Year: 2006

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gigs where the act doesn't turn up…

Yesterday afternoon, Tony Moore at The Bedford send round an email saying that Tommy Sims was playing. Now, those of you with a memory for the credits on early 90s CCM albums will already know Tommy as the bassist on just about everything that Charlie Peacock produced around that time, but he went on from there to work with Springsteen and then to put out a stunning solo album called ‘Peace And Love’ – proper late-70s-Stevie-style soulful singer/songwriter stuff. A great record.

So naturally I was very excited to see him play, and changed plans to head to the Bedford.

But he didn’t show. Bugger. Got there, and the lovely Tony Moore was most apologetic, with a ‘he might turn up later, he’s got a session’.

So I stuck around, and watched the various singer/songwriters on offer. A couple of good ones, a fairly duff one, and Tony himself playing the best set I’ve heard him play. Some great songs.

The Beford is a fab venue, and Tony does an amazing job booking there. the quality is WAY higher than most venues where the bands are being paid, let alone a free-entry no-one-gets-paid gig. The problem for me is that there seem to be a lot of career song-writers there, who don’t seem to have much to say. Lots of songs written because the subject would ‘make a good song’ not because it’s something that stirs the soul of the writer. On some occasions this doesn’t bother me at all, and I just enjoy the skill of the songwriting. Other times it bugs the hell out of me and makes me resolve to make music that matters.

But it was a fun night out anyway, and at least one of the bands had a great lil’ bassist, who had seen Michael Manring and I do a masterclass at The Guitar institute a few years back, so that was a lovely conversation. :o)

I now need to find out what Tommy Sims is up to while he’s in London! Would still love to meet him and say hi.

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John Peel: A Life In Music

Just finished this book, by Michael Heatley and have come to the conclusion that, should the body of work exist to support such an endeavour, I could happily read about John Peel for the rest of my life.

I say happily – I get the most jumbled mixture of feelings when reading about Peel, ranging from nostalgia for the late 80s, gratefulness that someone like him ever existed and dread for what the music world could descend into in its post-Peel state, all underscored by an aching sadness that he’s gone, and disappointment that I never met him. (He did walk past me once, outside Broadcasting House – maybe I should’ve stopped and said something. I think I was probably lost for words though…)

I can’t think of the death of anyone else that I haven’t actually met that has affected me as much – the more I think about it, the clearer it is what an influence listening to his show had on me in Berwick in the late 80s/early 90s. You’d have to spend a good couple of years in Berwick, without the internet or freeview, to fully understand the significance.

And the weird thing with Peel – and a testament to his broadcasting uniqueness – is that they can’t rebroadcast his shows. It wasn’t about ‘legacy’ music, or playing ‘classics’. It was about playing what grabbed him now. As much as i’d love to listen again to those shows from the late 80s, filled with Cud and Bongwater, Napalm Death and the Bhundu Boys, The Pixies and Marta Sebastian, Kanda Bongo Man and BoltThrower, they aren’t what Peel would play now, and repeating them isn’t what he was about. When Ronnie Barker died, his legacy was palpable, celluloid, archived and repeatable. Peel’s is wrapped up in the experimentation of hundreds of thousands of bands through the last 50 years, inspired to say ‘bollocks to convention’ and try something new, something that mattered. You can’t turn that into a retrospective series, beyond getting endless bands to say ‘yup, without Peel, I’d be driving a van’. And they queued up to do so when he died. Genuine tributes to the man who handed them a career.

In this book, I’m reminded of how so many of those people that I listen to, so much of the music I love was launched on listener’s ears by Peel. Just about every non-jazz influence I have can be traced back to Peel’s patronage.

Anyway, it’s a fine book – read ‘Margrave Of The Marshes’ first, but get this one to fill in a lot of the geeky musical info.

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GRRRRR, Apple meddling with great apps…

I HATE it when corporations do shit like this – a while ago, a friend turned me on to a great application called ‘Cover Flow’ – it basically catalogued all the albums in your iTunes folder and automatically downloaded the cover art for them so you can flick through it like a stack of records. A really great app. The interface was good, and the fact that it ignored single tracks, and just stuck with albums was great. It kept the whole thing neat.

Naturally, Apple saw it and wanted a piece of the action, and have built it into the new version of iTunes. But they’ve messed it up! It catalogues everything, uses the cover images embedded in the MP3s, is much harder to update, doesn’t jiggle around in the groovy way that cover flow did, and isn’t full screen, cos it’s built into itunes. In short, it’s a crap version of the freeware one that was put out before.

Thank God I’ve still got the original app, and I’m holding onto it. I might see if there’s way of uploading it somewhere for anyone if any of you want it… it’s for mac only though…

[UPDATE] GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR – the old Coverflow doesn’t integrate with the new iTunes!!!! How shit is that? So I’m going to have to ‘make the best of it’ with the new shit cover flow. not fair at all.

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singer/songwriter genius shows Street Team how it's done…

Juliet Turner, fabulous singer/songwriter and Recyclist from Greenbelt, sent this out to her mailing list yesterday –

“Hey. For any of you who are in London, try and check out this gig. Super amazing bassist Steve Lawson gathers together GREAT musicians and they play off the cuff/of the moment/who knows whats going to happen next/ music. I did some singing with Steve at the Greenbelt festival this summer which was a lot of fun. There’s a Recycled gig on the 21st Sept at 182 St John’s St. Clerkenwell, London when Jason Yarde (saxophonist, very celebrated jazz musician) and Leo Abrahams (guitarist, Brian Eno, Ed Harcourt, Roxy Music) will be joining Steve. The music will be extraordinary. More details on their myspace site.”

How lovely is that? The date is a day late (MySpace quite often lists gig dates a day late for some reason – always click on the gig and check the ACTUAL date of any gig you get off MySpace), but that’s the kind of support and encouragement that any musician craves but rarely gets.

As I’ve said numerous times before on this ‘ere blog, you REALLY need to check out Juliet’s music – her website is julietturner.com and her myspace address is myspace.com/burntheblacksuit – all three of her albums are beautiful, and her new single is utterly gorgeous (if you were at the Greenbelt RC gig, you might recognise the words to ‘Joy’ as she used it as the basis for the improv she did with Harry Napier, Huw Warren and I.)

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What, no Geddy Lee?

Thanks to a link from L1z’s blog, I headed over to MyHeritage.com and did their face recognition thingie. Here’s the result – I quite like being a cross between Trent Reznor and Keith Jarrett, but no Geddy Lee? shurely shum mishtake?

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New interview on line

Another interview with me online – this one’s at FretlessBass.com. It was a form interview, where they just sent 18 questions (the same 18 they send to everyone) for me to answer by email, so there’s no to-ing and fro-ing on the answers, which is a shame as that’s where the interestings stuff comes from, but it’s OK.

(and yes, Steve, I’ve told them they need to put a picture credit on for those photos, fear not.)

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Making loops interesting…

There’s been a long thread over on Looper’s Delight about making loops interesting. A lot of the discussion has been around things to do to your loops, or ways of playing that will make them interesting. All good stuff, but missing something… Here’s my reply to the list of about 5 minutes ago –

“Some interesting stuff coming through on this topic (that which I’ve had the time to read, anyway).

My own way of dealing with this, philosophically is to not think about the looping aspect of it unless I have to, but instead to try and conceive the ‘music’ first in an of itself. Having spent a lot of years playing loop-based music, I already quite naturally hear form in a loop-influenced way, so don’t tend to need to force things. Occasionally I’ll be looking for a different kind of arrangement, and then I go to my tools at hand to see if it’s going to be possible… the ever-growing feature-list of the Looperlative certainly helps in this area.

But I have, for the most part, avoided self-consciously labeled ‘loop music’. There are some people who do much more ‘loop-essential’ music than I that do it incredibly well – Bill Walker, it seems to me, exploits his looping boxes in a more obviously loop based way (especially his ultra-rhythmic synced stuff), but his boundless musicality comes through in a way that makes it sound like the technology was made for him. Likewise Claude Voit – quite obviously loop designed music in the rhythmic/repetitive mode, but not even remotely ‘dull’ or ‘tedious’ – just great music making use of the arrangement possibilities of his chosen hardware.

What’s most notable is that great music is unhindered by tech or lack of. The great musicians are the ones who enslave the technology to their musical ends, but also allow it to liberate their musical sensibilities into otherwise impossible arrangement options, but still hear it and present it as music, where the fundamentals of music, be they melodic, rhythmic, textural, cultural or onomatopoeic, carry through to the audience, and the geekability of the loopage is an added bonus not a necessary diversion from the unsatisfactory listening experience.

just a thought or two… “

It’s all about the music, peoples. Experimenting with looping possibilities makes for a fun (and personally rewarding) science project, but those techniques then need to be forgotten and committed to the subconscious so that the music can flow unimpeded. It’s a constant struggle, especially when one gets new toys, but one that must be resisted.

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