Tag: music

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When web-filters go mad..

So, there’s an article on World Music Central about Bruce Cockburn’s reissued albums.

However, their word filter doesn’t like the ‘cock’ half of his name, so his name is renders as Bruce *censor*burn. You couldn’t make it up…

Soundtrack – White Town, ‘Peek And Poke’ (most recent album from ‘Your Woman’ hit-bloke, and blog-buddy, Jyoti Mishra – tune-laden old school pop music, the way it used to be before attitude disolved all trace of tune. Some of it reminds me early Everything But The Girl in its mix of dryly recorded voice and minimal instrumentation and blatant pop melodicism. Good stuff!)

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Guy Pratt's Edinburgh Show

Last night was the preview of My Bass And Other Animals – Guy Pratt’s Edinburgh show. Guy’s a fantastic bassist, with a CV any bassist would be hugely jealous of – he’s played for Pink Floyd, Madonna, Michael Jackson, Coverdale/Page, Jimmy Nail. Oh, and Fat Les.

His show is a collection of mad stories from his life as a musician, with a little bit of bass playing – no solo tunes, just bits to demonstrate the gags.

It’s all very funny, some of it very familiar for anyone who’s toured or played festivals, or stayed in hotels with drunken rock stars. If Guy wasn’t such a skilled musician, a lot of his jokes at the expense of bassists would seem a bit bitter, but as he is a marvellous player, and fine composer too, they just draw you in to the gag.

It’s great that he’s going to be at Edinburgh, as it makes the ‘one bassist on stage doing a show’ thing seem slightly less freakish. His is more talking, and my show is more playing, but I’m sure I’ll get him up to guest once or twice during the run.

Definitely not a show to be missed if you’re anywhere near Edinburgh during August, and definitely not a show just for bassists – he’s been fastidious in removing any hint of muso-ness, to the point of not using one of my favourite Whitesnake stories of his. But it’s to his credit and the show’s benefit that he keeps it on a more general level.

Soundtrack – M83, ‘Dead Cities, Red Seas and Lost Ghosts’; Soulfly, ‘Soulfly’; Kris Delmhorst, ‘Songs For A Hurricane’.

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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.)

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Who's still buying it

So The Crazy Frog ringtone is still at number one??????? Who’s still buying it?? It was mildly diverting when I first heard it months and months ago. By the second time it was annoying, by the third time i was contemplating calling Amnesty and investigating laws on what constitutes torture-by-ringtone.

And now, inconceivably, it’s spent four weeks at #1. Are the public really that gullible? Don’t answer that, it’s clear that yes, they are. There are enough morons in the world who are happy to be browbeaten into buying something horrible just because they’ve seen it enough times.

Oh the horror.

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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).

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…and the tosser of the week award goes to…

Sean O’Kane, a ‘race relations worker’ who lives in Liverpool, who has been in California for the MJ trial, to lend his support to Michael

A couple of choice quotes –

“I came here because I couldn’t believe the injustice of it all.”

er, right… I wonder if he also went to Iraq to be part of the human shield, or has his flight to darfur booked…

“People have been talking about the similarities between Michael Jackson and Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela.

I think that’s fair.

Martin Luther King got his message across through his speeches. Michael gets his message across through his music.”

Do I need to comment on that one?

“He’s a martyr – but the thing to remember is he’s still alive.”

So he died for his cause, but is still alive – nice logic there, loser-boy.

I’m still not convinced that all the muppets hanging around outside the courthouse weren’t paid (though it’s not like MJ has got any money left…!) – after seeing the way the Labour Party used fake crowds during the campaign in the run-up to the last election (more complete losers!), I’m willing to believe that anyone could hire themselves some flunkies to hang around and make it look like they have public support.

Is anyone so daft as to turn out to show their support for a singer they don’t know who may well be guilty? That’s really odd behaviour.

And to fly across the world, and then compare MJ to Mandela and MLK? Me thinks Mr O’Kane needs help. Fast.

Soundtrack – Egberto Gismonti, ‘Magico’.

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Pavement art

Thanks to Not-At-All-Evil-Dann for sending me an email full of this guy’s art, Julian Beever is his name, and he does amazing perspective based artwork on the streets of Europe.

here are a couple of examples –

Check out some more of his work here – great stuff. I’m always inspired by artists thinking outside the box – being a solo bassist, you HAVE to think outside the box given that a) there’s no repetoir for the instrument, b) so much of what has been done solo on bass is horrible and c) most people think you’re mad, and will actively avoid the idea of solo bass, so you need to take them by surprise…

So when some crazy Belgian dude starts drawing cool perspective stuff on the streets of London, it inspires me to take my music elsewhere…

Soundtrack – Prefab Sprout, ‘Andromeda Heights’; Gillian Welch, ‘Time (The Revelator)’.

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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’.

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