Tag: michael manring

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Big with the 6Music crowd?

The Small Person sent me a link to this a few days ago – The 6Music big debate on favourite bassists – I’d seen it when it went up on the site (I listen to 6Music from time to time, would listen more if I remembered to tune in!), but not followed the ensuing posts, but there seem to be lots of mentions of me there, which is nice. I recognise a few of the names as street team peoples, doing their job, but there are others I don’t recognise.

Maybe they’re folks who heard my stuff when Stuart Maconie played it on The Freakzone, one of the finest radio shows anywhere in the world (and of course, available each week via ‘listen again’ so you don’t have to tune in on a Sunday afternoon).

Soundtrack – Michael Manring, ‘Soliloquy’.

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Election day…

So go vote! Whichever way you choose to vote, do it!

Bumped into a Labour dude handing out leaflets outside the tube station on Monday, and got into a bit of a chat. Told him I couldn’t possibly vote labour after an illegal war that caused the deaths of countless thousands of Iraqi civilians. If that war had been on Liverpool, he’d be in prison now. But they’re foreign so it doesn’t matter as much. My arse.

His reply was ‘I can’t argue with you there, but this election is about so much more than that, we can’t let the Tories back in’. True, the election does have a lot more going on than that. However, sanctioning what amounts to murder is a pretty big hurdle to surmount in the mental gymnastics required to convince me to put a tick next to a party candidate’s name on a ballot paper. The thought of the Tories getting in fills me with dread, it really does. All reports suggest that that won’t happen. Thankfully, Michael Howard’s campaign of inducing fear based on racist lies about immigration, talking almost exclusively about ‘illegal immigrants’ as a parasitical presence, not as people fleeing persecution, or just desparate for a better life. Rarely if ever mentioning the country’s huge need of a new workforce, with our own population greying, the birth rate dropping, and the public services needing a big injection of skilled workers…

Anyway, voting Tory clearly isn’t an option. Voting for the Labour party isn’t an option. My heart says vote Green – their manifesto is closest to my own convictions. My head says vote Lib-Dem – they are the ones most likely to make any kind if difference. We’ll see what happens when I get there. How I can still be this undecided minutes away from voting? What a weird scenario. Voting Labour used to be so easy – they were the party of workers, of unions, of taxing the rich to help the poor, of solid public services… And aside from a few MAJOR cock-ups (PPP being the most heinous of them), they’re record in the last couple of terms has been OK. Not great, but they do seem to be implimenting some policies that favour the poor. The airport expansion is a bit bogus, the mess that the rail and tube network are in is rubbish, schools still need more money, hospitals need to be brought back from the PPP firms that are ruining them, private contractors who make a balls up of building schools/hospitals/bridges/whatever else need to be held accountable for their mistakes, tardiness and missing deadlines. There are some really bad things, and some good things. But over all that, The war.

Soundtrack – Michael Manring, ‘Soliloquy’; Mike Watt, ‘The Secondman’s Middle Stand’; Miles Davis, ‘Cooking… and Relaxing with the Miles Davis Quinet’; Victor Wooten, ‘Yin Yang’.

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Finally, Michael Manring's CD has arrived…

It’s was one of those questions that had taken on an almost Monty Python-esque level of absurdity; ‘when’s Michael Manring‘s album coming out?’ – for the last 18 months or so, I’ve been asked this a few times a week, sometimes a few times a day! I started off telling people whatever spurious deadline Michael had told me that week – ‘well, we just need to blah blah blah and it’ll be ready in about three weeks’ etc. etc. It got more and more laughable as Michael missed more deadlines than end-times loonies predicting the end of the world.

So I gave up answering, other than to say ‘your guess is as good as mine, why not email him?’. Hopefully his inbox wasn’t flooded with requests that he was no better placed to answer that I was…

Anyway, his launch gig was last week, and my copy of the CD, ‘Soliloquy’, arrived this morning. My 10 o’clock lesson was cancelled due to illness, which has given me time for a first listen.

OK, these are first impressions, and I’m sure I’ll have more to say when I’ve heard it 20 times (some time tomorrow afternoon, I suspect!), but this really is the album that Michael’s been needing to make for a long time, the one that all of us have been waiting for.

It’s all solo, no overdubs, bass guitar pieces. He uses a whole range of basses, and an even wider range of techniques and sounds, but it’s all live all him (we like the sound of that – actually that reminds me of Michael mention at a gig once that he was going to release a live version of Selene, to which I answered, ‘we like live’, and he came back ‘you like live!’ – this was not long after And Nothing But The Bass had come out)

Anyway, all the live faves are here – Selene, Helios, Greetings Earthlings, Excuse Me, Mr Manring, Makes Perfect Sense To Me etc. and a load of other previously unheard magic.

I’m sure Michael will be unhappy with it in some way – he’s got that kind of analytical approach to these things where there’s an ideal in his head that he’s constantly chasing, refining and I imagine never quite gets to. It’s what makes his gigs so exhilerating. The rest of us will hear this as his best album to date, by quite some margin, and be inspired and scared by what’s possible on solo bass.

It also comes with a beautifully produced 20-odd page book in PDF format (if you work in an office with a colour laser printer, you’re really in luck!) with tonnes of great background info.

I’ve got some practice to do – it’s inspiring ideas for me already.

It will, I’m sure be available in my webshop soon (though, as with most things Manring-esque, there’s no knowing when!), but for now, you can order it from Michael direct – best to email him via his website, if the details still aren’t there (they weren’t a few days ago – how does this guy make a living?????)

Soundtrack – Michael Manring, ‘Soliloquy’.

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Two gigs coming up this week, and I really ought to be practicing…

Yup, gigs this week in Brighton (Tuesday, Joogleberry Theatre) and Cambridge (Thursday, CB2). Both are with John Lester and Theo Travis – triple bill gigs with me solo, me and theo duo, and john solo, with theo and I guesting on a tune or two…

So I really ought to have a play through some tunes, remind myself how all the duo stuff with theo goes. But I’ve been tidying, cooking, and faffing most of the day, and not doing any playing.

this morning was fun – turned up for church slightly late, but coincided with Paul (my godson’s dad) arriving, and we both decided to bunk off and go for a chat and a fry-up instead. A wise decision. Chats with Paul are always fun events, a most edifying alternative to the regular sunday morning God-bothering.

Soundtrack – Michael Manring, ‘Thonk’; Sarah Slean, ‘Day One’; Sarah McLachlan, ‘Surfacing’; John Martyn, ‘Solid Air’.

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Every Picture Tells A Story

Nice man The Cheat told me about a fine bit of free software yesterday, called – it’s a free photo archiving/editing/sorting program, that finds all the photos on your harddrive, and catalogues them for you. I discovered that I’ve got loads of duplicate sets of promo shots and stuff from my websites, from various incarnations of it being left littered around my hard-drive.

This is the best free application I’ve seen since (if you’re still using Internet Explorer for web-stuff, you REALLY need to get Firefox – more stable, safer, and easier to use, please, for the sake of all of us, switch!).

head over to the Picasa Website for more info and to download it. It’s developed by the people behind Google…

Soundtrack – Joni Mitchell, ‘Hejira’ (fast catching Julie Lee at the top of my Audioscrobbler most played list!); , ‘Drastic Measures’.

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Tour diary vol II

So, we were up to the Espresso Garden gig, which was lots of fun. The following night (Thursday) was another gig with Michael Manring, this time at The Brookdale Lodge – this place has a heck of a lot of weird mythology around it, involving mobsters, prostitutes, ghosts and god-knows-what-else. Very odd place.

As a gig venue, however, it rules. Firstly because dinner is served in the restaurant, which has a river running through the middle of it (I kid you not), and secondly because the music room has a great PA, a marvellous soundman, and a nice stage to play on.

Thanks to a borrowed mixer, I was able to do my ‘proper’ setup for the first time on the tour, with the Echoplexes in an auxiliary channel and the MPX-G2 in stereo. The sound was fantastic. Accugroove had lent me two identical cabinets to the ones I use at home, and a poweramp, so I was pretty much rocking.

The gig went well, though the big storm outside meant the audience wasn’t huge (brookdale is up in the Santa Cruz mountains, a pretty hazardous drive in the rain!)

So we’re up to Friday – Friday I set off from Santa Cruz, called in at the new AccuGroove world HQ (very nice it is too!) on my way up to meet Jeremy Cohen in Berkley. Jeremy and I have been chatting online for years, and have met up at past NAMM shows and last year in London when he and his wife were visiting. Now it was my turn to hang out on their turf, and then take Jeremy to see Kaki King at Freight and Salvage, a fantastic acoustic music club, with a lot of history, great sound and a fab view from everywhere in the room.

Saturday was masterclass day in San Jose – after Bob the original host falling ill, Mark Wright at AccuGroove became Mr Fixit and organised for the clinic to move to the Koinonia coffee shop, which was where the AccuParty in the evening was going to be anyway.

The day was a big success, the guys who came all asked lots of great questions, played well, and seemed to take lots away from it (if you were there, don’t forget to keep the discussions going over at the forum).

The clinic was followed by the AccuParty – a fun little hang out, time for people to try out the AccuGroove cabinets, and a chance for me to play some cool duets with Edo Castro.

Sunday – breakfast with the Turners, then left their lovely home and headed north to Novato to see more of my favourite people in California, Anderson Page, who works for Modulus and has been a good friend for many years, and Laura. After all the driving around gigging and teaching of the previous week, an evening in watching Pink Floyd live at Pompeii, drinking gorgeous wine (a present from Jim at the masterclass – future masterclass attendees take note!) and catching up was just what the doctor ordered. A marvellous evening on every level.

Monday morning I took my basses into Modulus – Joe Perman, who used to work there, has come back, and in the interim, my carved top fretted 6 was built, so he wanted a look at that, and while there sorted out the set up and intonation for me (thanks Joe!).

From there, I drove up to Sacramento to see Mike Roe. Mike’s the singer/guitarist in the 77s, who I’ve opened for in Sacramento before, and also in Orbis, an ambient side-project who opened for Michael Manring and I a couple of times. Dinner with Mike and Devon followed by watching about half of ‘Standing In The Shadows Of Motown’ made for another great evening.

Tuesday following breakfast I set off back to the Bay Area, calling in to see Michael Manring on the way, to discuss the next step in our plan for solo bass world domination. And then it was back to AccuGroove-land, for dinner with Mark Wright and family, and talking long into the night before flying home Wednesday.

All in all, a great trip – meeting up with so many great people in such a short space of time give me faith in the world. It often seems like a crappy place with the good people few and far between, but there are loads of ’em around. Much fine music was made, and much fun had.

Soundtrack – the CDs I took with me included – Talking Heads, ‘Stop Making Sense’; Athlete, ‘Vehicles and Animals’; Iain Archer, ‘Flood The Tanks’; Peter Gabriel, ‘Greatest Hits’; The Cure, ‘Greatest Hits’; Jing Chi, ‘3D’; Prefab Sprout, ‘Steve McQueen’; Julie Lee, ‘Stillhouse Road’; Pierce Pettis, ‘Everything Matters’; The Dum Dums, ‘It Goes Without Saying’; John Scofield, ‘Up All Night’; Bruce Cockburn, ‘Live’.

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American Tales pt 1

So I’m currently in Santa Cruz, having survived NAMM, and the drive north, and one gig with Michael Manring.

Got in last Tuesday, and was staying with the wonderful Doug, Vida and Dani for the first couple of days – it’s great to come out here and immediately feel at home. It just serves to reinforce my dislike of hotels.

Two days with the Lunns, then off down to NAMM. NAMM, for those new to the game, is a HUGE music equipment trade fair. The connection with the music industry means there are a fair few lovely people around. The commercial side of it means there are also a lot of losers on the make there. I tend to view NAMM as an archepelego (spelling, harv?) of lovely people in a sea of turd. you just run from one booth of nice people to the next, hoping not get hijacked by some moron trying to sell MIDI leiderhosen or the keyboard the doubles as a trouser press for musicians on the move…

All in all, it was a fab experience – I played at and compered the BassQuake event on Thursday night, which was much fun – Dan Elliot, the BassQuake founder, does an amazing job of putting together a great show every year.

On the show floor, I did one short set a day each for Modulus and AccuGroove, and spent lots of time just milling around catching up with people I rarely get to see. Some great friends where there – Anderson from Modulus, Mark and David from AccuGroove, Peter Murray, Michael Manring, Doug Lunn (again), Warren from Fodera, Wally and Lady Bo, Carl at Lakland, Eric Roche, Steve and Jill Azola, Rick and Jessica Turner, Dave Swift, Muriel Anderson, Sarita Stewart, John East, John Fearrante, Otiel Burbridge, Jeff Campatelli, Bill Walker, Bob Amstadt, Lowell, Dude. etc. etc. etc. loads and loads of great people, many of whom I only get to see once a year. Eating is a sacrament at NAMM – for me, I break bread with the Subway people every day – a foot long veggie delight, being my element of choice. Getting to eat with friends at NAMM is great, time away from the convention centre. Friday it was with Doug, Vida, Dani and Vinnie, Saturday with Peter Murray, Lunch was with Bob Amstadt on Saturday, and Tal Wilkenfeld on Sunday (fantastic young bassist from Australia working in NYC – you’re going to be hearing much more from her, I guarantee it).

So NAMM was lots of fun once again, and by not writing for a mag this year, I had a lot more time for just hanging out and enjoying the show.

During NAMM I was staying with Bob (QSC Bob from all the bass forums) and Alison – great people, who made me very welcome. The best thing about travelling is the people. The worst is missing the small person and the cats, but emailing whenever possible, and the occasional snatched phone call is having to do for now…

Sunday night after NAMM, Doug Lunn and I headed off the the Knitting Factory in LA to see Kaki King play – Kaki’s a killer guitarist, produced by the wonderful David Torn. She’s from that post-Hedges school, with a few twists of her own, and a great line in on-stage patter. A killer gig.

Tuesday was the long drive north, up here to Santa Cruz, staying with Rick and Jessica Turner. Rick and I could be stuck in a room together for months and not run out of things to talk about. They are both two of the most interesting and marvellous people I know, so coming here is my Northern California home, in the way that staying with the Lunns is in SoCal.

which brings us up to last night’s gig, back at the Espresso Garden in San Jose with Michael Manring. playing with Michael is, as you know from my raving after the UK gigs, the most enjoyable and fullfilling musical enviroment i’ve ever found myself in, and last night was great. Thanks to everyone who turned out.

And now I’m off out for lunch with Rick Walker, another great friend and fab percussionist.

more later…

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A Christmas pressie for my bass!

Well, it’s been two years since I last changed them, so I thought as a christmas pressie I’d give my 6 string fretless a new set of strings… Woah! It feels like a completely different instrument (that might also be down to me ill-advisedly tinkering with the truss rod at the same time…) – it suddenly sounds all bright and twangy! They’ll break in in a week or two, I’m sure, but it’s a huge difference from two year old flats to brand new ones… Now, do I do the 6 string fretted at the same time? Those have only been on for just over a year… :o)

Also discovered in changing the strings that thanks to not really playing much bass over the festive period thus far, my intonation has gone to shit… time to put in some practice, methinks!

In other news, The Small Person and I were due to meet up with Andrew AKA Calamateur today, but got so snarled up in traffic on the way, that we had to abort the visit and head home – the worst traffic I’ve been in in London for many a year… :o(

On a more upbeat note, I’ve just had an email from Michael Manring inviting me to do a couple of gigs with him at the end of January in CA, which will be a lot of fun!

BTW, a couple of people have emailed/AIM’d in defense of Lost In Translation, but nothing even vaguely convincing has been said of yet…

Soundtrack – Jonatha Brooke, ‘Plumb’ (one of the greatest albums ever made – she’s coming to do some gigs in the UK soon, finally!!)

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A questionaire…

I quite often get sent mini-interviews by students studying music who are doing a project on solo bass. Here’s the latest one – feel free to add to it over in the forum…

1) What is the biggest problem with young (18-30) bass players? What is the main obsticle that hinders young players from becoming well rounded musicians?

I think the biggest single factor is the shift in the west towards a culture of immediacy. Closely followed by the cult of celebrity. Becoming a ‘well rounded musician’ requires years of dedicated and focussed practice, a lot of unglamourous work, crappy gigs, rehearsing, jamming, mistakes, expense, lessons, books etc. Before you really get anywhere. There are no shortcuts, and there’s no ‘secret’ to it. It just takes effort.

Couple that with the tendency with the entertainment industry to value celebrity over integrity, fame over talent and exposure over experience, and you’ve got yourself an uphill struggle to ignore all the millions of distractions and do the work required, then keep doing it, never stop learning. That’s tough.

2) What do you see as the future of solo bass?

I think the music made on bass will continue to develop as more people see past the restrictions of the ‘function of the bass player in a band’ and see it as an instrument full of unexplored potential. The bass guitar has very few fixed physical properties in terms of what’s possible design-wise with the classification ‘bass guitar’ – and those limits are always expanding. I think we’re going to see a lot more hybrid instruments that go beyond the standard divisions between guitar, bass and other stringed instruments.

3) When you pushing the musical envelope on bass, are you thinking musicality or “is this even possible to do on bass”?

The purpose of pushing the envelope is to find the music that’s behind the limitations… pushing limitations is fun, but unless the quest is meaningful music, it doesn’t really hold that much interest for me. I love working on new ways to access sound, process sound and peform music on the bass, and seeing what new textures, sounds, ideas, and compositional processes are facilitated by that exploration.

4) What is the average time you put in per week for practicing?

Not enough. I guess it ranges from about 6 hours up to about 20 hours, depending on what else I’ve got going on…

5) Who has been the single most influential player for you musically?

Michael Manring. As much conceptually as sonically. The feeling of reading an article by someone who was able to articulate a lot of the thoughts I’d had and was already forging ahead exploring that territory gave me a lot of encouragement to head down a similar path. Our music doesn’t really sound all that similar, but the thought process behind it shares a lot of territory.

6) Why do you push yourself musically? What drives you to expand your musicality?

All sorts of things – boredom and frustration are great motivators, as is the need to come up with new material for different projects. Hearing new things that move me and trying to conjure up the same emotions in my own music is a big one for me. Lots of things outside music inspire me to play – nature, cities, people, relationships, faith – big things, small things. There’s a corresponding soundtrack to most of life’s events, and I’m perpetually exploring that space.

Soundtrack – Paul Simon, ‘Hearts And Bones’; Paul Simon, ‘One Trick Pony’; Bill Frisell, ‘Blues Dream’; Wheeler/Konitz/Holland/Frisell, ‘Angel Song’; Theo Travis, ‘Earth To Ether’.

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General update…

OK, I’ll fill you in on general goings on over the last week or so.

Last weekend was spent in Holland and Germany. The event I went over for was the European Bass Day, run by Marco Schoots, who publishes the Dutch bass mag, and runs a record label – an amazing guy. I was booked to play solo (actually, I was booked to play last year, but there was a pretty major breakdown in communication with the people who had offered to fund the trip, and I ended up not going… but that’s a whole other story…) Anyway, I was booked to play solo, and also with one of my favourite singers/bassists, John Lester – John, as you’ll know is the guy that opened for Michael Manring and I back in March on our tour here in England, and neither Michael nor I can work out why he isn’t a megastar yet – amazing voice, great songs, friendly engaging stage presence and a fabulous bassist… I’ll never understand this industry…

So, I went over to Amsterdam a day early to see John, to rehearse a few of his tunes and hang out in Amsterdam (oh, life is hard for your friendly neighbourhood solo bassist!). That was Saturday, and Sunday we drove to Viersen, just over the German border, where the Bass Day was being held.

My feelings about bass-days in general are mixed – I really like the idea of getting together with a load of bassists, and I love the chance to catch up with all my bass-chums that are at these events. But I really can’t cope with listening to hours and hours of machine gun slapping; after about half an hour it all starts to sound like someone drilling for oil. I guess it’s just me, ‘cos lots of people seemed to really be into it, but it really gets tired pretty quick. Guitar-fests and drum-fests are the same.

On a gigging level, it tends to work in my favour, as I’m often there as the alternative to the slap-monsters, and certainly both my set and John Lester’s went down really well – good crowds, well received, and quite a few CDs sold.

And it was great to see so many friends there – Stefan Redtenbacher, Jan Olof Strandberg, Jono Heale, Stevie Williams, amd even one very nice guy who’d travelled from Germany to see the gig with Michael Manring in London a couple of weeks ago!

So a fine time was had, and we stayed up in a bar back in Venlo til the early hours of the morning.

Monday was back to England, and Tuesday we collected the cats. So the rest of the week has been pretty cat-centric for The Small Person and I, discovering that these truly are remarkable, friendly and utterly adorable little animals. How anyone could have given them up is beyond either of us. It’s been a week of many snuggles with our new feline family. We always felt so lucky to have had five years with The Aged Feline, and there’s no way that any new cats could replace him, but it’s great to be able to give a home to more abandoned cats, and to then find that they have personalities bigger than most drummers is such a great bonus!

Teaching has gone mad of late – I’ve been doing loads and getting loads more emails from people wanting to learn, travelling from all over the southern half of england, and wales! I really really enjoy teaching, so it’s great to be in demand, but I don’t want to get into a position where I have to start turning people away… maybe I should make street-team membership a prerequisite of having lessons, and whittle them down a bit that way! :o)

Which brings us up to Friday night, when I went to a comedy gig – I’m a big fan of Rich Hall, but this was the first time I’d seen him live, doing his ‘Otis Lee Crenshaw’ failed country singer routine. Very very funny indeed, don’t miss him if he’s gigging near you. He was on at Club Senseless, which is hosted by Ronnie Golden – a comedy songwriter, who plays at the club with his band Ronnie and The Rex – he’s great, very funny, very clever. My only problem with the club is the amount of smoke. The Kings Head in Crouch End has a very low ceiling and really shitty air conditioning, so I end up leaving half way through anything I go to there, choking to death. BRING ON THE SMOKING BAN, says I.

And Yesterday, after a 7 hour teaching day, I went over to Oxford to see Jez and Susan Enan. I hadn’t seen Susan in ages, probably not since I played on her EP, but she’s been very busy working on a new album, getting a management deal and is about to move to the states and become a star. She fab, and it was very very nice to catch up with her and hear a few of the rough mixes from the new CD.

But I got back so late that I slept in and missed church today… doh!

anyway, here’s another piccie of the Fairly Aged Felines –

Soundtrack – Keith Jarrett Trio, ‘Tokyo 96’; Julie Lee, ‘Stillhouse Road’; Eric Roche, ‘The Perc U lator’; John Martyn, ‘Solid Air’; Lifehouse, ‘Stanley Climbfall’.

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