Tag: cds

Posted on

Looking forward to tomorrow's gig.

And in other news, I’ve got a very intersting gig tomorrow, in Hackney as part of the Spice Festival. The gig in question is the Solo Summit, at The Bullion Theatre.

It’s going to be a lot of fun, and lots of my favourite musicians are on the gig – Orphy Robinson, Cleveland Watkiss, Filomena Campus, Tunde Jegedi, Celloman (Ivan Hussey), Pat Thomas and just added to the bill, BJ Cole! What a lineup that is!

I’ll be playing solo, as well as looping and processing Filomena and Cleveland, so will be kept nice ‘n’ busy. I love the idea of a gig designed to explore the various ways that people perform solo, and am looking forward to stealing some ideas from all the people there!

Soundtrack – Wheeler/Konitz/Holland/Frisell, ‘Angel Song’ (one of my most favouritest albums ever, a hugely inspiring CD, featuring some of Bill Frisell‘s best playing)

Posted on

Less heavy stuff.

First up, thanks to everyone who phoned, texted, emailed – very nice of you all to call, especially those who only call when you think I might be dead… (just kidding).

So yesterday. Obviously started with bomb news. I had a gig booked with Ned Evett, a fabulous fretless guitarist and singer, who had landed in London the day before. He was, obviously, knackered and jetlagged, so slept very long indeed. His mobile wasn’t working cos he was in Angel – too close to all the shit. Didn’t get in touch with him til about 3.

Tried to get him to get a cab north, but no cabs would go down to Angel. So I had to go and get him.

Told him to start walking up Upper Street, and I’d get him somewhere along there. Got to Upper Street in good time, but then took 40 minutes to do half a mile on the street. Found Ned, loaded up, and headed for the back roads.

The radio announced that the motorways were largely unuseable. So we headed out on the A40, passed the M25 and started to weave through the backroads – Slough, Windsor, Bagshott etc. down to Guildford and onto the A3.

Eventually got to the venue at about 8.50, set up in double quick time, ate fast dinner (were both starving), and I was on stage before 9.30. Did it as one set straight through, with Ned joining me for a couple of improv duets before doing his solo set. A lovely audience of great listening peoples. Sold a bunch of CDs, and had a marvellous time. Well worth the hassles.

Driving home was obviously easier, listening to BBC London and people phoning in their stories of involvement in the days horribleness. Some really touching stories. Must be appalling for those who were involved. A nightmare for the relatives, and those critically injured. Still didn’t seem to be any consensus about the actual death toll. Each life already decided but unaccounted for.

Posted on

Bruce Cockburn at Toronto Live 8

Finally – been looking for this all day, waiting for it to come round on the AOL stream of the Toronto Live 8 gig.

He started with ‘If I Had A Rocket Launcher’, then went into ‘Call It Democracy’, followed by a fantastic lil’ speech, into ‘Waiting For A Miracle’.

His speech bit started with him mentioning that so much of the nay-saying about dropping debts and providing aid revolves around discussion of corrupt despotic leaders,

“Those corrupt leaders have been historically propped up in the position they’re in by the same countries, the G8 countries, that we’re addressing today, so now is the time to make ourselves heard,”

Anyway, here’s the lyrics to ‘Call It Democracy’ – an hymn to the death of the IMF, if ever there was one. It would’ve been great to have Bruce in London singing this as the centre-piece to the whole gig. Ah well.

Call It Democracy – Bruce Cockburn

Padded with power here they come
International loan sharks backed by the guns
Of market hungry military profiteers
Whose word is a swamp and whose brow is smeared
With the blood of the poor

Who rob life of its quality
Who render rage a necessity
By turning countries into labour camps
Modern slavers in drag as champions of freedom

Sinister cynical instrument
Who makes the gun into a sacrament —
The only response to the deification
Of tyranny by so-called “developed” nations’
Idolatry of ideology

North South East West
Kill the best and buy the rest
It’s just spend a buck to make a buck
You don’t really give a flying fuck
About the people in misery

IMF dirty MF
Takes away everything it can get
Always making certain that there’s one thing left
Keep them on the hook with insupportable debt

See the paid-off local bottom feeders
Passing themselves off as leaders
Kiss the ladies shake hands with the fellows
Open for business like a cheap bordello

And they call it democracy
And they call it democracy
And they call it democracy
And they call it democracy

See the loaded eyes of the children too
Trying to make the best of it the way kids do
One day you’re going to rise from your habitual feast
To find yourself staring down the throat of the beast
They call the revolution

IMF dirty MF
Takes away everything it can get
Always making certain that there’s one thing left
Keep them on the hook with insupportable debt
Notes

Commenting on the song, written in the early 80s, at a gig in 2000, Bruce said:

“That song came from the time of neo-conservatism, when governments supported business at the cost of lives and nobody gave a shit. We have since moved on to neo-liberalism, when governments support business at the cost of lives and nobody gives a shit; and I see we’re moving on to neo-feudalism, that’s the service economy coming at you. We will all serve. I’m not quite sure who we’re serving. There’s a sort of mystery there; are we serving Bill Gates? I think not, he’s too visible. Somebody else? Maybe you’re sitting right here (in the audience). Are you out there? Fuck off, if you are. (positive audience response) And if you’re not, well we missed a grand opportunity to level with each other.”

If you want to get the song, it was originally on World Of Wonders, was also on Bruce’s late-80s best-of ‘Waiting For A Miracle’, but my favourite version is on his late-80s live album, just called ‘Bruce Cockburn Live’, on Cooking Vinyl.

Posted on

More of file sharing and the multi-nationals

From BBC news –

“The US Supreme Court has ruled that file-sharing companies are to blame for what users do with their software.”

This was apparently a surprise, because a similar case happened with the advent of home videos, where people could record off the TV. Then, the ruling went in favour of the Video manufacturers.

This time, I guess because the inventors of grokster, morpheus, limewire etc. aren’t mulitnationals themselves, the increasingly erroneous US Supreme Court have ruled in favour of the millionaires.

Now, the interesting thing here is, does this mean I can now sue Sony if someone uses a Sony CDR to copy one of my CDs? Of course not, because Sony have more money than me, so naturally they are in the right. But it’d be a fun test-case – I’m sure I could argue quite convincingly that they were facilitating the exchange, at least as much as limewire facilitate the downloading of my MP3s. Limewire can be used for legal exchange as well as illegal.

But no, Sony were happy to sell CDRs, because then they were making the money. The artists weren’t, but who gives a shit about artists? They claim to, but clearly don’t. When the blank CDR/cassette/video market became an obvious source of funds, they stopped protesting and started making blank media. At least they’d make the money. if you had shares in Sony, you’d still win, even if the artists they claim to care about so much didn’t make anything.

But file sharing is different. No-one’s making any money off it. The programs are free, the files are exchanged for free. So because they can’t take over, the prosecute. Any illusion of recourse to the law is pure BS. It’s all about control, nothing to do with artist’s rights. How many of these companies are fighting for fair trade laws? How many are fighting for the rights of people who work in CD plants across the developing world. No, they are talking about hardworking pop-stars, who might not make that extra few million quid, about hard working video directors, who might have to start charging as little as $200,000 for a three week shoot, instead of their customary cool million.

If anyone is wasting the artist’s money it’s the labels. The deception is huge, and the logic flawed. Who is going to get the money when the file sharers are sued? The artists? the little labels, the little venues? yeah, right. More money for the multi-nationals. That’s what the spirit of rock ‘n’ roll is all about.

Bollocks to them all.

Posted on

CD piracy…

So, 1 in 3 CDs sold worldwide is a pirate copy. I wonder how that stacks up against the percentages of money made by record companies vs artists. Are the pirates ripping off the labels more than the labels are ripping off the artists? I suspect not.

From the article –

“Jorgen Larsen, president of music producer Universal Music International, said the livelihood of the artists and music industry workers was at risk if piracy continued to rise.”

I think the livelihood of the artists is put more at risk by signing to Universal than it is from piracy. I very much doubt anyone is bootlegging my CDs. In fact, I’d be slightly flattered if they were. I’m sure there are some CDR copies kicking around, and I hope that they inspire the owners to turn up to gigs. There’s certainly enough MP3 material of mine around to make up a whole CD of extras (moreso if you’re in the street team), but people still buy the CDs, come to the gigs, and everything’s ticking along quite nicely. I’m certainly more scared of one day having a breakdown and accidentally signing a record deal than I am of discovering 100,000 copies of Grace And Gratitude for sale in a Delhi street market – in fact, if they did, I’d probably just go and do a gig there!

Perhaps the markup on CDs is to blaim? If the labels are still trying to charge £16 a CD to music buyers in India/China/Mexico etc, how on earth do they expect them to come up with that kind of money? Maybe they should look at ways of making it more attractive to buy the real thing, rather than just blaiming the pirates for filling a gap in the market. If the record companies weren’t so obviously rapacious in their dealings with artists, and such a rip-off in terms of what they charge the end user, then people might feel more generously disposed towards them. How about if they started to give away 20% of their profits to arts projects in developing countries?

No, instead they blame ‘organised crime’ – I’d be interested to see the evidence for this. It’s quite possible that ‘organised crime’ units are somehow involved, but it’s equally possible that there are a bunch of opportunists who see a gap in the market created by the greed of the majors.

It’s like the Metallica/Napster debacle – I, along with 10 million other people, found it very hard to feel much sympathy for the multi-millionaire Lars Ulrich in his claims that he was being ripped off by Napster. If every single item of Metallica merch was fair trade, if they were pressuring their record company to encourage staff to unionise and putting pressure on for fairer wages around the world, if they implimented a scheme in Metallica PLC where the top paid person could only earn 9 times what the lowest paid person could earn, I’d be feeling a little more generous towards his claims that kids in colleges downloading Metallica albums were destroying his livelihood.

Soundtrack – Ali Farka Toure with Ry Cooder, ‘Talking Timbuktu’ (heard a piece on Radio 4 last night about Ali, and dug out this CD again – fantastic stuff – brings back marvellous memories of sitting at Rick Turner‘s house in Santa Cruz, discovering amazing new music from around the world, and listening to Rick’s remarkable stories.)

Posted on

…and in today's geek news…

Looks like Google are going to take on Paypal in the online payment game.

This has to be good news for online traders (such as me) – Paypal have a near-monopoly on the online money transfer market (at least on sites that don’t have their own credit card processing stuff). Paypal is safe and secure, and fairly easy to use, but monopolies are rarely a good idea.

There are others at around – on my online cd shop, people can pay by Paypal or NoChex – a UK only credit/debit card processing engine, that works well and is used by a few people – I still get about 25 Paypal sales to ever NoChex one.

So if Google come up with an alternative, hopefully it’ll make Paypal streamline and broaden their service in an attempt to stay ahead, and it means the google service will have to be really good to move people away from paypal.

If you haven’t used paypal before, feel free to try it out in my online store…

Posted on

Is anyone listening to the bassists?

So, I was just fiddling around on audioscrobbler.com, wondering who people were listening to, and ended up searching on a whole load of bassist’s names, to see who people were actually listening to.

As I’ve mentioned before, The Scrob is a really interesting chart in that it’s not what people are buying, or what they own but what they are actually listening to – what it is that people are taking down from the CD shelf, or dialing up on their ipod and choosing to listen to. The membership is, I think, a couple of hundred thousand, and largely, I guess, a young, tech-savvy slightly geeky bunch, on the whole…

So here are the bassists I searched on, in order.

Jaco Pastorius – 4306
Victor Wooten – 2608
Marcus Miller – 2466
Stanley Clarke – 1002
Jonas Hellborg – 499
Tony Levin – 399
John Patitucci – 388
Stuart Hamm – 342
Michael Manring – 318
Dave Holland – 275
Billy Sheehan – 274
Brian Bromberg – 244
Eberhard Weber – 233
Wayman Tisdale – 168
Avishai Cohen – 141
Renaud Garcia Fons – 126
Jimmy Haslip – 100
Adam Nitti – 100
Mark King – 94
Bass Extremes (Wooten/Bailey) – 88
Reid Anderson – 74
Alain Caron – 64
Doug Wimbish – 59
Jeff Berlin – 54
Trip Wamsley – 51
Steve Lawson – 49
Seth Horan – 47
Randy Coven – 42
Abraham Laboriel – 37
Bill Dickens – 28
Gerald Veasley – 27
Mo Foster – 26
Mark Egan – 22
Percy Jones – 18
Michael Dimin – 10
Matthew Garrison – 7
John Lester – 7
Glen Moore – 7
Laurence Cottle – 5
Fieldy – 5
Janek Gwizdala – 3

Now, bear in mind that this relies on them being entered into the iTunes/CDDB data base under their own name – some of these players maybe be listed as ‘the such and such band’ or something else. Feel free to have a browse at audioscrobbler.com and see who else you can find. Lemme know, and I’ll add them to the list…

Soundtrack – John Goldie, ‘Turn And Twist’ (jazz trio, with the marvellous Ewen Vernal on bass).

Posted on

Listening and Viewing…

Finally got hold of my copy of the As One Tsunami charity CD, which I’m on. It was posted a month ago, and for some weird reason the postal service decided that a box the size of a CD was too big for my letter box, which is clearly bollocks. So I finally collected it from the sorting office, and had a listen. There’s some great stuff on it, not least of all a Dean Brown track with Marcus Miller on fretless – very nice indeed. Also featured are some other amazing bassists – Laurence Cottle, Mo Foster, Jimmy Haslip etc. Top players.

Last night, TSP, Kathryn (current house-guest visiting from the states) and I watched Team America – it’s the South Park guys doing a satire on the War on Terrorism using Thunderbirds style puppets. I have to admit to being a big Trey Parker fan – I think the South Park stuff, when he’s doing satire, is brilliant. He does descend into mindless smut at times, but there’s usually a point to it. And when there isn’t, for me it still almost always stays on the right side of the ‘funny vs overly grubby’ scales.

And on that note, I also got a CD through yesterday from Toupe, a two basses + drums band from Southampton – I’d really enjoyed their last album, Alopecia, but when the first track I heard from the new album was called ‘f***ing’, my suspicions about the content of the new album were raised… As it is, bits of it are fab. Some fine satire on the music industry, and some other general frivolous nonsense. But, like their musical forebear, Frank Zappa, much of the album slips into crass comedy-porn. I’m sure there’s a point to it somewhere, it was just lost on me. If you’re into that kind of thing, definitely check them out. If you’re not, steer clear. I like the Toupe guys, and they are capable of making me laugh a lot with some of the stuff they do, but about a third of the album really misses the mark for me. Musically it’s somewhere in the Primus/SadHappy/Zappa territory – lots of funky ‘n’ furious slap lines, and some great distorted bass sounds, with that show-tune element that all three of the above mentioned bands have corrupted to similar effect in the past.

Soundtrack – Various Artists, ‘As One’; Prefab Sprout, ‘From Langley Park To Memphis’.

Posted on

Weekend of musical friends

So, Friday was the last commuter jazz gig (or ‘computer jazz’, if you’re the chief exec. of the South Bank) before the big refurb kicks in at the end of Meltdown at the end of June. Peter King was playing, and was marvellous – very fine saxophonist, even if he does play alto (not a big fan of alto, generally – it’s just a tenor sax for kids) – and the aforementioned malapropism-prone chief exec. did a lovely speech about lady jazzshark who as previously mentioned has been booking bands at the RFH since prehistoric days, and will be much missed.

So, naturally, sharky person had a big party afterwards, at a friend’s GORGEOUS flat overlooking the Thames along by Blackfriars bridge. That’s one hell of a view to wake up to each morning, for sure. Much celebration took place, and by all accounts no small about of debauchery, though I left at 10.30, so thankfully missed all that.

Saturday was a fun day – started by meeting up with the wonderful Todd Reynolds – an outstanding violinist, and truly lovely wonderful person. Todd and I have exchanged emails and been reading eachother’s posts to Loopers Delight for years, but hadn’t met, so it was great to put a face to an email address and spend the day filling in the gaps. We went back down to the RFH Foyer for the last Saturday gig before the closure (and therefore JazzShark’s last saturday gig) – many fragile hung over people there from the party the night before (fools… ;o) ) – and a lovely short film about a couple in their 70s who meet at the free gigs in the foyer to dance together.

After that, gave Todd the shortened tourist trip round central London (interesting that my tourist trips never take in Buckingham Palace – maybe my anti-royalist sentiments are spilling over into my appreciation of what’s valuable to see in town. I always take people past Downing Street and along Whitehall (the seat of our sham-democracy) and Trafalgar Square (site of many a kick-ass protest) and down to the South Bank (home of the arts), but ignore any of the Royal nonsense, unless it’s for a quick walk round St James’ Park.

I digress… A fantastic day spent wandering round with Todd, all in. Top bloke, fun day.

Then home, to pick up TSP to head out to Lizzie’s leaving do, only TSP is behind on writing work (TSP is high powered celeb journo, interviewing the great and good about all things healthy), so I leave cinderella at home and head off to the ball on my own.

Lizzie is one of life’s lovely people – a fantastic photographer/photo journalist, and very funny lady. Party was full of lovely people, naturally, with no repeats of Friday night’s debauchery (totally different group of friends here…) So good send off for Lizzie, but crap that she’s moving (only to Bristol, so we’ll still see lots of her, but still…)

Sunday – head off to church, but it’s an ‘away match’ (meaning that a family from outside the church are having a christening – though it turns out they were from the church, I just didn’t know them – major black mark against my name for not having said hi to them!!) anyway – decide to go for fry-up at nice cafe on the Holloway Road was Gawain instead. Gawain is a marvellous producer/programmer/musician who has got heavily into community music education and is doing amazingly well. Very inspiring to talk to, with lots of plans for collaborative stuff.

Then home, domestic stuff, drop mixing desk off at St Luvvies to be used at Soul Space service before heading to Finsbury Park tube to meet up with BJ and Juliet to go to Joe Jackson/Todd Rungren gig at Hammersmith homebrew Apollo or whatever it’s called this week.

The reason BJ and I are at the gig is that the lovely Todd Reynolds who I met up with on Saturday is playing with his amazing string quartet Ethel as opening act and collaborator with Joe and Todd (BJ played with Todd in John Cale’s band in the 90s). Juliet had a ticket anyway, so Todd got her an aftershow pass and we all piled down to the gig together.

Ethel kicked out – wow. Incredible energy and performance, and great gig. They looked great, played great, the music was magic and the audience were captivated.

Then Joe Jackson came on – now I’m quite a fan of Joe’s singles collection (playing at the moment, in an attempt to rescue my memory of his music), but the gig was poor. Very poor. The sound was very compressed, and solo voice and piano versions of his uptempo stuff didn’t, to my ears, work at all. The new material was particularly bad. Some of his piano playing was lovely, but the overall feeling was one of big disappointment.

So a lot was rest on Todd Rungren’s shoulders. And he didn’t rise to the occasion either. The songs all sounded thrown away, I couldn’t remember one snippet of melody at the end of any of them, his guitar sound was possibly the worst I’ve ever heard at a ‘big’ gig, and again I was left contemplating self harm as a more pleasant sensory experience than the assault my ears were currently being subjected to.

Then, all change once again. Ethel come back on, and we’re back to the gig being amazing – a Gilbert and Sullivan tune, a couple each from Joe and Todd and an encore of ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ (after Todd’s solo set I wanted to rename it ‘While My Guitar is Gently put through a wood-chipper’) – I’ve never seen a couple of aging rock stars so outrageously upstaged by a string quartet in my life. If the gig had been 40 minutes of Ethel, followed by 80 minutes of all five of them on stage playing a mixture of hits and misses, it could have been a breathtaking gig. As it was, it was two hours of dire self-indulgent horse-shit topped and tailed by two exquisite but far too short sets.

Ethel were a revelation, and are destined for hugeness. Please go and buy their CD, I guarantee you won’t regret it.

After all-too-brief chat with Todd after the gig, with just enough time to introduce him to Juliet and blag a copy of the Ethel album, it was time to hop on the last tube home.

Soundtrack – Joe Jackson, ‘Stepping Out – The Best Of’.

Posted on

laptop looping

A converasation with The Cheat at the weekend (well, the part of the conversation that wasn’t about the temperature of his flat) reminded me that I hadn’t blogged about Mobius. It’s a software looping application (Windows-only, sadly), that basically emulates 8 Echoplexes at once, is mappable to a MIDI footcontroller (or any other kind of midi controller), and basically rules. And it’s free.

Go and get it now before they realise how great it is and start charging for it.

Thanks to MKS over on the forum for alerting me to its existence (though all I really needed to do was read the discussion about it that had been happening on Loopers Delight).

Soundtrack – Michael McDonald, ‘Blink OF An Eye’ (is Michael McDonald a guilty pleasure? There’s something remarkable about his voice, and the music appeals to the slick Steely Dan/80s-grown-up-pop part of my music taste.I’ve always wondered what he’d sound like without the Karl Marx beard – he sounds like he’s trying to sing through a cat, so maybe he’d develope a really clear voice without it. Keep the beard, Mike)

© 2008 Steve Lawson and developed by Pretentia. | login

Top