art – Page 8 – stevelawson.net

January 7, 2008

free MP3s featuring Nels Cline…

My other latest recent musical obsession is guitarist Nels Cline. Best know these days as the guitarist in Wilco, he’s nevertheless been a mainstay of the LA experimental/free/out/weird scene for decades, as well as guesting with some big name dudes like Mike Watt (his guitar playing features heavily on Contemplating The Engine Room by Watt – an amazing album)

Anyway, there are a few free downloads on last.fm that feature him – first, there’s The Darkness Of Each Endless Fall by Stueart Liebig – Stig is an outstanding bassist from LA, and I just bought this track yesterday from eMusic, but on clicking on his name on last.fm just now, discovered I could’ve got it for free… So you can, and then go and buy loads of Stig’s music cos it’s amazing.

Also on last.fm are four free downloads from The Scott Amendola Band, featuring Nels. Again, I downloaded both albums from eMusic, but you can get tasters of them from last.fm, then go and buy them on emusic!

And lastly – same as before, I bought it on emusic before discovering the freebies – some of Nels’ own trio, The Nels Cline Singers, whose music is all instrumental, just in case the name throws you.

Get stuck in – you can get about an hour or so’s worth of free loveliness from that lot on last.fm. Seems like their label, Cryptogramaphone have free tracks from all their artists on last.fm – i’d recommend Jenny Scheinman, Alan Pasqua and Nels’ solo stuff as well, but it’s all worth checking out. Hours of spikey goodness.

January 7, 2008

…for Blue Nile Fans

One of the biggest shifts in my music knowledge in the last year has been my now-obsession with The Blue Nile – I’d owned a couple of their albums for years, but never really listened to them much until going through my iPod earlier in the year finding undiscovered gems and fell completely in love with Paul Buchanan’s bleak-yet-optimistic take on the world.

So today, I’ve completed my collection of their album releases, by buying Peace At Last from the Amazon.com download store, but more interestingly, I also managed to find a couple of Paul Buchanan solo tracks on a compilation album called Seasons Of Light on eMusic.com – they are, as expected, beautiful. If you’re a Blue Nile fan and want another 8 or 9 minutes of glorious loveliness to help ease the years til they next put an album out, these two tracks are a great way to do that.

Been having a lot of fun on eMusic today – Lo. and I were going through the site looking at all the industrial, metal, grunge and punk stuff we loved in our teens, from Helmet to The Melvins, Prong to Black Flag, but found that in our advanced years, we were much happier with gentle old lady music, so settled on Tanya Donelly’s achingly beautiful Whiskey Tango Ghosts – and she used to be in the Throwing Muses, so is sort of alternative-ish, right? right?

Sometimes you just gotta embrace becoming an old lady… though the Therapy singles collection, and the first Fudge Tunnel album both sounded pretty damned fine – guess I’ll have to pick them up as part of next month’s 50 tracks, and feel all young and dudeish again…

(oh, and my eMusic tip of the day is to set up your computer so m3u files (the files used to play the previews on the site) open with Quicktime – it handles them SOOO much better than iTunes and doesn’t litter your iTunes playlist with redundant entries… )

January 2, 2008

More youtube Steve/Lobelia videos…

Happy New Year! Hurrah! Hope your celebrations were fun…

here are three youtube vids of me and Lobelia live in Brighton about a month ago. Quality’s not great, but they were good performances for the most part. :o)

(Oh, and for those of you that have emailed me, I’ll get the download version of the new EP up ASAP, I promise! Sorry…)

Tea In The Sahara –

I Am Afraid Of the Dark –

Happy –

enjoy…

December 28, 2007

Reverb Nation picking up a head of steam…

I’ve blogged about Reverb Nation quite a few times, but it’s always worth another heads up as the user base is growing, and people’s familiarity with the two Facebook plug-ins (My Band for musicians and Reverb Nation for fans) is also growing.

The widgets on their site are a great way of compiling players for all your favourite artists onto one page, as Kev Cooke has done on his myspace page.

They still don’t accept information ‘pushed’ to the site, and don’t allow all that much tweaking and customisation of the widgets themselves, but the range of sizes available is a great idea, and the basic design is pretty cool looking…

Here are a few of the widgets for me, for playing music, adding to the mailing list, and showing your gigs…

Oh, and if you go to my reverb nation page and click on the ‘favourites’ tab, you’ll see all the fantastic musicians I know that are on there, with more stuff being added all the time!

December 26, 2007

Oscar Peterson RIP

Jazz pianist Oscar Peterson died on Christmas Eve. His album Night Train was the first jazz album I was ever able to play along to, due in large part to the amazing lines and tone of his long-time bassist Ray Brown, but also the relative simplicity of the underlying harmony. The magic though was in what they were doing over the top… It’s a principle I’ve held onto with most of my jazz playing ever since – keep the changes simple and give the players room to stretch. And from Ray’s playing on that record, I got a sense of how a line can be supportive, swinging and clear in its statement of the harmony.

It was one of the first jazz albums I understood at all – I liked a lot of jazz that I’d heard before it, but didn’t really know what was going on. It got me on a more emotional, visceral level. With Night Train, I could follow the changes through the solos and pick out a lot of what Oscar was doing in relation to the chords in his solos. It was beautiful stuff, and to this day it’s the album I go to first when recommending a first jazz album to get to my students.

So in memory of Oscar, here he is with not one by TWO world class legendary bassists – Ray Brown and NHOP –

And here’s the obit. from the Guardian.

December 19, 2007

Bass Masterclass – 'Bass 2.0' – San Jose, California, Jan 12th

date

Sunday January 13th, 10.00am-6pm

venue

Bass 2.0 Masterclass, San Jose, California

details

Bass Masterclass – fourth year of my California bass masterclass weekend. Sunday is a more specialised ‘solo bass and beyond’ day, looking at what’s possible with the instrument outside of it’s traditional role.

weblinks

map (via google)

Masterclass details on MySpace

December 19, 2007