Indie musicians dream of many things. Fame. Fortune. Somebody playing one of their songs. Despite the realism of that last point, a great many indie artists are so naive that people can sell them a load of hooey if it’s called something like “the tools you need to succeed” and packaged in some important-sounding music conference confab clusterfrack event.

After enduring too much verbiage from all these affairs, I wanted to react in an appropriate way. By screaming, of course, but also by exposing a lot of the telltale signs that indicate you are about to be fleeced. So, here are the steps that an immoral group of bastards need to take to begin financially raping unwary musicians.

Name Game

You’ll need a solid-sounding name for your event. Quick, write down everything that pops into your big greedwhore head, like “Weaseling Cash From Musicians: The Tenth Annual Music Millennium Summit.” Sure, the first part of that name is a little too on-the-money, if you know what I mean, but the second part is very strong. In fact, let’s go with it. Say it with me now: Tenth Annual Music Millennium Summit. TAMMS. Very cool.

Keep in mind that you don’t need to have actually conducted nine previous events. That’s just a logistical detail. Besides, musicians are too self-absorbed to look up anything about the history of your event. Nor will they take the time to research all of the lawsuits in your own background, or any of the interstate commerce complaints filed against all your business partners. Trust me, they won’t do any checking up on you at all. They’re musicians! Need I say more?

The Look

A snappy-looking logo for your event is something to consider. A good design will help attract the sensitive singer-songwriter types. However, the vast majority of musicians have no visual sensibilities (have you seen the album cover designs and band logos these people use?!) so you can pretty much put “TAMMS” into any type font you want. Let your web designer pick something. We all know how much taste and sensitivity those people have.

Painting a Word Picture

In all of your online communications, you’ll want to insert lots of Key Phrases that trigger a strong reaction and act as a CALL TO ACTION that will excite the typical musician. Consider utilizing a few statements like these:

“Is it time that your music is heard by people who can jump-start your career?” That’s a great question because every indie artist and music wannabe will say “Yes!” But you are not promising anything with that question so everyone associated with TAMMS is in the clear, lawsuit-wise.

Describe your confab in a way that cannot be disputed. “Our panelists are the type of industry pros you only dreamed of meeting, but now you’ll be in the room with them!” Dreamed of meeting, had nightmares about meeting; pretty much the same thing.

Tell your readers that “We will feature the movers and shakers who have a direct line to the platinum-selling artists, top hit producers, ad agency production teams, motion picture and television music supervisors, music distributors, and touring organizations you’ll need for your own superstar career!” Who’s to say these dweebs on your panels are not movers and shakers? Look, they move. And some of them tremble from drinking their lunch, and that makes them shakers.

You Are A Smart Reader

And you are so good looking, too! See how this works? Tell musicians exactly what they want to hear: “Your music deserves to be played for true industry insiders!” Can’t argue with a statement like that.

Also, use scare tactics just before asking for them to send you a check or give you their parents’ credit card number: “Don’t hold back just when opportunity presents itself. Don’t miss this chance to advance yourself and your music to the next level and beyond!” Yeah, you don’t want to miss a chance to go beyond the next level.

Phrases for Free

Since I am such a helper, here is a list of phrases that are proven effective in creating hype for music conferences:

Top-Tier Gathering of Professionals

Get on the Road to Inspiration and Success

Obtain New Insights

Networking!

Landmark Event

Make New Contacts (same as Networking! but use it anyway)

Career-Making Opportunity

Marquee Events

Top Industry Talent (same as Top-Tier Gathering of Professionals, but use it anyway)

Access to Business Professionals (same as Networking! but use it anyway)

Premiere Event (alternate with Red-Carpet Event and Industry Insider Event)

Word-Flow

You’re going to want to hire a word nerd who will deliver hard-hitting prose. Anybody can write something like this: “The Tenth Annual Music Millennium Summit is at the very heart of today’s entertainment scene!” But it takes a pro to write something if your event is being held in Jerkwater, Florida or Fungusbrain, Alabama. You may need wording like this: “While we’re outside the traditional entertainment capitals, TAMMS features major industry players direct from the very heart of today’s entertainment scene!”

Try to sound important without saying anything: “With the intense focus of a laser beam, TAMMS takes you beyond the cutting edge of where the entertainment industry is right now and explores where everything will be tomorrow!”

Do not be afraid to pile on the words: “You will be able to take advantage of a plethora of non-stop Industry Seminars, Exciting New Talent Showcases, Vital Hands-On Workshops, Creative Concert Presentations, and much more!”

Promises!

Promise great results without promising results: “By featuring the go-to professionals from the frontlines of the entertainment industry, our seminars and workshops will enable you to take your talent from amateur to pro and from good to great!” Sure, whatever.

Be specifically vague: “Here is where you’ll mingle with the executives and company representatives who are dedicated to discovering the new talent and new artists who will be ready to succeed in all the vibrant areas of the industry!” I wrote that sentence and even I don’t know WTF it means.

You probably should come up with a Mission Statement that sounds lofty: “Created, developed, and produced by a cadre of acclaimed industry veterans, TAMMS and its founders are using our decades of success in the entertainment industries to follow through on our dedication to providing opportunities for new talent to flourish in the always exciting and continually evolving world of entertainment.”

Remember: you only need to be truthful in a Romney-esque sort of way. Actual facts are not required.

Affiliate with Everybody

All large companies employ someone whose job it is to get that firm’s logo in front of as many eyeballs as possible. So ask every music-related corporation to become a sponsor of your event. If they just want to have some brochures on the Media Table, fine. You’ll still be able to put their company logo on your Sponsors Page (that part of the website that looks like the side of a NASCAR racer).

But if they give you some products to use as prizes, or they send you money, or they provide some broadcast or print advertising, then you might toss their name into the name of the event: “Tenth Annual Music Millennium Summit Brought to you By Universal Musical Instruments Retailers.” Which would be TAMMSBTYBUMIR but you’ll still be able to keep on using your TAMMS logo.

Don’t turn down anybody or anything. There can be product mentions anywhere, even in the mundane line-item listings: “Build Better Bookings: A Seminar on Getting the Gigs You Deserve, sponsored by Flivitz Hair Extensions, the Rockstar Wave of the Future.”

Have some awards: “TAMMS Star of Tomorrow.” Think quantity not quality on this. Arrange the award categories by genre and by gender so there are lots of them.

Plus, you might be able to rake in extra cash by selling plaques or trophies to the “winners.” Remember, indie artists are desperate for some recognition and many will shell out an extra hundred bucks for a three dollar laminated certificate. And some of them will pay two hundred bucks for a seven dollar bowling trophy that has a microphone or musical note glued on top.

Bigger is Better (and it’s bigger, too)

Don’t be afraid to list everything several times. In addition to describing every part of your presentation, take each heading and put it in a litany of offerings, like so: “Pre-party gatherings! Exclusive industry parties! Guest speakers! Showcase performances! Red carpet interviews! Celebrity photo-ops! Panel presentations! Networking! Round-table discussions! All happening in real time! Taking place in the physical realm! Actual people will be attending! All attendees will be breathing actual air!” And so on.

Always hype these events to the max: “Your opportunity to be seen in front of media, A&R, and industry decision makers! Enjoy delicious food and great cocktails during these superb opportunities to meet and greet the people who may control the next steps in the advancement of your career!” (Note the double-dip in using certain power words: “opportunity” and “opportunities.” Sure, this is from the Department of Redundancy Dept., but musicians won’t notice and they are always impressed by the sheer number of words in any document. You’ve seen the contracts these people sign, right?)

Seminar Naming Schemes

The trick is to take your normal, everyday, mundane panels and name them so they sound like “Must See” assemblies of the best talent and latest technology from the leading companies in the entertainment world. Thus, a panel discussion on streaming becomes “Using New Technology to Boost Your Music Income!”

Here are a few suggestions for making rubbish sound fascinating and worth the horrendous price-gouging fees you will be collecting from unsuspecting indie artists:

***Brand & Brand: The Togetherness Synergy Concept for Global Success!

***Money Can be Music to Your Ears AND Your Wallet: A Profitable Look at Revenue Streams!

***Team-building to Maximize Your Profits!

***Touring Tips & Tricks: Your Guidebook of Money-Making Opportunities!

***New Media Means New Revenue for You!

***Impress the Press and Reach All of Your True Audience!

***$elling Your $tuff: Super Secrets of Merchandising Millionaires!

Showcases

Indie musicians are fine with pay-to-play, so you should have no problem getting hundreds or even thousands of dollars for artists to play your pre-show events, your lunch breaks, your lobby display areas, and your evening networking cocktail schmooze-fests. Remember, you just have to say this to musicians: “Now is the time to Show the World What You’ve Got!”

Goose everything up a notch or two with the promise that “Showcase performers will be competing to receive industry contracts!” Well, sure, they’re competing just by performing, right? “Plus, there will be awards of fabulous gear and accessory packages!” (A box of earplugs counts as a gear and accessory package.)

And who knows, maybe some P.R. geek will offer a “V.I.P. Marketing Campaign” to some lucky winner. (Yup, I was roped into this once; the band was so disgusted with the event that they never asked me to do any work for them.)

Multi-Media

Reach a wider audience by conducting a “Creative Film & TV Production Summit” and a “Movie, TV & Theater Acting Summit” at the same time. Get a local college to hold student film screenings at the afternoon break and you can claim to be offering a “TAMMS Film Festival” at the same time.

Don’t forget the models. You’ll want a “TAMMS Model-of-the-Future Contest.” Same thing can work with dancers, poets, rock critics, comics, DJs, booking agents, gardeners, and yoga instructors, for all I know.

Video everything. Maybe you can sell podcasts of each panel discussion. That way, you can pick the pockets of the indie artists in other cities. Who among them wouldn’t want to pay fifty bucks for a grainy, out-of-focus, and barely audible 40-minute video of people droning into microphones while the audience members count the death of their own brain cells?

Who’s Not Who

So many record company personnel have been let go, downsized, terminated, retired, or fired in the past few years that you can pick up a lot of panelists who actually have decent-sounding resumes. (This is quite apart from the fact that they are out-of-work and ain’t never going back into the record industry unless they learn new technological skills.)

I won’t belabor the point here, but you’ll be able to mention dozens of people appearing as part of your Exclusive Industry Insiders, and all of their bios will look something like this:

Barry Backslapper has a three-decade-long history of success at the very pinnacle of the entertainment industry. Long recognized as one of the premiere observers of new talent, Mr. Backslapper was instrumental in the careers of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, N’Sync, Madonna, 2Pac, Cher, The Who, Elvis Presley, ABBA, Michael Jackson, Elton John, Led Zeppelin, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Miles Davis, Merle Haggard, Mariah Carey, The Bee Gees, Justin Bieber, Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, Pink Floyd, Kelly Clarkson, Rod Stewart, Carrie Underwood, William Hung, Rihanna, and The Three O’Clock. He currently is serving as CEO, President, Chief Operating Officer, and Office Manager of Backslapper Entertainment, a very limited partnership.

Go For It

Follow these steps and you will be on your way to the bank as well as on the way to hell. Oops, I mean you will be on your way to a highly-regarded position in the indie music community.

 
Article is Copr. © 2012 by John Scott G, and originally published on MusicIndustryNewswire.com – all commercial and reprint rights reserved.

It is just before midnight and I am standing on the tacky floor of the Sunset Strip tourist trap known as the House of Blues, wondering about my purpose in life. Why am I in this oversize dive, I ask myself. The HOB has long been a clip joint where every surface has a layer of grime and every employee has the haunted look of a carnival grafter looking for ways to bilk the next mark, the next rube, the next chump.

At last, the background music fades out, the house lights dim, and the soiled curtains part to reveal a tuxedo-clad conglomeration of soul-bop funk ‘n’ rollers who have whipped themselves into a frenzy. Whether they are truly possessed by the spirit or are simply acting up a storm is something we will never know; either way, the effect on the audience is considerable.

The group is epic, starting with a ten-piece brass section that is punching and swinging at the same time. Their sound alternates between superb and something slightly better than that. There are also two keyboard players plus a rhythm guitarist, bassist, drummer, and five backing vocalists. They are wound up tighter than a skinflint’s purse strings and they conspire to lay down an irrefutable beat that shakes the entire square block of Sunset Boulevard.

I glanced at the crowd and saw people bobbing and weaving, often with awestruck expressions or big smiles on their faces. Many on the dance floor appear to have lost some control of their hips which are now undulating in a manner that is suggestive, to say the least.

High NPM (Notes Per Minute)

Insinuating its way over and under this churning, burning, and finger-poppin’ sonic stew is the electric guitar of Sam Mayfield, a musician who seems to defy the laws of physics when playing his axe. His approach to the instrument might be looked at in this manner: while strumming an eight chord progression is all well and fine, listeners might find it interesting if the player picked out each individual note in each of the chords, all in the same amount of time it would take a regular performer to simply strum. Mayfield is positively phenomenal. You know about high MPH (miles per hour), Mayfield has high NPM (notes per minute).

The Man

After three high-energy numbers from this powerhouse band, the time was ripe for the big guy, the main man, the true king, the prime shouter of the soul review, the legend, Doctor Solomon Burke. He emerged from the wings slowly, regally, all three hundred pounds of him. His royal badness entered wearing a floor-length ermine robe, seemingly floating through an aura of rarefied air.

His presence alone caused a visceral change in the crowd. Clad in a blinding gold suit, he made his way to the edge of the stage and created a near-riot when he began handing out roses which he gently kissed in between delivering lines of one of his slower (read “still pretty damn fast”) songs. I was nearly trampled once and several times knocked off balance by whooping or crying females who rushed forward to obtain one of those flowers.

Burke was in full voice and he had come forth to take no prisoners. He was an unstoppable force of nature and one of those acts of God for which there is no possible insurance policy. All the while, Burke’s very big band slammed out the chunka-chunka-ka-pow-pow beats and Mayfield worked his Fender six-string in an attempt to perform at a never-before-heard rate of speed. But it was the big guy who controlled everything. After all, Burke is larger than life in every possible way.

Throughout the concert, he thundered, he crooned, he coaxed, he demanded, he talked sweet, he talked funky, he made you dance, he made you sweat, he made girls cry, and he made us all dizzy. Let’s face it: Solomon Burke conquered.

Commercial Tie-In

The whole grand affair was part of the promotional launch for one of the greatest collections of bompin’ stompin’ rockin’ music ever recorded. I am speaking of the Rhino Records product, the superlative “Beg, Scream & Shout: The Big Ol’ Box of ’60s Soul.” I love mine (please note my dutiful helpful hype) and have enjoyed every one of the 144 (count ‘em!) tracks containing some of the thickest, nicest, and nastiest soul grooves you’ll hear anywhere.

Coda

Led by Burke, the entire ensemble performed with exuberance, ebullience, and exaltation. They played like this was the very last concert anybody was ever going to hear and it was absolutely magnificent. I left the venue on such a high that I almost didn’t notice my shoes sticking to the floor with each step.

Such was the state of our music temples in the nineteen nineties; I have returned to the HOB on several occasions in the last decade-and-a-half and the grime has always been apparent and annoying. Some things never change.

For more information: http://thekingsolomonburke.com/

Video of “Cry to Me”

Article is Copr. © John Scott G, and originally published on MusicIndustryNewswire.com – all commercial and reprint rights reserved. IMAGE CREDIT: ”Best of” album cover from Rhino Records.

From the band’s first few notes, it was clear that the packed house at Cozy’s blues club was in for a treat. We just didn’t know how big a treat.

The opening numbers featured nifty solos from Terry DuRouen on electric guitar and James Davis on electric keyboards, plus tight rhythm from Howard Deere on bass and Danny Pucillo on drums.

Deere, Davis, and DuRouen each took a vocal, and they were smoothly soulful. If these guys had kept going on their own, it would have been a fine night of entertainment because of their tasty chops and a background that is steeped in the blues. But there was Something Else on the way to totally take over the evening.

Heavenly Hell

DuRouen stepped to the mic and introduced a nitro-powered force-field called Guitar Shorty and all hell broke loose. At first, Shorty stood stock still while playing at the very back of the club. His axe plugged into a wireless system, he wailed, and the club seemed to start spinning.

His pyrotechnics were hypnotic as he leisurely made his way through the audience. Stretching out a snaky and delightfully evil blues, he regarded us with a smile on his lips and a twinkle in his eye. Every section of the club got to see a few moments of rockin’ blues performed in an up-close-and-personal manner. Shorty played for people at the bar, and for folks seated at their tables, and for those who were lined up against the wall.

Excitement kept building as more and more people spotted him moving through the club. When he climbed up on stage, the tension broke and he received the first of dozens of rounds of strong applause.

Sonic Stratosphere

For the next 90 minutes, the very concept of what can be done on an electric guitar was altered in the mind of every listener. It seemed as if no one else in the world plays like this. It may be safe to say no one else in the world has ever played like this.

Think of the most amazing blues-rock performance you can imagine. Think about Bluesbreakers-era Eric Clapton. Think about Albert Collins. Think about Albert King, T-Bone Walker, Buddy Guy. Hell, go ahead and think Hendrix. You probably won’t believe me until you experience it for yourself, but Guitar Shorty in person can be that powerful.

What’s more amazing, after a half-hour break, he climbed back on stage and cranked things up for another truly superlative 90-minute set. Let’s do the simple math: that’s three hours of stinging, soaring, vibrant blues-rock numbers that shook hips, turned heads, and drained the club’s beer kegs.

Historic

Guitar Shorty knows how to work a room, having started performing at age 14. In his career, he has toured or played with Ray Charles, Otis Rush, Sam Cooke, Guitar Slim, B.B. King, Little Milton, Johnny Copeland, Lowell Fulson, and the aforementioned T-Bone Walker. He traded licks with Jimi Hendrix, and historians have noted that some riffs on “Are You Experienced” were first developed by Guitar Shorty back when he was in Seattle dating and eventually marrying Jimi’s half-sister, Marcia.

Sounds

The tone Shorty gets from his equipment is phenomenal. The sound seems to start somewhere down inside his bone marrow. Coupled with this furious playing is a superior sense of dynamics. Some people can make a guitar speak. Guitar Shorty makes his axe shout, orate, pontificate, sing, and nibble on your ear.

Shorty’s original tunes are skillful, but what’s most impressive is his ability to explore so many lovely nuances of each song’s chords. His improvisational skills are such that you believe he could take any three-note progression and turn it into a superlative hell-bent-for-leather solo.

From where is he getting all these blistering licks? “I hear so much music coming in my ears,” he told me. “When my eyes are closed, I’m seeing music. And I’m seeing the frets on my guitar.” There are magnificent melodies inside this man, and it takes a live show for him to let them all out.

Guitar Shorty (born David William Kearney) should be a household name for his spotlight-grabbing stage presence alone. In concert, he takes the axe and strums it, flat-picks it, finger-picks it; he plays his guitar with two hands, one hand, a foot, his teeth, even his rump. He bends notes on both sides of the nut, and I swear he sometimes was bending entire chords without touching the whammy bar.

Whether strutting his stuff or just delivering a song with his big-throated blues wail of a voice, Guitar Shorty puts on the kind of show you never forget.

Addendum: The All Music site lists Guitar Shorty’s activity as being in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and 00s. However, his website and the Alligator Records site both feature listings of upcoming gigs, so I guess that “10s” should be added to that list. Okay, about the headline of this article . . . well look, we just couldn’t resist. Could you? For more information: www.guitarshorty.com

 
Article is Copr. © 2012 by John Scott G – all commercial and reprint rights reserved. Originally published on MusicIndustryNewswire.com.

The Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard would have called this the despair of too much possibility; or, the dilemma of the aesthete, faced with the rotation principle. There’s simply too many options. It’s analogous to fuzz/overdrive pedals. At one point I had a couple hundred of them. Then I realized – how many do you really need? I wasn’t using them, anyway. So off they went. In fairness to them, however, the converse also can be true; different tools elicit separate emotions and invoke disparate ways of being. So it’s a fine line between not enough and too many – a slippery slope that is one of those black diamond runs, which I’m still learning to ski.

Eventually I settled down and realized what I liked best were EL84s. They go best with my style of playing – fingerpicks with medium-to-heavy gauge strings. This particularly is true for some of your larger Gibson jazz-style guitars, which I always use to play rock music anyway. While I have had reasonable success with Rickenbackers and a few odder models like Vox and Shergold, particularly in the 12-string department, I never have been able to learn how to play a Telecaster or a Stratocaster.

With a bigger instrument, though, one literally can hear the sound waves develop in its chamber, climb their way into the pickups, swish through the wiring, whirl around in the tubes and then pop out of the speakers. Once they get to the amp, they don’t have as much room to move around in the EL84. If they were expecting, say, a KT66, this must come as a surprise to them. They start bumping into each other, building up velocity, developing rounded contours like pebbles on a river bank being worn smooth by the current. After awhile they develop a lustrous patina, a kind of complexity and refinement, with overtones and harmonics built into the fundamentals – a way of being heard that almost is magical.

Strings obviously are important, too, and needless to say I’ve experimented with many different combinations. On thin-line electrics (both 6 and 12), for me, Pyramid Gold flatwounds now sound best. On the bigger guitars, though, I use medium gauge La Bella Phosphor Bronze acoustic guitar strings – I think the way they go is .012, .016, .022W, .031, .041 and .052. They are acoustic guitars too, sort of. A while ago it occurred to me that a wound “B” string would sound a lot better than a plain one, so now I’m using a .017W in place of the .016. This results in more tension on the string; it becomes more resistant, and vibrates better after you hit it. It’s not as flabby as a plain B.

I always use a compressor to even out string attack with the picks. I used to deploy incredibly complex compressor set-ups, using direct boxes to get into high-end studio compressors and then other boxes to get out of them and back into the amplifiers. I would use two or three compressors, splitting them by frequency so (for example) you could compress the bass end more heavily than the treble. Like the tube comparison contest, I eventually tired of doing this and decided just to use simple guitar compressors, which after all were made for just this type of activity. Lately I have been using a Dan Armstrong Orange Crusher reissue by Vintage Tone Project. I also have had good luck with a Jangle Box and even a simple MXR. While the control layout is minimal, these have maximum voicing for guitar.

The main problem I’ve had with most compressors is they tend to over-emphasize the sound of the high “E” string. Not their fault, because that’s what they do, that particular frequency just ends up being too bright. I have tried a variety of different techniques to minimize this, including notch filters at all of the nearby E frequencies (329.6 Hz, 659.3 Hz, 1397 Hz, etc.). What I finally settled on was an MXR 10-band EQ with everything set at 0 except the top band (16kHz), which I pull down as far as possible to –12 db. I insert this in the signal chain after the compressor. This does a pretty good job. Then, to give the sound more bloom and a fuller midrange, I’ve been using a Matchless Hot Box with the 12AX7 tube swapped out for a 12AT7, which preserves its qualities with less gain; or, an Aphex Guitar Xciter, which does pretty much the same thing. When set properly, you can hear the picks dancing on top of the strings.

I keep changing this last element around and have used a variety of other pedals for tonality and coloration. And then you can go crazy after that with various modulation effects. I permit myself to do this only occasionally to try and avoid contending with permanent insanity. I have to cope with enough low-lying brain fog the way matters presently stand, no point in exacerbating it with frightening devices that go over under sideways down, and then some.

Here’s a picture of a few guitars. From left to right: Tal Farlow, Trini Lopez, Byrdland and Barney Kessel. Plus the set-up described above, in this case going through a Trainwreck Climax amp. It breaks up really nice when you whack the lower strings with your thumbpick, yet retains crystalline clarity with the top ones. A few adjustments with the tone controls and before you know it, a perfectly good afternoon has vanished. But you’ve written a song you’ve never heard before, and leave the studio smiling.

Thanks to Tina at the Amp Shop in Sherman Oaks for keeping the guitars up and running, and to Greg Back for a couple of major restorations.

Article and photographs Copr. © 2012 by John Kronemyer – all commercial and reprint rights reserved. Originally published on MusicIndustryNewswire.com.

One of the best ideas for musicians that I share with artists as a music consultant is to figure out special things happening on that date, anniversaries for that city, that state, that club or even birthdays on a more famous level.

The music industry market is over saturated with artists plugging shows in the same way and at the same time. If you can take a specialized and specified marketing approach, you will stand out that much more.

VIDEO:

Industry Tips by Loren Weisman, author of “The Artist’s Guide to Success in the Music Business,” are Copr. © 2012 – all commercial and reprint rights reserved. Learn more at artistsguide.net.

The problem mainly has to do with the band’s inclination to attempt to integrate quasi-blues elements into their compositions, which detracts from their consistency and vitality and ends up inundating them with unessential, irrelevant and distracting elements. I know that towards the end of his career Jim Morrison reported a desire to become more of an old grizzled blues player than an incandescent pop star, however this was a deplorable ideation on his part and a large contributor to the overall decline in the quality of the band’s recorded oeuvre.

There is nothing per se wrong with blues bands, other than their proclivity to be rather boring. It was completely wrongful, though, for the Doors to conceptualize themselves in this dimension, because that wasn’t what they were about, it wasn’t for what they stood for, it was inconsistent with who they were as an integral performing unit, it detracted from the sufficiency and vitality of the band’s premise, and it interfered with its ability to model a new way of looking at issues from the mundane to the profound and wildly extravagant, such as what is the purpose of life and the meaning of being.

To begin with, though, it’s hard to overestimate the impact the Doors had on the little clique I was a member of in high school. They exploded onto the scene like some kind of weird neutron bomb, genetically altering everything within its path. All of a sudden those Simon & Garfunkel records we’d been listening to just weren’t the same anymore. The girls we knew debated endlessly about who they’d rather have sex with: Jim Morrison or Mick Jagger. This was mildly puzzling as there were any number of perfectly serviceable guys hanging around with whom they could have sex if in fact they wanted to, but this seemed to fall outside the scope of discourse (and didn’t really start happening until all of us transported ourselves off to matriculate at Berkeley).

The Doors were qualitatively different than the other influential bands then comprising the soundtrack of our lives, such as the Jefferson Airplane, Love, the Byrds and the Buffalo Springfield. Yes, there was the theatrical presence of the aforementioned Mr. Morrison, the disconcerting and other-worldly effect of Ray Manzarek’s spooky organ, John Densmore’s crisp drum riffs (particularly notable are the off-beat toms) and Robby Krieger’s experimentalist guitar playing. But there is something more to it than that; a phenomenological texture that sharply differentiated them from their immediate counterparts.

If one were making a list of influential bands of the time, the Doors would have to be in a separate column. Thanks to brilliant production by Paul Rothchild, their records had a sound all of their own, which amalgamated and congealed the different instruments into a supernatural whole. While it was possible to hear each instrument clearly in separation, there was an overall sheen to them that one didn’t find with records by any of the other aforementioned bands. Please understand I’m not casting aspersions on the production of records by these other bands, which was wonderful and is highly deserving of acclaim in its own right. All I’m trying to point out is that the Doors records sounded completely different. And, the band’s creaky but visionary existentialist ethos of love-sex-death-nihilism-hallucination-delusion, both explicit and implied, put them into a different category altogether.

I saw the band on a half dozen occasions throughout its duration and evolution, performing shows of varying quality. Why they used those gigantic Acoustic amplifiers remains a mystery. While they made for an inspiring pile of speaker cabinets, they were transistorized (not tubes), and they sounded terrible – harsh and brittle. I always hoped Krieger had a small Fender twin by the side of the stage, which is what he really used, and the Acoustics simply were props (this commonly is done today with, say, Marshall stacks). In the band’s defense, PA technology in the late ‘60s – early ‘70s was primitive, particularly with monitoring. So, much of a band’s amplification power had to come from on stage. I also saw the band circa 2002 sans Densmore at the Universal Amphitheater, with Ian Astbury doing a creditable Jim Morrison impression (though Val Kilmer’s in Oliver Stone’s movie about the band might have been better overall; a legitimate subject for debate).

I listened to all of their records from start to finish during the space of a recent afternoon. Essentially there are six Doors records: their eponymously entitled debut; “Strange Days;” “Waiting for the Sun;” “Soft Parade;” “Morrison Hotel” and “L.A. Woman.” Yes they did release “Absolutely Live” while the band still was together, but I would situate that more in the category of concert performances. “American Prayer” isn’t bad but it was released years later; as a concept record of spoken poetry with music overdubs it doesn’t really count. There were a couple of eminently forgettable albums by the band after Morrison’s demise. And, the past several years have seen a plethora of releases of live shows. I was following these for a while but then got tired of listening to them as they are pallid examples of the band’s work, particularly when compared to the paradigmatic cases of their studio albums. King Crimson has a similar problem with releases of its live shows. I know there are completists among us who enjoy these types of initiatives, but they really are best forgotten; just because they exist doesn’t mean they should be allowed to escape from confinement.

The first three records may be considered as a group. The individual songs, and even the order in which they appear, have become crystallized over time. In retrospect, though, some clearly are better than others. Perhaps a vestige of their early performing days, the first record contained several anomalous quasi-blues songs like “Soul Kitchen,” “Alabama Song” and “Backdoor Man.” These are markedly inferior to songs such as “The Crystal Ship” and “Take It as It Comes,” which more felicitously iterate the band’s essential characteristics. [On the topic of “The Crystal Ship,” there is an astonishing cover version, readily locatable on the www, by the band The Joyride; if you haven’t heard it you must stop everything you’re doing and listen to it immediately.]

“Strange Days” is much more consistent. Compositionally, “I Can’t See Your Face in My Mind” is reminiscent of “End of the Night;” “My Eyes Have Seen You” could be an extension of “I Looked at You;” and “Horse Latitudes” is entirely dispensable. If there was one song I would omit it would be “Moonlight Drive,” which again veers off-point; and then of course there are the lengthy expositions of “When the Music’s Over” versus “The End.” Its then scandalous Oedipal references notwithstanding, “When the Music’s Over” actually is a superior song to “The End” in most respects; the poetry is better and the music’s far more engaging.

“Waiting for the Sun” is the pinnacle of this trio. There really isn’t a bad song on it. “Hello, I Love You” is one of the great pop songs of all time; the only one I can compare it to is “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” by the Rolling Stones. “Love Street” echoes the themes of “People Are Strange;” “Summer’s Almost Gone” and “Wintertime Love” are ingenious counterparts; and “Yes, the River Knows” is a beautiful, mystical, bittersweet paean to lost romance. If there was one song I would omit it would be “My Wild Love,” which is more in the nature of “Horse Latitudes” and generally out-of-place when juxtaposed against the others.

The controversies really started to occur with the band’s fourth album, “The Soft Parade.” By and large I would like to come to the album’s defense. Mainly listeners were turned off by the addition of orchestral elements. Personally I do not view this as problematic; it actually enhances those songs on which it is deployed. The record sounds different; there is more separation and not as much midrange, it sounds crisper. Maybe this was due to the evolution of recording technology, which then was occurring at a rapid pace. The real problem is that the quality of songwriting has become much more inconsistent. “Touch Me,” “Wild Child,” “Shaman’s Blues” and particularly “Wishful Sinful” are amazing. However “Tell All the People,” “Do It,” “Easy Ride” and “Runnin’ Blue” are horrible; much worse than even the worst songs on the album’s three predecessors. I still am of two minds about the song “The Soft Parade.” I can remember one evening up at Berkeley hooking up a huge PA system and repeatedly broadcasting the song’s introductory declamation (“When I was back there in seminary school …”) over Berkeley’s entire northside. This was particularly amusing given that there in fact were (and are) several seminary schools there.

“Morrison Hotel” continued to evidence the band’s slide. Most of the songs are terrible, such as “Roadhouse Blues,” “You Make Me Real” and “The Spy.” “Maggie McGill” is nothing more than a drunken rant. “Waiting for the Sun” is all right, however, it sounds more like it should have been on the earlier record of the same name. Three songs have intriguing breaks about mid-way through: “Peace Frog,” “Ship of Fools” and “Land Ho!” If one was to edit these breaks and put them together, changing keys and tempi as appropriate, then simply erase the rest of the songs, the result might be halfway interesting. “Blue Sunday” and “Indian Summer” are beautiful love songs, though derivative of “Yes, the River Knows.”

Then we get to “L.A. Woman,” which is an awful record all around no matter how you look at it. The production is uninspired, the songs are mediocre, and the band is a pallid shadow of its former self. The only half-acceptable one is “Riders on the Storm,” and even it isn’t that good. The entire album could be safely extirpated from the Doors’ canon without loss, and in fact most likely an enhancement to its durability. Why they released this record will remain a mystery.

Article is Copr. © 2012 by David Kronemyer, and originally published on MusicIndustryNewswire.com – all commercial and reprint rights reserved.

Two musicians walk into a bar. One doesn’t order a drink. Hey, it could happen.

If you smiled, this book (“You’ve Got a Deal: The Biggest Lies of the Music Business”) is for you. Actually, even if you didn’t find it funny, you can learn a lot about musicians and the music business by reading this volume of jokes, tales, stories, puns, one-liners, and sarcastic observations.

No doubt some people will read these pages and shriek with the kind of laughter that comes from recognition. Others will enjoy plenty of LOL moments but think that “the biz” can’t possibly be as horrific as presented here. But in a brief conversation with the author, Weber told me that the music industry is “actually much worse than what is in the book. Every one of my colleagues who has read it has told me at least one story that goes even further than what I’ve written.”

As Weber notes at the start of the work:

If you think that many of the lies you are about to read are the great truths of our business, then like me, you have been in the business way too long. If you think that some of the stuff you are about to read is especially cruel, harsh or too brutal, then you haven’t been in the business long enough.

Naturally, Weber includes the most famous comment on the topic, the one by gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson: “The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.”

While you might be tempted to say Jeffrey Weber’s paperback opus is “cynical,” I think that “realistic” is closer to the truth. In any case, it’s damn funny.

Inside Information

Weber writes from a position of knowledge based on his extensive experience and a wealth of inside information. “Probably too much inside information,” he says with a rueful grin.

With a three-decade career in music, he has produced tracks or full albums for an incredible array of artists: From Ronnie Dio to Pat Boone. From MC Lyte to David Crosby. From Jackson Browne to the Count Basie Orchestra. From Nancy Wilson to Ritchie Blackmore. From Etta James to the Utah Symphony.

His wide-ranging credits, which you can find on the StudioExpresso website, also include such artists as Steve Lukather, Marcus Miller, Michael McDonald, Chick Corea, Stanley Clark, Linda Hopkins, Kenny Burrell, McCoy Tyner, Buddy Miles, Billy Preston, Kenny Rankin, Diane Reeves, Rita Coolidge, and Luther Vandross.

Helpful

In addition to provoking guffaws, chuckles, giggles, and hoots of laughter, Weber feels that the book can help up-and-coming musicians prepare for some of the problems, challenges, difficulties, roadblocks, and speed-bumps they are likely to encounter along the way. In reality, You’ve Got a Deal! is an instruction manual disguised as a joke book.

The opening section on “Biggest Record Company Lies” is somewhat balanced with the section on “Biggest Musician and Singer Lies.” Well, perhaps “balanced” is not the proper word because the record company lies will keep you poor while the musician and singer lies can be countered by insisting they hit the right notes and refrain from the substance abuse.

Observations

Weber points out that many entries in the book are verbatim reports of actual conversations or business correspondence. As with this record company executive’s reply to an attorney’s request for fairness in a recording contract: “I’ll be Goddamned before I’ll commit to being equitable!”

There are some jokes requiring at least some knowledge of the situations, personalities, and job descriptions within the business. Such as when the record label A&R guy is asked his opinion of a new song and he says “I don’t know — I’m the only one who’s heard it.” Or this observation: “There is a very fine line between ‘arranging’ and ‘mental illness’.”

The rewrite of the 23rd Psalm from the perspective of the rhythm section is blasphemous but delightful: “The Lord is my drummer, I shall not rush. . . .”

Some of the jokes are miniature album reviews or critical analyses of people’s careers: “What do a cup of coffee and Eric Clapton have in common? The both suck without Cream.”

Some anecdotes are helpful for fathers of daughters who date musicians: “What do you say to a drummer in a three-piece suit? Will the defendant please rise.”

There is also an amorous short story that is hysterically entertaining because the profanity and anatomical references have been replaced by the names of jazz musicians: “It was a balmy night out and I was feeling thelonious. I hadn’t had any tatum in so long. . . .”

Types of Humor

Light bulb jokes, tone-deaf jokes, and musicians playing out-of-tempo jokes abound. Some are funnier than others, but the book seemed free of any real groaners. And sometimes Weber got me to choke on my coffee as a laugh line crept up on me. One such example was his special feature on imagined Jewish Country-Western song titles, which contains this gem:

“Mamas Don’t Let Your Ungrateful Sons Grow Up to Be Cowboys (When They Could Very Easily Have Just Taken Over the Family Hardware Business that My Own Grandfather Broke His Back to Start and My Father Built Up Over Years of Effort Which Apparently Doesn’t Mean Anything Now That You’re Turning Your Back on Such a Gift!)”

Definitions

Because one of my current jobs is editing the “DictionaryTomorrow” project, I was especially interested in his Glossary of Terms at the end of the book. Here are a few of the ones that made me smile:

Agent: A character who resents performers getting 90% of his salary.

Augmented Fifth: A 36-ounce bottle.

Modulation: “Nothing is bad in modulation.”

Movie composer: Someone who can write like anyone except himself.

Plague: A collective noun, as in “a plague of conductors.”

Transsectional: An alto who moves to the soprano section.

Vibrato: Used by singers to hide the fact that they are on the wrong pitch.

Giving Back

Weber is donating a portion of the proceeds from book sales to two organizations. The first is Reader to Reader (www.readertoreader.org), a non-profit group which distributes books to school and public libraries in the poorest communities. The second is MusiCares (www.grammy.org/musicares) which provides financial assistance to those in need within the music community.

Calls to Action

Musicians, producers, songwriters, and others in the industry are invited to participate in further editions of the book. Weber and his publisher “are looking for more great lies, stories, song titles, jokes, definitions” and more. Don’t know how long Weber will maintain this incredible accessibility, but he prints his e-mail in the book: it’s WeberWorks@earthlink.net but please just contact him with serious comments, okay? In other words, don’t you be a joke.

Finally, I’d like to quote one of his most intriguing observations:

There apparently exists, somewhere in Los Angeles, a computer that generates music for television dramas. When TV composers need a new dramatic cue, they turn on this computer; after sorting through millions of possible musical themes, it spits out “ONE LONG LOW SCARY NOTE ON A SYNTHESIZER,” and this becomes the cue. The next time they need a cue, the computer spits out “TWO LONG SCARY NOTES ON A SYNTHESIZER.” And so on, ad infinitum. We need to locate this computer and destroy it with hammers — along with TV producers and entertainment lawyers.

For that item alone: Jeffrey Weber, a grateful nation salutes you.

Book Summary

You’ve Got a Deal: The Biggest Lies of the Music Business by Jeffrey Weber, illustrated by Bob Wynne

Headline Books, Softcover, 176 pages; ISBN: 9780938467328; $14.95

www.headlinebooks.com

Article is Copr. © 2012 by John Scott G, and originally published on MusicIndustryNewswire.com – all commercial and reprint rights reserved.

Jimi Hendrix explored this topic when he sang of “Castles made of sand, that melt into the sea, eventually” and “I’ll see you in the next world, don’t be late.” Its primary exponent in recent times, however, was the great Sun Ra. He understood this dynamic better than anyone. Not only that, he expressed it in beautiful poetry and music infused with a mystical Egyptians-in-space cosmology.

Sun Ra’s concerns, however, go beyond a possible after-life or a world that is an alternative to this one. More fundamentally, he was concerned with the meaning of being in this world.

Illustrative is an untitled Declamation that appears at 8:25 on Live at the Horseshoe Tavern (recorded March 13, 1978, disc III, released by Transparency Records).

Here, Sun Ra states:

I have many names –

Names of mystery, names of splendor, and names of shame.

You sleep in the deep dark Babylonian night,

Dreaming, thinking this illusion that you call life is real.

It’s just an illusion, an infinite conclusion.

This is not life!

They think this is life, they think this is real.

How could you dare to say this world of misery is the ultimate of being?

How can you dare to call this thing of existence, life?

This is not life – this is death disguised as life.

It is not real.

This misery, this world of pain and distraction, is not life.

I know what life is – life is not full of tears – Life knows no death.

How can it be life, if there is truth?

No, this is not life. You are only asleep and dreaming.

Just dreaming of sleep, in the deep dark Babylonian night.

You are dreaming that you are doing all the things you did, before you die.

You will die dreaming.

Cry, cry for the people of earth, cry to heaven.

Maybe heaven will hear, and the people no longer will have to die.

Why should you have to die? Is there any reason why? What does it prove?

Look for something else. Bypass dying, and bypass death.

Look for being – all that you can be – and continue to be, just as millions of beings.

Being – immortal, eternal being. It’s not life, it’s not death.

Let us do it together, across the sea of immortality, beyond the furthest stars.

Let us journey together across the sea of immortality.

Let us go somewhere there, many light years in space,

Where human beings have never been,

That human eyes have never seen,

And human feet have never trod.

I know that I’m a member of an angel race,

My home is somewhere there out in outer space.

I could have enjoyed myself on this planet, if the people had been alive,

But this world is not my home.

The satellites are spinning, the world is just awakening.

Where happiness is pending, a better day is breaking.

The galaxy’s awaiting, for planet earth’s awakening.

What do you do when you know that you know, that you know that you’re wrong?

You’ve got to face the music, you’ve got to listen to the cosmos song.

We sing this song to a great tomorrow,

We sing this song to abolish sorrow.

Come on, and take a journey.

Take my hand, I’m a stranger from paradise.

In some far place, many light years in space,

I’ll build a world of abstract dreams,

I’ll wait for you, somewhere there, many light years away,

Traveling a strange celestial road.

Article is Copr. © 2012 by David Kronemyer and originally published on MusicIndustryNewswire.com – all commercial and reprint rights reserved.

Jocelyn Pook does not hear sound the way most people do. Whereas someone else might hear a droning piece of machinery, she hears the foundation of a song in which mere sonic noise is fashioned into auditory excitement. Where one person might hear a simple chord, she hears the potential for a mellifluous combination of aria and electronica. Where the average person might notice a few birds chirping in the distance, she hears the idea for the creation of an etude or tone poem.

Of course, that’s just the way I see it. And so is this: Jocelyn Pook creates music of such majestic beauty that it serves to suggest the grace of the gods.

Talent

Let’s back up a moment and consider the talent it would take to compose music for, and perform along with, Peter Gabriel, PJ Harvey, Laurie Anderson, This Mortal Coil, Massive Attack, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Nick Cave, Lyle Lovett, and the Communards. While that is daunting enough, now ponder what would be needed to be able to handle commissions and assignments from Stanley Kubrick, Derek Jarman, the BBC, The King’s Singers, and the Royal Opera. Pretty nifty, but every one of those achievements is just part of the resume of Jocelyn Pook.

Her curriculum vitae begins with her studies at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama but immediately afterwards she hit the road with the Communards and very quickly began collaborating with musicians, artists, choreographers, and filmmakers who operate at a high level of critical and popular recognition.

Scores

In addition to recording, touring, and leading her own projects (Electra Strings and the Jocelyn Pook Ensemble), she has created or contributed to the soundtracks and scores for such motion pictures as: The Merchant of Venice, directed by Michael Radford; L’Emploi du Temps, directed by Laurent Cantet; Brick Lane, directed by Sarah Gavron; and Gangs of New York, directed by Martin Scorsese.

Also among her motion picture credits are Caravaggio, the Derek Jarman film; Room in Rome, directed by Julio Medem; The People v. Leo Frank, directed by Ben Loeterman; The Government Inspector, directed by Peter Kosminsky; Storm Over Everest, directed by David Breashers; and Death On The Staircase, directed by Jean-Xavier de Lestrade; as well as Edward II, Mad About Music, and Blight for British television.

Music for the stage is another area of specialization for Pook and her work has been a part of My Body, Your Body, the DV8 Physical Theatre production; Deluge for O Vertigo; the National Theatre’s production of St Joan; Phantasmaton for the Shobana Jeyasingh Dance Company; and Darshan Singh Bhuller’s Requiem for the Phoenix Dance Company.

The ROH2, which is the contemporary arm of the Royal Opera House, commissioned and produced her opera, Ingerland. BBC Radio 3 commissioned her Portraits in Absentia, which intertwines music, resonances, and voices from her recorded phone messages. Pook has also composed music for such theatre productions as: Peter Brook’s Insomniac; Bobby Baker’s Box Story and How to Live; and The Royal Shakespeare Company’s King John.

Ears Wide Open

There is no doubt that Pook’s most widely-known work resulted from her being asked to compose the original music for Stanley Kubrick’s final film, Eyes Wide Shut. People tend to fall into one of two positions in discussing that score. “I love it!” say some folks. “I hate it!” say some others.

When questioned, the haters almost always refer to the soundtrack’s solo piano piece, “Musica Ricercata, II,” which was composed by Gyorgy Ligeti. While I am a huge fan of that piece, as well as everything I’ve ever heard by Ligeti, I recognize that his oeuvre may be an acquired taste. The point is that Pook’s exquisite compositions in the Kubrick film are often unfairly maligned by people who haven’t bothered to look into them.

There are also some strange comments about what are called “those backwards vocals” on the track used in “Masked Ball,” the erotic coupling sequence of the film. It is unlike almost anything else utilized in motion pictures. My own reaction is one of awe at how organic this piece sounds while at the same time possessing an almost mathematically precise progression of voice-and-instruments.

While nothing on the Eyes Wide Shut soundtrack attained the popular acceptance of that portion of “Also Sprach Zarathustra” used in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, I find her compositions to be at an equally high level. For me, her achievements are as compelling as that Strauss work. In both cases, I first heard them while watching the films. And in both cases, I have subsequently played the works in their entirety many times.

Whole New Worlds

Jocelyn Pook creates musical works that combine the new and the traditional. Her approach melds the energy of youth with the experience of maturity. In piece after piece, she combines disparate styles, genres, textures, or source material. Or all four. The result is the conjuring of new aural worlds. They may be unnerving but they are also ethereal. They may be haunting one moment and peaceful the next. She can achieve massive alterations of mood often with nothing more than the modulation of one instrument.

She has already created a body of work that is representative of a magnificent transcendence. These are songs and suites that some might term moody-groovy. Her works sparkle for their inventiveness and dexterous blending of wide-ranging influences. The Pook style is certainly mysterious, and sometimes even quite unusual, but every one of her creations is consistently satisfying to the soul. Put on some Pook and you have the opportunity to be transported to a different plane of existence and to enjoy a celestial piece of legerdemain.

Listening Room

Recently, I took a couple of Pook’s albums, Flood and the Eyes Wide Shut soundtrack, to Anisound, the mixing and mastering studio run by Matt Forger (Michael Jackson, Quincy Jones, Patrick O’Hearn). The goal was to subject the recordings to intense audio scrutiny. Forger put them up on a couple of his speaker systems and I am now more impressed than ever. While I enjoyed and respected her work when playing them on my home, auto, and computer systems, after hearing them in a near-perfect listening room, I absolutely love them.

In other words, like all valuable and vibrant music, Pook’s work just gets better the more you dive into it.

As I said a few paragraphs ago, Jocelyn Pook does not hear sound the way most people do. After listening to her work, neither will you.

For more information, visit: www.jocelynpook.com .
 

Article is Copr. © 2012 by John Scott G and originally published on MusicIndustryNewswire.com – all commercial and reprint rights reserved.

VIDEO:

For music majors, this book is a must-read. For the rest of us, there are passages that will be a bit technical. At least Schiff mixes a scholarly approach with a delightful human touch, as in this sentence from the preface: “One day, after I had mapped out a chronological outline of the century with some flashy chapter headings, an alternative approach suddenly came to mind. . . Instead of doing battle with history I would write a nonhistory.”

Schiff states that his concentration in the book will be on the century’s music in terms of color, rhythm, melody, harmony, love, history, and God, always referencing Ellington’s music even when long passages explore the work of classical, jazz, and pop music composers.

Quite frankly, this approach just should not work, yet the result puts twentieth century music into perspectives I had never considered. Better still, his writing has encouraged me to widen my exposure to many more works and artists.

Listen

References to musical works abound throughout the book and I kept wishing that a CD or flash drive accompanied the volume. Thankfully, there is much available on YouTube. If, for example, you want to check out selections from Bartok’s “Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta,” or Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring,” or Schoenberg’s string quartets, you can do so. And while not all of Ellington’s approximately 1,000 compositions are available, there are quite a few postings of his work.

Quotes

Each chapter opens with carefully selected quotations. I found that reading them before and after each chapter was instructive. And these, too, prompted me to expand my reading. Some are famous, like: “Ellington plays the piano but his real instrument is his band,” from his frequent collaborator, Billy Strayhorn. Schiff expands on that by stating “Ellington hired players with idiosyncratic and instantly recognizable playing styles, and composed parts for specific players rather than instruments.”

A quote from Claude Debussy, “The century of aeroplanes has a right to a music of its own,” made me look up Roger McGuinn’s comment about musical sounds in history: “The sound of the airplane in the forties was a rrrrrrroooooaaaahhhhh sound …. Now [1965] we’ve got the krrrriiisssshhhhh jet sounds…. It’s the mechanical sounds of the era: the sounds are different and so the music is different.” That quote is not in the book but it certainly could be.

Capturing Sound

Ellington did more than consider his performers when composing, he also frequently wrote with recording technology in mind, including the role of the microphone.

Early on Ellington saw that the new mechanisms for amplification and recording could enhance coloristic explorations. Long before the advent of recording “production,” let alone of electronic music, Ellington revealed his genius for technologically enabled sound synthesis in “Mood Indigo,” first recorded on October 17, 1930, but written especially for the “microphonic transmission” of a radio broadcast.

For the most part, Schiff wants to go beyond the sonics, to deal with “the intersection of high art and popular entertainment: African, American, and European traditions, improvised performance, and rigorous composition.”

To do so, Schiff delves deeply into twentieth-century pop and classical music, often in witty observations such as “…the 1950s, for instance, were the decade of both Boulez and Buddy Holly” and “With the appearance of Ella Fitzgerald’s ‘song book’ albums. . . the much-maligned output of Tin Pan Alley became the much-acclaimed Great American Songbook.”

Going Beyond

In dissecting Ellington’s works, Schiff is both analytical and appreciative. But if, like me, you do not have music theory skills, you may have to just allow yourself to be carried along by his prose until full meaning returns. Here is an example of his discussion of “Prelude to a Kiss” –

Harmonies heat up the melody’s seductive moves. Ellington set the initial pitch, B, atop a D dominant-ninth chord to form the interval of a thirteenth above the bass, the highest possible upper addition to a triad. The thirteenth is a double dissonance, one seventh (upward from C to B) stacked on another (from D to C). Music theory terms these combinations of tones dissonances, but they sound sensuous, not harsh.

Digging Deep

The book delves into the why and how of Ellington’s works from many angles. While his viewpoints are consistently interesting, Schiff doesn’t stop with his own estimations; he includes comments by colleagues and critics across a spectrum of the music world. A quote by Andre Previn really is a killer: “Stan Kenton can stand in front of a thousand fiddles and a thousand brass and make a dramatic gesture and every studio arranger can nod his head and say, ‘O yes, that’s done like this.’ But Duke merely lifts a finger, three horns make a sound, and I don’t know what it is.”

Schiff continually defines or even redefines music from the inside out. And he is quite egalitarian, digging into Alban Berg and George Gershwin equally. Genres are also explored, and he delivers one of the most interesting descriptions of the blues I have ever seen:

As much a poetic as a musical genre, it has its own verse form, syntax, vocabulary, imagery and subject matter. . .

Form: a thought stated, repeated, completed (surprisingly)

Syntax: lines broken midway by a caesura, and at the end by a comma; these breaks usually filled with a guitar response

Imagery: Love, tears, the railway

Subject: Suffering and escape from suffering

More than musical categories are deliberated. In a discussion of Ellington’s various “Blue Light” compositions comes this observation: “Like Monet’s series of haystack paintings, these works bathe identical subjects in changing light; heard back-to-back, they might be termed ‘blues-as-process’.” You will find references to painting, poetry, ballet, and literature throughout the volume.

High-fallutin’

There is a sense of bias in that classical composers are introduced by last name (as in this sentence: “Euro-jazz by Milhaud, Ravel, Hindemith, Krenek, and Weill dominated the new music scene of the 1920s”) while jazz and pop composers, and most jazz performers, are presented with both given and surnames. I admit that “Davis” or “Goodman” may not mean as much at first glance as “Miles Davis” or “Benny Goodman,” but who other than those deeply into music know that it’s Darius Milhaud, Paul Hindemith, and Kurt Weill? (And how many people know that it’s Ernst Krenek?)

From time to time, things get a little high-fallutin’ for my taste, as in his use of “vers libre” instead of just saying “free verse” or when he writes of George Perle’s discussion of Alban Berg’s hand-annotated score to his “Lyric Suite” that “The annotated score may be less an urtext than a billet-doux.” Really, it doesn’t seem that it would have been so hard to just say “less an original musical manuscript than a love letter.” But maybe that’s just me. However, Schiff’s next sentence is: “Perle’s revelation of the secret program marked a turning point in the hermeneutics of twentieth-century music from modernist formalism to postmodernist semiotics.” Hello.

Black and White

The subject of race appears from time to time. “Until rhythm and blues crossed over to become rock and roll, the blues scale functioned as a racial marker in pop tunes,” he writes, going on to note:

The blues scale indicated that a song, like “Stormy Weather,” was intended for black performers because it portrayed emotions that “they” had but “we” could not express, or it portrayed a “mongrel” condition, like that portrayed by mixed-race Julie in Show Boat when she sings “Can’t Help Lovin’ That Man of Mine.” The blues scale in particular became a fixture of torch songs, from “The Man I Love” to “The Man That Got Away,” sung by women who had “gone south” and paid the price.

My first reaction was WTF but since so much else in the book seems either right on or revelatory I’ll go revisit those songs and see if I get the same context as he does.

Observations

There is much to admire in this book. In no particular order, let me mention his noting the now-forgotten practice of classical improvisations: “Opera singers in the baroque and bel canto eras added ornaments and embellishments to arias; concerto soloists were similarly expected to improvise cadenzas.” And this:

To a greater or lesser extent, jazz improvisers are not just doing what comes naturally. Most jazz players live up to the old title “professor” that once designated the resident pianist at a bordello. They know more about music theory than anyone else in the business, and they practice as systematically as the most competitive concert violinists.

Also terrific is his shout out to jazz composers: “There is much evidence to suggest that certain practices of European modern harmony, including added notes, polymodality, and polytonality, began as responses to jazz (or its predecessor, ragtime) rather than the other way around.”

Or consider this description of one of Arnold Schoenberg’s works: “Op. 23 no.2 sounds like a man wrestling with an angel. Its harmonies are at once visionary and tactile…” Schiff makes me want to listen to this work immediately.

In his rumination on Ellington’s “Warm Valley,” Schiff injects poetry into his prose:

…instead of observing love from the outside, it turns listeners into lovers. Long before Nietzsche termed this phenomenon “Dionysian,” musicians recognized the erotic power of their art in the genres of the serenade and nocturne. Much of Ellington’s oeuvre (like Mozart’s or Chopin’s) is music of the night, enveloping the listener in the sensuality of sound. When Johnny Hodges keened a melody with vibrato and rubato, hesitations, swells, and slides, his tone was like an intimate touch.

Schiff himself points out that “Americans, and Europeans as well, conflated jazz and sex, and imagined jazz as a black Dionysus….” Schiff then includes a quote from Ellington about the relationship of sonics and eroticism, including a reference to “an aria of the sex symphony.” I won’t include the whole passage, but like his musical compositions, it is beautifully crafted and quite delicious.

Modern Music

Schiff touches on music by Steve Reich, Charlie Parker, Cole Porter, Erik Satie, and many more. He also explores some of the hullabaloo over free jazz, which is often performed with no regard for harmonic progression and which raises atonality to new heights. He states that “Ellington anticipated this controversy by more than a decade” in his 1947 Carnegie Hall concert where he “let loose the most outside piano solo he or anyone else had imagined up to that time.”

In moments like these, Schiff makes you yearn to be a part of the ongoing flow of all music, not just jazz, or classical, or pop, or anything else. And that is one of the highest compliments I can pay the book.

Book Summary:
The Ellington Century by David Schiff
University of California Press, Hardcover, 336 pages;
ISBN: 9780520245877; $34.95, £24.95
www.ucpress.edu
www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520245877 .

Article is Copr. © 2012 by John Scott G and originally published on MusicIndustryNewswire.com – all commercial and reprint rights reserved under U.S. and international copyright conventions. Video – Mood Indigo by Duke Ellington and His Orchestra.

VIDEO:

http://youtu.be/GohBkHaHap8