Secret Society

Someone controls electric guitar

David Byrne blogs about last night's Boris + Sunn0))) hit -- they of the recent NYT profile:

Saw Sunn0))), the minimal metal band, last night. Last Sunday there was a huge article about them in the NY Times which I suspect might dash my hopes for them joining the lineup for one of the nights at Carnegie Hall I’m curating next Feb. But who knows? I expected a sell out last night as a result of that article, but I guess the Times demographic and the audience for extremely loud minimal metal has a small overlap. I can see the Venn diagram in my mind.

The opening act, Boris, was similar to SunnO))), though much less rigorous in their minimalism and visual presentation. Some prefer their less extreme approach.

Well, it’s not the sort of music you go home humming to yourself. It’s a sensory assault — intense and strangely pleasurable (I wore earplugs). Most of all, it’s theater, well conceived and beautifully executed — and in perfect context (this club venue was a former church). It is also deeply ritualistic.

Read the rest.

Every picture has its shadows

Don Alias's final interview at AAJ.

[I should add that I've had several recent Google hits from people inquiring about Don's cause of death. At the time, it was announced as "under investigation" and I haven't heard anything further.]

But when I hear that crazy sound, I don't look down

Central Park Summerstage complete schedule announced today. Free shows of interest:

Charlie Hunter & Bobby Previte with special guests Elliott Sharp as Groundtruther, Matthew Shipp, Nils Petter Molvaer, Sex Mob Friday, June 16, 2006

Feist, Buck 65, Jason Collett
Sunday, June 25, 2006 (despite this, the show is called "Canada Day!")

Seu Jorge, Jose Gonzalez, Alex Cuba Band
Sunday, July 02, 2006

Maldita Vecindad, Konono No. 1, Daara J
Sunday, July 23, 2006

Talvin Singh, Asha Puthli and special guests:
Dewey Redman, Guru, Solar & DJ Doo Wop, Prefuse 73, Outernational
Curated by DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid
Sunday, August 13, 2006

Flattened everything that stands

Composer Julia Werntz offers a frank and depressing look at Boston's frankly depressing jazz scene.

Twenty years ago, the Boston area was still a stopping point with a number of venue options for musicians on tour. Here is a sample of what my husband, jazz pianist Pandelis Karayorgis, and I collectively remember hearing in the mid-to-late 1980s: Abbey Lincoln, Lester Bowie, David Murray, and Don Cherry with Ed Blackwell at Charlie's Tap in Central Square, Cambridge; Cecil Taylor, Randy Weston, Steve Lacy, and Sun Ra at the Nightstage on the opposite end of Central Square; Mal Waldron, and Geri Allen with Joseph Jarman and Reggie Workman at the Willow Jazz Club in Ball Square, Somerville; Archie Shepp, Jacki Byard, and Henry Threadgill with Andrew Cyrille and Fred Hopkins at the 1369 Jazz Club in Inman Square, Cambridge. (Notice that none of these places, oddly, were actually in Boston itself.) These same venues, of course, were also the places one regularly heard local talent—older and "emerging"—such as the Fringe, the Joe Maneri Quartet, Jimmy Giuffre, Ran Blake, Joe Morris, and too many others to mention.

It's stunning to think about what we've lost. All of the above venues are gone today (at least one was a drug front, another was evicted...), and no other jazz clubs have opened to replace them. Today musicians and their audiences here struggle desperately to find places to meet.

Julia goes on to talk to Boston's Charlie Kohlhase, Chicago's Ken Vandenmark, and NY's Matthew Shipp about the playing opportunities (or lack thereof) in The Hub.

Ça tourne dans ma tête

The complete River To River and Celebrate Brooklyn (Prospect Park) schedules are now available.

Prospect Park highlights: Laurie Anderson with Skuli Sverrisson and Peter Scherer. TV on the Radio/Matt Pond PA/Voxtrot. Angelique Kidjo + Vusi Mahlasela. Yo La Tengo does The Sounds of Science. Kronos does Philip Glass's Dracula score with... (wait for it... ) Slavic Soul Party opening. Bill Frisell does Keaton, etc. Canada in NY lineup still TBA but last year it was the New Pornographers, the Sadies, and Stars. The Brooklyn Phil is there, of course, but playing [sigh] "crowd-pleasing classics."

The Bang on a Can marathon at River To River we already mentioned. I may also check out Super Furry Animals on June 2 and what the hell, maybe even Ricky Skaggs on June 1. The R2R website makes it absurdly difficult to just look at the damn schedule, but if you enter the keyword "music" in their search engine, things work out much better. The Hold Steady are on July 27, Dave Holland is on August 3.

[via Brooklyn Vegan]

UPDATE: Bryant Park announced as well. Prince, Kanye West... insanity.

Carnival Town

Apparently Norah Jones played The Delancy on Friday night with El Madmo -- her [ahem] punk band. Ms. Jones took the stage wearing a blonde wig, pancake makeup, fishnets... the works.

As it happened, there were were a handful of NYC music bloggers in attendence -- Stereogum, Gothamist, Yeti Don't Dance, Village Indian, and Fists with Your Toes. They took pictures.

[via Brooklyn Vegan]

Cymbal Rush

No new Radiohead this year, but Thom Yorke's solo album will drop on July 11th.

Stereogum has details, linkage.

Artists Only

David Byrne will curate the an upcoming Perspectives series at Carnegie Hall -- lineup TBA.

Keep an eye on Byrne's blog for possible hints.

[via Brooklyn Vegan]

Say Ah

Ben Ratliff: Listening with Bob Brookmeyer

Really great stuff in there:

Born in Kansas City. Mo., in 1929, Mr. Brookmeyer had a largely unhappy youth that coincided with the killer years of Kansas City swing, when Count Basie was the North Star. He first heard Basie at the Tower Theater in 1941, at a Sunday matinee between showings of western movies, with his father.

"I melted," he said in his low, rumbling voice. "It was the first time I felt good in my life. I was not a very successful child."

[…]

"New Orleans was a whole other feel, but Kansas City was concentrating on the smooth, rhythmic 4/4," he said. "That was everything. There was what you might call a coolness — that's an awful word — a subtlety, and a strength that didn't hit you over the head. Long beats on the bass. Drums really concentrating on cymbals, making a smooth patina."

Basie himself was the key to all this. "He had supernatural powers," Mr. Brookmeyer said. "He didn't evince a lot of effort. Whereas other people seemed to take music and pound it into the ground — bounce it off the earth — Basie came from under the crust of the earth and through your feet."

[…]

Bill Harris had an overpowering voice on his own, I said. Was he too large a presence for a big band, too disruptive?

"I wouldn't say disruptive," Mr. Brookmeyer corrected. "He was influential. His sound was highly emotional. His personality was so strong that he guided the band a lot. As a trombonist in a big band, you're in the middle of everything. You learn how things are made. My old joke is that saxophonists get all the girls, trumpet players make all the money, and trombone players develop an interior life."

Except that if you've studied with Brookmeyer, you know what's coming next...

Back in New York in the early 80's — which was also when he started his teaching career in earnest — he began to question the entire established language of jazz performance, but especially solos, which he had come to regard as "ritual gone mad."

"My first rule became: The first solo only happens when absolutely nothing else can happen," he explained. "You don't write in a solo until you've completely exhausted what you have to say. If you give a soloist an open solo for 30 seconds, he plays like he's coming from the piece that you wrote. Then he says, 'What the hell was that piece that I was playing from?' And the next 30 seconds is, 'Oh, I guess I'll play what I learned last night.' And bang! Minute 2 is whoever he likes, which is probably Coltrane."

It's important to take all this with a grain of salt. When Brookmeyer is writing for a soloist he likes -- for instance, Clark Terry ("El Co"), Gerry Mulligan ("Celebration Suite" -- Jeru's big shoes are more than adequately filled by Scott Robinson on the recording), Till Brönner ("Tah-DUM!"), or, naturally, himself ("American Tragedy") -- his rule about "the first solo only happens when absolutely nothing else can happen" goes straight out the window.

It's more a matter of deciding when he can trust a soloist to advance the musical narrative unassisted, and when they require more guidance -- deciding when and where and how to "keep your hand on the soloist." And with the soloist outnumbered 17-to-1, you, the composer-bandleader, have access to a lot of different ways of manipulating the soloist -- from subtle, subliminal cues to throwing them into shark-infested waters and making them fight for their lives.

This bit from near the end nicely encapsulates the most important thing I learned from Bob:

Mr. Brookmeyer talked about the qualities of music that are important to him. "How do you begin to speak to the listener?" he began. "The listener doesn't have to like the process, but he needs to be in the process, to make the trip with you.

"In the 80's," he continued, "I began to wonder how long I could extend my musical thought and still not break the relationship with the listener, not put the listener to sleep. When I became a teacher, I realized that everybody writes too short. You've got to finish your thought."

Don't miss the audio excerpt where Bob talks about Basie -- it's under the "Multimedia" heading in the left-hand column.

Also, Bob's playlist reminds me that I desperately need to blog about the most-criminally overlooked reissue of 2005. Unfortunately, it's crunch time for me (Pulse gigs are coming up, of which more soon), so blogging will be thin on the ground for the next few weeks.

In the meanwhile, if you haven't already, please partake of the Secret Society audio clips on the right-hand side. Listen, share, burn, host 'em on your own blog... that's what they're there for.

More contrast and compare

David Berger and the Sultans of Swing:

The sonic experience is heightened by the extreme care taken to record the band live in the studio without headphones, mix it with absolutely no compression and run it through an analog board, so that what you hear on this CD is as close to a live performance as ever captured on any jazz CD. Leif Marten Olofsson the CEO/Chief Designer of Marten Design, makers of top-of-the-line audiophile speakers says, "In the autumn of 2005 I had the pleasure to see and listen to David Berger and his Sultans of Swing live in Sweden. Since then they have been a favourite for me both musically, and when we do demos with our speakers. This latest album has a directness and uncompressed dynamic that shows all the benefits of our speakers. Fantastic!"

Chris Speed:

I will say that the idea was to record a jazz album as dub as possible, and Chris and Danny at Good and Evil totally hooked it up, they tracked it on a 2” 16-Track Deck at 15 ips; and mixed down to a 1/2” at 30 ips and we compressed the shit out of it, and put the mixes as in your face as we could. I especially love the crackly organ...

Bottles break, music plays

NYC has Anti-Social Music.

Boston has Socially Awkward Composers.

Kick my brains round the floor

Nick Southall has a fascinating and controversial article over at Stylus Magazine about another incredibly annoying trend in pop recording (and, increasingly, in nonpop recording) -- the loudness arms race, where records are mastered with increasingly absurd levels of compression in order to make them sound "hotter" than everything else. This process also flattens out all the dynamic peaks and valleys, making the entire record unremittingly loud and, often, clipped and muddy as well. Many recording engineers get really steamed about this -- as they should, because too much compression (especially during the mastering process) totally ruins all of their meticulous work in the studio -- but they are under constant pressure from artists, producers, and labels to "make it hotter."

Salient quotes:

Record companies these days (and I don’t just mean nasty behemoths like EMI or Sony—your favourite indie are probably just as bad) are eager to make CDs as loud as possible because they think, with some justification, that this is what people want. In order to get CDs to be consistently loud, they get compressed—essentially this means that the quieter moments are made louder in relation to the, um, louder moments, to make the entire CD a consistent, and high, level of volume. During the compression process, the tops of signals can be cut off, or "clipped." Compress a record too much, and it sounds bad. Make it “clip” even slightly, and it sounds worse.

There are two ways to measure "loudness"—peak levels and average levels. The former refers to the loudest part of a piece of music or sound; a crescendo or climax. The difference between the highest and lowest points makes for the average level. Sadly, the science of psychoacoustics suggests our ears generally respond to the average level rather than the peak level of volume—hence we would perceive a consistently loud piece of rock music as being "louder" than a piece of classical that reaches the same or even a higher volume level during a crescendo, simply because the rock song is "loud" all the way through. "Loud" records grab our attention (obviously—being louder they are harder to ignore on first impression) and in order to grab attention quicker and more effectively in a crowded marketplace, record companies and artists have been striving to make their records as loud as possible from the second the first note is played, whatever the cost.

[...]

Levels have crept up over the last decade though, and alarmingly so. Nevermind is 6-8dB quieter than, say, Hopes & Fears by Keane—to contextualise this, those 6-8dB will make Nevermind sound approximately half as loud. On most modern CDs the music is squashed into the top 5 dB of a medium that has over 90 dB of range. It’s like the oft-quoted fact that humans use only 10% of their brain [N.B. Not actually true - DJA]—imagine what we could do if we realised potential. Think of the classic, exciting Pixies formula again—it doesn't exist anymore, because those dynamic leaps have been ironed out. Keane should NOT be twice as loud as Nirvana.

[...]

Music with an incredibly loud signal is referred to in the industry as "hot." One way to make music "hot" is by compressing it—essentially this means lowering the peaks so they're almost level with the troughs, and then increasing all of the signal to make it as loud as you can before it starts "clipping." Only a lot of people seemingly don't know when to stop. Compression can be added at almost any stage of the recording process, in large or small doses. Small increments added at both recording, mixing and mastering are more effective in preserving sound quality than huge leaps taken at the final stage, for instance.

One result of this is that modern CDs have much more consistent volume levels than ever before. But when is it desirable for music to be at a consistent volume? When it's not being actively listened to; i.e. when it's intended as background music. Sudden (or even gradual) dynamic changes in ambient volume disturb people from what they are otherwise doing (shopping, eating, working) by making them pay attention to the fluctuating sound rather than the task in hand—I only notice the air conditioning at work when it switches off ten minutes before I go home every day, for instance—for the previous eight hours, my brain tunes the hum out so I can concentrate. So it is with music too—it may grab your attention more effectively at the start, but it's ultimately easier to ignore too. All music becomes background music if it's at one flat level, no matter how loud.

[...]

If there’s a jump-the-shark moment as far as CD mastering goes then it’s probably Oasis. In 1987 Appetite for Destruction averaged about -15dB RMS volume, and was considered loud. By 1994 the average loudness in RMS power for a rock record was -12dB. (What’s the Story) Morning Glory in 1995 hit a phenomenal -8dB on many tracks. The 1997 remaster of Raw Power reaches an extraordinary -4dB, making it supposedly the loudest rock record ever. In 2005 the average RMS volume is -9dB. Audiophiles and people who work in audio engineering largely agree that this is too loud, but in the face of massive commercial impetus their say is often ignored. Arguably (What’s the Story) Morning Glory became so successful in the UK precisely because it was so loud; its excessive volume and lack of dynamics meant it worked incredibly well in noisy environments like cars and crowded pubs, meaning it very easily became an ubiquitous and noticeable record in cultural terms.

[...]

On At War with the Mystics, for instance, there is so much clipping during the crescendos (which aren't real crescendos anyway, because they're the same volume) that it almost seems as if it's being used deliberately as another instrument in the mix. It’s this flatness, this clipping, this unwavering attack, that wears and tires and means you won’t listen to your favourite records, if they’re from the last few years, as often as you might want to, because they are intrinsically unmusical and unpleasant. Hence, perhaps, the perpetual merry-go-round of seeking the newest flavour-of-the-month; over-compressed music sounds great for a couple of listens, but there is little desire to replay the music because your brain recognises that there is something fundamentally unmusical about the sound.

There we'll relax and taste the fruit of all our actions

David Bowie is taking a year off from touring and recording, and has apparently really been getting into Nixon in China lately.

It makes me be what I'm supposed to be

When I was little, the music I liked best was TV show themes. "Entertainment Tonight," that was a good one. Also, "Ripley's Believe It Or Not," "The A Team," "LA Law," "MacGyver," "Cheers"... these were the core of my repertoire at the piano. There were some movie soundtracks I liked too -- St. Elmo's Fire (though I wasn't allowed to see the actual movie) and Ghostbusters especially. The first tape I really got deeply into was a dub of a Henry Mancini record my grandfather made for me.

As may be quickly becoming apparent, I did not listen to any of the popular music that would have been normal for a kid my age. Unlike my classmates, I didn't flip out over Michael Jackson's Thriller or Prince's Purple Rain or the Police's Synchronicity or the Beastie Boys' Licensed to Ill -- while they were an inescapable part of the general musical landscape, I didn't own 'em and (at best) the music just didn't make much of an impression. One of my best friends was really into the Ramones, the Talking Heads, the Violent Femmes, etc, but I thought he had terrible taste in music, and I kept going back to my beloved Mancini tape.

It was the summer of 1987 when finally I decided I might get beat up less, escape constant ridicule, etc, if I tried to engage with the popular culture of my peer group. I made it my mission to listen to the radio constantly. Rick Dees Weekly Top 40 became a sacrament not to be missed. I forced myself to listen to everything with an open mind -- it didn't matter if I loved it or hated it, it was just important that I know about it. I still know all the words to almost every hit song from 1987.

My next step was to try to persuade my parents to let me sign up for the Columbia House Music Club -- in that initial, glorious batch of twelve tapes, the one I was most excited about was Huey Lewis and the News' Small World -- which, for some reason, was never as popular with my peers as it was with me. Ditto with Steve Winwood's Roll With It, Richard Marx's self-titled debut and Rick Astley's Whenever You Need Somebody. But like everyone else, I got way into INXS' Kick, George Michael's Faith, Michael Jackson's Bad, and U2's Rattle and Hum. I never did buy a copy of GNR's Appetite for Destruction, but I (somewhat surprisingly) found myself loving all the radio hits, especially "Paradise City."

Following that, like all good suburban white boys, I started getting into rap -- especially It Takes A Nation of Millions and Ice-T's Power -- but what I really loved around that time, more than anything, was Living Colour's Vivid. I think that's the first record (well, er, tape... ) I listened to that clicked for me as something more than just a collection of tunes. It was heavy but it was smart, the playing was badass and it was incredibly varied -- it drew on all these genres and styles I knew absolutely nothing about, and every listen gave the thrill of fresh discovery. The angry and anguished tunes felt far more real to me than anything else I'd ever heard -- "Cult of Personality" (of course) but also "Middle Man," "Desperate People," "Open Letter To A Landlord," "Memories Can't Wait," (I'd never heard the original) -- damn. This music did things to me I'd had no idea music could even do.

As it turns out, my fling with popular music lasted just three years -- in the summer of 1990, I abruptly stopped listening to anything at all except jazz. (I would allow myself a little blues, occasionally, and I also made an exception for Living Colour's Time's Up, but that was about it.) I had started playing piano in the school jazz band and discovered I had some talent for it, so I started taking lessons and going to workshops, and it seemed like everyone was broadcasting the same Wyntonite message to us budding jazz nerds: "Popular music is an evil and corrupting influence, and jazz -- and, uh, classical -- are the only True Musical Arts. If you want to play jazz, you have to listen to jazz exclusively. Anything else will fuck up your playing."

So I obediently purged almost my entire collection and started over with Kind of Blue (and, um, the soundtrack to Siesta -- those were the two Miles tapes they had in stock at the mall), Clark Terry's In Orbit (with Thelonious Monk), and an Italian import of dubious legality that had some of the Charlie Parker Dial sessions.

Because of this, I missed out on what's supposed to be the transformative musical moment of my generation, which had been brewing practically in my own backyard. I never got Nevermind or In Utero or Ten or Ritual de lo Habitual or Badmotorfinger or Superunknown or Dirt. I lost track of hip-hop as well -- I completely missed out on De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, Gang Starr... What was the point? They weren't captial-A Art -- not like "Watermelon Man" or "The Sidewinder." Kurt Cobain couldn't possibly have anything of any value to communicate to an obsessive, depressed, antisocial teenager like myself -- unlike, say, Sammy Cahn or Johnny Mercer. What good would it do to stay in touch with the musical culture I was growing up in? All that was current and popular was necessarily coarse and unclean, and needed to be sacrificed in the name of Art. At least, that's what anyone who knew anything about jazz seemed to be telling me, and who was I to argue?

This brings me to a couple of recent posts at New Music Box by a young composer named Colin Holter, who is just finishing up his first year of an MM in comp at the University of Illinois. Colin is... somewhat conflicted:

Are my colleagues and I at a disadvantage because pop, rather than Western classical music, is the music in which we were socialized? In other words, wouldn't it be better to know the Beethoven piano sonatas forwards and backwards than the second Weezer album? Were we listening to the wrong music in our formative years?

Those of us who are preparing for doctoral prelims in the next couple of years would probably agree that we were. I certainly wish I had familiarized myself with the standard rep rather than Gang Starr's "Just to Get a Rep," and not just for the prelims' sake either. My respect for the "classical" literature is enormous, having heard and performed quite a bit of it, but my knowledge of it is peppered with holes—holes that are not only embarrassing but also potentially detrimental to my compositional awareness. More importantly, I wonder how years of pop have shaped my perception of music as a listener. Has my familiarity with the conventions of rock weakened my ability to make sense of large-scale formal shapes, for example? Why is it that even my favorite new music masterpieces don't elicit an emotional reaction from me, but the right band playing the right song at the right time can reduce me to tears?

In answer to that last question, composer and WWE afficionado Seth Gordon helpfully observes: "Well, seems kinda simple - you just don't like classical music as much."

Leaving that possibility aside for the moment, though, the idea that a composer who didn't cut themselves off from popular music during their formative years -- as I mostly did, much to my regret -- now lamenting that they wish they'd O.D.'d on Haydn string quartets back in junior high makes me want grab Colin by the shoulders and shake him very hard. Despite what his teachers may be telling him, the idea that there's actual virtue in being disconnected from the musical culture at large is completely insane. Insane, Colin. The idea that you, as a composer of contemporary music, will write better music if you purge the stuff that has the deepest emotional resonance for you is also, I'm afraid, bugfuck insane. If this is what the your teachers are feeding you, Colin, flee. Either that, or tell them to go screw, and crank that Gang Starr record you loved so much. Revel in it, swim in it, but also: take notes. Because when you figure out how to draw out what attracted you to that record in the first place and make it yours, you'll be much further ahead than if you'd gone back in time and force-fed your 11-year old self more Haydn.

Undaunted, Colin returned the following week with a related post:

A former teacher of mine whose opinion I respect enormously once compared pop culture to a giant amoeba:  It's tempting to believe that we can sever a pseudopod or two for our own use, but the integrity of our music will ultimately be enveloped and digested by it.  He was referring in part to the ideal of immanence, a goal easily compromised by appropriation from other styles or works, and implying, I think, his conviction (which I share) that a project based on the recontextualization and manipulation of preexisting elements rather than on the difficult but utterly necessary search for new elements is doomed to produce incestuous and shallow music.

To be clear, Colin's appetite and affection for pop culture and popular music are (apparently) undiminished -- it's just that now, he feels much more guilty about it. I won't spoil Seth's priceless response by excerpting it here -- just go read the thread (scroll down to "incest, peppermints, color of time... ").

[Seth has promised to start his own blog soon, which I will gleefuly link to once it's up and running. The blogoshpere needs him.]

I will only point out that my captial-A Art has always been about appropriation. Early jazz musicians started by appropriating blues, ragtime, marches, impressionism, etc, and continued on merrily appropriating Tin Pan Alley and Broadway and gospel and soul and atonality and so on, right on down the line. Was the integrity of Miles Davis's music enveloped and digested by "Bye Bye Blackbird" or "Someday My Prince Will Come"? Are John Coltrane's recordings of "Chim Chim Cheree" and "The Inch Worm" incestuous and shallow?

And if the monstrous amoeba of popular culture is so all-consuming, what makes you think you can escape it even if you want to?

More Kebekwa

I was curious about Kebekwa, the Montreal-based percussion ensemble mentioned in Don Alias's NYT obit, so I emailed my friend Chris Smith, a Montreal-based trombonist and arranger. Here's what he had to say:

The band is [now] called Québa (kay-bah) and is still going, under the direction of one of the original members, one of Don's protégés, a guy called Chipito (Alain Labrosse, but even his wife calls him Chipito). [...] The guys Don tutored are all still the best Afro-Cuban percussionists in Montreal, including the Labrosse brothers, Normand Bock, Michel Dupire, and some others. They played a lot at the now-defunct L'Air du Temps, where I heard them a couple of times. I last heard them (obviously without Don!) a couple of years ago as the closing show at the JazzFest des Jeunes du Quebec (MusicFest Canada provincial level) where I adjudicate each year.

It only took my little finger

Randy Nordschow asks "How long has it been since you've been completely blown away by a new piece?"

Get out of my space, get out of my face

I wasn't planning on announcing my MySpace profile quite yet, but some of my crafty co-conspirators have already found it, so I suppose might as well extend the invitation to everyone else.

And yes, I know, MySpace is part of the world's worst media baron's evil empire and is mostly populated by hipsters with terrible hair, and there's nothing there you can't get here (in fact, my MySpace audio clips are all tuncated due to the 6 MB file limit), but I'm told that "if you have a band, you just have to be on MySpace," so um... here I am.

[How's that for infectiously enthusiastic self-promotion?]

Stick a fork in it

As I alluded to earlier a lot of people really hate Pitchfork. (For the uninitiated, Pitchfork is a widely read and influential online indie rock mag.)

I cop to being a semiregular Pitchfork reader, mainly because while I'm not exactly a staple on the indie rock club scene (I have my hands full just trying to hit a fraction of the jazz gigs I want to see), I remain ever-curious about what y'all are listening to, good and bad. So I'll occasionally stop by PF to see whatever they're hyping this week and maybe give it a taste -- I've found a lot of interesting music that way. Now it's true that the reviews don't often give a very good idea what the music they're describing actually sounds like. And it's also true that many of their reviewers are kids who don't really seem to know anything about music recorded before they were born. And sure, the prose is notoriously overwrought to boot. And, yes, I know they are every bit as beholden to their advertisers as mainstream dead tree publications like, say, Spin (or Down Beat). And okay, sure, I admit that howlers like this are par for the course over there:

Impulse! Records had been defunct for more than a quarter century.

So… wait a minute, why the hell do I bother with Pitchfork?

Over on this thread, Jon Abbey (a Pitchfork-hater) recommends I Hate Music (a Bagatellen-associated forum), but the musical focus is completely different and (as another contributor to the thread pointed out) bulletin boards aren't really conducive to skimming. There's also Stylus, Dusted and PopMatters, which are all arguably better than Pitchfork, but not that much better. (For instance, this Dusted review of the Either/Orchestra's Live in Addis is one of the most horribly misguided reviews I've ever read, easily as bad as the worst of Pitchfork.)

Now, I know there's no shortage of indie rock-oriented blogs out there, but that's precisely the problem -- there are far too many to wade through unaided and find the ones that are actually worthwhile. So, um, suggestions welcome.

Meanwhile, I think I'll start with JVS's excellent Vermont-based blog Latitude 44.2N. His review of the Calexico+Salvador Duran+Iron and Wine show at the Spectrum makes me both nostalgic for Montreal and damn sorry I couldn't make the NYC dates on this tour -- especially since I won't be able to catch Calexico's gig at Joe's Pub on Jan 24th either. Sigh.

Every one of those late night stations playings songs bringing tears to my eyes

I'm fairly sure I'm the last person on the internets to find out about Pandora, but on the off chance you're even further behind the curve than I am…

Pandora is sort of like a custom radio station that is aggressively marketed to a single-person demographic (i.e., you), or an artificially intelligent jukebox that tries to follow up your initial selection with other stuff you'll like. It also learns from your feedback -- "I like it," "I don't like it," etc.

For instance, I went there and tried entering "Maria Schneider" as the artist. I didn't offer any feedback, I just let it play for a while to see what it would come up with. Here's what I got:

"Nocturne" - Maria Schneider, Allegresse
"New Leaf" - Drew Gress, 7 Black Butterflies
"Concierto de Aranjuez," Miles Davis, Sketches of Spain
"Orbits" - Wayne Shorter, Alegría
"Thieves and Poets Part 3" - John McLaughlin, Thieves and Poets
"Journey Home" - Maria Schneider, Allegresse (okay, evidently since Pandora calls this "Maria Schneider Radio," it's going to play Maria's stuff with more regularity than the others)
"Dizzy's Business" - Dizzy Gillespie Big Band, Birks Works
"Discipline" - Sun Ra, Space Is The Place
"Ad Lib On Nippon" - Duke Ellington, The Far East Suite
"Hiroshima Memorial" - Dave Liebman Big Band, Beyond The Line
"Todo Modo" - Mingus Big Band, I Am Three
"Zulu" - Tony Lujan, Zulu

Not bad at all, I thought. Of the tracks I wasn't already familiar with, I thought the McLaughlin was a long way from John's best work, the Liebman was beautiful and very different from other things I've heard from him, and the Tony Lujan (who I've never even heard of) had strong writing and playing, but never quite grabbed me.

Anyway, you can create up to 100 different "stations," each based on either an artist or a specific song, and each independently customizable. And it's free! (Apparently, the free version is ad-supported, but I haven't heard any yet.)

This is definitely a fun toy. If you try it, make a note of your results and post them in comments.

EDIT: I let it play a little longer, and I got "Piece One," from Anthony Braxton's out-of-print 1976 record Creative Orchestra Music. How cool is that?

The Way of the Exploding Solo

Via my friend Travis, this is quite simply the greatest thing I have ever seen on the internet.