Tag: music

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We like surprise phone calls.

Phone rings. Caller ID thingie says it’s Ned Evett. Where’s Ned? I answer. Turns out his in Islington! (the exclamation mark is there ‘cos I was expecting him to be in Boise, Idaho – if someone from St Luvvie’s had rung me to say they were in Islington, they wouldn’t warrant any ! at all.)

Fortunately, I had a few hours that I’d set aside for practicing and writing new tunes that I could happily sacrifice for a couple of hours sat eating and drinking mint tea with Ned. Ned’s a fretless guitarist – makes his own fretless guitars (or, at least, renders other guitars fretless) by removing the fingerboards and replacing them with mirrored glass. Yes, that’s what I said, mirrored glass. No lines, no frets, just smooth glass. He’s clearly insane, or would be if it didn’t sound so great. The lovely thing about Ned’s music is that despite the freakishness of his chosen instrument, it’s all about songs. He’s a singer/songwriter, who happens to have a guitar that looks like it was designed by Salvador Dali.

Anyway, I can’t think of many nicer ways to spend a monday afternoon that sitting chatting with Ned.

Soundtrack – Talk Talk, ‘Spirit Of Eden’.

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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’.

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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’.

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Top comedy gig…

TSP and I are determined to make up for the fact that we missed all the great comedy stuff at the Edinburgh Festival that we really wanted to see.

So last night we went to The Banana Cabaret at The Bedford in Balham. We knew it was a nice venue from going to the new Kashmir Klub there fairly regularly.

The headliners last night were Milton Jones and Gina Yashere – obviously a v. popular choice judging by the ‘standing room only’ situation by the time we arrived. It was also extremely smokey and we were reconsidering our decision… until the first act came on, John Fothergill – a regular on the London comedy club scene (apparently – I’ve never been to a comedy club before, only comedy gigs in theatres), and a very funny man.

Then came some poor bloke who pretty much died on his arse – given that I’ve only gone to Comedy in theatres before now, the standard of live comedy I’ve seen has been very high – people like Eddie Izzard, Lee Evans, Ross Noble, Rhona Cameron, Barry Cryer etc… hang on, I have been to a comedy club before – Club Senseless in Crouch End, but their booking policy is so choosy there’s never going to be any rubbish there either (I’ve seen Rich Hall and Rob Deering there – both top pros).. so, that doesn’t really count. Where was I? Ah yes, poor bloke dying on stage – it’s not that he was dreadful, he just wasn’t very funny. Which just goes to confirm my response to anyone who ever says ‘you should do stand-up’ after one of my gigs. No I shouldn’t. If I’m not funny, but vaguely friendly and endearing on my gigs, I can still win. People will like me, enjoy the music, and smile a bit, and that’s a success. If you’re not very funny but just come across as a nice bloke at a comedy gig, YOU’RE RUBBISH! there’s no halfway measure. No-one can say ‘shut up and player yer guitar’. They just get impatient for the next act.

So I’ll stick with making people laugh between songs – that way I still have my proper skill to fall back on, something I’ve spent decades honing, rather than a half-arsed haphazard approach to comedy, which just sort of happened and is really helpful for getting reviews on the Edinburgh Fringe, but isn’t really what I do for a living…

Anyway, the headliners were, as expected, fantastic. Very very funny. I’ve seen Milton Jones live loads of times – at Greenbelt, and a few other comedy gigs around, but he never fails to make me fall about laughing. An exceedingly skillful comedian. Gina is someone that TSP and I have enjoyed on TV for years, and is equally if not more funny on stage. Great observational stuff, very endearing personality and some top absurd stories.

All in all a great night out, despite having spent £12 to stand up. Next Time we’ll get there earlier.

Soundtrack – Erin McKeown, ‘Grand’.

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So this is meant to change my mind about Smoking

So the pro-smoking lobby have got David Hockney on side? He’s apparently been making a noise at the Labour party conference about the right to smoke in pubs –

“You cannot have a smoke free bohemia. Without a bohemia you pay a heavy price,” he said in an interview with The Independent. “Picasso smoked until he was about 98 and so did Matisse.” – right, and so did a fair few other people. However, millions more are dying across the world of smoking related illnesses. Most of them smoke, some of them don’t. Very few of them would smoke again if they were given the chance to start over. And as for a smoke-free bohemia – I thought artists were supposed to be forward thinking, blue-sky-people, envisaging the world that could be. etc. etc. Clearly Hockney is sold on some cliched view of Bohemia as Paris in the early 20th Century. You might as well say you can’t have a Bohemia without huge amounts of dog shit on all the streets – that’s been a feature of Paris for a long time as well…

Clearly Hockney has no idea what he’s talking about – no medical training, no background in social theory. He’s a painter (quite a good one). This quote from the article is telling –

Mr Hockney was taken to Brighton by Forest, a pro-smoking lobby group funded by cigarette makers. At a packed meeting he attacked the government’s plans alongside Joe Jackson, the 80s singer, and the chef Antony Worrall-Thompson.

Right, and what other areas of my life are going to be informed by the three stooges? What on earth have Joe Jackson and Worrall Thompson got to do with anything? I quite like Joe Jackson’s music (recorded, not live), but I’m not about to take tips from him about anything, least of all public policy. Forest are guilty of the most ludicrous of PR faux-pas. Three minor league celebs with no qualification to talk on any subject other than their speciality of art, music or food, pontificating about the right to smoke – PISS OFF, CRAP CELEBS! Nobody cares.

Smoking is rubbish – pointless, damaging, anti-social and expensive. The industry is corrupt beyond belief (it always astounds me when I meet leftie eco-monkeys who smoke – how on earth do they square that one???) and the health effects are a HUGE and pointless burden on the NHS.

Hockney’s comment on this is telling –

Did the artist worry about being hijacked by the tobacco manufacturers? ” No,” he quipped.

“I am glad of the tobacco manufacturers. I am a big customer of theirs. They make a good vegetarian product.”

So no concern about the other environmental effects of the tobacco industry, the human cost, the aggressive marketing to the world’s poorest nations, the covering up of health reports. So long as it’s ‘veggie’. You dickhead.

If I smoked, I’d give up after hearing that, for fear of being associated with a moron like Hockney. and If I owned one of his paintings, I’d probably chop it into 20,000 pieces and sell them.

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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’.

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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’.

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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’.

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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’.

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how does this happen?

“After a three-year investigation, a grand jury in Philadelphia reported yesterday that two leading figures in the U.S. Roman Catholic hierarchy, Cardinals John Krol and Anthony Bevilacqua, deliberately concealed the sexual abuse of hundreds of children by at least 63 priests in that city from 1967 to 2002.”

Have a read of the rest of the article. How can anyone, of any faith or no faith, feel that there is anything worth protecting over and above the kids that were being abused? Was it just an old boys network of fellow abusers? A misplaced faith in the church to sort out its own problems? Pressure from church heirarchy to not blacken the name of the church? All of those are so insignificantly tiny when compared with the irrepairable damage that the abuse these 63 (63??????) priests inflicted on so many children.

It is so far beyond me that anyone would ever go out of their way to protect a paedophile that part of me believes there must be more to the story – were the Cardinals being threatened? Did they really not know? Surely no-one is that rancid, least of all those who preach in the name of the ‘prince of peace’.

I guess the ones I feel most sorry for (after the abused kids, of course) are ordinary Catholics, who must be torn between turning their back on a church institution that has allowed this to go on, and sticking with the church that has nurtured their faith thus far. thinking about it, there are certainly things that go on in the Anglican church that sicken me (the rabid homophobia of some of the bishops in the international synod – and I don’t just mean the opposition of the ordination of Gay clergy, I mean the vile hatred that is preached by some of the more extreme characters), and other things that I just disagree with. Maybe it’s just that as a late joinee of the C of E, I don’t feel that much of a bond with the worldwide Anglican communion. I certainly don’t feel any affinity with those who preach homophobia, mysoginy and racism in the name of God!

It’s an eternal struggle for people of any faith, I guess – do you stick with the institution with all its faults, aware that you may be tarnished by your association with those unsavoury types, or do you form your own little cuddly club of likeminded people… Having spent many many years in a cuddly club of likeminded people, I’ll give that one a miss. Surrounding yourself with people who all believe the same thing is really really hazardous to one’s critical faculties. I know too many fundementalists of all stripes – be they religious fundies, athiestic fundies, football fundies or musical zealots – who constantly seek the company of those who serve to uncritically affirm their beliefs, which just leads to ever more entrenched levels of unchallengeable belief. I once spent almost two years surrounded by people who thought roughly the same things as me – towards the end it started to feel like some sort of benign cult.

Since then I’ve tried to vary my circles of influence, to bring my beliefs under question when possible, and to work on the assumption in what I believe that ‘I might be wrong’ – seems really obvious when you say it, but I went for a very long time being closed to the idea that someone might prove me wrong about any of my deeply held convictions about the life the universe and bass playing.

I still have a support network – when you’re feeling down, the last thing you want is some muppet tearing at the things you hold dear – but I try to broaden things out where I can.

Soundtrack – Trip Wamsley, ‘It’s Better This Way’.

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