Jeff Albert's blog and podcast home
From Doug Ramsey’s very cool Arts Journal blog: Rifftides: Doug Ramsey on jazz and other matters
Clark Terry, interviewed by Nat Hentoff, on the hard work required to become a master of improvisation:
If you don’t prepare yourself for all kinds of surprises, you’re going to be surprised.
I recently renewed my eMusic membership, and have been burning through the downloads.
One album that I downloaded was Dave Douglas’ Mountain Passages.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I saw an add for this site over at jazz corner.
Has anyone heard of them or done business there? It looks cool. Choice of file format and no DRM. Let me know if you have heard of them. If I find something that I want to buy, I’ll post about the experience.
Merge Records and Saddle Creek Records are offering mp3 downloads to customers who bought vinyl versions of their releases.
To quote the Guiness dude: “Brilliant!!”
Via Boing Boing
This NYT article is about a new angle on the rock band business model by the band Korn.
Korn Sells a Stake in Itself – New York Times
I see some positive in having each entity on the band’s “team” sharing in the success (or failure) of the other members of the team. Woring together for a common cause usually works better than “I got mine you deal with yours.”
Religion is not one of the usual topics here, and neither is network TV, but this salon.com article written by a preacher about a TV show is right on. If those things interest you, click the link.
Salon.com Arts & Entertainment | Sinfully bad TV
BTW, salon.com has a premium service, but you can watch a short ad and still get the content for free (well, except for the 30 secs you spent watching the ad).
Well, here it is, the first Scratch My Brain podcast.
This first episode has has music from Jesse Lewis Union and a track from the Jeff Albert & Ed Barrett album Duets Vol. 1, as well as some discussion of other podcasts that have influenced and encouraged me, a bit about Creative Commons, some ideas on DRM (Digital Rights Management), a mild dose of self-promotion, and wisdom from a four year old.
Another story about the ever evolving new music business.
Buying Music From Anywhere and Selling It for Play on the Internet – New York Times
…the economics of online stores is changing the financial calculations of the music business, making it profitable to sell a relatively small number of copies of a song, as long as a compact disc is not manufactured and distributed.
The place where I am seeing the implementation of this get sticky is when you hit a niche market that is audiophile heavy. There is a notable percentage of free jazz listeners that are into audiophile experiences, and digital distribution is still lacking in that area. Hopefully the bandwidth and lossless codecs will catch up soon.