Category: Musing on Music

Posted on

"can anyone join in?" – some thoughts on Improv and Jamming

I’ve had a few messages on Myspace from people asking if the Recycle Collective is an open jam that anyone can come and play at. The answer to that is an emphatic ‘NO!’, the reason being the fundamental difference between an improvised music gig and a jam. A jam is, for better or worse, primarily about the musicians. If an audience digs it, that’s fine, if it results in some OK music, that’s fine, but in general, jams tend to follow a few set formulae – jazz standards, rock/pop classics or myriad variations on ‘funk in E’ – all fine in an of themselves, but really not the kind of thing around which I’m going to book a series of shows featuring the finest improvising musicians the UK has to offer.

Have a quick look at the list of past RC gigs on the website. The players are a) top class (Mercury Prize nominees, platinum selling, session legends, Royal Opera singers… no dead weight at all…) and b)put together in very specific combinations.

See, with this kind of improv the choice of players is the composition. It’s at that point that I relinquish my control and instead trust that the players will play whatever they think is ‘good’ at that time. And as a result, the RC has featured some of the most exciting music I’ve ever been involved in. It’s not a jazz gig, it’s not a ‘free improv’ gig in the sense that ‘free improv’ works for the London Improvisors Orchestra. We’ve had some out squeaky stuff, but we’ve also had singer/songwriters, jazz, ambient, electronica, new acoustic, minimalism, maximalism, funk, fusion, gospel and the huge list of crazy influences that Cleveland weaves into his vocal improvs!!

While it is improvised, and it’s great fun, it has none of the lowest common denominator connotations of a jam. Jamming is fun, it’s cool to jam, it’s just that improvised music can be so much more, and this ends up being infinitely more rewarding for the musicians and the audience.

If I wasn’t playing at and booking the RC, I’d be its biggest fan, by miles. It’s a phenomenal indulgence to book my favourite musicians in the world, all of whom are people I respect, admire and love hanging out with, and to make such fantastic unpredictable music with them. You REALLY ought to come down and check it out if you can…
xx

Posted on

Weird interview style, but great answers from Bruce Cockburn

Just found this via the ‘Humans’ discussion list (Bruce Cockburn email geekfest, a lovely bunch of people) – it’s taken from www.canada.com, and is a very odd way to publish an interview, just as a series of soundbites on topics, but Bruce Cockburn has always been great at one liners, so here’s the list –

On recording and performing at age 61: “It’s not so much wondering
how I could be doing this at this age as [the fact] I’ve actually
lasted this long. When I started out I had no idea where I was going
to go.”

On pop and songs that appear in TV advertisements: “Once I hear a
song in a commercial, I don’t want to listen to the record again.
It’s ruined for me.”

On songwriting: “It’s just that bloodhound hunt for the perfect piece
of writing.”

On artistic restlessness: “There’s a kind of feeling I have of
wanting to get onto the next thing. Sometimes even before I’ve
finished the thing I’m working on.”

On being prolific (Life Short Call Now is his 29th recording): “Every
album I’ve made has always felt like it might be my last.”

On mortality: “Once you’re past 50, the odds are you’re looking at
the downward slope . . . Almost everything I’ve written is about
death and hope. In some way I’ve written my own obituary dozens of
times, you know.”

On the cosmos: “I kind of feel like every speck is significant. And
I’m certainly a speck . . . Perhaps I owe this to experiences with
LSD way back when, but it seems to me that everything touches
everything, and everything is in an constant state of flux. And that
flux has an order to it.”

On why it’s not so bad to be a speck: “I’m also as essential to the
cosmos as anything else in it.”

On God: “I don’t have much of a definition of God these days. I like
the kabbalists’ way of referring to God as ‘the boundless who is not
really accessible.’ You have to approach God — in their view —
through angels or through imagery that doesn’t reflect the
boundlessness, because it’s beyond comprehension… I kind of feel
like that.”

On why his parents bought young Cockburn a guitar only after he
solemnly swore not to wear sideburns and a leather jacket: “They were
worried about rock and roll and teenaged gangs with switchblades.”

On being frequently summoned to support good causes: “Sometimes I get
frustrated. I’m not the only guy out there. Call up Avril Lavigne,
for cryin’ out loud. She’s going to get to a lot more people than me.”

On the phrase “tattoos done while you wait” which appears in his new
song, Life Short Call Now. (Cockburn was inspired while driving
through Missouri): “All of a sudden there’s this big white billboard
with small print in the middle of it, that says, ‘Mike’s Tattoos,
done while you wait’ and a phone number. I thought, ‘That’s gotta be
in a song.’ “

And now I’m off to get ready for my gig near Newport in Wales tonight. See you there!

Posted on

No Music Day

Another one of those crazy schemes from Bill Drummond, No Music Day is a day to avoid listening to all music, and instead think about what it is and what it does for us. In Bill’s words, “I decided I needed a day I could set aside to listen to no music whatsoever. Instead, I would be thinking about what I wanted and what I didn’t want from music”

Read the full article from the Observer here.

I like Bill Drummond, I like the way his mind works, and I like that I can’t tell how much of what he’s doing is just taking the piss. I own two pieces of the artwork he cut up and sold for a dollar a piece. This seems like yet another fine idea.

Posted on

"I like pretty much anything…"

so goes the beginning to So many people’s list of favourite music on MySpace. They then proceed to list only music that has a) singers, b) that sing in english and c) bands with drum kits, or programmed drums that sound like drum kits.

THAT’S NOT ‘PRETTY MUCH ANYTHING’!! By any stretch of the imagination, that’s a very very narrow range of what’s on offer in the world of music. This faux cosmopolitan approach to music is fostered by radio and TV shows that claim to have a hugely wide booking policy that reminds me of that line in The Blues Brothers ‘we have both types of music – Country AND Western’.

I feel like bombarding these people with MP3s of Gamalan orchestras and Harry Partch, Tuvan throat singing and Gustav Mahler, Bollywood soundtracks and Andean pan pipes, Noel Coward and Fats Waller, Henry Purcell and Meshuggah… ‘pretty much anything’ really, until they say ‘I have, in the greater scheme of things, incredibly conservative music taste, it runs the gamut of ‘white-boy stadium guitar nonense’ from Coldplay to Stereophonics, but I have got a Boards Of Canada album, cos someone told me they were cool, and it was cheap in Borders.’

For the record, I don’t like ‘pretty much anything’ – I actively dislike most of the music I’ve heard in my life. It’s not out of some musicological misanthropy, it’s just that even across the range of styles and genres I like, I tend to only like the best of it. The reason being that most music isn’t very good. That’s what’s magical about music – if it was as easy as breathing, we wouldn’t value it at all. We wouldn’t have favourites, in the same way that most of us don’t have favourite ‘walkers’ – (“ooh, just look at the way he puts one foot in front of the other”) – we can almost all do it, it’s a hugely useful skill, but it’s not generally considered a uniquely artistic one in the way that making great music is.

That said, our reasons for liking music go beyond the sound of the music itself, often. There are emotional resonances based on things we’ve heard before, there are cultural, social and personal connections with the performers and writers, there are lyrics that grab us and draw us into styles we wouldn’t previously have bothered with, there’s music played by people we know (The Cheat is always laughing at me for spending most of my time listening to music by friends of mine), there’s music that we encounter in good situations (opening for a favourite band, soundtracking a favourite film, or just on in the background when great things happen).

But that still doesn’t come close to ‘pretty much anything’ – so if you have that on your myspace page, please go and change it, and put something more honest! ;o)

Posted on

Steve Reich finale

Last night was the final night of the Steve Reich 70th Birthday concert series at The Barbican. As you know, I saw The Cave on Thursday, and the wonderful Todd Reynolds was working hard to try and find me a ticket for the sold out show on Sunday. Eventually I get an email telling me there’s one there for me, but it’ll be £30. Fair enough says I, £30 is a bargain to see such a fab gig.

So i arrange to meet Todd, head down to the Barbican and buy my ticket for £30. Takes a while to find Todd, at which point he tells me he’s managed to get me a free ticket! yay! So we return the £30 one and get a refund, and Todd takes me in to see about 5 minutes of a rather lacklustre performance of ‘Electric Counterpoint’ – one of my favourite Steve Reich pieces, but SO not done justice by the dude playing it at the Barbican.

After that , I settle down to watch a bit of The Bang On A Can All Stars on the free stage, but the sound is pretty rough, so Todd and I head off on a futile search for food, find none, he heads off to eat backstage, I head off to collect my comp ticket. Run into Harriet, who played musical saw on the gig with Stephen Daltry earlier on in the year, and to Catherine, wife of MKS, whose grandfather had provided the poetry for the Gavin Bryars piece being premiered… ’tis a small world, to be sure.

Anyway, enough waffle – the gig. Three pieces, cello counterpoint, live cello to 6 or 7 pre-recorded cellos (with video in this case) – started shakily, suspect intonation etc, got much better as it went on. Daniel Variations – the Reich piece commissioned for the festival – for his usual chamber orchestra and four voices, which was excellent, a lovely piece of music. The words seemed rather superfluous (one of the Daniels referred to it the title was Daniel Pearl, the reporter kidnapped and killed in Iraq, and the ‘tribute’ to him was to use the words ‘my name is Daniel Pearl’ – sadly, that phrase as a standalone to an english audience will often end up in the last two words being substituted for ‘Michael Cain’.) – didn’t seem to offer any real tribute to Daniel, or comment on his death or anything. But I guess I don’t listen to Steve Reich for the lyrics.

Which, in the case of ‘music for 18 musicians’ is probably just as well – it’s Reich’s masterpiece, and his best known work, and it’s incredibly hypnotic, a total monster of a piece to perform (the marimba ostinatos are swapped between a number of musicians, as I don’t think one person could keep up that for an hour). Anyway, it was fantastic – I’m told by a couple of people who’ve seen it a number of times that it wasn’t a great version of that piece, but it sounded good to me!

the aftershow was a nice affair, nice to chat to Todd, Brad, David Sheppard (former StevieStudent who was doing an incredible job of the sound), and then to catch the last tube home… All in all a great night out, and lots cheaper than I’d planned too!

Posted on

Steve Reich – the Cave, The Barbican, last night.

A lovely evening last night, spent with Todd Reynolds – violinist extraordinaire, who’s in town playing violin as part of Steve Reich’s ensemble in the concert series celebrating Steve’s 70th birthday. Last night’s show was The Cave, a multimedia piece based in interviews with Jews, Muslims and Americans from lots of backgrounds about Abraham and the story of his first two sons – Ishmael and Isaac. The music is all based on the rhythms and cadences of the voices, and as such changes time signature, key and tempo every couple of bars. Without doubt some of the most insanely complex and difficult to perform music I’ve ever come across. I can’t even begin to imagine how they pulled it off. The conductor, Brad Lubman, was outstanding, conducting in different meters with each hand, cueing the singers, seemingly random piano chords, and the rest of the ensemble. By no means an easy experience, largely due to it’s length and the changes in time, the music itself was actually fairly accessible, probably because the vocal cadences humanised the whole thing.

And once again, it confirmed for me what an incredible musician Todd is – having now seen him play with his former quartet, Ethel, with Joe Jackson and Todd Rungren, play solo at the Recycle Collective, improvising at the RC, playing ‘lead guitar’ with the Michael Gordon band, and now this crazy music with Steve Reich, he’s clearly one of the most remarkable musicians I’ve ever encountered. And one of my favourite people. Leo and I went down early to meet Todd for dinner before the gig, which was truncated by a 6.30 soundcheck, but after the gig Todd and Conductor-Brad both came over to the pub for a drink before heading out to Steve Reich’s birthday celebrations. A marvellous evening all round, great people, amazing music, out of this world playing and conducting, and fantastic company in the form of Leo, Todd, Brad and Julian (Seigel – top sax bloke who was at the gig too, and met us in the pub after). Great stuff.

There are a few more Steve Reich gigs on – go if you can. He’s America’s most important living composer of New Music, and a huge influence on so many people – when I was 17 and studying music AS level, he was composer of the week radio 3, and I recorded it every day and listened to those tapes over and over, writing a series of minimalist-style pieces, including a serial minimalist piece for cello and marimba, that I remember being quite good, but my memory is pretty much certainly better than the actual thing… Still, the shifting textures of so much of Steve’s work is there in much of the loop stuff I do, so it was great to finally see some of his music live.

Posted on

A solo theremin gig???

Yup, that was the first half of the gig I saw last night – Pamelia Kurstin’s gig at The Vortex was one I happened upon while looking at their website for something else entirely last week. When I saw that her two collaborators on the gig were Seb Rochford and A< HREF=http://www.liamnoble.co.uk/>Liam Noble, it was a sure thing – had to see that.

The first half of the gig was a solo looped Theremin set – Pamelia was using two DL4s and an EH Bass Microsynth – and the first 20 minutes of it was captivating. After that it was still good, it’s just tricky to sustain that level of interest without varying the arrangement ideas (would love to hear what she’d do with a Looperlative instead of the DL4s).

The second half was wonderful – lots of mad squeaky gate improv stuff with Seb on drums and Liam on piano. Both guys are such great and original improvisors, and worked really well with the theremin craziness coming from Pamelia, who veered from violin territory to clarinet tones to the sound of a pizzicato double bass. Fascinating stuff. All in all a top gig, and I’ll have to get her for the Recycle Collective next time she’s in London!

What was also most fun about the night was the number of other players that showed up – Julian Seigel, Estelle Kokot, Mandy Drummond, Phil Robson, Dylan Bates, Jason Broadbent – a most enjoyable jazz-hang! And what’s more, the Vortex are wanting to book the trio from August’s RC gig – me, seb and Andy Hamill – for a gig in Jan/Feb! Yay! And I got booked for a gig with Estelle in a couple of weeks time – more on that soon…

Posted on

Chuck Rainey's clinic…

What a fun night out that was! The Bass Centre hosted another great clinic last night (as I mentioned on the blog on Saturday) – Chuck Rainey played and sang, but more than that told stories from years in the business. Some great lil’ stories about working with Quincy Jones and Aretha Franklin, Lalo Schiffrin and Ricky Lee Jones… An entertaining storyteller and a great bassist, it made for a great night out (though I’m still not that convinced by the PJB amps he’s playing through – I’m just SO spoiled by the AccuGroove cabinets that genuinely, very few things ever even get close…)

Anyway, ’twas a great night out – at the end after the clinic, Chuck, Barry Moorhouse (bass centre owner), Phil Jones (who makes the amps) and I sat round, hearing all the stories that couldn’t make it into the clinic itself. Most entertaining!

It’s also great to hear a 67 year old bassist who’s still trying new things – he only switched from 4 string to 6 string bass when he was 60… so there’s hope for all of us!

I’ve also got a better idea now of what the hell he’s playing on ‘Woody And Dutch…’ from Ricky Lee Jones’ ‘Pirates’ album.

These nights at the Bass Centre are such a gift for bassists, and the next one is going to be BRILLIANT – Seth Horan is coming to do a night, hosted by Warwick. Seth’s a singer/songwriter/solo bassist from the US – an amazing songwriter, great bassist and marvellous performer, you SO don’t want to miss that (and it’s one that you can take your girlfriend/boyfriend to without fear of them getting bored shitless by endless bass noodling – he actually writes songs… no, really, actual songs – who’d have thought it?) I think that one is on December 8th – I’ll confirm that as soon as I’ve got the details. Til then, go and have a listen to some of Seth’s songs on his MySpace page, then get the CDs – both Conduit and NotWithStanding are worth £10 of anyone’s money.

© 2008 Steve Lawson and developed by Pretentia. | login

Top