Hiatus

I'm gone until New Years.

I will be sitting on the beaches of Mexico reviewing my 18th century theory. So brush up on realizing figured bass, and explaining modulation the classical way if you so miss Maria's Music during my absence.

I don't understand why jazz musicians say "first inversion" and classical musicians say "6". Jazz musicians say it how it is, and classical musicians come up with a symbol to describe how it is. Jazz is a fast paced art. You need short, simple phrases to get the idea across quick. Classical music is a thought-out art. The better part of a jazz song, the improvisation, is lead only by chord changes. The whole of a classical work is written out.

Check out the new Do The Math if that doesn't interest you.

Have a merry Christmas! And a happy New Year.

National Honor Society

I am a tad (well, very) cynical about National Honor Society and programs like it. The idea that membership in a club, who's main purpose is to volunteer (i.e. without selfish motives), is going to get you into a "good" college is ridiculous. Membership in National Honor Society does not reflect any sort of scholarly output of the members either. You are only asked to join if you have good grades already.

But as always, Mr. Ethan Iverson has it spot on.

From 9th grade on every great teacher I've ever had would know who Schoenburg is. More and more I am led to the belief that an eclectic music library and being smart go hand in hand. Few idiots listen to Charlie Parker or Mozart. I'll have to think about it more before I start forming to many shameless characterizations.

Genres

I hate genres.

You can't describe any good artist with one or two words.

Sonny Rollins: 1959, 1982, 1988 - 1990

John Coltrane: 1958, 1960, 1961 and 1965, 1965

Ludwig Van Beethoven: 1797, 1806 1824

John Cage: 1939, 1940, 1942

Herbie Hancock: 1975, 1992, 2006

Happy Apple: 2004, 2006

Kenny G: 1986, 1988, 1997
For the record, I am embarrassed to put this music with the other artists. I don't think Mr. Gorelick is a "good artist" but one word wouldn't describe his music.

Green Day: 1994, 2005

I especially hate the label "classical":

J.S. Bach, Frederik Chopin, Claude Debussy, Sergey Rachmaninov, Alexander Scriabin, Igor Stravinsky,

Reviews

Mwanji Ezana has an interesting post about reviewing music. The comments are pretty cool to read too.

If somebody says they like Kenny G I immediately think they know nothing about jazz. That's probably more of a stereotype than anything else. A well grounded stereotype in my opinion. Nevertheless, it's very easy to draw more from the review than what is actually there. At least concretely there. I'm not sure if that's good or bad.

Online Music Downloading

To begin with, I love CDs. So much so that I would never consider buying a song online, when I could buy the CD. There are various reasons. Firstly, I love having the CD. There is something about holding the "Kind of Blue" CD in your hands that doesn't compare to having to buying on iTunes. Beyond this purely aesthetic pleasure, I find functional benefits in a CD. That same "Kind of Blue" CD the personnel listed on it. You might say "well you can find that on Wikipedia", and yes, you can. Take a lesser known CD like Happy Apple's "Youth Oriented". On that CD I can find both the personnel and who wrote every song. And on the inside there are some pretty trippy pictures to accompany the listening experience. "Kind of Blue" features some historical liner notes. And if your computer fries, you still have the CD nicely sorted on your book shelf. My reasoning to buy the CD is not so much focused on the music, but everything else about a CD. I do absolutely despise talking to people who say they "know" a band, when they downloaded their 3 most popular songs off of Limewire. Knowing a band is listening the heck out of whole CDs, from their whole career.

I hate record companies for putting CDs out of print. Here's an idea: a website that buys 50 copies of a CD when it is released, and doesn't sell them until it goes out of print. It would probably flop... but it'd be nice. If you don't know about a band when it's first CD comes out there is an amazing likelihood that you will never have that first CD. You might be able to find somebody who has it and have them burn you a copy, but then you lose that aesthetic CD feel. Either that or it is listed on Amazon for $70, and after staring at if for 3 months you finally break down and buy it.

Saying this, I read about something cool, that I would use. Deutsche Grammophon just launched an online store with liner notes in a PDF file which carries out of print CDs. I haven't quite found the same frustration with out of print CDs in the classical genre, but it is a great first step. It wouldn't hurt record companies to put their CDs online for download, where it arguably is cost prohibitive to keep printing a CD that isn't selling. It wouldn't be quite the same as having the CD, but I would settle for it. The complete Beethoven Symphonies via Leonard Bernstein is cheaper on Amazon.com as a CD than it is on the online download site. That was the only thing I checked, but I would think it would be the other way around. Seems CDs are always a bit more expensive.

Intelligent blogging

I am a bit sick and have a lot of work to do. Thus, I'm not posting every other day. I like to spend a little time writing my posts. There is a little bit of a debate among me and some of my friends who also blog.

Some say that what you say is more important that how you say it.
Others say that everybody talks like dis on teh net so why tpye god.?
I say that if you are trying to be taken seriously, you have to take yourself seriously first.

So when I have the time to take my blogging seriously and type up a nice post, I will.

Nobody wants to read a bunch of uninformed garbage.

Rampant Idiocy

If you needed another reason(s) to hate Howard Stern: Reason 1, Reason 2, Reason 3

The Band is the Zs.

It is disgusting when, as an excuse for your inability to understand complex music, you criticize the music. I bet any amount of money that if you set The Zs down in a straight-ahead setting they would nail it.

If you don't understand the music don't criticize it's players. If you cannot speak intelligently about the music just shut up. As if it wasn't evident enough that those loonies don't understand the music, did you notice when she said "your to rhythmical"?

And the sad thing is that idiot is making millions and the musicians aren't.

It was hard for me to make it through these clips.


Some "horse shit" for your enjoyment:

Jazz: The Underappreciated Art Form

I play in a big band that will, every now and then, play at functions where the band is not the "primary focus", i.e. nobody came to hear us; they are there for a more important reason. And it is not surprising that we do not receive applause. In fact, until tonight, we had never been applauded after playing a song at these events. Disheartening.

Well tonight the band was running a bit low on material, and we had already played a song twice, so a trio was quickly formed. The conversation went thusly:

Leader to Sax (me): "You have something together?"
Sax to Piano: "You want to play that one song?"
Piano to Sax: "The Chili Peppers tune we were playing? Yeah..." (referring to "Especially in Michigan)
Sax to Drummer: "Play a rock beat, don't slow down, hit your drums hard"
Piano to Sax: "Are we going to follow the form we normally do"
Sax (not remembering what this normal form is) to Piano: "No".

We received applause. And not just the sort of polite clapping you sometimes get. It was hoot and holler applause.

I listen to big bands and the music captivates me. I'm excited, interested... ext. I don't know why the greater public doesn't see eye to eye with me. And what confuses me more is that the trio was complete improv. The drummer had no clue what was going on, and the piano and sax didn't rehearse it much. The big band had spent hours getting every note to begin and end with each other. The amount of effort put in and the amount of appreciation you get is so backwards.

Tends to challenge the jazz purists dislike of The Bad Plus though: The trio playing a rock song was payed more attention than the big band playing classic charts.

Just as you never hear an accountant say they are in it for the numbers, you won't hear me saying I play music for the response I get from the crowd (assuming there is one).

Here We Go

That is what rap is about. Kanye West thinks. Why can't the rest of popular Western music?

Hopefully he can be a role model for more than high school kids.

Regardless of politics, the man has his head on straight. I do wish there were more conservatives in music though.

10 Things I Hate About You

Forgive me if I'm getting too teenager on you.



I was playing on "Doxy" today, and I couldn't stop thinking of this.

Jazz: The Evil Artform

I am reading Peter Blecha’s book, “Taboo Tunes (A History of Banned Bands & Censored Songs)". I never realized the uproar that jazz caused in it’s lifetime. I am very accustomed to the greater public disliking (even hating) avant-garde music of all genres, and have heard it called “the devil’s music” more than once. Unfortunate.

In the modern day though, people seem exercise their dislike for a type of music by ignoring it. I am finding that hatred of music was much more active in the early 20^th century.

I knew that Nat “King” Cole was beat at a concert in Alabama in the 1950s but I would have pinned that on racism. Quotes from some members of the White Citizens Council (the group that beat him) were enlightening:

“One proud member even ‘articulated’ their position with a remark that rock ’n’ roll, ‘the basic, heavy-beat music of the Negroes,’ was intended to appeal to the base in man, that it ‘brings out the animalism and vulgarity’ in people, and that it was the basis of a ‘plot to mongrelize America.’ Another attempted to justify the attack on Cole – whose music was far from rock ‘n’ role – by asserting that it was ‘only a short step… from the sly, nightclub technique vulgarity of Cole, to the openly animalistic obscenity of the horde of Negro rock ‘n’ rollers.’”

He outlines a myriad of examples of ridiculous attacks on jazz music: The BBC banned jazz music from the air in the mid-1930s. The archbishop of Dubuque, Iowa said in 1938 of Duke Ellington, “jam sessions, jitterbugs, and cannibalistic rhythm orgies are wooing our youth along the primrose path to hell”. And of course Rev. Mark Matthews assertion that “jazz is an evidence of intellectual and moral degradation”.

For the record the music I love is leading me to hell, evidence of my intellectual and moral degradation and bringing out the animalism and vulgarity in me. Fun.

Rap Music Is Hard To Defend

I first heard this phrase from Chris Rock. The idea has been with me since I was 8, when I weekly heard what is now Ryan Seacrest’s “American Top 40”. I do not normally go to Chris Rock for the words to expresses my ideas but I can appreciate a comedic sketch that has a point, aside from cheap giggles.

Rap songs are simple, which is not a bad thing. Good rap songs are simple and not simplistic. A given rap song will have a background and rapping. The background in rap music, unlike other forms of music, tends to be repetitive (many times the background is a looped track). This repetitive nature does not detract from the music; in fact, it tends to thrust focus onto the rapper, serving to make the rappers message more interesting. There are exceptions to this blatant genrezation (Yes, I made the word up. An explanatory post will come soon) of rap music for sure.

Mainstream rap has slowly degraded since its beginning days. In 1982, Grand Master Flash and the Furious Five released a song entitled “The Message” (video, lyrics) The background does not make this song (though it has been sampled many times), but rather the rapping (which has also been sampled):

I dance to the beat, shuffle my feet / Wear a shirt and tie and run with the creeps / Cause its all about money, ain’t a damn thing funny / You got to have a con in this land of milk and honey

It’s a great rap song! Firstly, it is original. Sadly, few rap songs put out today are original. Secondly, it forces you to think about a greater idea. Why is it that America is focuses so heavily on money? Is that good or bad? Why not end the problem and adopt communism? It is delivered so simply: “cause its all about money”, but that one idea forces you to think about how that is effecting America and whether America needs to change. And the song does not resort to sex appeal to interest listeners. Throughout the whole song, you get the impression that each word was chosen intelligently. It is easy to defend music when it is intelligently created, no matter how weird.

In April 2007 Soulja Boy released his knockout of a song “Crank That (Dat) Soulja Boy” (video, lyrics). The song is boring. It repeats… constantly. If I could understand half of what he said I would count the number of times he says “hoe”. And I’m all for a healthy amount of repetition in music; I could listen to John Coltrane play the same 8 notes for a minute. Soulja Boy is simply unoriginal, uninteresting and seemingly inattentive to the music he is creating. His repetitive lyrics don’t lead to any sort of greater idea, at least to those not fluent in his unique vocabulary. How profound is somebody who repeats themselves? He throws out “hoe” and “bitch” to no effect. Maybe appreciating words that have a purpose is puritan. What does this even mean:

I'm jocking on yo bitch ass / And if we get the fightin / Then i'm cocking on your bitch

I am all for coloring your speech with words that upper society might not appreciate. But only when you use choice words with purpose, for a desired effect. When you have no apparent thought behind which words you use you sound stupid.

Good music is intelligent. In jazz music, performers study for years so they are able to sit down and improvise a great song. They intelligently choose every note they play. Kenny G (I’m not a big fan…) plays fast runs because they are impressive to couples making out on Friday night. He puts little thought into the notes that he is playing. The only defense I've heard of Mr. G was, "he is making a lot more money than any other jazz musician ever will"; because your income is reflective of your musical talents...? In classical music performers study for years to be able to perform music that composers write for months. When I listen to out-there classical music, I can appreciate its abstractness because a composer wanted the song to sound that way. Maybe I do not understand the song. I couldn’t expect to understand “The Iliad” written in Greek because I do not understand Greek, even though the work is immensely profound when I can understand it.

The majority of modern rap music is not intelligent though! The artists do not think about what they are saying. Modern rap music fits the same mold of Soulja Boy's killer tune: it is unorginal, repetitive, and unintelligent. How can you defend this:ing.

I'm hot cause I'm fly (fly) / You ain't cause you're not (Mims) / This is why, This is why / This is why I'm hot

I've been spoiled: all of the music I listen to is so good that when I hear junk like this on the radio I'm repulsed.

Heads-up.

Ximena Sariñana (her Myspace is in Spanish, along with most information) by way of YouTube. Guitarist on some tracks (all tracks below) Ilan Bar Lavi is also in the worth-checking-out group, Secret Architecture.

The Way You Look Tonight
Summertime
My Funny Valentine
Como Soy

Secret Architecture, Live at the Cedar is available as a FLAC file here. It might take a while to download (it is a bit torrent file), but it is worth the wait. On my small computer speakers the audio quality difference is noticeably different between their Myspace and the FLAC file.

Blue Shades, by Frank Tichelli from the 07-08 MMEA Symphonic Band recording.

Welcome

I was introduced to the expansive world of Internet blogging through The Bad Plus' blog, Do The Math, and I soon expanded my reading list to include Classical Convert, The Improvising Guitarist, Alex Ross at The Rest is Noise and others. One of the things that first intrigued me about The Bad Plus' blog was their "Information Received" sections, where you could regularly find lists of the books, movies, recordings, concerts, magazines that they were 'receiving'. I wish they would still write those every now and then. Never the less, I thought it would be acceptable to start my blog with a similar section.

Information Received, Oct. 23

Live Gigs:
Tanner Taylor Trio (St. Barnabas Church)

Books:
Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift
Tabboo Tunes: A History of Banned Bands & Censored Songs, Peter Blacha

Recordings:
Happy Apple Back on Top, Happy Apple
Mahler's 2nd Symphony "Resurrection", Utah Symphony Orchestra, Maurice Abravanel
African Symphony - Abdullah Ibrahim