Tag: cds

Posted on

John Lester/Gretchen Peters gig

Regular readers or Stevie-gig-goers will already be familiar with John Lester – he’s proof if ever it were needed that being fantastic won’t necessarily make you a star (if it did, he’d be the new Sting). For the uninitiated, he’s a singer/songwriter who plays upright and electric bass to accompany himself. He’s a marvelous songwriter, and a really gifted bassist, and has released two really lovely albums.

One of his now-regular gigs is with Nashville-based singer/songwriter Gretchen Peters, both opening the show solo and playing bass for Gretchen’s trio.

It’s one of my favourite gig experiences – going to see a friend play that I know is fantastic, but the rest of the audience is pretty much unaware of, knowing that within the next half an hour, lots of people are going to have a new artist to add to their list of favourites. I remember seeing Julie Lee play at the Stables on one of the Bob Harris Presents… nights, where very few people knew who she was, and most of the audience were in love before she came off stage. A great feeling. I like offering things like that to my audience (obviously in a smaller way, as my crowds tend to be smaller than those that Gretchen or the Bob Harris gigs pull) – the gigs I’ve done with Rob Jackson, Calamateur and John Lester have offered that to the people who had come to see me play, and got to hear something else marvelous into the bargain.

Anyway, John won the audience over last night with his first song, and by the end of the set, was selling CDs like a headline act. Great to see.

I wasn’t familiar with Gretchen’s music before the gig, but am a convert now – there are hints of Mary Chapin Carpenter, Sheryl Crow before she went crap, and even a bit of Joni Mitchell, but in a really mellow guitar/double bass/piano trio. Beautiful songs played to perfection. It was great seeing John just doing the bassist’s job – we solo players rarely get to see each other playing in bands (oh, if I had a fiver for every email I get saying ‘I’d love to see you playing in a band’…) so that was a real treat.

And what’s more, the early curfew at the venue meant that John and I could head off for curry and catch up on a year’s worth of news and gig stories.

The only downer on the evening at all was the choice of venue – I’ve done my rant about Carling venues before, and this one was at the Bar Academy in Islington – this was a better environment that when I saw Nick Harper here, but why have an all standing venue for an acoustic trio?? Why have a barman making loads of noise when an acoustic trio is on? The layout of the venue is rubbish, and again, the lack of chairs seems primarily aimed at keeping the beer drinking potential of the audience mobile enough to up their consumption.

I hope the promoter of the show finds a more suited venue soon…

Soundtrack – Vikki Clayton, ‘Looking At The Stars’.

Posted on

Autumn, the time to start bass lessons…

…or so it seems. I’ve had a major influx of new students over the last few weeks, as well as a few who I haven’t seen since before the summer starting back up again. It’s most enjoyable, as they cover the span from total beginners to fairly advanced, young to old, disco to metal. I love the variety of things I get to work on with my students, who all bring with them their own questions and musical challenges and obstacles that I then help them to negotiate.

I’ve never understood why some teachers won’t teach beginners – for me, teaching a total beginner is hugely rewarding and in many ways much easier than trying to undo the damage done by years of dodgy self-taught habits or even worse, rubbish instilled by a bad teacher elsewhere (which 9 times out of 10 comes from a guitarist who teaches bass as well to make some extra cash, but is inadvertently risking hospitalising their students due to the dreadful left-hand technique they teach).

What’s far more important than the experience level of the student are their expectations and the extent to which they click with the way I teach. I occasionally get students who want to learn in a more formally structured way, doing graded exams and working on specific pieces out of books. I won’t put students through the grades, as I’ve not seen any advantage in them at all – the material isn’t particularly enjoyable, nor are the pieces particularly good examples of the styles they are working on (why learn a piece in the style of Bob Marley, when you can learn a Bob Marley tune?), and the skill set they engender is not one that is going to help much in any playing situation I can think of. This mistake with grades is, as I see it, that the classical model is based on the need to learn a fixed repertoire – if you’re learning to play an orchestral instrument, there are certainly pieces that you will be expected to play, a range of pieces that are written with a very specific understanding of the instrument in mind. That makes it fairly easy to codify and grade that skill set, and to come up with set exercises that demonstrate the degree to which a particular musician is able to play that repertoire.

if you want to be a musician in a band, it’s much more about your ability to play within the style of the band you’re in, to bring something new to it, to respond to a very wide range of musical communications – learning songs off CD, dealing with poorly written chord charts, improvising, writing, playing tunes that don’t make ‘sense’, getting a dirty screwed up sound in order to give the song more edge… all things that are pretty much unique to a situation. There are of course fundamental ‘rules’ of music theory, harmony, rhythm and such like that apply across the board, but they can be taught via any style of music, and don’t require an externally established set of exam pieces to demonstrate whether you can do them or not. You, as the musician, need to be able to make instant value judgments about your playing in relation to the situation and make adjustments accordingly.

So I choose the specifics of each teaching course with reference to the taste and playing situations of the student in question – the route I’ll take to teach theory is different for students who play only metal compared to those who play in church. the material is the same, the approach and the examples are very different.

There are a few things I always stress with students, that seem to be woefully absent from most teaching scenarios, musical or otherwise. The first rule is, if you don’t understand something, say so because it’s my fault not yours – I’m being paid to make sense, not to rant. if that was the case, you’d just buy a video so at least you could pause it and play it again. If a particular student doesn’t understand what I’m on about, the onus is on me to come up with a new way of explaining the point in question, not on them to stress over it until it all becomes clear.

The second rule is to contextualise everything. I’ve had a lot of students turn up who are great at practicing, but dreadful at applying it to actual music – that connection has never been made, so they can run up and down endless scales, but have no way of turning it into basslines, melodies, ideas. If the stuff was practiced in context in the first place, you’d never end up in that situation. If a particular exercise can’t be placed in a context, it’s not worth doing. There’s plenty of music to be played that can be contextualised.

Soundtrack – Erin McKeown, ‘Grand’.

Posted on

Me in Bassics magazine

I posted a thing about this on my NewsFeed page a while ago, but I finally got a copy of Bassics Magazine through today, with the interview with me in it. It’s the biggest interview I’ve done in print (there are a couple of big ones on the net with various e-mags), and looks great. The questions were pretty good so it’s well worth a read if you should see a copy in your local newsagent/borders/barnes and noble/wherever you buy mags.

The cover star of the issue is Michael Manring, so it’s a fine solo bass filled issue. There’s also a track of mine on the cover CD, as well as some video footage, which I’m looking forward to seeing again – the Cheat and I filmed it at St Luke’s at the start of the year. We wanted to do it at St Luke’s cos we could do it in front of the big purple curtains in the main church, but the day we booked it they were installing a new PA, so we had to film it in the back hall, which means the backdrop is a yellow-painted brick wall. It looks like I’m filming it in prison! Hopefully my wikkid skillz will obscure any reservations people might have about learning from a convicted felon serving time at her majesty’s pleasure.

I’ve been a busy boy this morning, putting together the press release for the John Peel Day gig with Rise – click here for the PDF. That’s now been mailed to all the relevant media peoples so now we wait for some coverage and a huge crowd!

Soundtrack – Michael Franti and Spearhead, ‘Everyone Deserves Music’.

Posted on

A Blogger's Favourite Blogs blog-meme

OK, here’s a meme for all y’all who blog out there –

If you were stuck on a desert island with an internet connection to only one blog, whose would it be?
Which is the blog that makes you laugh the most?
Which blog is most likely to make you cry?
Which blog is most likely to inspire you to part with cash for a CD/DVD?
Which blog is most likely to cause you to change your mind about an issue?
Which blog do you read first in the morning?
Of the blogs you read by people you don’t know, who would you most like to meet?

And here’s my answers –

1) – assuming that www.howtobuildboatsoutofsand.blogspot.com doesn’t exist, It’d probably be Liz’s – I’m sure if there was a decent curry house on the island, she’ll blog about it at some point, as well as somewhere to purchase stylish footwear should the opportunity arise.
2) – either Liz’s or Going Jesus.
3) – er, probably Sleepless In Sudan – which could also fit into the above category – equal parts hilarious and heartbreaking.
4) – Most likely Sid’s blog.
5) – Hugo’s blog – either him or his comments. Lots of great brain food there. There are a couple of others that teach me a lot – George Monbiot and Jyoti but I don’t often change my mind on an issue because of them, just discover an issue I wasn’t previously aware of.
6) assuming all the blogs I read have got new posts listed, it’s normally Gareth’s, knowing that we’ll be chatting about whatever we’ve both blogged about within about 5 minutes of me switching my computer on. Though, it may actually be the Shark, as she lives in NYC and thus blogs later than anyone else I read, so is more likely to have posted after I went to bed… And this was in no way influenced by her offence at not being mentioned in the rest of the list. Not at all.
7) Either Sara, Hugo or Jyoti – all very interesting peoples.

Right, there you go – now go answer them on your own blogs!

Soundtrack – Duke Ellington, ‘The Classic Tracks Of The 40s’ (featuring the legendary Jimmy Blanton on bass).

Posted on

Jazz is dead?

Spent a wonderful evening yesterday with Orphy Robinson – just called round to drop off a CD of the tracks for the gig with Rise on Oct 13th, but as is always the case with Orphy, ended up spending hours putting the world to rights, and listening to some great stories.

Orphy and I have some very similar thoughts on music, and while our own music sounds quite different (he can actually be bothered to write lovely complex through composed music as well as doing the more free improv/spontaneous composition stuff), the genesis of it is similar – both of us have spent a lot of time around people who play ‘proper’ jazz, who studied Bird, learned the omni-book and did what you’re supposed to do – transcribed thousands of licks by your favourite artists. But both of us were turned off by that in favour of looking to the narrative aspects of music, drawn to musicians like Coltrane and Monk who told stories within a jazz framework, rather than just looking to burn their ‘opponents’ in a jam.

Both of us had a fear of screwing up when playing ‘real’ jazz, but when it came to soloing wanting something of ourselves to come out, and so looked to freer improv as inspiration for self expression. I learn so much whenever I chat to Orphy about where his music comes from – he’s been pro for at least 10 years more than me, and having been signed to Blue Note and played with loadsa big names, has a heck of a lot more experience than I.

But we both see our role as story-tellers, and as such are willing to take from any musical tradition that works for us. Our origins are different – Orphy’s background is Caribbean and its musical heritage. Mine is prog-rock and 80s art-rock/pop. So both of us bring that to the table when we play, and both had a rude awakening into the world of free improv (the first free record I ever bought was ‘Montreaux Suisse’ by Air (not the french pop band), and Orphy had gigged alongside members of the band…!)

And it seems like our journeys are becoming to norm for ‘instrumental improvising’ musicians – that all the interesting stuff is ‘jazz plus’ – taking a jazz framework and dropping loads of other influences in. Whether it’s players like Theo Travis and Ben Castle who bring prog elements to their writing and improvising, or the current golden boys of the brit-jazz scene Polar Bear and Acoustic Ladyland who bring elements of classic rock, electronica and hardcore to their music, it’s the everything else that is keeping jazz vibrant, vital and renders moot the bollocks talked about Jazz being dead. Wynton has done his best to turn Jazz into a museum piece, and the rest of the world has ignored him, thank God.

And coincidentally, there’s an interesting interview with Brad Mehldau in the Guardian talking about this very thing.

Soundtrack – King Crimson, ‘Discipline’.

Posted on

Lost and found part 2

So, other than my speeding ticket, I’ve unearthed a couple of long-missing CDs – ‘the Free Story’ and Michael Jackson’s ‘Off The Wall’; both great CDs that I’ve missed over the last few months. Especially ‘Off The Wall’ – ignoring for a moment the fact that for the last 16 years or so, Mr Jackson’s private life has made far more impact than his music, he has been responsible for some awesome music in his time, and Off The Wall is arguably his masterpiece.

It didn’t sell as well at Thriller, but then, nor did any other record ever made, so that hardly makes it a ‘hidden gem’. It contains some of the funkiest songs he’s ever recorded – Rock With You, Don’t Stop Til You Get Enough and Get On The Floor – the only track that doesn’t quite maintain the quality is ‘She’s Out Of My Life’ which is a nice ballad, but not up there with the funky stuff.

Anyway, if you haven’t got it, set aside thoughts of the recent court case and weirdness involving surrogate mothers, oxygen tanks, pet monkeys, Liz Taylor and baby-dangling and pick up one of the finest soul/funk/pop albums ever made.

Soundtrack – Michael Jackson, ‘Off The Wall’.

Posted on

Some indie solidarity…

BDB just sent me a link to a band called The Books – two blokes from the states who make odd noises with samples and one of them plays cello and bass (can’t work out what the other one plays) – they make their own samples, release their own records, and have a very odd website. All fine stuff.

A quick look at their stats on Last.fm reveals that they have over 74,000 listeners on there!! A truly remarkable statistic.

Which made it all the more sad to find the following notice on their website –

A Note About Our Finances:

We feel the need to dispel any notions that we are financially sitting pretty because of the acclaim our music has enjoyed. It’s true, we’ve released a couple of records and we’re grateful to all of the writers who have taken the time to write about them, but unfortunately our record sales do not reflect this. Our work, although deeply satisfying to us, has left us both on the brink of financial collapse since we began, so we are asking you: Please, do not steal our music thinking that we can afford it. We barely get by, and aren’t able to afford basic things like health insurance, let alone raising a family, etc. We love what we do, and we love that people listen, but if you would like to see our work continue, please support us, and all of the artists you enjoy, as directly as possible. The sad fact is, we can make a much better living selling t-shirts than we can selling music, so please help us keep this going.

Thanks!
Paul and Nick

Sad reading but I know exactly what they mean – I get way more interest, and have way more people who know my music than my CD sales would suggest. I remember a stat pre-internet that said that for every album sold, two copies were made. I’m guessing that’s at least doubled now. But it’s tricky – we all want people to listen to our music, and don’t want to have to go the route of disabling CDs from being copied onto iPods, or only having really shitty quality MP3s available. But it can be tough to make it all pay. One argument suggests that if people are swapping your MP3s then they’ll turn up to your gigs, and I’m sure there’s some truth in that, but on a week by week basis, it’s still tough to keep a record label functioning at the ‘profile’ level that the artists have when the sales don’t neccesarily reflect that.

From their statement, compared to their listening figures on last.fm, I’m in nothing like the dire situation that The Books appear to be in, but then I also haven’t got every track of every CD of mine available for download (all of theirs are on their site, I’m not sure if you can actually download them all).

The sales of the download versions of my CDs are doing well, and like the Books, I can see t-shirts being a good earner as time goes on.

I was talking at one point about doing a CDR amnesty – that anyone who sent me their copied version of one of the albums, or a signed statement that they’d just made MP3 copies off their friends could have a replacement for it for a fiver… I still quite like the idea but it was pointed out that it was in effect rewarding piracy and penalising those people who bought the CDs in the first place. I like to see it in more pragmatic terms than that, but I’ll hold off for now.

Still, you do have the opportunity to head over to the online shop and buy a CD/download/T-shirt/gig ticket if you like! There’s even a paypal tip-jar on the MP3s page (though I’m not sure if that just a way of absolving people’s conciences for downloading over an album’s worth of material but only giving me £2 for it!)

Either way, I feel sorry for The Books if things are really as bad for them as the statement above suggests, and I’m glad that my fan base is generally more forthcoming with the money for Cds!

Soundtrack – Eric Roche, ‘With These Hands’; The Cure’, ‘Greatest Hits’; Cathy Burton, ‘Speed Your Love’.

Posted on

Eric's Funeral

Yesterday was Eric Roche‘s funeral. I was hugely grateful to Thomas Leeb for forwarding the details to me, and I drove up to Haverhill yesterday lunchtime.

The turnout was amazing – hundreds of people including the great and the good of the UK guitar scene turned out to pay their respects to a musician we all loved and admired so much.

The service itself was lovely – the vicar did an amazing job, helped by the fact that he’d known Eric for over a year through his illness, and had spent a lot of time with him talking about his plans for the funeral.

The eulogies were very moving, particularly the ones from one of Eric’s oldest friends who’d been with him since he was in his early teens, and the one from guitar legend Martin Taylor – Martin had produced Eric’s last album, the truly brilliant ‘With These Hands’. The job of playing one of Eric’s tunes – the title track from that album – fell to Stuart Ryan, who did an amazing job of it. That was a role that no-one in the room would have relished, and Stuart played beautifully.

Funerals are a mixed affair generally – it’s often difficult to get past the mawkish hyperbole about what a great person the deceased was, but in Eric’s case, the vast majority of people there were just repeating what they’d been saying for years – he was a deeply inspiring person, amazing musician, hilarious to be around and hugely encouraging to his students and peers.

The get-together afterwards was an amazing gathering – guitarists and writers from all the UK’s major guitar mags mixing and chatting about eric, about guitar about gigs – all the things that Eric did so well.

The more I chatted to people the clearer it became that we were running a parallel course in so many ways – for years we were both teaching at music schools, writing columns for magazines, releasing solo CDs, playing at tradeshows and mushing it altogether into a career. Eric was way more marketable that me, and an even better self-publicist, and was, tragically, on the edge of moving into much bigger things. He was already selling out in provicial theatres, and was the star attraction at guitar festivals across Europe, even visiting China earlier this year. It would surprise me at all if he became the Eva Cassidy of the guitar – though it will be tragic for all the people who from now discover him through his records not to be able to see him live.

Still, you’ve got to get With These Hands – it’s genius, it’s beautiful and no CD collection is complete without it.

The main thought I had going through my head during the service was how unfair the whole thing was – some people live who seemingly don’t deserve to, and others die needlessly due to the genetic russian roulette of cancer. But that’s just it, I guess. Life isn’t fair, never has been. The world is a lot of wonderful things – it’s beautiful, inspiring, funny, there’s music and art and love and nature and rain and the sea and cats and mint tea and friends and family and all kinds of magical beautiful unfathomably wonderful things. But it isn’t fair, and we can’t earn our health, or the right not to get cancer, or the right not to get run over or mugged or blown up on a tube-train or… We can limit the chances by taking care of those things that we have control over – eating properly, not smoking, avoiding situations where people might run amok with an automatic weapon. But we’re not in control, and there’s no system of fairness that apportions tragedy to those who deserve it and witholds it from those who are ‘nice’ or ‘clean living’ or whatever.

I was looking at Eric’s parents and thinking that no-one should ever have to bury their own kids. It’s the great injustice. The order’s all wrong. Eric was only 37, which is no age at all. Two little kids and a wife. A family full of love. It’s too much to even think about, really.

But some things live on. the music definitely, and the memory and the inspiration, in big and small ways. Eric’s most well-known peers have expressed a desire to do something to help, to organise benefit gigs for the family. Some are already taking place (Martin Taylor is playing in Cambridge in October, and we’re talking about getting something to happen in London in January). And we can spread the world about the music – that’s the easy bit, it spreads itself.

There are small things that live on – Eric inspired the best tune I’ve written in a long time – and there are big things, like the ACM in Guildford renaming their guitar course after him (Eric was head of guitar there for years, and wrote the guitar course).

And you, you can go and buy his CDs – start with With These Hands, it’ll blow you away. Go on, you’ll discover some great music, and his family will benefit too.

So all in, the funeral was a fitting tribute to a much loved guitar genius, and a testament to his influence. On Radio 2 yesterday afternoon, Billy Bragg – who has been working on a songwriting project with terminal cancer patients – commented that the one thing that cancer gives you is time; time to get things in order, to plan your funeral to say what needs to be said, in a way that a sudden tragedy doesn’t.

Soundtrack – KT Tunstall, ‘Eye To The Telescope’; Kris Delmhorst, ‘Songs For A Hurricane’; Juliet Turner, ‘Season Of The Hurricane’.

Posted on

Alison Krauss at Hammy Odeon

Middle of last week, an email arrives telling me that as a thankyou for helping her out over the years, Julie Lee had put me and and a few other lovelies on the guestlist for Alison Krauss – Alison and Julie are good chums, so we got tickets and passes for a ‘meet and greet’ before the show. Yippee! It all sounds marvellous – even more so given that helping out Julie is such a pleasure that it hardly requires rewards…

Anyway, TSP and I jump in the new car and head off down to Hammersmith to meet The Cheat, The producer formerly Known as Showbiz Jude and Mark, and find when we get there that a powercut has taken out the Odeon (OK, I know it’s called the Apollo and is sponsored by some crappy beer company or other, but it’ll always be the Hammersmith Odeon to anyone who actually cares).

We head off to the pub, not knowing if gig will go ahead at all. Make occasional reckies (how do you spell ‘recky’?? it’s short for reconnaissance, I think, so can’t see how you’d abbrieviate that… but I digress), the traffic lights are still out, so we know the odeon is still without power.

Meet and Greet is cancelled, and we all started to head off when ‘poomph’ (poomph???) the lights came on! ‘hurrah’ said anyone too posh to cheer in a normal way.

Following some frenetic gig preparations, we were inside and sat down (in fab seats) and the band came on.

After my trip to Nashville last October, I’m a convert to the delights of bluegrass anyway, and it doesn’t get much better than this – the playing was amazing, the songs beautiful, and Alison has spectacular natural comic timing. It was yet another example of the simple rule about american bands – they get to play live so many more times that any UK band does before they go in and record that they end up being much better musicians. Even when their ideas aren’t as good as ours, the playing is usually of a higher quality (there are exceptions to the rule – me, for example – but in general… )

So the meet and greet didn’t happen, but the gig was well worth waiting for til someone put some 50p coins in the Hammersmith meter.

At the end of the gig, as we were coming out, I commented to Jude that I’d like to get Alison’s live album ‘I’ve got it you can borrow mine’ says jude. ‘I’ll buy it, I’ve already got her best of’ says me, which in the hubbub was mis-heard by Jude as ‘does she get her breasts out?’ – clearly, that’s one of my main criteria when choosing a bluegrass CD – whether or not there are boobs on the cover… very odd…!

Anyway, thanks Julie – a fantastic night out, even without Alison exposing herself on a CD sleeve.

soundtrack – Rise Kagona.

Posted on

New things at last.fm

First there was audioscrobbler. then they added last.fm, a sister internet radio station that chose tracks based on your audioscrobbler profile.

Hang on Steve, what the hell is audioscrobbler in the first place? Oh sorry. You see how at the bottom of most blog posts, I have a list of what I’ve been listening to, and the word ‘soundtrack’ next to it is in bold. Well that’s because it’s a link. if you click that link you get taken to a page that gives you details of every bit of music I’ve played in itunes over the last year or so. It has charts of who I’ve listened to the most, and for each artist it has charts of how many people are listening to them, what tracks are being played the most, etc.

Anyway, that was the scrob. And they also had last.fm, which had much the same information available on it as the scrob, but in a slightly crappier format.

So the whizkidz behind it decided to combine the two sites, and give the new site a bit of an overhaul. and it’s now last.fm. go and have a look. Do a search on an artist or two. then check out my page – the one that’s always linked from the bottom of the blogs. You’ll see what I’ve been listening to. How clever is that?

Anyway, they’ve also made it much easier for record companies to upload their music for the radio stations. So I’ve just been uploading the Pillow Mountain catalogue. check out the pages there for Grace And Gratitude and for For The Love Of Open Spaces. From there you can preview the CDs, or add them to your last.fm radio station (personalised radio, for free, with no adverts. Oh yes).

All in, last.fm is a music geek’s paradise – head over there, sign up and geek out!

Soundtrack – last.fm solobasssteve radio (you need the Last.fm player and a last.fm account for this link to work)

© 2008 Steve Lawson and developed by Pretentia. | login

Top