Secret Society

Nothin' on but the radio

Audio of Secret Society's Excellent Adventure on WNYC this afternoon can be had here:

http://www.wnyc.org/shows/soundcheck/episodes/2009/09/21

Solos: on "Transit," Matt Holman (fluegelhorn); on "Zeno," Alan Ferber (trombone).

CO-CONSPIRATORS
WINDS
Erica vonKleist
Rob Wilkerson
Sam Sadigursky
Dan Pratt
Josh Sinton

TRUMPETS
Seneca Black
Jon Owens
Matt Holman
Eli Asher
John Bailey

TROMBONES
Alan Ferber
Josh Brown
James Hirschfeld
Max Seigel

RHYTHM
Sebastian Noelle, electric guitar
Gordon Webster, piano
Matt Clohesy, bass
Jon Wikan, drums

Speaking on the themes of stolen virtue missing from the radio, radio

Secret Society will be performing live on the air during today's episode of WNYC's Soundcheck. The show airs from 2:00 - 3:00 PM EDT -- our segment will start around 2:35 PM or so.

Baby your mind is a radio

Secret Society's July 15 show at Le Poisson Rouge is going out over the airwaves on WFMU tomorrow, July 31, at (I am told) 10:30 AM-ish Eastern. If you're not within signal range, there's a web stream here -- and the show will also be available for download from WFMU's Beware of the Blog following the broadcast. (I understand there has been some confusion recently regarding my ontological status so I hope this helps clear things up.) Big thanks to 'FMU's Scott McDowell and LPR's Matthew Duane for making this happen.

UPDATE: Stream the show (or just our segment) here -- downloadable MP3s up soon.

Yo, expert in this profession, the session

Nerdpocalypse 2: The Nerd Ascendancy: a "horribly hung over" John Hodgman appears as a guest on Rachel Maddow's radio show. Topics under discussion include the end of Get Your War On, the brouhaha over Yo Yo Ma & co's finger-synched inauguration "performance" (including a digression on Anthony McGill's hunkiness), Governor Paterson's terrible NY senate pick, an upcoming sports competition of some kind, and, of course, cocktails.

I have uploaded the audio of this segment for your listening pleasure. You're welcome.

MP3: John Hodgman on the Rachel Maddow Show, 23 Jan 2009

Spiritus Mundi

Yesterday, Rachel Maddow, subbing on the Al Franken show, interviewed Tim Westergren of Pandora.com, the cool online music service we blogged about earlier.

Some interesting tidbits gleaned from their conversation:

• Pandora programs in "sets" (something I'd come to suspect). This is to say, it tends to zero in on one significant attribute of your feed material -- the song(s) or artist(s) you used to set up your "station" -- at a time. This means Pandora will program several songs in a row that share that single attribute (say, instrumentation, or vocal style) before moving on to another attribute -- presumably this is designed to avoid too much stylistic jumping-around.

• Pandora employs music theory grads to chart the attributes of each song. Not to be snarky, but this probably explains why some of the songs are occasionally described badly or flat-out incorrectly ("major key tonality" for minor-key songs, etc) -- in my experience, theory majors don't always have the best ears. (They might have done better with musicology majors!)

• Pandora doesn't take lyrics into consideration at all. Of course, this is a valid and interesting approach, and part of the fun -- by focusing on purely musical similarities, it often suggests interesting but cool left-field connections -- but the service may ultimately be frustrating for people (like Lindsay) who listen much more intently to the lyrics than the music, and are more interested in finding new music based on lyrical similarity rather than musical similarity.

Anyway, you can download Friday's broadcast here. The segment with Tim Westergren starts around the 1:33:45 mark.

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?

Maddow 2.0

Some good news for fans of the best news show in the country -- starting Jan 2, 2006, the Rachel Maddow show will be (A) expanded to two hours instead of one, and (B) broadcast at a (barely) more tolerable timeslot (7-9 AM instead of 5-6 AM).

Of course, everyone who reads this blog already subscribes to the Rachel Maddow Show podcast, right?