Tag: Gigs

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A day off

didn’t have any gigs or recording or NAMMing to do today, so had a mellow day pottering up the Pacific Coastal Highway – that’s Highway 1. It runs all the way from San Diego up into Oregon, I think (maybe even to Seattle – anyone care to put me right?) – I’ve driven it from LA to the Bay Area before, but never the bit below LA. As I was staying just south of Long Beach last night, I started there and headed slowly up the coast.

There were some lovely bits and some really grim bits – Seal Beach sounded like a nice place, but turned out to be largely just some hideous Naval war machine thing. then there was LA harbour – Steve Brown, if you ever need a location for some kind of post-apocalyptic industrial wasteland for a photo shoot, that’s the place!

and I got all the way to Venice Beach which I know quite well anyway.

Throughout the day I was phoning all my southern california chums, catching up and arranging where and when to meet up. Eventually got through to Kerry Getz, who I’ve played with in London before now, and so we were able to catch up this evening, which was lovely.

And now I’ve found that the house next door to where I’m staying has an unsecured wireless connection, so that’s how I’m online now! Gotta love untech-savvy peoples!

Soundtrack – Francis Dunnery, ‘Man’ (I’m struck once again by what an incredble album this is – the tunes and vocals are outstanding, Frank’s guitar playing is an glorious as ever, but the real revelation is Matt Pegg’s bass playing – some of the most amazing singer/songwriter bass playing I’ve ever heard – his sound, his phrasing and his choice of style is so unlike anything else I’ve heard before. Definitely one of my favourite bass albums.) The rest of the in-car tunage from the last few days – Juliet Turner, ‘Live’ (another glorious album); Foo Fighters, ‘The Colour And The Shape’; OST, ‘Bugsy Malone’; Scritti Politti, ‘Cupid And Psyche’.

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Few more thoughts on last night's gig

So, the format was that we’d do three sets, and each ‘curate’ one of the sets – I started, and I played solo, then duo with Cleveland, then we played as a trio. Next up was Cleveland solo, duo with BJ then trio, and finally BJ solo, me and BJ duo, then trio.

The three trio pieces were all very different sometimes very floaty, but the last one a high energy beat-box-led number – Cleveland’s contribution to a looping set is huge – being able to beatbox, sing tunes, do that tabla vocalisation thing, layer chords… he’s amazing. Couple that was BJ’s remarkable emotional empathy with his instrument – the steel in BJ’s hands has an amazing yearning quality, and my melancholic but ultimately hopefully noodlings, and you’ve got a rather potent mix.

the duos were really interesting, just to see what happens when you take one element out of the trio – the track that BJ and I did was fun, in that instead of ploughing our usual dark ambient furrow, we actually morphed into a country 12 bar! There was a bridge at one point, but I wasn’t looping at all until the last minute of the piece… an unexpected one for us as well as the audience!

I think the most fun for me as a listener was Cleveland’s solo set – he’s only just getting familiar with the Echoplex, and so his looping method is gloriously haphazard, but the end result was amazingly slick – his ability to respond in a group situation spills over to his looping, and he made whatever was happening work. He was just spinning the dial on his FX unit and using whatever sound came up, and coming up with the most incredible layers of vocalese.

All in all, one of the best gigs I’ve been involved in for ages, and two out of two for the Recycle Collective. It’s definitely turning into what I’d intended it to be – the most vital new music night in London!

If you were there, feel free to post your reviews in The Forum or here in the comments on this post…

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New Year's resolutions

Part one, music/work-related –

1) – new solo album
2) – new album with Theo
3) – more gigs in Italy
4) – make headway on first book (any of the ideas will do, no really)
5) – record live DVD? possibly…
6) – establish Recycle Collective as THE monthly gig to be at (it already is, people just don’t know it yet)
7) – do band arrangements of my tunes and gig them (the quartet I’ve been talking about for about a year and a half)
8) – look afresh at distribution deal options
9) – more collaborations!
10) – less time wasted online, more time practicing.

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2005 – a year in review

Good year? Bad year? not sure…

Musically, not a bad year – didn’t release any albums, but I guess that means that the last one is still doing OK, so didn’t feel any major pressure to get something new happening. Now I’m glad I waited due to all the new musical ideas offered up by the Looperlative.

Some great gigs – bassday, bassfest thing in Italy in July, Edinburgh festival (where staying with Jane and Gareth was also a year highlight – much fun). Gig with Ned Evett in Petersfield was much fun, as was recording with Ned. Finished an albums worth of material with Calamateur, AKA Andrew Howie, and there’s a lot of great stuff on there – I’m excited about what we might be able to do with that. Recycle Collective started – was v. small, but musically one of the best gigs I’ve been involved with.

Teaching’s been great – lots of very fine students, lots of beginners making progress, and meeting lots of lovely new people. also started a new column for Bass Guitar Magazine – good to be back writing again (which reminds me, I’ve got one to finish ASAP!)

Personally, it’s been a fairly good year – one big scare with the ginger fairly aged feline, who was given roughly two weeks to live, but with chemo got rid of a satsuma sized tumor IN A WEEK!!!! – we’re still amazed by that, and he’s going great. Life with both the fairly aged felines has been lots of fun (I really feel sorry for all those of you with cat allergies who have to lavish your attention on human offspring as a replacement…) seeing them both take over the house and garden and settle in.

another year of doing no work on the house… hmmm, maybe I should start by just TIDYING MY OFFICE!!! lazy bastard…

World events – both the best and worst things that happened this year were the same – the Make Poverty History campaign was such a monumental success at getting poverty reduction and the plight of people living in extreme poverty in Africa, Asia and Latin America into the minds of every day people, it felt like there were really a chance to make a proper change. millions of people signing petitions, emailing MPs and congressmen, documentaries being made, and of course Live8 and the march in Edinburgh.

And then the worst thing – the gargantuan fuck-up that the G8 leaders made of the opportunity to do something for the world’s poor. Never before in the history of the world had there been such a wellspring of popular support for governments making decisions in favour of the poor, diverting cash and resources to help those in need, changing trade laws to balance things out. Millions upon millions of people around the world were calling for it, huge numbers of politicians were calling for it. Even mad right wing american jihadists like Pat Robertson were on-side (!!), but still those sad twisted old men of the G8 sat round the table in Gleneagles, in their opulence and grandeur and bollocksed the whole thing up. Their pledges fell woefully short, and then they even undid a lot of that. It was disgusting, sickening and saddening that such an opportunity had been wasted. Bono and Bob Geldof had done an amazing job of getting the campaign off the ground, from their involvement in the commission for Africa, and DATA, through to organising Live8, but they bottled it when the announcement was made, took the encouraging words one step too far and declared the Gleneagles bullshit to be a triumph. I’m guessing they aren’t too happy with where it’s gone. The follow up at the World Trade Talks in November was equally shit. A tragedy on a scale that all the terrorists in the world couldn’t hope to achieve.

The week of Live8 and the G8 was a busy one, given that it was also the week of two other disasters – firstly London getting the Olympics (another monumental waste of money which will leave the PPP funding bodies rubbing their grubby hands in glee), and then the London bombing. The bombing had begun to feel like an inevitability for a while – there was no way that the huge disquiet amongst the world’s muslim population about the Iraqi occupation and the continued support for Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land was going to go unmarked in the UK. And finally it did, four huge bombs, three on the underground, one on a bus, quite a few people dead (though not as many as lost their lives in Iraq that weekend… that didn’t make the world news). A tragedy, but one that the government still refuse to admit was linked to the situation in the middle east. Stupid stupid fools.

But at the end of the year, some great news, perhaps the first great news in british life for a long time – registered civil partnerships for Gay couples. Finally gay people can get married (no, I really don’t care if you don’t want to call it a marriage or a wedding – it is, and that’s great.)

And the media spectacle of the year was certainly George Galloway in front of the US senate committee, absolutely ripping them apart. The most damning indictment of the Bush administrations lies and coverup in Iraq, and right there in the heart of the beast. Genius! Galloway can be a bit of a bellend, and his campaign in the General Election (ah yes, we had one of those – what a non-event that was) was horrible and divisive, but on that one day in the Senate, he ruled the world.

oh, media event of the year joint first was Harold Pinter’s nobel prize acceptance speech – another damning destruction of the history of US foreign military intervention.

What else? A few noteable partings – we lost the great Ronnie Barker, one of the finest comic actors and writers Britain has ever produced; Mo Mowlam, one of the few politicians of conviction we still had; Rosa Parks, the unwitting god-mother of the civil rights movement in the US; Andrea Dworkin feminist writer and thinker.

And on a personal level, the death of Eric Roche was a terribly sad loss – a huge talent and dear friend who has featured in this blog more than almost anyone else. Playing at the tribute gig to him on what would have been his birthday was a huge honour.

Blogwise, it’s been my most bloggingest year ever – over 510 posts this year, over 450 visitors a day (??? I’m sure there’s a mistake there somewhere…) and the demise of being able to tell people what I’ve been up to – ‘so, steve, what have you been up to?’ ‘well, I had a gig th….’ ‘yeah I read about that’ ‘oh, well I went out to see a…’ ‘ah yes, that film, read your review of that’ ‘THEN WHY DID YOU ASK???’

Thanks for reading, for emailing for commenting on the blog, and particularly thanks if you’ve been buying CDs and t-shirts, coming to gigs, spreading the word, and generally helping me pay the bills this year. Love you lots! x

Soundtrack – The The, ’45 RPM – the singles’.

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The privilege of making gorgeous music for a living.

Had a fantastic studio session today – overdubbing bass parts on some new tunes by BJ Cole and Davy Spillane. The tracks so far feature BJ on pedal steel, Davy on a collection of low whistles and pipes, and Guy Jackson on piano and keys. The combination of just these three is pretty intoxicating – gorgeous evocative sounds whirling around each other, both Davy and BJ embellishing all the tunes so they weave in and out of each other’s space even when they are playing in ‘unison’.

It was really nice to have such a full canvass on which to put what I do – so many recording jobs are bass and drums first, so there’s no knowing what’s going to happen on top. Here, the arrangements are pretty fixed, so the spaces that I had to play in were already in place. I did some stuff where I was playing one note in a bar, just playing the roots deep down on the B string of my Renaissance fretless, and other places where I was playing melodic fills and nice twiddly stuff up the top end of my Modulus fretless 6. Much fun. Now I’m looking forward to the gigs, when they happen!

Soundtrack – The Cure, ‘Greatest Hits’.

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the reality TV myth…

The reality TV people do like to tell us that it’s all about finding talent, people with star quality, the ‘x-factor’ as the show-title goes. Which makes this quote particularly laughable –

“after last year’s winner, Steve Brookstein, sank without trace, X Factor bosses are confident they have found a real star this time around.” (from the daily record).

look, if they can’t find hugely talented people with a nation wide search, a TV budget and a captive audience of 10 million, the whole thing is a charade. I think I’ve said this before here, but the best that reality TV has thrown up so far is Will Young – an above average white-soul singer. Gareth Gates has vanished, Hearsay have vanished. Liberty X are hanging on, getting closer and closer to performing naked in the vain hope it’ll keep them an audience. If the shows had ANY validity at all they’d be finding the people who are genuinely the most mind-blowingly gifted musicians, singers and songwriters in the country. But they aren’t. They are unearthing malleable brainless pop-star wannabes that they can trap in usurious deals, make a load of money off then dispense with. No time is spent developing talent, no time is spent helping them to find a style, to practice their craft. It’s all about the ‘rags to riches’ story of someone who sings in the bath and then ends up on stage because of natural talent.

the problem with that is that that kind of ‘natural talent’ doesn’t exist. Some people have developed a musical sensibility sort of by accident, but to become a performer, to work with a band, to write songs, to communicate as a musician, you need to work hard. You need to do gigs, to spends weeks, months, years in rehearsal rooms honing your craft. That doesn’t happen in the bath.

I’ve worked with ‘naturally gifted people’ – they’re a pain in the arse. They sound great if the arrangement is exactly the same as the one they’ve been singing along with on the radio, because their skill is mimickry, not being a musician.

The reality TV shows aren’t set up to find musical depth, just one hit wonders and losers turned ‘boy dun good’ stories like Darius Dinesh and The Cheeky Girls. It’s shameful, and a blot on the music life of the UK.

All we need to remember is that it’s got nothing to do with us – we just carry on making the music that matters to us, avoid all the crappy competitions and flash-in-the-pan dancing for chicken BS. Music is worth more than that. Simon Cowell can shove it up his arse.

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mad laws…

As a general rule, I’m a big fan of the PRS. They send me money when my music is played on the radio, they send me a portion of the ticket price when I do gigs etc. I like them.

However, This story in the Macclesfield Express is just mad – apparently music shops now have to pay a PRS licence if they want people to be able to try out guitars, cos an 11 year old kid playing Sweet Child O’ Mine really badly in a shop is public performance.

That’s nuts. Proper nuts. Making them pay if they play the radio or CDs in the shop is fine – that’s the same for any shop that plays music. But for demoing guitars?? Who are they hoping to benefit? Do the shop owners have to submit a play list ‘today’s songs – 20, minute-long version of smoke on the water; Sweet Child O’ Mine – intro played 9 times, close enough to be copyrightable, 3 of those. etc.’

Come on, PRS, that’s not a proper law. Spend your time and energies elsewhere. I like you, I really do, but this is just silly. Running an instrument shop is a precarious enough job at the best of times – don’t make it harder.

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the Vortex

Been spending far too much time at The New Vortex this last couple of weeks – last week I was there for Dudley Philips album launch gig, then Tuesday I went to see Lleuwen Steffan and her band. Last night was the Works.

Lleuwen is the singer on that welsh hymns album I was raving about last week – still getting lots of airplay here, definitely in my top 5 of the year. The gig on Tuesday was with her band, Acoustique, which featured, unbenownst to me until I got there, my buddy Owen Lloyd Evans on bass. Their set didn’t feature any of the hymn tunes, but did have a lot of originals, sung in Welsh that sounded a bit like a more funky, acoustic Bjork. Lovely stuff. They did a couple of standards, which were fine, but it was the welsh language stuff that really shone. Definitely one to look out for and see if you can.

the Works, formerly known as WoodWorks, is Patrick Wood’s marvellous band – Patrick is surprisingly little-known on the London jazz scene, despite his band acting as breeding ground for so many great musicians in the city – the list of who’s been in the band at one time or another is nuts, from John Etheridge to Andy Gangadeen, Cleveland Watkiss to Tony Remy.

The current line-up is Patrick on keys and guitar, Mark Lockheart on saxes and bass clarinet, Neville Malcom on bass and Nic France on drums. The tunes are lovely open forms that the band jam on and stretch out live – lots of eye contact and hardcore listening going on. The small audience were much appreciative, and hopefully they’ll be playing again soon so you can go see them too!

Both these gigs are yet more evidence that the London jazz scene is producing music of a quality to rival any jazz city on the planet. the Vortex is such a vital venue, and after the sadness of the original vortex closing, it’s great to have it back with the same eclectic booking policy in a great new venue in Stoke Newington. check out their online programme on the website and go see some stuff there!

I’ll almost certainly be back there tonight for Ingrid Laubrook’s quartet, featuring the marvellous Seb Rochford on drums.

And keep an eye out for Theo and I playing there in February.

Plan for today – some teaching this morning, Theo round this afternoon to plan our february tour promotion etc. Some bass practice/R&D for the album after that, and then to see Ingrid play tonight.

Soundtrack – The Pixies, ‘Bossanova’.

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'sorry mate, your names not on the list'

I was just sending a message to my mailing list about a gig this weekend (Sunday night in Haverhill, near Cambridge, see gigs page for details), and thought I’d big up the mailing list here, as some of you may not be on it, and may not have thought to join it, thinking I post all the news here…

…well I don’t, so if you want to keep up with gig dates, cd news etc. please head over to the mailing list signup page – there you can join the ordinary mailing list, the street team mailing list or the Recycle Collective list. Or sign up for all three – you won’t get duplicates of messages if I happen to send them to more than one list (PHPlist is clever like that).

The street team, in case you were unaware, are a lovely bunch of people who help me to spread the word about what I do – they post on internet message boards, dish out flyers, put up posters and in some cases promote gigs! They’re a vital part of the stevie-plan for world domination, and I appreciate bigly all they do.

So go on, sign up now!

Soundtrack – Prefab Sprout, ‘Steve McQueen’.

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Improv inspiration

Last night’s gig made for a fantastic companion piece to the night before… it’s a shame nobody else was able to be at both!

The gig was an improv performance, featuring music, dance and video projections. The musicians were me, Rowland Sutherland on flute, Roger Goula on guitar and loopage, and the organiser, singer Filomena Campus.

The evening started with me playing a low droning loop as people were coming in the door, which served to punctuate the beginning of the gig really well, as it stopped just as the first bit of poetry was read (a TS Eliot poem), from which I surreptitiously sampled the line ‘Before the beginning and after the end. All all is always now’ – which I then used to feed into the rest of my opening solo piece. So end of poem, into a 5 or so minute improv of me, and I was then joined by a dancer, Sofie Arstall, who was responding to what I was doing, and to the projections that were happening on the wall behind me (I’m told they were amazing).

Filomena joined us, and her voice was fed into the sample collage of my stuff and the TS Eliot line. All in all, a fab lil’ improv.

following that Roger and Rowland played a duet – both are great players. in these kind of situations Roger and I think quite similarly, in that we juxtapose weird noises with tonal elements – he created a mad loop of heavily processed and mangled guitar scrapes and squeaks, and then added a lovely jazzy chordal thing over the top, while Rowland played some of the most amazing flute work I’ve ever heard, using a whole load of extended techniques I’d not really come across before. Lovely stuffs.

Roger and I were then both employed to loop a load of noise from the audience as part of the next guided improv, which errupted into a (staged) argument amongst a load of audience members (this again was looped and processed), which blended into another improv piece…

I love gigs like this – I always come away with new ideas for places to go, musically. It’s also really unusual to do gigs where I don’t get to connect with the audience by chatting with them as well. It’s got to the point where the chat is as much a part of allowing the audience to know what I’m about as the playing is, so going back to just playing is another interesting challenge, and a good one.

Hopefully we’ll get to do all of this again soon – Roger is going to be at the Recycle Collective in March, and I’m sure Filomena will be involved very soon too – maybe I’ll do a trio gig with her and Rowland at some point…

Soundtrack – Bill Frisell, ‘East/West’.

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