NYT
March 28, 2008
Travelers in Search of Mexico’s Magic Find Town of Witches and Warlocks
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.
CATEMACO, Mexico — To kill a man, Alejandro Gallegos García explains, all you need is a black cloth doll, some thread, a human bone and a toad. Oh, and you must ask the devil permission, in person, at a cave in the hills where he is said to appear.
Assuming you have these things, plus the green light from the prince of darkness, you simply lash the doll to the bone, shove it down the unfortunate toad’s throat, sew up its lips and take the whole mess to a graveyard, reciting the proper words.
“The person will die within 30 days,” Mr. Gallegos said matter of factly, as if he were talking of fixing a broken carburetor. (The toad dies too, by the by.)
“There exists good and bad in the world, there exists the devil and God,” he went on, turning a serpent’s fang in his rough fingers. “I work in white magic and in black magic. But there are people who dedicate themselves only to evil.”
Mr. Gallegos, 48, is a traditional warlock, one of dozens who work in this idyllic town, nestled near the Gulf of Mexico by Lake Catemaco in the state of Veracruz. Like most witches here, he melds European and native traditions in his work, a special brew of occultism he learned from his uncle.
His cramped cement workroom holds an image of the Virgin Mary and a large crucifix with a bloodied Jesus. A six-pointed star is painted on the floor, with a horseshoe to one side and a St. Andrew’s cross on the other. Candles dedicated to various saints crowd his table, most with photographs lashed to them. Some are photos of men and women whom the client wants to ensnare in love. Others are of barren women who want children. Others are of people with maladies from asthma to cancer.
Beneath the table Mr. Gallegos keeps ragged boxes full of herbs, bark and roots that have been used in these parts for medicinal purposes since before Hernán Cortés was a gleam in his great-great-grandfather’s eye.
He has dead bats, used in certain love charms, and ground-up rattlesnake, for curing illnesses. He uses oils extracted from lizards and turtles, the dried tongues of certain fish, coyote skin, eggs, chickens, holy water from the church and less-than-holy water from the lake. He knows dozens of local plants and their attributes. And he wields the tooth of a venomous snake.
“This goes back to ancient times,” he said. “There were witches here before the Spanish. Here there is a mix of everything, even of God.”
Catemaco is known throughout Mexico as a center for witchcraft and, to the dismay of some hard-core practitioners, magic has become a big tourist draw. The town holds an International Congress of Witches on the first Friday of every March.
During the event, a black mass is held at the mouth of the cave where the devil supposedly loiters. An oversize six-pointed star — they call it a Star of David — is set alight, to the delight of photographers. Politicians show up to receive amulets for good luck at the polls. Believers flock to the town to have their auras cleansed.
Sandra Lucía Aguilar, a 25-year-old cashier, traveled 22 hours by bus from Cancún for the black mass. A few days later she found herself in the waiting room of a popular witch doctor known as “The Crow,” hoping for a little black magic to force her errant boyfriend to return.
“I lived with him for five years, and then, overnight, he ran off with another woman,” she said. “I want him back. He humiliated me a lot and I want to humiliate him.”
The Crow turns out to be a slick-looking fellow named Héctor Betaza Domínguez, who wears white guayabera shirts and sits in a candlelit room among effigies of La Santa Muerte, a Mexican icon resembling the grim reaper in drag.
Mr. Betaza says people come to see him from all over Mexico and from major cities in the United States with large Mexican communities. Many simply want “una limpia,” or cleansing, to ward off evil spirits. But a majority of the complaints are broken hearts.
Asked where he learned his craft, Mr. Betaza, who calls himself a “master of occult sciences,” becomes evasive, muttering something about his mother having practiced magic. “This you don’t learn,” he said. “It’s something that you carry in the blood.”
Not everyone is convinced. The Rev. Tomás Alonso Martínez has the unenviable job of parish priest in a town best known as a haunt of the devil and witches. “It’s farce,” he said, “a lie, a fraud.”
In his five years in Catemaco, Father Martínez says he has seen so-called witches practice all sorts of confidence schemes, extracting money from gullible and vulnerable people.
One common trick is to tell someone he is hexed and then remove the hex for a fee. Another is to tell people they are sick, then offer them a traditional cure for an outlandish sum.
“They attribute to themselves power they cannot have,” the priest said. “The fundamental problem that exists with these people is that there are people who believe them. Anyone can set themselves up as a witch.”
Even Father Martínez acknowledges, however, that mixed in with the questionable practices are vestiges of a pre-Hispanic past. The use of Catholic saints also bespeaks a syncretism of beliefs, he notes.
In his church, an icon of the Virgin Mary sits in an alcove directly above and behind the altar. Before Mass, many go to the shrine and pass herbs over their bodies to cleanse themselves. Some leave pictures of loved ones, amulets and prayers.
That syncretism also emerged clearly when Mr. Gallegos performed a cleansing ritual on a recent afternoon. The client was a taxi driver named Santos Luna Cruz who wanted protection from envious rivals.
Stripped to the waist, Mr. Luna stood on a worn piece of velvet in the center of a chalk Star of David. Candles burned at each point of the star. A horseshoe was to one side, a St. Andrew’s cross to the other. Two glasses of water, believed to absorb evil spirits, were placed in front of him.
Mr. Gallegos sprinkled holy water, garlic and ammonia over him. Then, chanting the common Catholic prayer to “the father, the son and the Holy Ghost” and invoking a long list of saints, Mr. Gallegos held eggs to the man’s head and rubbed them over his body.
He scratched crosses with his serpent’s tooth on Mr. Luna’s face, arms, chest and abdomen. He took a live chicken and passed it over his client. He blew the holy water from his mouth in a fine spray at the man, and beat him with clusters of herbs.
When it was over, Mr. Luna, 34, grinned and ran his hand through his wet hair. “I felt very stressed out at first, but now I feel lighter, better,” he said. “I feel like he is taking away from my body the bad vibrations.”
Mr. Gallegos pointed to two eggs that broke during the ritual. “When the egg breaks, it is because it has absorbed the pain inside the young man,” he said.
Friday, March 28, 2008
Thursday, March 27, 2008
Brainy Stuff: Neural Scans During Jazz Improvisation
Neural Substrates of Spontaneous Musical Performance: An fMRI Study of Jazz Improvisation
Charles J. Limb1,2*, Allen R. Braun1
1 Language Section, Voice, Speech and Language Branch, National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, United States of America2 Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery and Peabody Conservatory of Music, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, United States of America
Abstract
To investigate the neural substrates that underlie spontaneous musical performance, we examined improvisation in professional jazz pianists using functional MRI. By employing two paradigms that differed widely in musical complexity, we found that improvisation (compared to production of over-learned musical sequences) was consistently characterized by a dissociated pattern of activity in the prefrontal cortex: extensive deactivation of dorsolateral prefrontal and lateral orbital regions with focal activation of the medial prefrontal (frontal polar) cortex. Such a pattern may reflect a combination of psychological processes required for spontaneous improvisation, in which internally motivated, stimulus-independent behaviors unfold in the absence of central processes that typically mediate self-monitoring and conscious volitional control of ongoing performance. Changes in prefrontal activity during improvisation were accompanied by widespread activation of neocortical sensorimotor areas (that mediate the organization and execution of musical performance) as well as deactivation of limbic structures (that regulate motivation and emotional tone). This distributed neural pattern may provide a cognitive context that enables the emergence of spontaneous creative activity.
Read the entire article HERE, which includes more graphics (and a lot of jargon I don't really understand).
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Researchers Play Tune Recorded Before Edison (1860!)
NYT
March 27, 2008
Researchers Play Tune Recorded Before Edison
By JODY ROSEN
For more than a century, since he captured the spoken words “Mary had a little lamb” on a sheet of tinfoil, Thomas Edison has been considered the father of recorded sound. But researchers say they have unearthed a recording of the human voice, made by a little-known Frenchman, that predates Edison’s invention of the phonograph by nearly two decades.
The 10-second recording of a singer crooning the folk song “Au Clair de la Lune” was discovered earlier this month in an archive in Paris by a group of American audio historians. It was made, the researchers say, on April 9, 1860, on a phonautograph, a machine designed to record sounds visually, not to play them back. But the phonautograph recording, or phonautogram, was made playable — converted from squiggles on paper to sound — by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif.
“This is a historic find, the earliest known recording of sound,” said Samuel Brylawski, the former head of the recorded-sound division of the Library of Congress, who is not affiliated with the research group but who was familiar with its findings. The audio excavation could give a new primacy to the phonautograph, once considered a curio, and its inventor, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, a Parisian typesetter and tinkerer who went to his grave convinced that credit for his breakthroughs had been improperly bestowed on Edison.
Scott’s device had a barrel-shaped horn attached to a stylus, which etched sound waves onto sheets of paper blackened by smoke from an oil lamp. The recordings were not intended for listening; the idea of audio playback had not been conceived. Rather, Scott sought to create a paper record of human speech that could later be deciphered.
But the Lawrence Berkeley scientists used optical imaging and a “virtual stylus” on high-resolution scans of the phonautogram, deploying modern technology to extract sound from patterns inscribed on the soot-blackened paper almost a century and a half ago. The scientists belong to an informal collaborative called First Sounds that also includes audio historians and sound engineers.
David Giovannoni, an American audio historian who led the research effort, will present the findings and play the recording in public on Friday at the annual conference of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif.
Scott’s 1860 phonautogram was made 17 years before Edison received a patent for the phonograph and 28 years before an Edison associate captured a snippet of a Handel oratorio on a wax cylinder, a recording that until now was widely regarded by experts as the oldest that could be played back.
Mr. Giovannoni’s presentation on Friday will showcase additional Scott phonautograms discovered in Paris, including recordings made in 1853 and 1854. Those first experiments included attempts to capture the sounds of a human voice and a guitar, but Scott’s machine was at that time imperfectly calibrated.
“We got the early phonautograms to squawk, that’s about it,” Mr. Giovannoni said.
But the April 1860 phonautogram is more than a squawk. On a digital copy of the recording provided to The New York Times, the anonymous vocalist, probably female, can be heard against a hissing, crackling background din. The voice, muffled but audible, sings, “Au clair de la lune, Pierrot répondit” in a lilting 11-note melody — a ghostly tune, drifting out of the sonic murk.
The hunt for this audio holy grail was begun in the fall by Mr. Giovannoni and three associates: Patrick Feaster, an expert in the history of the phonograph who teaches at Indiana University, and Richard Martin and Meagan Hennessey, owners of Archeophone Records, a label specializing in early sound recordings. They had collaborated on the Archeophone album “Actionable Offenses,” a collection of obscene 19th-century records that received two Grammy nominations. When Mr. Giovannoni raised the possibility of compiling an anthology of the world’s oldest recorded sounds, Mr. Feaster suggested they go digging for Scott’s phonautograms.
Historians have long been aware of Scott’s work. But the American researchers believe they are the first to make a concerted search for Scott’s phonautograms or attempt to play them back.
In December Mr. Giovannoni and a research assistant traveled to a patent office in Paris, the Institut National de la Propriété Industrielle. There he found recordings from 1857 and 1859 that were included by Scott in his phonautograph patent application. Mr. Giovannoni said that he worked with the archive staff there to make high-resolution, preservation-grade digital scans of these recordings.
A trail of clues, including a cryptic reference in Scott’s writings to phonautogram deposits made at “the Academy,” led the researchers to another Paris institution, the French Academy of Sciences, where several more of Scott’s recordings were stored. Mr. Giovannoni said that his eureka moment came when he laid eyes on the April 1860 phonautogram, an immaculately preserved sheet of rag paper 9 inches by 25 inches.
“It was pristine,” Mr. Giovannoni said. “The sound waves were remarkably clear and clean.”
His scans were sent to the Lawrence Berkeley lab, where they were converted into sound by the scientists Carl Haber and Earl Cornell. They used a technology developed several years ago in collaboration with the Library of Congress, in which high-resolution “maps” of grooved records are played on a computer using a digital stylus. The 1860 phonautogram was separated into 16 tracks, which Mr. Giovannoni, Mr. Feaster and Mr. Martin meticulously stitched back together, making adjustments for variations in the speed of Scott’s hand-cranked recording.
Listeners are now left to ponder the oddity of hearing a recording made before the idea of audio playback was even imagined.
“There is a yawning epistemic gap between us and Léon Scott, because he thought that the way one gets to the truth of sound is by looking at it,” said Jonathan Sterne, a professor at McGill University in Montreal and the author of “The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction.”
Scott is in many ways an unlikely hero of recorded sound. Born in Paris in 1817, he was a man of letters, not a scientist, who worked in the printing trade and as a librarian. He published a book on the history of shorthand, and evidently viewed sound recording as an extension of stenography. In a self-published memoir in 1878, he railed against Edison for “appropriating” his methods and misconstruing the purpose of recording technology. The goal, Scott argued, was not sound reproduction, but “writing speech, which is what the word phonograph means.”
In fact, Edison arrived at his advances on his own. There is no evidence that Edison drew on knowledge of Scott’s work to create his phonograph, and he retains the distinction of being the first to reproduce sound.
“Edison is not diminished whatsoever by this discovery,” Mr. Giovannoni said.
Paul Israel, director of the Thomas A. Edison Papers at Rutgers University in Piscataway, N.J., praised the discovery as a “tremendous achievement,” but called Edison’s phonograph a more significant technological feat.
“What made Edison different from Scott was that he was trying to reproduce sound and he succeeded,” Mr. Israel said.
But history is finally catching up with Scott.
Mr. Sterne, the McGill professor, said: “We are in a period that is more similar to the 1860s than the 1880s. With computers, there is an unprecedented visualization of sound.”
The acclaim Scott sought may turn out to have been assured by the very sonic reproduction he disdained. And it took a group of American researchers to rescue Scott’s work from the musty vaults of his home city. In his memoir, Scott scorned his American rival Edison and made brazen appeals to French nationalism. “What are the rights of the discoverer versus the improver?” he wrote less than a year before his death in 1879. “Come, Parisians, don’t let them take our prize.”
M&C note: NYT has the 1860 sound sample online.
March 27, 2008
Researchers Play Tune Recorded Before Edison
By JODY ROSEN
For more than a century, since he captured the spoken words “Mary had a little lamb” on a sheet of tinfoil, Thomas Edison has been considered the father of recorded sound. But researchers say they have unearthed a recording of the human voice, made by a little-known Frenchman, that predates Edison’s invention of the phonograph by nearly two decades.
The 10-second recording of a singer crooning the folk song “Au Clair de la Lune” was discovered earlier this month in an archive in Paris by a group of American audio historians. It was made, the researchers say, on April 9, 1860, on a phonautograph, a machine designed to record sounds visually, not to play them back. But the phonautograph recording, or phonautogram, was made playable — converted from squiggles on paper to sound — by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif.
“This is a historic find, the earliest known recording of sound,” said Samuel Brylawski, the former head of the recorded-sound division of the Library of Congress, who is not affiliated with the research group but who was familiar with its findings. The audio excavation could give a new primacy to the phonautograph, once considered a curio, and its inventor, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, a Parisian typesetter and tinkerer who went to his grave convinced that credit for his breakthroughs had been improperly bestowed on Edison.
Scott’s device had a barrel-shaped horn attached to a stylus, which etched sound waves onto sheets of paper blackened by smoke from an oil lamp. The recordings were not intended for listening; the idea of audio playback had not been conceived. Rather, Scott sought to create a paper record of human speech that could later be deciphered.
But the Lawrence Berkeley scientists used optical imaging and a “virtual stylus” on high-resolution scans of the phonautogram, deploying modern technology to extract sound from patterns inscribed on the soot-blackened paper almost a century and a half ago. The scientists belong to an informal collaborative called First Sounds that also includes audio historians and sound engineers.
David Giovannoni, an American audio historian who led the research effort, will present the findings and play the recording in public on Friday at the annual conference of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif.
Scott’s 1860 phonautogram was made 17 years before Edison received a patent for the phonograph and 28 years before an Edison associate captured a snippet of a Handel oratorio on a wax cylinder, a recording that until now was widely regarded by experts as the oldest that could be played back.
Mr. Giovannoni’s presentation on Friday will showcase additional Scott phonautograms discovered in Paris, including recordings made in 1853 and 1854. Those first experiments included attempts to capture the sounds of a human voice and a guitar, but Scott’s machine was at that time imperfectly calibrated.
“We got the early phonautograms to squawk, that’s about it,” Mr. Giovannoni said.
But the April 1860 phonautogram is more than a squawk. On a digital copy of the recording provided to The New York Times, the anonymous vocalist, probably female, can be heard against a hissing, crackling background din. The voice, muffled but audible, sings, “Au clair de la lune, Pierrot répondit” in a lilting 11-note melody — a ghostly tune, drifting out of the sonic murk.
The hunt for this audio holy grail was begun in the fall by Mr. Giovannoni and three associates: Patrick Feaster, an expert in the history of the phonograph who teaches at Indiana University, and Richard Martin and Meagan Hennessey, owners of Archeophone Records, a label specializing in early sound recordings. They had collaborated on the Archeophone album “Actionable Offenses,” a collection of obscene 19th-century records that received two Grammy nominations. When Mr. Giovannoni raised the possibility of compiling an anthology of the world’s oldest recorded sounds, Mr. Feaster suggested they go digging for Scott’s phonautograms.
Historians have long been aware of Scott’s work. But the American researchers believe they are the first to make a concerted search for Scott’s phonautograms or attempt to play them back.
In December Mr. Giovannoni and a research assistant traveled to a patent office in Paris, the Institut National de la Propriété Industrielle. There he found recordings from 1857 and 1859 that were included by Scott in his phonautograph patent application. Mr. Giovannoni said that he worked with the archive staff there to make high-resolution, preservation-grade digital scans of these recordings.
A trail of clues, including a cryptic reference in Scott’s writings to phonautogram deposits made at “the Academy,” led the researchers to another Paris institution, the French Academy of Sciences, where several more of Scott’s recordings were stored. Mr. Giovannoni said that his eureka moment came when he laid eyes on the April 1860 phonautogram, an immaculately preserved sheet of rag paper 9 inches by 25 inches.
“It was pristine,” Mr. Giovannoni said. “The sound waves were remarkably clear and clean.”
His scans were sent to the Lawrence Berkeley lab, where they were converted into sound by the scientists Carl Haber and Earl Cornell. They used a technology developed several years ago in collaboration with the Library of Congress, in which high-resolution “maps” of grooved records are played on a computer using a digital stylus. The 1860 phonautogram was separated into 16 tracks, which Mr. Giovannoni, Mr. Feaster and Mr. Martin meticulously stitched back together, making adjustments for variations in the speed of Scott’s hand-cranked recording.
Listeners are now left to ponder the oddity of hearing a recording made before the idea of audio playback was even imagined.
“There is a yawning epistemic gap between us and Léon Scott, because he thought that the way one gets to the truth of sound is by looking at it,” said Jonathan Sterne, a professor at McGill University in Montreal and the author of “The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction.”
Scott is in many ways an unlikely hero of recorded sound. Born in Paris in 1817, he was a man of letters, not a scientist, who worked in the printing trade and as a librarian. He published a book on the history of shorthand, and evidently viewed sound recording as an extension of stenography. In a self-published memoir in 1878, he railed against Edison for “appropriating” his methods and misconstruing the purpose of recording technology. The goal, Scott argued, was not sound reproduction, but “writing speech, which is what the word phonograph means.”
In fact, Edison arrived at his advances on his own. There is no evidence that Edison drew on knowledge of Scott’s work to create his phonograph, and he retains the distinction of being the first to reproduce sound.
“Edison is not diminished whatsoever by this discovery,” Mr. Giovannoni said.
Paul Israel, director of the Thomas A. Edison Papers at Rutgers University in Piscataway, N.J., praised the discovery as a “tremendous achievement,” but called Edison’s phonograph a more significant technological feat.
“What made Edison different from Scott was that he was trying to reproduce sound and he succeeded,” Mr. Israel said.
But history is finally catching up with Scott.
Mr. Sterne, the McGill professor, said: “We are in a period that is more similar to the 1860s than the 1880s. With computers, there is an unprecedented visualization of sound.”
The acclaim Scott sought may turn out to have been assured by the very sonic reproduction he disdained. And it took a group of American researchers to rescue Scott’s work from the musty vaults of his home city. In his memoir, Scott scorned his American rival Edison and made brazen appeals to French nationalism. “What are the rights of the discoverer versus the improver?” he wrote less than a year before his death in 1879. “Come, Parisians, don’t let them take our prize.”
M&C note: NYT has the 1860 sound sample online.
Musicians in Second Life
CNN.com
March 25, 2008
Music and technology
Posted: 02:59 PM ET
Why a musician starts an SL career? First of all he has to trust in his music and he must think to share something new with his audience. This is the story of Swina Allen, whose gig I attended last week at the Gold Club. In his music you can find some bluesy roots, but actually it is affected also by some rock influences(Carlos Santana and Weather Report above all) and even some innovative jazz (Joe Zawinul,Waine Shorter e Jaco Pastorius):the result is an original sound, a kind of smooth jazz and chillout.
As soon as Swina started his second life he opened a club, the Italian Mood(yudasin22.99,45), suddenly it became a sort of musical workshop hosting many live musicians gigs of different genres. But Swina felt to be mainly a musician and so he decided to get in the game! He started playing all around in SL gathering a nice crowd of fans.
After the gig I asked some question to the artist, and he kindly answered me:first of all I asked him what he feels in performing in SL and he said “ well,it depends on what do you expect:I guess that the main thing is not not the music in itself, but first of all the feelings you get across, keeping the people with you till the gig ends it’s the strongest emotion and sometimes it’s not necessary to be technically perfect: in sl you may get an immediate feedback and it is well shown by the generous tips of the avatars attending your performance!”
When I asked Swina how does he create his songs he told me that usually he starts with a drums pattern and after he adds some new parts(pads,synths)using only some virtual instruments(VLS);sometimes he edits the tracks with a little of quantization but only for the attack putting together some sampled chorus and voices.
Finallly he adds also keyboards and then he refines the whole with the acoustic guitar. I asked him what does he expect from SL:”The great advantage in SL is that it may put you in contact with many other musicians from all over in the world:you may listen easily to their music and maybe it will be possible starting a collaboration sharing experiences.
Technology seems to be such important for this artist and so I asked him what he thinks of:”Technology may help:today a musician may have his own studio without any huge investments; digital music did this revolution: it helps the autonomy both for creation and production. Of course promotion is not so easy even with web 2.0,social network and web radios. And of course SL itsef are able to spread music all around.
Submitted by Simona Dawes
March 25, 2008
Music and technology
Posted: 02:59 PM ET
Why a musician starts an SL career? First of all he has to trust in his music and he must think to share something new with his audience. This is the story of Swina Allen, whose gig I attended last week at the Gold Club. In his music you can find some bluesy roots, but actually it is affected also by some rock influences(Carlos Santana and Weather Report above all) and even some innovative jazz (Joe Zawinul,Waine Shorter e Jaco Pastorius):the result is an original sound, a kind of smooth jazz and chillout.
As soon as Swina started his second life he opened a club, the Italian Mood(yudasin22.99,45), suddenly it became a sort of musical workshop hosting many live musicians gigs of different genres. But Swina felt to be mainly a musician and so he decided to get in the game! He started playing all around in SL gathering a nice crowd of fans.
After the gig I asked some question to the artist, and he kindly answered me:first of all I asked him what he feels in performing in SL and he said “ well,it depends on what do you expect:I guess that the main thing is not not the music in itself, but first of all the feelings you get across, keeping the people with you till the gig ends it’s the strongest emotion and sometimes it’s not necessary to be technically perfect: in sl you may get an immediate feedback and it is well shown by the generous tips of the avatars attending your performance!”
When I asked Swina how does he create his songs he told me that usually he starts with a drums pattern and after he adds some new parts(pads,synths)using only some virtual instruments(VLS);sometimes he edits the tracks with a little of quantization but only for the attack putting together some sampled chorus and voices.
Finallly he adds also keyboards and then he refines the whole with the acoustic guitar. I asked him what does he expect from SL:”The great advantage in SL is that it may put you in contact with many other musicians from all over in the world:you may listen easily to their music and maybe it will be possible starting a collaboration sharing experiences.
Technology seems to be such important for this artist and so I asked him what he thinks of:”Technology may help:today a musician may have his own studio without any huge investments; digital music did this revolution: it helps the autonomy both for creation and production. Of course promotion is not so easy even with web 2.0,social network and web radios. And of course SL itsef are able to spread music all around.
Submitted by Simona Dawes
Saturday, March 22, 2008
Cachao Interview from 2006
The Life of the Legendary Cachao
http://www.miamiherald.com/1060/story/466464.html
Posted on Thu, Apr. 20, 2006
BY LYDIA MARTIN
lmartin@MiamiHerald.com
The legendary Cachao, credited with giving Cuban music its swinging bass line, sits at Versailles sipping a cortadito made just how he likes it - evaporated milk and Splenda. There isn't a server here who would get it wrong.
He's trying to tell you about his earliest days at the upright bass, when he was 9 and had to stand on a crate to reach the thing.
"You know [legendary Cuban pianist and singer] Bola de Nieve? I accompanied him in the silent movies. It was just the pictures and our music, " he says in his soft rasp.
But he can't finish the story about the beginnings of a career that is now, remarkably, reaching the 80-year mark. The early lunch crowd raises cafecitos in salute, they wave, they come over to shake his hand. Some call him Señor Cachao. Most say Maestro.
Israel "Cachao" Lopez, 87, acknowledges the irony with a gentle smile. There have been upswings and downswings. Friday he performs at the James L. Knight. On June 24, he will be honored at Carnegie Hall. But it wasn't long ago that he was just another aging exile here at aging exile central. He drank his cortaditos and kept to himself the fact that he helped create the mambo and later instigated the descarga, or jam session, the thing that gave Cuban musicians license to burn the house down.
He was a musician's musician whose entire family played and who moved with ease between the Havana Philharmonic Orchestra and dozens of bands that played the popular sound of the day. He and his brother Orestes Lopez rushed that sound toward the future in 1937 when they started toying with the starched danzón - an elegant form of Cuban music that dates to the late 1800s that was composed in three sections; they sped up and syncopated the third part, but at first, few dancers could follow. "We called that part mambo. That was la parte sabrosa (the tasty part). My brother and I would say to each other, 'Mambea, mambea ahí, ' which meant to add swing to that part."
A couple of years ago, a journalist traveled to Cuba and brought back the original sheet music of the Lopez brothers' first mambo. It hangs in Cachao's living room now. The only lyrics, in Cachao's hand: "Mambo, mambo, mambo, sabroso mambo."
LEAVING CUBA
In 1962, politics made him drag himself to the Havana airport to leave the island for good. He had to lie to his only daughter about where he was going that afternoon. Maria Elena was only 9. Her mother had left a couple of years before to lay the groundwork to get her family to New York. Cachao had tried to leave Maria Elena behind once before, in 1961. But she had cried so hard at the airport, he turned around and ran back home. Which is why the second time, he left without a word. "Imagine how hard it was, " Cachao says, staring down at his cortadito. "It was harder for her mother than for me. But I couldn't stay in Cuba. We knew we had to leave to get her out later. We just didn't know how long it would take."
Buenaventura, Cachao's wife of 58 years (everybody called her Estelle for reasons Cachao himself can't explain), died last year. She was only 15 or 16 when she swooned for one of Cachao's danzones at a party. But when she asked to meet the composer, she wasn't impressed. "She thought I was too fat. She didn't like me. But we became friends and a couple of years later I asked for her hand, " Cachao says with a chuckle.
After Buenaventura's death, daughter Maria Elena, now a grandmother herself, moved from the Bronx to live with her dad. They share an unassuming two-bedroom apartment in a new building off Calle Ocho in Coral Gables. Cachao's five Grammys sit on the entertainment center above the TV. But mostly they serve to prop up snapshots of Cachao's two grandsons. Says Maria Elena, who finally got out of Cuba in 1967: "As many times as I have seen him play, every time he is on stage, I cry. To see a musician so surrendered to his art is incredible. Whether it was a baby shower or Carnegie Hall, he played with the same emotion."
What's strangely missing from Cachao's place is his instrument. "I don't need a bass at home. I rent them, " he says. "It's hard to drag it around the airports at my age. The one I bought in 1930 for $30, I recently sold to a collector for $25,000. It was easier not to have it. Insuring it cost $2,000 a year. And I really don't need to practice any more."
Cachao delivered his delicious thump, thump, thump to New York's Latin jazz scene in 1964, after two years in Spain. Later he played endless Las Vegas orchestra pits. But by 1978, Buenaventura had put her foot down, demanding they move to Miami to get Cachao away from the gaming tables. He was hooked on blackjack and roulette, burning through thousands of dollars while scratching his head about fellow entertainers' casino habits.
"Frank Sinatra would arrive with Dean Martin, Sammy Davis and a mob of bodyguards. He would sit and listen to different bands I happened to be in, because he loved Cuban music. You had to play Siboney for him. Once he heard it, he got up and went to the tables. Liberace would play only the penny machine. And he would get really angry when he was losing. People around him would say, 'Take it easy, take it easy.' But he had just lost a whole dollar and he didn't care that he was a millionaire, it was a whole dollar."
ANONYMOUS BANDS
Miami is where the baby showers came in. It may have been the closest thing to Havana, but it wasn't a city with much of a live music culture. Besides, times had changed. The mambo, even the descarga, had become part of the sepia-toned past.
But Cachao never complained. He put everything into being the anonymous sideman in a string of anonymous banquet hall bands.
"At least I never had to become a barber. I was still living from my music. And I never gambled again. The big lie about gambling is that you can win. Maybe for a little while, but in the end you always lose, " says Cachao, who admits he still buys the occasional lottery ticket. "I never spend more than $1."
What happened next everybody at Versailles knows. In the early 1990s, a Hollywood actor named Andy Garcia, a youngster who pined for an era he was too young to have lived through himself, yanked Cachao, one of his childhood idols, from obscurity with the help of another youngster named Emilio Estefan. In 1994, they released Israel "Cachao" Lopez Master Sessions, Volume I, on Estefan's Crescent Moon label. It helped spark new interest in the retro Cuban sound not just locally, but across the globe. "Those two, and Glorita, too, are like my children, " Cachao says.
Even before Master Sessions, Garcia was obsessed with the idea of making a movie based on Guillermo Cabrera Infante's Tres Tristes Tigres. Even then, he knew Cachao's music would play a big part the The Lost City, which opens April 28, and the soundtrack, which features several of his songs.
"I always saw the music as a protagonist, " Garcia said. "For the physical protagonist in the movie, the music is the one thing he finds solace in in exile. It is the one thing that never betrays him. It's true for me, too. When I close my eyes and I hear a piece of music from the past, I go back and live an era I didn't even know. I never saw Beny Moré live. But in my imagination I have." Friday at the Knight Center, Garcia will play not just with Cachao but with Moré's famed trombonist, Generoso Jiménez, who left Cuba in 2003. "I'll be like a kid in candy store, " Garcia said. Generoso and Cachao go way back. In 2005, they performed at the Grammys alongside Bebo Valdés, Arturo Sandoval and Johnny Pacheco in what the Recording Academy billed as a "once-in-a-lifetime performance."
"It was delicious, " says Generoso. "To be with Bebo and Cachao on stage again. At our age. Imagine that. I remember Cachao from when we were kids. I recorded a descarga album with him before he left Cuba. Now, here we are working again together in Miami. I find myself enchanted with life as I'm about to turn 89."
Cachao, who turns 88 in September, seconds that emotion.
"To be remembered after all these years. It's beautiful."
Cachao Obituary
Print This Article
Posted on Sat, Mar. 22, 2008
Legendary musician 'Cachao' dies at 89
By ENRIQUE FERNANDEZ
Known to the world simply by his nickname -- Cachao -- bassist, composer and bandleader Israel López died Saturday morning at Coral Gables Hospital of complications resulting from kidney failure. He was 89.
Cachao was one of the most important living figures in Cuban music, on or off the island, and ''arguably the most important bassist in twentieth-century popular music,'' according to Cuban-music historian Ned Sublette. He not only innovated Cuban music but also influenced the now familiar bass lines of American R&B, ''which have become such a part of the environment that we don't even think where they came from,'' Sublette said.
Cachao and his brother Orestes are most widely known for their late-1930s invention of the mambo, a hot coda to the popular but stately danzón that allowed the dancers to break loose at the end of a piece.
It debuted in a chic Havana night club -- and flopped.
''Nothing happened,'' Cachao told The Miami Herald in 1992. ``Here was this 180-degree turn. The whole orchestra was out of work for six months after that because people didn't understand that type of music.''
Typically modest, Cachao always credited bandleader Dámaso Pérez Prado for making the beat world-famous in the 1950s.
''People think there could've been some antagonism,'' Cachao said. But ``if it weren't for him, the mambo wouldn't be known around the world.''
A possibly more important musical moment took place in 1957, when Cachao gathered a group of musicians in the early morning hours, pumped from playing gigs at Havana's popular nightclubs, for an impromptu jam at a recording studio. The resulting descargas, known to music aficionados worldwide as Cuban jam sessions, revolutionized Afro-Cuban popular music. Under Cachao's direction, these masters improvised freely in the manner of jazz, but their vocabulary was Cuba's popular music. This was the model that wold make live performances of Afro-Cuban based genres, from salsa to Latin jazz, so incredibly hot.
This majestic influence came from a man of sweet demeanor and unassailable sense of humor. Fronting his band at a fancy dance in Coral Gables when he was already in his late 80s, he seemed so frail that he had to lean his whole body on the contrabass to keep from falling. But his beatific smile and closed eyes proved that he was in heaven already, embracing his instrument like a lover, like a strong friend.
Yet he no longer owned a bass.
''That's outrageous,'' said jazz legend Charlie Haden when he heard this at the time. ``I'll give him one of mine.''
But a contrabass took up too much room in his small Coral Gables apartment. Besides, what need did he have to rehearse? Cachao carried his bass, his music, inside him.
A marvel of the 20th century, Cachao was born in 1918 in the same Havana house where Cuban poet and patriot José Martí was born. He was the youngest of three children in a family of distinguished musicians, many of them bassists -- around 40 and counting in his extended family.
As an 8-year-old bongo player, he joined a children's septet that included a future famous singer and bandleader, Roberto Faz. A year later, already on bass, he provided music for silent movies in his neighborhood theater, in the company of a pianist who would become a true superstar, the great cabaret performer Ignacio Villa, known as Bola de Nieve (Snowball).
His parents made sure Cachoa was classically trained, first at home and then at a conservatory. When he was 13, he joined his father and brother in the Orquesta Filarmónica de La Habana -- The Havana Philharmonic -- playing contrabass under the baton of guest conductors like Herbert von Karajan, Igor Stravinsky and Heitor Villa-Lobos. He had to stand on a box to reach the strings.
He was equally at home playing in a dance band, changing out of his coattails at the end of a concert to play with Arcano y sus Maravillas. When they weren't playing, Cachao and his brother created some 3,000 danzones.
''One day I was in my own home and I turned on the radio,'' he told The Miami Herald. 'And I heard a danzón that I liked. And I said `Who is that'? -- and at that moment, the announcer says it's mine.''
After a rich musical career in his home country, he left Cuba in 1962. His brother Orestes stayed on the island. As retribution for leaving, Cachao said, the Cuban government removed his name from all of his recordings, leaving only Orestes on the label. That, he said, was a ``big tragedy.''
Cachao eventually landed in Las Vegas because, as he admitted, ``I was a compulsive gambler.''
Though cured later in life, he nearly gambled away every penny until his wife whisked him away.
For a while, he had two distinct musical personae. In the New York salsa scene he was revered as a music god, with homage concerts dedicated to him, and records of his music produced by Cuban-music collector René López. In Miami, he was an ordinary working musician who would play quinceañeras and weddings, or back up dance bands in the notorious Latin nightclubs of the Miami Vice era.
It took a celebrity, Miami's own Andy García, to integrate his musical personality into one: that of a legendary master. In the '90s, García produced the recordings known as Master Sessions, accompanied by big concerts honoring his legacy. Cachao's star rose again.
But he remained a working musician, if at a much higher level of appreciation. Cachao continued to perform and record with all the energy of a much younger artist. Though already frail and distraught at the funeral of his fellow legend, trombonist Generoso Jiménez, in September 2007, he headlined a rollicking concert in Miami a week later.
Earlier this month, just days before he was hospitalized, the multiple Grammy winner was in the Dominican Republic receiving a lifetime achievement award. Cachao was planning an European tour in August with violinist Federico Britos, with whom he frequently collaborated.
The day before his death, Cachao told his friend Britos, ''When am I supposed to record with you again? I have to get out of bed.'' And he was in pre-production for a CD of new compositions.
''It was not only a great musician who died,'' said producer Emilio Estefan, who was at his bedside, ``but a great señor -- a gentleman. Even in his deathbed he would make sure his visitors felt at ease. He belonged to the people.''
Cachao, whose wife of 58 years, Ester Buenaventura López, died in 2004, is survived by their daughter María Elena López, grandson Hector Luis Vega and his nephew Daniel Palacio.
"Cachao" Israel Lopez (1918-2008)
The King of Latin bass is dead. Long live the king.
Cuban music icon 'Cachao' dies
Grammy winner pioneered mambo, influenced modern-day rhythms
The Associated Press
updated 6:12 p.m. PT, Sat., March. 22, 2008
MIAMI - Cuban bassist and composer Israel "Cachao" Lopez, who is credited with pioneering the mambo style of music, died Saturday at age 89, a family spokesman said.
Known simply as Cachao, the Grammy-winning musician had fallen ill in the past week and died surrounded by family members at Coral Gables Hospital, spokesman Nelson Albareda said.
Cachao left communist Cuba and came to the United States in the early 1960s. He continued to perform into his late 80s, including a performance after the death of trombonist Generoso Jimenez in September 2007.
Cachao was born in Havana in 1918 to a family of musicians. A classically trained bassist, he began performing with the Havana symphony orchestra as a teenager, working under the baton of visiting guest conductors like Herbert von Karajan, Igor Stravinsky and Heitor Villa-Lobos during his nearly 30-year career with the philharmonic.
He also wrote hundreds of songs in Cuba for bands and orchestras, many based on the classic Cuban music style known as son.
He and his late brother, multi-instrumentalist Orestes Lopez, are known for the creation in the late 1930s of the mambo, which emerged from their improvisational work with the danzon, an elegant musical style that lends itself to slow dancing.
"The origins of 'mambo' happened in 1937," Cachao said in a 2004 interview with The San Francisco Chronicle. "My brother and I were trying to add something new to our music and came up with a section that we called danzon mambo. It made an impact and stirred up people. At that time our music needed that type of enrichment."
Cachao influences
The mambo was embraced early on and Cuban composers and jazz musicians have tweaked it over the years. It also influenced the development of salsa music.
In the 1950s, Cachao and his friends began popularizing the descarga ("discharge" in Spanish), a raucous jam session incorporating elements of jazz and Afro-Cuban musical approaches.
Cachao left Cuba in 1962, relocating first to Spain, and soon afterward came to New York where he was hired to perform at the Palladium nightclub with the leading Latin bands.
In the United States, he collaborated with such Latin music stars such as Tito Puente, Tito Rodrigues, Machito, Chico O'Farrill, Eddie Palmieri and Gloria Estefan.
He worked in Las Vegas for most of the 1970s. He fell into obscurity during the 1980s after he moved to Miami, where he ended up playing in small clubs and at weddings.
Career revival
But his career enjoyed a revival in the 1990s with the help of Cuban-American actor-director Andy Garcia, who made a 1993 documentary about the bassist's career, "Cachao ... Como Su Ritmo No Hay Dos" (Like His Rhythm There Is No Other) and also produced several CDs, including the Grammy-winning album "Ahora Si!" in 2004.
In 2006, Cachao was saluted at two Jazz at Lincoln Center concerts with the Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra paying tribute to the Latin bass tradition, and he led a mambo all-star band at a JVC Jazz Festival program at Carnegie Hall.
In a statement Saturday, Garcia credited Cachao with being a major influence in Cuban musical history and said his passing marked the end of an era.
"Cachao is our musical father. He is revered by all who have come in contact with him and his music," Garcia said. "Maestro ... you have been my teacher, and you took me in like a son. So I will continue to rejoice with your music and carry our traditions wherever I go, in your honor."
Cuban-born reed player and composer Paquito D'Rivera said Cachao made friends everywhere he went with his affable personality and good sense of humor. D'Rivera said he was working on a piece he had written for the multiple Grammy winner when he heard about the death.
"He was what a great musician should be. He represented what true versatility in music is all about," D'Rivera told The Associated Press in a telephone interview.
A wake is set for Wednesday, and his burial is Thursday, Albareda said.
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Cuban music icon 'Cachao' dies
Grammy winner pioneered mambo, influenced modern-day rhythms
The Associated Press
updated 6:12 p.m. PT, Sat., March. 22, 2008
MIAMI - Cuban bassist and composer Israel "Cachao" Lopez, who is credited with pioneering the mambo style of music, died Saturday at age 89, a family spokesman said.
Known simply as Cachao, the Grammy-winning musician had fallen ill in the past week and died surrounded by family members at Coral Gables Hospital, spokesman Nelson Albareda said.
Cachao left communist Cuba and came to the United States in the early 1960s. He continued to perform into his late 80s, including a performance after the death of trombonist Generoso Jimenez in September 2007.
Cachao was born in Havana in 1918 to a family of musicians. A classically trained bassist, he began performing with the Havana symphony orchestra as a teenager, working under the baton of visiting guest conductors like Herbert von Karajan, Igor Stravinsky and Heitor Villa-Lobos during his nearly 30-year career with the philharmonic.
He also wrote hundreds of songs in Cuba for bands and orchestras, many based on the classic Cuban music style known as son.
He and his late brother, multi-instrumentalist Orestes Lopez, are known for the creation in the late 1930s of the mambo, which emerged from their improvisational work with the danzon, an elegant musical style that lends itself to slow dancing.
"The origins of 'mambo' happened in 1937," Cachao said in a 2004 interview with The San Francisco Chronicle. "My brother and I were trying to add something new to our music and came up with a section that we called danzon mambo. It made an impact and stirred up people. At that time our music needed that type of enrichment."
Cachao influences
The mambo was embraced early on and Cuban composers and jazz musicians have tweaked it over the years. It also influenced the development of salsa music.
In the 1950s, Cachao and his friends began popularizing the descarga ("discharge" in Spanish), a raucous jam session incorporating elements of jazz and Afro-Cuban musical approaches.
Cachao left Cuba in 1962, relocating first to Spain, and soon afterward came to New York where he was hired to perform at the Palladium nightclub with the leading Latin bands.
In the United States, he collaborated with such Latin music stars such as Tito Puente, Tito Rodrigues, Machito, Chico O'Farrill, Eddie Palmieri and Gloria Estefan.
He worked in Las Vegas for most of the 1970s. He fell into obscurity during the 1980s after he moved to Miami, where he ended up playing in small clubs and at weddings.
Career revival
But his career enjoyed a revival in the 1990s with the help of Cuban-American actor-director Andy Garcia, who made a 1993 documentary about the bassist's career, "Cachao ... Como Su Ritmo No Hay Dos" (Like His Rhythm There Is No Other) and also produced several CDs, including the Grammy-winning album "Ahora Si!" in 2004.
In 2006, Cachao was saluted at two Jazz at Lincoln Center concerts with the Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra paying tribute to the Latin bass tradition, and he led a mambo all-star band at a JVC Jazz Festival program at Carnegie Hall.
In a statement Saturday, Garcia credited Cachao with being a major influence in Cuban musical history and said his passing marked the end of an era.
"Cachao is our musical father. He is revered by all who have come in contact with him and his music," Garcia said. "Maestro ... you have been my teacher, and you took me in like a son. So I will continue to rejoice with your music and carry our traditions wherever I go, in your honor."
Cuban-born reed player and composer Paquito D'Rivera said Cachao made friends everywhere he went with his affable personality and good sense of humor. D'Rivera said he was working on a piece he had written for the multiple Grammy winner when he heard about the death.
"He was what a great musician should be. He represented what true versatility in music is all about," D'Rivera told The Associated Press in a telephone interview.
A wake is set for Wednesday, and his burial is Thursday, Albareda said.
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Friday, March 21, 2008
Pep Bands: For Bands, Songs Remain the Same
NYT
March 19, 2008
For Bands, Songs Remain the Same
By JOHN BRANCH
Step inside an arena where N.C.A.A. tournament games are being played. Close the eyes during timeouts. Listen to the pep bands play their jaunty tunes. And remember what year it is.
Pep bands may provide the N.C.A.A. tournament’s greatest culture clash — giving a time-warped soundtrack to games that decide this year’s champion.
At last weekend’s Pacific-10 Conference tournament in Los Angeles, Staples Center was periodically filled with horn-tooting variations of songs by Bon Jovi (“Livin’ on a Prayer”), Boston (“More Than a Feeling”), Ozzy Osbourne (“Crazy Train”), the Police (“Message in a Bottle”) and KC and the Sunshine Band (“Get Down Tonight”).
Across the country, during the Big East tournament at Madison Square Garden, the well-worn strains of Michael Jackson (“Thriller”), Kansas (“Carry On Wayward Son”), Guns N’ Roses (“Paradise City”) and the Doobie Brothers (“Long Train Runnin’ ”) helped fill the downtime when the court was empty.
It can seem that the pep bands are forever behind the times, playing from song lists borrowed from classic-rock radio stations and wedding-reception D.J.s.
But there is a method to their madness — and to their Madness (“Our House”).
“We try to play songs that not only appeal to the blue-hairs in the crowd, but also to our students,” said Jim Hudson, director of athletic bands at Arizona State.
The brass-heavy 30-piece ensembles (the tournament allows no amplification — meaning no electric guitars — and only 30 band members for each team) are typically subsets of the university’s much larger marching band. And there are plenty of reasons why the song lists (most bands arrive ready to play 40 to 60 songs) can seem dated.
Mostly, it is because fans want it that way. Bands are looking to get toes tapping and chins wagging no matter the listener’s age.
There are other reasons. Rock anthems, with their catchy melodies and complex chord progressions, often lend themselves to arrangements better than other genres. Older songs have become part of each band’s familiar repertory and never leave. Copyright issues and costs can limit the possibilities for fresh tunes.
And, perhaps — admit it, occasional pep-band listener — the bands are sometimes too hip, playing songs so fresh that they are not recognized. Most fans pay little attention to a game’s background noise, only when a familiar tune catches the ear: Wait. No way. Is that Journey they’re playing?
“Well, we do have a lot of Journey,” the Cal student director Stephen Gamboa said.
Most college bands last weekend played plenty of songs from this decade, too, by the likes of the Black Eyed Peas, Kanye West, 50 Cent, Green Day and the Offspring.
“The kids want to play what they listen to, not what I want to listen to,” said Art Bartner, Southern California’s longtime director of bands. “I’m basically Chicago, Earth Wind & Fire, Tower of Power. They want to do a lot of the newer ones.”
U.S.C.’s standards include its well-known fight song and “Tusk,” the 1979 Fleetwood Mac song that featured the university’s marching band. It also plays cutting-edge variations from Foo Fighters and System of a Down.
Updating the songbook is an annual tug-of-war. Most bands hold year-end votes for band members. At U.C.L.A., the bottom five songs are dropped. Five new ones are added.
“ ‘Build Me Up Buttercup’ is the most controversial song we have,” said Reesa Jones, the undergraduate teaching assistant leading U.C.L.A.’s band at the Pac-10 tournament. “Some love it, some hate it. Tubas love it, because it’s their one chance for a solo. But a lot of others just hate it.”
U.C.L.A. recently added songs by the Red Hot Chili Peppers (“Can’t Stop”) and Matchbox Twenty (“How Far We’ve Come”). The band also regularly plays the theme song from the 1970s television show “The Jeffersons” (“Movin’ on Up”).
At U.S.C., band members take samples of new songs to Bartner and his assistants. They ascertain how well guitar riffs and piano solos can be transformed for trumpets, trombones and mellophones.
Most pep-band arrangements, designed for timeouts, range from 100 seconds to 2 minutes. Raps, with their repetitive hooks, are increasingly used for 30-second timeouts.
Choosing the right mix has legal complexities, too. Music is copyrighted, so bands typically cannot simply choose a song and start playing it — although many do.
In theory, bands need to get approval and pay for the rights to use songs. They often start with the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (Ascap) or Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI), which license music and distribute royalties to songwriters and composers. They deal with sheet-music publishers, such as Hal Leonard or Alfred Publishing, which combine to control the majority of the popular-music catalog.
Rights to a song can cost $50 to $350, according to Jeni Paulson, president of CopyCat Music Licensing. Her company, a type of middleman, works with many Pac-10 and Big Ten band directors. They call, usually in the summer after making a wish list for the coming school year, and say which songs they want to use. CopyCat does the research on licensing and returns with a price.
“Not all directors know that they’re supposed to ask permission,” Paulson said.
Some artists and songs are simply off limits. Van Halen’s “Jump” is a popular request, but always denied. So are the works of the composer John Williams, meaning that the familiar chords of “Jaws,” “Star Wars” or “Raiders of the Lost Ark” should not be heard blaring through arenas.
But there is still plenty to hear in the coming days. From the Kingsmen (“Louie, Louie”) to Parliament (“Give Up the Funk”), from Twisted Sister (“We’re Not Gonna Take It”) to 50 Cent (“Candy Shop”), the bands will play on, or at least until the game starts again.
And when the game ends, after a quick rendition of a fight song or alma mater — and, almost invariably, one side’s version of Kool & the Gang’s “Celebration” — the bands are shooed away and replaced by two new ones for the next game.
Listen carefully. They want to please you. And, yes, that probably was Journey.
March 19, 2008
For Bands, Songs Remain the Same
By JOHN BRANCH
Step inside an arena where N.C.A.A. tournament games are being played. Close the eyes during timeouts. Listen to the pep bands play their jaunty tunes. And remember what year it is.
Pep bands may provide the N.C.A.A. tournament’s greatest culture clash — giving a time-warped soundtrack to games that decide this year’s champion.
At last weekend’s Pacific-10 Conference tournament in Los Angeles, Staples Center was periodically filled with horn-tooting variations of songs by Bon Jovi (“Livin’ on a Prayer”), Boston (“More Than a Feeling”), Ozzy Osbourne (“Crazy Train”), the Police (“Message in a Bottle”) and KC and the Sunshine Band (“Get Down Tonight”).
Across the country, during the Big East tournament at Madison Square Garden, the well-worn strains of Michael Jackson (“Thriller”), Kansas (“Carry On Wayward Son”), Guns N’ Roses (“Paradise City”) and the Doobie Brothers (“Long Train Runnin’ ”) helped fill the downtime when the court was empty.
It can seem that the pep bands are forever behind the times, playing from song lists borrowed from classic-rock radio stations and wedding-reception D.J.s.
But there is a method to their madness — and to their Madness (“Our House”).
“We try to play songs that not only appeal to the blue-hairs in the crowd, but also to our students,” said Jim Hudson, director of athletic bands at Arizona State.
The brass-heavy 30-piece ensembles (the tournament allows no amplification — meaning no electric guitars — and only 30 band members for each team) are typically subsets of the university’s much larger marching band. And there are plenty of reasons why the song lists (most bands arrive ready to play 40 to 60 songs) can seem dated.
Mostly, it is because fans want it that way. Bands are looking to get toes tapping and chins wagging no matter the listener’s age.
There are other reasons. Rock anthems, with their catchy melodies and complex chord progressions, often lend themselves to arrangements better than other genres. Older songs have become part of each band’s familiar repertory and never leave. Copyright issues and costs can limit the possibilities for fresh tunes.
And, perhaps — admit it, occasional pep-band listener — the bands are sometimes too hip, playing songs so fresh that they are not recognized. Most fans pay little attention to a game’s background noise, only when a familiar tune catches the ear: Wait. No way. Is that Journey they’re playing?
“Well, we do have a lot of Journey,” the Cal student director Stephen Gamboa said.
Most college bands last weekend played plenty of songs from this decade, too, by the likes of the Black Eyed Peas, Kanye West, 50 Cent, Green Day and the Offspring.
“The kids want to play what they listen to, not what I want to listen to,” said Art Bartner, Southern California’s longtime director of bands. “I’m basically Chicago, Earth Wind & Fire, Tower of Power. They want to do a lot of the newer ones.”
U.S.C.’s standards include its well-known fight song and “Tusk,” the 1979 Fleetwood Mac song that featured the university’s marching band. It also plays cutting-edge variations from Foo Fighters and System of a Down.
Updating the songbook is an annual tug-of-war. Most bands hold year-end votes for band members. At U.C.L.A., the bottom five songs are dropped. Five new ones are added.
“ ‘Build Me Up Buttercup’ is the most controversial song we have,” said Reesa Jones, the undergraduate teaching assistant leading U.C.L.A.’s band at the Pac-10 tournament. “Some love it, some hate it. Tubas love it, because it’s their one chance for a solo. But a lot of others just hate it.”
U.C.L.A. recently added songs by the Red Hot Chili Peppers (“Can’t Stop”) and Matchbox Twenty (“How Far We’ve Come”). The band also regularly plays the theme song from the 1970s television show “The Jeffersons” (“Movin’ on Up”).
At U.S.C., band members take samples of new songs to Bartner and his assistants. They ascertain how well guitar riffs and piano solos can be transformed for trumpets, trombones and mellophones.
Most pep-band arrangements, designed for timeouts, range from 100 seconds to 2 minutes. Raps, with their repetitive hooks, are increasingly used for 30-second timeouts.
Choosing the right mix has legal complexities, too. Music is copyrighted, so bands typically cannot simply choose a song and start playing it — although many do.
In theory, bands need to get approval and pay for the rights to use songs. They often start with the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (Ascap) or Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI), which license music and distribute royalties to songwriters and composers. They deal with sheet-music publishers, such as Hal Leonard or Alfred Publishing, which combine to control the majority of the popular-music catalog.
Rights to a song can cost $50 to $350, according to Jeni Paulson, president of CopyCat Music Licensing. Her company, a type of middleman, works with many Pac-10 and Big Ten band directors. They call, usually in the summer after making a wish list for the coming school year, and say which songs they want to use. CopyCat does the research on licensing and returns with a price.
“Not all directors know that they’re supposed to ask permission,” Paulson said.
Some artists and songs are simply off limits. Van Halen’s “Jump” is a popular request, but always denied. So are the works of the composer John Williams, meaning that the familiar chords of “Jaws,” “Star Wars” or “Raiders of the Lost Ark” should not be heard blaring through arenas.
But there is still plenty to hear in the coming days. From the Kingsmen (“Louie, Louie”) to Parliament (“Give Up the Funk”), from Twisted Sister (“We’re Not Gonna Take It”) to 50 Cent (“Candy Shop”), the bands will play on, or at least until the game starts again.
And when the game ends, after a quick rendition of a fight song or alma mater — and, almost invariably, one side’s version of Kool & the Gang’s “Celebration” — the bands are shooed away and replaced by two new ones for the next game.
Listen carefully. They want to please you. And, yes, that probably was Journey.
Saturday, March 15, 2008
The Wire's ghetto "Goodnight Moon"
There are lots of blog discussions about the final scene in HBO's The Wire season 5, episode 7 ("Took"), especially on the HBO message board for the series. Screenwriter Richard Price apparently lifted the passage from his novel Clockers at the request of producer David Simon. If you remember Goodnight Moon from your childhood or, more likely (and like me), you've read it to your own children, it is a beautiful intersection of your own life and the gritty realism of this great television show.
Detective Kima Greggs to her weekends-only adopted son Elijah, sitting at window past bedtime, looking out upon a restive, active Baltimore street:
Kima: Let's say goodnight to everybody. Goodnight moon...
Elijah: Goodnight moon...
Kima: Goodnight stars...
Elijah: Goodnight stars...
Kima: Goodnight po-pos...
Elijah: Goodnight po-pos...
Kima: Goodnight fiends...
Elijah: Goodnight fiends...
Kima:Goodnight hoppers...
Elijah: Goodnight hoppers...
Kima: Goodnight hustlers...
Elijah: Goodnight hustlers...
Kima: Goodnight scammers...
Elijah: Goodnight scammers...
Kima: Goodnight to everybody...
Elijah: Goodnight to everybody...
Kima: Goodnight to one and all...
Elijah: Goodnight to one and all.
Writes Alan Sepinwall (if you know the characters of the show):
"[I]t fits perfectly into this episode, as the show throws its support behind Gus' "This ain't Beirut" argument with Klebanow and Whiting. A carpet-bagging, myopic writer like Templeton looks at Baltimore as a blighted, war-torn city that's beyond salvation, where a Baltimore native like Gus or Kima looks on it as a messed-up place that's still, as Gus says, "Our f--kin' city."
If Templeton had a kid and tried to do "Goodnight Moon" for him in the middle of the night and then heard street activity outside his window, he'd likely slam the window shut and try to distract the kid from all that scary noise. What Kima does -- what "The Wire" consistently and brilliantly does -- is to incorporate the unfortunate sights and sounds outside the window into a larger view of the world, which is the world Elijah will grow up in. Yes, the drug culture is tragic and a blight on society, but it exists, and it affects Kima and will affect Elijah one day -- and, frankly, Kima has affection for certain elements of it. (Bubbles, for one.) You can be afraid of the world outside your window, you can demonize it and mythologize it and try to win awards from it, or you can confront it head on and maybe even find a way to make it seem less scary for the little boy in your arms."
I miss the show already.
UPDATE 2010
Finally found a low quality clip; let's see how long this stays up (fair use for purposes of criticism and evaluation):
Free Music? Only With a Fight
NYT
March 15, 2008
What's Online
Free Music? Only With a Fight
By DAN MITCHELL
LIKE most purveyors of media, music labels are flailing about for a new business model even as their old one is quickly becoming outmoded.
One proposed solution — giving music away online, supported by advertising — was the subject of a panel discussion this week at the South by Southwest music conference in Austin, Tex. “Of course a panel on online music-business models was going to degenerate into a food fight,” wrote Joseph Weisenthal of paidContent.org.
The stew boiled over when Ted Mico, the head of digital strategy at Interscope/Geffen/A&M records, declared, “I need more marketing and promotion on the Internet like I need a root canal without anesthetic.”
He was responding to his fellow panelist, Peter Rojas, the founder of a new music blog, RCRD LBL (pronounced record label.) Mr. Rojas is one of many advocates of the idea that music shouldn’t really be “sold,” but rather used to promote other things, like advertised goods, with a portion of revenue going to artists.
On RCRD LBL, artists offer their music free, without restrictive digital rights management software. In return, the artists get a portion of the site’s ad revenue. Such blogs, he said, are “a huge force in music right now and in some ways more important than the labels because that is where bands are being broken.”
Mr. Mico disagreed. “Different people want different forms of access,” he allowed, but giving away music on blogs isn’t the answer.
Several people in the audience sided, loudly, with Mr. Mico, with some going so far as to accuse Mr. Rojas of ripping off the artists on his site. They had to be reminded that the artists are there by choice.
Mr. Mico said he believed that subscription services like Rhapsody may yet catch on. “It is clear that somebody at some point will crack the subscription nut,” he said. A subscription service, he said, “allows people to discover music without having to pay extra for it.”
It also tends to keep labels in control of the music-distribution chain. But even Mr. Mico had to admit that when it comes to subscription services, “the trouble is, nobody that hasn’t experienced it wants to experience it.”
LOSING AIR
The selling point for Apple's MacBook Air is the laptop's lightness and thinness. But be careful, warns Steven Levy, a technology columnist at Newsweek, the Air is so light and so thin that you can easily lose it.
Mr. Levy should know, because he lost his. After tearing his apartment apart and considering that the laptop might have been stolen, he remembered leaving it on the coffee table, where newspapers and magazines tend to pile up. “My wife,” he wrote, “whose clutter tolerance is well below my own, sometimes will swoop in and hastily gather the pulp in a huge stack, going directly to the trash-compactor room just down the hall.”
As far as Mr. Levy can tell, that’s where his laptop ended up.
LITANY OF ERROR
Record labels were making terrible missteps long before the advent of the digital age. Blender.com offers a list of what it considers the 20 worst. They include MCA Records’ decision in 1989 to pass on a Seattle upstart band called Nirvana while also betting big on “Leather Boyz With Electric Toyz,” the debut album of a hair-metal band called Pretty Boy Floyd.
The worst record-label mistake ever, according to Blender, was the labels decision to sue Napster out of existence. “Napster’s users didn’t just disappear,” the site reminds us. “They scattered to hundreds of alternative systems — and new technology has stayed three steps ahead of the music business ever since.”
March 15, 2008
What's Online
Free Music? Only With a Fight
By DAN MITCHELL
LIKE most purveyors of media, music labels are flailing about for a new business model even as their old one is quickly becoming outmoded.
One proposed solution — giving music away online, supported by advertising — was the subject of a panel discussion this week at the South by Southwest music conference in Austin, Tex. “Of course a panel on online music-business models was going to degenerate into a food fight,” wrote Joseph Weisenthal of paidContent.org.
The stew boiled over when Ted Mico, the head of digital strategy at Interscope/Geffen/A&M records, declared, “I need more marketing and promotion on the Internet like I need a root canal without anesthetic.”
He was responding to his fellow panelist, Peter Rojas, the founder of a new music blog, RCRD LBL (pronounced record label.) Mr. Rojas is one of many advocates of the idea that music shouldn’t really be “sold,” but rather used to promote other things, like advertised goods, with a portion of revenue going to artists.
On RCRD LBL, artists offer their music free, without restrictive digital rights management software. In return, the artists get a portion of the site’s ad revenue. Such blogs, he said, are “a huge force in music right now and in some ways more important than the labels because that is where bands are being broken.”
Mr. Mico disagreed. “Different people want different forms of access,” he allowed, but giving away music on blogs isn’t the answer.
Several people in the audience sided, loudly, with Mr. Mico, with some going so far as to accuse Mr. Rojas of ripping off the artists on his site. They had to be reminded that the artists are there by choice.
Mr. Mico said he believed that subscription services like Rhapsody may yet catch on. “It is clear that somebody at some point will crack the subscription nut,” he said. A subscription service, he said, “allows people to discover music without having to pay extra for it.”
It also tends to keep labels in control of the music-distribution chain. But even Mr. Mico had to admit that when it comes to subscription services, “the trouble is, nobody that hasn’t experienced it wants to experience it.”
LOSING AIR
The selling point for Apple's MacBook Air is the laptop's lightness and thinness. But be careful, warns Steven Levy, a technology columnist at Newsweek, the Air is so light and so thin that you can easily lose it.
Mr. Levy should know, because he lost his. After tearing his apartment apart and considering that the laptop might have been stolen, he remembered leaving it on the coffee table, where newspapers and magazines tend to pile up. “My wife,” he wrote, “whose clutter tolerance is well below my own, sometimes will swoop in and hastily gather the pulp in a huge stack, going directly to the trash-compactor room just down the hall.”
As far as Mr. Levy can tell, that’s where his laptop ended up.
LITANY OF ERROR
Record labels were making terrible missteps long before the advent of the digital age. Blender.com offers a list of what it considers the 20 worst. They include MCA Records’ decision in 1989 to pass on a Seattle upstart band called Nirvana while also betting big on “Leather Boyz With Electric Toyz,” the debut album of a hair-metal band called Pretty Boy Floyd.
The worst record-label mistake ever, according to Blender, was the labels decision to sue Napster out of existence. “Napster’s users didn’t just disappear,” the site reminds us. “They scattered to hundreds of alternative systems — and new technology has stayed three steps ahead of the music business ever since.”
Friday, March 14, 2008
For Bronx School’s Dancers, the Moves Are Irish
NYT
March 14, 2008
For Bronx School’s Dancers, the Moves Are Irish
By ELISSA GOOTMAN
Taja Garnett’s parents are from Belize, but her nickname is “Irish girl.”
Ever since Taja, 10, joined the Keltic Dreams, the Irish dance troupe that is the unlikely pride of her Bronx elementary school, she has been so consumed by high kicks, heel clicks and treble hop backs that she practices “on the street, at the bus stop, sometimes at the train station, in the living room, on the bus when I’m standing up and there’s no seats.”
Oh, and also in class. In class? That’s right, with her fingers, she explained, demonstrating the way her index finger acts as the left foot and her middle finger as the right.
“I look at the teacher,” Taja chirped, her eyes gleaming mischievously behind wire-rimmed glasses, “and do it at the same time.”
With a student body that is 71 percent Hispanic and 27 percent black, Public School 59 does not seem an obvious home for a thriving Irish dance troupe. And when Caroline Duggan first arrived from Dublin at age 23 to try her hand as a New York City public school music teacher, it wasn’t. Many of her students had never heard of Ireland. Why, they wanted to know, did she talk funny?
Then, to stave off homesickness, Ms. Duggan hung a “Riverdance” poster in her fifth-floor classroom, and one thing led to another. The children pointed to a long-haired dancer on the poster and asked if it was her. No, she laughed, but I could show you a few steps. The impromptu lesson grew into a wildly popular after-school program and, for the first time last year, a trip to Ireland that still inspires dreamy looks among those lucky enough to go.
“The grass wasn’t like ordinary grass,” recalled Nyiasha Newby, 10. “It was like sparkling and stuff, because the water was on it. It was, like, fresh.”
On a recent afternoon, as cars blaring hip-hop music rolled past P.S. 59, on Bathgate Avenue near 181st Street, and neighbors called to one another in Spanglish, the school auditorium swelled with the soaring sounds of drums, fiddles and uilleann pipes.
Sixty growing feet laced into clunky black shoes spun, kicked and hop-1,2,3’d their way across the stage, in routines that Ms. Duggan, now 29, had choreographed, infusing the traditional Irish dancing she was reared on with elements of hip-hop, salsa and African dance. Toothy smiles mingled with the bitten lips of deep concentration. The Keltic Dreams were at it again.
“It kind of took on a life of its own,” marveled the principal, Christine McHugh.
There was Anna Perez, 10, her hair pulled back into a tight bun, who wants to be a professional Irish dancer when she grows up. There was Alice Olom, 11, rehearsing alongside third-graders even after having moved on to middle school herself.
“There are some people in here that are very, very shy, so I’m here to let them know that shyness is not an option in Irish dancing,” Alice said, her long braids pulled back in a ponytail. “You have to be confident in everything you do.”
For years, Ana Sotomayor, 47, had tried to teach her son, Angel Perez, 11, the salsa moves she had learned growing up in Puerto Rico. For years, she recalled, he had shrugged her off, saying he didn’t like it and couldn’t do it.
But there Angel was, center stage, hands on his hips and baggy jeans flapping as he began a routine with a short solo.
“Every time I see him in a show I cry, because I’m very proud of him,” Ms. Sotomayor said. “He’s very shy, but then when I see him dance I see another Angel, very secure in what he’s doing. He’s very different.”
Parents agree that the dancing has filtered into other aspects of their children’s lives.
“She knows that she has to do good in school to keep up with her Irish dancing,” Maritza Rosa, 42, said of her daughter Karilis Javier, 11.
Ms. Rosa was taken aback when Karilis first mentioned her new hobby.
“I thought she would do, you know, the Latin dance, the merengue, the salsa, the English music that’s here in the Bronx,” she said. “I said, ‘Irish dancing?’ And then I said, well, something different, something new for the kids.”
Now, Ms. Rosa said, she finds herself experimenting with steps. “You see your child perform,” she said, “and you get into it.”
It has not always been easy. In the months leading up to last year’s trip to Ireland, Ms. Duggan had a window into the difficulties in her students’ lives. In her quest to obtain passports, which only a few children had, she navigated tricky immigration issues and helped track down a number of fathers who had not seen their children in years.
One student had a tearful reunion with her father in the back of the school auditorium. Another, an 8-year-old, showed up for rehearsal clutching her passport just weeks before the trip; after months of trying, relatives had finally managed to contact her father in Puerto Rico to get his needed signature.
Ms. Duggan had long feared she would never be able to raise enough money for the Ireland trip. That changed two years ago, after she met Tim O’Connor, then the Irish consul general in New York, who put her in touch with a network of Irish-American New Yorkers. She eventually raised $70,000, enough to take to Ireland 32 students and 19 chaperones, among them Mrs. McHugh, who had never been overseas.
The group performed on Ireland’s “Late Late Show” and at the official residence of the president, Mary McAleese. They were filmed for a documentary, “A Bronx Dream,” which is scheduled to be shown on Irish television on Monday, St. Patrick’s Day.
One of Jesely Salcedo’s favorite memories, though, is of the visit with Ms. Duggan’s mother, who hid foil-covered chocolate leprechauns in her backyard. “We even had our own little treasure hunt,” Jesely, 11, recounted.
Now, Ms. Duggan is struggling to raise money for this year’s trip to Ireland and preparing her young charges for another big day: The St. Patrick’s Day parade in Manhattan on Monday, in which they will march for the first time.
Ms. Duggan has outlasted most of the young teachers she met when she first came to New York, who, like her, had been recruited from overseas to fill shortages. “The administration wasn’t supportive or they didn’t like their school or they missed their family,” she said.
She credits the people of P.S. 59, from Mrs. McHugh — who welcomed her for Christmas Eve dinner in Riverdale one year when she could not afford a ticket home — to students like Jesely, who have embraced Irish dancing as though the culture were their own. Which, in a sense, it now is.
“As I get older I’ll even show my kids, so that way they, like, can spread it around,” Jesely said. “Cause I think like the whole world should know about it.”
Sunday, March 09, 2008
In New York, With Beliefs That Still Challenge Cuba
New York Times
March 10, 2008
Citywide
In New York, With Beliefs That Still Challenge Cuba
By DAVID GONZALEZ
Carmen Peláez is a liberal with a deep laugh and a great sense of the absurd. All of those qualities are tested when she encounters fellow New Yorkers who still admire Fidel Castro.
Ms. Peláez, a Cuban-American actress, was born in this country and raised in Miami. She came to New York in 1993 to study acting. In the mid-’90s, she traveled to Cuba to explore the world of her great-aunt, Amelia Peláez, a noted painter who died in 1968. All those experiences pulse through “Rum & Coke,” a one-woman show in which she channels relatives on both sides of the Florida Straits and weary Habaneros stuck on an island forgotten by the outside world.
The play was her retort to the fascination with Che T-shirts, solidarity tours to Cuba and the endless praise of the revolution’s twin pillars of health and education.
“When I started writing the play, I thought people just didn’t know what was happening in Cuba,” she said after the show closed its monthlong New York run last week. “But the longer I live here, the more I realized, they don’t care.”
She was reminded of that last month when Mr. Castro finally stepped down as president after nearly 50 years in power. The move prompted wistful reflections from old rabble-rousers and praise from some politicians. Representative José E. Serrano called Mr. Castro a “great leader” whose retirement ensured the future of the Cuban system and its achievements, which he said enjoyed “a broad base of support” on the island.
What really stumped Ms. Peláez was how the Bronx congressman’s only brickbats were against the “twisted policies” of the United States government.
“They would rather keep their little pop revolution instead of saying it is a dictatorship,” Ms. Peláez said. “I had somebody come to me after a show and say, ‘Don’t ruin Cuba for me!’ Well, why not? They’re holding on to a fantasy.”
This city has long attracted Cuban artists and intellectuals in exile. Many of those who now live here thrive on the city’s culture, its mix of people and even its weather (four seasons, instead of hot and hotter). Perhaps the greatest Cuban exile of all, José Martí, lived and worked in 19th-century New York as he rallied his countrymen in the fight for independence from Spain.
Exiles and refugees are still coming to New York, having decided that life in Castro’s Cuba — the only life they ever really knew — was not worth the sacrifice of personal freedoms. This month, some of them will observe the fifth anniversary of the Cuban government’s crackdown on 75 dissidents, independent journalists and librarians, who were sentenced to as many as 28 years. Most of them are still in prison.
Paul Berman, a writer in residence at New York University who has written critiques of the American left and Cuba, said the plight of these recent arrivals does not strike the same chord here it once did for those who fled the Soviet bloc.
“Back in the ’70s and ’80s, some mathematician would come out of the Soviet Union and there would be a meeting of intellectuals to greet him,” Mr. Berman said. “That kind of human rights zeal just seems to have disappeared.”
Cristina Martinez came of age in the Soviet Union, were she was sent to study electrical engineering in 1985 after graduating from high school in Cuba. Her extracurricular lessons were unavoidable, watching as perestroika and glasnost swept through society.
“The press was starting to bring to light everything they had hidden during 75 years of Communism,” she said. “It was a lesson, that this was the future we wanted to go to. This is the light. We had all toyed with the idea of changing the Cuban reality, to criticize it, to make it better.”
But as walls fell and borders opened, Cuba clung to its way. Disillusioned, Ms. Martinez fled to Spain, where she taught at a university for six years. Her politics were leftist enough that her Spanish friends joked she was “the reddest person they ever met.”
Maybe not in New York, where she has lived since 1996, working as a computer systems administrator at an Upper West Side school. Though she still considers herself a liberal who favors the underdog, she is puzzled by the image of Cuba as an international paladin.
“The image is one of the defender of the oppressed and defender of just causes,” she said. “People who understand the Cuban reality know it is not like that. It is not something they would want for themselves or their own country. Or, they are opportunists who use Cuba as a symbol knowing full well what is happening.”
Although Enrique Del Risco knows what has happened on the island where he was born 40 years ago, he still gets odd looks from college students when he tries to explain Cuba’s reality. He left Cuba in 1996 and settled in New York two years later, teaching Spanish at New York University.
“I grew up believing in the system,” he said. “Quite a believer. My parents, too.”
He, too, thought there would be change during the late 1980s. Instead, he found himself slowly suffocating, with his writings earning him reprimands.
“I was more scared of surrendering than being put in jail,” he said. “I was scared that I would stop being myself. I was someone who thinks independently and expresses that.”
Yet to try and tell that to some of his students, he said, was like talking about extraterrestrial life. He knows to expect a dual riposte — yes, but what about universal health care and education?
“At the root of that is a great belittling of Cubans,” he said. “It’s like we are some sort of little animals who only need a veterinarian and someone to teach us tricks and we’ll be fine.”
He is dismayed by the way Cuban officials deflect questions from university students who wonder why they cannot travel overseas or stay at Cuban hotels, which are essentially reserved for tourists. Ricardo Alarcón, president of Cuba’s National Assembly, told one such questioner that when he was a diplomat posted in New York during the 1960s and ’70s, shopkeepers would eject him the moment they learned he was Hispanic.
“There is a fear of the future that comes from control of information,” Mr. Del Risco said. “You can see that in what Alarcón said. You can only dare say what he said in a country that is disinformed.”
Mr. Del Risco’s New York is welcoming.
“I feel more at home in New York than in Madrid,” he said. “From the first day you get here you feel like you are from here. There is not that distance or someone asking you what you are doing here.”
He loves the variety. The rush. The chance to do it all. Or do nothing at all.
“I was always in love with New York,” he said. “Even when I was an anti-imperialist, I was pro-New York.”
March 10, 2008
Citywide
In New York, With Beliefs That Still Challenge Cuba
By DAVID GONZALEZ
Carmen Peláez is a liberal with a deep laugh and a great sense of the absurd. All of those qualities are tested when she encounters fellow New Yorkers who still admire Fidel Castro.
Ms. Peláez, a Cuban-American actress, was born in this country and raised in Miami. She came to New York in 1993 to study acting. In the mid-’90s, she traveled to Cuba to explore the world of her great-aunt, Amelia Peláez, a noted painter who died in 1968. All those experiences pulse through “Rum & Coke,” a one-woman show in which she channels relatives on both sides of the Florida Straits and weary Habaneros stuck on an island forgotten by the outside world.
The play was her retort to the fascination with Che T-shirts, solidarity tours to Cuba and the endless praise of the revolution’s twin pillars of health and education.
“When I started writing the play, I thought people just didn’t know what was happening in Cuba,” she said after the show closed its monthlong New York run last week. “But the longer I live here, the more I realized, they don’t care.”
She was reminded of that last month when Mr. Castro finally stepped down as president after nearly 50 years in power. The move prompted wistful reflections from old rabble-rousers and praise from some politicians. Representative José E. Serrano called Mr. Castro a “great leader” whose retirement ensured the future of the Cuban system and its achievements, which he said enjoyed “a broad base of support” on the island.
What really stumped Ms. Peláez was how the Bronx congressman’s only brickbats were against the “twisted policies” of the United States government.
“They would rather keep their little pop revolution instead of saying it is a dictatorship,” Ms. Peláez said. “I had somebody come to me after a show and say, ‘Don’t ruin Cuba for me!’ Well, why not? They’re holding on to a fantasy.”
This city has long attracted Cuban artists and intellectuals in exile. Many of those who now live here thrive on the city’s culture, its mix of people and even its weather (four seasons, instead of hot and hotter). Perhaps the greatest Cuban exile of all, José Martí, lived and worked in 19th-century New York as he rallied his countrymen in the fight for independence from Spain.
Exiles and refugees are still coming to New York, having decided that life in Castro’s Cuba — the only life they ever really knew — was not worth the sacrifice of personal freedoms. This month, some of them will observe the fifth anniversary of the Cuban government’s crackdown on 75 dissidents, independent journalists and librarians, who were sentenced to as many as 28 years. Most of them are still in prison.
Paul Berman, a writer in residence at New York University who has written critiques of the American left and Cuba, said the plight of these recent arrivals does not strike the same chord here it once did for those who fled the Soviet bloc.
“Back in the ’70s and ’80s, some mathematician would come out of the Soviet Union and there would be a meeting of intellectuals to greet him,” Mr. Berman said. “That kind of human rights zeal just seems to have disappeared.”
Cristina Martinez came of age in the Soviet Union, were she was sent to study electrical engineering in 1985 after graduating from high school in Cuba. Her extracurricular lessons were unavoidable, watching as perestroika and glasnost swept through society.
“The press was starting to bring to light everything they had hidden during 75 years of Communism,” she said. “It was a lesson, that this was the future we wanted to go to. This is the light. We had all toyed with the idea of changing the Cuban reality, to criticize it, to make it better.”
But as walls fell and borders opened, Cuba clung to its way. Disillusioned, Ms. Martinez fled to Spain, where she taught at a university for six years. Her politics were leftist enough that her Spanish friends joked she was “the reddest person they ever met.”
Maybe not in New York, where she has lived since 1996, working as a computer systems administrator at an Upper West Side school. Though she still considers herself a liberal who favors the underdog, she is puzzled by the image of Cuba as an international paladin.
“The image is one of the defender of the oppressed and defender of just causes,” she said. “People who understand the Cuban reality know it is not like that. It is not something they would want for themselves or their own country. Or, they are opportunists who use Cuba as a symbol knowing full well what is happening.”
Although Enrique Del Risco knows what has happened on the island where he was born 40 years ago, he still gets odd looks from college students when he tries to explain Cuba’s reality. He left Cuba in 1996 and settled in New York two years later, teaching Spanish at New York University.
“I grew up believing in the system,” he said. “Quite a believer. My parents, too.”
He, too, thought there would be change during the late 1980s. Instead, he found himself slowly suffocating, with his writings earning him reprimands.
“I was more scared of surrendering than being put in jail,” he said. “I was scared that I would stop being myself. I was someone who thinks independently and expresses that.”
Yet to try and tell that to some of his students, he said, was like talking about extraterrestrial life. He knows to expect a dual riposte — yes, but what about universal health care and education?
“At the root of that is a great belittling of Cubans,” he said. “It’s like we are some sort of little animals who only need a veterinarian and someone to teach us tricks and we’ll be fine.”
He is dismayed by the way Cuban officials deflect questions from university students who wonder why they cannot travel overseas or stay at Cuban hotels, which are essentially reserved for tourists. Ricardo Alarcón, president of Cuba’s National Assembly, told one such questioner that when he was a diplomat posted in New York during the 1960s and ’70s, shopkeepers would eject him the moment they learned he was Hispanic.
“There is a fear of the future that comes from control of information,” Mr. Del Risco said. “You can see that in what Alarcón said. You can only dare say what he said in a country that is disinformed.”
Mr. Del Risco’s New York is welcoming.
“I feel more at home in New York than in Madrid,” he said. “From the first day you get here you feel like you are from here. There is not that distance or someone asking you what you are doing here.”
He loves the variety. The rush. The chance to do it all. Or do nothing at all.
“I was always in love with New York,” he said. “Even when I was an anti-imperialist, I was pro-New York.”
Thursday, March 06, 2008
Saudi Rappers Compete in Dubai Hip-hop Contest
Washington Post
'An Earthquake That Shifted the World Around Us'
Beyond a Disapproving Kingdom, Untested Saudi Rappers Find Transformation and Victory, of Sorts, at Hip-Hop Contest in Dubai
By Faiza Saleh Ambah
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, March 7, 2008; A11
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates -- Even before they stepped onstage at the MTV Arabia competition finale, members of the Saudi hip-hop group Dark2Men knew they would not win.
The contestants were to be judged on their lyrics, stage presence and performance, but Dark2Men had never performed in public because of strict social and religious codes in their native Saudi Arabia that ban nightclubs, concerts and theaters. The seven other finalists, from the less restrictive Arab countries of Egypt, Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates, had rapped live for years.
But backstage before the show, one of the show's co-hosts told the contestants something that made Dark2Men's impending loss seem like victory, the members said. "He said no matter what happened in the competition, we would go down in history when they wrote the book about Arab hip-hop," said Hani Zain, 27, who raps in Arabic for the group.
An Egyptian won the competition, which is being broadcast this month, but the three men of Dark2Men said their lives had been transformed by the experience in ways they had not imagined.
"It was an earthquake that shifted the world around us," said Tamer Farhan, 24, who raps in English. "It gave meaning to all the hardships we faced to get here."
Saudi Arabia, home to Islam's holiest shrines, follows a stringent form of Islam that prohibits alcohol and the mingling of unrelated men and women. The conservative kingdom does not allow the study of music in schools, and many Saudis consider careers in acting, singing or dancing as shameful.
But the advent of satellite television channels such as MTV Arabia, which was launched in the Emirates in November, and social networking Web sites have made it easier for young people to pursue interests deemed contrary to the country's tradition and culture.
The Dark2Men members, for example, met up on a rap Web site and compose their music using online programs. They have posted several songs on YouTube and have a Facebook site.
But even as they rap in praise of Islam and their mothers, and against the war in Iraq and terrorism, their biggest hurdle has been convincing family, friends and Saudi society that they are not simply trying to imitate a decadent Western lifestyle.
Since winning the MTV Arabia hip-hop audition in January, they have struggled with fiancees unhappy about the attention garnered by their television appearances broadcast across the Arab world, bosses angry about their extended leaves from work, and fathers worried that their sons would leave stable jobs and become entertainers.
For a week last month in Dubai, they forgot those pressures as they danced until dawn at nightclubs, stared wide-eyed at a fancy restaurant's glass-enclosed cold room full of wine and champagne bottles, and learned how to move onstage.
Maan Mansour, 25, who sings in Arabic and English and had never traveled outside of Saudi Arabia, said he developed a passion for performing. "There's this unique feeling you get right before you go onstage that's fear and excitement," he said. "Then as soon as you put your foot on that first step, it's as if a cascade of cool water washes over your chest, and it's amazing."
Zain said a highlight of the MTV Arabia experience was spending time with Farid "Fredwreck" Nassar, a Palestinian American music producer who has worked with American rappers 50 Cent and Snoop Dogg.
Zain, Dark2Men's main composer, said he pestered Nassar while he was producing the group's song, asking questions and looking over his shoulder, but was told several times, half-jokingly, to leave the room. "I learned more in two days with Farid than I did in years in Saudi Arabia," Zain said.
Mansour, an equipment sterilization technician, and Farhan, a human resources assistant at a hospital, went back to work a few days after they returned to their home town of Jiddah. But Zain resigned from his job as a bank computer programmer.
Zain said he needed time to concentrate on his rap career and wanted to be available in case the contestants were asked to tour after a CD of their songs is released next month.
Farhan, who now spends an hour a day answering fan mail, sat with his laptop at a coffee shop during his lunch hour last week and sighed as he read a notice from a fellow contestant, Emirati rap group Desert Heat, announcing a performance at a nightclub in Oman, with tickets selling for $26.
"If I could make money rapping like these guys, I would have left my job," Farhan said. But there's nowhere to perform in Saudi Arabia, and leaving his job would mean that Farhan and his family would be without health insurance, a risk he said he was not ready to take.
Farhan has had to postpone his wedding because things are still in flux. Last year, "when I got engaged I was just a normal guy working at a hospital," he said. "Now I'm succeeding at rap, suddenly everybody knows me. Suddenly I'm always busy."
Farhan said his father has made peace with his choice. "He voted for us and made his friends vote, too" in the competition's people's choice award, conducted by text message. The results have not yet been announced.
But for Farhan, the most gratifying part of the experience has been inspiring others. "Young guys come up to us and say: 'We thought that pursuing a dream in Saudi Arabia was impossible. You guys made it in hip-hop with everyone against you. That gives us hope that even here, anything is possible.' "
Dark2Men has met with several advertising and production companies seeking sponsorship and studio space to record a CD. But until that happens, the group is recording a mixtape with aspiring rappers.
During breaks while recording his segment at a local studio, Zain talked to the other rappers about organizing an underground concert to make money.
"I've given myself till the end of March," Zain said. "If I'm able to make some money on this, I'll keep going. If not, I'm going to have to start looking for a job."
'An Earthquake That Shifted the World Around Us'
Beyond a Disapproving Kingdom, Untested Saudi Rappers Find Transformation and Victory, of Sorts, at Hip-Hop Contest in Dubai
By Faiza Saleh Ambah
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, March 7, 2008; A11
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates -- Even before they stepped onstage at the MTV Arabia competition finale, members of the Saudi hip-hop group Dark2Men knew they would not win.
The contestants were to be judged on their lyrics, stage presence and performance, but Dark2Men had never performed in public because of strict social and religious codes in their native Saudi Arabia that ban nightclubs, concerts and theaters. The seven other finalists, from the less restrictive Arab countries of Egypt, Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates, had rapped live for years.
But backstage before the show, one of the show's co-hosts told the contestants something that made Dark2Men's impending loss seem like victory, the members said. "He said no matter what happened in the competition, we would go down in history when they wrote the book about Arab hip-hop," said Hani Zain, 27, who raps in Arabic for the group.
An Egyptian won the competition, which is being broadcast this month, but the three men of Dark2Men said their lives had been transformed by the experience in ways they had not imagined.
"It was an earthquake that shifted the world around us," said Tamer Farhan, 24, who raps in English. "It gave meaning to all the hardships we faced to get here."
Saudi Arabia, home to Islam's holiest shrines, follows a stringent form of Islam that prohibits alcohol and the mingling of unrelated men and women. The conservative kingdom does not allow the study of music in schools, and many Saudis consider careers in acting, singing or dancing as shameful.
But the advent of satellite television channels such as MTV Arabia, which was launched in the Emirates in November, and social networking Web sites have made it easier for young people to pursue interests deemed contrary to the country's tradition and culture.
The Dark2Men members, for example, met up on a rap Web site and compose their music using online programs. They have posted several songs on YouTube and have a Facebook site.
But even as they rap in praise of Islam and their mothers, and against the war in Iraq and terrorism, their biggest hurdle has been convincing family, friends and Saudi society that they are not simply trying to imitate a decadent Western lifestyle.
Since winning the MTV Arabia hip-hop audition in January, they have struggled with fiancees unhappy about the attention garnered by their television appearances broadcast across the Arab world, bosses angry about their extended leaves from work, and fathers worried that their sons would leave stable jobs and become entertainers.
For a week last month in Dubai, they forgot those pressures as they danced until dawn at nightclubs, stared wide-eyed at a fancy restaurant's glass-enclosed cold room full of wine and champagne bottles, and learned how to move onstage.
Maan Mansour, 25, who sings in Arabic and English and had never traveled outside of Saudi Arabia, said he developed a passion for performing. "There's this unique feeling you get right before you go onstage that's fear and excitement," he said. "Then as soon as you put your foot on that first step, it's as if a cascade of cool water washes over your chest, and it's amazing."
Zain said a highlight of the MTV Arabia experience was spending time with Farid "Fredwreck" Nassar, a Palestinian American music producer who has worked with American rappers 50 Cent and Snoop Dogg.
Zain, Dark2Men's main composer, said he pestered Nassar while he was producing the group's song, asking questions and looking over his shoulder, but was told several times, half-jokingly, to leave the room. "I learned more in two days with Farid than I did in years in Saudi Arabia," Zain said.
Mansour, an equipment sterilization technician, and Farhan, a human resources assistant at a hospital, went back to work a few days after they returned to their home town of Jiddah. But Zain resigned from his job as a bank computer programmer.
Zain said he needed time to concentrate on his rap career and wanted to be available in case the contestants were asked to tour after a CD of their songs is released next month.
Farhan, who now spends an hour a day answering fan mail, sat with his laptop at a coffee shop during his lunch hour last week and sighed as he read a notice from a fellow contestant, Emirati rap group Desert Heat, announcing a performance at a nightclub in Oman, with tickets selling for $26.
"If I could make money rapping like these guys, I would have left my job," Farhan said. But there's nowhere to perform in Saudi Arabia, and leaving his job would mean that Farhan and his family would be without health insurance, a risk he said he was not ready to take.
Farhan has had to postpone his wedding because things are still in flux. Last year, "when I got engaged I was just a normal guy working at a hospital," he said. "Now I'm succeeding at rap, suddenly everybody knows me. Suddenly I'm always busy."
Farhan said his father has made peace with his choice. "He voted for us and made his friends vote, too" in the competition's people's choice award, conducted by text message. The results have not yet been announced.
But for Farhan, the most gratifying part of the experience has been inspiring others. "Young guys come up to us and say: 'We thought that pursuing a dream in Saudi Arabia was impossible. You guys made it in hip-hop with everyone against you. That gives us hope that even here, anything is possible.' "
Dark2Men has met with several advertising and production companies seeking sponsorship and studio space to record a CD. But until that happens, the group is recording a mixtape with aspiring rappers.
During breaks while recording his segment at a local studio, Zain talked to the other rappers about organizing an underground concert to make money.
"I've given myself till the end of March," Zain said. "If I'm able to make some money on this, I'll keep going. If not, I'm going to have to start looking for a job."
Tuesday, March 04, 2008
Nine Inch Nails Fashions Innovative Web Pricing Plan
NYT
March 4, 2008
Nine Inch Nails Fashions Innovative Web Pricing Plan
By JEFF LEEDS
LOS ANGELES — Since being released from its major-label recording contract last year, Nine Inch Nails has joined the growing ranks of prominent artists who are navigating the digital wilderness on their own. Like another independent-minded act, Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails has responded to the wash of free music on the Internet, but with its own tactic: the band has uploaded tracks from its new album directly to an unauthorized file-sharing network even as it offered more elaborate versions for up to $300.
The plan, which was announced on the Nine Inch Nails Web site, nin.com, on Sunday night, is the latest in a running series of experiments that counter the music industry’s typical sales and marketing tactics. Fans can obtain digital downloads of the first nine tracks from the 36-track instrumental collection, “Ghosts I-IV,” and a bundle of graphics free from the band’s Web site or through online sites using BitTorrent technology, where users can share unauthorized music and other media.
The band, which is led by Trent Reznor, described file sharing in one online post as “a revolutionary digital distribution method, and we believe in finding ways to utilize new technologies instead of fighting them.”
Mr. Reznor also afforded fans freedom in another way. The band decided to offer the music with a Creative Commons license, a new type of intellectual-property copyright. It allows creators to reserve certain rights and, in effect, authorize various unpaid uses of their products. In this instance the band is allowing virtually any noncommercial use of its music. The band is also testing a tiered pricing system that could add a new wrinkle to the conventional wisdom on how to attract fans in the music business, in which a slump in sales has prompted Wal-Mart and other retailers to pressure record companies to cut their wholesale prices. The Nine Inch Nails plan also expands upon a model that had been tested by a handful of other acts, like Radiohead, which offered its latest album, “In Rainbows,” online in a setup that allowed fans to name their own price (including nothing) or pay roughly $80 for an expanded version.
Nine Inch Nails is offering a digital download of the entire 36-track “Ghosts I-IV” collection for a flat $5 from its site and Amazon.com. The band will offer a CD version in a two-disc package for $10, with sales through its site or through record shops starting April 8. (A $39 vinyl version will be available the same day.) For particularly enthusiastic — or deep-pocketed — fans, there are two more extensive collections: a $75 version will include the music on two CDs, and a DVD will contain data files of the multitrack recordings of the 36 songs, allowing fans to remix and alter the music as they choose. A $300 deluxe version — the band said only 2,500 will be made, all with Mr. Reznor’s signature — will include the discs, the vinyl set and additional material.
Jim Guerinot, the manager of Nine Inch Nails, suggested that the band’s plans are not “a reaction to what doesn’t exist today. I think it’s more just like, ‘Hey, in a vacuum I can do whatever I want to do.’ ” Referring to Mr. Reznor, he said, “His appetite is such that: ‘I want a little bit of everything. I’m not content with just a singular experience.’ ”
One option Mr. Reznor is not offering fans is a way to obtain the entire collection free. Last year he produced an album by the rapper and poet Saul Williams, which was offered online free or for a $5 contribution in a test of whether people would pay if given a choice. Mr. Reznor wrote on his band’s Web site that he had been disheartened by the lack of paying customers.
March 4, 2008
Nine Inch Nails Fashions Innovative Web Pricing Plan
By JEFF LEEDS
LOS ANGELES — Since being released from its major-label recording contract last year, Nine Inch Nails has joined the growing ranks of prominent artists who are navigating the digital wilderness on their own. Like another independent-minded act, Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails has responded to the wash of free music on the Internet, but with its own tactic: the band has uploaded tracks from its new album directly to an unauthorized file-sharing network even as it offered more elaborate versions for up to $300.
The plan, which was announced on the Nine Inch Nails Web site, nin.com, on Sunday night, is the latest in a running series of experiments that counter the music industry’s typical sales and marketing tactics. Fans can obtain digital downloads of the first nine tracks from the 36-track instrumental collection, “Ghosts I-IV,” and a bundle of graphics free from the band’s Web site or through online sites using BitTorrent technology, where users can share unauthorized music and other media.
The band, which is led by Trent Reznor, described file sharing in one online post as “a revolutionary digital distribution method, and we believe in finding ways to utilize new technologies instead of fighting them.”
Mr. Reznor also afforded fans freedom in another way. The band decided to offer the music with a Creative Commons license, a new type of intellectual-property copyright. It allows creators to reserve certain rights and, in effect, authorize various unpaid uses of their products. In this instance the band is allowing virtually any noncommercial use of its music. The band is also testing a tiered pricing system that could add a new wrinkle to the conventional wisdom on how to attract fans in the music business, in which a slump in sales has prompted Wal-Mart and other retailers to pressure record companies to cut their wholesale prices. The Nine Inch Nails plan also expands upon a model that had been tested by a handful of other acts, like Radiohead, which offered its latest album, “In Rainbows,” online in a setup that allowed fans to name their own price (including nothing) or pay roughly $80 for an expanded version.
Nine Inch Nails is offering a digital download of the entire 36-track “Ghosts I-IV” collection for a flat $5 from its site and Amazon.com. The band will offer a CD version in a two-disc package for $10, with sales through its site or through record shops starting April 8. (A $39 vinyl version will be available the same day.) For particularly enthusiastic — or deep-pocketed — fans, there are two more extensive collections: a $75 version will include the music on two CDs, and a DVD will contain data files of the multitrack recordings of the 36 songs, allowing fans to remix and alter the music as they choose. A $300 deluxe version — the band said only 2,500 will be made, all with Mr. Reznor’s signature — will include the discs, the vinyl set and additional material.
Jim Guerinot, the manager of Nine Inch Nails, suggested that the band’s plans are not “a reaction to what doesn’t exist today. I think it’s more just like, ‘Hey, in a vacuum I can do whatever I want to do.’ ” Referring to Mr. Reznor, he said, “His appetite is such that: ‘I want a little bit of everything. I’m not content with just a singular experience.’ ”
One option Mr. Reznor is not offering fans is a way to obtain the entire collection free. Last year he produced an album by the rapper and poet Saul Williams, which was offered online free or for a $5 contribution in a test of whether people would pay if given a choice. Mr. Reznor wrote on his band’s Web site that he had been disheartened by the lack of paying customers.
Musician turns to fans for help with new disc
CNN
Musician turns to fans for help with new disc
* Story Highlights
* Jill Sobule asks fans to contribute towards making new album
* For $10, you get a CD; for $10,000, you can sing on the record
* Sobule best known for mid-'90s hit "I Kissed a Girl"
NEW YORK (AP) -- In making six CDs, singer Jill Sobule has worked for two major record companies that dumped her and two indie labels that went bankrupt beneath her.
Now she's turning to people she can really trust -- her fans.
Sobule, whose witty and poignant writing first attracted attention with the song "I Kissed a Girl," has set up a Web site asking fans to donate money so she can make a new CD. She set a goal of $75,000 and, in a month, she's made about $58,000 as of midday Tuesday.
She's another example of a musician taking control of her career as the business crumbles around her, and doing it with a unique sense of humor.
Contributors can choose a level of pledges ranging from the $10 "unpolished rock," which earns them a free digital download of her disc when it's made, to the $10,000 "weapons-grade plutonium level," where she promises "you get to come and sing on my CD. Don't worry if you can't sing -- we can fix that on our end."
For the $500 "gold level," Sobule will mention your name in a song, maybe even rhyme with it. The $750 "gold doubloons level" is "exactly like the gold level, but you give me more money."
Sobule is surprised at how empowering the whole experience has been.
"The old kind of paradigm, where you've always waited for other people to do things, you'd have your manager and your agent," she said. "You'd wait for the big record company to give you money to do things and they tell you what to do. This is so great. I want to do everything like this."
She set the $75,000 goal because she wanted to do things right. Well-known producer Don Was has agreed to work with her, and she expects friends like Cyndi Lauper and John Doe to sing with her. She also needs to pay for making and distributing the CDs, and promotion to publicize it.
Sobule even wrote to explain all this to some snarky Web sites that pointed out that someone can easily record music for $500 in their basement these days.
"I wrote, 'Don't you understand, it's not just the recording budget, it's also my gambling debts,' " she joked, "and they became my best friends."
For a $5,000 contribution, Sobule said she'll perform a concert in the donor's house. The lower levels are more popular, where donors can earn things like an advanced copy of the CD, a mention in the liner notes and a T-shirt identifying them as a "junior executive producer" of the CD.
Besides the studio album (recording starts next month), Sobule also wants to record a live CD and a collection of new tracks with just her voice and guitar, asking amateurs to take a stab at making their own arrangements around her.
One positive, unexpected result from her campaign is getting to know her fans a little, beyond just the faces that stare at her onstage. Many have written messages that are posted on Sobule's Web site and offer suggestions.
Sobule always let the business people do their thing while she concentrated on being the artist.
"I lived like that forever and this time, this is fun," she said. "This is creative."
Musician turns to fans for help with new disc
* Story Highlights
* Jill Sobule asks fans to contribute towards making new album
* For $10, you get a CD; for $10,000, you can sing on the record
* Sobule best known for mid-'90s hit "I Kissed a Girl"
NEW YORK (AP) -- In making six CDs, singer Jill Sobule has worked for two major record companies that dumped her and two indie labels that went bankrupt beneath her.
Now she's turning to people she can really trust -- her fans.
Sobule, whose witty and poignant writing first attracted attention with the song "I Kissed a Girl," has set up a Web site asking fans to donate money so she can make a new CD. She set a goal of $75,000 and, in a month, she's made about $58,000 as of midday Tuesday.
She's another example of a musician taking control of her career as the business crumbles around her, and doing it with a unique sense of humor.
Contributors can choose a level of pledges ranging from the $10 "unpolished rock," which earns them a free digital download of her disc when it's made, to the $10,000 "weapons-grade plutonium level," where she promises "you get to come and sing on my CD. Don't worry if you can't sing -- we can fix that on our end."
For the $500 "gold level," Sobule will mention your name in a song, maybe even rhyme with it. The $750 "gold doubloons level" is "exactly like the gold level, but you give me more money."
Sobule is surprised at how empowering the whole experience has been.
"The old kind of paradigm, where you've always waited for other people to do things, you'd have your manager and your agent," she said. "You'd wait for the big record company to give you money to do things and they tell you what to do. This is so great. I want to do everything like this."
She set the $75,000 goal because she wanted to do things right. Well-known producer Don Was has agreed to work with her, and she expects friends like Cyndi Lauper and John Doe to sing with her. She also needs to pay for making and distributing the CDs, and promotion to publicize it.
Sobule even wrote to explain all this to some snarky Web sites that pointed out that someone can easily record music for $500 in their basement these days.
"I wrote, 'Don't you understand, it's not just the recording budget, it's also my gambling debts,' " she joked, "and they became my best friends."
For a $5,000 contribution, Sobule said she'll perform a concert in the donor's house. The lower levels are more popular, where donors can earn things like an advanced copy of the CD, a mention in the liner notes and a T-shirt identifying them as a "junior executive producer" of the CD.
Besides the studio album (recording starts next month), Sobule also wants to record a live CD and a collection of new tracks with just her voice and guitar, asking amateurs to take a stab at making their own arrangements around her.
One positive, unexpected result from her campaign is getting to know her fans a little, beyond just the faces that stare at her onstage. Many have written messages that are posted on Sobule's Web site and offer suggestions.
Sobule always let the business people do their thing while she concentrated on being the artist.
"I lived like that forever and this time, this is fun," she said. "This is creative."
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