Category: Recommendations/Reviews

sideman business practice comes to audience members

When I first decided to be a professional musician, my goal was to be a great craftsman musician. I wanted to be the cat who got called for anything that used a trombone. My goals have since developed into more specifically artistic ones, but I feel good about what I did as a jack of many trades trombonist. I played symphonies, and operas, and reggae bands, and had cool gigs with “big acts” as far ranging as Ronnie Milsap and Stevie Wonder. Coming up in that “sideman” scene, one learns much about the etiquette and unwritten rules of behavior that one must follow to remain regularly employed. One of the rules that can vary geographically, and even by sub-scene, is when it is or isn’t cool to send a sub. In New Orleans it is never cool to send a sub with out telling he leader, but on certain gigs, it is acceptable to call the leader and say “hey, something came up and I can’t do Saturday, but Jerry will be there to sub for me.”

Today I received an email from the great trombonist/composer/teacher Ed Neumeister. If you are not hip to Ed, check him out, his stuff is great. The email was letting his mailing list know about some upcoming performances and DVD releases. (Check the website for that info) Ed came through the New York craftsman scene on the way to where he is now, so I loved it when he closed his email:

Mark your calendar now.

Hope to see you there. Thanks!

Keep in touch.

Ed

PS if you can’t make it, please send a sub….

Jacob Garchik : Unis

I stumbled across this video on Jacob’s MySpace page today. I’ve got this CD, and have liked it since I got it, but seeing them perform this piece, really helped me understand the structure. The trombone dork in me is trying not to go into a long post about the cool old tuning-in-the-slide Conn that Jacob is playing, and how fabulous he sounds on it. I’ll shut up, just watch and listen.

Carl Stone – Frank Gratkowski and Hamid Drake

It is a good music weekend in New Orleans. Tomorrow night (Friday March 20), electronic musician extraordinaire Carl Stone will be at the CAC. That same night Hamid Drake, Frank Gratkowski, Tim Green and Bill Hunsinger will be at Zeitgeist.

Frank and Hamid are doing a series of gigs, and Frank is staying a few days longer than Hamid to do even more stuff. I will be playing with Frank on the Open Ears on March 24. All of the details of the Gratkowski and Drake residencies are at scatterjazz.com.

sommeil: a concert for sleep

Below is an excerpt from the press release for a sleep concert that will be presented on April 11 in New Orleans. I know Tanner (the instigator) from some things he has done upstairs at the Blue Nile, and they were very cool things. Click the link for the full info, and spread the word to anyone you think might be into it.

sommeil: a concert for sleep, official press release

“Tanner Menard, Antenna Gallery and Experimedia Records

presents Sommeil: A Concert for Sleep, an international collaborative

experiment. Sommeil will be an all-night event beginning

at 10:00 pm on Saturday April 11th and ending on Sunday April

12th at 7:00 am. Participants are asked to slowly fall asleep while

live ambient and environmental music is performed through the

night by Tanner Menard.

Sommeil: A Concert for Sleep will be Menard’s reinterpretation of

the sleep concert experiment, first created by Robert Rich in 1982

and will be presented at the Antenna Gallery 3161 Burgundy

St New Orleans, LA 70117 in the heart of the St Claude Arts

District. The concert will be realized with Rich’s permission and

guidance. Sleep concerts are all-night events in which the audience

is asked to attend the concert with a sleeping bag and pillow

and to fall asleep while a slowly unfolding sonic texture evolves

over the course of the night and into the morning. People attending

the event are asked to be willing to sleep during the event or

at least to remain silent during the course of the nine hour experience.

Not merely a recreation of Rich’s original idea, Sommeil is

a conceptual, global remix of a performance type that addresses

one of the most basic functionalities of ambient and environmental

sound; music by which to sleep.

In the spirit of remix and the Creative Commons movement, Menard,

a Louisiana native, has compiled submissions of audio material

for the concert from nearly seventy artists across the globe.

These artists answered a call for submissions marketed online by

Experimedia Records which asked for music and field recording

to be used, remixed and mashed up during this nocturnal event.

Submissions include drones, found sound, recordings of natural

and unnatural environments and synthetic music created on synthesizers

and computers. Submitters have included radio scientists,

geologists, psychologists, sound artists, musicians, composers,

installation artists as well as several well known figures in the

ambient music scene. During the course of the evening, Menard

will remix these sleep submissions into a constantly evolving

sonic texture that will lull the audience to sleep.”

Music criticism criticism and The Bad Plus

There is fine line that the thinking/blogging/music-reviewing recording artist must walk. I have never really claimed to be a music critic, but I have written reviews of music that I like here. I find it awkward to be critical of others’ work, while putting my own music out, with hopes of people liking it, and writing positively about it.

The relationship between reader and reviewer is one that has gotten significant, if inconclusive, thought from me on many occasions. I want to be able to judge a critic’s taste from their body of work, then be able to draw my own conclusions about new music based on my balancing of the critics words, and my knowledge of their taste.

I don’t know much of Michael J. West’s taste, but he reviewed For All I Care by The Bad Plus in the March Jazz Times. This is an album that has kept returning my listening bin. There is something that I find very compelling about it, although I don’t know that I can articulate exactly what it is about it that compels me. I do know that the two parts of the album that West singles out as “unlistenable” and “demented…like they’re playing on separate planets” are the two parts of the album that catch my ear as the most interesting.

I guess we all already knew that there are differing tastes in our business, or we would all listen to the same records. I just find it interesting that the same parts of an album can be heard as the best and worst parts by two different, yet seemingly aware and educated, listeners.

Timing, computers, and diffusion

My involvement with, and exploration of, electroacoustic music has increased exponentially in the past few months, and it is a lot of fun. I am finding that new tools of expression are helping me increase my understanding of the factors that make music compelling.

88F29FBC-B16A-4B61-877F-2AE7AA448532.jpg

Right around the time I started getting serious about exploring electronic music on a deeper level, this disc showed up in my mailbox. Cities and Eyes by The Skein: Andrea Parkins and Jessica Constable is a a duo project that lists the performers’ instruments as: electric accordion, effects, samples and live processing, synthesizers, piano, voice, and electronics. Some of those are listed for both musicians. To my ears, this CD does a great job of taking sounds that we don’t normally associate with “songs,” and putting them in a context that has the vibe of “songs.”

If you are not sure how you feel about electronic music, check out Jon Appleton.

I have spent the last three nights at the LSU Festival of Contemporary Music. The guest composer was John Chowning. He is a wonderfully engaging man, and ridiculously smart. That is a great combination, and it was a real pleasure to get to spend some time with one of the pioneers of computer music.

One of the most interesting learning aspects of the weekend, for me, was getting to explore LSU’s ICAST surround sound system. For the FCM it was set up as 12 pairs of loudspeakers, plus a subwoofer. The speakers are set up in a way that allows stereo mixes to be presented in a variety of ways that remain true to the original stereo placement, but allow front/rear motion, and variation of the sound in relation to direct or reflected paths from the speakers to the ear. That is a somewhat simplified explanation, as there are many other possibilities with the system. The part that excited me, was that ICAST provides a performance aspect to the presentation of prerecorded music. This makes the concert experience very different from simply listening to the pieces on a nice stereo. Several students had the opportunity to diffuse (mix) a piece each night. It was a lot of fun, and thought provoking on several levels. Diffusing also gives me a bit of the performers rush that I get when playing. Over the three nights, I got to diffuse Love Song by Paul Rudy, Le Renard et La Rose by Robert Normandeau, and Fat Millie’s Lament by Kenneth Gaburo.

John Boutte

John Boutte is a bad dude. A Facebook fried just posted an audience video of John singing “Blackbird,” which made me search out and play the track “Why,” which he recorded with the New Orleans Social Club. It’s really heavy, especially in context.

There was a big concert at the New Orleans Arena on the one year anniversary of Katrina. It was a big gospel blow out fundraiser that also included NOSC, Dr John, and Stevie Wonder. I was standing next to the stage while NOSC was on, and when John sang “Why,” I had to go backstage into the hallway. It wasn’t a couple of tears kind of emotional, it was “I am going to bawl like a baby if I don’t walk away” emotional.

If you get a chance to check John out, don’t miss it.