Month: January 2006

Dave Holland article

This article (found via Tim Niland’s blog) is a nice look at one of today’s busier and more influential musicians.

Bassist Dave Holland has found his bliss in his bands

The band exemplifies Holland’s artistic raison d’être: to play vital music with musicians with whom he feels an aesthetic and social bond.

“For me, music is a group effort, a thing you do with people,” said Holland — who in his 40-year career has played with such artists as Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Stan Getz, Jack DeJohnette, Pat Metheny and Roy Haynes.

“It requires a certain cooperation, a respect for each other,” he said. “There are a lot of good things you can learn from it. It’s a lot of what life’s about, being nice to the person who’s sitting next to you, being effective in small ways. I think that’s all we can do.”

I love the concept of music as a social interaction amongst the musicians. The best music is often made by people with a social as well as musical connection.

WNYC – Soundcheck: You Can’t Learn A Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing (January 12, 2006)

Check out the cool interview with Dana Gioia, the chairman of the NEA, that appeared on last Thursday’s Soundcheck on WNYC.

WNYC – Soundcheck: You Can’t Learn A Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing (January 12, 2006)

I like where he talks about well rounded artists: poets that support music, musicians that go to galleries, etc. How can we as artists expect people to support our art, if we don’t support the art of others?

Criticism based on taste

From Gerard McBurney’s article Guardian Unlimited | Arts features | In from the cold:

Any western European like myself, brought up within the highbrow aesthetic consensus of the cold war period, will remember their teachers and mentors dismissing Shostakovich as more or less worthless. His music was “undercomposed”, we were told, and he was as at best second rate, a kapellmeister in the wake of, but not as good as, the likes of Hindemith and Prokofiev. He was not to be considered in the same breath as the great and glorious gods of modernism like Schoenberg, Bartók and Stravinsky. Many thought him far worse than mediocre, angrily deriding him as a dreary and bombastic court-bard to Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev, a time-server, a purveyor of cheap and diluted film-music masquerading as art.

This article made me think about the concept that much of musical criticism is driven by extra-musical factors. In the case of Shostakovich it may have been his politics. The knock on him that his music was really just film music posing as a symphony reminds me of the way some jazz snobs put down certain electric or rock influenced music.

Recently on The Bob Edwards Show, the guest was a writer whose name I am spacing at the moment. They were discussing literary criticism, and the point was made that critics end up having to write lots of words, when all they really want to say is, “I liked this. Read it.”

The day arts criticism is based on taste instead of agenda, the world will be a better place. I like Shostakovich. His music moves me. That doesn’t make me lowbrow, any more than the fact that you like the LCJO version of “A Love Supreme” makes you hip.

Recent listening 1/12/06

I recently renewed my eMusic membership, and have been burning through the downloads.

One album that I downloaded was Dave Douglas’ Mountain Passages.

Mountain Passages Cover

I heard the travelling version of this band, doing mostly music from this CD, at Snug Harbor in New Orleans a little over a year ago. They really knocked me out. The recording is as good as the live show.

The other thing that I grabbed on eMusic that has been getting into my ears is Matthew Shipp’s Equilibrium.

Equilibrium Cover

Matthew Shipp has been on my “stuff to check out” list for quite some time. I read an interview of Shipp on Bagatellen, and when asked which of his own albums was his favorite, he answered Equilibrium. That made it the obvious choice for my first Matthew Shipp eMusic exploration.

Saving music, one MP3 at a time

From the national Post in Canada: Saving music, one MP3 at a time

…the commercial universe is no longer the be-all and end-all. Today, discerning music listeners aren’t at the mercy of a few label bosses, marketing gurus and program directors.

If they’re willing to invest even a small amount of effort, they can go online, confer with other fans and have at their fingertips every imaginable artist in every imaginable genre.

The result is that, more so than generations past, the current one really is appreciating musical performance.

A look at how the proliferation of iPods and the ready availablility of music has effected the way people value music.

More Music, Less Opportunity?

Joel Harrison write in his All About Jazz piece More Music, Less Opportunity?:

There seems to be an inverse ratio between numbers of creative music makers and jobs, record deals, airplay, media coverage. Every jazz player is perennially asking, “How do I stay relevant? How do I get my music heard?”

I don’t know that he answers this question, but he does get the conversation started.