Tag: Steve Lawson

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Friday Random 10 again

Here’s today’s random playlist…

Talking Heads – CrossEyed And Painless (Remain In The Light version, not the ‘Stop Making Sense’ version)
Steve Lawson – Behind Every Word (yay for me!)
Talking Heads – Once In a Lifetime (this time it is from Stop Making Sense)
Duran Duran – Wild Boys
King’s X – Honesty
Kate Bush – Somewhere In Between
Galactic Cowboys – Speak To Me
Window On The Deep – BJ Cole
Stevie Wonder – Knocks Me Off My Feet
Kings X – Alone

two appearances each for Talking Heads and King’s X? Is iTunes making taste-based suggestions for what I should listen to – ‘stop listening to crap 80s pop songs, and get back to listening to lots more Talking Heads and King’s X’ – as advice goes, it’s up there as some of the best I’ve received in a long time!

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Friday random 10…

seems to be a bit of an online tradition to post a random playlist generated by your iTunes or whatever on a Friday. ‘Til now, there hasn’t been much point for me, as I didn’t have enough stuff to do it with. But now that I’ve got the new harddrive, and am furiously copying CDs across, it’ll be a little better –

1- Steve Lawson, No More Us And Them (seriously, it’s not a fix!)
2 – Charlie Haden/Pat Metheny, Tears Of Rain
3 – U2, Tryin’ To Throw Your Arms Around The World
4 – Paul Simon, Senorita With A Necklace Of Tears
5 – Steve Lawson, Here Endeth The Lesson (again, it’s what actually came up!)
6 – The Works, Meeting Place
7 – James Taylor, Line Em All Up
8 – Mary Chapin Carpenter, I’ll Take My Chances
9 – Jeff Buckley, Corpus Christi Carol
10 – Lleuwen Steffan, Gwahoddiad

there you go!

:o)

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New track on MySpace…

Just added a new track to my MySpace page. It’s a track called ‘Scott Peck’, which features the truly marvellous BJ Cole on pedal steel. He’s great, he is.

The bio on the page has been updated as well, to include the info about the new album, and this quote –

“Steve Lawson is a brilliant musician. I’ve known about him and listened to him for many years. He may not be one of the most famous bassists but he is definitely one of the most talented.” – Victor Wooten

Which is nice.

Enjoy the track…

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Not only a good write up…

…but a ‘Critics Choice’ listing as well!

Says much the same thing –

‘Improvising jazz and soul vocalist explores loops and sampling with Brian Eno sidekick Leo Abrahams and bassist Steve Lawson.’

Now I’m a v. happy bunny. :o)

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Should've blogged this a week ago…

It’s normally the first thing I do when Time Out arrives around the time of a Recycle Collective gig – check the entry. But I only got round to looking today, and it’s been in for a week. This is what it says –

*Cleveland Watkiss/Leo
Abrahams/Steve Lawson Recycle
Collective at Darbucka, EC1: 7pm; £7 concs
£5. Superb monthly concert series that
explores the relationship between live
improv and live looping (ie recycling the
song as it unfolds and using the created loop
as part of the unfolding piece). Tonight with
superb singer Watkiss, Brian Eno sidekick
Abrahams and bassist Lawson.

that’s rather nice isn’t it? No reason for you not to come along now. :o)

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One more summer on the Royal Mile

So, after having said that I wasn’t going to do the Edinburgh Festival this year, it looks like I will be after all. Only this time, instead of doing it solo, it’ll be a duet with Julie McKee, one of my favourite singers around. Julie and I have been working on duo versions of pop tunes for a while now, everything from Earth Wind And Fire to John Martyn, The Police to Soundgarden, Kylie to Tom Waits, so we’re gonna do that stuff late night on the fringe, with a few loopy ambient things and a solo tune or two thrown in for good measure.

I’m really looking forward to it – we’re only doing 5 or 6 dates, so it’s fairly low pressure, and the upfront cost isn’t going to be as high as it was for me last year.

here’s the blurb for the festival fringe programme –

Julie McKee/Steve Lawson – The New Standard.
“A musical match made in heaven, divine jazz-influenced vocalist McKee and acclaimed solo bassist Lawson give a fresh spin to the pop canon, from Sondheim to Soundgarden. Unmissable.
www.thenewstandard.co.uk

(don’t bother going to the address at the moment, it currently just points back to my website, but will have all the info about the gig).

So expect a gig or two before then as we get out and try out our looping ‘n’ pop songs duo! It’s going to be lots of fun. If you’re in or around Edinburgh in the second week of August, come and see it – we’ll be at The Lot.

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contender for the king of mint teas crown…

Had to buy a box of mint tea bags as soon as I got here – too many places where you can’t get things that are neither caffeinated or fizzy. So a trip Trader Joes was in order. Why don’t we have Trader Joes in the UK? It’s fantastic. Anyway, TJs mint tea is gorgeous – up there with Dr Stuarts. Oh yes, bloglings, it’s that good – try to refrain from drooling on the keyboard at the very thought of such at thing.

So I’m a happy minty stevie today.

Soundtrack – Jeff Taylor, ‘promo ep’ (all the songs from his myspace page plus one more – great stuff); Steve Lawson/Jeff Kasier (the improv stuff we recorded on sunday – marvellous noises – watch this space.)

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nice news

this morning I got an email from not-at-all-evil Dan, saying that ‘For the Love Of Open Spaces’, my duet CD with Theo Travis, is included in the new edition of the Penguin Guide To Jazz On CD.

Surely not? Aha, Amazon has a searchable book feature, so I head over there. Do a text search on me, and sure enough there’s an entry for it. Can I read it? Er no, for some reason Amazon tells me I’m not allowed to. So It’s over to The Cheat and his wikkid skillz to get a copy.

He then furnishes me with a JPG of said review, which reads thusly –

***(*) For The Love Of Open Spaces
Pillow Mountain PMR 0014 Travis; Steve Lawson (b). 7/03.

Lusciously beautiful without descending into New Age clap-trap, the music here walks an awkward line with great confidence. Both musicians make extensive use of loop technology (although, as they proudly say, no synths or midi-triggered sounds), and the result is a series of mood poems crafted with skill and a capacious melodic bent. Lawson gets a bit rocky here and there and maybe a couple of the pieces stat around a little too long, but in what is often a threadbare genre they’ve done very well.

How nice is that? ‘Luciously Beautiful’ is a fab quote for posters etc. and 3 1/2 stars is v. good for the Guide (they are, quite rightly, very precious about 4 and 5 star reviews).

And it times very nicely with the recycle collective gig that we’ve got coming up on Nov 16th – all the more reason for you to book that baby-sitter now and come along to the gig!

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Rehearsal fun

So Rise Kagona and Doug Veitch are here, and we’ve had two rehearsals – last night was just the three of us, two guitars and bass, running through the songs for tomorrow night, and then today Jez joined us to put the keyboard parts in place. Playing this stuff is just so much fun – it’s a challenge to get the African feel right, and to try and ‘think African’, feeling the songs rather than analysing what’s going on, but I’m definitely feeling more inside these songs that I did with Duncan’s stuff at Greenbelt – I think it’s just having spent the last couple of months listening to African stuff more than anything else has got me into the right head-space.

There are a few of the lines that I’d got slightly wrong from the CDs, so we’ve been correcting the parts, and I’m pleased with how quickly I’ve got a hang of that stuff. It’s been a lot of work and it appears to have paid off. You’ll have to come tomorrow night to see if it worked!

Gig details again, in case you’ve missed them up until now –

Venue – Darbucka World Music Bar, 182 St John’s Street, Clerkenwell, London EC1 – nearest tube, Farringdon.
Date – Thursday Oct 13th
Time – doors 7.30, first band on 8pm.
Bill – Rise Kagona and band, Steve Lawson and Calamateur

Be there!

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September's blog search terms…

Here’s the top 20 search terms for the blog – not surprisingly, Eric was by far the most searched for query that lead people to the site. the others aren’t that exciting, though I love the idea of somebody being so bored that they’d search the internet for ‘strange things’. And for some reason ‘etymology of dude’ crops up every month in the list – how weird is that??

1 eric roche
2 steve lawson
3 tal wilkenfeld
4 brooklyn beckham
5 background images for myspace
6 myspace people
7 eric roche illness
8 love press ex-curio
9 strange things
10 joe perman
11 myspace background images
12 narcissim
13 amy kohn
14 bangla ringtone
15 bassworld
16 charlie peacock love press ex curio review
17 do nothing til you hear from me
18 etymology of dude
19 laws on piracy
20 link 182

…and here’s a handful of the more bizarre search strings that led to www.stevelawson.net over the last month – the mind boggles!

german chicken dance download
when did robbie williams play at la scala in london
steve lawson afc wimbledon
supergluing cuts
garmet sawing machine
guestbook northampton 2005
telephone number st columba s church johnstone terrace edinburgh
fingers vinegar callouses -leroy
e=mc2 mks
electric archlute
died from hiccups
dr fox hypothesis
finley quaye = kevin bacon
i like to go bowling with my friend bert mp3
houmus recipe

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