msnbc/Newsweek
Soldier Rap, The Pulse of War
The sound may be raw, but the lyrics tell a story from Iraq that you don't often hear—from the soldiers on the streets.
By Scott Johnson and Eve Conant
Newsweek
June 13 issue - It took only a few ambushes, roadside bombs and corpses for Neal Saunders to know what he had to do: turn the streets of Baghdad into rap music. So the First Cavalry sergeant, then newly arrived for a year of duty in Sadr City, began hoarding his monthly paychecks and seeking out a U.S. supplier willing to ship a keyboard, digital mixer, cable, microphones and headphones to an overseas military address. He hammered together a plywood shack, tacked up some cheap mattress pads for soundproofing and invited other Task Force 112 members to join him in his jerry-built studio. They call themselves "4th25"—pronounced fourth quarter, like the final do-or-die minutes of a game—and their album is "Live From Iraq." The sound may be raw, even by rap standards, but it expresses things that soldiers usually keep bottled up. "You can't call home and tell your mom your door got blown off by an IED," says Saunders. "No one talks about what we're going through. Sure, there are generals on the TV, but they're not speaking for us. We're venting for everybody."
Rap is becoming the pulse of the Iraq war, as the sounds of Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison were for Vietnam. The essential difference is that new electronic gear is giving today's troops the ability to create a soundtrack of their own rather than having a mass-produced version flown in from home. Stateside rap sounds tame to the guys serving in Iraq anyway. This week an open-mike competition in Baghdad is expected to draw many of the front-line military's top performers. The GI rappers, many producing or aiming to produce their own CDs, are giving listeners back home an uncensored glimpse of life in Iraq, straight from the troops—troops like Johnny (Snap) Batista and Richard (Ten Gram) Bachellor, who patrol Baghdad with a unit of the Marine Antiterrorism Battalion. In their off-duty hours they place a boombox on the pavement in the Green Zone and improvise rhymes about how it feels to be shot at or to lose a friend to an improvised explosive device (IED). One of their most popular numbers starts in a hushed tone, almost a whisper: "There's a place in this world you've never seen before / A place called streets and a place called war / Most of you wanksters ain't never seen the fleet / You talk about war and you've only seen the street."
For American audiences, the best-known voices are probably the freestyle rappers in the documentary "Gunner Palace." The film, which opened in March and is coming out on DVD this month, follows the daily lives of an Army artillery unit billeted at a mansion formerly belonging to Saddam Hussein's elder son, Uday. "There's going to be a whole culture that emerges from this war," says director Michael Tucker, who lived with his subjects for two months. Spc. Javorn Drummond, 22, one of the palace freestylers, has been rapping since he was a kid, but he says Iraq was a whole different thing. "In Iraq you can lose your life in half a second," he says. "But rapping keeps you focused. If you're sittin' on a gun and you're tired, waiting for a sniper to come at you, you just start thinking up a rap and your fear goes away. It's motivation, you get an adrenaline rush from it." He and his fellow rappers Richmond (Hotline) Shaw and Nicholas (Solo) Moncrief have rotated back to Fayetteville, N.C., where they're working on a compilation CD.
Rap gave six members of the First Armored Division a way to hold themselves together. They call their group Corner Pocket. Based at Baghdad's airport last year, they were pounded by daily mortar and rocket attacks. Finally they put the whole mess into rhyme and set out to tape it as a music video on location at the airport. "Every time we'd go out to record our music, there'd be an attack and we'd have to stop," says Spc. Joseph Holmes, who laid down the music tracks for "Stay in Step." It's about the cost of survival: "Soldiers are dying every day, that's why we ain't smiling. I'm the one you see on TV / Army infantry, one arm holding my sleeve from a previous injury / Bloody desert combat fatigues, dusty and ammoless M-16 with a shredded sling /... Hit in the head and shoulder but still taking deep breaths / 'Cause I'm in Kevlar and sappy plates in my flak vest."
The big labels and distributors don't seem to get it yet. "Live From Iraq" is available on the Web (4th25.com), but you won't find it in most record stores. A gunnery sergeant in Baghdad has offered to help Snap and Ten Gram produce a CD, and they're hoping to burn four tracks soon. Corner Pocket is working on 23 songs, in the hope of finding a label that will pick them up. Hotline says he's excited by how well his privately produced CD is moving—"We had no idea this would catch on so fast"—but he's the one who's selling it: cranking up the volume at parties, hawking copies on the streets of Fayetteville, persuading local radio stations to give it air time.
Last month Snap learned that an explosion had killed a good friend in Iraq. "It just makes me want to be here more, knowing that people want to hurt us," he says. He and Ten Gram rap on: "I'm a pit bull at night, I'm out to gitcha / Devil Dog mentality bitin' whoever's witcha / I taste blood, I'm tired of marchin' in the mud / I throw down my 9 and now I'm pumpin' slugs." Refusing to give in is what the music is all about.
© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.
© 2005 MSNBC.com
Monday, June 06, 2005
Friday, June 03, 2005
How technology has transformed the sound of music
THE NEW YORKER
THE RECORD EFFECT
by ALEX ROSS
How technology has transformed the sound of music.
Issue of 2005-06-06
Posted 2005-05-30
Ninety-nine years ago, John Philip Sousa predicted that recordings would lead to the demise of music. The phonograph, he warned, would erode the finer instincts of the ear, end amateur playing and singing, and put professional musicians out of work. “The time is coming when no one will be ready to submit himself to the ennobling discipline of learning music,” he wrote. “Everyone will have their ready made or ready pirated music in their cupboards.” Something is irretrievably lost when we are no longer in the presence of bodies making music, Sousa said. “The nightingale’s song is delightful because the nightingale herself gives it forth.”
Before you dismiss Sousa as a nutty old codger, you might ponder how much has changed in the past hundred years. Music has achieved onrushing omnipresence in our world: millions of hours of its history are available on disk; rivers of digital melody flow on the Internet; MP3 players with ten thousand songs can be tucked in a back pocket or a purse. Yet, for most of us, music is no longer something we do ourselves, or even watch other people doing in front of us. It has become a radically virtual medium, an art without a face. In the future, Sousa’s ghost might say, reproduction will replace production entirely. Zombified listeners will shuffle through the archives of the past, and new music will consist of rearrangements of the old.
Ever since Edison introduced the wax cylinder, in 1877, people have been trying to figure out what recording has done for and to the art of music. Inevitably, the conversation has veered toward rhetorical extremes. Sousa was a pioneering spokesman for the party of doom, which was later filled out by various post-Marxist theorists. In the opposite corner are the technological utopians, who will tell you that recording has not imprisoned music but liberated it, bringing the art of the élite to the masses and the art of the margins to the center. Before Edison came along, the utopians say, Beethoven’s symphonies could be heard only in select concert halls. Now CDs carry the man from Bonn to the corners of the earth, summoning forth the million souls he hoped to embrace in his “Ode to Joy.” Conversely, recordings gave the likes of Louis Armstrong, Chuck Berry, and James Brown the chance to occupy a global platform that Sousa’s idyllic old America, racist to the core, would have denied them. The fact that their records played a crucial role in the advancement of African-American civil rights puts in proper perspective the aesthetic debate about whether or not technology has been “good” for music.
I discovered much of my favorite music through LPs and CDs, and I am not about to join the party of Luddite lament. Modern urban environments are often so chaotic, soulless, or ugly that I’m grateful for the humanizing touch of electronics. But I want to be aware of technology’s effects, positive and negative. For music to remain vital, recordings have to exist in balance with live performance, and, these days, live performance is by far the smaller part of the equation. Perhaps we tell ourselves that we listen to CDs in order to get to know the music better, or to supplement what we get from concerts and shows. But, honestly, a lot of us don’t go to hear live music that often. Work leaves us depleted. Tickets are too expensive. Concert halls are stultifying. Rock clubs are full of kids who make us feel ancient. It’s just so much easier to curl up in the comfy chair with a Beethoven quartet or Billie Holiday. But would Beethoven or Billie ever have existed if people had always listened to music the way we listen now?
"The machine is neither a god nor a devil,” the German music critic Hans Stuckenschmidt wrote in 1926, in an essay on the mechanization of music. That eminently reasonable sentiment appears as an epigraph to Mark Katz’s “Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music” (California; $19.95). It’s one of a number of recent books on the history of recording; two others are Colin Symes’s “Setting the Record Straight: A Material History of Classical Recording” (Wesleyan; $39.95), which analyzes how the discourse around LPs and CDs shapes what we hear, and Robert Philip’s “Performing Music in the Age of Recording” (Yale; $35), which advances a potent thesis about how the phonograph transformed classical culture. Katz’s book is the most approachable of these tomes. In lucid, evenhanded prose, it ranges all over the map, from classical to hip-hop. Although Katz believes that machines have profoundly affected how music is played and heard, he discourages a monolithic, deterministic idea of their impact. Ultimately, he says, the technology reflects whatever musical culture is exploiting it. The machine is a mirror of our needs and fears.
The principal irony of phonograph history is that the machine was not invented with music in mind. Edison conceived of his cylinder as a tool for business communication: it would replace the costly, imperfect practice of stenography, and would have the added virtue of preserving in perpetuity the voices of the deceased. In an 1878 essay, Edison (or his ghostwriter) proclaimed portentously that his invention would “annihilate time and space, and bottle up for posterity the mere utterance of man.” Annihilation is, of course, an ambiguous figure of speech. Recording broke down barriers between cultures, but it also placed more archaic musical forms in danger of extinction. In the early years of the century, Béla Bartók, Zoltán Kodály, and Percy Grainger used phonographs to preserve the voices of elderly folksingers whose timeless ways were being stamped out by the advance of modern life. And what was helping to stamp them out? The phonograph, with its international hit tunes and standardized popular dances.
In the eighteen-nineties, alert entrepreneurs installed phonographs in penny arcades, allowing customers to listen to favorite songs over ear tubes. By 1900, the phonograph was being marketed as a purely musical device. Its first great star was an operatic tenor, Enrico Caruso, whose voice remains one of the most transfixing phenomena in the history of the medium. The ping in his tone, that golden bark, penetrated the haze of the early technology and made the man himself viscerally present. Not so lucky was Johannes Brahms, who, in 1889, attempted to play his First Hungarian Dance for Edison’s cylinder. It sounds as if the Master were coming to us from a spacecraft disintegrating near Pluto. There was something symbolic in Edison’s inability to register so titanic a presence as Brahms: despite Caruso’s fame, and despite later fads for Toscanini, Bernstein, and Glenn Gould, classical music had a hard time getting a foothold in this slippery terrain. From the start, the phonograph favored brassy singing, knife-edged winds and brass, the thump of percussion—whatever could best puncture surface noise. Louis Armstrong’s trumpet blasted through the crackle and pop of early records like no other instrument or voice of the time—he was Caruso’s heir. Pianos, by contrast, were muddled and muffled; violins were all but inaudible. Classical music, with its softer-edged sounds, entered the recording era at a disadvantage. The age of the cowbell had begun.
Whenever a new gadget comes along, salesmen inevitably point out that an older gadget has been rendered obsolete. The automobile pushed aside the railroad; the computer replaced the typewriter. Sousa feared that the phonograph would supplant live music-making. His fears were excessive but not irrational. Early ads for the phonograph took aim at the piano, which, around the turn of the century, was the center of domestic musical life, from the salon to the tavern. The top-selling Victrola of 1906 was encased in “piano-finished” mahogany, if anyone was missing the point. An ad reproduced in Colin Symes’s book shows a family clustered about a phonograph, no piano in sight. Countless ad campaigns since have claimed that recordings are just as good as live performances, possibly better—combining, supposedly, the warmth of live music with the comfort of home. They have provided, to use some well-worn phrases, “the best seat in the house,” “living presence,” “perfect sound forever.” They inspired the famous question “Is it live or is it Memorex?” (If it’s Memorex, is it dead?) Edison was so determined to demonstrate the verisimilitude of his machines that he held a nationwide series of Tone Tests, during which halls were plunged into darkness and audiences were supposedly unable to tell the difference between Anna Case singing live and one of her records.
It’s easy to laugh now at the spectacle of the Tone Tests. Either Edison was engaging in serious hanky-panky or audiences were so eager to embrace the new technology that they hypnotized themselves into ignoring the wheeze of cylinder static. But a hipper form of the same mumbo-jumbo is heard in high-end audio showrooms, where ten-thousand-dollar systems purport to re-create an orchestra in your living room. Even if such a machine existed, the question once posed by the comedians Flanders and Swann lingers: Why would we want an orchestra in our living room? Isn’t the idea of sitting in a room listening to a tape of five hundred people performing the Mahler Eighth Symphony totally bizarre—the diametrical opposite of the great communal ceremonies that Mahler yearned to enact? So says the party of doom. The party of hope responds: Audiences generally ignored or misunderstood Mahler until repeated listening on LPs made his music comprehensible.
Like Heisenberg’s mythical observer, the phonograph was never a mere recorder of events: it changed how people sang and played. Katz, in a major contribution to the lingo, calls these changes “phonograph effects.” (The phrase comes from the digital studio, where it is used to describe the crackling, scratching noises that are sometimes added to pop-music tracks to lend them an appealingly antique air.) Katz devotes one striking chapter to a fundamental change in violin technique that took place in the early twentieth century. It involved vibrato—that trembling action of the hand on the fingerboard, whereby the player is able to give notes a warbling sweetness. Until about 1920, vibrato was applied quite sparingly. On a 1903 recording, the great violinist Joseph Joachim uses it only to accentuate certain highly expressive notes. (The track is included on a CD that comes with Katz’s book.) Around the same time, Fritz Kreisler began applying vibrato almost constantly. By the nineteen-twenties, most leading violinists had adopted Kreisler’s method. Was it because they were imitating him? Katz proposes that the change came about for a more pedestrian reason. When a wobble was added to violin tone, the phonograph was able to pick it up more easily: it’s a “wider” sound in acoustical terms, a blob of several superimposed frequencies. Also, the fuzzy focus of vibrato enabled players to cover up slight inaccuracies of intonation, and, from the start, the phonograph made players self-conscious about intonation in ways they had never been before. What worked in the studio then spread to the concert stage. Katz can’t prove that the phonograph was responsible for the change, but he makes a good case.
Composers, who had reigned like gods over the dearly departed nineteenth century, were uncertain and quizzical in the face of the new device. Symes amusingly tracks the ambivalence of Igor Stravinsky, who styled himself the most impeccably up-to-date of composers. In 1916, the conductor Ernest Ansermet brought Stravinsky a stack of American pop records, Jelly Roll Morton rags apparently among them, and the composer swooned. “The musical ideal,” he called them, “music spontaneous and ‘useless,’ music that wishes to express nothing.” (Just what Jelly Roll was after!) Stravinsky began writing with the limitations of the phonograph in mind: short movements, small groups of instruments, lots of winds and brass, few strings. On his first American tour, in 1925, he signed a contract at Brunswick Studios, where Duke Ellington later set down “East St. Louis Toodle-O.” Then, in the next decade, he abruptly adopted the John Philip Sousa line: “Oversaturated with sounds, blasé even before combinations of the utmost variety, listeners fall into a kind of torpor which deprives them of all power of discrimination.” By the nineteen-forties, Stravinsky was living in America, and, seeking new avenues of exposure, he embraced recording once again. He went so far as to endorse the Stromberg-Carlson Custom 400 loudspeaker, comparing it to a “fine microscope.” You could try to find some consistent theory behind these statements, but the short version is that Stravinsky was confused.
The youngest composers of the twenties—those who had come of age during and after the First World War—had no hesitation about submitting to the phonograph. Perhaps Katz’s most fascinating chapter is devoted to the short-lived Grammophonmusik phenomenon in German music of the twenties and early thirties. Paul Hindemith, Kurt Weill, Ernst Toch, and Stefan Wolpe seized upon the phonograph not merely as a means for preserving and distributing music but as a way of making it. Wolpe was the first to take the plunge; at a Dada concert in 1920, he put eight phonographs on a stage and had them play parts of Beethoven’s Fifth at different speeds. Weill wrote an interlude for solo record-player—playing “Tango Angèle,” his first “hit”—in the au-courant 1927 opera “The Tsar Has Himself Photographed.” Hindemith and Toch experimented with performances involving phonographs; fragmentary evidence of their legendary 1930 Gramophone Concert can be found on Katz’s CD, and it’s some of the craziest damn stuff you’ll ever hear. We are only a step or two away from the electronic avant-garde of John Cage, whose “Imaginary Landscape No. 1,” for piano, cymbals, and variable-speed turntables, dates from 1939. It turns out that the teen-age Cage attended the Gramophone Concert during a summer break from school.
With the arrival of magnetic tape, the relationship between performer and medium became ever more complex. German engineers perfected the magnetic tape recorder, or Magnetophon, during the Second World War. Late one night, an audio expert turned serviceman named Jack Mullin was monitoring German radio when he noticed that an overnight orchestral broadcast was astonishingly clear: it sounded “live,” yet not even at Hitler’s whim could the orchestra have been playing Bruckner in the middle of the night. After the war was over, Mullin tracked down a Magnetophon and brought it to America. He demonstrated it to Bing Crosby, who used it to tape his broadcasts in advance. Crosby was a pioneer of perhaps the most famous of all technological effects, the croon. Magnetic tape meant that Bing could practically whisper into the microphone and still be heard across America; a marked drop-off in surface noise meant that vocal murmurs could register as vividly as Louis Armstrong’s pealing trumpet.
Magnetic tape also meant that performers could invent their own reality in the studio. Errors could be corrected by splicing together bits of different takes. In the sixties, the Beatles and the Beach Boys, following in the wake of electronic compositions by Cage and Stockhausen, began constructing intricate studio soundscapes that they never could have replicated onstage; even Glenn Gould would have had trouble executing the mechanically accelerated keyboard solo in “In My Life.” The great rock debate about authenticity began. Were the Beatles pushing the art forward by reinventing it in the studio? Or were they losing touch with the earthy intelligence of folk, blues, and rock traditions? Bob Dylan stood at a craggy opposite extreme, turning out records in a few days’ time and avoiding any vocal overdubs until “Blood on the Tracks,” the fourteenth record of his career. Yet frills-free, “lo-fi” recording has no special claim on musical truth; indeed, it easily becomes another phonograph effect, the effect of no effect. Even Dylan cannot escape the fictions of the medium, as he well knows: “I’m gazing out the window / Of the St. James Hotel / And I know no one can sing the blues / Like Blind Willie McTell.”
In the nineteen-eighties, as Dutch and Japanese engineers introduced digital recording in the CD format, the saga of the phonograph experienced a final twist. Katz, in the last chapters of his book, delights in following the winding path from Germany in the nineteen-twenties to the South Bronx in the nineteen-seventies, where the turntable became an instrument once again. D.j.s like Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, and Grandmaster Flash used turntables to create a hurtling collage of phonograph effects—loops, breaks, beats, scratches. The silently observing machine was shoved into the middle of the party. It was assumed at first that this recording-driven music could never be recorded itself: the art of the d.j. was all about fast moves over long duration, stamina and virtuosity combined. As Jeff Chang notes in his new book “Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation” (St. Martin’s; $27.95), serious young d.j.s like Chuck D, on Long Island, laughed when a resourceful record company put out a rap novelty single called “Rapper’s Delight.” How could a single record do justice to those endless parties in the Bronx where, in a multimedia rage of beats, tunes, raps, dances, and spray-painted images, kids managed to forget for a while that their neighborhood had become a smoldering ruin? The record labels found a way, of course, and a monster industry was born. Nowadays, hip-hop fans are apt to claim that live shows are dead experiences, messy reënactments of pristine studio creations.
Recording has the unsettling power to transform any kind of music, no matter how unruly or how sublime, into a collectible object, which becomes décor for the lonely modern soul. It thrives on the buzz of the new, but it also breeds nostalgia, a state of melancholy remembrance and, with that, indifference to the present; you can start to feel nostalgic for the opening riff of a new favorite song even before you reach the end. Thomas Mann described the phonograph’s ambiguous enchantments in the “Fullness of Harmony” chapter of “The Magic Mountain,” published in 1924. When a deluxe gramophone arrives at the Berghof sanitarium, it sends mixed messages to the young man who operates it. At times it sings “a new word of love” (shades of Robert Johnson’s “Phonograph Blues”), at times it exudes “sympathy for death.” At the end of the novel, the hero goes marching toward an inferno of trench warfare, obliviously chanting the Schubert tune that the gramophone taught him. These days, he’d be rapping.
Throughout the twentieth century, classical musicians and listeners together indulged the fantasy that they were living outside the technological realm. They cultivated an atmosphere of timelessness, of detachment from the ordinary world. Perhaps it’s no accident that concert dress stopped evolving right about the time that Edison’s cylinder came in: performers wished to prolong forever those last golden hours of the aristocratic age. Recording was well liked for its revenue-generating potential, but musicians preferred to think of it as a means of transcribing in the most literal manner the centuries-old classical performance tradition. With scattered exceptions—Weimar-era experimenters, postwar electronic composers, mavericks like Glenn Gould and the producer John Culshaw—musicians avoided the hey-let’s-try-this spirit that defined pop recording from the start. As Symes points out, classical releases were prized for their unadorned realism. Recordings were supposed to deny the fact that they were recordings. That process involved, paradoxically, considerable artifice. Overdubbing, patching, knob-twiddling, and even digital effects such as “pitch correction” are as common in the classical studio as in pop. The phenomenon of the dummy star, who has a hard time replicating onstage what he or she purports to do on record, is not unheard of.
Robert Philip, in “Performing Music in the Age of Recording,” points out that the vaunted transparency of classical recording is often a micromanaged illusion, and then goes further; he suggests that technology fundamentally altered the tradition that it was intended to preserve. Violin vibrato, as discussed in Mark Katz’s book, is but one example of a phonograph effect in classical performance. Philip shows how every instrument in the orchestra acquired a standard profile. Listening to records became a kind of mirror stage through which musicians confronted their “true” selves. “Musicians who first heard their own recordings in the early years of the twentieth century were often taken aback by what they heard, suddenly being made aware of inaccuracies and mannerisms they had not suspected,” Philip writes. As they adjusted their playing, they entered into a complex process that Katz calls a “feedback loop.” Feedback is what happens when an electric-guitar player gets too close to an amp and the amp starts squealing. Feedback in classical performance is the sound of musicians desperately trying to embody the superior self they glimpsed in the mirror and, potentially, turning themselves into robots in the process.
Philip begins his book with a riveting description of concerts at the turn of the last century. “Freedom from disaster was the standard for a good concert,” he writes. Rehearsals were brief, mishaps routine. Precision was not a universal value. Pianists rolled chords instead of playing them at one stroke. String players slid expressively from one note to the next—portamento, the style was called—in imitation of the slide of the voice. And the instruments themselves sounded different, depending on the nationality of the player. French bassoons had a reedy, pungent tone, quite unlike the rounded timbre of German bassoons. French flutists, by contrast, used more vibrato than their German and English counterparts, creating a warmer, mellower aura. American orchestral culture, which brought together immigrant musicians from all countries, began to erode the differences, and recordings canonized the emergent standard practice. Whatever style sounded cleanest on the medium—in these cases, German bassoons and French flutes—became the gold standard that players in conservatories copied. Young virtuosos today may have recognizable idiosyncrasies, but their playing seldom indicates that they came from any particular place or emerged from any particular tradition.
Archival reissues give tantalizing glimpses of the world as it was. Philip notes that in a 1912 performance the great Belgian violinist Eugène Ysaÿe “sways either side of the beat, while the piano maintains an even rhythm.” In disks by the Bohemian Quartet, he says, “each player is functioning as an individual,” reacting with seeming spontaneity to the personalities of the others. Edward Elgar’s recordings of his Second Symphony and Cello Concerto, from 1927 and 1928, respectively, are practically explosive in impact, destroying all stereotypes of the composer as a staid Victorian gentleman. No modern orchestra would dare to play as the Londoners played for Elgar: phrases precipitously step over one another, tempos constantly change underfoot, rough attacks punch the clean surface. The biographical evidence suggests that this borderline-chaotic style of performance was exactly what Elgar wanted. “All sorts of things which other conductors carefully foster, he seems to leave to take their chance,” a critic observed. Modern recordings of Elgar are so different in sound and spirit that they seem to document a different kind of music altogether. The symphonies have turned into monumental processional rituals, along the lines of the symphonies of Bruckner, or at least the version of Bruckner that conductors now give us.
All those lost tics and traits—swaying on either side of the beat, sliding between notes, breaking chords into arpeggios, members of a quartet going every which way—are alike in bringing out the distinct voices of the players, not to mention the mere fact that they are fallible humans. Philip writes, “If you hear the Royal Albert Hall Orchestra sliding, you may or may not like it, but you cannot be unaware of the physical process of playing.” Most modern performance tends to erase all evidence of the work that goes into playing: virtuosity is defined as effortlessness. One often-quoted ideal is to “disappear behind the music.” But when precision is divorced from emotion it can become anti-musical, inhuman, repulsive.
Is there any escape from the “feedback loop”? Philip, having blamed recordings for a multitude of sins, ends by saying that they might be able to come to the rescue. By studying artifacts from the dawn of the century, musicians might recapture what has gone missing from the perfectionist style. They can rebel against the letter of the score in pursuit of its spirit. But there are enormous psychic barriers in the way of such a shift: performers will have to be unafraid of indulging mannerisms that will sound sloppy to some ears, of committing what will sound like mistakes. They will have to defy the hyper-competitive conservatory culture in which they came of age, and also the hyper-professionalized culture of the ensembles in which they find work.
In at least one area, though, performance style has undergone a sea change. Early music has long had the reputation of being the most pedantically “correct” subculture in classical music; Philip exposes its contradictions in one chapter of his book. But the more dynamic Renaissance and Baroque specialists—Jordi Savall, Andrew Manze, the Venice Baroque Orchestra, Il Giardino Armonico, William Christie’s Les Arts Florissants—are exercising all the freedoms that Philip misses in modern performance: they execute some notes cleanly and others roughly, they weave around the beat instead of staying right on top of it, they slide from note to note when they are so moved. As a result, the music feels liberated, and audiences tend to respond in kind, with yelps of joy.
Philip, at the end of his masterly thesis, is left with an uncertainty. No matter how much evidence he accumulates, he can’t quite prove that classical playing became standardized because the phonograph demanded it. Records cannot be entirely to blame, he admits: otherwise, similar patterns would surface in popular music, which, whatever its problems, has never lacked for spontaneity. The urge toward precision was already well under way in the late nineteenth century, when Hans von Bülow’s Meiningen orchestra was celebrated as the best-rehearsed of its time, and when the big new orchestras of America, the Boston Symphony first and foremost, astonished European visitors like Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler with the discipline of their playing. Other technologies that preceded the phonograph also changed how people played and listened. Those who got to know music on a well-tuned piano began to expect the same from an orchestra. The sonic wonders of Boston’s Symphony Hall—the first hall whose acoustics were scientifically designed—placed a golden frame around the music, and the orchestra had to measure up. Most of all, classical music in America suffered from being a reproduction itself, an immaculate copy of European tradition. We’ve been listening to the same record for a century and a half.
Twenty years ago, the American composer Benjamin Boretz wrote, “In music, as in everything, the disappearing moment of experience is the firmest reality.” The paradox of recording is that it can preserve forever those disappearing moments of sound but never the spark of humanity that generates them. This is a paradox common to technological existence: everything gets a little easier and a little less real. Then again, the reigning unreality of the electronic sphere can set us up for a new kind of ecstasy, once we unplug ourselves from our gadgets and expose ourselves to the risk of live performance. Recently at Carnegie Hall, Gidon Kremer and the Baltimore Symphony played Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto, and, over and above the physical power of Kremer’s playing—his tone ran the gamut from the gnawingly raw to the angelically pure—the performance offered the shock of the real: on an average, bustling New York night, Shostakovich bore down on the audience like a phantom train.
In 1964, Glenn Gould made a famous decision to renounce live performance. In an essay published two years later, “The Prospects of Recording,” he predicted that the concert would eventually die out, to be replaced by a purely electronic music culture. He may still be proved right. For now, live performance clings to life, and, in tandem, the classical-music tradition that could hardly exist without it. As the years go by, Gould’s line of argument, which served to explain his decision to abandon the concert stage, seems ever more misguided and dangerous. Gould praised recordings for their vast archival possibilities, for their ability to supply on demand a bassoon sonata by Hindemith or a motet by Buxtehude. He gloried in the extraordinary interpretive control that studio conditions allowed him. He took it for granted that the taste for Buxtehude motets or for surprising new approaches to Bach could survive the death of the concert—that somehow new electronic avenues could be found to spread the word about old and unusual music. Gould’s thesis is annulled by cold statistics: classical-record sales have plunged, while concert attendance is anxiously holding steady. Ironically, Gould himself remains, posthumously, one of the last blockbuster classical recording artists: Sony Classical’s recent rerelease of his two interpretations of Bach’s Goldberg Variations sold two hundred thousand copies. That’s surely not what Gould had in mind for the future of the medium.
A few months after Gould published his essay, the Beatles, in a presumably unrelated development, played their last live show, in San Francisco. They spent the rest of their short career working in the recording studio. They proved, as did Gould, that the studio breeds startlingly original ideas; they also proved, as did Gould, that it breeds a certain kind of madness. I’ll take “Rubber Soul” over “Sgt. Pepper’s,” and Gould’s 1955 Goldbergs over his 1981 version, because the first recording in each pair is the more robust, the more generous, the more casually sublime. The fact that the Beatles broke up three years after they disappeared into the studio, and the fact that Gould died in strange psychic shape at the age of fifty, may tell us all we need to know about the seductions and sorrows of the art of recording.
THE RECORD EFFECT
by ALEX ROSS
How technology has transformed the sound of music.
Issue of 2005-06-06
Posted 2005-05-30
Ninety-nine years ago, John Philip Sousa predicted that recordings would lead to the demise of music. The phonograph, he warned, would erode the finer instincts of the ear, end amateur playing and singing, and put professional musicians out of work. “The time is coming when no one will be ready to submit himself to the ennobling discipline of learning music,” he wrote. “Everyone will have their ready made or ready pirated music in their cupboards.” Something is irretrievably lost when we are no longer in the presence of bodies making music, Sousa said. “The nightingale’s song is delightful because the nightingale herself gives it forth.”
Before you dismiss Sousa as a nutty old codger, you might ponder how much has changed in the past hundred years. Music has achieved onrushing omnipresence in our world: millions of hours of its history are available on disk; rivers of digital melody flow on the Internet; MP3 players with ten thousand songs can be tucked in a back pocket or a purse. Yet, for most of us, music is no longer something we do ourselves, or even watch other people doing in front of us. It has become a radically virtual medium, an art without a face. In the future, Sousa’s ghost might say, reproduction will replace production entirely. Zombified listeners will shuffle through the archives of the past, and new music will consist of rearrangements of the old.
Ever since Edison introduced the wax cylinder, in 1877, people have been trying to figure out what recording has done for and to the art of music. Inevitably, the conversation has veered toward rhetorical extremes. Sousa was a pioneering spokesman for the party of doom, which was later filled out by various post-Marxist theorists. In the opposite corner are the technological utopians, who will tell you that recording has not imprisoned music but liberated it, bringing the art of the élite to the masses and the art of the margins to the center. Before Edison came along, the utopians say, Beethoven’s symphonies could be heard only in select concert halls. Now CDs carry the man from Bonn to the corners of the earth, summoning forth the million souls he hoped to embrace in his “Ode to Joy.” Conversely, recordings gave the likes of Louis Armstrong, Chuck Berry, and James Brown the chance to occupy a global platform that Sousa’s idyllic old America, racist to the core, would have denied them. The fact that their records played a crucial role in the advancement of African-American civil rights puts in proper perspective the aesthetic debate about whether or not technology has been “good” for music.
I discovered much of my favorite music through LPs and CDs, and I am not about to join the party of Luddite lament. Modern urban environments are often so chaotic, soulless, or ugly that I’m grateful for the humanizing touch of electronics. But I want to be aware of technology’s effects, positive and negative. For music to remain vital, recordings have to exist in balance with live performance, and, these days, live performance is by far the smaller part of the equation. Perhaps we tell ourselves that we listen to CDs in order to get to know the music better, or to supplement what we get from concerts and shows. But, honestly, a lot of us don’t go to hear live music that often. Work leaves us depleted. Tickets are too expensive. Concert halls are stultifying. Rock clubs are full of kids who make us feel ancient. It’s just so much easier to curl up in the comfy chair with a Beethoven quartet or Billie Holiday. But would Beethoven or Billie ever have existed if people had always listened to music the way we listen now?
"The machine is neither a god nor a devil,” the German music critic Hans Stuckenschmidt wrote in 1926, in an essay on the mechanization of music. That eminently reasonable sentiment appears as an epigraph to Mark Katz’s “Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music” (California; $19.95). It’s one of a number of recent books on the history of recording; two others are Colin Symes’s “Setting the Record Straight: A Material History of Classical Recording” (Wesleyan; $39.95), which analyzes how the discourse around LPs and CDs shapes what we hear, and Robert Philip’s “Performing Music in the Age of Recording” (Yale; $35), which advances a potent thesis about how the phonograph transformed classical culture. Katz’s book is the most approachable of these tomes. In lucid, evenhanded prose, it ranges all over the map, from classical to hip-hop. Although Katz believes that machines have profoundly affected how music is played and heard, he discourages a monolithic, deterministic idea of their impact. Ultimately, he says, the technology reflects whatever musical culture is exploiting it. The machine is a mirror of our needs and fears.
The principal irony of phonograph history is that the machine was not invented with music in mind. Edison conceived of his cylinder as a tool for business communication: it would replace the costly, imperfect practice of stenography, and would have the added virtue of preserving in perpetuity the voices of the deceased. In an 1878 essay, Edison (or his ghostwriter) proclaimed portentously that his invention would “annihilate time and space, and bottle up for posterity the mere utterance of man.” Annihilation is, of course, an ambiguous figure of speech. Recording broke down barriers between cultures, but it also placed more archaic musical forms in danger of extinction. In the early years of the century, Béla Bartók, Zoltán Kodály, and Percy Grainger used phonographs to preserve the voices of elderly folksingers whose timeless ways were being stamped out by the advance of modern life. And what was helping to stamp them out? The phonograph, with its international hit tunes and standardized popular dances.
In the eighteen-nineties, alert entrepreneurs installed phonographs in penny arcades, allowing customers to listen to favorite songs over ear tubes. By 1900, the phonograph was being marketed as a purely musical device. Its first great star was an operatic tenor, Enrico Caruso, whose voice remains one of the most transfixing phenomena in the history of the medium. The ping in his tone, that golden bark, penetrated the haze of the early technology and made the man himself viscerally present. Not so lucky was Johannes Brahms, who, in 1889, attempted to play his First Hungarian Dance for Edison’s cylinder. It sounds as if the Master were coming to us from a spacecraft disintegrating near Pluto. There was something symbolic in Edison’s inability to register so titanic a presence as Brahms: despite Caruso’s fame, and despite later fads for Toscanini, Bernstein, and Glenn Gould, classical music had a hard time getting a foothold in this slippery terrain. From the start, the phonograph favored brassy singing, knife-edged winds and brass, the thump of percussion—whatever could best puncture surface noise. Louis Armstrong’s trumpet blasted through the crackle and pop of early records like no other instrument or voice of the time—he was Caruso’s heir. Pianos, by contrast, were muddled and muffled; violins were all but inaudible. Classical music, with its softer-edged sounds, entered the recording era at a disadvantage. The age of the cowbell had begun.
Whenever a new gadget comes along, salesmen inevitably point out that an older gadget has been rendered obsolete. The automobile pushed aside the railroad; the computer replaced the typewriter. Sousa feared that the phonograph would supplant live music-making. His fears were excessive but not irrational. Early ads for the phonograph took aim at the piano, which, around the turn of the century, was the center of domestic musical life, from the salon to the tavern. The top-selling Victrola of 1906 was encased in “piano-finished” mahogany, if anyone was missing the point. An ad reproduced in Colin Symes’s book shows a family clustered about a phonograph, no piano in sight. Countless ad campaigns since have claimed that recordings are just as good as live performances, possibly better—combining, supposedly, the warmth of live music with the comfort of home. They have provided, to use some well-worn phrases, “the best seat in the house,” “living presence,” “perfect sound forever.” They inspired the famous question “Is it live or is it Memorex?” (If it’s Memorex, is it dead?) Edison was so determined to demonstrate the verisimilitude of his machines that he held a nationwide series of Tone Tests, during which halls were plunged into darkness and audiences were supposedly unable to tell the difference between Anna Case singing live and one of her records.
It’s easy to laugh now at the spectacle of the Tone Tests. Either Edison was engaging in serious hanky-panky or audiences were so eager to embrace the new technology that they hypnotized themselves into ignoring the wheeze of cylinder static. But a hipper form of the same mumbo-jumbo is heard in high-end audio showrooms, where ten-thousand-dollar systems purport to re-create an orchestra in your living room. Even if such a machine existed, the question once posed by the comedians Flanders and Swann lingers: Why would we want an orchestra in our living room? Isn’t the idea of sitting in a room listening to a tape of five hundred people performing the Mahler Eighth Symphony totally bizarre—the diametrical opposite of the great communal ceremonies that Mahler yearned to enact? So says the party of doom. The party of hope responds: Audiences generally ignored or misunderstood Mahler until repeated listening on LPs made his music comprehensible.
Like Heisenberg’s mythical observer, the phonograph was never a mere recorder of events: it changed how people sang and played. Katz, in a major contribution to the lingo, calls these changes “phonograph effects.” (The phrase comes from the digital studio, where it is used to describe the crackling, scratching noises that are sometimes added to pop-music tracks to lend them an appealingly antique air.) Katz devotes one striking chapter to a fundamental change in violin technique that took place in the early twentieth century. It involved vibrato—that trembling action of the hand on the fingerboard, whereby the player is able to give notes a warbling sweetness. Until about 1920, vibrato was applied quite sparingly. On a 1903 recording, the great violinist Joseph Joachim uses it only to accentuate certain highly expressive notes. (The track is included on a CD that comes with Katz’s book.) Around the same time, Fritz Kreisler began applying vibrato almost constantly. By the nineteen-twenties, most leading violinists had adopted Kreisler’s method. Was it because they were imitating him? Katz proposes that the change came about for a more pedestrian reason. When a wobble was added to violin tone, the phonograph was able to pick it up more easily: it’s a “wider” sound in acoustical terms, a blob of several superimposed frequencies. Also, the fuzzy focus of vibrato enabled players to cover up slight inaccuracies of intonation, and, from the start, the phonograph made players self-conscious about intonation in ways they had never been before. What worked in the studio then spread to the concert stage. Katz can’t prove that the phonograph was responsible for the change, but he makes a good case.
Composers, who had reigned like gods over the dearly departed nineteenth century, were uncertain and quizzical in the face of the new device. Symes amusingly tracks the ambivalence of Igor Stravinsky, who styled himself the most impeccably up-to-date of composers. In 1916, the conductor Ernest Ansermet brought Stravinsky a stack of American pop records, Jelly Roll Morton rags apparently among them, and the composer swooned. “The musical ideal,” he called them, “music spontaneous and ‘useless,’ music that wishes to express nothing.” (Just what Jelly Roll was after!) Stravinsky began writing with the limitations of the phonograph in mind: short movements, small groups of instruments, lots of winds and brass, few strings. On his first American tour, in 1925, he signed a contract at Brunswick Studios, where Duke Ellington later set down “East St. Louis Toodle-O.” Then, in the next decade, he abruptly adopted the John Philip Sousa line: “Oversaturated with sounds, blasé even before combinations of the utmost variety, listeners fall into a kind of torpor which deprives them of all power of discrimination.” By the nineteen-forties, Stravinsky was living in America, and, seeking new avenues of exposure, he embraced recording once again. He went so far as to endorse the Stromberg-Carlson Custom 400 loudspeaker, comparing it to a “fine microscope.” You could try to find some consistent theory behind these statements, but the short version is that Stravinsky was confused.
The youngest composers of the twenties—those who had come of age during and after the First World War—had no hesitation about submitting to the phonograph. Perhaps Katz’s most fascinating chapter is devoted to the short-lived Grammophonmusik phenomenon in German music of the twenties and early thirties. Paul Hindemith, Kurt Weill, Ernst Toch, and Stefan Wolpe seized upon the phonograph not merely as a means for preserving and distributing music but as a way of making it. Wolpe was the first to take the plunge; at a Dada concert in 1920, he put eight phonographs on a stage and had them play parts of Beethoven’s Fifth at different speeds. Weill wrote an interlude for solo record-player—playing “Tango Angèle,” his first “hit”—in the au-courant 1927 opera “The Tsar Has Himself Photographed.” Hindemith and Toch experimented with performances involving phonographs; fragmentary evidence of their legendary 1930 Gramophone Concert can be found on Katz’s CD, and it’s some of the craziest damn stuff you’ll ever hear. We are only a step or two away from the electronic avant-garde of John Cage, whose “Imaginary Landscape No. 1,” for piano, cymbals, and variable-speed turntables, dates from 1939. It turns out that the teen-age Cage attended the Gramophone Concert during a summer break from school.
With the arrival of magnetic tape, the relationship between performer and medium became ever more complex. German engineers perfected the magnetic tape recorder, or Magnetophon, during the Second World War. Late one night, an audio expert turned serviceman named Jack Mullin was monitoring German radio when he noticed that an overnight orchestral broadcast was astonishingly clear: it sounded “live,” yet not even at Hitler’s whim could the orchestra have been playing Bruckner in the middle of the night. After the war was over, Mullin tracked down a Magnetophon and brought it to America. He demonstrated it to Bing Crosby, who used it to tape his broadcasts in advance. Crosby was a pioneer of perhaps the most famous of all technological effects, the croon. Magnetic tape meant that Bing could practically whisper into the microphone and still be heard across America; a marked drop-off in surface noise meant that vocal murmurs could register as vividly as Louis Armstrong’s pealing trumpet.
Magnetic tape also meant that performers could invent their own reality in the studio. Errors could be corrected by splicing together bits of different takes. In the sixties, the Beatles and the Beach Boys, following in the wake of electronic compositions by Cage and Stockhausen, began constructing intricate studio soundscapes that they never could have replicated onstage; even Glenn Gould would have had trouble executing the mechanically accelerated keyboard solo in “In My Life.” The great rock debate about authenticity began. Were the Beatles pushing the art forward by reinventing it in the studio? Or were they losing touch with the earthy intelligence of folk, blues, and rock traditions? Bob Dylan stood at a craggy opposite extreme, turning out records in a few days’ time and avoiding any vocal overdubs until “Blood on the Tracks,” the fourteenth record of his career. Yet frills-free, “lo-fi” recording has no special claim on musical truth; indeed, it easily becomes another phonograph effect, the effect of no effect. Even Dylan cannot escape the fictions of the medium, as he well knows: “I’m gazing out the window / Of the St. James Hotel / And I know no one can sing the blues / Like Blind Willie McTell.”
In the nineteen-eighties, as Dutch and Japanese engineers introduced digital recording in the CD format, the saga of the phonograph experienced a final twist. Katz, in the last chapters of his book, delights in following the winding path from Germany in the nineteen-twenties to the South Bronx in the nineteen-seventies, where the turntable became an instrument once again. D.j.s like Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, and Grandmaster Flash used turntables to create a hurtling collage of phonograph effects—loops, breaks, beats, scratches. The silently observing machine was shoved into the middle of the party. It was assumed at first that this recording-driven music could never be recorded itself: the art of the d.j. was all about fast moves over long duration, stamina and virtuosity combined. As Jeff Chang notes in his new book “Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation” (St. Martin’s; $27.95), serious young d.j.s like Chuck D, on Long Island, laughed when a resourceful record company put out a rap novelty single called “Rapper’s Delight.” How could a single record do justice to those endless parties in the Bronx where, in a multimedia rage of beats, tunes, raps, dances, and spray-painted images, kids managed to forget for a while that their neighborhood had become a smoldering ruin? The record labels found a way, of course, and a monster industry was born. Nowadays, hip-hop fans are apt to claim that live shows are dead experiences, messy reënactments of pristine studio creations.
Recording has the unsettling power to transform any kind of music, no matter how unruly or how sublime, into a collectible object, which becomes décor for the lonely modern soul. It thrives on the buzz of the new, but it also breeds nostalgia, a state of melancholy remembrance and, with that, indifference to the present; you can start to feel nostalgic for the opening riff of a new favorite song even before you reach the end. Thomas Mann described the phonograph’s ambiguous enchantments in the “Fullness of Harmony” chapter of “The Magic Mountain,” published in 1924. When a deluxe gramophone arrives at the Berghof sanitarium, it sends mixed messages to the young man who operates it. At times it sings “a new word of love” (shades of Robert Johnson’s “Phonograph Blues”), at times it exudes “sympathy for death.” At the end of the novel, the hero goes marching toward an inferno of trench warfare, obliviously chanting the Schubert tune that the gramophone taught him. These days, he’d be rapping.
Throughout the twentieth century, classical musicians and listeners together indulged the fantasy that they were living outside the technological realm. They cultivated an atmosphere of timelessness, of detachment from the ordinary world. Perhaps it’s no accident that concert dress stopped evolving right about the time that Edison’s cylinder came in: performers wished to prolong forever those last golden hours of the aristocratic age. Recording was well liked for its revenue-generating potential, but musicians preferred to think of it as a means of transcribing in the most literal manner the centuries-old classical performance tradition. With scattered exceptions—Weimar-era experimenters, postwar electronic composers, mavericks like Glenn Gould and the producer John Culshaw—musicians avoided the hey-let’s-try-this spirit that defined pop recording from the start. As Symes points out, classical releases were prized for their unadorned realism. Recordings were supposed to deny the fact that they were recordings. That process involved, paradoxically, considerable artifice. Overdubbing, patching, knob-twiddling, and even digital effects such as “pitch correction” are as common in the classical studio as in pop. The phenomenon of the dummy star, who has a hard time replicating onstage what he or she purports to do on record, is not unheard of.
Robert Philip, in “Performing Music in the Age of Recording,” points out that the vaunted transparency of classical recording is often a micromanaged illusion, and then goes further; he suggests that technology fundamentally altered the tradition that it was intended to preserve. Violin vibrato, as discussed in Mark Katz’s book, is but one example of a phonograph effect in classical performance. Philip shows how every instrument in the orchestra acquired a standard profile. Listening to records became a kind of mirror stage through which musicians confronted their “true” selves. “Musicians who first heard their own recordings in the early years of the twentieth century were often taken aback by what they heard, suddenly being made aware of inaccuracies and mannerisms they had not suspected,” Philip writes. As they adjusted their playing, they entered into a complex process that Katz calls a “feedback loop.” Feedback is what happens when an electric-guitar player gets too close to an amp and the amp starts squealing. Feedback in classical performance is the sound of musicians desperately trying to embody the superior self they glimpsed in the mirror and, potentially, turning themselves into robots in the process.
Philip begins his book with a riveting description of concerts at the turn of the last century. “Freedom from disaster was the standard for a good concert,” he writes. Rehearsals were brief, mishaps routine. Precision was not a universal value. Pianists rolled chords instead of playing them at one stroke. String players slid expressively from one note to the next—portamento, the style was called—in imitation of the slide of the voice. And the instruments themselves sounded different, depending on the nationality of the player. French bassoons had a reedy, pungent tone, quite unlike the rounded timbre of German bassoons. French flutists, by contrast, used more vibrato than their German and English counterparts, creating a warmer, mellower aura. American orchestral culture, which brought together immigrant musicians from all countries, began to erode the differences, and recordings canonized the emergent standard practice. Whatever style sounded cleanest on the medium—in these cases, German bassoons and French flutes—became the gold standard that players in conservatories copied. Young virtuosos today may have recognizable idiosyncrasies, but their playing seldom indicates that they came from any particular place or emerged from any particular tradition.
Archival reissues give tantalizing glimpses of the world as it was. Philip notes that in a 1912 performance the great Belgian violinist Eugène Ysaÿe “sways either side of the beat, while the piano maintains an even rhythm.” In disks by the Bohemian Quartet, he says, “each player is functioning as an individual,” reacting with seeming spontaneity to the personalities of the others. Edward Elgar’s recordings of his Second Symphony and Cello Concerto, from 1927 and 1928, respectively, are practically explosive in impact, destroying all stereotypes of the composer as a staid Victorian gentleman. No modern orchestra would dare to play as the Londoners played for Elgar: phrases precipitously step over one another, tempos constantly change underfoot, rough attacks punch the clean surface. The biographical evidence suggests that this borderline-chaotic style of performance was exactly what Elgar wanted. “All sorts of things which other conductors carefully foster, he seems to leave to take their chance,” a critic observed. Modern recordings of Elgar are so different in sound and spirit that they seem to document a different kind of music altogether. The symphonies have turned into monumental processional rituals, along the lines of the symphonies of Bruckner, or at least the version of Bruckner that conductors now give us.
All those lost tics and traits—swaying on either side of the beat, sliding between notes, breaking chords into arpeggios, members of a quartet going every which way—are alike in bringing out the distinct voices of the players, not to mention the mere fact that they are fallible humans. Philip writes, “If you hear the Royal Albert Hall Orchestra sliding, you may or may not like it, but you cannot be unaware of the physical process of playing.” Most modern performance tends to erase all evidence of the work that goes into playing: virtuosity is defined as effortlessness. One often-quoted ideal is to “disappear behind the music.” But when precision is divorced from emotion it can become anti-musical, inhuman, repulsive.
Is there any escape from the “feedback loop”? Philip, having blamed recordings for a multitude of sins, ends by saying that they might be able to come to the rescue. By studying artifacts from the dawn of the century, musicians might recapture what has gone missing from the perfectionist style. They can rebel against the letter of the score in pursuit of its spirit. But there are enormous psychic barriers in the way of such a shift: performers will have to be unafraid of indulging mannerisms that will sound sloppy to some ears, of committing what will sound like mistakes. They will have to defy the hyper-competitive conservatory culture in which they came of age, and also the hyper-professionalized culture of the ensembles in which they find work.
In at least one area, though, performance style has undergone a sea change. Early music has long had the reputation of being the most pedantically “correct” subculture in classical music; Philip exposes its contradictions in one chapter of his book. But the more dynamic Renaissance and Baroque specialists—Jordi Savall, Andrew Manze, the Venice Baroque Orchestra, Il Giardino Armonico, William Christie’s Les Arts Florissants—are exercising all the freedoms that Philip misses in modern performance: they execute some notes cleanly and others roughly, they weave around the beat instead of staying right on top of it, they slide from note to note when they are so moved. As a result, the music feels liberated, and audiences tend to respond in kind, with yelps of joy.
Philip, at the end of his masterly thesis, is left with an uncertainty. No matter how much evidence he accumulates, he can’t quite prove that classical playing became standardized because the phonograph demanded it. Records cannot be entirely to blame, he admits: otherwise, similar patterns would surface in popular music, which, whatever its problems, has never lacked for spontaneity. The urge toward precision was already well under way in the late nineteenth century, when Hans von Bülow’s Meiningen orchestra was celebrated as the best-rehearsed of its time, and when the big new orchestras of America, the Boston Symphony first and foremost, astonished European visitors like Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler with the discipline of their playing. Other technologies that preceded the phonograph also changed how people played and listened. Those who got to know music on a well-tuned piano began to expect the same from an orchestra. The sonic wonders of Boston’s Symphony Hall—the first hall whose acoustics were scientifically designed—placed a golden frame around the music, and the orchestra had to measure up. Most of all, classical music in America suffered from being a reproduction itself, an immaculate copy of European tradition. We’ve been listening to the same record for a century and a half.
Twenty years ago, the American composer Benjamin Boretz wrote, “In music, as in everything, the disappearing moment of experience is the firmest reality.” The paradox of recording is that it can preserve forever those disappearing moments of sound but never the spark of humanity that generates them. This is a paradox common to technological existence: everything gets a little easier and a little less real. Then again, the reigning unreality of the electronic sphere can set us up for a new kind of ecstasy, once we unplug ourselves from our gadgets and expose ourselves to the risk of live performance. Recently at Carnegie Hall, Gidon Kremer and the Baltimore Symphony played Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto, and, over and above the physical power of Kremer’s playing—his tone ran the gamut from the gnawingly raw to the angelically pure—the performance offered the shock of the real: on an average, bustling New York night, Shostakovich bore down on the audience like a phantom train.
In 1964, Glenn Gould made a famous decision to renounce live performance. In an essay published two years later, “The Prospects of Recording,” he predicted that the concert would eventually die out, to be replaced by a purely electronic music culture. He may still be proved right. For now, live performance clings to life, and, in tandem, the classical-music tradition that could hardly exist without it. As the years go by, Gould’s line of argument, which served to explain his decision to abandon the concert stage, seems ever more misguided and dangerous. Gould praised recordings for their vast archival possibilities, for their ability to supply on demand a bassoon sonata by Hindemith or a motet by Buxtehude. He gloried in the extraordinary interpretive control that studio conditions allowed him. He took it for granted that the taste for Buxtehude motets or for surprising new approaches to Bach could survive the death of the concert—that somehow new electronic avenues could be found to spread the word about old and unusual music. Gould’s thesis is annulled by cold statistics: classical-record sales have plunged, while concert attendance is anxiously holding steady. Ironically, Gould himself remains, posthumously, one of the last blockbuster classical recording artists: Sony Classical’s recent rerelease of his two interpretations of Bach’s Goldberg Variations sold two hundred thousand copies. That’s surely not what Gould had in mind for the future of the medium.
A few months after Gould published his essay, the Beatles, in a presumably unrelated development, played their last live show, in San Francisco. They spent the rest of their short career working in the recording studio. They proved, as did Gould, that the studio breeds startlingly original ideas; they also proved, as did Gould, that it breeds a certain kind of madness. I’ll take “Rubber Soul” over “Sgt. Pepper’s,” and Gould’s 1955 Goldbergs over his 1981 version, because the first recording in each pair is the more robust, the more generous, the more casually sublime. The fact that the Beatles broke up three years after they disappeared into the studio, and the fact that Gould died in strange psychic shape at the age of fifty, may tell us all we need to know about the seductions and sorrows of the art of recording.
Sunday, May 29, 2005
Ringtone tops British charts?
Phone Ring Tone Set to Top U.K. Charts
May 29, 8:30 AM (ET)
LONDON (AP) - A cell-phone ring tone appeared set to top the British singles chart Sunday, outselling the new single by the band Coldplay by nearly four to one, a music retailer said.
"Crazy Frog Axel F," a ring tone based on the sound of a revving Swedish mo-ped, is the first tune being used on mobile phones to cross into mainstream music charts, said Gennaro Castaldo, a spokesman for HMV, the British music retailing chain.
Coldplay had hoped to go straight to No. 1 on this Sunday's British singles chart with its new song, "Speed of Sound." But by Saturday, it appeared that the ring tone - which is available for digital download and as a compact disc single - would prevail, said Castaldo.
The ring tone was expected to replace the Oasis tune "Lyla" as the No. 1 hit on the list released Sunday by the Official UK Charts Co. The weekly singles chart, which has been released since 1952, is based on the sales of 5,600 retail shops across Britain.
While "Crazy Frog" and other ring tones do not appear to be much of a hit among adults, so many youngsters are personalizing the sound of their cell phones that such digital music could change world music markets.
"Music purists might not be too happy at the prospect of the "Crazy Frog" outselling Coldplay, but it shouldn't come as that much of a surprise when you consider its huge novelty appeal and the massive amount of exposure it is currently getting," said Castaldo.
The ring tone is based on a song that was recorded in Sweden nearly a decade ago by 17-year-old Daniel Malmedahl, using the high pitched revving of a two-stroke motorcycle, The International Herald Tribune reported Saturday.
May 29, 8:30 AM (ET)
LONDON (AP) - A cell-phone ring tone appeared set to top the British singles chart Sunday, outselling the new single by the band Coldplay by nearly four to one, a music retailer said.
"Crazy Frog Axel F," a ring tone based on the sound of a revving Swedish mo-ped, is the first tune being used on mobile phones to cross into mainstream music charts, said Gennaro Castaldo, a spokesman for HMV, the British music retailing chain.
Coldplay had hoped to go straight to No. 1 on this Sunday's British singles chart with its new song, "Speed of Sound." But by Saturday, it appeared that the ring tone - which is available for digital download and as a compact disc single - would prevail, said Castaldo.
The ring tone was expected to replace the Oasis tune "Lyla" as the No. 1 hit on the list released Sunday by the Official UK Charts Co. The weekly singles chart, which has been released since 1952, is based on the sales of 5,600 retail shops across Britain.
While "Crazy Frog" and other ring tones do not appear to be much of a hit among adults, so many youngsters are personalizing the sound of their cell phones that such digital music could change world music markets.
"Music purists might not be too happy at the prospect of the "Crazy Frog" outselling Coldplay, but it shouldn't come as that much of a surprise when you consider its huge novelty appeal and the massive amount of exposure it is currently getting," said Castaldo.
The ring tone is based on a song that was recorded in Sweden nearly a decade ago by 17-year-old Daniel Malmedahl, using the high pitched revving of a two-stroke motorcycle, The International Herald Tribune reported Saturday.
Thursday, May 26, 2005
Pat Metheny on Kenny G
Part 1; click here to get to the reference post and then part 2. This was apparently posted on Metheny's official website, but I could not find the original.
Date: Jun 05 2000 Subject: Controversy and Kenny G
Question: Pat, could you tell us your opinion about Kenny G - it appears you were quoted as being less than enthusiastic about him and his music. I would say that most of the serious music listeners in the world would not find your opinion surprising or unlikely - but you were vocal about it for the first time. You are generally supportive of other musicians it seems.
Pat's Answer:
kenny g is not a musician i really had much of an opinion about at all until recently. there was not much about the way he played that interested me one way or the other either live or on records. i first heard him a number of years ago playing as a sideman with jeff lorber when they opened a concert for my band. my impression was that he was someone who had spent a fair amount of time listening to the more pop oriented sax players of that time, like grover washington or david sanborn, but was not really an advanced player, even in that style. he had major rhythmic problems and his harmonic and melodic vocabulary was extremely limited, mostly to pentatonic based and blues- lick derived patterns, and he basically exhibited only a rudimentary understanding of how to function as a professional soloist in an ensemble - lorber was basically playing him off the bandstand in terms of actual music. but he did show a knack for connecting to the basest impulses of the large crowd by deploying his two or three most effective licks (holding long notes and playing fast runs - never mind that there were lots of harmonic clams in them) at the keys moments to elicit a powerful crowd reaction (over and over again) . the other main thing i noticed was that he also, as he does to this day, play horribly out of tune - consistently sharp.
of course, i am aware of what he has played since, the success it has had, and the controversy that has surrounded him among musicians and serious listeners. this controversy seems to be largely fueled by the fact that he sells an enormous amount of records while not being anywhere near a really great player in relation to the standards that have been set on his instrument over the past sixty or seventy years.
and honestly, there is no small amount of envy involved from musicians who see one of their fellow players doing so well financially, especially when so many of them who are far superior as improvisors and musicians in general have trouble just making a living. there must be hundreds, if not thousands of sax players around the world who are simply better improvising musicians than kenny g on his chosen instruments. it would really surprise me if even he disagreed with that statement.
having said that, it has gotten me to thinking lately why so many jazz musicians (myself included, given the right “bait” of a question, as i will explain later) and audiences have gone so far as to say that what he is playing is not even jazz at all.
stepping back for a minute, if we examine the way he plays, especially if one can remove the actual improvising from the often mundane background environment that it is delivered in, we see that his saxophone style is in fact clearly in the tradition of the kind of playing that most reasonably objective listeners WOULD normally quantify as being jazz. it’s just that as jazz or even as music in a general sense, with these standards in mind, it is simply not up to the level of playing that we historically associate with professional improvising musicians. so, lately i have been advocating that we go ahead and just include it under the word jazz - since pretty much of the rest of the world OUTSIDE of the jazz community does anyway - and let the chips fall where they may.
and after all, why he should be judged by any other standard, why he should be exempt from that that all other serious musicians on his instrument are judged by if they attempt to use their abilities in an improvisational context playing with a rhythm section as he does? he SHOULD be compared to john coltrane or wayne shorter, for instance, on his abilities (or lack thereof) to play the soprano saxophone and his success (or lack thereof) at finding a way to deploy that instrument in an ensemble in order to accurately gauge his abilities and put them in the context of his instrument’s legacy and potential.
as a composer of even eighth note based music, he SHOULD be compared to herbie hancock, horace silver or even grover washington. suffice it to say, on all above counts, at this point in his development, he wouldn’t fare well.
but, like i said at the top, this relatively benign view was all “until recently”.
not long ago, kenny g put out a recording where he overdubbed himself on top of a 30+ year old louis armstrong record, the track “what a wonderful world”. with this single move, kenny g became one of the few people on earth i can say that i really can't use at all - as a man, for his incredible arrogance to even consider such a thing, and as a musician, for presuming to share the stage with the single most important figure in our music.
this type of musical necrophilia - the technique of overdubbing on the preexisting tracks of already dead performers - was weird when natalie cole did it with her dad on “unforgettable” a few years ago, but it was her dad. when tony bennett did it with billie holiday it was bizarre, but we are talking about two of the greatest singers of the 20th century who were on roughly the same level of artistic accomplishment. when larry coryell presumed to overdub himself on top of a wes montgomery track, i lost a lot of the respect that i ever had for him - and i have to seriously question the fact that i did have respect for someone who could turn out to have have such unbelievably bad taste and be that disrespectful to one of my personal heroes.
but when kenny g decided that it was appropriate for him to defile the music of the man who is probably the greatest jazz musician that has ever lived by spewing his lame-ass, jive, pseudo bluesy, out-of-tune, noodling, wimped out, fucked up playing all over one of the great louis’s tracks (even one of his lesser ones), he did something that i would not have imagined possible. he, in one move, through his unbelievably pretentious and calloused musical decision to embark on this most cynical of musical paths, shit all over the graves of all the musicians past and present who have risked their lives by going out there on the road for years and years developing their own music inspired by the standards of grace that louis armstrong brought to every single note he played over an amazing lifetime as a musician. by disrespecting louis, his legacy and by default, everyone who has ever tried to do something positive with improvised music and what it can be, kenny g has created a new low point in modern culture - something that we all should be totally embarrassed about - and afraid of. we ignore this, “let it slide”, at our own peril.
his callous disregard for the larger issues of what this crass gesture implies is exacerbated by the fact that the only reason he possibly have for doing something this inherently wrong (on both human and musical terms) was for the record sales and the money it would bring.
since that record came out - in protest, as insigificant as it may be, i encourage everyone to boycott kenny g recordings, concerts and anything he is associated with. if asked about kenny g, i will diss him and his music with the same passion that is in evidence in this little essay.
normally, i feel that musicians all have a hard enough time, regardless of their level, just trying to play good and don’t really benefit from public criticism, particularly from their fellow players. but, this is different.
there ARE some things that are sacred - and amongst any musician that has ever attempted to address jazz at even the most basic of levels, louis armstrong and his music is hallowed ground. to ignore this trespass is to agree that NOTHING any musician has attempted to do with their life in music has any intrinsic value - and i refuse to do that. (i am also amazed that there HASN’T already been an outcry against this among music critics - where ARE they on this?????!?!?!?!- , magazines, etc.). everything i said here is exactly the same as what i would say to gorelick if i ever saw him in person. and if i ever DO see him anywhere, at any function - he WILL get a piece of my mind and (maybe a guitar wrapped around his head.)
NOTE: this post is partially in response to the comments that people have made regarding a short video interview excerpt with me that was posted on the internet taken from a tv show for young people (kind of like MTV) in poland where i was asked to address 8 to 11 year old kids on terms that they could understand about jazz.
while enthusiastically describing the virtues of this great area of music, i was encouraging the kids to find and listen to some of the greats in the music and not to get confused by the sometimes overwhelming volume of music that falls under the jazz umbrella. i went on to say that i think that for instance, “kenny g plays the dumbest music on the planet” - something that all 8 to 11 year kids on the planet already intrinsically know, as anyone who has ever spent any time around kids that age could confirm - so it gave us some common ground for the rest of the discussion. (ADDENDUM: the only thing wrong with the statement that i made was that i did not include the rest of the known universe.)
the fact that this clip was released so far out of the context that it was delivered in is a drag, but it is now done. (it’s unauthorized release out of context like that is symptomatic of the new electronically interconnected culture that we now live in - where pretty much anything anyone anywhere has ever said or done has the potential to become common public property at any time.) i was surprised by the polish people putting this clip up so far away from the use that it was intended -really just for the attention - with no explanation of the show it was made for - they (the polish people in general) used to be so hip and would have been unlikely candidates to do something like that before, but i guess everything is changing there like it is everywhere else.
the only other thing that surprised me in the aftermath of the release of this little interview is that ANYONE would be even a little bit surprised that i would say such a thing, given the reality of mr. g’s music. this makes me want to go practice about 10 times harder, because that suggests to me that i am not getting my own musical message across clearly enough - which to me, in every single way and intention is diametrically opposed to what Kenny G seems to be after.
Proceed to Part 2
Pat's comments are © Pat Metheny.
Copyright © 2000 Jazz Guitar ONLINE
Date: Jun 05 2000 Subject: Controversy and Kenny G
Question: Pat, could you tell us your opinion about Kenny G - it appears you were quoted as being less than enthusiastic about him and his music. I would say that most of the serious music listeners in the world would not find your opinion surprising or unlikely - but you were vocal about it for the first time. You are generally supportive of other musicians it seems.
Pat's Answer:
kenny g is not a musician i really had much of an opinion about at all until recently. there was not much about the way he played that interested me one way or the other either live or on records. i first heard him a number of years ago playing as a sideman with jeff lorber when they opened a concert for my band. my impression was that he was someone who had spent a fair amount of time listening to the more pop oriented sax players of that time, like grover washington or david sanborn, but was not really an advanced player, even in that style. he had major rhythmic problems and his harmonic and melodic vocabulary was extremely limited, mostly to pentatonic based and blues- lick derived patterns, and he basically exhibited only a rudimentary understanding of how to function as a professional soloist in an ensemble - lorber was basically playing him off the bandstand in terms of actual music. but he did show a knack for connecting to the basest impulses of the large crowd by deploying his two or three most effective licks (holding long notes and playing fast runs - never mind that there were lots of harmonic clams in them) at the keys moments to elicit a powerful crowd reaction (over and over again) . the other main thing i noticed was that he also, as he does to this day, play horribly out of tune - consistently sharp.
of course, i am aware of what he has played since, the success it has had, and the controversy that has surrounded him among musicians and serious listeners. this controversy seems to be largely fueled by the fact that he sells an enormous amount of records while not being anywhere near a really great player in relation to the standards that have been set on his instrument over the past sixty or seventy years.
and honestly, there is no small amount of envy involved from musicians who see one of their fellow players doing so well financially, especially when so many of them who are far superior as improvisors and musicians in general have trouble just making a living. there must be hundreds, if not thousands of sax players around the world who are simply better improvising musicians than kenny g on his chosen instruments. it would really surprise me if even he disagreed with that statement.
having said that, it has gotten me to thinking lately why so many jazz musicians (myself included, given the right “bait” of a question, as i will explain later) and audiences have gone so far as to say that what he is playing is not even jazz at all.
stepping back for a minute, if we examine the way he plays, especially if one can remove the actual improvising from the often mundane background environment that it is delivered in, we see that his saxophone style is in fact clearly in the tradition of the kind of playing that most reasonably objective listeners WOULD normally quantify as being jazz. it’s just that as jazz or even as music in a general sense, with these standards in mind, it is simply not up to the level of playing that we historically associate with professional improvising musicians. so, lately i have been advocating that we go ahead and just include it under the word jazz - since pretty much of the rest of the world OUTSIDE of the jazz community does anyway - and let the chips fall where they may.
and after all, why he should be judged by any other standard, why he should be exempt from that that all other serious musicians on his instrument are judged by if they attempt to use their abilities in an improvisational context playing with a rhythm section as he does? he SHOULD be compared to john coltrane or wayne shorter, for instance, on his abilities (or lack thereof) to play the soprano saxophone and his success (or lack thereof) at finding a way to deploy that instrument in an ensemble in order to accurately gauge his abilities and put them in the context of his instrument’s legacy and potential.
as a composer of even eighth note based music, he SHOULD be compared to herbie hancock, horace silver or even grover washington. suffice it to say, on all above counts, at this point in his development, he wouldn’t fare well.
but, like i said at the top, this relatively benign view was all “until recently”.
not long ago, kenny g put out a recording where he overdubbed himself on top of a 30+ year old louis armstrong record, the track “what a wonderful world”. with this single move, kenny g became one of the few people on earth i can say that i really can't use at all - as a man, for his incredible arrogance to even consider such a thing, and as a musician, for presuming to share the stage with the single most important figure in our music.
this type of musical necrophilia - the technique of overdubbing on the preexisting tracks of already dead performers - was weird when natalie cole did it with her dad on “unforgettable” a few years ago, but it was her dad. when tony bennett did it with billie holiday it was bizarre, but we are talking about two of the greatest singers of the 20th century who were on roughly the same level of artistic accomplishment. when larry coryell presumed to overdub himself on top of a wes montgomery track, i lost a lot of the respect that i ever had for him - and i have to seriously question the fact that i did have respect for someone who could turn out to have have such unbelievably bad taste and be that disrespectful to one of my personal heroes.
but when kenny g decided that it was appropriate for him to defile the music of the man who is probably the greatest jazz musician that has ever lived by spewing his lame-ass, jive, pseudo bluesy, out-of-tune, noodling, wimped out, fucked up playing all over one of the great louis’s tracks (even one of his lesser ones), he did something that i would not have imagined possible. he, in one move, through his unbelievably pretentious and calloused musical decision to embark on this most cynical of musical paths, shit all over the graves of all the musicians past and present who have risked their lives by going out there on the road for years and years developing their own music inspired by the standards of grace that louis armstrong brought to every single note he played over an amazing lifetime as a musician. by disrespecting louis, his legacy and by default, everyone who has ever tried to do something positive with improvised music and what it can be, kenny g has created a new low point in modern culture - something that we all should be totally embarrassed about - and afraid of. we ignore this, “let it slide”, at our own peril.
his callous disregard for the larger issues of what this crass gesture implies is exacerbated by the fact that the only reason he possibly have for doing something this inherently wrong (on both human and musical terms) was for the record sales and the money it would bring.
since that record came out - in protest, as insigificant as it may be, i encourage everyone to boycott kenny g recordings, concerts and anything he is associated with. if asked about kenny g, i will diss him and his music with the same passion that is in evidence in this little essay.
normally, i feel that musicians all have a hard enough time, regardless of their level, just trying to play good and don’t really benefit from public criticism, particularly from their fellow players. but, this is different.
there ARE some things that are sacred - and amongst any musician that has ever attempted to address jazz at even the most basic of levels, louis armstrong and his music is hallowed ground. to ignore this trespass is to agree that NOTHING any musician has attempted to do with their life in music has any intrinsic value - and i refuse to do that. (i am also amazed that there HASN’T already been an outcry against this among music critics - where ARE they on this?????!?!?!?!- , magazines, etc.). everything i said here is exactly the same as what i would say to gorelick if i ever saw him in person. and if i ever DO see him anywhere, at any function - he WILL get a piece of my mind and (maybe a guitar wrapped around his head.)
NOTE: this post is partially in response to the comments that people have made regarding a short video interview excerpt with me that was posted on the internet taken from a tv show for young people (kind of like MTV) in poland where i was asked to address 8 to 11 year old kids on terms that they could understand about jazz.
while enthusiastically describing the virtues of this great area of music, i was encouraging the kids to find and listen to some of the greats in the music and not to get confused by the sometimes overwhelming volume of music that falls under the jazz umbrella. i went on to say that i think that for instance, “kenny g plays the dumbest music on the planet” - something that all 8 to 11 year kids on the planet already intrinsically know, as anyone who has ever spent any time around kids that age could confirm - so it gave us some common ground for the rest of the discussion. (ADDENDUM: the only thing wrong with the statement that i made was that i did not include the rest of the known universe.)
the fact that this clip was released so far out of the context that it was delivered in is a drag, but it is now done. (it’s unauthorized release out of context like that is symptomatic of the new electronically interconnected culture that we now live in - where pretty much anything anyone anywhere has ever said or done has the potential to become common public property at any time.) i was surprised by the polish people putting this clip up so far away from the use that it was intended -really just for the attention - with no explanation of the show it was made for - they (the polish people in general) used to be so hip and would have been unlikely candidates to do something like that before, but i guess everything is changing there like it is everywhere else.
the only other thing that surprised me in the aftermath of the release of this little interview is that ANYONE would be even a little bit surprised that i would say such a thing, given the reality of mr. g’s music. this makes me want to go practice about 10 times harder, because that suggests to me that i am not getting my own musical message across clearly enough - which to me, in every single way and intention is diametrically opposed to what Kenny G seems to be after.
Proceed to Part 2
Pat's comments are © Pat Metheny.
Copyright © 2000 Jazz Guitar ONLINE
Saturday, May 07, 2005
America Heavy Metal Concert in Cuba
U.S. Band Gives Outdoor Concert in Cuba
By JOHN RICE, Associated Press WriterSat May 7, 4:46 PM ET
The American group Audioslave broke decades-long barriers with a thundering concert before thousands of Cuban fans — who knocked over barriers to get closer to the first U.S. rock band to play an outdoor concert in Cuba.
Chris Cornell's scream — "I won't do what you tell me!" — boomed off the high-rise apartment buildings on south side of the stage Friday night as feedback shrieks from Tom Morello's guitar drifted into the night breeze over the Caribbean to the north.
"This is the best thing that has happened here this year," said 25-year-old rock fan Omar Juanes.
"The best thing in your life," shouted a nearby friend who darted back into a crowd of more than 3,000 people — many with dreadlocks, body piercings and tattoos. A few swooped around the edges of the crowd on roller blades.
It was a distinct difference from the orderly, clean-cut crowds who march in massive anti-U.S. protests along the Malecon waterfront at the same venue: the Jose Marti Anti-Imperialist Tribunal before the U.S. Interests Section, or diplomatic mission.
Even before the concert, hundreds of fans were so eager that they sent metal security barricades clanging to the pavement and rushed forward to fill a 50-yard long area that had been reserved for special guests — mostly workers and teachers with exemplary official records.
Police allowed the fans to stay in the invaded space and several joked with tattooed youths in Metallica T-shirts swigging rum.
U.S. travel restrictions on Cuba and the Cuban government's ambivalence toward rock music have limited visits by U.S. rockers to Cuba.
Officials often cite Billy Joel's 1979 indoor performance as a rock and roll landmark here.
But elemental grunge, thrash and metal are the most popular styles of rock on an island rich in its own complex, polyrhythmic popular music.
Audioslave had the whole crowd screaming and dancing when it went back to its frantic, pounding, grungy roots, but left those in the back merely toe-tapping on some of the newer, less frantic songs.
"We would like to have stronger music — bands like Metallica," said a gaunt man sitting alongside friends on the Malecon seawall who gave his name as Walter Delgado, 32. Even so, he said, "We are happy for the first time in our rock and roll history."
By JOHN RICE, Associated Press WriterSat May 7, 4:46 PM ET
The American group Audioslave broke decades-long barriers with a thundering concert before thousands of Cuban fans — who knocked over barriers to get closer to the first U.S. rock band to play an outdoor concert in Cuba.
Chris Cornell's scream — "I won't do what you tell me!" — boomed off the high-rise apartment buildings on south side of the stage Friday night as feedback shrieks from Tom Morello's guitar drifted into the night breeze over the Caribbean to the north.
"This is the best thing that has happened here this year," said 25-year-old rock fan Omar Juanes.
"The best thing in your life," shouted a nearby friend who darted back into a crowd of more than 3,000 people — many with dreadlocks, body piercings and tattoos. A few swooped around the edges of the crowd on roller blades.
It was a distinct difference from the orderly, clean-cut crowds who march in massive anti-U.S. protests along the Malecon waterfront at the same venue: the Jose Marti Anti-Imperialist Tribunal before the U.S. Interests Section, or diplomatic mission.
Even before the concert, hundreds of fans were so eager that they sent metal security barricades clanging to the pavement and rushed forward to fill a 50-yard long area that had been reserved for special guests — mostly workers and teachers with exemplary official records.
Police allowed the fans to stay in the invaded space and several joked with tattooed youths in Metallica T-shirts swigging rum.
U.S. travel restrictions on Cuba and the Cuban government's ambivalence toward rock music have limited visits by U.S. rockers to Cuba.
Officials often cite Billy Joel's 1979 indoor performance as a rock and roll landmark here.
But elemental grunge, thrash and metal are the most popular styles of rock on an island rich in its own complex, polyrhythmic popular music.
Audioslave had the whole crowd screaming and dancing when it went back to its frantic, pounding, grungy roots, but left those in the back merely toe-tapping on some of the newer, less frantic songs.
"We would like to have stronger music — bands like Metallica," said a gaunt man sitting alongside friends on the Malecon seawall who gave his name as Walter Delgado, 32. Even so, he said, "We are happy for the first time in our rock and roll history."
Friday, May 06, 2005
New of the Weird: Music Item 05-05-05
Christopher Garica, 46, of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, was turned down for unemployment benefits in March because as administrative judge found that he was proporely fired by a convenience store for misconduct in that he would not stop "air drumming" on duty (using real drumsticks), causing some customers to complain of feeling threatened.
Thursday, May 05, 2005
Louie Louie, Round 185
Band Banned From Performing 'Louie Louie'
2 hours, 40 minutes ago
A pop culture controversy that has simmered for decades came to a head when a middle school marching band was told not to perform "Louie Louie."
Benton Harbor Superintendent Paula Dawning cited the song's allegedly raunchy lyrics in ordering the McCord Middle School band not to perform it in Saturday's Grand Floral Parade, held as part of the Blossomtime Festival.
In a letter sent home with McCord students, Dawning said "Louie Louie" was not appropriate for Benton Harbor students to play while representing the district — even though the marching band wasn't going to sing it.
Band members and parents complained to the Board of Education at its Tuesday meeting that it was too late to learn another song, The Herald-Palladium of St. Joseph reported.
"It's very stressful for us to try to come up with new songs for the band," eighth-grader Laurice Martin told the board. "We're trying to learn the songs from last year, but some of us weren't in the band last year."
Dawning said that if a majority of parents supports their children playing the song, she will reconsider her decision.
"It was not that I knew at the beginning and said nothing," Dawning said. "I normally count on the staff to make reliable decisions. I found out because a parent called, concerned about the song being played."
"Louie Louie," written by Richard Berry in 1956, is one of the most recorded songs in history. The best-known, most notorious version was a hit in 1963 for the Kingsmen; the FBI spent two years investigating the lyrics before declaring they not only were not obscene but also were "unintelligible at any speed."
2 hours, 40 minutes ago
A pop culture controversy that has simmered for decades came to a head when a middle school marching band was told not to perform "Louie Louie."
Benton Harbor Superintendent Paula Dawning cited the song's allegedly raunchy lyrics in ordering the McCord Middle School band not to perform it in Saturday's Grand Floral Parade, held as part of the Blossomtime Festival.
In a letter sent home with McCord students, Dawning said "Louie Louie" was not appropriate for Benton Harbor students to play while representing the district — even though the marching band wasn't going to sing it.
Band members and parents complained to the Board of Education at its Tuesday meeting that it was too late to learn another song, The Herald-Palladium of St. Joseph reported.
"It's very stressful for us to try to come up with new songs for the band," eighth-grader Laurice Martin told the board. "We're trying to learn the songs from last year, but some of us weren't in the band last year."
Dawning said that if a majority of parents supports their children playing the song, she will reconsider her decision.
"It was not that I knew at the beginning and said nothing," Dawning said. "I normally count on the staff to make reliable decisions. I found out because a parent called, concerned about the song being played."
"Louie Louie," written by Richard Berry in 1956, is one of the most recorded songs in history. The best-known, most notorious version was a hit in 1963 for the Kingsmen; the FBI spent two years investigating the lyrics before declaring they not only were not obscene but also were "unintelligible at any speed."
Sunday, May 01, 2005
Reggaeton in LA
A Rowdy Sound Leaves Salsa Behind on the Dance Floor
By Agustin Gurza
Times Staff Writer
April 30, 2005
At the Rumba Room, a two-story nightclub at Universal CityWalk that draws a young Latino crowd, the entertainment is segregated. Downstairs, dancers groove mostly to a mix of salsa, cumbia and merengue. Upstairs, the vibe is strictly hip-hop, the language mainly English.
Every Friday, however, the stroke of midnight signals a spontaneous shift toward that most elusive of dance-floor moments: full nightclub consensus.
That's when DJ Joe Matrix starts spinning the hottest new sound in Latin music: "reggaeton," a gritty tropical fusion that palpably amps up the club's energy level. Fans swarm the main floor as music born in Puerto Rican barrios takes center stage 3,300 miles away.
Within the last year, this rowdy and often raunchy dance music has spread like a riot through the youth culture of Latin America, from the streets of San Juan to the nightclubs of Santiago de Chile, Hollywood and East L.A. With a pulsing beat that even detractors find hard to resist, reggaeton (pronounced reggae-TONE) has suddenly surfaced as the most powerful commercial force in Latin music since Ricky Martin made America live la vida loca.
While corporate music executives were caught up looking for another Ricky, it turns out, the rough-and-tumble stars of reggaeton were developing the next big thing under the industry's radar in the poor neighborhoods and housing projects of Puerto Rico. Their grass-roots musical movement, nurtured at the edges of society and commerce in the do-it-yourself fashion of early hip-hop, is a bootstrap success story in today's focus-group-driven entertainment industry.
The music followed several intertwining paths from barrio to world music stage. It spread slowly at first through the constant mobility of immigrants: Puerto Ricans in New York, especially, and Central Americans in Los Angeles. Once major record labels caught wind of this localized phenomenon, they helped disseminate the style by feeding records to club DJs, the genre's key tastemakers. Then, in the past year, the music catapulted to the top of the charts through the tried-and-true music business method: the making of hits.
This weekend, the Reggaeton Invasion tour sweeps into town for two shows at Gibson Amphitheatre (formerly Universal Amphitheatre). Tickets sold out in 10 days for concerts tonight and Sunday at the 6,200-seat auditorium. The tour features the genre's top stars — Daddy Yankee, Don Omar, Hector El Bambino and Luny Tunes — and testifies to its recent West Coast breakthrough.
The wave seems to have hit California overnight, even though the music's origins date back a quarter-century. Just last year, major reggaeton acts Tego Calderon and Ivy Queen appeared in Los Angeles with almost no fanfare, drawing modest crowds to obscure venues such as Prince Hall, a Masonic lodge near Compton.
Since the birth of rock 'n' roll, populist musical movements have exposed the recording industry as being out of touch with the pulse of the streets. Major record companies, for instance, were slow to take rap seriously when it began in the 1970s.
In Puerto Rico, while Latin labels continued to promote the polished salsa sound of stars such as Marc Anthony, fans were growing weary of the dance music that many felt had become homogenized in the corporate rush to spread its popularity.
"We asked ourselves, 'What's happening with salsa sales?' " said John Echevarria, president of Universal's Latin division in the U.S. "They keep falling and falling and falling. One answer, obviously, was piracy. But the next thing we discovered was that an underground [reggaeton] market had developed, and it was very active. We realized there was this whole other genre that had filled the void."
Topping this weekend's bill is the dashing Daddy Yankee, a veteran rapper with a bullet wound in his leg who has emerged as reggaeton's first superstar. His latest CD, "Barrio Fino," is the first reggaeton album to crack the Top 30 on Billboard's pop album chart. Propelled by the infectious party hit "Gasolina," it's close to becoming the first reggaeton album to sell 1 million units in the U.S. and Puerto Rico.
The CD is one of eight reggaeton releases among the Top 25 sellers on Billboard's Latin album chart.
Though reggaeton hasn't yet reached the success of crossover artists such as Martin or Shakira, the music is getting a big boost from some mainstream media outlets. Reggaeton and other Latin hip-hop tracks are now part of the regular rotation on L.A.'s top-rated hip-hop station, Power 106 (KPWR-FM, 105.9)
"All the kids are going crazy over this music," said Tony Matrix, brother and business partner of the Rumba Room DJ. "It's like when disco came out and everybody went wild for it."
And nothing says success like endorsement deals. Recently, Daddy Yankee was tapped to promote rapper Sean "P. Diddy" Combs' clothing line, Sean John.
Calderon, with his big Afro and gap between his front teeth, appeared last year on billboards promoting Hennessy Cognac. Still, in the fickle world of popular music, reggaeton's staying power is an open question. "Those who don't understand it say it's just a fad," said Daddy Yankee, interviewed recently in Puerto Rico. "But those of us who live it, who dress it, who speak it and express it, we know that what we have created is more than that. It's a way of life."
A Distinct Twist
The first Spanish-language reggae records were made in the 1970s in working-class neighborhoods of Panama City, populated by descendants of Jamaican immigrants who moved there to help build the Panama Canal.
"When we recorded [reggae] in Spanish, we gave it our own distinct twist, adding idiosyncrasies that are totally different from Jamaican folklore," said Panamanian musician El General, whose 1980s recordings are considered precursors of reggaeton. "We added timbales and congas instead of drums, and it started taking on a different flavor."
The signature rhythm of reggaeton is based on the beat of Jamaican dancehall music, but with more muscle. It has the go-go energy of a cheerleading chant, the menacing undercurrent of gangsta rap and the chug-a-lug ethos of a fraternity party. It also has its own dance, a sexually suggestive bump-and-grind indelicately called el perreo — roughly translated, the doggie dance.
The music quickly took root in Puerto Rico, where artists such as Vico C had pioneered a vibrant style of Spanish-language rap, also during the 1980s. It was this melding of borrowed styles — Latino rap and Latino reggae — that gave birth to the genre. Puerto Ricans later enhanced it by adding layers of other tropical styles: salsa, merengue, bachata and even Puerto Rican bomba.
As the popularity of reggaeton has spread, it has not only eclipsed salsa sales, but also muscled ahead of competing strains of Spanish-language rap and hip-hop, including the homegrown L.A. variety by artists such as Akwid, who combine hip-hop with traditional Mexican music. Most local Latino rappers still struggle to attract audiences to club shows where they play for promotion but little or no pay.
L.A.'s barrio rappers tend to have a somber message and thuggish image, which, even supporters admit, has kept them from breaking out of their niche market.
"People love the fact that reggaeton is danceable," said Rick Valenzuela, partner in Rik-Raf Entertainment, which manages local Latino rap acts. "That's part of why it's blowing up."
Reggaeton can be socially conscious and politically assertive, but it's the sexually charged, party-hearty aspect that has it blasting from car radios seemingly everywhere.
"You can have a headache, you can feel upset, you can be anemic, and suddenly, you're in your car, you put on the music and it's all good," said Tato Hernandez, a burly promoter who cranked up the volume in his pickup as he cruised San Juan streets. "Reggaeton takes people and just turns them around."
British-born businessman Adam Kidron sees another quality in reggaeton that helps explain its success: "That hip-hop confidence to influence the world."
Kidron's company, Urban Box Office, a New York-based firm that markets directly to Latinos via bodegas, barbershops and newsstands, distributes a DVD/CD package titled "Chosen Few 'El Documental,' " which has been on the Billboard charts for almost 20 weeks.
It's the only reggaeton album among the eight on the chart that is not distributed by Universal Music, which has taken the lead in making deals with the major players. This year, Universal went beyond simply distributing reggaeton recordings by establishing its own urban music label, Machete Music, and it quickly bought a half interest in VI, the dominant independent reggaeton label with five of those eight charting albums.
Partnering with mainstream multinational labels has been one key to the recent growth of reggaeton. But coming to those agreements was not easy. At first, reggaeton was often associated with drugs, gangs, violence and sex. The music was largely ignored by the record industry and actively suppressed by powerful opponents in Puerto Rico.
Additionally, the performers weren't terribly interested in all that came with major-label respectability. They were accustomed to using music samples of U.S. hits without permission and saying whatever they wanted without censorship. Many were suspicious of corporations and believed they could make more money peddling homemade cassettes out of apartments in the projects, or cacerios.
That insular attitude slowed the music's expansion. But it greatly increased the musicians' credibility in the eyes of fans.
"These guys have survived in a world where nobody would open up a door for them," said Gus Lopez, head of Universal's Burbank-based Machete label. "They made money, lost money, made videos that never got played, got shot down by the media, maybe even hit with a couple of lawsuits because of all the sampling they were doing. But they did it all themselves…. The kids know when they say something, they've lived it."
Today, even Puerto Rican politicians have abandoned their opposition and jumped on the reggaeton bandwagon. In last year's national elections, candidates from all three of the island's political parties campaigned to reggaeton beats.
Still, the music remains primarily a Latino pop phenomenon, lacking the crossover success that catapulted artists of the Latin explosion into mainstream pop stardom. Some say the continued growth of the genre depends on its ability to establish greater links with mainstream hip-hop.
Combs' choice of Daddy Yankee as a pitchman is more than just a fashion endorsement; it's a crucial endorsement for reggaeton, said Jazmin Perez, assistant music editor at the hip-hop magazine Vibe in New York.
"It's kind of like [Combs] saying that Daddy Yankee is part of hip-hop," Perez said.
Continued collaborations, she added, will determine whether reggaeton remains a fad or becomes a long-term force in pop music. Last year, a reggaeton/hip-hop collaboration — "Oye Mi Canto" by New York rapper N.O.R.E. with Daddy Yankee — marked a milestone when it hit the Top 20 on the Billboard and MTV charts.
"That was the song that put reggaeton on the map, maybe more so than 'Gasolina,' " said David Gomez, a musician who works the world-music section at Amoeba Music in Hollywood. " 'Oye Mi Canto' got people asking about the music. That was the bridge."
Back at the Rumba Room, a firecracker DJ named Khool-Aid, from Power 106, warmed up the crowd with a string of epithets and obscene gestures. A self-described "Jewish girl from the Valley," she was there to introduce reggaeton's Julio Voltio, the night's special guest from Puerto Rico.
Voltio, who has recorded a track with L.A. rapper Lil Rob, emerged with the ubiquitous hip-hop cap worn sideways, "L.A." stitched to the front. It's a savvy salute to the hometown fans, mostly Mexican American, and who, like the Matrix brothers, are helping propel the reggaeton juggernaut on its westward expansion.
"The boom is here," Khool-Aid, host of the syndicated Latino rap show "Pocos Pero Locos," said during an interview. "People want to hear their own voice. It's the streets…. It's the future."
By Agustin Gurza
Times Staff Writer
April 30, 2005
At the Rumba Room, a two-story nightclub at Universal CityWalk that draws a young Latino crowd, the entertainment is segregated. Downstairs, dancers groove mostly to a mix of salsa, cumbia and merengue. Upstairs, the vibe is strictly hip-hop, the language mainly English.
Every Friday, however, the stroke of midnight signals a spontaneous shift toward that most elusive of dance-floor moments: full nightclub consensus.
That's when DJ Joe Matrix starts spinning the hottest new sound in Latin music: "reggaeton," a gritty tropical fusion that palpably amps up the club's energy level. Fans swarm the main floor as music born in Puerto Rican barrios takes center stage 3,300 miles away.
Within the last year, this rowdy and often raunchy dance music has spread like a riot through the youth culture of Latin America, from the streets of San Juan to the nightclubs of Santiago de Chile, Hollywood and East L.A. With a pulsing beat that even detractors find hard to resist, reggaeton (pronounced reggae-TONE) has suddenly surfaced as the most powerful commercial force in Latin music since Ricky Martin made America live la vida loca.
While corporate music executives were caught up looking for another Ricky, it turns out, the rough-and-tumble stars of reggaeton were developing the next big thing under the industry's radar in the poor neighborhoods and housing projects of Puerto Rico. Their grass-roots musical movement, nurtured at the edges of society and commerce in the do-it-yourself fashion of early hip-hop, is a bootstrap success story in today's focus-group-driven entertainment industry.
The music followed several intertwining paths from barrio to world music stage. It spread slowly at first through the constant mobility of immigrants: Puerto Ricans in New York, especially, and Central Americans in Los Angeles. Once major record labels caught wind of this localized phenomenon, they helped disseminate the style by feeding records to club DJs, the genre's key tastemakers. Then, in the past year, the music catapulted to the top of the charts through the tried-and-true music business method: the making of hits.
This weekend, the Reggaeton Invasion tour sweeps into town for two shows at Gibson Amphitheatre (formerly Universal Amphitheatre). Tickets sold out in 10 days for concerts tonight and Sunday at the 6,200-seat auditorium. The tour features the genre's top stars — Daddy Yankee, Don Omar, Hector El Bambino and Luny Tunes — and testifies to its recent West Coast breakthrough.
The wave seems to have hit California overnight, even though the music's origins date back a quarter-century. Just last year, major reggaeton acts Tego Calderon and Ivy Queen appeared in Los Angeles with almost no fanfare, drawing modest crowds to obscure venues such as Prince Hall, a Masonic lodge near Compton.
Since the birth of rock 'n' roll, populist musical movements have exposed the recording industry as being out of touch with the pulse of the streets. Major record companies, for instance, were slow to take rap seriously when it began in the 1970s.
In Puerto Rico, while Latin labels continued to promote the polished salsa sound of stars such as Marc Anthony, fans were growing weary of the dance music that many felt had become homogenized in the corporate rush to spread its popularity.
"We asked ourselves, 'What's happening with salsa sales?' " said John Echevarria, president of Universal's Latin division in the U.S. "They keep falling and falling and falling. One answer, obviously, was piracy. But the next thing we discovered was that an underground [reggaeton] market had developed, and it was very active. We realized there was this whole other genre that had filled the void."
Topping this weekend's bill is the dashing Daddy Yankee, a veteran rapper with a bullet wound in his leg who has emerged as reggaeton's first superstar. His latest CD, "Barrio Fino," is the first reggaeton album to crack the Top 30 on Billboard's pop album chart. Propelled by the infectious party hit "Gasolina," it's close to becoming the first reggaeton album to sell 1 million units in the U.S. and Puerto Rico.
The CD is one of eight reggaeton releases among the Top 25 sellers on Billboard's Latin album chart.
Though reggaeton hasn't yet reached the success of crossover artists such as Martin or Shakira, the music is getting a big boost from some mainstream media outlets. Reggaeton and other Latin hip-hop tracks are now part of the regular rotation on L.A.'s top-rated hip-hop station, Power 106 (KPWR-FM, 105.9)
"All the kids are going crazy over this music," said Tony Matrix, brother and business partner of the Rumba Room DJ. "It's like when disco came out and everybody went wild for it."
And nothing says success like endorsement deals. Recently, Daddy Yankee was tapped to promote rapper Sean "P. Diddy" Combs' clothing line, Sean John.
Calderon, with his big Afro and gap between his front teeth, appeared last year on billboards promoting Hennessy Cognac. Still, in the fickle world of popular music, reggaeton's staying power is an open question. "Those who don't understand it say it's just a fad," said Daddy Yankee, interviewed recently in Puerto Rico. "But those of us who live it, who dress it, who speak it and express it, we know that what we have created is more than that. It's a way of life."
A Distinct Twist
The first Spanish-language reggae records were made in the 1970s in working-class neighborhoods of Panama City, populated by descendants of Jamaican immigrants who moved there to help build the Panama Canal.
"When we recorded [reggae] in Spanish, we gave it our own distinct twist, adding idiosyncrasies that are totally different from Jamaican folklore," said Panamanian musician El General, whose 1980s recordings are considered precursors of reggaeton. "We added timbales and congas instead of drums, and it started taking on a different flavor."
The signature rhythm of reggaeton is based on the beat of Jamaican dancehall music, but with more muscle. It has the go-go energy of a cheerleading chant, the menacing undercurrent of gangsta rap and the chug-a-lug ethos of a fraternity party. It also has its own dance, a sexually suggestive bump-and-grind indelicately called el perreo — roughly translated, the doggie dance.
The music quickly took root in Puerto Rico, where artists such as Vico C had pioneered a vibrant style of Spanish-language rap, also during the 1980s. It was this melding of borrowed styles — Latino rap and Latino reggae — that gave birth to the genre. Puerto Ricans later enhanced it by adding layers of other tropical styles: salsa, merengue, bachata and even Puerto Rican bomba.
As the popularity of reggaeton has spread, it has not only eclipsed salsa sales, but also muscled ahead of competing strains of Spanish-language rap and hip-hop, including the homegrown L.A. variety by artists such as Akwid, who combine hip-hop with traditional Mexican music. Most local Latino rappers still struggle to attract audiences to club shows where they play for promotion but little or no pay.
L.A.'s barrio rappers tend to have a somber message and thuggish image, which, even supporters admit, has kept them from breaking out of their niche market.
"People love the fact that reggaeton is danceable," said Rick Valenzuela, partner in Rik-Raf Entertainment, which manages local Latino rap acts. "That's part of why it's blowing up."
Reggaeton can be socially conscious and politically assertive, but it's the sexually charged, party-hearty aspect that has it blasting from car radios seemingly everywhere.
"You can have a headache, you can feel upset, you can be anemic, and suddenly, you're in your car, you put on the music and it's all good," said Tato Hernandez, a burly promoter who cranked up the volume in his pickup as he cruised San Juan streets. "Reggaeton takes people and just turns them around."
British-born businessman Adam Kidron sees another quality in reggaeton that helps explain its success: "That hip-hop confidence to influence the world."
Kidron's company, Urban Box Office, a New York-based firm that markets directly to Latinos via bodegas, barbershops and newsstands, distributes a DVD/CD package titled "Chosen Few 'El Documental,' " which has been on the Billboard charts for almost 20 weeks.
It's the only reggaeton album among the eight on the chart that is not distributed by Universal Music, which has taken the lead in making deals with the major players. This year, Universal went beyond simply distributing reggaeton recordings by establishing its own urban music label, Machete Music, and it quickly bought a half interest in VI, the dominant independent reggaeton label with five of those eight charting albums.
Partnering with mainstream multinational labels has been one key to the recent growth of reggaeton. But coming to those agreements was not easy. At first, reggaeton was often associated with drugs, gangs, violence and sex. The music was largely ignored by the record industry and actively suppressed by powerful opponents in Puerto Rico.
Additionally, the performers weren't terribly interested in all that came with major-label respectability. They were accustomed to using music samples of U.S. hits without permission and saying whatever they wanted without censorship. Many were suspicious of corporations and believed they could make more money peddling homemade cassettes out of apartments in the projects, or cacerios.
That insular attitude slowed the music's expansion. But it greatly increased the musicians' credibility in the eyes of fans.
"These guys have survived in a world where nobody would open up a door for them," said Gus Lopez, head of Universal's Burbank-based Machete label. "They made money, lost money, made videos that never got played, got shot down by the media, maybe even hit with a couple of lawsuits because of all the sampling they were doing. But they did it all themselves…. The kids know when they say something, they've lived it."
Today, even Puerto Rican politicians have abandoned their opposition and jumped on the reggaeton bandwagon. In last year's national elections, candidates from all three of the island's political parties campaigned to reggaeton beats.
Still, the music remains primarily a Latino pop phenomenon, lacking the crossover success that catapulted artists of the Latin explosion into mainstream pop stardom. Some say the continued growth of the genre depends on its ability to establish greater links with mainstream hip-hop.
Combs' choice of Daddy Yankee as a pitchman is more than just a fashion endorsement; it's a crucial endorsement for reggaeton, said Jazmin Perez, assistant music editor at the hip-hop magazine Vibe in New York.
"It's kind of like [Combs] saying that Daddy Yankee is part of hip-hop," Perez said.
Continued collaborations, she added, will determine whether reggaeton remains a fad or becomes a long-term force in pop music. Last year, a reggaeton/hip-hop collaboration — "Oye Mi Canto" by New York rapper N.O.R.E. with Daddy Yankee — marked a milestone when it hit the Top 20 on the Billboard and MTV charts.
"That was the song that put reggaeton on the map, maybe more so than 'Gasolina,' " said David Gomez, a musician who works the world-music section at Amoeba Music in Hollywood. " 'Oye Mi Canto' got people asking about the music. That was the bridge."
Back at the Rumba Room, a firecracker DJ named Khool-Aid, from Power 106, warmed up the crowd with a string of epithets and obscene gestures. A self-described "Jewish girl from the Valley," she was there to introduce reggaeton's Julio Voltio, the night's special guest from Puerto Rico.
Voltio, who has recorded a track with L.A. rapper Lil Rob, emerged with the ubiquitous hip-hop cap worn sideways, "L.A." stitched to the front. It's a savvy salute to the hometown fans, mostly Mexican American, and who, like the Matrix brothers, are helping propel the reggaeton juggernaut on its westward expansion.
"The boom is here," Khool-Aid, host of the syndicated Latino rap show "Pocos Pero Locos," said during an interview. "People want to hear their own voice. It's the streets…. It's the future."
Thursday, April 28, 2005
Bollywood Business
Wednesday April 27, 01:28 PM
Bollywood's attempt to escape murky past falters after flops
Photo : AFP
BOMBAY (AFP) - Bollywood -- the world's largest movie-making centre -- has long been burdened by associations with Bombay's underworld, deriving much of its funding from gangsters' so-called "black money".
Just five years ago the Hindi cinema industry's credibility was at an all-time low as the "mob" brought kidnapping, murder and extortion along with its much-needed funding.
But in 2001 a sudden influx of "clean" cash from India's major industrial groups hoping to make quick bucks by dabbling in the glitzy and glamorous world of film heralded a new dawn for the industry.
Top conglomerates run by India's wealthiest families -- such as the Tatas, the Birlas, the Singhanias and liquor baron Vijay Mallya -- plunged into film financing when the Indian government declared Bollywood a bona fide industry.
A series of flops and millions of lost dollars later, however, and the more respectable investors are running scared, leaving Bollywood's hopes of putting its murky past behind in tatters.
Many of the new financiers have been left with burnt fingers after backing flicks with weak scripts, and are rethinking their strategies. Tata, meanwhile, has pulled out of the business altogether.
"They are licking their wounds and reviewing what went wrong," says film analyst Indu Mirani.
"These companies were worse than some of those truck transporters who put their surplus money into films," she says, referring to a trend in the late 1990s when anyone with spare cash would put it into a Bollywood movie in the hope of quick returns and that the industry's glamour would rub off on them.
The main problem says Mirani, is that the big companies had no experience of film and chose weak scripts, which even big stars such as Bollywood legend Amitabh Bachchan and leading actors Sanjay Dutt, Hrithik Roshan, Bipasha Basu and Rani Mukherjee could not rescue.
"It appears that even these sophisticated businessmen got enamoured by the glamour and forgot that finally it is the script that has to be good and not just the stars for a film to be a hit," Mirani tells AFP.
In the past few years, the Tatas produced suspense drama "Aetbaar" (Trust), the Pantaloon group made romantic flick "Na Tum Jaano Na Hum" (Neither You Know, Neither Do I), the Birlas made "Dev" and "Black" -- a story of a deaf, dumb and blind girl -- while the Singhanias made love story "Woh Tera Naam Tha" (That Was Your Name) and Mallya produced action-cum-suspense drama "Rakht" (Blood).
"All these movies failed to connect with the Indian audiences who are very fickle," says Mirani.
Trade figures reveal that "Aetbaar" earned about two-thirds of its 150 million rupee (3.4 million dollar) production costs while "Woh Tera Naam Tha" earned just 40 million rupees against an investment of 120 million rupees.
While "Dev" lost half of its around 60 million rupees budget, "Black", according to Applause Entertainment -- the filmmaking arm of the Birla group -- managed to come out ahead, making 30 million rupees profit.
None of the top 10 Bollywood films of 2004, according to a list by global research house PricewaterhouseCoopers, was produced by companies. They were made by long-time filmmakers putting their own money in scripts that clicked with the audience.
"The movie business is a quick-sand business and is driven by passion," says Anshuman Swami, chief executive of Birla-owned Applause Entertainment.
"We have made money from 'Black' and intend to fund films in the future. We will continue to make movies, but know that the game is slow and steady."
The Tatas, however, decided enough was enough after "Aetbaar" bombed and sold off its media division, Tata Infomedia -- which included film division Cutting Edge, to ICICI Ventures.
The new owners, who have renamed the company Infomedia India, shut down Cutting Edge as they felt it was not feasible to produce films.
"We didn't see any competitive advantage in the film business," says Prakash Iyer, managing director of Infomedia India Limited. "We felt it made better sense to see other business opportunities."
Officials from the Singhanias and Mallya group were not available for comment.
Bollywood, India's prolific Hindu-language film industry that churns out about 250 features a year, accepts part of the blame, saying a lack of professionalism has left companies disillusioned.
"I think the only reason companies are not coming is the indiscipline in the film industry," actress Urmila Matondkar tells AFP.
"I remember when I was a newcomer I used to land up on sets early, or on time, and everyone used to make fun of it, saying I was punctual because I was new."
Aside from big companies, the turn of the millennium has brought into Bollywood other sources of financing, including loans from the Industrial Development Bank of India, the raising of equity on the stock market and private equity deals in which individuals enter into contracts for financing a movie with returns payable on profits made.
Other "non-traditional sources" of funding, says Sunir Kheterpal of India's Yes Bank, who has just released a detailed report on the financing of Indian film, include funds from music companies and television channels.
"In addition to entry of new money into the Hindi film industry, this trend will enable higher transparency in operations," says Kheterpal.
Before 2000, some 40 to 50 percent of movies made were funded by the underworld, with gangsters in Bombay conducting a reign of terror and extortion against producers, directors and even actors, according to various industry estimates.
But the stranglehold of the "mob" loosened when police launched a massive crackdown, arresting some kingpins in Bombay as well as in Dubai.
"In a situation like this when the industry was losing its credibility, companies came in with funds and everyone thought it was the best thing to happen to Bollywood," says analyst Mirani.
But she adds, they came in overly cautious.
"They gave money only to big banners and projects with big actors. Newcomers who had brilliant scripts were left stranded for want of money as companies were not keen to take the business risk," she says.
"People with brilliant scripts did not get access to money or to stars."
Experts feel the way out for Bollywood is for the industry itself to corporatise rather than depend on big companies to front up with funds.
They say traditional filmmakers should float professional business entities and fund films that will tell a good story.
"Corporatisation of the industry has to happen and in fact it is slowly happening," producer-director Subhash Ghai tells AFP.
"For the healthy growth of Bollywood, the future has to be a blend of corporate culture and film mind," adds analyst Mirani.
Bollywood's attempt to escape murky past falters after flops
Photo : AFP
BOMBAY (AFP) - Bollywood -- the world's largest movie-making centre -- has long been burdened by associations with Bombay's underworld, deriving much of its funding from gangsters' so-called "black money".
Just five years ago the Hindi cinema industry's credibility was at an all-time low as the "mob" brought kidnapping, murder and extortion along with its much-needed funding.
But in 2001 a sudden influx of "clean" cash from India's major industrial groups hoping to make quick bucks by dabbling in the glitzy and glamorous world of film heralded a new dawn for the industry.
Top conglomerates run by India's wealthiest families -- such as the Tatas, the Birlas, the Singhanias and liquor baron Vijay Mallya -- plunged into film financing when the Indian government declared Bollywood a bona fide industry.
A series of flops and millions of lost dollars later, however, and the more respectable investors are running scared, leaving Bollywood's hopes of putting its murky past behind in tatters.
Many of the new financiers have been left with burnt fingers after backing flicks with weak scripts, and are rethinking their strategies. Tata, meanwhile, has pulled out of the business altogether.
"They are licking their wounds and reviewing what went wrong," says film analyst Indu Mirani.
"These companies were worse than some of those truck transporters who put their surplus money into films," she says, referring to a trend in the late 1990s when anyone with spare cash would put it into a Bollywood movie in the hope of quick returns and that the industry's glamour would rub off on them.
The main problem says Mirani, is that the big companies had no experience of film and chose weak scripts, which even big stars such as Bollywood legend Amitabh Bachchan and leading actors Sanjay Dutt, Hrithik Roshan, Bipasha Basu and Rani Mukherjee could not rescue.
"It appears that even these sophisticated businessmen got enamoured by the glamour and forgot that finally it is the script that has to be good and not just the stars for a film to be a hit," Mirani tells AFP.
In the past few years, the Tatas produced suspense drama "Aetbaar" (Trust), the Pantaloon group made romantic flick "Na Tum Jaano Na Hum" (Neither You Know, Neither Do I), the Birlas made "Dev" and "Black" -- a story of a deaf, dumb and blind girl -- while the Singhanias made love story "Woh Tera Naam Tha" (That Was Your Name) and Mallya produced action-cum-suspense drama "Rakht" (Blood).
"All these movies failed to connect with the Indian audiences who are very fickle," says Mirani.
Trade figures reveal that "Aetbaar" earned about two-thirds of its 150 million rupee (3.4 million dollar) production costs while "Woh Tera Naam Tha" earned just 40 million rupees against an investment of 120 million rupees.
While "Dev" lost half of its around 60 million rupees budget, "Black", according to Applause Entertainment -- the filmmaking arm of the Birla group -- managed to come out ahead, making 30 million rupees profit.
None of the top 10 Bollywood films of 2004, according to a list by global research house PricewaterhouseCoopers, was produced by companies. They were made by long-time filmmakers putting their own money in scripts that clicked with the audience.
"The movie business is a quick-sand business and is driven by passion," says Anshuman Swami, chief executive of Birla-owned Applause Entertainment.
"We have made money from 'Black' and intend to fund films in the future. We will continue to make movies, but know that the game is slow and steady."
The Tatas, however, decided enough was enough after "Aetbaar" bombed and sold off its media division, Tata Infomedia -- which included film division Cutting Edge, to ICICI Ventures.
The new owners, who have renamed the company Infomedia India, shut down Cutting Edge as they felt it was not feasible to produce films.
"We didn't see any competitive advantage in the film business," says Prakash Iyer, managing director of Infomedia India Limited. "We felt it made better sense to see other business opportunities."
Officials from the Singhanias and Mallya group were not available for comment.
Bollywood, India's prolific Hindu-language film industry that churns out about 250 features a year, accepts part of the blame, saying a lack of professionalism has left companies disillusioned.
"I think the only reason companies are not coming is the indiscipline in the film industry," actress Urmila Matondkar tells AFP.
"I remember when I was a newcomer I used to land up on sets early, or on time, and everyone used to make fun of it, saying I was punctual because I was new."
Aside from big companies, the turn of the millennium has brought into Bollywood other sources of financing, including loans from the Industrial Development Bank of India, the raising of equity on the stock market and private equity deals in which individuals enter into contracts for financing a movie with returns payable on profits made.
Other "non-traditional sources" of funding, says Sunir Kheterpal of India's Yes Bank, who has just released a detailed report on the financing of Indian film, include funds from music companies and television channels.
"In addition to entry of new money into the Hindi film industry, this trend will enable higher transparency in operations," says Kheterpal.
Before 2000, some 40 to 50 percent of movies made were funded by the underworld, with gangsters in Bombay conducting a reign of terror and extortion against producers, directors and even actors, according to various industry estimates.
But the stranglehold of the "mob" loosened when police launched a massive crackdown, arresting some kingpins in Bombay as well as in Dubai.
"In a situation like this when the industry was losing its credibility, companies came in with funds and everyone thought it was the best thing to happen to Bollywood," says analyst Mirani.
But she adds, they came in overly cautious.
"They gave money only to big banners and projects with big actors. Newcomers who had brilliant scripts were left stranded for want of money as companies were not keen to take the business risk," she says.
"People with brilliant scripts did not get access to money or to stars."
Experts feel the way out for Bollywood is for the industry itself to corporatise rather than depend on big companies to front up with funds.
They say traditional filmmakers should float professional business entities and fund films that will tell a good story.
"Corporatisation of the industry has to happen and in fact it is slowly happening," producer-director Subhash Ghai tells AFP.
"For the healthy growth of Bollywood, the future has to be a blend of corporate culture and film mind," adds analyst Mirani.
Tuesday, April 26, 2005
Important French Ruling on Copyright
MSNBC.com
French court rules against copy protection
Unprecedented DVD ruling could have huge consequences
The Associated Press
Updated: 6:47 p.m. ET April 26, 2005
PARIS - A French court has ordered DVD vendors to pull copies of the David Lynch film "Mulholland Drive" off store shelves as part of an unprecedented ruling against copy prevention techniques.
The appeals court ruled Friday that copy prevention software on the DVD violated privacy rights in the case of one consumer who had tried to transfer the film onto a video cassette for personal use.
The ruling could be a major setback for the DVD industry, which places lock software on disks as part of its battle against piracy. The industry blames illegal copying for millions of dollars in lost revenues each year.
"This ruling means that 80 percent of DVDs now on the French market are equipped with illegal mechanisms," said Julien Dourgnon, spokesman for consumer advocacy group UFC-Que Choisir, which brought the case.
"Stores will probably not have to send back products already in stock," Dourgnon said Tuesday. "But in the future, no DVD or CD that has the device can be sold."
France, along with other European Union members including Germany and Spain, has laws guaranteeing the right of consumers to copy recordings they have purchased for private use.
Lionel Thoumyre, a lawyer for the artist rights group Spedidam, said the ruling sets a new precedent in the European Union, where intellectual property laws are nearly identical among member states.
"This is brand new," he said. "I think this is the first judgment in Europe going in this direction."
The consumer group filed the suit on behalf of a man who bought the "Mulholland Drive" DVD and then wanted to copy the movie onto a videocassette so he could show the film at his mother's home.
The ruling overturned a lower court's decision in favor of the defendants, co-producers Alain Sarde Films and Studio Canal and distributor Universal. The suit was filed in 2003.
The defendants also were found guilty of violating French consumer protection laws, which state that a vendor must notify consumers of a product's essential characteristics.
The only notification of the copy prevention software on the DVD in this case were the letters "CP," short for "copying prohibited," in small print on the cover, a warning that the court found insufficient.
Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
© 2005 MSNBC.com
URL:
French court rules against copy protection
Unprecedented DVD ruling could have huge consequences
The Associated Press
Updated: 6:47 p.m. ET April 26, 2005
PARIS - A French court has ordered DVD vendors to pull copies of the David Lynch film "Mulholland Drive" off store shelves as part of an unprecedented ruling against copy prevention techniques.
The appeals court ruled Friday that copy prevention software on the DVD violated privacy rights in the case of one consumer who had tried to transfer the film onto a video cassette for personal use.
The ruling could be a major setback for the DVD industry, which places lock software on disks as part of its battle against piracy. The industry blames illegal copying for millions of dollars in lost revenues each year.
"This ruling means that 80 percent of DVDs now on the French market are equipped with illegal mechanisms," said Julien Dourgnon, spokesman for consumer advocacy group UFC-Que Choisir, which brought the case.
"Stores will probably not have to send back products already in stock," Dourgnon said Tuesday. "But in the future, no DVD or CD that has the device can be sold."
France, along with other European Union members including Germany and Spain, has laws guaranteeing the right of consumers to copy recordings they have purchased for private use.
Lionel Thoumyre, a lawyer for the artist rights group Spedidam, said the ruling sets a new precedent in the European Union, where intellectual property laws are nearly identical among member states.
"This is brand new," he said. "I think this is the first judgment in Europe going in this direction."
The consumer group filed the suit on behalf of a man who bought the "Mulholland Drive" DVD and then wanted to copy the movie onto a videocassette so he could show the film at his mother's home.
The ruling overturned a lower court's decision in favor of the defendants, co-producers Alain Sarde Films and Studio Canal and distributor Universal. The suit was filed in 2003.
The defendants also were found guilty of violating French consumer protection laws, which state that a vendor must notify consumers of a product's essential characteristics.
The only notification of the copy prevention software on the DVD in this case were the letters "CP," short for "copying prohibited," in small print on the cover, a warning that the court found insufficient.
Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
© 2005 MSNBC.com
URL:
Monday, April 25, 2005
A Newly Discovered Recording of 'Trane and Monk
New York Times
April 25, 2005
A Jazz Discovery Adds a New Note to the Historical Record
By BEN RATLIFF
You might reasonably think that the recorded past of American music has been mapped out - that after all the academic books and scholared-up CD reissues, we know what's between A and Z. Of the important works, anyway. Ephemera will always keep rolling in, intensifying the reds and golds of the historical picture, broadening the context.
But now this: tapes bearing nearly a full hour of the Thelonious Monk quartet with John Coltrane, found at the Library of Congress in January. The library made the announcement this month.
The tapes come from a concert at Carnegie Hall on Nov. 29, 1957, a benefit for a community center. The concert was recorded by the Voice of America, the international broadcasting service, and the tapes also include sets by the Dizzy Gillespie Orchestra, Ray Charles with a backing sextet, the Zoot Sims Quartet with Chet Baker, and the Sonny Rollins Trio. (Newspaper accounts of the concert indicate that Billie Holiday appeared as well, though she is not on the Voice of America tapes.)
But it is Monk with Coltrane that constitutes the real find. That band existed for only six months in 1957, mostly through long and celebrated runs at the East Village club the Five Spot. During this period, Coltrane fully collected himself as an improviser, challenged by Monk and the discipline of his unusual harmonic sense. Thus began the 10-year sprint during which he changed jazz completely, before his death in 1967. The Monk quartet with Coltrane did record three numbers in a studio in 1957, but remarkably little material, and only with fairly low audience-tape fidelity, is known to exist from the Five Spot engagement.
The eight and a half Monk performances found at the Library of Congress, by contrast, are professionally recorded, strong and clear; you can hear the full dimensions of Shadow Wilson's drum kit and Ahmed Abdul-Malik's bass. It is certainly good enough for commercial release, though none has yet been negotiated.
On the tapes, Monk is Monk, his pianistic style basically formed at least 10 years before, with its sudden drawls and rhythmic hesitations. He lets Coltrane solo at length with very little accompaniment; the saxophonist plays rows and rows of original licks and runs, built with blizzards of 16th notes. The notable exception is Coltrane's solo on "Blue Monk." Through 10 blues choruses, he builds an even crescendo of logic, letting down his guard and relying less on his stock phrases. (The other songs on the tape, from the evening's two sets, are "Monk's Mood," "Evidence," "Crepuscule With Nellie," "Nutty," "Epistrophy," "Bye-Ya," "Sweet and Lovely" and a truncated second version of "Epistrophy.")
The music was discovered by accident, during the routine practice of transferring tape from the Library of Congress's Voice of America collection to digital sound files for preservation. Larry Appelbaum, a studio engineer, supervisor and jazz specialist at the library, said that he was given a batch of about 100 tapes for digitization one day in January and looked to see what was there; among them he noticed a brown cardboard box for a 7½-inch reel, marked in pencil "sp. Event 11/29/57 carnegie jazz concert (#1)," with no names on it. It piqued his interest, and one of the boxes holding the Carnegie tapes - there were eight in all - said "T. Monk." "It got my heart racing," Mr. Appelbaum said. (None of the tape boxes mentioned Coltrane.)
No bootleg recordings of the concert are known to exist, because even though it was recorded, it was not broadcast. The Coltrane specialist Lewis Porter knew of the tape's possible existence and inquired about it years ago, but after an initial search yielded nothing, Mr. Appelbaum said, he forgot about it completely. He was surprised to finally find it, of course, but his sense of surprise has been worn down over the years.
"There's always more," Mr. Appelbaum said sagely, in a recent interview in his recording laboratory at the Library of Congress's recorded sound division. He repeated the phrase so often during the afternoon that it became a mantra.
The Library of Congress holds the country's largest collection of sound recordings, and jazz of course forms only a tiny part of it. The full extent of several essential collections is thoroughly cataloged; they include everything ever recorded at the library's Coolidge Auditorium, including T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost and Robert Lowell reading their work, chamber music performances by the Budapest String Quartet, and Jelly Roll Morton singing and spieling for eight hours in 1938. All of John and Alan Lomax's famous field recordings are kept there as well.
But among the collections still being cataloged are the 50,000 Voice of America tapes, which for 40 years have been housed in a dark, climate-controlled room. The tapes constitute a valuable history of radio, and of music in New York. (The Voice of America also recorded every Newport Jazz Festival from 1955, its second year, to 1976, four years after the festival relocated from Rhode Island to New York City.) The cataloging has proceeded gradually, with first priority given to the most historically important and most physically fragile material.
Michael Gray, librarian and archivist at the Voice of America, which still operates out of Washington, confirms that in 1957, and for a long time after that, the broadcast service had access to the Carnegie Hall Recording Company's services. The Voice of America was allowed to record performances at Carnegie Hall free of charge, without paying the hall or the musicians, as long as it broadcast only overseas; this was regarded as public diplomacy through music. Of course, some musicians would not consent to be recorded, which is probably why there is no Billie Holiday on the tape.
Besides satisfying jazz fans, the discovery of the Monk tape has Gino Francesconi, Carnegie Hall's archivist since 1986, excited by the idea that much more of the hall's past may be preserved than he thought. "We knew that Voice of America recorded here," he said. "But we didn't have any formal documentation of it, and it's fantastic to know that they've discovered this." There's always more.
April 25, 2005
A Jazz Discovery Adds a New Note to the Historical Record
By BEN RATLIFF
You might reasonably think that the recorded past of American music has been mapped out - that after all the academic books and scholared-up CD reissues, we know what's between A and Z. Of the important works, anyway. Ephemera will always keep rolling in, intensifying the reds and golds of the historical picture, broadening the context.
But now this: tapes bearing nearly a full hour of the Thelonious Monk quartet with John Coltrane, found at the Library of Congress in January. The library made the announcement this month.
The tapes come from a concert at Carnegie Hall on Nov. 29, 1957, a benefit for a community center. The concert was recorded by the Voice of America, the international broadcasting service, and the tapes also include sets by the Dizzy Gillespie Orchestra, Ray Charles with a backing sextet, the Zoot Sims Quartet with Chet Baker, and the Sonny Rollins Trio. (Newspaper accounts of the concert indicate that Billie Holiday appeared as well, though she is not on the Voice of America tapes.)
But it is Monk with Coltrane that constitutes the real find. That band existed for only six months in 1957, mostly through long and celebrated runs at the East Village club the Five Spot. During this period, Coltrane fully collected himself as an improviser, challenged by Monk and the discipline of his unusual harmonic sense. Thus began the 10-year sprint during which he changed jazz completely, before his death in 1967. The Monk quartet with Coltrane did record three numbers in a studio in 1957, but remarkably little material, and only with fairly low audience-tape fidelity, is known to exist from the Five Spot engagement.
The eight and a half Monk performances found at the Library of Congress, by contrast, are professionally recorded, strong and clear; you can hear the full dimensions of Shadow Wilson's drum kit and Ahmed Abdul-Malik's bass. It is certainly good enough for commercial release, though none has yet been negotiated.
On the tapes, Monk is Monk, his pianistic style basically formed at least 10 years before, with its sudden drawls and rhythmic hesitations. He lets Coltrane solo at length with very little accompaniment; the saxophonist plays rows and rows of original licks and runs, built with blizzards of 16th notes. The notable exception is Coltrane's solo on "Blue Monk." Through 10 blues choruses, he builds an even crescendo of logic, letting down his guard and relying less on his stock phrases. (The other songs on the tape, from the evening's two sets, are "Monk's Mood," "Evidence," "Crepuscule With Nellie," "Nutty," "Epistrophy," "Bye-Ya," "Sweet and Lovely" and a truncated second version of "Epistrophy.")
The music was discovered by accident, during the routine practice of transferring tape from the Library of Congress's Voice of America collection to digital sound files for preservation. Larry Appelbaum, a studio engineer, supervisor and jazz specialist at the library, said that he was given a batch of about 100 tapes for digitization one day in January and looked to see what was there; among them he noticed a brown cardboard box for a 7½-inch reel, marked in pencil "sp. Event 11/29/57 carnegie jazz concert (#1)," with no names on it. It piqued his interest, and one of the boxes holding the Carnegie tapes - there were eight in all - said "T. Monk." "It got my heart racing," Mr. Appelbaum said. (None of the tape boxes mentioned Coltrane.)
No bootleg recordings of the concert are known to exist, because even though it was recorded, it was not broadcast. The Coltrane specialist Lewis Porter knew of the tape's possible existence and inquired about it years ago, but after an initial search yielded nothing, Mr. Appelbaum said, he forgot about it completely. He was surprised to finally find it, of course, but his sense of surprise has been worn down over the years.
"There's always more," Mr. Appelbaum said sagely, in a recent interview in his recording laboratory at the Library of Congress's recorded sound division. He repeated the phrase so often during the afternoon that it became a mantra.
The Library of Congress holds the country's largest collection of sound recordings, and jazz of course forms only a tiny part of it. The full extent of several essential collections is thoroughly cataloged; they include everything ever recorded at the library's Coolidge Auditorium, including T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost and Robert Lowell reading their work, chamber music performances by the Budapest String Quartet, and Jelly Roll Morton singing and spieling for eight hours in 1938. All of John and Alan Lomax's famous field recordings are kept there as well.
But among the collections still being cataloged are the 50,000 Voice of America tapes, which for 40 years have been housed in a dark, climate-controlled room. The tapes constitute a valuable history of radio, and of music in New York. (The Voice of America also recorded every Newport Jazz Festival from 1955, its second year, to 1976, four years after the festival relocated from Rhode Island to New York City.) The cataloging has proceeded gradually, with first priority given to the most historically important and most physically fragile material.
Michael Gray, librarian and archivist at the Voice of America, which still operates out of Washington, confirms that in 1957, and for a long time after that, the broadcast service had access to the Carnegie Hall Recording Company's services. The Voice of America was allowed to record performances at Carnegie Hall free of charge, without paying the hall or the musicians, as long as it broadcast only overseas; this was regarded as public diplomacy through music. Of course, some musicians would not consent to be recorded, which is probably why there is no Billie Holiday on the tape.
Besides satisfying jazz fans, the discovery of the Monk tape has Gino Francesconi, Carnegie Hall's archivist since 1986, excited by the idea that much more of the hall's past may be preserved than he thought. "We knew that Voice of America recorded here," he said. "But we didn't have any formal documentation of it, and it's fantastic to know that they've discovered this." There's always more.
Saturday, April 23, 2005
An Interesting Angle on Artist M.I.A.
Village Voice
Rock&Roll&
Burning Bright
Let's think for just a moment about how much M.I.A. actually supports the Tamil Tigers
by Robert Christgau
March 1st, 2005 11:36 AM
By Robert Christgau
Although M.I.A.'s "Galang" failed to render me instantly ecstatic the way a hot single should, soon enough Arular had my entire household dancing around the dining room. Compared to most grime or whatever, its nursery rhyme tunefulness breathed female principle. So at first I didn't bother to decipher the London-based Sri Lankan's patois.
Did I notice "I got the bombs to make you blow"? Maybe as metaphor—which it is, but not the way I thought. Had I registered Sasha Frere-Jones's trenchant New Yorker comment: "What makes this genuine world music, aside from the references, is the weaving of the political into the fabric of what are still, basically, dance tunes. Any division of life into personal and political halves is absent"? Maybe as rhetoric, without understanding what was at stake. But then I learned that this 28-year-old art school grad with Elastica connections had a radical pedigree—via her father, a Tamil "revolutionary" in Sri Lanka. And then came word of an M.I.A. thread at I Love Music (ilxor.com) that morphed from rumor to exultation to, suddenly, a heartrending roller coaster of a political debate.
Outsiders commented or raved or asked questions or noodged the discussion back toward music or imposed their own left or neocon agendas. But the chief participants were two Sri Lankans exiled by ethnic conflict: a Tamil who critically supported the Tamil Tigers, or LTTE, as the only chance of ending Sinhalese oppression, and a half-Sinhalese half-Tamil who thought the Colombo government bad and the Tigers much worse. Coming in late was an anti-LTTE Tamil who'd suffered Sinhalese bombings and interrogations and still feared the Tigers could assassinate him in exile, as they had other dissenters. As bearers of belief and experience, all three were credible even when they contradicted each other, but extracting an overview was impossible. My normally reliable panel of geopolitically informed leftist democrats knew nothing about the Indian Ocean island either. So I did some reading. Because it's true: M.I.A. makes an issue of the Tamil Tigers. If we care about her, she wants us to care about them. My conclusions are brutally compressed and inexpert by definition, but let me try.
Ethnic enmity in the former Ceylon will ring a bell with fans of colonialism in Rwanda or Ireland, where divide-and-conquer also set the stage for civil war. The minority Tamil Hindus had a leg up until independence, whereupon the Sinhalese Buddhists took their revenge, though never at Tutsi-Hutu levels. The 1956 replacement of English by Sinhalese as the official language, onerous educational and other discrimination, and the gradual impoverishment of the Tamil northeast had inspired many resistance groups by the mid '70s. These were soon dominated by the LTTE, a Marxist-inflected ethnic movement committed to establishing an independent homeland called Eelam. Armed struggle, which began in 1983, has cost 65,000 lives in a nation of under 20 million.
The Tigers invented modern suicide bombing, particularly the infamous "jacket," and in 2001 had 75 of the 188 suicide bombings worldwide since 1980 on their dossier. The Sinhalese upped the ante with the civilian bombing (of "suspected terrorists") we know so well from Palestine, plus widespread rape and occasional firing squads. Like the IRA, the Tigers have been generously funded by exiles, from India's larger Tamil population too. The U.S. declared them a terrorist organization in 1997. Feared assassins—Rajiv Gandhi is counted among their victims—they appear less given to random violence than their Palestinian counterparts, and since September 11 have all but abandoned suicide bombing. Both UNESCO and Amnesty International have recently censured them for the heinous practice of conscripting children by force, Sendero-style. But they're legitimate enough that Colombo has been pursuing détente with them for years.
As the daughter of a known rebel in a war zone, M.I.A. spent most of her young girlhood intimate with violence. She escaped Sri Lanka with her mother and two siblings at 10 or 11. British racism was no fun, but it beat war, and she excelled in school. Her father, Arul Pragasam a/k/a Arular, joined the Tigers from the more conciliatory EROS group. He has never lived with her and hasn't seen her since 1995. Extensive online and library research revealed only scant reference to Arular, but he's definitely an LTTE big shot. Circa 1976 he trained with the PLO in Lebanon, where he took advantage of his engineering degree to become an explosives expert. Wonder whether he designed any jackets.
Sinhalese depredations have been atrocious. But my reading suggests that more Sri Lankan Tamils want equality than want Eelam, and from this distance I'm not pro-LTTE. Hence I strongly advise fellow journalists to refrain from applying "freedom fighter" and other cheap honorifics to M.I.A.'s dad. But I also advise them to avoid the cheaper tack taken in last week's Voice by Simon Reynolds: "Don't let M.I.A.'s brown skin throw you off: She's got no more real connection with the favela funksters than Prince Harry." Not just because brown skin is always real, but because M.I.A.'s documentable experience connects her to world poverty in a way few Western whites can grasp. Moreover, beyond a link now apparently deleted from her website to a dubious Tamil tsunami relief organization, I see no sign that she supports the Tigers. She obsesses on them; she thinks they get a raw deal. But without question she knows they do bad things and struggles with that. The decoratively arrayed, pastel-washed tigers, soldiers, guns, armored vehicles, and fleeing civilians that bedeck her album are images, not propaganda—the same stuff that got her nominated for an Alternative Turner Prize in 2001. They're now assumed to be incendiary because, unlike art buyers, rock and roll fans are assumed to be stupid.
M.I.A. has no consistent political program and it's foolish to expect one of her. Instead she feels the honorable compulsion to make art out of her contradictions. The obscure particulars of those contradictions compel anyone moved by her music to give them some thought, if only for an ignorant moment—to recognize and somehow account for them. In these perilous, escapist days, that alone is quite a lot.
Rock&Roll&
Burning Bright
Let's think for just a moment about how much M.I.A. actually supports the Tamil Tigers
by Robert Christgau
March 1st, 2005 11:36 AM
By Robert Christgau
Although M.I.A.'s "Galang" failed to render me instantly ecstatic the way a hot single should, soon enough Arular had my entire household dancing around the dining room. Compared to most grime or whatever, its nursery rhyme tunefulness breathed female principle. So at first I didn't bother to decipher the London-based Sri Lankan's patois.
Did I notice "I got the bombs to make you blow"? Maybe as metaphor—which it is, but not the way I thought. Had I registered Sasha Frere-Jones's trenchant New Yorker comment: "What makes this genuine world music, aside from the references, is the weaving of the political into the fabric of what are still, basically, dance tunes. Any division of life into personal and political halves is absent"? Maybe as rhetoric, without understanding what was at stake. But then I learned that this 28-year-old art school grad with Elastica connections had a radical pedigree—via her father, a Tamil "revolutionary" in Sri Lanka. And then came word of an M.I.A. thread at I Love Music (ilxor.com) that morphed from rumor to exultation to, suddenly, a heartrending roller coaster of a political debate.
Outsiders commented or raved or asked questions or noodged the discussion back toward music or imposed their own left or neocon agendas. But the chief participants were two Sri Lankans exiled by ethnic conflict: a Tamil who critically supported the Tamil Tigers, or LTTE, as the only chance of ending Sinhalese oppression, and a half-Sinhalese half-Tamil who thought the Colombo government bad and the Tigers much worse. Coming in late was an anti-LTTE Tamil who'd suffered Sinhalese bombings and interrogations and still feared the Tigers could assassinate him in exile, as they had other dissenters. As bearers of belief and experience, all three were credible even when they contradicted each other, but extracting an overview was impossible. My normally reliable panel of geopolitically informed leftist democrats knew nothing about the Indian Ocean island either. So I did some reading. Because it's true: M.I.A. makes an issue of the Tamil Tigers. If we care about her, she wants us to care about them. My conclusions are brutally compressed and inexpert by definition, but let me try.
Ethnic enmity in the former Ceylon will ring a bell with fans of colonialism in Rwanda or Ireland, where divide-and-conquer also set the stage for civil war. The minority Tamil Hindus had a leg up until independence, whereupon the Sinhalese Buddhists took their revenge, though never at Tutsi-Hutu levels. The 1956 replacement of English by Sinhalese as the official language, onerous educational and other discrimination, and the gradual impoverishment of the Tamil northeast had inspired many resistance groups by the mid '70s. These were soon dominated by the LTTE, a Marxist-inflected ethnic movement committed to establishing an independent homeland called Eelam. Armed struggle, which began in 1983, has cost 65,000 lives in a nation of under 20 million.
The Tigers invented modern suicide bombing, particularly the infamous "jacket," and in 2001 had 75 of the 188 suicide bombings worldwide since 1980 on their dossier. The Sinhalese upped the ante with the civilian bombing (of "suspected terrorists") we know so well from Palestine, plus widespread rape and occasional firing squads. Like the IRA, the Tigers have been generously funded by exiles, from India's larger Tamil population too. The U.S. declared them a terrorist organization in 1997. Feared assassins—Rajiv Gandhi is counted among their victims—they appear less given to random violence than their Palestinian counterparts, and since September 11 have all but abandoned suicide bombing. Both UNESCO and Amnesty International have recently censured them for the heinous practice of conscripting children by force, Sendero-style. But they're legitimate enough that Colombo has been pursuing détente with them for years.
As the daughter of a known rebel in a war zone, M.I.A. spent most of her young girlhood intimate with violence. She escaped Sri Lanka with her mother and two siblings at 10 or 11. British racism was no fun, but it beat war, and she excelled in school. Her father, Arul Pragasam a/k/a Arular, joined the Tigers from the more conciliatory EROS group. He has never lived with her and hasn't seen her since 1995. Extensive online and library research revealed only scant reference to Arular, but he's definitely an LTTE big shot. Circa 1976 he trained with the PLO in Lebanon, where he took advantage of his engineering degree to become an explosives expert. Wonder whether he designed any jackets.
Sinhalese depredations have been atrocious. But my reading suggests that more Sri Lankan Tamils want equality than want Eelam, and from this distance I'm not pro-LTTE. Hence I strongly advise fellow journalists to refrain from applying "freedom fighter" and other cheap honorifics to M.I.A.'s dad. But I also advise them to avoid the cheaper tack taken in last week's Voice by Simon Reynolds: "Don't let M.I.A.'s brown skin throw you off: She's got no more real connection with the favela funksters than Prince Harry." Not just because brown skin is always real, but because M.I.A.'s documentable experience connects her to world poverty in a way few Western whites can grasp. Moreover, beyond a link now apparently deleted from her website to a dubious Tamil tsunami relief organization, I see no sign that she supports the Tigers. She obsesses on them; she thinks they get a raw deal. But without question she knows they do bad things and struggles with that. The decoratively arrayed, pastel-washed tigers, soldiers, guns, armored vehicles, and fleeing civilians that bedeck her album are images, not propaganda—the same stuff that got her nominated for an Alternative Turner Prize in 2001. They're now assumed to be incendiary because, unlike art buyers, rock and roll fans are assumed to be stupid.
M.I.A. has no consistent political program and it's foolish to expect one of her. Instead she feels the honorable compulsion to make art out of her contradictions. The obscure particulars of those contradictions compel anyone moved by her music to give them some thought, if only for an ignorant moment—to recognize and somehow account for them. In these perilous, escapist days, that alone is quite a lot.
Mariachi Music In Public Schools
April 24, 2005
Sousa? Many Students March Instead to Mariachi
By PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN
CHULA VISTA, Calif., April 17 - At home with his family - four brothers and a foster mother - Jorge Geraldo struggles with pimples and shyness, a handsome 18-year-old with deep brown eyes who sleeps on Goofy and Donald Duck sheets that tend to lie in an unmade heap on his bunk bed.
But come the weekend, he dons his traje de charro - the suit of the horseman, a glimmering costume with gold buttons slithering up the sides and custom-fitted by a tailor in nearby Tijuana - to become the lead singer in Mariachi Chula Vista, a group of high school mariachi musicians who have forsaken John Philip Sousa marches at halftime of football games in favor of spending the weekends playing at parties, baptism receptions and the like.
The 15 young musicians - cellphones attached to elaborately stitched leather belts to communicate with carpooling mariachi moms and dads - are stars in a spirited and growing movement to bring the centuries-old Mexican musical tradition of mariachi to public schools.
Across the country, more than 500 public schools now offer mariachi as part of the curriculum, said Daniel Sheehy, a mariachi expert and director of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings in Washington.
Mariachi music is aggressive and festive, dominated by a celebratory explosion of trumpets - usually played in short, fast bursts - lilting native vihuela and guitarrón guitars, and occasionally punctuated by a grito, which is jubilant, soulful yell.
The music is flourishing in San Antonio, where a high school mariachi class has been offered since 1970, and at Chula Vista High School here, six miles north of the border with Mexico and where the student body is 78 percent Hispanic. But mariachi has also taken root in Milwaukee, Chicago, Tucson and Albuquerque, and in small towns with large migrant populations like Wenatchee, in eastern Washington.
Two years ago, the Clark County School District in Las Vegas recruited Javier Trujillo, a 28-year-old musician from Tucson, to develop a mariachi curriculum at 10 schools. He has hired eight teachers, with five more en route - so many that the teachers recently formed their own mariachi ensemble.
The mariachi movement has also crossed cultures. At the Oak Grove Middle School in Concord, a San Francisco suburb, the student population is 67 percent Hispanic, and mariachi is taught by Emile Patton, who is half African-American. One of her lead singers is Connie Kakhigna, a seventh grader whose parents are Laotian and Vietnamese.
"It's a different culture than mine, so to learn it is cool," she said. "Most of my friends are Hispanic. This makes me feel involved with them."
The number of students involved in mariachi is "growing substantially," said John Mahlman, the executive director of MENC, formerly the Music Educators National Conference, in Virginia. Mr. Mahlman said his organization was conducting a nationwide survey to see how far the trend had spread.
"It's a musical bridge between family, school, community and culture," he said.
As a middle school student, Mr. Geraldo, who is now a high school senior, spent a brief stint playing Sousa marches and Bruce Springsteen medleys on the trombone as a member of the marching band. "I tried to relate, but it was really weird," he said. "It's hard being Mexican in America, because society says you have to adjust to succeed."
Then he discovered mariachi, developing calluses to play the guitarrón, a six-string bass, his voice perfectly suited for Romeo-like songs of temptresses and betrayed love. "Something took over me," he recalled. "I felt alive, I guess. It was like, 'Wow.' I didn't know you could do that with music."
Texas and California, a state in which Hispanics are expected to be the majority by 2040, are in the forefront of the mariachi-in-the-schools movement. The music is joining band, orchestra and choir in the school music pantheon.
The members of Mariachi Chula Vista - the sons of construction workers, nurses aides, and truck drivers, and the daughters of welders, mechanics and supermarket clerks - are the most accomplished group in the Sweetwater Union High School District, one of the nation's fastest-growing school districts and a highly evolved mariachi outpost: 12 of 20 junior high and high schools now offer classes.
The Mariachi Scholarship Foundation provides $750 college stipends for graduating seniors and varsity letters are awarded for mariachi performance. The first Chula Vista International Mariachi Conference is to take place this June.
The members of Mariachi Chula Vista, accompanied by Mark Fogelquist, a 57-year-old teacher who plays the violin and has a master's degree in ethnomusicology from the University of California, Los Angeles, are in demand on weekends. They have played at birthday parties, weddings, housewarming parties, the opening of a department store, a post office retirement party and who knows how many baptisms.
One of the baptisms was for baby Antonio Serrano, held in a park with a view of Tijuana that was transformed by the sheer joy of the music into a mini-Plaza Garibaldi, the fabled mariachi gathering spot in Mexico City. Staccato trumpets and violins in lush three-part harmonies filled the air, mingling with the smell of gorditas on the grill.
The proceeds - as much as $1,800 on a busy weekend - help pay for a tailor, who crosses the border to measure for costumes, and trips to festivals like the Tucson International Mariachi Conference, where students study with maestros like Victor Cardenas of Mariachi Vargas, who autographed a vihuela guitar for 16-year-old Martha Ramirez. For many, "it is their first time staying in a hotel, or flying in an airplane, or meeting people from another social strata," Mr. Fogelquist said.
"You don't see the marching band and the choir playing four gigs a weekend," he added. "Mariachi is part of the musical life of the culture, a part of the daily life of Mexicans in a way that's hard for Americans to understand."
In Chula Vista, where Interstate 805 separates older neighborhoods mired in poverty from new subdivisions with walking trails and three-car garages, mariachi music is helping students to cross an even more profound divide.
Nationally, Hispanic students lag behind both white and African-American students, with 10 percent earning college degrees, compared with 34 percent for whites and 18 percent for blacks. Hispanics also drop out of high school at a higher rate - 25 percent, compared with 13 percent for blacks and 7 percent for whites.
Edward M. Brand, the Sweetwater superintendent, said that the mariachi program, which started as an after-school class in 1996, and literacy and other arts programs have helped keep Hispanic students in school. Ten years ago, he said, the dropout rate among the district's Hispanic students was 20 percent; today, it is just under 6 percent.
Mr. Fogelquist watches over his students - from arranging rides for musicians whose parents do not have cars to making sure that one of his students who is struggling with math remembers to sit in the front row of the math class.
"He wants us to respect ourselves," said Mr. Geraldo, who plans to enter college next year. "That's the whole deal."
Mariachi was the music of itinerant rural musicians, an adaptation of Spanish theatrical music incorporating violins, harps and guitars. Its popularity has been somewhat eclipsed in Mexico, where it is considered "something of the past that you experience at weddings or baptisms or in bars when you're drunk," said Hugo Morales, a MacArthur fellow and the founder of Radio Bilingüe, the Latino public radio network, which sponsors a mariachi conference in Fresno.
Victor Quezada, 43, the father of Angel, a 16-year-old violinist, grew up in Tijuana listening to Pink Floyd, Deep Purple and Lynrd Skynrd. "When my son first started I said, 'No mariachi! Why not a rock band?' " he recalled.
For recent immigrants and especially for young people, Mr. Morales said, mariachi helps foster cultural identity and self-esteem, helping the young "articulate their feelings through music."
After rehearsals, Jorge Geraldo takes care of his four brothers. At home, said Martha Jimenez, 40, his foster mother, he sings while washing dishes or taking out the garbage, inspiring cousins from near and far. "Kids around here can be influenced in so many directions," she said. "You see him on stage and you know how big a part of him mariachi is."
Sousa? Many Students March Instead to Mariachi
By PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN
CHULA VISTA, Calif., April 17 - At home with his family - four brothers and a foster mother - Jorge Geraldo struggles with pimples and shyness, a handsome 18-year-old with deep brown eyes who sleeps on Goofy and Donald Duck sheets that tend to lie in an unmade heap on his bunk bed.
But come the weekend, he dons his traje de charro - the suit of the horseman, a glimmering costume with gold buttons slithering up the sides and custom-fitted by a tailor in nearby Tijuana - to become the lead singer in Mariachi Chula Vista, a group of high school mariachi musicians who have forsaken John Philip Sousa marches at halftime of football games in favor of spending the weekends playing at parties, baptism receptions and the like.
The 15 young musicians - cellphones attached to elaborately stitched leather belts to communicate with carpooling mariachi moms and dads - are stars in a spirited and growing movement to bring the centuries-old Mexican musical tradition of mariachi to public schools.
Across the country, more than 500 public schools now offer mariachi as part of the curriculum, said Daniel Sheehy, a mariachi expert and director of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings in Washington.
Mariachi music is aggressive and festive, dominated by a celebratory explosion of trumpets - usually played in short, fast bursts - lilting native vihuela and guitarrón guitars, and occasionally punctuated by a grito, which is jubilant, soulful yell.
The music is flourishing in San Antonio, where a high school mariachi class has been offered since 1970, and at Chula Vista High School here, six miles north of the border with Mexico and where the student body is 78 percent Hispanic. But mariachi has also taken root in Milwaukee, Chicago, Tucson and Albuquerque, and in small towns with large migrant populations like Wenatchee, in eastern Washington.
Two years ago, the Clark County School District in Las Vegas recruited Javier Trujillo, a 28-year-old musician from Tucson, to develop a mariachi curriculum at 10 schools. He has hired eight teachers, with five more en route - so many that the teachers recently formed their own mariachi ensemble.
The mariachi movement has also crossed cultures. At the Oak Grove Middle School in Concord, a San Francisco suburb, the student population is 67 percent Hispanic, and mariachi is taught by Emile Patton, who is half African-American. One of her lead singers is Connie Kakhigna, a seventh grader whose parents are Laotian and Vietnamese.
"It's a different culture than mine, so to learn it is cool," she said. "Most of my friends are Hispanic. This makes me feel involved with them."
The number of students involved in mariachi is "growing substantially," said John Mahlman, the executive director of MENC, formerly the Music Educators National Conference, in Virginia. Mr. Mahlman said his organization was conducting a nationwide survey to see how far the trend had spread.
"It's a musical bridge between family, school, community and culture," he said.
As a middle school student, Mr. Geraldo, who is now a high school senior, spent a brief stint playing Sousa marches and Bruce Springsteen medleys on the trombone as a member of the marching band. "I tried to relate, but it was really weird," he said. "It's hard being Mexican in America, because society says you have to adjust to succeed."
Then he discovered mariachi, developing calluses to play the guitarrón, a six-string bass, his voice perfectly suited for Romeo-like songs of temptresses and betrayed love. "Something took over me," he recalled. "I felt alive, I guess. It was like, 'Wow.' I didn't know you could do that with music."
Texas and California, a state in which Hispanics are expected to be the majority by 2040, are in the forefront of the mariachi-in-the-schools movement. The music is joining band, orchestra and choir in the school music pantheon.
The members of Mariachi Chula Vista - the sons of construction workers, nurses aides, and truck drivers, and the daughters of welders, mechanics and supermarket clerks - are the most accomplished group in the Sweetwater Union High School District, one of the nation's fastest-growing school districts and a highly evolved mariachi outpost: 12 of 20 junior high and high schools now offer classes.
The Mariachi Scholarship Foundation provides $750 college stipends for graduating seniors and varsity letters are awarded for mariachi performance. The first Chula Vista International Mariachi Conference is to take place this June.
The members of Mariachi Chula Vista, accompanied by Mark Fogelquist, a 57-year-old teacher who plays the violin and has a master's degree in ethnomusicology from the University of California, Los Angeles, are in demand on weekends. They have played at birthday parties, weddings, housewarming parties, the opening of a department store, a post office retirement party and who knows how many baptisms.
One of the baptisms was for baby Antonio Serrano, held in a park with a view of Tijuana that was transformed by the sheer joy of the music into a mini-Plaza Garibaldi, the fabled mariachi gathering spot in Mexico City. Staccato trumpets and violins in lush three-part harmonies filled the air, mingling with the smell of gorditas on the grill.
The proceeds - as much as $1,800 on a busy weekend - help pay for a tailor, who crosses the border to measure for costumes, and trips to festivals like the Tucson International Mariachi Conference, where students study with maestros like Victor Cardenas of Mariachi Vargas, who autographed a vihuela guitar for 16-year-old Martha Ramirez. For many, "it is their first time staying in a hotel, or flying in an airplane, or meeting people from another social strata," Mr. Fogelquist said.
"You don't see the marching band and the choir playing four gigs a weekend," he added. "Mariachi is part of the musical life of the culture, a part of the daily life of Mexicans in a way that's hard for Americans to understand."
In Chula Vista, where Interstate 805 separates older neighborhoods mired in poverty from new subdivisions with walking trails and three-car garages, mariachi music is helping students to cross an even more profound divide.
Nationally, Hispanic students lag behind both white and African-American students, with 10 percent earning college degrees, compared with 34 percent for whites and 18 percent for blacks. Hispanics also drop out of high school at a higher rate - 25 percent, compared with 13 percent for blacks and 7 percent for whites.
Edward M. Brand, the Sweetwater superintendent, said that the mariachi program, which started as an after-school class in 1996, and literacy and other arts programs have helped keep Hispanic students in school. Ten years ago, he said, the dropout rate among the district's Hispanic students was 20 percent; today, it is just under 6 percent.
Mr. Fogelquist watches over his students - from arranging rides for musicians whose parents do not have cars to making sure that one of his students who is struggling with math remembers to sit in the front row of the math class.
"He wants us to respect ourselves," said Mr. Geraldo, who plans to enter college next year. "That's the whole deal."
Mariachi was the music of itinerant rural musicians, an adaptation of Spanish theatrical music incorporating violins, harps and guitars. Its popularity has been somewhat eclipsed in Mexico, where it is considered "something of the past that you experience at weddings or baptisms or in bars when you're drunk," said Hugo Morales, a MacArthur fellow and the founder of Radio Bilingüe, the Latino public radio network, which sponsors a mariachi conference in Fresno.
Victor Quezada, 43, the father of Angel, a 16-year-old violinist, grew up in Tijuana listening to Pink Floyd, Deep Purple and Lynrd Skynrd. "When my son first started I said, 'No mariachi! Why not a rock band?' " he recalled.
For recent immigrants and especially for young people, Mr. Morales said, mariachi helps foster cultural identity and self-esteem, helping the young "articulate their feelings through music."
After rehearsals, Jorge Geraldo takes care of his four brothers. At home, said Martha Jimenez, 40, his foster mother, he sings while washing dishes or taking out the garbage, inspiring cousins from near and far. "Kids around here can be influenced in so many directions," she said. "You see him on stage and you know how big a part of him mariachi is."
Friday, April 22, 2005
Soundless Sound System?
Inventor Creates Soundless Sound System
Fri Apr 22,11:30 AM ET
By TYPH TUCKER, Associated Press Writer
PORTLAND, Ore. - Elwood "Woody" Norris pointed a metal frequency emitter at one of perhaps 30 people who had come to see his invention. The emitter — an aluminum square — was hooked up by a wire to a CD player. Norris switched on the CD player.
"There's no speaker, but when I point this pad at you, you will hear the waterfall," said the 63-year-old Californian.
And one by one, each person in the audience did, and smiled widely.
Norris' HyperSonic Sound system has won him an award coveted by inventors — the $500,000 annual Lemelson-MIT Prize. It works by sending a focused beam of sound above the range of human hearing. When it lands on you, it seems like sound is coming from inside your head.
Norris said the uses for the technology could come in handy — in cars, in the airport or at home.
"Imagine your wife wants to watch television and you want to read a book, like the intellectual you are," he said to the crowd. "Imagine you are a lifeguard or a coach and you want to yell at someone, he'll be the only one to hear you."
Norris holds 47 U.S. patents, including one for a digital handheld recorder and another for a handsfree headset. He said the digital recorder made him an inventor for life.
"That sold for $5 million," Norris laughed. "That really made me want to be an inventor."
He demonstrated the sound system at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, also called OMSI, on Thursday.
Norris began tinkering as an inventor at a young age — taking apart the family radio and putting it back together again. He said ideas come to him when he's driving around or talking with friends.
"I don't know how I got to be an inventor, but I guess some kids can play the piano, and I can invent."
Norris will receive the Lemelson-MIT Prize at a ceremony here on Friday.
One of his most recent patents is for the AirScooter, a personal flying machine designed for commuting. It reaches speeds up to 55 mph and is light enough — under 300 pounds — to not require a license to fly.
The AirScooter was also on display at OMSI, although Norris didn't fly it.
The machine has a single seat, a four-stroke engine and is barely 10 feet tall. Its pontoons allow it to land on water. The machine's fiberglass and aluminum construction keeps its weight down. Bike-style handle bars move two helicopter blades, which spin in opposite directions.
Norris' AirScooter was shown on "60 Minutes" last Sunday. He said since the airing of the show, more than 7 million people have visited the AirScooter's Web site.
Norris said he and his crew have tested the AirScooter for four years, and he couldn't have created the machine without a skilled group of aeronautics engineers around him.
Fri Apr 22,11:30 AM ET
By TYPH TUCKER, Associated Press Writer
PORTLAND, Ore. - Elwood "Woody" Norris pointed a metal frequency emitter at one of perhaps 30 people who had come to see his invention. The emitter — an aluminum square — was hooked up by a wire to a CD player. Norris switched on the CD player.
"There's no speaker, but when I point this pad at you, you will hear the waterfall," said the 63-year-old Californian.
And one by one, each person in the audience did, and smiled widely.
Norris' HyperSonic Sound system has won him an award coveted by inventors — the $500,000 annual Lemelson-MIT Prize. It works by sending a focused beam of sound above the range of human hearing. When it lands on you, it seems like sound is coming from inside your head.
Norris said the uses for the technology could come in handy — in cars, in the airport or at home.
"Imagine your wife wants to watch television and you want to read a book, like the intellectual you are," he said to the crowd. "Imagine you are a lifeguard or a coach and you want to yell at someone, he'll be the only one to hear you."
Norris holds 47 U.S. patents, including one for a digital handheld recorder and another for a handsfree headset. He said the digital recorder made him an inventor for life.
"That sold for $5 million," Norris laughed. "That really made me want to be an inventor."
He demonstrated the sound system at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, also called OMSI, on Thursday.
Norris began tinkering as an inventor at a young age — taking apart the family radio and putting it back together again. He said ideas come to him when he's driving around or talking with friends.
"I don't know how I got to be an inventor, but I guess some kids can play the piano, and I can invent."
Norris will receive the Lemelson-MIT Prize at a ceremony here on Friday.
One of his most recent patents is for the AirScooter, a personal flying machine designed for commuting. It reaches speeds up to 55 mph and is light enough — under 300 pounds — to not require a license to fly.
The AirScooter was also on display at OMSI, although Norris didn't fly it.
The machine has a single seat, a four-stroke engine and is barely 10 feet tall. Its pontoons allow it to land on water. The machine's fiberglass and aluminum construction keeps its weight down. Bike-style handle bars move two helicopter blades, which spin in opposite directions.
Norris' AirScooter was shown on "60 Minutes" last Sunday. He said since the airing of the show, more than 7 million people have visited the AirScooter's Web site.
Norris said he and his crew have tested the AirScooter for four years, and he couldn't have created the machine without a skilled group of aeronautics engineers around him.
Saturday, April 02, 2005
Led Zeppelin
While waiting for some tacos today, a blast of Led Zeppelin came over the shop stereo: "Over the Hills and Far Away," from the Houses of the Holy album (1973). I was struck by how ebullient, fun, strong, exciting, and compelling the band was, particularly on the chorus. I've thought that for a long time, so that wasn't new, but I hadn't heard this tune in awhile. And I haven't heard anything on the radio that comes close to the vitality of that sound; so much rock today sounds so derivative, so unoriginal. Zeppelin rocked pretty damn hard, they had some unique voices, and a unique, acid distorted take on the blues. It's nice to know that some of the stuff you listened to a long time ago still sounds good.
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