« October 2007 | Main | December 2007 »
And so this begat this webcomic from Hijinks Ensue.
The thing is, though -- you know how Stephen Colbert actually comes across as being much less of a cartoon figure than Papa Bear? On this, Idolator and I are agreed -- Universal CEO Doug Morris's original comments are impossible to top.
[Via Molly.]
-----
A gentle reminder that our fall fundraiser is in full swing. Please consider making a tax-deductible donation.
Greenleaf Music is offering freebie downloads of the the first two tracks from the new Dave Douglas & Keystone album, Moonshine.
Their recording process actually sounds really interesting -- it's a single in-studio performance, recorded mid-tour in Bray, Ireland, in front of a live audience, but somehow the resulting multitrack recording was still isolated enough for Dave and co. to edit, mix, and master it with it the same flexibility and fidelity they would have with a "regular" studio record. Check out the treatment on Gene Lake's drums on the title track, and the slice of delay+echo at the top of Dave's solo.
UPDATE: Now you can remix the title track yourself. Or just listen to the instruments in isolation, if you want. (This is actually more fun than you'd think. And you find out all kinds of stuff -- for instance, it turns out the effects-treated drum beat at the beginning emanates from DJ Olive's turntables -- Gene Lake doesn't play until the rest of the rhythm section kicks in at around 0:16.)
-----
A gentle reminder that our fall fundraiser is in full swing. Please consider making a tax-deductible donation.
This deadpan faux interview in Wired is probably the best parody of a cigar-chomping old-school record executive I've ever seen. It hits all the essential notes -- curmudgeonliness, arrogance, transparently self-serving self-righteousness, withering contempt for the consumer, a habitual sense of entitlement built from years of easy profits, absolute short-term ruthlessness coupled with an almost quaintly naive technophobia, and utter like-I-give-a-fuck indifference to how he's coming across. This is a character who thinks the drinks at Starbucks cost a mere $2, and who asks, rhetorically, how much you'd be willing to pay for Coca-Cola if it came out of the tap in your kitchen, ignoring that Coca-Cola sells $800 million worth of tap water every year. Hell, at one point he even tries to pass off Morgan Freeman's Shmoo monologue from Lucky Number Slevin as his own bit -- repurposed as a parable of the fundamental wrongness of intellectual property theft. That is some seriously brilliant satirical writing.
A few more choice excerpts:
There's no one in the record company that's a technologist," Morris explains. "That's a misconception writers make all the time, that the record industry missed this. They didn't. They just didn't know what to do. It's like if you were suddenly asked to operate on your dog to remove his kidney. What would you do?"Personally, I would hire a vet. But to Morris, even that wasn't an option. "We didn't know who to hire," he says, becoming more agitated. "I wouldn't be able to recognize a good technology person — anyone with a good bullshit story would have gotten past me."
[...]
When I suggest to Morris that the labels gave Jobs license to create what was in effect an Apple Walkman that played only Apple cassettes, it's Caraeff who answers. "Looking back, the best thing we could have done would have been to mandate one format," he says. So why didn't that happen? Morris is happy to field this one. "It never crossed anyone's mind!" he exclaims. "We were just grateful that someone was selling online. The problem is, he became a gatekeeper. We make a lot of money from him, and suddenly you're wearing golden handcuffs. We would hate to give up that income."
[...]
Back in his dining room, Morris is incredulous. He's once again talking about how his job should simply be finding and breaking new acts.
This stereotype of the dinosaur-like record exec who hasn't noticed that the asteroid has already struck the earth was probably never exactly true in the first place, but in addition to being a fun read, this piece does make for a convenient shorthand sketch of everything the industry is now desperately trying to distance themselves from, by hiring people like Rick Rubin and...
... whoa, whoa, hold up. You're telling me that is a real interview with Doug Morris, who is, in fact, the CEO of Universal Music Group?
Currently?
[PS Howie Klein's response is also a must-read.]
-----
A gentle reminder that our fall fundraiser is in full swing. Please consider making a tax-deductible donation.
Carroll Park, Brooklyn, 17 March 1928:
I swear, you still see those exact same three guys hanging out in the neighborhood every day.
[Via Pardon Me For Asking. See also Lost City for more of this sort of thing.]
-----
A gentle reminder that our fall fundraiser is in full swing. Please consider making a tax-deductible donation.
Isn't it a bit early yet for this sort of thing? You'll have your fill of these lists soon enough, I'm sure, but check out #89. No really, check her out.
Sure, it's the single token jazz appearance on an otherwise pretty myopic list, but hey, that's one more than last year. Can this be the beginning of jazz's long-awaited popular resurgence? Will the team that once upon a time had a lock on the title of America's Favorite Music rise again to challenge the current champions?
[Be sure to click through to the actual study, which is extremely entertaining: "conservatives were more likely to watch only two channels out of the 24 highest-rated networks: Fox and Fox News." And: "conservatives dislike most music genres." You don't say.]
-----
A gentle reminder that our fall fundraiser is in full swing. Please consider making a tax-deductible donation.
The musical accompaniment is to die for.
-----
A gentle reminder that our fall fundraiser is in full swing. Please consider making a tax-deductible donation.
Just as it's not possible for Ethan to write impartially about Bill McHenry, I am hardly the one to give you a disinterested account of Maria Schneider's Thanksgiving week run at Jazz Standard. Nate Chinen has some on-point observations -- me, I reliably revert to slack-jawed fanboy mode whenever I hear the band. I went late on Friday night -- a bit too late, as I missed the opening of the set-opener, Allegresse, and walked into Ingrid Jensen's effects-enhanced trumpet solo in medias res. The electronics serve the music well, although the best moment came later when Ingrid and saxophonist Steve Wilson sparred while drummer Kendrick Scott surged.
This was a real thrown-in-the-deep-end situation for Kendrick, subbing for Clarence Penn in the middle of the run with no opportunity for rehearsal. Maria's music lives and dies by the drummer -- it's by far the most demanding and elusive role in the band, and most of the truly vital information about how to play it can't be conveyed on the page. There aren't many drummers who could have responded as well as Kendrick did under that kind of pressure, navigating the whitewater rapids of Allegresse, the stuttering gestures of Choro Dançado and the unmetered balladry of Rich's Piece, reading like a madman but bringing his own flow to the music.
(I was lucky enough to have Kendrick play with Secret Society around this time last year -- you can listen to that show here.)
The band closed the final, too-short set with a piece they haven't played in many years. I'm very glad to have caught it, as this is the tune that quite literally changed my life -- for better or for worse, there is simply no way Secret Society would exist if I hadn't been slain by Wrygly back in '94. (That first Maria Schneider record could be the jazz The Velvet Underground and Nico -- everyone who heard it started a big band.) Charlie Pillow, Marshall Gilkes, and Ben Monder contributed some incendiary solos, but really, the band had me at the first three chords. I still think this is the greatest thing Maria has ever written.
Despite her stratospheric reputation in the jazz press, Maria seems paradoxically underrated (or sometimes just flat-out unknown) by the new music intelligentsia. Part of this has to do with her unabashed romanticism -- for a lot of the self-styled avant-garde, it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that skronk -- and, of course, her enviable popularity inevitably generates a certain amount of skeptical backlash. But if we're going to celebrate Osvaldo Golijov's remarkable musical alchemy and vivid orchestration -- and I certainly count myself among his admirers -- then we should also recognize that Maria has for almost 15 years now been working brilliantly with many of the same ingredients, transmuting deep reserves of contemporary jazz, flamenco, Brazilian music, Peruvian music, pop songcraft, and a classically-informed but entirely innovative approach to sound, color and structural unity. I can't help but feel that there is something fundamentally wrong with people who would dismiss music of such astounding vitality and artistry because it happens also to be very pretty.
-----
A gentle reminder that our fall fundraiser is in full swing. Please consider making a tax-deductible donation.
Studios = pwned.
Via Ezra Klein.
Meanwhile, on Broadway, the stagehands union is being sued by theatre owners and producers. Tiger tiger tiger.
Sorry about the dearth of recent blogging. Like I said, deadline -- parts will be handed in later today and there will be much rejoicing.
-----
A gentle reminder that our fall fundraiser is in full swing. Please consider making a tax-deductible donation.
Just back from night two of Dudamania at Carnegie. (Thanks, Molly!) I am actually running up against a fast-approaching hard deadline trying to complete the music for my own orchestral debut, so for now at least, I will let Jon Stewart speak for me:
EDIT: And also Steve Smith. (The comment of mine that Steve references is that under Dudamel, Bartók's infamous pastiche of Shosta 7 was actually genuinely funny. This bit is, in my experience at least, never funny.)
-----
A gentle reminder that our fall fundraiser is in full swing. Please consider making a tax-deductible donation.
John Rogers, one of my favorite scriptwriting bloggers, explains the basis for the Writers Guild of America strike. It makes for fascinating reading, especially for anyone involved in trying to make a living from their creative work. I especially like this bit:
One of my favorite jokes, just a lovely piece of writing, is Chris Rock's bit about the time one of Siegfried and Roy's tigers mauled Roy."Everybody's mad at the tiger. 'That tiger went crazy!' That tiger didn't go crazy ... that tiger went tiger."
This is how I feel about corporations in general, extended to the Studios in particular. There are those who rail at the AMPTP for being profit-maximizing heartless, soul-less bastards as if that were a bad thing. It's not.
A corporation's job is to make money, and if necessary fuck you in the process. Just like a tiger's job is to eat, and if necessary kill you in the process. I'm okay with that. I like capitalism. A lot. I like tigers. A lot. That doesn't mean I trust corporations not to try to screw me and everyone next to me when negotiating. Nor would I trust a tiger not to attack me in the wild. Nor am I personally offended when they try.
All this to say that the Studios have not been negotiating in good faith, nor probably did they ever intend to. Why? They went tiger.
Obviously, I am 100% for the WGA (when it's Viacom vs. the writers of the Daily Show, who the hell cheers for Viacom?), but I can't help but be a little rueful about the relative bargaining power of their union versus our union. You take your victories where you can find them, of course, but I can't help but feel that if the American Federation of Musicians had ever gotten serious about organizing and fighting for recording artists (not just the session musicians, orchestral musicians, and B'way pit players it primarily represents) -- and, on the flip side, if recording artists had ever recognized the need for solidarity, especially when negotiating with tigers -- we would not all have gotten saddled with recording contracts that look like this this.
A measly 0.3% residual on DVD sales is certainly a raw deal, but when it comes to going tiger, the AMPTP has got nothing on the RIAA:
The Copyright Office sets the statutory rate for mechanical royalties [N.B. "mechanical royalties" are the fee a composer or lyricist gets paid when an album containing their music is sold], increasing every two years according to changes in cost of living as determined by the Consumer Price Index. The rate increases are by authority of the 1976 amendment to the Copyright Act. The first rate increase was in 1981. It was at about this time that the Controlled Composition clause became commonplace in record contracts.The main purpose of the controlled composition clause is to NOT pay artists the statutory rate and to NOT increase royalties as costs of living increases; basically, to thwart copyright law.
The controlled composition clause limits the amount of mechanical royalties the company is required to pay for records it releases, and holds the artist responsible for the excess. In essence, the record companies are compelling artists to subsidize the payment of mechanical royalties. Here’s how they do it: (all examples assume today’s royalty rate of $.0755).
[N.B. This was written in 2001 -- the statutory rate for mechanicals in 2007 is now a whopping $.091 per song.]
Artist gets 75% of the statutory rate per song = $0.056 per song, not $0.0755
This is based on the minimum statutory rate, so the company calculates the same rate for a 10-minute song as for a 2-minute song. This thwarts the statute, which provides increased rates for songs over 5 minutes.Artists gets royalties on maximum of 10 songs = $0.56 per album total
Under the statute, an album with 12 songs would earn $.90. Under this clause, the maximum royalties payable would be $0.56. If the maximum is exceeded (by using a cover song or a producer demanding a higher rate), the artist is held responsible for that excess.Rate is fixed on date master is delivered.
The reduced rate will never increase, thwarting the Copyright Office statutory cost of living increases. Record labels lock in the earliest date possible. Some contracts fix the date at execution of the contract signing, knowing full well that the record won’t hit the shelves for two years.Not pay royalties on “free goods”
Under the compulsory license provisions of Copyright Act, record labels are required to pay mechanical royalties on all records “made and distributed.” Instead, record labels thwart this law by refusing to pay for so-called “free goods.” This confusing word “free-goods” is not defined as promo albums. Rather, all major labels define “free goods” as 15% of the records they sell. Using this provision, major labels calculate royalties on only 85% of records sold.Reduced rate applies to all “controlled compositions”
The definition of “controlled composition” casts a wide net. It includes songs written by producers on the album. Customarily, the record company hires these producers without negotiating a reduced mechanical royalty rate. The artist is forced to make up the difference. This is particularly egregious because most artists have no control over producers.Hold Artist responsible for excess mechanical royalties.
If the total amount paid by the company does exceed the specified maximums, the difference will be deduced from the artist’s royalties. The possibilities of the artist running afoul of all these provisions are endless and, potentially, very expensive for the artist.The following example illustrates the devastating effect this clause has on royalties:
Example: Artist has agreed to be responsible for any costs of mechanicals over $0.56 (75% of statutory times 10 songs). Artist has no say over what is recorded. She records 15 songs written by the record label’s “affiliated publisher” who charges the full statutory rate of $.075 per song, or $1.13 for the album. The Artist now OWES the record label $0.57 per record. In five years, when the statutory rate increases to [$.091] per song, but the artist’s rate stays the same, the artist will OWE $0.85 per album! Each record sold puts her deeper in the hole, and farther away from ever recouping.
Read the whole thing (and weep).
-----
A gentle reminder that our fall fundraiser is in full swing. Please consider making a tax-deductible donation.
Secret Society North is the Canadian cousin to my New York-based steampunk bigband, Secret Society. It began as a response to the bigband leader's dilemma -- how the hell do you go on the road with an 18-piece ensemble? I realized I could make it work if I put together a hybrid edition of Secret Society, one that augments the core of the NYC band with some of my favorite Canadian musicians, a handpicked group made up of friends and collaborators from my years on the Montreal jazz scene. I call this band Secret Society North.
Secret Society North have been invited to perform at the 2008 IAJE (International Association for Jazz Education) Conference in Toronto. This is by far the largest jazz event in the world, regularly attracting over 7,000 attendees. Our gig there is an important opportunity to present Secret Society tunes to a much wider audience, but more than that, it's a chance for us to perform fresh and forward-looking music for students and educators who too often let their focus on jazz's past obscure their view of what is happening right now.
Secret Society North will also be playing non-IAJE hits at a couple of very cool venues -- La Sala Rossa in Montreal and Tranzac in Toronto. Believe it or not, this is the first opportunity I've had to present Secret Society music in my home and native land. I am planning on marking the occasion by premiering a brand-new work, written expressly for the talents of these amazing musicians.
However, we cannot do this alone. It's never easy asking for money but we really do need your help to make this mini-tour happen. Like most events of this kind, IAJE does not actually pay the bands that perform there. And we do not have the luxury of a record-company supported showcase gig -- instead, we are appealing directly to you, our loyal fans. We humbly ask for your support to help us defray the travel expenses and other costs associated with bringing our innovative and genre-defying music to audiences in Toronto and Montreal that have never heard anything quite like it before.
Thanks to the good people at Fractured Atlas, your donations are tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law. In fact, you can make a secure online contribution right now:
Or, if you prefer to contribute by check, that can also be arranged -- contact me for details.
Please allow me to introduce the members of Secret Society North:
If you are not familiar with these tremendous musicians, take a moment to click through to their individual websites. It is my great honor to have them perform my music.
Please consider joining the august ranks of those who have already made a contribution to this project.
MANDATORY DISCLAIMER GOES HERE: Darcy James Argue's Secret Society North's Winter '08 Tour is a sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, a non-profit arts service organization. Contributions in behalf of Darcy James Argue's Secret Society North may be made payable to Fractured Atlas and are tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law.
MP3: Music for 18 Musicians, Section VI - Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble
The GVSU recording of Music for 18 dropped a few weeks ago. Since then there's been renewed interest in the ensemble, especially their 5 AM performance of this hourlong Steve Reich masterwork at the Bang On A Can Marathon earlier this year. A lot of people are surprised to learn that the Grand Valley State kids played for an audience of some 400 people -- "for reasons that no one could quite understand" to quote Alex Ross.
Well, speaking as one of The 400, it honestly did not occur to me that there was anything unusual about the size of the audience, even given the, ah, nontraditional timeslot. Of course, I'm the guy who thought it would be fun to liveblog the entire 27-hour marathon, so you may not want to put too much stock in my idea of what "usual" is. But I have received some email inquiries by people who are genuinely curious about what motivated those who turned out. (Perhaps some are thinking of launching their own 5 AM music series?)
It's tempting to be glib and say 'What part of 'The City That Never Sleeps' don't you understand?" On any given Saturday night in NYC, there are lots of people still out getting their fun on at 5 AM. (Obviously, it's not just NYC -- back in my callow youth, when we would hit Montreal's afterhours dance clubs, by 5 AM the party was just getting started.) When you've got close to a thousand people who came down to the Winter Garden to check out the free shows, including sets by The Books, Juana Molina, and a live version of Brian Eno's Music for Airports, it didn't seem that surprising that many of those listeners would choose to stick around for the "afterparty" (or drift in after a night on the town).
The 5 AM set was planned to coincide with the rising sun -- the opening Pulses began cloaked in darkness, but by the work's end the Winter Garden's glass-enclosed atrium was flooded with daylight. (You can see the progression in the photos I took.) This experience now seems inextricable from the piece's story arc -- the maracas in Section VI will hereafter always evoke dawn for me.
Music for 18 Musicians is not an easy piece, and Grand Valley State University is not exactly a magnet school for young virtuosi. The students there mostly have their sights set on teaching gigs, not whirlwind international careers. But that actually makes the piece a better fit for them, in a couple of important ways.
First, given a certain basic level of competence, its difficulties are the same for everyone. It's no easier for a Juilliard wunderkind to learn to play Music for 18 Musicians than it is for anyone else. In fact, because the music allows so little room for individual showmanship, it may even be harder for the young hotshot to put aside his ego and submit to the demands of the music. (Kyle Gann talks about this equalizing effect in his post on coaching minimalist and postminimalist rep.)
Second, like all of Reich's music, Music for 18 Musicians is impossible to perform unless everyone involved has a highly developed sense of rhythmic authority. You need to be strong enough in your own sense of time that you can play your part securely and accurately, but you also have to be hyper-attuned to where everyone else is feeling the time, and sensitive enough to adjust your own placement to match what is happening around you. Without a conductor, a drummer, or a click track to impose the beat, it's almost inevitable that you will end up with an 18-way tug-of-war. Learning to play the piece is largely about everyone learning how to pull in the same direction. For these young musicians, being forced to take personal responsibility for the time in large group context... and then being forced to keep up that intensity of concentration for an hour or more -- this is the best, more important and relevant lesson you could possibly teach the next generation of music educators.
I've often found it a bit curious that for a composer who is both hugely influenced by jazz (especially Kenny Clarke's sense of forward motion and Coltrane's single-minded motivic transformations) and is himself hugely influential far beyond his own musical turf (to cite but the latest of countless examples, Radiohead's In Rainbows has at least two tracks that are explicitly built around Reichian techniques) -- Steve Reich's influence on jazz musicians has been practically nonexistent. There are exceptions, of course -- Pat Metheny, John Hollenbeck, Joe Phillips, and, uh, yrs trly -- but an awful lot of jazz musicians, from arch-traditionalists to ostensible avant-gardists, find Reich's music anathema. My own mentor, Bob Brookmeyer, drips contempt for all things minimalist. (He once had to be escorted out of a performance of a Philip Glass opera.)
A few weeks ago, I gave a workshop on Reich's music for some jazz majors out at Queens College. I started by having the class attempt to read through Clapping Music, which I hoped would (A) be fun, and (B) give everyone a first-hand taste of some of the difficulties involved in performing Reich's music. It's fair to say there was a wide range of reactions to this, from "enthusiastic curiosity" to "are you fucking kidding me with this shit?". The skepticism intensified considerably when I played them the first few minutes of Come Out. I was definitely expecting some pushback on that one, but I'd also hoped that the kids would at least be somewhat impressed by Piano Phase, especially with the help of these nifty video aids:
(Unfortunately, at the time the Aidu clip wouldn't load.)
Anyway, at this point the battle lines were clearly drawn, but we had a productive side discussion about the value of the avant-garde generally, and the merits of studying music you can't stand. I'm glad the people who were not into this music spoke up -- it's always much more fun when people say their piece instead of just gritting their teeth in silence. And I think even the skeptics found a little relief when we moved on to the comparatively lush Music for Mallet Instruments, Organ and Voices and the openly jazz-inflected New York Counterpoint. But the experience made me wonder how much grief GVSU New Music Ensemble director Bill Ryan got from his students when they learned they would be devoting the year to learning a piece that doesn't offer many of the obvious rewards most players expect when they perform music. It also got me wondering how and why the virtues of Reich's music -- propulsion, clarity, patience, audible development, complexity via the manipulation of simple materials, the gradual construction of an effective large-scale musical narrative -- do not seem to resonate with very many of my fellow jazz musicians.
+John+Fedchock+(trombone)+Ben+Monder+(guitar&buy=http://www.artistshare.com/?productID=357&projectID=357&img=http://www.artistshare.com/artists/001/1/images/4503_tn.jpg&cliplink=discography/7.swf&dir=artists/001/1/){kind=link}
Recent Comments