As always, the blogroll only seems to get fixed when its decrepitude becomes sufficiently embarrassing, when I look at it and go, "Wait, I still haven't blogrolled Blog X? How can that be?"
Andrew Durkin (Jazz: The Music of Unemployment)
Yeah, that would be the most thoroughly embarrassing omission, especially since Andrew's been blogging since September 2004. And you know when it might have been a more opportune time to blogroll him? Before our double-bill back in January. Anyway, Andrew has apparently decided that January's East Coast tour wasn't enough to sate the nation's love for Industrial Jazz, and in March will be launching a full-scale invasion of Portland and Seattle, although for this new tour of duty he's got to rotate the troops:
This week I was preoccupied with the task of organizing things for our next set of dates (March 7 and 8 in Portland and Seattle, respectively). This should be easy, right? We just came off a burning east coast tour, the band is white-hot and ready to go, right? Right!Wait a minute! What's this? Lo and behold, I depleted my entire budget making the east coast tour happen (not complaining here, just stating the facts, m'am). So it actually turns out that for the upcoming northwest hootenannies (hottenanni?), I can't afford to bring any of the usual suspects up from LA. That's right -- I'm gonna have to do these dates with a brand-freakin'-new band.
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Kris Tiner (Stop The Play And Watch The Audience)
IJG associate Kris Tiner has also been blogging since before I started, though I only discovered his blog when he started liveblogging the "Industrial Jazz On Ice" tour. Those posts are still well worth reading -- go to the January archives, then scroll down and work your way up. Kris valiantly attempts to make the case for Shooby Taylor, The Human Horn, which he then uses as a jumping-off point to riff on his own descent from Jazz Puritanism into pop apostasy (something I blogged about myself a while back):
Somewhere along the way, though, I absorbed this awful "jazz ideology" that forcefully declared any and all other music inferior. I'm not talking about the cultural conservatism of the J@LC crew, mind you. But for much of my teenage years popular or commercial forms of music (and for a while even all that dusty, dead old classical music) were completely banned from my consciousness. I just didn't want to bother with it. For the life of me I still don't know exactly where this idea came from. I often suspect my subscription to Down Beat magazine (long since cancelled) had something to do with it.
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Surviving The Crunch (Ted Reichman)
You all know Ted as the accordionist from the Claudia Quintet. His blog is thoughtful, personal, and literate, as might be expected from a fellow Pynchon fan, and his reflections on Hyde Park, MA (south of Boston proper, near Mattapan and Roslindale) are on point:
Hyde Park, like my neighborhood, which is nearby, is in some ways a place that feels trapped in time. Boston as a whole, like New York, has changed a lot since I moved away, but in the outer neighborhoods between the city and the suburbs the big money hasn't quite purged the pre-milennial Americana yet, though it is trying. As Anthony Coleman said when I took him on a short tour, "You could film a Douglas Sirk movie here."
As noted previously. Definitely check out his video podcasts of his recent live gigs. The guy's making a return to the scene after a long hiatus, which he spent designing polyphonic ring tone hardware, so clearly he's got a lot to atone for. But Dolby is deep -- there's a lot more to his catalog than just "She Blinded Me With Science," and he'll be coming out with a record of new material sometime this year. His blog is endlessly entertaining, too -- check his post on scoring the Ken Russell flick Gothic:
I had never worked with an orchestra before, and I’d made the mistake of signing a deal with Virgin where I had to pay all recording costs out of my own fee. I reckoned I could just about afford the London Philharmonic plus an orchestrator for one day. We had 18 cues to record. I carefully prepared and sequenced them all in my Fairlight and gave the recordings to the orchestrator to transcribe. But I don’t read music and have little or no formal training, so I trusted him to transcribe my Fairlight versions faithfully. This he had not done. Orchestral players being heavily unionized as they are, on the dot of 9am they opened their sheet music for the first time. I stood there in the middle of a 96-piece orchastra thrilling at the sounds of my compositions. But every few bars, something was off. I made mental notes as they played each cue through. I had to walk from one section to the next saying, “Ok cellos… that part that goes ‘da DAAA da da…’ what’s your top note there?” “Erm, A flat?” I thought about it and said “…ok…. change that to an A natural will you?”
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Brett's video blog. Not to be confused with the muckraking, shit-disturbing original. Just jazz videos and GooTube links, lots of 'em.
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The Black Torrent Guard (Andy H-D)
Flattery will get you everywhere. Seriously, I thought for sure Andy was already on the blogroll. Anyway, with St. Botolph's Town gone, he's your go-to guy for Boston happenings and pinhole photography (for examples, check his Flickr stream). Best of all, Andy's not afraid to stick his neck out:
This moment was ruined, [Stravinksy's] Mass is a godawful piece. Nevermind the lackluster Bach consort or the poor blending from the Chamber Singers, the piece is bad. I can think of no other way to describe it other than it sounds as though it was written for high school choir. Some things are rarely heard because they were ahead of the curve or circumstance caused them to slip through the crack, but sometimes it is because it isn't very good. One neat thing I managed to glean from it was its continuation of the Palestrina tradition of homophony when you really need to hear the words. The machine gun-like pace of the Credo may have been meant to play behind interesting figures in the winds, but the winds certainly weren't making it sound like that. One brief glimmer of brillance came at the end of the Credo, after the aforementioned march the Amen blossomed into what seemed to be infinite shards of tradition. That might have just been by comparison.
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Soho the Dog (Matthew Guerrieri)
Composer, conductor, pianist, and Boston Globe correspondent. (Yeah, there's a whole lot of Boston in this update -- deal.) Matthew blogs about you stuff you need to know, like diamonds made from DNA extracted from Beethoven's hair and how composer cred affects a band's sight-reading.
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Thirteen Ways (Eighth Blackbird)
Definitely the most helpful new music ensemble blog out there: How to bowl. How to do interviews. How to tour without roadies. How to drink. How to cue. How to sequence your album. And how to slaughter a chicken.
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Brian Nation and Steve Bagnell document the scene in my ancestral homeland. See also their individual blogs, Brian's Beat the Devil and Steve's 14 Days In May.
Prof. McJeebie is on sabattical. RedBlackWindow is become rogerbourland.com. Latitude 44.2 North has merged with False 45th. St. Botoloph's Town is no longer with us. Goddogo is gone, baby... has posts that will "most likely be randomly appearing and disappearing for the the time being"... has requested that he be removed from the blogroll. Café Aman also seems to be on permanent hiatus.
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