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.