Category: Musing on Music

Posted on

managing copyright in a global environment…

One of the big problems for artists distributing music (for free or profit) online is that copyright laws are different the world over. That’s why there are Russian websites selling very cheap downloads of ‘illegally’ ripped CDs. There’s very little law enforcement in most of the former soviet union, and if a site is hosted in a particular country, it’s subject to those hosting laws…

…at least, it seemed to be. Tom from the forum sent me a link to this BBC article about a public domain sheet music site in Canada who had fastidiously made sure that all the music they posted complied with Canadian copyright law, but were then threatened with being sued for copyright infringement when Europeans downloaded the scores! (the salient legal point being that copyright in Europe remains with the estate of a deceased composer for 20 years longer than in Canada).

The interesting thing here from a moral/ethical standpoint is that the point was a) contested by the Europeans, and b) there wasn’t an option to add a disclaimer to the site. Interesting that one of the synonyms for this in the web world would be porn, where the laws related to what you can and can’t look at are hugely different across the globe (I’m not sure if they still do, but the UK used to have MUCH stricter laws about what could be published than in the US…) – I’m sure there’s a hell of a lot of stuff available on sites that are legal in the host country but illegal in other places. In the US, it’s probably true across state lines! But has anyone been prosecuted? I’ve not read about it if they have (but to be fair, I tend to read a lot of news stories about legal issues in the music industry, and not too many about the porn industry…)

So it’s kinda sad that porn goes on unchecked and able to get round localised legality just by hosting off-shore, and a wiki established by a student strictly within the laws of the host country, attempting to provide a great resource for musicians firstly in Canada, but then across the world, is curtailed…

The pernicious onward march of Capitalism, I guess – he who can afford the best lawyers wins…

…though it’s definitely worth comparing the worlds of sheet music and recorded music here – this was, apparently, the largest public domain music score library on the internet, and was being widely used. Is there much of a community for trading public domain recordings? I know there was a bit of a kerfuffle recently when a bunch of still-living crusty old jazz dudes were getting upset that they were about to lose the rights to their own recordings which were now 50 years old (that does seem a bit weird, though not really top of the list when looking at the positive and negative impacts of copyright…) No, copyright infringement in recorded music is now seen as a matter of not getting caught – the RIAA prosecute a bunch of school kids for downloading and think it will frighten everyone else into compliance.

But they screwed it up for everyone by trying to make it an issue of illegal action followed by legally enforced action. They excluded themselves entirely from any dialogue about the impact on creativity, or as I keep saying, and the impact of the music life of the listener when you have no filter. So in a digital world, where community ethics seem to have far more influence on behaviour than any notions of legality, they pushed the discussion into communities that proceeded to laugh at them, use Lars Ulrich as as totem of out-of-touch-millionaire-rock-star-greed and were then able to ‘morally’ justify all the filesharing as a blow against ‘the man’.

Actually, I guess what’s worth throwing in here (damn, this is a disjointed blog post!) is the case of the Real Book – a book of jazz scores written by a load of (I think) Berklee college students, with some pretty heinous chords in them, which was sold by the hundreds of thousands the world over. I’ve no idea who was duplicating it, but it was sold under the counter in shops for YEARS before anyone did a proper legal version – then Chuck Sher came along and published a great book called The New Real Book, which has the proper chords for things in it, neatly printed arrangements, a load of unneccesary pictures of jazz stars (huh?), but is generally a great resource. There are about 5 volumes, as well as Latin versions (that’s Latin music, not jazz scores in Latin) and a ‘Standards Real Book’ which I haven’t got, but is probably the most useful of them.

However, there are digital versions of this kicking around as well – some enterprising young file-sharer has scanned in the New Real Books and uploaded them somewhere. I guess they see themselves somehow in the tradition of the old Real Book, keep the music alive, or whatever… I dunno, it’d be great if Chuck would put out a legal PDF version of all the books for a sensible fee. It’s great to be able to support the people who write these tunes.. There is also now a legal version of the old Real Book – cleaned up, some corrected changes, much cheaper than the Sher books…

Anyway, where did this start? Ah, yes, sheet music, porn, cross-border copyright problems… My last point to note is that there’s already cross border protection for buying digital music – you can only access iTunes in the country you’re a) from and b) in – I can’t buy from UK iTunes while I’m in the US!! That seems completely mad. One central store, in the host country of the company, so occasionally someone else gets a break due to fluctuations in exchange rates. Surely that makes the whole thing easier and more fun? :o) Even my favourite legal download site, emusic has different costs for stuff in different countries. There aren’t many online industries that bother with that – if you’re looking to buy domain names, or web hosting, you just pay the fee for the country where the service is being provided…

Anyway, I hope the music library is able to just stick a disclaimer at the top of certain works saying ‘this music is still illegal to download for free in Europe, please go and buy it’ and get their archive back online…

Posted on

Bass playing, like riding a bike…

Yesterday was the first rehearsal for the London Jazz Festival gig that I’m doing on Nov 24th with Corey Mwamba. I played with Corey years ago at a gig in Derby and we’ve been trying to find a way to play together again since then, so when he asked me to do this gig, I said yes straight away. However, the first time we played together it was all improv (my forte). This time, it’s REALLY heavily written stuff, Corey’s own marvellous, dense, polytonal, odd-meter compositions. Definitely the toughest music I’ve played for a very long time.

I can’t remember the last time I had a heavy reading gig – probably depping on a pantomime about 7 years ago… but at least that stuff had each of the musicians playing in the same key, and the same time signature as the drummer… this stuff is way deeper.

Anyway, I’d glanced at the sheet music a few weeks ago, but had woefully underestimated how tough it was going to be, so when I had a play through on Tuesday, I was pretty certain that at Wednesday’s rehearsal I was going to be rather shit.

Fortunately, I’d also underestimated my own wikkid skillz, and found the stuff much easier than I’d thought. (‘Easy’ definitely being a relative term here…) I got through most of it just fine, and managed to read some of the bits that apparently none of the other bassists who’ve played this music have got right.

A few things helped immensely that are pertinent here for anyone dealing with learning tunes on gigs.

firstly, the rest of the musicians were not only hugely talented but really lovely people. Robert Mitchell on piano, Deborah Jordan on vocals, Shaney Forbes on drums and Corey himself on vibes are all amazing players, great improvisors and delightful people. The aim of everyone was to encourage eachother to get the best out of the music. This has been my experience in EVERY situation I’ve been in like this. At one college I used to teach at, the owner of said college once had a go at me for not giving the students enough of a ‘roasting’ (a very unfortunate term given some of the stories about the antics of certain sporting icons at the time…) – meaning make it tough for them, give them a hard time etc. His reasoning was that that’s what it’s like in ‘the real world’ so was what they needed to be prepared for. Bollocks. It’s never happened to me. Learning to deal with antisocial misanthropic losers isn’t what one should be learning at music college. Developing a love for music and a passion for creativity as well as an understanding of the mechanics of music, a deeper knowledge of the history, of style, of nuance… getting a hard time from the staff is a really stupid idea (especially given that the person who said this time me hadn’t done a proper gig in years, if ever, so was speaking out of no experience whatsoever…)

Secondly, the rehearsal was staggered – it started with just Corey, me and Shaney, working on the rhythm section stuff. It gave Shaney and I a chance to get used to eachother’s playing, and as Deborah and Robert had played the music before, they weren’t sat around getting bored while we learned parts.

Thirdly, Corey was all about making great music – he was open to suggestions, very vocal when he was happy with what was happening, and we were all smiling and enjoying ourselves with it. Deadly serious about having fun.

All in, it was a great day, I realised that I’m a better musician that I thought I was, and learnt some new skills too, played some deep challenging and beautiful music with amazing musicians. What more could we want?

We’ve got another rehearsal next week, and then the gig on the freestage at the Barbican on Nov 24th, at 2.30pm… be there! :o)

Posted on

The difference between BitTorrent and 'home taping'.

Back in the 80s there was an ad campaign run by the RIAA or someone that said ‘Home Taping Is Killing Music’ – there were even moves to levy a royalty on blank cassettes… A lot of people are now drawing comparisons with the way that people now download music off the web, ‘we’ve always had copied music, I used to tape stuff off my friends when I was a kid. Bit Torrent is no different’, goes the argument.

Here’s where it differs – and why I believe home-taping, and the real equivalent now which is duping a CD from a friend, aren’t killing music – lending music to your friends so they could copy them carried a lot of social capital. In general, people only lent CDs to their friends, and there was a reciprochal loaning taking place, if you had cool music to lend to your friends, it carried with it a cache that could put you in strong social stead at school, and it meant that in a functional peer group, everyone bought music with their pocket money, and everybody had a slightly bigger music collection than that which they could afford. Still, you were copying stuff from people with whom you would then discuss it, and the likelihood was that as a group you may well build an affinty with a particular band, scene or genre, and as your disposable income increased, so did the desire and means to own more than just the one album that you bought. I know that when I was at school I had a couple of copies of Cure albums before I bought them, and felt a great sense of pride when I replaced those tapes on vinyl – now i was a real fan.

It was an entirely different relationship to that of the downloader who installs BitTorrent and then proceeds to download 60 albums worth of Bob Dylan, and a 12gig Torrent of Joni Mitchell, or whatever… where the ‘ubiquity/scarcity’ dichotomy that Gerd talks about is enacted on your iPod or harddrive in a way that actually wrecks your relationship with music. So instead of developing a unique soundtrack within a peer group, one that requires a degree of financial investment, a fair amount of time (copying stuff onto cassette took a lot longer than downloading!) and the building up of a whole load of social capital, now you have a music collection bigger than most record shops, and absolutely nothing defined about it that makes it YOUR soundtrack. No filter. And our relationship with music is ALL about the filters.

So, again, the question is not just ‘how do we get paid for this?’. It’s bigger than that. It’s about how we re-engage with the process of becoming the soundtrack, how do we provide those filters, how do we connect with our audience both in an iconic way (where our music and the associated ‘brand’ speaks to them in some way) and also connecting personally.

The web is such an amazing tool for breaking down the barriers between artist and audience. It’s magic that I can write this stuff, and people can comment, or post on my forum. It’s great that I can email many of my favourite artists direct from their myspace page. It’s also great that I can then buy their latest album directly from them, investing in their career, connecting with them directly (or at least from my paypal account to theirs) and often get a ‘thankyou’ email back from them… That’s a good thing, and I don’t think the same is going to happen with free downloads. It just doesn’t carry the same transactional currency (even without the financial consideration) – it’s an uneven exchange, as the artist has provided music (that – let’s not forget – didn’t take weeks or even months to make, it took YEARS of playing to get to the place where the music is any good) but the downloader has just provided attention. Now don’t get me wrong, I am grateful when people take the time to listen to my music, but I’m not a charity case – I hope that people who listen to it again after that do so because it’s GOOD. It’s of value, and it offers them something of substance. Best case scenario it becomes part of their soundtrack to the world, along with all the other music that means something to them. And if it means something, it’s worth something, more than just a fraction of a penny from their ISP collected download tax, that Google then forward onto Sting and Madonna on my behalf – hey, don’t mention it, my financial situation will hardly be altered by the few meagre pounds that come my way each year, whereas your uber-wealth needs feeding. ;o) etc.

Does that make sense? (not the bit about Sting and Madonna, the stuff about bittorrent and home taping)

Posted on

More on studying music full time

Last week, I went up to Manchester then Perth in Scotland to do two University masterclasses. Luckily for me, neither of them were billed to specifically, so I got to get up and play a bit, then talk about a mixture of musical things and business things. The reaction was largely wonderful, as I’ve already mentioned, and I’ve had quite a few nice messages via email and myspace from the students saying that they were inspired to think differently about their career, their creative path and what it is to be a musician… That’s magic, and I’m delighted that what I was TRYING to say actually got through…

Here’s a summary of a few of the things I was telling them – much of it was the same as I posted here last week –

College is the only place where you get the time and space be absurdly creative without considering how to pay the bills – it may be that you’re having to work a job to pay your way through college (I did for a while), but your actual college time should give you space to do the kind of absurd creative things that you probably won’t have much time for once you’re in a band that’s trying to get gigs and find their niche. You’ll have some time for it then, I hope, just not as much. So make the most of it.

Being a great musician is not guarantee of work – I know lots of great musicians who aren’t making a living at it, and a fair few shitty ones who are millionaires. So think about the business now, think about what’s important to you now, start thinking like someone who is going to spend their life making music now. Cos the only concrete difference between you as a student and me as a ‘pro’ is purely financial. The rest is perception.

Music is way too important to be wasted on fame – fame is, by and large, the penalty you pay for musical success. If your aim is to be famous, write to Trisha about your unnatural love for large breed dogs, don’t devalue music in your own life and that of the people around you by trying to use it to chase fame. The chances of you finding ‘fame’ are minute, and when you get there, you’ll probably hate it… So instead, look for a way to make money playing the music you love. It is possible. Tough, but possible.

If you were there, can you think of any other things I said that helped? Oh, yes, I talked about finding your voice as a player, and made my regularly made point that if you’re looking to absorb an influence, don’t write music that sounds like their music, aim to write music that makes you feel the way their music makes you feel – it’s no use me trying to sound like Joni Mitchell, or else people will just say ‘he sounds like Joni Mitchell’ – no-one says that about Joni, or if they do it’s a way of highlighting her originality, not her derivativeness! Instead, when I listen to Hejira, I try to be aware of what I feel like, what mood it evokes, what it is about it that makes it such a special record. And I try to embody some of that honesty, integrity, transparency and narrative clarity in my own music…

Posted on

Music as ancillary?

So, back on track – onto the task of unpacking the notion of our music being given away for ‘free’, the story going that it’s great publicity, that we’ll develop a degree of ubiquity (or localised ubiquity – is that an oxymoron???) and it will serve us well in the long run.

A lot of the talk about new ways of getting music out there has revolved around established bands ‘giving away’ their music, with the aim of spreading the word about their tours, and making it back in the live arena, the two main ones being Prince (who gave his new album away in the UK with copies of The Daily Mail – a heinous newspaper, inexplicably read by a couple of million people a day…) and The Charlatans, who gave theirs away to downloaders on the XFM radio website.

Now, what’s happening here really? Is anyone being altruistic? Prince was paid handsomely by the Mail (just been trying to find out exactly how much, but can’t – it was over a million anyway…) the Mail circulation spiked by almost a million, and you can bet your ass they charged more for advertising in that issue, knowing that they would have that many more copies out there.

No, what happened was that the CD – and the music on it – became an ancillary product to the Mail selling advertising space, and getting people who wouldn’t normally buy it (both those who hate it, and those who would normally buy a rival paper like the Sunday Express). No-one was ‘giving away’ anyway. The mail sold it as part of the cover price, and Prince sold it to the paper.

I know less about the Charlatans deal, but the XFM website is advertising driven, and they clearly benefit from increased traffic, both in terms of new listeners and click throughs to their advertisers. I wonder if the Charlatans are on for a cut of that. I also wonder what they’ll do when everybody’s doing it.

See, advertising space in newspapers is REALLY expensive, so if you can get the jump on the rest of the market, and are a big enough band to make a splash by announcing something like this, or the Radiohead deal, you’re getting serious amounts of column inches for free, or rather, for the cost of the album. Right now, it pays for a band like the Charlatans or Radiohead to be seen to be giving it away, but it’s a trade, and for the people doing the giving away, the music is ancillary to their primary business – it’s just there to generate traffic.

This isn’t a new thing, as I’ve blogged in the past about Carling owning loads of venues, with the purpose of selling more beer (wow, it was over two years ago that I wrote that!), but it is something that we REALLY need to be aware of in all the talk of ‘free’ – we need to ask the question, ‘is this ‘free’ idea just about someone else making money out of me giving my music away?’

It’s already happening – Myspace, for example. You get free hosting of a few music files and a page, and they make billions in advertising. We’re providing the content that fuels Murdoch’s empire (yeah, when you put it like that, it’s pretty seedy). However, it’s a knowing agreement, and in return WE get the traffic too – it’s our content, we can get the click throughs etc. and hopefully the increased audience…. hopefully.

So there are two models here – symbiosis and exploitation. Trying to sell indie musicians on the idea of giving their music away for free because Prince and the Charlatans think it’s a great idea is utter bullshit. It’s heinous. There is no parallel, as we won’t generate either the column inches or the fee for licensing our product to whichever media outlet wants to distribute it…

And unless someone comes up with a far far better workable scheme, the same would be true of whatever globalised collection agency was needed to distribute the fees collected when music is made downloadable for free in exchange for a ‘tax’, possibly collected by ISPs. The music would be ancillary to the company behind the agency making money and branding it. The kind of size of operation needed to do such a thing online means it could only really be handled by one of the online giants – Google, Yahoo, News Corps, Microsoft or Macintosh – I really don’t relish the thought of trying to contact Google’s new licensing department to get my share of the license cash… Still, I have a couple of chapters of The End Of Control that I’ve not read yet, so must go and find out how Gerd has been expanding on his ideas…

Posted on

Bass 2.0?

The “…2.0” suffix is being widely used to denote a significant leap forward from the first version of something, inspired by the description of changes in the way the web is used and perceived as ‘Web 2.0’. So we now have Media 2.0, Music 2.0 etc… It’s quite a useful shorthand, if a little nebulous, but it did make me wonder if it would work as a way of describing what I’m up to musically – Bass 2.0 – Bass 1.0 being the use of instruments within the bass family as defined by their role as ‘the bass’ within the music, and then the extensions on from that (taking that role and expanding on it, making it more twiddly, but still sitting well within the tradition of what’s expected of a bass instrument.)

Bass 2.0, as I see it, is where the role becomes something entirely separate from the instrument.

Q: What makes the bass an instrument distinct from the guitar, and why is that important?

The instrument is defined by it’s place within the lineage of bass guitar luthiery, the descendants of Leo Fender’s Precision and Jazz, which set the parameters for scale length and string spacing in place, no matter how many strings. String spacing can be tighter or wider, and scale length moves around, but even then it’s defined by it’s relation to the standard – short scale, long scale, etc.

So it’s a different family of instruments, originally designed with a particular role in mind, but now designed to be more of a blank slate, maximising the tone-shaping potential via electronics, and accentuating certain resonant characteristics via advanced building methods.

For quite a while, people playing bass as a solo or melody instrument did so very much within the lineage of the role – there was a continuum between what bass guitarists (instrumentalists) did as ‘bass players’ (music functionalists) – even Jaco stayed largely in that world, in that there’s very little of what he did that is unrecognisable as a bass as we know it (though I can’t even begin to imagine what it must’ve been like to hear ‘Portrait Of Tracey’ when his self-titled debut first came out…!)

The first person that I’m aware of to really take a ‘Bass 2.0’ approach to the instrument was Michael Manring – the redesign of the basic properties of the instrument that he and Joe Zon did to create the hyperbass have yet to be surpassed or even matched in terms of what possible in extending the possibilities of the 4 string bass (interesting the the most radical bass design ever is still a 4-string.)

There’s some stuff on his album ‘Drastic Measures’ that hints at what’s possible, but it’s his next three solo albums – Thonk, Book Of Flame and Soliloquy – that as a trilogy set the standard for Bass 2.0 – music conceived from the mind of someone who is very much a bassist, but who uses the instrument as a tool to create incredible music, rather than turning ‘bass playing’ into a circus trick or parlour game by just doing the same old shit faster and twiddlier than anyone else.

Where does my music fit into this? Well, i was deeply influenced by Michael’s ideas, even before I’d ever heard him, and took ‘Thonk’ as a green light to move away from the slapping and tapping I’d been doing before (even though there’s loads of slapping and tapping on Thonk) and do my own thing. It was a few years before I played a solo show, but as I’ve mentioned here before, the concept for my solo music was in place by the time I did my first gig (the track ‘Chance’ on And Nothing But The Bass is taken from that very first gig.)

And I’ve been trying to build on that ever since, holding in juxtaposition my love of the bass, it’s history, it’s place in the last 50 years of popular music with my desire to make the music i hear in my head. Tellingly, very few of my influences are bassists, because it’s always been about music first. Most of the ideas I take from bassists are physical ideas rather than compositional or emotional ones – the stuff that really counts.

And of course, within Bass 2.0 there’s an even deeper understanding of what the bass does when it’s being ‘the bass’ – I talk about this a lot when I’m doing looping masterclasses etc. – when I started playing solo, there was a fear projected onto me by some ‘older and wiser’ musicians who suggested that it would spoil my ‘normal’ playing, that I’d lose the joy of playing simple lines because i’d always be wanting to take solos and play melodies. In reality that couldn’t be further from the truth – because i spend my days thinking in layers, I’m happier than ever to just be one of those layers, to play the simple bass parts that hold everything else together. I haven’t had that many chances to do it of late, which made last night’s gig with John Lester at the 606 all the more frustrating, as I couldn’t hear John’s guitar at all, so wasn’t able to play with the level of confidence that his music really needs. It wasn’t rubbish by any stretch, just not as on it as it should’ve been… Shame, cos the rest of the gig was amazing.

Anyway, so, Bass 2.0 seems to be a nice way of categorising a desire to take the bass instrument to new places musically – there are certain tonal things that the physical size, shape and string length of the instrument allow that mean that even things that ‘sound like guitar’ or ‘sound like a synth’ have a unique quality to them…

Posted on

A couple of alternate views from people who think giving music away is a good idea…

Jeff Schmidt just posted a link on his blog to this article on AlterNet by Bob Ostertag, an experimental musician in the San Francisco scene, explaining why he’s made his entire back catalogue (or all of it that he has the rights for available online for free.)

The Long Tail blog (by Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail and Editor In Chief of Wired mag) features a post about the perils of thinking about the music industry as being solely about the sale of CDs, and says that it’s actually really healthy if you look at a load of other indicators – Gigs and Merch, Download sales, Licencing for TV/Film/Ads, Vinyl Sales (which I’d group with other ‘premium product’, generally – bought by DJs because there’s still kudos in vinyl DJing, but also largely by fans who often don’t even own record players – single sales are half about how great a medium vinyl is for DJs, and half an anachronistic throw-back for fans who don’t see the actual ‘music’ but need to be even more of a music fan. It strikes me as a way of classifying your allegiance – I like this band enough to download, this band enough to buy the CD, and this band so much that I’ll even buy their singles despite as yet having nothing to play them on…)

Anyway, both posts are interesting, though as Jeff points out, Bob does descend into a rant about the mendacity of big corporations, record labels etc. I’d love to see some figures for what Bob’s doing, as he says in the article that making records has always been a ‘break even at best’ exercise for small labels. I’m assuming he’s talking about the labels that put his stuff out. It never has been for me. My solo Cds have always made money (less so on the duo CDs, but they have made some) and their sale, especially at gigs has been really important to my income stream. That doesn’t automatically mean that I ‘deserve’ that in the long run, but it does give the lie to the idea that ‘nobody’s making money out of releasing music on indie labels’ or whatever other myths are abound…

Anyway, have a read of them both – Chris’ position is vey similar to that of Gerd – the music industry is healthy, it’s just the process of charging per-unit for recorded music that’s on the way out…

Posted on

recorded music as an advert for gigs – the death of an artform?

This post started out as a response on the stevelawson.net forum to a comment from lovely Tom who said, “Perhaps the last few decades have been an anomaly and we will go back to live concerts being the mainstay of the music industry”

To which I responded thusly (i’m cross-posting it here, because the notion that records can be given away by all musicians as a way of publicising gigs has become the standard answer to why file-sharing is ‘great!’, even though that’s not what Tom – a vinyl junkie and great supporter of musicians – meant)

Steely Dan would be screwed then… no more Peter Gabriel or Blue Nile albums, no more records that take 3 years of writing and experimentation to come up with…

I think the thing that is being missed here is that recorded music is already an ‘advert’ for live music! And vice versa. A lot of times, the only money I make on a gig is CD money. Take that away, and I don’t make anything. The idea that we’re moving back to a live music economy would be just fine if there was a commensurate shift in the way venues viewed music, but the vast majority of gigging opportunities in cities are about selling beer. So the musicians are in the bar area (or at least ‘a’ bar area), playing to people who are drinking and talking, aren’t paid to be there, and get to do 30 mins max because the higher turnover of musicians means that each of them bring friends along who drink… So the bar makes a few hundred (or a few thousand, in some cases) quid, and pays nothing (and then complains that the PRS are robbing bastards because they charge them a licence for broadcasting music – hah!)

The way that musicians make money is fragmented already – I get paid for gigs, I get paid for CDs, I get paid for teaching, for masterclasses and clinics, occasionally for session work (live or studio, though most of my live work outside of my own music is pro bono for friends), royalties for live performance and radio airplay (thank God for the BBC/PRS) and very occasionally for writing about music. I’ve made money on t-shirts before now (not much), and i’ve received a fair amount of payment in kind from music equipment manufacturers, but precious little towards keeping a roof over my head…

In any one year those levels change throughout the year. This year has been a lot about gigs, music gear demos (did a fair bit for looperlative earlier in the year in Italy and Germany), and so far, not much about music sales (the Calamateur Vs. Steve Lawson album has sold a few copies, but certainly nothing to compare with a ‘proper’ CD release, sadly…)

The beauty of the music scene is its breadth – there are people who are all about the gigs, and people who are all about the studio creations, there are bands who manage to come up with an image and brand that means they make literally thousands a night on merch and live off that money (the Stourbridge scene of the late 80s/early 90s).

If recorded music just becomes an advert for gigs, it will not only be the death of an income stream for musicians, it’ll mean the death of an artform, as album-as-work-of-art become album-as-advert. (whoever heard of a 30 minute ambient advert?) As a synonym, imagine what it would mean for world cinema if all films were given away for free, and paid for by product placement and TV-style ad-breaks?

I seriously want to do more gigs, play more live music, and I would indeed be happy to spend my life just playing live and releasing documents of that process. At least, at the moment I would, because all my albums are essentially live anyway. But there are LOADS of great artists whose contribution to the artistic quilt is their remarkable skill in the studio, a skill that requires time, and money and expertise and training and years of trial and error. All of which need to be paid for somehow, and won’t happen if they are playing 250 nights a year in order to make some dough…

[blog-only addendum]

it’s funny how in the course of the discussion some people look forward to a golden age when all musicians are paid via some kind of music license (Gerd Leonhard et al), despite it meaning that there are going to yet again be middle men creaming it off – interesting that Gerd talks about this being a way for artists to get remunerated directly, but hasn’t yet mentioned the need for a multi-billion dollar intermediary such as google, yahoo, news corps etc…. unless he’s suggesting the setting up of a global non-profit organisation whose sole purpose is to make sure that the new music license (which lots of people will see as a tax) gets distributed fairly… meanwhile, the musicians at the very end of the long tail will just drop off…

One possible scenario that scares me is that we see a ‘mainstream’ licensing scheme, so you can get all the James Blunt you want as part of that license, but running along side it is a sub culture of ‘art music’ performers and recording artists, who still charge, and who operate within a community of arts patrons. To some extent it’s already happening (I’m guessing that people who buy my CDs and downloads, either here or at gigs, do so with a very different sense of investment in what’s going on that even those who by a David Sylvian, Bill Frisell or Blue Nile record in HMV), but the idea of such a schism is unappealing purely due to the implied elitism of the mainstream/art-music split – I don’t really want to be part of some elitist musical world, but I REALLY don’t want to be told by ‘the market’ that need to play shorter snappier tunes, and maybe start singing, in order for my music to connect with an audience fast enough for them to ‘get it’ and come and see me live…

The thinking goes on…

Posted on

Loop-Fests and non-music-specific music communities

It’s Loop Fest season again – firstly the daddy of them all, the Y2KLoopFest in Santa Cruz (Y2K7 this year). But this year, Andy Butler is doing a low-key thing in Norwich, which looks like fun. There have been others in Germany and other places in the states – generally smaller affairs, but seemingly most enjoyable.

Rick Walker, the organiser of the Santa Cruz fest, has done an amazing job of turning it into An Event – taking what was originally a way for he and I to do a show in Santa Cruz back in 2000 (with Michael Manring, Max Valentino, Scott Drengen and another guy who’s name completely escapes me, sadly…) and turning it into an annual event that this year has big name headliners in the form of Arild Andersen and Henry Kaiser.

A lot of the momentum for this came out of the rather-wonderful-and-at-times-all-too-serious Looper’s Delight community; a mailing list of people using looping in their music. Lots of great friendships have come from the list, and some fab collaborations (for me, I doubt I’d ever have played in California outside of the NAMM show if it wasn’t for the connection with Rick, and I also met the fabulous Luca Formentini on there too, with whom I’ve recorded a duet album that should be out some time next year).

I’ve always been a little uneasy about the idea that looping is its own genre – it clearly isn’t, any more than ‘repetitive music’ is a genre, or ‘german music’ or ‘music by freakishly tall people’. It has certain characteristics, but those are more to do with the limitations in the imagination of the user rather than any stylistic quality inbuilt in the technology. (though, thanks to the ever-wonderful Robert Fripp’s role as part-pioneer part-populariser of looping as a performance medium, a HUGE number of the loopers around are guitarists doing soundscapes, to varying degrees of success)

But that’s no bad thing – what Rick understood years ago is that audiences like a peg to hang their hat on – it doesn’t matter if it’s a loop fest or an acoustic music fest or a celebration of the music of italy or an electronic music fest – it gives the person marketing it an angle. My own hyper-sensitivity to being pigeonholed means that I bristle at the idea that what I do is defined by the technology, or that there’s some style attached to the instrument (as though solo bass is also a style or genre), but for the audience, it’s just an in road, an opening, a narrowing of focus that allows them engage with what we do, and crucially gives the media something to grab hold of.

Rick has managed to get press coverage for some pretty esoteric music, and even get the clearly-mad-mayor-of-Santa-Cruz to declare each festival day as ‘international live looping day’ (I have a mayoral proclamation hanging on my wall from the inaugural one, that most people think is some kind of weird ironic home-made christmas present. :o)

The point being, these are good things. The role of the curator is to make sure that whatever weird set of assumptions people come to these events with, the music they hear is great. There’s no such style as ‘loop music’ but that doesn’t mean that you can’t put together a coherent program of excellent music featuring looping musicians. The line up at Rick’s fests has gone from being a bunch of bassists who loop at the first one, though a period when it was largely about loopists getting together to ogle each other’s gear, to a place where he’s booking internationally known musicians (albeit from pretty esoteric scenes) for a festival of quality music. Hat’s off to his tenacity, long may it continue.

As I said a couple of weeks ago here looping is no longer a gimmick that will cover the lameness of your music but it can still work as a hook to get people through the door to hear great music.

BTW, It’s also Bass-fest season, though thus far, for the first time in years, I’ve not been invited to play at any of them… we’ll see if that changes, but it might make a nice change to be doing normal gigs at this time of year rather than playing to rooms full of bassists… They are generally enjoyable events, though meeting the people involved is mostly more interesting that listening to a lot of the music…

Posted on

It's ain't what you say, it's the way that you say it…

There’s been a fairly long discussion on one of the bass-geek e-lists I’m on of late about phrasing and patterns and such – it started out with a guy who was feeling stuck in the patterns that he played, and was asking for a way out.

My answer to that is always the same – learn more patterns. Not wanting to use any patterns in music is like not wanting to use grammar when talking – it inhibits your ability to communicate (non-idiomatic free-improv notwithstanding). The problem – as with language – comes when you know so few patterns (or expressions) that their repetition reveals your lack of familiarity with the subject (style/tune/key/chord progression) – in Italian, I know about 6 phrases, which I repeat ad nauseum in an attempt to sound slightly less like a typical doesn’t-speak-any-other-languages Brit. But it’s clear from my limited range that I really don’t know the language. My accent isn’t bad (especially not when I’ve been there a while), but I still don’t have the vocab to sound even like an ex-pat, let alone a local.

If I could even vary the phrases I knew slightly, it’d make for a broader base from which to converse. Same with music – start by mixing up what you already know. Change one element – could be the last note, or the first note, or putting a rest in the middle, or starting the phrase in a different part of the bar… It really doesn’t matter, the point is to get away from the tried and tested, and start to branch out into newer areas.

Anyway, the discussion on the list moved away from that to what ‘phrasing’ is all about, and why (in the opinion of some of us) bassists are particularly bad at expressive, fluid phrasing. Here’s what I wrote in response, with particular reference to the quote from Stig at the top (he’s wise, very wise)

>>”also in my view, this is something that most ebass players do not do.
they tend to favor the instrument’s percussive or shreddable qualities,
and neglect the more “expressive” aspects. << Which is utterly baffling given what a phenomenally expressive instrument the bass - and particularly the fretless bass - can be... I guess that the tendency towards metric subdivision and testosterone-driven displays of dexterity is somehow related to the requirement in so much rock music to play things in a consistent, steady, non-varying way. Multiply that up to a solo and it becomes the same thing at 2, 4 or 8 times the speed one or two octaves higher... Easier to do that than to move away from seeing rhythmic 'correctness' as being about a dualist 'in time/out of time' binary equation, and instead see the emergence of a rhythmic or textural, um, gestalt (?) as a consequence of observation and awareness of what makes music connect, and then working on developing the control to execute that, based on what it is you want to play in relation to what your awareness tells you should be happening, however seemingly complex, random, a-rhythmic, poly-rhythmic or whatever that may be. There aren’t many rock/pop basslines that require you to change the tone-shaping effect of your right hand technique from one note to the next, whereas expressive shaping of a melodic line often demands that in order to set up the kind of question/answer phrase-logic that Stig alluded to.

It’s clearly a much bigger issue for improvising musicians and solo musicians than it is for bands operating solely within an idiom that has readily defined parameters – if I suddenly got the gig playing bass in Green Day, I wouldn’t be quite so aware of the benefits of understanding the influence of fluctuations in the rhythm of a loop on the listener, or how palm muting a single note in the middle of an improvised melodic phrase might make it sound more like a question than a statement, and would be far more concerned about where to place the bass notes on the beat in order to produce the kind of urgency required by the music. (something that would be much better learnt by playing lots of punk music, going to punk shows and listening to punk records than my studying rhythmic placement in any other context…)

there you go. :o) Any of this stuff could be equally applicable to any musician, it’s just that bass players are particularly geared to not play tunes well (in the same way that guitarists from a blues background often struggle with anything that needs to be rhythmically precise – their training just hasn’t focussed on those elements). Ultimately, it’s all about control and awareness, but that’s a whole other book.

© 2008 Steve Lawson and developed by Pretentia. | login

Top