuss it. (News item: Marquee Club set to close)

http://www.musicthinktank.com/blog/does-emi-uniquely-understand-that-enabling-and-enhancing-the.html

Read the following description of how a listener might interface with a visual image to select new music from artists they've never heard of before. That sounds fantastic to me!

Here’s a user interface that can be built today.  Forget looking for songs using genre, forget charts, and forget simple sounds-like lookups.  Discovering songs like this sucks.  Take any ten thousand songs and combine it with any high-resolution landscape image.  Break down the songs into mathematical equivalents, and using Same Sonic Science, divide them into 100 buckets by similarity.  Break down the image and logically map the buckets of songs onto fragments of the image using artificial intelligence.
 

Touch the sunny segment of the image and listen.
You want more sun, move your hand into the sun.
Touch the water in the image and listen.
Touch the dark shades in the image and listen.
Listen to the blue sky.
Cover flow to the next image.  Try an urban landscape.
More your hand over the image.
Zoom in, zoom out.
You want harsh, touch harsh.  You want soft, touch soft.
You want to get complicated, go into a virtual world.
Hang this on the wall in your living room using a 60” touch screen TV.
Or, just use it in your iPhone.
Pay a small subscription fee or deal with the strategically placed ads that appear.

Had a great gig tonight with an old group that was reunited for the first time in many years at this summer's jazz fest. Quatrain is a jazz quartet founded by a local bassist named Pete Johnston who's working on his Ph.D. at York University in Toronto right now, and the group showcases his original compositions.

Back in the day, we always had trouble finding a good drummer, but tonight we brought in a relatively new guy on the scene named Doug Cameron. Doug is one of those rare breeds of drummer who plays well, plays inventively and creatively, doesn't bash hell out of his instrument at the fortissimo dynamic level all the time, and actually listens to the other musicians as they're playing in order to adapt his own dynamics and feel to what's actually happening in the moment. Add to that a solid sense of time (i.e. he doesn't randomly slow down or speed up throughout a given tune), and you have the makings of an excellent professional drummer, which Doug Cameron certainly is. It was a pleasure to play with him tonight, and we'll almost certainly invite him to join us for a recording session later in the spring to lay down a number of these tunes we played tonight.

The remainder of the group is similar to our AST lineup, with myself on tenor sax and Chris Elson on piano. Our AST bassist, Adam Fine, also came down to see the show, which was nice. And a few people went out of their way to mention my own playing tonight, too. That's flattering in the most delightful way -- flattering that they thought I sounded good, but even more flattering that they were listening carefully enough to notice. Most non-concert-hall gigs, people are more interested in conversation than the live music being played on stage. Tonight seemed to be an exception, though. We had an attentive audience. Most musicians I know would play for free if the audiences were always like that. If only the club owners knew that, eh? What few paying gigs are left might dry up, if they figured out how to promote the shows in just the right way to bring in those sorts of audiences.

I transcribed these quotes from a Miles Davis DVD I own which features interviews with numerous old band members, interview footage with Miles himself, and the entire 1970 Isle of Wight concert at which he performed for some 600 thousand fans. Biggest jazz performance of its time -- don't know if that's ever been surpassed since then.

These first two are from Miles, just him talking about his approach to music.

I like a lot of rhythm; broken rhythm

I like strong melodies
I like smooth voice leading on the piano and chords on the synthesizer

Maybe a patch on the synthesizer will turn me on to write something in that particular path
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Listen, sound and music change so click
It's like the world on its axis, turning
It doesn't turn so you can say, I'm a turning
It turns so slow that you can't feel it

Music changes you

I also have to highlight this luminous and illustrative quote from James Mtume, a member of Miles' electric band in the 1970s:

We cannot make new music without access to new colours. And unfortunately, jazz stopped developing when the premier jazz creators did not want to accept the reality of electronics.

Look, when the piano came along and the tempered scale was created and we got A440 [cycles per second], that was the synthesizer of its time. I'm sure there were some harpsichord players walking around talking about, "Hey, they're not keeping it real."

Bassist Dave Holland speaks of his experience with Miles:

As far as I was concerned, every time Miles put the horn to his lips it was a great event.

The bass player has a tremendous responsibility in the music to create a centre, to create a focus within the music that Miles is creating. But how you do that can change drastically from one situation to another.

What I did with Miles was influenced by the things that I heard around me at those times: what Jack Bruce was doing with Cream, what Jimi was doing with his band, and of course there were always the influences of James Brown's music and a lot of the other things that were going on at that time.

Context for the Isle of Wight concert was expertly set by Bob Belden, Sony music producer:

Now, can you imagine being Miles Davis, you've been struggling your whole life, you've got money, but you've got high expectations [placed on you], you've been with Charlie Parker, Coltrane, Cannonball [Adderley], Wayne Shorter, Ron [Carter], Tony [Williams], and you've got this record [Bitches Brew] which is essentially a jam session, and it becomes the top-selling jazz record of all time at the time. And then on top of that, you do the Fillmores, and you're on the Newsweek magazine, and within the space of six months, he played the Isle of Wight. East Afton Farm, Isle of Wight: Half a million people, minimum: playing opposite Hendrix, all those pop acts that were at the top of the scene at that moment -- that's as high as any jazz musician ever got in the world, playing that kind of music. That was the mountaintop.

Other acts that played the 1970 Isle of Wight festival included Chicago, Free, Procol Harum, The Doors, The Who, Joni Mitchell, Sly & The Family Stone, Free, John L. Sebastian, Emerson Lake & Palmer, Jethro Tull, Joan Baez, Canadian acts Leonard Cohen and the band Lighthouse, and of course, Miles Davis.

ulisten.net podcast #6 (download MP3)

Today's podcast features a funky rearrangement by Wade Marcus of the Blood, Sweat & Tears hit, Spinning Wheel. It's another one of the hot tracks from the same box set featured on Podcast #3 (The Stovall Sisters - Hang On In There).

The main groove of this tune, which starts cooking from beat one, is what's most notable on this track. The riff played by the bassist, guitarist and organist in unison is highly sophisticated without losing a lick of its hard-ass funk quality. Marcus's selection of flute to play the melody is at once enigmatic and playful. But that flute ain't playing Bach: it digs in hard during the solo section. And among other things, don't miss the lush string arrangements that pop in for a brief visits -- especially near the climax of the tune and the extension of the flute solo. And then, before the guitar solo and the fade, a totally unexpected foray into 70s TV and film soundtrack scoring -- it feels like this could be on behind a car chase scene in a Dirty Harry flick.

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Artist Name: Wade Marcus
Track Title: Spinning Wheel
Album Title: What It Is! Funky Soul And Rare Grooves (1967-1977) (4-CD box set)
Release Date: 2006

You can buy this recording at: cd universe | amazon.com (not available at amazon.ca) | rhino records | itunes (US store only) | froogle | google

You can now keep up with the ulisten.net podcasts on LJ at ulisten.


ulisten.net podcast #5 (download MP3)

The most serious hip-hop heads out there may already know the backstory of this track, but I remember being pretty excited about it when I learned about it in this great NY Times interview by Chuck Klosterman with Brian Burton and Thomas Calloway (a.k.a Danger Mouse and Cee-Lo). In that interview, Danger Mouse said how surprised he was by what a hit his tune Crazy was, because it was almost a direct rip-off of an Ennio Morricone song. With considerable further research on my part, I discovered that the tune he referred to was called Nel Cimitero de Tucson, and it came from the soundtrack for the 1968 spaghetti western called Preparati La Bara!.

Now, this information in and of itself is not terribly significant -- until you hear the source track upon which Danger Mouse based his hit Crazy, that is. Move the pitch of the original track up by only 1 whole step and you're suddenly hearing almost exactly the same backing track to Crazy. To the note! It's all laid out for you on today's podcast.

Also of note on this track are the lyrics. They really struck me on my first listening of the tune, and now that I've thoroughly digested them after more than several dozen hearings, I think there's a lot of wisdom in there. Wisdom about not taking yourself too seriously, about the fallacy of our apparent control over the moment, and about seeing ourselves for who we really are.

(Credit to this post on stereogum.com for what was probably one of the first breaks of this news. I wish I'd found that post when I first started researching this piece, because I only found out the details through much more circuitous means. Additional trivia: someone built a MySpace page for Gianfranco Reverberi that's focused on this track. Reverberi appears to be the actual composer of the source track, and more info on his credits can be found on his IMDB page, along with that of his brother Gianpiero.)

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Artist Name: Gnarls Barkley
Album Title: St. Elsewhere
Release Date: 2006
Producer: Danger Mouse (birth name Brian Burton)
Vocalist: Cee-Lo (birth name Thomas Calloway)
Websites: Crazy video on YouTube | Gnarls Barkley | Danger Mouse on Wikipedia | Cee-Lo on Wikipedia

Buy the recording at: cd universe | amazon.com | amazon.ca | itunes | froogle | google

This recent post in The Lefsetz Letter is ranty, but cutting, in its synopsis of what's wrong with music today. Granted, that's a major theme of his blog in general, but he's a very credible source and has some interesting things to say. Here's an excerpt:

CDs are in free-fall. This week sales were off 22.8% from last year’s numbers. That’s front page news in my book. But somehow, it’s not on the very first page of the "New York Times" or the "Wall Street Journal", the newspapers of record. And if it were, Warner and EMI stocks would tank. For Wall Street, which does not read the "Billboard Bulletin", seems out of the loop.

Recorded music sales are now a joke. If you’re an act, unless you make Top Forty music that would benefit from TV exposure and terrestrial radio play, in other words unless you make mainstream pop or hip-hop music, WHY BOTHER WITH A MAJOR LABEL? They’re not interested in artist development. Hell, EMI won’t EXIST by time you put out your SECOND album, never mind your third or fourth. You want to get caught in that vortex? Where contractual hassles, being tied-up in merger/downsizing/bankruptcy, will kill your career?

All this talk about Apple’s dominance with iTunes, DRM, per track prices…IRRELEVANT! Every band is now a cottage industry, charging at a different point in the food chain. In other words, the music is the loss leader, the taste, that gets people in the door.

Oh, it didn’t HAVE to be this way. If only the majors had legalized P2P, had been willing to stop fighting to preserve their distribution monopoly. I mean what difference does it make if you own the CD sphere if the CD sphere is CRUMBLING?

Canadian-born hit songwriter/producer David Foster was interviewed by Nora Young on The Arts Tonight last night, and he works for a record label now, and he backed up some of what Lefsetz says here. He says that without some major changes, many of the major record labels will simply be gone within a few years. His prediction was that CDs will be the cost of a Big Mac within the next two years (two years?) and that there will be a whole paradigm shift in music distribution.

I think the paradigm shift has already happened. Whoever isn't satisfied with the musical pablum being poured down their throats on commercial radio and music TV is probably knowledgeable about what they like, and they download it for free on BitTorrent. The rest don't give a shit about music at all and never have, and they probably only buy one or two CDs a year.

I built this site nearly a year ago now, but have only now produced my first podcast for the site. It features a Jaco Pastorius track called Come On, Come Over that I've already presented here before. But the podcast has a bunch of my speaking on it, too.

The download page and description of the track is at this page:
http://ulisten.net/podcast001/

A direct link to the podcast itself in MP3 format (4.5 MB) is:
http://ulisten.net/podcasts/ulisten.net.001.mp3

I contemplated a naming structure of just 001.mp3 for the filenames, but I thought if anyone (like I often do) downloaded the MP3 file itself to listen to this, then they might appreciate a naming convention that's more logical. Even though the ID3 tags are populated.

I'll try to keep releasing one new track each week, and then once I have a critical mass of tracks on there, I'll start promoting the site more widely. But please feel free to send the link to anyone you know who might dig that track, please.

Dustin