Tag: music

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EuroBlog #2

Right, bit of a catch up.

Milan first – got the train from Geneva to Milan, which rode through the Swiss Alps on a journey that was beautiful even with loads of low lying fog and rain.

Got to Milan, and was picked up at the airport by Nic Angileri and taken to the masterclass. As soon as I had started the clinic, it was obvious that something was up with the Looperlative. The screen kept shutting down, and while the audio was working fine, there was no MIDI control for a few minutes at a time… big big problem. Was fine for a clinic, as I just demonstrated other things, but didn’t bode well for the gig in the evening…

The gig was at a really cute little venue in the city called Atmosphere Live – we set up, and the Looperlative was misbehaving in the soundcheck, and continued to behave weirdly into the gig – I ended up finishing the gig with a couple of chord melody jazz things and a three bass jam with Nic Angileri and Fabio Rigamonti, both very fine players. As it was, I ended up selling more CDs at the gig, than I have at any gig for quite a while, so either it was pity and I should break my gear more often, or my musicalness came across even with the broked stuffs. I prefer the latter. ;o)

Friday morning, I visited Mollinelli (sp?) guitars with Nic, makers of some beautiful handmade instruments. Italy has a fabulous luthery tradition, and most of the builders here seem to combine beauty with a strong experimental design aesthetic. Good stuff.

Back onto the train to Desenzano, and onto my Italian ‘home’ with Luca and Gio, two of my favouritest people in the world.

My #1 concern was still the Looperlative, and I plugged it in, took it out of the rack, and just as a precaution, took the lid off to see if anything had worked loose (you can see how desperate I was, given my previous track record with blowing up the LP1 whenever I take the lid off) – I made sure that all the cables and connectors were seated OK, and put the lid back…

Gig that night was in Brescia, a little way out of the main town, in the basement of a modern bar in a village – not at all the kind of place you’d expect to find an experimental electronica night. But then, Andrea Nones, who runs the Ground Collective in Brescia is no ordinary promoter. For a start he’s also an excellent musician (he was playing at the gig as well), but has an amazing ability to turn experimental music into something that everyone would want to hear! The night started with DJs and a free buffet (a great idea to make sure everyone arrives at the start of the gig!) and then moved onto a range of different acts, from a solo guitarist with a Frisell fixation, to a duo of electronics and acoustic piano, a vocalist or two, and a lovely solo set by a guy playing a homemade Warr-Guitar-style tapping thing. Very nice indeed.

Then the last act – me and Luca! We’ve recorded a lot together, but never played live, but Luca’s a fantastic and sensitive improvisor with an amazing palette of sounds. The Looperlative behaved very well, and the set was really nice. Lots of interesting twists and turns, and I did a solo version of ‘Behind Every Word’ in the middle. A successful show, and a handful of CD sales.

So the Looperlative seems to be fixed, but Bob in his usual ‘above and beyond the call of duty’ way had already shipped a new one out to Italy to arrive monday…

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Last night's gig.

Very enjoyable gig last night with Estelle Kokot at Octave near Covent Garden.

The enjoyableness came from playing great music with very fine musicians – Estelle’s a fab songwriter, singer and pianist, and is predisposed to stretching out her songs into long involved jams. Much fun. The drummer was Richard Spaven, a lovely understated creative player.

Fortunately that was all enough to get over the crapness of the venue. Whoever invented the term ‘dinner jazz’ needs a swift kick in the nads. Everything about the venue said ‘background music’ – very little lighting on the band, very few chairs that actually faced the band, tables not really laid out to give a good view of what’s on, no MC to introduce the music, no instructions to listen. They charge a fiver to just come in an listen, but if I’d paid a fiver to listen, I’d expect not to have to listen over the din of people talking. Next to the Octave, Thursday night’s Recycle Collective was like a night at the Royal Opera.

If the Octave sorted that out, they’d have a great little venue – it’s a nice room, not a bad PA, and God knows we need more decent jazz venues in London. As things are, this isn’t the answer. Still, it was £70 when I wasn’t doing anything else, in my home town, playing great music with great musicians, So I’m not complaining.

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No Music Day

Another one of those crazy schemes from Bill Drummond, No Music Day is a day to avoid listening to all music, and instead think about what it is and what it does for us. In Bill’s words, “I decided I needed a day I could set aside to listen to no music whatsoever. Instead, I would be thinking about what I wanted and what I didn’t want from music”

Read the full article from the Observer here.

I like Bill Drummond, I like the way his mind works, and I like that I can’t tell how much of what he’s doing is just taking the piss. I own two pieces of the artwork he cut up and sold for a dollar a piece. This seems like yet another fine idea.

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Tonight's Recycle gig

I just knew that the combination of me, BJ and Theo was going to be fab. And it was. Eventually… First I had to deal with a flat tyre, and one where the nut that the monkeys in the garage in Nottingham that replaced my break pads put on was a non-standard size and shape, resulting in me having to call the flippin’ AA out, for a flat! how loserish is that? Balls, I say, and again, Balls.

Anyway, the music was magical, and made up for the hassle of the car (except for poor TSP, who tripped down the stairs and twisted her ankle while sorting out the AA man, as I was on stage at the time).

The only downside to the evening was that it being a Thursday, there were a few more people just rolling up to the venue, some of them having been told on the phone by someone that it was a Salsa night and was free to get in. So big weirdness with some of them coming in and paying, but then talking through the gig, and others not coming in… All very odd and needing to be sorted out with venue owner. Darbucka is such a great place, I love playing there, but we’ve got to get this delineation between gig and club sorted out – I don’t mind friends of the owner coming in, but I do if they’re talking and messing it up for people who are listening. Having said that, it was a pretty small crowd and the guy’s guy to make some money on the evening… So, we’ll have a chat and sort it out. If needs be, I’ll move it to another venue, but I’d really rather not, as Darbucka is perfect in every other way. You can help by putting November the 15th in your diary now! that’ll be me, Cleveland Watkiss and Huw Warren, and hopefully some after hours recycling with special guests to celebrate the first birthday of the Recycle Collective! Yay! What fun. We’ve survived a year, we’ve a shed load of fantastic musicians, some small crowds, some big crowds, a great gig at Greenbelt. It’s been a lot of fun. This next year is time to step things up a little and see if we can take it out of being a little gig once a month to biggger more marketable thing for venues out of london… any suggestions on how to do this would be greatly appreciated. After all, despite lots of people telling me they think I’m good at promo, I haven’t got a clue what I’m doing, and don’t seem to be able to get particularly big crowds along to these things, despite booking the finest musicians around. I’m not complaining, as the people who come along are lovely and appreciative and a pleasure to play for, and as the old cliche goes, the music is it’s own reward, but it’d be nice to find out the secret to getting a gig like this to happen three times a month to a coupla hundred people a time…

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Gigs over the next few days

Tomorrow night (Thursday) is this month’s Recycle Collective gig, featuring me with BJ Cole and Theo Travis – this is going to be a fantastic night for me, given that they are two of my favourite musicians to both listen to and play with. Theo, as you know, I’ve been playing with for years, and you’ve probably already got For The Love Of Open Spaces (if you haven’t, click the link to order it! :o) ) – he’s effortlessly inventive and melodic, and just gets better and better every time I hear him.

BJ is the most regular recycle guest, and keeps coming back cos he’s so much fun to play with! There’s something so unique about playing alongside pedal steel guitar, as harmony seems to work in a very different way on it to guitar, or a keyboard harmony instrument, so when BJ is laying down chords, the effect is to create a completely different kind of harmonic backdrop to what’s going on that you’d get anywhere else. He’s a fabulously creative musician, a lovely bloke, and well worth you coming out to listen to!

So that’s Thursday. Then on Saturday, I’ve got a rare ‘side man’ gig, playing for Estelle Kokot – fab piano playing jazz singer and songwriter, and ever so slightly nuts, in a good way. It’ll be a trio with her and Richard Spaven on drums, at The Octave in Covent Garden, and music starts at 9. I think it’s a fiver to get in. The songs are great, and it’ll of course be one of those rare chances to hear me playing normal bass, though I get a few solos in the set too, just no looping.

So go on, come to both, I dare you.

click here for the full details (venue address, ticket deets etc.) for Thursday’s Recycle gig.

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masterclass at ACM

Had a most enjoyable afternoon giving a masterclass at the Academy Of Contemporary Music in Guildford – I’ve been there a few times before, both with Michael Manring and with Trip Wamsley, but it was nice to go and do a session all by myself. Stefan Redtenbacher who runs the bass dept there had asked me to speak on the transition from music student to pro, so I chatted a fair bit about the kind of things that people actually make money out of these days (having to break it to them that being a ‘session musician’ pretty much no longer exists as a career path) and some of the skills that have helped me out. I played a handful of my own tunes (Behind Every Word, improv groovy thing, Deeper Still and excerpts of Knocks Me Off My Feet and What A Wonderful World) and played a couple of the New Standard tunes from the laptop.

Lots of great questions were asked, and I certainly had a lot of fun – hopefully they did too!

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"I like pretty much anything…"

so goes the beginning to So many people’s list of favourite music on MySpace. They then proceed to list only music that has a) singers, b) that sing in english and c) bands with drum kits, or programmed drums that sound like drum kits.

THAT’S NOT ‘PRETTY MUCH ANYTHING’!! By any stretch of the imagination, that’s a very very narrow range of what’s on offer in the world of music. This faux cosmopolitan approach to music is fostered by radio and TV shows that claim to have a hugely wide booking policy that reminds me of that line in The Blues Brothers ‘we have both types of music – Country AND Western’.

I feel like bombarding these people with MP3s of Gamalan orchestras and Harry Partch, Tuvan throat singing and Gustav Mahler, Bollywood soundtracks and Andean pan pipes, Noel Coward and Fats Waller, Henry Purcell and Meshuggah… ‘pretty much anything’ really, until they say ‘I have, in the greater scheme of things, incredibly conservative music taste, it runs the gamut of ‘white-boy stadium guitar nonense’ from Coldplay to Stereophonics, but I have got a Boards Of Canada album, cos someone told me they were cool, and it was cheap in Borders.’

For the record, I don’t like ‘pretty much anything’ – I actively dislike most of the music I’ve heard in my life. It’s not out of some musicological misanthropy, it’s just that even across the range of styles and genres I like, I tend to only like the best of it. The reason being that most music isn’t very good. That’s what’s magical about music – if it was as easy as breathing, we wouldn’t value it at all. We wouldn’t have favourites, in the same way that most of us don’t have favourite ‘walkers’ – (“ooh, just look at the way he puts one foot in front of the other”) – we can almost all do it, it’s a hugely useful skill, but it’s not generally considered a uniquely artistic one in the way that making great music is.

That said, our reasons for liking music go beyond the sound of the music itself, often. There are emotional resonances based on things we’ve heard before, there are cultural, social and personal connections with the performers and writers, there are lyrics that grab us and draw us into styles we wouldn’t previously have bothered with, there’s music played by people we know (The Cheat is always laughing at me for spending most of my time listening to music by friends of mine), there’s music that we encounter in good situations (opening for a favourite band, soundtracking a favourite film, or just on in the background when great things happen).

But that still doesn’t come close to ‘pretty much anything’ – so if you have that on your myspace page, please go and change it, and put something more honest! ;o)

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Steve Reich finale

Last night was the final night of the Steve Reich 70th Birthday concert series at The Barbican. As you know, I saw The Cave on Thursday, and the wonderful Todd Reynolds was working hard to try and find me a ticket for the sold out show on Sunday. Eventually I get an email telling me there’s one there for me, but it’ll be £30. Fair enough says I, £30 is a bargain to see such a fab gig.

So i arrange to meet Todd, head down to the Barbican and buy my ticket for £30. Takes a while to find Todd, at which point he tells me he’s managed to get me a free ticket! yay! So we return the £30 one and get a refund, and Todd takes me in to see about 5 minutes of a rather lacklustre performance of ‘Electric Counterpoint’ – one of my favourite Steve Reich pieces, but SO not done justice by the dude playing it at the Barbican.

After that , I settle down to watch a bit of The Bang On A Can All Stars on the free stage, but the sound is pretty rough, so Todd and I head off on a futile search for food, find none, he heads off to eat backstage, I head off to collect my comp ticket. Run into Harriet, who played musical saw on the gig with Stephen Daltry earlier on in the year, and to Catherine, wife of MKS, whose grandfather had provided the poetry for the Gavin Bryars piece being premiered… ’tis a small world, to be sure.

Anyway, enough waffle – the gig. Three pieces, cello counterpoint, live cello to 6 or 7 pre-recorded cellos (with video in this case) – started shakily, suspect intonation etc, got much better as it went on. Daniel Variations – the Reich piece commissioned for the festival – for his usual chamber orchestra and four voices, which was excellent, a lovely piece of music. The words seemed rather superfluous (one of the Daniels referred to it the title was Daniel Pearl, the reporter kidnapped and killed in Iraq, and the ‘tribute’ to him was to use the words ‘my name is Daniel Pearl’ – sadly, that phrase as a standalone to an english audience will often end up in the last two words being substituted for ‘Michael Cain’.) – didn’t seem to offer any real tribute to Daniel, or comment on his death or anything. But I guess I don’t listen to Steve Reich for the lyrics.

Which, in the case of ‘music for 18 musicians’ is probably just as well – it’s Reich’s masterpiece, and his best known work, and it’s incredibly hypnotic, a total monster of a piece to perform (the marimba ostinatos are swapped between a number of musicians, as I don’t think one person could keep up that for an hour). Anyway, it was fantastic – I’m told by a couple of people who’ve seen it a number of times that it wasn’t a great version of that piece, but it sounded good to me!

the aftershow was a nice affair, nice to chat to Todd, Brad, David Sheppard (former StevieStudent who was doing an incredible job of the sound), and then to catch the last tube home… All in all a great night out, and lots cheaper than I’d planned too!

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How Music Gear Endorsements Work…

It’s one of those perennial questions on bass forums and in emails I get – how do you get an endorsement deal with a bass company? The latest endorsement related discussion revolved around a very friendly chap on on of the bass forums I post on sending me a message to say he was friendly with the owners of a particular company and could put in a word for me for an endorsement deal with them.

Which was very nice buy wholly unnecessary, given that

  • a) I knew the company owner already,
  • b) don’t really like what they make b) wouldn’t switch from what I’m using now just because I was offered lots of money (something that’s really not going to happen to a player in my position) and
  • c) LOVE the stuff I’m using.

Let’s make it clear, getting paid to play someone’s particular product is very rare indeed. Becoming a demonstrator happens occasionally to lesser known players, but that’s just a job like any other – it’s not really a perk, more a cool job. It involves a lot of work, and usually pretty grueling sessions at trade shows. There’s rarely a retainer, and the rate of pay is pretty good, usually, but certainly not something most people could live on…

The Big Boys (probably about 5-10 of them in the world) are on a retainer – signature product sales often incur a royalty for the person whose name is on the front, and there are all kinds of deals struck to get HUGE name players using the gear, which range from split ad campaigns (promoting the gear and the artist’s new album) through to high profile clinic tours that follow the band’s tour, and even stands at arena shows for the company.

Next down are those that get instruments – these are rarely ‘free’, even if you don’t pay for them. They are in exchange for promotional services. They are usually there because the company in question can’t really afford to pay what you’re worth for clinics and appearances and being in ads, so instead they give you gear, which is worth a lot more in hard cash terms to you than it is to them. So I’ve had a few bits of free gear, and in exchange they get the exposure for me using the gear on clinics and masterclasses… it’s more of an acknowledgement thing for what actually happens – my students get to see the gear cos it’s what I play through…

When I left my previous amp deal, and started using AccuGroove, I was offered ‘deals’ of sorts with a host of companies. It was rather nice being courted (no one actually phoned me to schmooze me, but it happened to be around the time of a couple of trade shows and at those trade shows, word got round that I was no longer using the amp I had been using, and I was told by the owners and A & R people from about 6 companies that they would like to ‘work with me’. One of them offered a paid position as demo guy as well. Most of them were much higher profile than AccuGroove, but all had one thing in common – they didn’t get close to the sound I was looking for in my new rig. I knew it had to be stereo and MUCH higher fidelity than it was before. Add to that that I already knew the AccuGroove guys and was friends with them, knew what their speakers could do, I decided to go with quality and friendship over (potential) money and exposure.

Is this because I’m some kind of puritan? No, it’s as much a longer term commercial decision as it is one of ‘integrity’. The guys on the high dollar deals with companies that mass produce cheap crap in China tend to switch fairly often – when someone comes along offering more money, they jump ship, and every time they do, their reputation slides just that little bit further. If I was play in a Nu Metal band to 10s of thousands of people a night, that wouldn’t really filter through, the kidz would just go out and buy the new signature bass and all would be happy.

However, if you’re a solo bassist, you tend to be scrutinised more by the tech-heads. I got loads of emails when I changed my amp set up, asking me what was wrong with the old one, people who’d bought the old one because of me, and wondering if they’d make a mistake etc. The geeks were watching, and I realised that if I was changing every 18 months or so, my credibility was going to disappear pretty damn quick.

So I went with the one that offered me the best possible sound. To get any better, I’d have to go to the pro audio world, and start using studio monitors on stage. Problem with that is, they’d be WAY too heavy, and far too fragile. There genuinely is nothing that could do what I’m doing with these speakers. The nearest direct comparison would be PA companies like Mackie and JBL, but they both tend to optimise their speakers for vocal projection, sacrificing low end and tonal sweetness. They work fine as PAs, not so great as bass amps.

Same with Modulus – I’ve been playing a Modulus bass for over 13 years, the only non-Modulus bass I’ve owned (still own) in that time is my Rick Turner, and their instruments do just about everything I need them to do. They like what I do, I love what they do, and the relationship is mutually agreeable. Add to that that Modulus are, as far as I’m aware, the only bass building company who are striving to use 100% independently certified eco-friendly wood, and you’ve got yourself a match made in bass heaven. it’s the same all the way round.

So if you’re thinking about such things, have a bit of a profile and something to offer a company, my advice would be to forge a friendship with the people who make the gear that you LOVE, rather than just trying to schmooze the A and R people at companies that take out huge ads in magazines.

For the record, the companies that I have some kind of ‘deal’ with [as of Oct 7 2006] are:
AccuGroove Speakers
Modulus Basses
Looperlative
East UK Preamps
Bass Centre Elites Strings
Evidence Audio cables

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Steve Reich – the Cave, The Barbican, last night.

A lovely evening last night, spent with Todd Reynolds – violinist extraordinaire, who’s in town playing violin as part of Steve Reich’s ensemble in the concert series celebrating Steve’s 70th birthday. Last night’s show was The Cave, a multimedia piece based in interviews with Jews, Muslims and Americans from lots of backgrounds about Abraham and the story of his first two sons – Ishmael and Isaac. The music is all based on the rhythms and cadences of the voices, and as such changes time signature, key and tempo every couple of bars. Without doubt some of the most insanely complex and difficult to perform music I’ve ever come across. I can’t even begin to imagine how they pulled it off. The conductor, Brad Lubman, was outstanding, conducting in different meters with each hand, cueing the singers, seemingly random piano chords, and the rest of the ensemble. By no means an easy experience, largely due to it’s length and the changes in time, the music itself was actually fairly accessible, probably because the vocal cadences humanised the whole thing.

And once again, it confirmed for me what an incredible musician Todd is – having now seen him play with his former quartet, Ethel, with Joe Jackson and Todd Rungren, play solo at the Recycle Collective, improvising at the RC, playing ‘lead guitar’ with the Michael Gordon band, and now this crazy music with Steve Reich, he’s clearly one of the most remarkable musicians I’ve ever encountered. And one of my favourite people. Leo and I went down early to meet Todd for dinner before the gig, which was truncated by a 6.30 soundcheck, but after the gig Todd and Conductor-Brad both came over to the pub for a drink before heading out to Steve Reich’s birthday celebrations. A marvellous evening all round, great people, amazing music, out of this world playing and conducting, and fantastic company in the form of Leo, Todd, Brad and Julian (Seigel – top sax bloke who was at the gig too, and met us in the pub after). Great stuff.

There are a few more Steve Reich gigs on – go if you can. He’s America’s most important living composer of New Music, and a huge influence on so many people – when I was 17 and studying music AS level, he was composer of the week radio 3, and I recorded it every day and listened to those tapes over and over, writing a series of minimalist-style pieces, including a serial minimalist piece for cello and marimba, that I remember being quite good, but my memory is pretty much certainly better than the actual thing… Still, the shifting textures of so much of Steve’s work is there in much of the loop stuff I do, so it was great to finally see some of his music live.

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