The Jethro Tull version of Bach's Bouree is one of my musical touchstones. It was the first thing I'd learned on the flute (at least the melody I mean). And as much as television shows like HBO's Vinyl exude raw hatred for Tull, the jazz version of the bouree is absolutely brilliant.
And that brilliance would be completely absent if it weren't for the bass part. Glenn Cornick was an amazing player and the bass solo does one of the things one does not normally expect from a bass solo: it's musical.
A kind of study of theme and variation, using the counterpoint to the melody as the starting place (which, c'mon, that's awesome), the bass part actually goes into freaking chords. Chords, man. Chords. Chords on bass are notoriously muddy. But Cornick, genius that he was, created a whole subject/answer jazz/rock classical/modern simple/elegant part with this piece.
The simple/elegant part of it makes it surprisingly tricky to play.
The best tab I can find for it is on Songsterr. Some of the positions, however, seem suspect to me. There are some jumps which seem unnecessary and looking at videos of Cornick playing it, he doesn't seem to be playing it that way.
But it's a good start. And tablature is not a terrible way to read either. There are some time things which confuse me somewhat. But I'm getting over them.
My buddy Mike Kessell (who designed and built much of Millennium Crisis) plays drums for Cavallo.
They rock.
No, I mean they freakin' rock.
The above link is to their Bandcamp page. And the recordings sound great (I even own their vinyl!) But live?
Live they rock.
I mean they freakin' ROK.
This is the kind of band that's so dynamic that really it's all about hearing them live.
And they're an instrumental band. There need to be more instrumental bands.
So I was checking out the Bandcamp blog and there's this dude who reviews metal and he has a blog with this post about a band called Wiht. I think they only made one album. Which, in their case, means they only released two songs.
This band is/was amazing. Think an instrumental Tool but with more delicateness and subtlety. They're definitely a "heavy" act but there's a world of dynamics and Floyd built in. I think they're no longer together.
The Cat Empire. You know. On the Gogol Bordello tip.
And then there's this band what is called Leningrad. And the song below is called "Fish". And yeah, they're total crazy.
Mystical Weapons. I heard them yesterday when I was having my very decadent shave in a barber shop. They're totally like Gentle Giant meets King Crimson in a post-aught indy-modern world. Which is funny because their provenance is so not that. Or maybe it is.
I left this at rehearsal last week. Hopefully someone will find it and squirrel it away for me.
I actually saw Lamb play in New York several years ago. My friend John Cheary went with me. We were standing at the foot of the stage and this beautiful girl pushed her way up right in front of me. John leaned over and said to me "That's a guy."
So for the whole show I figure it's a guy who's rubbing his butt against me but later it turned out that no, it was just a very pushy girl.
Presumably Gorecki is their most famous single. We do have hands down the worst radio in the world in the greater New York area so of course I've never heard it on the radio.
Instead I was introduced to them via some late-night video show (I suspect not MTV) with their music video of B-Line. Do NOT watch this when you're about to go to bed.
What I kind of like about this song "There's a Hole" by Ex Cantador is that it starts with these very straight plainsong-indy vocals and guitar but then goes in a direction one doesn't expect. The player is embedded above, if you're reading on email or an RSS reader you may not see the link.
Anybody else convolve Elton John's "Beyond the Yellow Brick Road" with Neil Young's "After the Gold Rush"?
I mean, they're both about gold. Sort of.
They both mention replacements. One a replacement for a lover, and the other a soldier.
Neil Young's is a lot more poignant. The line "and I felt like getting high" always gets a big round of applause at his concerts but it's one of the most tragic lines in rock and roll.
So I dig Jake Conte and the video song and Pamplemoose and everything, but it just occurred to me that the video song is technically a copyright violation unless they've gone and gotten the picture synchronization rights from the publisher and composer. Which I doubt.
Our copyright law is really from the pre-MTV age. I don't actually know how MTV handles sync rights in the videos it shows, I'm kind of under the impression they've knocked out deals with the record companies and the publishers -- and those publishers and record companies have also (by this point) forced all their artists/writers to conform to letting MTV use their music (at least in the US) for no additional fees.
But I seriously doubt that Jake Conte has negotiated with the Gaga legal team. And so far, nobody probably cares too much because they figure it just works out for Gaga and company just fine.
Although the question I've been asking for nigh on 20 years now is why does Weird Al Yankovic seem to have to ask permissions of artists to do their songs? It seems to me that a parody is pretty much right in there with fair use. Is it the sync rights he needs to get the song on MTV? Who knows?
Finding out this information is spectacularly difficult. That's mostly because the copyright law is so complex that even reporters who (vaguely) understand it can't put it in simple enough terms to write factual articles about it.
And there we are.
As it turns out, I like Jake Conte's version of Judas better. It's very Nine Inch Nails, surprisingly...
UPDATE: Weird Al, apparently, just wants permission from the original artists. He realizes he doesn't need it. But it also makes it easier for him to get credited (read: "royalties") as a writer. Which is interesting.
You know, drum solos can be hard to take. No matter how well they're played they can be... long. Even Moby Dick gets a bit tiresome in the middle. Inna Gadda Da Vida is only tolerable if you're very stoned.
But here the Faces do a pretty good job of everything. I do wish the audio quality of this was a tad better. It sounds to me like it was actually recorded pretty well (although you can hear a limiter kick in with the bass). But recording to videotape in 1970 is not my idea of "hi-fi".
A neat thing about Bandcamp is that you can use it like you used to use MySpace. You'd see that friends of yours, or friends of friends, were fans of some band and then you'd immediately go and listen to the band yourself.
With Bandcamp you don't have "friends". It's simply a brilliant back-end to your band's website and such. But you can surf around on Bandcamp.
That's how I found this Portishead-ish German outfit called Soleil. I expect to hear them on SomaFM soon.
Now, I've never been one who pedestaled "youth". Indeed, I sounded like a grumpy old man as a teenager. And the truth is that I like modern pop music. Lady Gaga is amusing. And I like that song Bulletproof by La Roux.
And I certainly don't mind doing covers of classic songs (I actually released a 12" EP with a cover of Cream's Sunshine of Your Love with a "band" called Plaid Cow.)
But when you're a hard rockin' outfit like Type O Negative you'd thing you'd do something other than making a kind of meh cover of Neil Young's Cinnamon Girl. Wouldn't you?
Now this is actually a lesson I have to keep learning. There are, for instance, things which are fun to play (like high-gain preamp distortion) that actually don't sound that good. They feel good. They don't sound good.
When mixing, the same thing happens when you add too much compression. You feel like it's better. But it's not. It's just louder. And although you think louder is better (everyone thinks louder is better, it's virtually a principal of psychoacoustics) it ain't necessarily so.
And it takes discipline to play a guitar which isn't screaming on every note. A guitar which actually rings and then dies out. You know, like a natural instrument.
I've been playing both my amps at a variety of volumes. I have cranked up my JTM-45 clone, the Celtic Amps Edana that is, to 11. And it turns out that just too much. I know because I've listened to recordings where I've "dimed" the amp (the controls only go up to 10, the "11" thing is just a Spinal Tap joke) and it actually over-saturates. It's awfully fun to play. But it's too much.
At about 4 on the dial the guitar sound will rock your vole. If you play some power chords hard with a Les Paul, the growl you get is like no other sound you can imitate with other gear. And if you pick lightly, there's this amazing sheen in the sound.
Neil Young actually uses a relatively clean sound here. I mean "relative" to a modern rock high-gain sound. The guitars certainly break up. But the dynamics and the incredible one-note solo are the point.
But with the tools available to the modern guitar player and mixer, it's awfully tempting to go a lot further than this sound, even if you don't really need it.
And instead of linking to either version of Cinnamon Girl, here is Down by the River instead.
Neil famously uses a Fender Deluxe. The amp I play in tandem with my Edana is a Lil' Dawg Mutt, which is a Deluxe front-end with a Champ power section. It's a remarkably loud little 6-watt amplifier.
Tonight I saw Patricia Barber at the Jazz Standard in New York City. The club is a nice little club and it sounds very good.
When we first walked in actually we were going to sit close to the stage but then it occurred to me that we'd be in an acoustical "dead spot" and perhaps further from the stage would be better. The waiter suggested up by the bar would be better because there (hid in the "rafters") was a delayed speaker system which actually made the bar area sound really good, but at reasonable volumes.
I think that was the right decision because otherwise the experience would have been "Jazz drum concerto backed by Patricia Barber and others".
This is not the band I saw her with. I just got this from a website somewhere.
I felt she sounded much better live than I'd heard her on record. She had a backup band that I'll call, for lack of a better name, "Three Skinny White Guys With Black Shirts and Jeans". The performance had a nice feeling to it, which I suppose is the whole point of jazz. Her voice is great. My only complaint is that her mic technique seems to be in inverse proportion to how great a singer she is. I would put another large-diaphragm microphone about 2 1/2 to 3 feet away from her, tell her it's for the piano, and use it as the main microphone for her voice. It seemed like even that close-mic'ed "throaty" sound she does so well would come across with a nice U47 a couple feet away. Even live. She actually sounded best to me when she sang totally off-axis to her vocal microphone (which I didn't recognize.)
Interestingly the drums were mic'ed by a single Neumann cardioid behind the drummer's head. Yep, I was the dorkmeister who went up to the sound guy afterward and asked him about that mic. He said it was primarily for the recording but that a bit of it went into the PA system. I asked him if there were any issues with the drummer himself getting in-between the mic and the drums and he allowed as how he didn't think so. I suspect that the mic was actually just far away enough and with a wide enough pattern that it really didn't matter.
The set felt very organic. I think if you were going to the show to hear some particular song by Patricia Barber you'd likely be disappointed. But the one thing which impressed me greatly is the musical patience she has. As an artist she's willing to take her time and not rush things in order to "put on a show".
