Tag: last.fm

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Boris Pontificates on Booze

Boris Johnson holds a rather unique place in my heart, largely just by being a Tory MP that doesn’t make me physically sick. He seems like a sweet soul, though I’m certain that he’s way more together than his bungling public persona would suggest – he’s an MP and a magazine editor and I doubt he could function too well as either if he were as scatter brained as he makes out… well, at least not as a magazine editor (it seems like there are several MPs with quite severe learning difficulties, if their policy decisions are anything to go by).

Anyway, Boris has a blog – sadly, it’s not updated as often as it would need to be to be truly interesting and marvellous, but there is this great article about the changes in licencing laws – he has a lovely turn of phrase.

Soundtrack – Finley Quaye, ‘Maverick A Strike’.

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Hey, moron, what took you so long??

I guess it had to happen eventually, Right wing ‘christian’ extremists blame the Hurricane on New Orleans’ party people – apparently New Orleans is the worst place in the world right now for sin, as they allow Gay Pride parades and Mardi Gras celebrations. As a result, according to the dickheads at ‘repent america’, God has punished them with the Hurricane.

Interesting that there’s no mention of global warming in their report, nor have they chastised God for punishing the poor and ignoring the manifold sins of the rich and powerful. No, because as we all know, on the Sin-hit-parade, being Gay is far worse than robbing the poor to fund your classic car collection. So long as it’s ‘legal’, it’s fine for the wealthy to keep twisting international trade laws to destroy the lives of the poor. All the world’s problems can be blamed on gay people. Thanks for making it so simple.

This reminds me of a very wise quote from a friend of mine about George Bush – ‘the problem with Bush isn’t that he’s a conservative evangelical Christian, it’s that he isn’t conservative evangelical enough’ – the culture of conservative evangelicalism in the US have utterly dispensed with their supposed respect for The Bible as the authority in deciding what’s right and wrong. The entire Biblical narrative follows the story of God holding leaders to account for their mistreatment of the poor. All the way through, ‘disobedience’ is as much about justice, about failing the poor and the marginalised as it is about personal piety.

And what about Grace? At what point will these so-called christians get down of their soap-box and acknowledge that the Christian story is one of God’s grace towards the entire created order. We fail, we get it wrong, and we look to God and she says ‘don’t do it again’.

I have two conflicting responses that immediately spring to mind – the first is to disown myself from anything labeled as ‘christian’, in the hope that I’m never going to be tagged as anything to do with these psycotic fuckwits pretending to speak on behalf of God. The other is to put more energy into reclaiming the concept of ‘christianity’ from the madmen… I guess this post falls into the latter category, but tomorrow I’ll be back to calling myself a messianic taoist and disowning the fascists… :o)

Soundtrack – The Rough Guide To Franco (After playing with Duncan and Rise at Greenbelt, I’m going to be hitting the African CDs pretty hard, trying to get myself comfortable with all these marvellous rhythms!)

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another murky step into the digital realm for the music industry

OK, so follow Napster’s model, HMV and Virgin are starting to offer a subscription download service – basically you pay £14.99 and you get access to all the tunes you want. As long as you keep paying, the tunes stay active. If you stop, the tunes are disabled.

This SO doesn’t work for me at all. I don’t like the idea that you have a licence to play something, rather than buying it. I don’t even like the fact that iTunes MP3s are disabled for sharing. There need to be incentives for listeners to buy music, that we all know, and I’m not sure that crippling the digital formats is going to make people feel positively disposed towards them.

For one thing, it just gives software monkeys something else to target their energies into – beating the encryption. The easiest way is clearly going to be to re-record the audio off the track into another format. This can be done very easily if you have an external soundcard, and the software to do it internally is already readily available. If some little hacker-chimp comes up with a one click version of this, it’ll mess up the entire market in crippled files. Is it already out there? I’m guessing yes, and I just haven’t heard about it yet…

And how does it work for the artists? Someone downloads two hundred albums in a month, to add to their archive. how is their £14.99 divided? Is a set fee paid for each track? per album, a percentage of that person’s subs? All seems to be a really crap way of trying to put a stranglehold on downloads that isn’t going to work.

So what incentives work? A feeling of closeness with the artist? Cool packaging? Web-access that can be only got at through the enhanced CD? or just making downloads cheap and easy. And with that, I point you to the downloads page in my online store – three of the albums there are no longer available anywhere else.

Soundtrack – Andy Thornton, ‘The Healing Darkness’.

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The horror of Katrina

So much for ‘walking on sunshine’… The true horror of Hurricane Katrina may not be fully realised by the rest of us for a few weeks to come, when the body count starts to rack up, but in New Orleans and Biloxi at the moment, it’s all too real.

I’ve got at least one friend who is missing in NOLA – bass player friend who decided to stick it out there. Seems like a lot of people without good transport or community around them thought they’d ride it out, before they realised how bad it was, and by that time it was too late. I just hope Stew is OK.

Here’s one horrific report from a local New Orleans station, WWLTV.

My thoughts and prayers go out to anyone who has friends or relatives caught in this mess…

Soundtrack – Charlie Peacock, ‘Love Press Ex-Curio’ (nu-jazz project from noted CCM singer/producer, featuring amazing all-star cast (including Victor Wooten and James Genus on bass) – really lovely stuff, full review to come soon…)

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Inconsistency?

So, London Underground have banned an ad featuring Jerry Hall holding 12 men on leashes.

LU said it “breaches our advertising code relating to the depiction of men, women and children as sexual objects.”

Which is quite clearly bollocks. Ads all over the underground depict women as sexual objects. At certain times of the year, depending on what kind of products are being advertised at the time, most women in ads are depicted as sex objects. There’s a huge double standard at work here. I have no desire to defend crass reality TV shows that have Jerry Hall ‘training’ men – it’ll be unwatchable shit anyway – but I do get really annoyed when advertising standards people pretend that women being sexually objectified hasn’t become the norm in advertising. Ads where it doesn’t happen are pretty rare. Yes, the occasional bloke gets in there too, but for the most part, men are portrayed as aspirational symbols to other men (equally destructive in its own way, given that their airbrushed adonis bodies are utterly unobtainable to 99% of blokes, in the same way that the huge-boobs-tiny-waist look is impossible for all but a handful of women, and for celebs is pretty much always airbrush enhanced).

Advertising is an almost entirely morally bankrupt area, and it’d be great to see LU – who own an enourmous amount of ad space – take a sensible stand on what’s acceptable and what isn’t. This time, they’ve missed the mark by miles.

Soundtrack – Andy Thornton, ‘The Healing Darkness’ (a great bunch of songs, that I first heard in their infancy months and months ago (maybe years ago, even!) – I’m not on this one, more’s the pity, but it’s still fantastic, and well worth getting)

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Me in a magazine.

Here you go, there’s an interview with me in the new issue of Bassics magazine – and on the CD there’s a track (shizzle) and a bit of video with me explaining looping and performing a tune (can’t remember what the tune is, maybe Grace and Gratitude). Filming the video was lots of fun – The Cheat acted as video monkey, and did a fine job. I recorded the audio to Minidisc and then chopped up the different video angles to fit the soundtrack. The only problem is that we did it at St Luke’s hoping to be able to use one of the groovy burgandy curtains as a backdrop, but they were installing a new PA in the main bit of the church, so we were through in the back hall, with a yellow brick background that makes it look like I’m in prison… niiice.

Soundtrack – Mo Foster, ‘live’ (an advanced copy of an upcoming album by Mo – as with everything Mo does, it’s lovely, and of course I’ll report here when it’s released); Cathy Burton, ‘Speed Your Love’ (Cath was singing BVs at Greenbelt for Ricky Ross, and her album is lovely); Julie Lee, ‘Stillhouse Road’ (a fantastic record that I never get tired of hearing).

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Why everyone should hire Steve Brown

Over at rockandrollconfidential.com they have a catalogue of the internet’s worst band promo shots, the hall of douchebags – some of the captions are very funny indeed, and many of the pictures are hilarious with or without captions. It’s amazing just how unaware some people are of what’s needed to do promo, and for that reason, anyone in a band needs to look at the hall of fame, then head over to Steve Brown’s site, check out what proper band shots look like and pay him lots of money to make you look very cool indeed. Seriously, you’ll get more gigs, and less people will laugh at your website.

Soundtrack – right now, I’m just listening to Duncan’s songs over and over to get them firmly planted in my head for the gigs at Greenbelt.

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not one but two Amy Kohn gigs in London

One of the best things about Edinburgh is meeting up with other performers. Sometimes it’s a fleeting yet encouraging chat outside a venue (I met Alan Carr outside the Assembly Rooms where he was performing, and had a lovely chat and swapped encouragement for the fest) and other times it’s people who become top chums and you stay in touch with.

Amy Kohn is a friend of JazzShark‘s, who was playing up at Edinburgh, and who stepped into the role of Echoplex footpedal on Fringe Sunday and jammed along on accordian, on Amo Amatis Amare. She was down in London this weekend playing a couple of gigs so we went along. First up she was at The 12 Bar – an acoustic venue in central London, playing at an accordion night (oh yes, it’s not just bassists who get together for a geek-out once in a while!). Obviously for this gig she was just playing accordion and singing, but was fab. She writes very quirky songs, with lots of really odd harmony in them, and it takes a while to get drawn into Amy-world, but when you catch up with her, it’s beguiling stuff.

Monday’s gig was at Ray’s Jazz in Foyles – just a half hour in-store. But they had a piano, so I went along to see what Amy was like with piano instead of accordion. Damn, she’s a fantastic piano player! Scary stuff indeed. The Accordion is a great live tool, in that it gives her freedom to move around, it’s pretty original for a left-field singer/songwriter and is just makes a nice change, but Amy’s piano playing is on a whole other level. There are nods towards Tori and Kate Bush, but that’s just a tiny part of what Amy does. She’s as much Charles Ives as she is Tori Amos, and her background in musical theatre definitely creeps in there too… I picked up copies of both her albums, and have listened to the brand new so-new-it’s-only-an-advance-copy one, which is marvellous. Really really original and lovely. Top stuff.

Today’s been a day of two halves – the first half was spent shopping in Enfield with my auntie Babs. Well, she’s actually my third cousin Babs, but has always been auntie Babs… (maternal grandmother’s cousin). Anyway, I think I’ve probably blogged about Babs before – she’s 80 (I think), but looks about 20 years younger, has a more active social life than most people half her age, a great sense of humour, and is much fun to go out for lunch with. Today she needed the batteries in her smoke alarms changing, so that was a fine excuse for us to go out for lunch before heroic me shimmying up a ladder to swap said batteries over.

And now I’m listening to and playing through the songs for Duncan’s greenbelt gig. Lucky me – what a charmed life. 🙂

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Gig last night…

Despite being exhausted, the promise of a chance to play a set with Orphy and a couple of friends from the States last night at the Red Rose was too tempting, so I headed off out again.

I took a much scaled down rig with me, as I knew I was only going to be playing for about 10 minutes, and really couldn’t be arsed to take the whole lot out again after setting it up and packing it down 12 days in a row at Edinburgh!

the Americans in question are Jeff Kaiser and Andrew Pask playing trumpet (jeff), sax and clarinet (andrew) through lots of delicious electronic processing (Andrew works for Cycling 74, so has written some glorious loop algorythms for Max/MSP).

They did about 25 minutes, and then Orphy and I joined them for a 10 minute improv thingie, which sounded lovely from where I was sat.

The rest of the evening was fun too – a solo trombone set from Alan Tomlinson was a mindblowing mixture of virtuosic free improv and clowning. Very funny indeed.

Then Evan Parker and John Coxon did a lovely guitar/sax duet, which ran the gamut from outnoisemadness to a bluesy mellow jazz bit in the middle and back to freakoutland. Very fine stuff.

And finally a quintet of Tony Bevan (bass sax), Mark Saunders (drums), John Edwards (bass), Ashley Wales (electronics) and Orphy (percussion etc.) finished off the night with more craziness.

And what’s more there was a huge crowd in – by far the biggest I’ve ever seen at the Red Rose, which was great especially for Jeff and Andrew, coming all this way. It was lovely to catch up with Jeff – he came to one of my gigs a couple of years ago in Ventura County, California, and loved it and we’ve been in touch ever since, so it was great to finally get to see him play live.

The London Improv scene is fascinating – it’s got a pretty unique sound to it, and a fairly broad spread of contributors. There are elements to it that come across as over-zealous in their rejection of all things tonal, and other players who seem to embrace just about anything and everything. It’s not a scene I could inhabit all year round – I’d start to feel guilty about playing so much inside music, and that’s insane – but it’s one that I feel enriched and inspired by whenever I get a chance to see those guys play. The time and energy and focus that players like John Edwards and Tony Bevan have put into exploring the outer reaches of what’s possible with their instruments is awe inspiring.

And now I’m exhausted. Today I’m going to have to tidy up the mess from Edinburgh – my office looks like the stock room at a badly organised high-end bass shop, so I need to whip it into shape before teaching tonight.

Soundtrack – Avishai Cohen, ‘Lyla’ (a pressie to educate me from JazzShark – and a fabulous album it is too!)

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