Joep L. Blom wrote: I've heard good jazz performances. And as I mentioned above, I like some jazz performers. Or (to me) the endless soundalike lookalike stuff that passes for way too much jazz these days? Sorry, to my ears, the days of jazz performers that actually sound like themselves seems to have passed. Too many players now seem to be trying only to sound like someone else. (BTW, I find that very disappointing in any musician or artist, regardless of style of music or art. Be yourself, not someone else!) I would say that "boring" is something that is perceived by the mind of a person. It is, after all, just an opinion. I doubt that there's any "objective" measure that defines "boring". Not nonsense, just my opinion. Yes, singers are a special case compared to instrumentalists. No two human voices are alike to the degree that instruments are. Again (particularly about pop singers), while I may think well of a singer who can successfully sound like someone else, I'm still disappointed that they don't put the same effort into sounding like themselves. There's a Christian band I know of called Apologetx. They are skilled enough to sound note-for-note like practically any other band in existence, and specialize in redoing other band's secular songs with Christian lyrics. They play skillfully, but someday I'd actually like them to write and play their own music instead! I'd like to know what their own sound is! Really? Hmm, haven't noticed that. (Well, I've heard a number of jazz performances where NO ONE was playing the "tune", if there actually was one.) (And it has nothing to do with presence or absence of improvisation. During my own piano studies, I studied improvisation, enjoy it and value it highly. So you'd think I'd like the improvisational aspect of jazz, yes? If you say so. Some of which I do enjoy. Those are past-days jazz greats, not their modern descendants. I like Coltrane and Tatum, don't know the other two. I think that any kind of music that has wrapped itself up so much in its own internals and demands that others change to accommodate it is just a self-absorbed niche. That's OK if that's what one is interested in. But if one is trying to make money from music, I think one is intentionally limiting one's financial success, and really has no right to complain that people aren't buying enough music to support one in the way one would like to be accustomed to. IOW, if you want money for your music, offer music that people with money are willing to give you money for. Don't complain that they're "ignorant" or "don't know better" or that the music they like and PAY FOR is "boring" (it isn't to them) or they're being held prisoner by big-media music distributors. I'm also not a fan of visual arts (painting, sculpture, etc) that require you to read a multipage statement about the item to get any communication from it. What my artist daughter calls "spot on the wall" art, some of which is by famous artists, hangs on walls in world-famous museums, and (in America, typically) is USUALLY supported by Arts Grants or one sort or another. (Music of any sort doesn't suffer from that problem, perhaps because sound has inherently more power and effect than a brush stroke on canvas. Assuming one isn't deaf, of course.) I like visual art, too, but find Andy Warhol's art boring. At Pompidou Center in Paris one year, I saw a Japanese painter who "painted" by slashing his bare feet with razor blades, then hanging in a bosen's chair over the canvas spread on the floor and painting on the canvas with with his own blood. Found that more a sign of mental illness than art. (Must be something wrong with me, I'm sure, couldn't possibly be anything wrong with the artists.) I've been through it with jazz folk before - been insulted, called names, etc. Been told by some jazz players that the ONLY REAL MUSIC IS JAZZ (usually their particular idea of what JAZZ is, played the way they do it), that if you're not playing jazz, YOU'RE NOT A MUSICIAN! Heard that most recently three years ago, from a man, BTW, who is a very skilled, well-trained, experienced and deeply-disturbed (in the clinical psychological sense) musician. Perhaps jazz is his way to deal with the severe childhood abuse he suffered that left him so disturbed? Although he has so much rage inside that I could picture him as a first-generation punk rocker, before punk went commercial. ;-) No "error" - just different opinion. I have all sorts of music in my personal collection, including jazz, lest you think I'm an "it's gotta be popular music" person. My parents have jazz records in their collection dating back a good long ways, like early Louie Armstrong recordings. Someday they'll probably end up in my collection. (I will admit that I have ONE song each from Britney Spears and Madonna. My only complaint about Michael Jackson's death is that he didn't take them with him.) -- David gnome(a)hawaii.rr.com authenticity, honesty, community

Joep L. Blom wrote: Wouldnt' say "must", would prefer "should". There is a point to mimicking others: to learn techniques or different ways of thinking about your instrument. There's a long tradition in the art world of students learning painting techniques by copying the old masters. I might not have seen it. This thread has spawned some of the longest emails I've seen on the list! (And not all of it due to me!) We've probably heard analogous nonsense about any genre of music, for generations. "It's all just noise!" "It's old-fashioned!" I understand that after J. S. Bach's death, his own sons turned their backs on his music, inventing their own (lesser) replacements for it, and that only a chance rediscovery made J.S. Bach the musical giant he is today. I'm working on an improvised piece right now, for violin and a phase shifting synthesizer sound swirling around in the background. Nothing I would consider "classical" music - for example, no real structure to it beyond a repeated violin theme or two. I had it playing at my office one day, and my boss asked me to "turn down my classical music." ;-) I think big-name pop-singers are often "voice-cast" like that. I don't think that's so true of all pop singers. For every big $$$ Britney or Madonna or Lady Gaga, there are hundreds or thousands of pop singers world wide who are often much better singers than the big names, and still have their own voices. That's part of the fun of the Internet! And, sometimes, when a big-name pop singer matures and feels secure in themselves and their career achievements, they start breaking out of the voice-cast mold. Can't think of any particular one at the moment, although my wife tells me that Celine Dion in concert is not nearly as stuck in a "big-name pop singer" mode as she is in her popular recordings. And Linda Ronstadt recorded and released a number of CDs of Spanish-language music. (Interesting thing about Linda Ronstadt: she vocally "tried on" a number of voice styles and even recorded albums in them before finding her own voice.) I think it's much harder to make one human voice sound like another voice than it is to make one standard violin sound like another standard violin. (Excepting maybe gaps like a bluegrass fiddle and a Stradivarius!) But that could be because I'm not much of a singer. I didn't know about the Glenn Miller band competition, but there are plenty of "tribute" bands making a living sounding as much like someone else as they can get. Some of them (in honesty) may even be doing it better than the original! No. Private classical lessons beginning at age three. My instructor was very big on the fact that musicians during the Baroque era were REQUIRED to be able to improvise on the spot. Someone (perhaps the wealthy patron at whose gathering you were playing) in the audience would stand up and sing (or whistle) a melody that you might not have ever heard before, and you were expected to improvise 2, 3 or 4 part contrapuntal music from it, or dance music, etc. Or someone might come up to play on recorder or some other instrument, and you were expected to improvise accompaniment. (Remember, the baroque "Continuo" really means, "Here's a bass line, a suggestion of chords, maybe a cadenza or two. Make the rest up as you go along!") I got to the point where I could improvise a decent 2- or 3-part invention, or a basic 3-voice fugue. From there I added ragtime, rock, blues, synthesizer stuff, etc. And additional instruments. All very much improvisational. (Sometimes I'm too improvisational for my own good. Up until a few months ago I was working with a rock guitarist. I was fine just making things up as we went along. It drove him CRAZY! He wanted every note planned out, and only played something if he'd practiced it repeatedly for days. That drove ME crazy!) I still find improvisation my favorite way of "writing" music. (Although taking a sheet of staff paper and writing music by how it looks on the page is fun, too. I'm also a visual artist, although no formal training beyond high school.) I think the present classical world's mindset has its good points, too. Learning to perform classical "standards" like a Bach fugue, a Beethoven sonata, or whatever particular pieces are considered "standards" for your instrument enhances your technique, gets you thinking about how others have performed the same piece, and (I think) makes you listen more intently when you hear that same piece performed by others. A great standard piece will also push you beyond the limits of your own music making. Many composers were also incredibly-gifted performers and wrote music that demanded every bit of skill they had. Don't forget the influence of academia on how classical music is handled today. Academics teach students, so there's a propensity to teach the "right" way to play a piece, students are supposed to learn the "right" way to do things. There's also a propensity to highly value whatever you're an expert at - it helps make you feel good about yourself. But you probably know all that, anyway. I'll have to go do that. I really like listening to great individual musicians doing great performances. (Probably why I like classical organ music - one performer making such awesome, complex, enormous and beautiful sound!) I haven't played for pay for decades. I spent two years supporting myself as a musician in the northern California rock scene before deciding that I just didn't want to sacrifice everything else in my life to really make it. We made enough to get by, got lots of free beer, performed a couple of times at the California State Fair, had some good experiences. The lead guitarist had classical music training, too, so we had fun playing our "classical improvisation" where we'd just improvise classical music for 20 minutes or so. He was a decent guitarist once you got him away from the high-pitched screaming notes he loved on the rock side. We also did a couple of country songs, several Alice Cooper covers (one of our drummers sang exactly like Alice Cooper), the other organist sang and played like Lee Michaels, parody songs, and a number of our own songs. Had some bad experiences, too. Our pay for our last gig disappeared sometime between the time we crashed and the next practice (we skipped a few days, too exhausted to resume!). The first practice after that, our lead guitarist showed up with a shiny new gold Les Paul Custom Deluxe guitar that suspiciously cost just about as much as we'd been paid for our last gig. Yet he insisted he had no idea what happened to the gig money. It went downhill from there! Or are driven by the need to be "just like everyone else", to be "cool". To conform. Or to have their insecurity about taste in music or anything else helped by the reassurance that "It must be good, everyone else likes it." I think this really hits in the teen years, when you're no longer a little kid, but you're not an adult, and you're definitely not your parents. Your body is going crazy and the person you thought you were before the hormone changes started is getting upended, rocked and changing into someone you've never met before, something unknown because the change is ongoing. For many people, I think that's terrifying! So teens take refuge in the herd - "cool" people dress this way, like this kind of music/movie/food, do this or that cool thing, hang out with this, that or the other "cool" person. "Popular" music (defined as the music teens in "my" herd listen to) then becomes a defense, a reassurance and comfort. Maybe some people just never get past that stage? Snobbery in action. I think Europe has an advantage over America when it comes to art. There's a lot more interest in and support for art all over Europe than there is here. I think part of it is that in America a number of art forms now appear to be supported solely via government or other grants doled out by small groups of people who quite gave up caring what anyone else thinks. They've become their own little "cool in-groups." (See comments above about teen herds?) I used to write and sell poetry. Didn't make a living at it, it was just part of the creative writing business back then. At the time, poets in America made a living in only a few ways: wrote greeting card verse!, or were university professors. (I think one woman poet made a good living writing small books of maudlin verse that were sold on rotating racks near the greeting cards.) One of my poetry instructors (and my undergraduate advisor) has had several poetry collections published. I have one of them. None of the poems strike a chord with ordinary people. He's probably not sold enough copies to recoup the publishing cost! I don't recall ever using "you're not a musician" that way. I know I've used it during my rock band days in answer to people who couldn't understand why we'd would practice all day, go play a gig, grab some breakfast afterwards at 4:00 AM, then crash for a couple of hours before beginning it all over again. "You're not a musician" wasn't implying they were stupid or anything! Perhaps it implied that being a musician was stupid? Often these were people who had nice 9-to-5 M-F jobs and steady paychecks. If they didn't think we were stupid, they probably thought we were crazy! Oh, I also use the "not a musician" a different way. I'm currently playing in a church band. Two other musicians in the band have serious or professional experience. The other musicians are decent amateurs, but they can get upset when they make a mistake. I just remind them that the people in the congregation aren't musicians. They probably have no idea that a mistake happened! For a lot of people, the fact that the band all started together and ended together is the only thing they're aware of. ;-) See comments a good ways above. Not boring! And I can tell the difference between Glenn Gould playing Bach, and myself playing the same piece! Instead of "boring", I think people who do any one thing a lot (music, art, programming, target shooting, whatever) needs to watch out for the danger of becoming jaded. The "been there, done that, NEXT!" attitude that gives snap judgements and closes your perceptions. I've heard a lot of guitarists play classic Chuck Berry riffs, or the opening to Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven. I still like hearing both! (Although I remember one music shop in my home town that had a big sign stating that anyone who played "Stairway to Heaven" would be ejected from the store!) Even somebody just learning one of those riffs. I've been a professor and a technology trainer. It's gratifying to hear someone trying to learn, to acquire new skill or develop their talent, and gratifying to help them along the way. (Well, I haven't had to listen to anyone learning bagpipes for the first time! That might be more excruciating than gratifying!) No, music is still copyrighted. It's just that the attitude towards copyright has gone retro. "Retro?" If you look back through American history, you will find a widespread and complete disregard for copyright and patents held by people outside of America. (Much of American industrialization was built on illegal use of European patents, American publishers routinely issued their own editions of copyrighted European books without paying anything to the copyright holder.) I recall seeing something in an article on copyrights / patents / intellectual property that developing countries - countries trying to grow their economies - always take a cavalier attitude toward copyright and patents. (China, for instance, is still in that stage, although they've grown way past the "developing economy" stage.) Once the country becomes "established," they're vehement that everyone respect copyright and patents. (Particularly if they themselves hold copyrights or patents that others might want to use.) It almost makes me think that the real motivation for rigid copyright/patent laws is fear of competition. Perhaps part of the fear behind organizations like the MPAA is the knowledge that as computer technology grows, serious movie making will no longer be the exclusive domain of the movie industry. (Just like music making technology has come down from expensive banks of hardware to commodity PCs and free software. I remember a time when I really really really wanted a Fairlight sound sampling system. Now we can have "better than that" for the price of a decent sound card and microphone.) This will open up the field of telling stories via movie to essentially anyone. For awhile, the big movie industry's experience at telling stories via movie will keep them going. But as others do it, the story telling skills will become commonplace. And someday technology will attain the goal that George Lucas sought after Star Wars made him a billionaire: the ability to make a movie *by himself*. And the tide of truly independent movie makers will rise, keep getting better and better, and eventually wash away Hollywood & Bollywood & the other centers of big corporate movie making. Just think what the world would be like if someone back in the early days of movie making had patented the whole movie making process ("business process patents," anyone?), then used their resulting wealth to successfully keep extending patents the way Disney Corporation got copyright protection extended to prevent Mickie Mouse from entering the public domain). We'd have only Hollywood movies - and barrages of patent infringement suits keeping Japanese, Chinese, Indian and European movies out of the United States! There'd be a flourishing black market in "foreign" films, with "film runners" smuggling the latest Hong Kong martial arts movie across the borders into the grubby hands of organized crime who would shift it down to shady "film dealers" and "speakeasy movie theaters"! All because of copyrights and patents. See - back on topic! ;-) -- David gnome(a)hawaii.rr.com authenticity, honesty, community

Paul Davis wrote: Paul, As a european musician I agree with you that music, classical especially but also jazz and folk and many other types of music and art (dance, stage, etc) are subsidised but there is a reason. We have a different view, governmentally, on culture. I don't think - but I'm ignorant in this aspect - that the US government ( or state government) give money for cultural aspects. Here ( in the Netherlands) we have a Ministry of Culture so politicians determine what is culture (music, art, dance, etc.) (even worse civil servants are responsible for the implementation) and squander money as they deem fit and in our country everything is done by "committees" who get subsidised and who not. So if you are not a favourite of (someone in) the committee than you're out of luck. In short, it is an in crowd method of dispersing favours (like the former kings did) only loosely related to quality. (but I an a cynic). Joep

On Sat, Jul 03, 2010 at 11:27:59AM -0400, Paul Davis wrote: Berlin is probably special, but you'd find such activity in most big European cities (big enough to provide a non-trivial audience). As to state support for 'non commercial' culture, even in Europe things are changing, and the current economic crisis doesn't help. It depends very much on the type of government. Populists ones like in Italy (Berlusconi) are doing their best to kill off anything they see as 'elitist'. A new law regarding this was forced through parliament last week (with a confidence vote of course, the 40th or so in two years), and at least half the performances at La Scala and other places have been cancelled in protest. Ciao, -- FA O tu, che porte, correndo si ? E guerra e morte !

On Sun, Jul 4, 2010 at 3:33 PM, Louigi Verona <louigi.verona(a)gmail.com> wrote: Well, we have a terminology problem here. When i mentioned "classical" above it was in the context of referring to the music of what called itself "classical" music in the mid-20th century. there are plenty of performances of the music of, say 1700-1850 here in philadelphia, but very little of the "classical" music of, say, 1930-2000. I'm not sure which type you were referring to, but i suspect the former.

On Saturday 03 July 2010 06:49:05 david wrote: I seem to remember reading some science fiction once where poets were the stars and musicians were in the state poets are in now. snip > Just think what the world would be like if someone back in the early > days of movie making had patented the whole movie making process I heard that Hollywood is where it is and not the East coast because things were patented and they went far away to "hide" - that's one story I have read at least. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Patents_Company#Backlash_and_De… > ("business process patents," anyone?), then used their resulting wealth > to successfully keep extending patents the way Disney Corporation got > copyright protection extended to prevent Mickie Mouse from entering the > public domain). We'd have only Hollywood movies - and barrages of patent > infringement suits keeping Japanese, Chinese, Indian and European movies > out of the United States! There'd be a flourishing black market in > "foreign" films, with "film runners" smuggling the latest Hong Kong > martial arts movie across the borders into the grubby hands of organized > crime who would shift it down to shady "film dealers" and "speakeasy > movie theaters"! > All because of copyrights and patents. See - back on topic! > ;-) > David > gnome(a)hawaii.rr.com > authenticity, honesty, community all the best, drew

On Saturday 03 July 2010 03:30:44 Joep L. Blom wrote: Give em time, they'll find a way to retroactively pull it back. But they probably have to sort out the "ownership" first. all the best, drew

Paul Davis wrote: Historically? Mostly recordings or live performances. Maybe what NPR calls jazz. I don't even listen to much non-jazz via broadcast radio! I've heard that jazz is very "hard to pin down". Even amongst jazz players! OK, I've heard of hip-hop. Is trip-hop the music that results when they trip over baggy, drooping pants? ;-) Cool - I'll have to check them out. Thanks! I think radio music in the US is very limited! There's NPR's classical side. There's the usual assortment of popular genres, and (here in Hawaii) traditional Hawaiian music, modern Hawaiian music, and the Hawaiian-Reggae fusion called Jawaiian. Jazz is played in some of the clubs and art galleries, but there's no radio station here that plays jazz. (Unless some older jazz shows up on an oldies station. Any oldies stations still playing music from the 30s, 40s or 50s? Most of them seem to think "old" music began in the 60s or 70s, and play only music that was Top 40 stuff of that time.) My best friend considers Baroque music to be just on the edge of new. He really prefers older music than that - Gregorian chant, for instance! -- David gnome(a)hawaii.rr.com authenticity, honesty, community

david wrote: When someone says "traditional New Orleans jazz", for me that means the work of Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, et cetera, *not* the later 'Dixieland' revival that henceforth defined "New Orleans jazz" for most listeners (unfortunately). It don't get better than Armstrong on "West End Blues" or Jelly Roll's "King Porter Stomp". :) Best, dp

On Thu, Jul 01, 2010 at 07:48:00PM -1000, david wrote: "Jazz is not dead. It just smells funny." -- Frank Zappa Heh, speaking of Zappa: "I hear the people of this land enjoy traditional jazz" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ond09u9bekA Back to the OP: with regard to ASCAP, I joined it last year at the behest of a friend who suggested I get my publishing situation together. If this nonsense is what ASCAP going to use my US$25 for, I will not be renewing. With regard to the general discussion about money, publishing, copyright, and commerce, I've given up. I think we've made a total of US$30 gross-- altogether-- from the CD we put out, and it cost us about US$180 in out-of-pockeet costs (studio time, mostly), and another US$200 or so in capital equipment (headphones, headphone amps, cables, etc., which will get amortized over the course of other things). The studio time came out of band funds saved up from previous gigs, and the equipment came out of my own pocket. Working on it was a joy, but the realization that such efforts will never result in anything more than just costing money, kind of took the wind out of it, though at least it was POSSIBLE to do it on a shoestring, which was satisfying in and of itself. Humans will create stuff (music, code, art) because humans like-- or NEED-- to create stuff. The question of whether we get paid for it or not is in the hands of a system that is largely arbitrary and often outright malicious (obvious example: corporate executives getting paid massive sums to destroy the environment, cheat pensioners, and sack workers). In the case of music and art-- and to get back on-topic--, corporations and organizations like ASCAP figured out a long time how to control the means of producing and distributing music, and for a long time they forced musicians to enrich those corporations and organizations in order to fulfill a basic human need for expression and creation. Happily, they are no longer in control, we have Linux and the GPL and Creative Commons and Moore's Law and digital distribution and the internet, thus art and music and code can be made without sucking up to the bastards. Victory for us. But how about getting paid? That's a much bigger issue-- bigger than art or copyright. I think our whole global economic system is broken, and I'm not surprised to see it teetering on the brink of a total collapse that is long overdue. I often riff on the English word "value" to indicate this disconnect, much like RMS has so often riffed on the English word "freedom". It goes like this: definition #1 of "value" is what something is worth in money and/or trade, something is "valuable" in a monetary sense, but definition #2 of "value" is the moral or social por spiritual or ethical or religious sense of "values"-- what is important, what is right or wrong. Our economic system has disconnected the two from each other, and has gone schizoid: what is "valuable" in an economic sense is often the complete opposite from what is "valuable" from a moral, ethical, or social sense. "Value" #1 is often the inverse of "Value" #2. Such a society is bound to be ill, and such a system cannot survive. Maybe it's just my getting older-- and my formative years occurring during the "NO FUTURE" days of punk rock and hardcore, and the Reagan/Thatcher and the Boesky/Milken Wall Street feeding frenzy--, but the more repetition I've seen in these patterns of discussion over the past three or four decades, the more a nihilistic streak comes out, and I'm tempted to wish that the whole corrupt edifice would just crumble, already, and be done with it. But what would take its place? That's the hard question. I predict that the next evolutionary step would be to apply the GPL or Creative Commons to money: to run an entire economy-- or sections of it for starters-- in an open-source kind of way. Over the past decade I've found alternative currencies interesting, such as Timebanks, LETS, etc., Maybe there's some promise there, but it's still very early to say. Sorry for the long digression there, but I guess I felt I had to say it. -ken

On 07/03/2010 08:12 AM, fons(a)kokkinizita.net wrote: One thing we all are getting a good idea of is what it feels like to be overburdened with debt and financially bankrupt. We are also getting a taste of what kind of lengths we are all prepared to go to to protect our own interests against the greed of corporation, society and individuals. It's not all bad but it's pretty tiring to be constantly confronted with the realities of the ever faster resource depletion combined with increasing population and therefore faster resource consumption. -- Patrick Shirkey Boost Hardware Ltd