Music Musings

...which showcase his idiosyncratic sense of humor and non-linear thinking. Example:

On some of your more recent solo albums, you’ve re-worked older pieces. Why? Were you unsatisfied with the original versions?
The trigger is finding out you don’t have enough material to fulfill your contract. But it’s a great chance to fix or improve on something you’ve written ... or performed. Some pieces just keep morphing, “Ojo” being one example, and some sort of grow up. Peter Pan had the wrong idea, it pretty much sucks to be a child. No respect, no place, no experience, no knowledge; if you get old enough, those things start coming and you learn to be a child again.
I’ve completely exited the question.

And here is another, longer interview (complete transcript preceded by summary).

The music industry has been engaged in a progressively more stupid, vindictive and futile campaign for years to stop people from downloading music via the Internet. All it has achieved is to criminalize a small number of downloaders, and piss off millions more. Right now, frankly, I could not care if the whole of the major recorded music industry was to be vaporized tomorrow morning. Any industry that thinks that threatening to sue your customers is an acceptable business tactic deserves to go the way of the dinosaurs. This is quite apart from my humbe opinion that most of the product they produce is crap...
However, at long last, from the UK comes a proposal to charge downloaders an annual fee, which will then allow them to download music. This proposal, although it may require some tweaking, seems to me to be a sensible step forward. When it comes to downloading, the genie is out of the bottle, and it will never return to the bottle. That being the case, the music industry needs to accept that, move on, and find a business model that will still result in fair payments for the industry and (most importantly) the creative artists.

I passed the magic 10000 mark just before my UK vacation for my granny's 100th birthday party.
My only observation is that I am starting to see more issues with errors in cross-linking of tracks in the indexing system on the iPod. Occasionally, one or more tracks on an album will turn out to be from a completely different artist and album. This can be corrected by re-loading from the last backup, but it is annoying. When you are trying to listen to Stephen Stills and find a Terje Rypdal tune instead, it jolts you...

1. Talking Heads "Fear of Music"
Newly remastered from vinyl. "Fear of Music" marked the beginning of the transition of Talking Heads from pop to a more polyrhythmic pop-funk sound (using musicians from the Parliament/Funkadelic axis), which reached its ultimate point on "Remain In Light".
The opening tune, "I Zimbra", is the marker for that transition, with the kit drums of Chris Frantz supplemented by a carpet of percussion. "Life During Wartime" also signals the transition, again with multiple percussion overdubs.
There is a remastered and expanded version of this LP now available on CD, which includes different versions of several tunes, including a version of "Life During Wartime" that includes a guitar solo by Robert Fripp. I may have to buy this re-release soon.

I am currently working through some older gems in my collection. Some of these LPs have been attacked by mildew. Although I have thoroughly cleaned them, some of them still have surface noise. As a result, I have been spending several hours at a time on some of the older LPs de-noising them.
When I finish this pass of LP remastering, I shall be turning to remastering from pre-recorded tapes and some backups of LPs on tape that are in better condition than the LPs are now.
This remastering process is available on a small scale for gems that people may have. Contact me at graham@grahamshevlin.com for further details.
I am going to experiment in the next 2 weeks with remastering at 24 bit 96 Khz to DVD for several LPs, to see if the results are better than conventional CD mastering at 16 bits 44.1 Khz. The digital files will be recorded from the LP at 24 bit 96 KHz, not up-converted.

1. Brand X "Livestock"
Brand X was an occasional band formed in the mid-1970's. The original line up was John Goodsall (guitars), Percy Jones (bass), Robin Lumley (keyboards), Morris Pert (percussion) and Phil Collins (yes, that Phil Collins) on kit drums.
Brand X occupied the space that would become known (for better or for worse, mostly worse) as "Fusion", a term invented by the recording industry when they realized that they had no place to rack Weather Report LPs.
Brand X music was long-form instrumentals, with elements of jazs, funk and rock. They lacked the compositional acuity of Weather Report; some of their pieces tended to be more like groove-based workouts, without the European classical sensibility that permeated Zawinul and Shorter's compositions for Weather Report.
Brand X operated as an occasional studio and live band, touring limited by Phil Collins' day job with Genesis. For part of the time, Brand X used Kenwood Dennard for live concerts, as Collins by the early 1980's had two other jobs - his original day job with Genesis, and his rapidly ascending solo career. Brand X as a band still exists today, albeit with a rather different line-up.
"Livestock" was recorded in 1977 in London. Based on other live tapes available from this period, the tunes on this LP have been significantly edited from their live form; however what is available is highly interesting and enjoyable, partly because it shows Phil Collins to great effect as a solid and inventive multi-faceted kit drummer, a skill that rarely showed after a while in both Genesis and his solo career.

2. Joni Mitchell "The Hissing Of Summer Lawns"
This LP, released in 1975, is often overlooked by listeners, because it falls between the more accessible jazz-tinged style first used on "Court And Spark" in 1974, and the more sparse songwriting and performing style first heard on "Hejira" in 1976 and later refined on "Don Juan's Reckless Daughter".
The subject matter is wide-ranging, including 50's and 60's suburbia in Canada ("In France They Kiss On Main Street") and current suburbia in California ("Harry's House/Centerpiece"). The lyrics are shot through with irony, intrigue and wry social observation, and may be the most cinematic set of lyrics on a Joni LP (Joni has remarked in the past that she is really a frustrated film-maker).
The LP follows the Steely Dan practice of setting highly observational, almost subversive lyrics to lush and superficially sweet-sounding music. Some tunes make extensive use of trumpet and flugelhorn (mostly played by Chuck Findley) - on "Edith And The Kingpin" he sounds like he is channeling Burt Bacharach. The final result is superficially lush, but many of the lyrics hint at darkness beneath the surface tranquility - in "Harry's House", for example, all that glitters is certainly not gold, and the song ends with the wife informing her spouse where to stick "Harry's House...and Harry's take-home pay".
I also have a copy of many of the original song demos for this LP, which is interesting listening, since the demos (mostly recorded on acoustic guitars) are almost like a stylistic throwback to Joni's earlier sparse solo style. Listening to the demos shows how much the addition of the band and the arrangements added to the impact of the songs as finally released.

...from the early 90's, judging by the references to the Gulf War.

With my process of remastering LPs to CD now in full swing, I passed 9000 tunes on the iPod several weeks ago. Today the total stands at 9253. I predict 10000 will be loaded before Memorial Day weekend...
UPDATE - As at 15th May, it is 9569 songs. I will need to up the rate of addition to get to 10000 by Memorial Day weekend, but I am not going to sacrifice quality. I could get to 10000 tonight if I didn't care what landed there...

One of the LPs that I bought in the UK while still at college was Gene Clark's solo LP "No Other", released in 1974. The LP was almost totally ignored in the UK, although it sold well in Holland, where Gene Clark was actually quite famous (one of his previous solo LPs having been named "Album Of The Year" in a poll).
This Wikipedia article explains the origins and history of the LP very well. This is a collection of songs of tremendous depth and sophistication, recorded with a long list of top-flight musicians. I have sent reduced-bandwidth MP3 versions of "Silver Raven" to several friends, and the response has been "wow! who is that?". As the Wikipedia entry explains, "No Other" was probably conceived of as a double LP, but recording timeframes and costs escalated to the point where only 9 songs were fully recorded and 8 included on the LP. "Train Leaves Here This Morning" was only released much later on a compilation collection, but by that time the song had appeared, performed by The Eagles on their first LP in 1972.
Sadly, the LP sank without trace at the time because Asylum Records were upset that it was late, over budget and regarded as insufficiently commercial, so it was not promoted at all, and with Clark not touring to support the LP, it's commercial fate was sealed (it was deleted within 2 years). A version of the LP is available in Europe on CD, containing additional tracks including alternative versions of several of the released LP tracks, plus "Train Leaves Here This Morning", but I have not found it here in the USA, so I am listening to my remastered vinyl version, and jolly splendid it sounds too.

When I was a small child growing up next to the North Sea, one of the few pleasures that my mother seemed to have was going to the local cinema (now recently and sadly defunct) to see new blockbuster movies. (I would later pester my father to take me to see Beatles movies at the same venue, which he did on sufferance, but that's another story).
One of the movies that she went to see was "The Big Country", which was not only a successful movie, but one with a soundtrack that gained a lot of radio exposure at the time. I remember hearing the main theme a lot on the radio, and it had a sweeping, swooping grandeur that impressed me deeply at the time.
Much later, when I first listened to "Facing West" by Pat Metheny, from his solo CD "Secret Story", I heard in that tune elements of the grandeur that I first recognized in "The Big Country".
The soundtrack music was composed by Jerome Moross, who was never one of the better-known Hollywood music composers. He started out composing music for Broadway theatres, and also wrote classical works, before starting to write film music.
The interesting thing I recently discovered reading his family web site is that the main theme was inspired by the open spaces of northern New Mexico, which Moross stopped over to visit en route to California in the late 1930's. Moross says:

...as we hit the Plains I got so excited that I stopped off in Albuquerque (which at the time was a small town of about 35,000 people) and the next day I got to the edge of town and walked out onto the flat land with a marvellous feeling of being alone in the vastness with the mountains cutting off the horizon. When it came to writing the Main Title of the film, [The Big Country], I wrote the string figure and the opening theme almost automatically.

Anyway, I just ordered the original soundtrack music from the movie, so now I can wallow in nostalgia...if it's still what it used to be...

Courtesy of the production line which is now converting my vinyl LP collection to CDs, here are some gems:

1. Joe Walsh "Barnstorm"
In 1974 I wandered into a record shop near my home and persuaded the shop to let me listen to Joe Walsh's new LP "The Smoker You Drink, The Player You Get". What came through the headphones was a sophisticated sound unlike anything I had previously heard, skillfully using synthesizers and Kenny Passarelli's fretless bass to create a very different soundscape. I was not so impressed by the songwriting as I was by the overall soundscape and production of the LP. My best friend and I agreed to disagree about Walsh's guitar playing; he opined that he played in cliches, I saw his guitar playing as merely a component of the overall sound.
I subsequently found that Walsh had recorded an earlier solo LP named "Barnstorm" so I bought that LP (which took some doing, since at the time it had never been properly released in the UK, so I had to hunt around for it).
After quitting the James Gang, Walsh had retreated to Northern Colorado in the winter of 1971 with Joe Vitale and Kenny Passarelli to write and record "Barnstorm". What emerged from this process was a collection of songs light years removed from the James Gang. Using a wide palette of sounds, including synthesizers, acoustic guitars, and flute from Vitale, "Barnstorm" is really a suite of contemplative songs, mostly ballads, with a number of linking instrumental passages. The soundscape from "Barnstorm" would be re-used with only minor modifications on the next two Walsh solo LPs, "The Smoker You Drink" and "So What". Effectively those LPs are more slick and focussed variants of "Barnstorm", but "Barnstorm" is where it all began. Later Walsh would join the Eagles just in time to participate in their best-selling LP "Hotel California" (still one of my least-favourite LPs of all time; to me it represents an excellent example of what happens when you spend too long working on music).

2. Lounge Lizards "Lounge Lizards"
This was the debut album by a band that immediately created a challenge for listeners and critics. What did you call this type of music, quirky yet memorable? Somebody coined the phrase "fake jazz" for it, which founder John Lurie probably wishes he had never heard...
This is the first of what would be an occasional series of releases from the band, which would change line-ups for every release. On this debut LP the band's members included the guitarist Arto Lindsay, who plays what can only be described as angular and fractured guitar - he manages to make Robert Fripp sound mellifluously melodic by comparison.
Founder John Lurie is something of a renaissance man - saxophonist, band leader, actor, film musician, record company owner, and artist, all while struggling with significant medical issues in recent years. Currently his medical issues have forced him to focus his energies on painting.

3. Bernie Leadon and Michael Georgiades "Natural Progressions"
When I first started listening seriously to LPs just before going to college, I rather quickly rejected the in-fashion bands of the time (Yes, Genesis, Moody Blues, ELP etc.) who seemed to me to be devoid of any soul,preferring instead to focus on music that was lyrically and structurally pompous. Instead I listened to jazz and acquired an interest in American country-rock, including the Eagles, who at the time had released 2 LPs ("Eagles" and "Desperado") that seemed to me to be authentic and organic, and different to listen to. My favorite Eagles member was Bernie Leadon , who I came to see as the heart of the band, since he was a fine multi-instrumentalist, playing guitars, mandolin, banjo and pedal steel (it is his pedal steel on "Best Of My Love") and also wrote great country-tinged songs like "21", "Bitter Creek" and "Train Leaves Here This Morning" (which he cro-wrote with Gene Clark).
After leaving the Eagles at the end of 1975 (after which time I lost interest in that band, as they morphed from an interesting country-rock band into a rather average rock-pop band), Bernie Leadon made the LP "Natural Progressions" in 1976 with his friend Michael Georgiades. As one would expect, the LP was primarily acoustic, with a mellow collection of mid-tempo songs and ballads. I found this interesting comment about the LP from an interview on Rocks Back Pages with Glyn Johns in 1981:

I enjoyed making the record very much, and when we'd finished it, Bernie went off in his little Volkswagen camper down to Mexico or somewhere, and when he came back, he called me and said "I've got to tell you that I've got a cassette player in my camper and it runs fast. I've been listening to the album fast for two weeks, and it sounds much better fast". I told him that was absolute rubbish and a figment of his imagination, but in fact, listening to it now, he's absolutely right – all the tempos are too slow, and the whole thing is so laid back it's ridiculous, like a big yawn. I think it must have been because we recorded it in his house and it was all very wonderful and beautiful, the view was great, and things got too laid back.

Slow tempos or not, some of the songs are great, and there are some great arrangements, especially the strings on "Glass Off".

I am busy re-mastering a lot of vinyl LPs to CD. This is a fun process, since I have not listened to many of these LPs for what seems like a looong time, plus the audio restoration software I am using allows me to remove clicks, pops and surface noise, making the final results much better than listening to the LP.
I may offer the process as a paid service if I can figure out how to make any money from it...

..in which he offers some interesting observations and thoughts about the recording industry in general. On some of the evolution in the 1960's and 70's:

...in the ‘50s, the songwriters had an absolute stranglehold on the record business. Basically, the songwriters would come up with a hit song, shop it around the labels and it would go to the highest bidder. Labels did not like that, and that’s a lot of what allowed the self contained group thing to come in, because the labels said, okay we’re only going to sign people that write their own material.

On the current state of the record industry:

For some reason or another, people like to blame the record company on not being profitable and I’m not even sure the record companies are profitable at this point, because when you start adding up the math, I mean the record store is getting at least half of the price of a compact disc and right now we’re in an interesting situation, in that the record stores are calling all of the shots!
So basically you have to pay for placement in a record store, you have to pay for a listening station, I mean on space music releases, I’ve had deadlines like you would have on an Elvis Presley single in the 60s! (laughs). Because they had scheduled thousand of dollars worth of listening stations in some chain, and you gotta have the CDs there or those listening stations are gonna be empty but they’ve still paid for it.
It’s kind of a bizarre situation right now where I think a lot of the whole industry is gonna have to reinvent itself. But it has a number of times in the past and there’s no reason to believe that it won’t again, so I’m actually feeling kind of upbeat as the whole thing comes crumbling down, cause in some ways it’s a mess that needs to be straightened out, needs to start being run by people inside the music business rather than outside accountants.
I think we’re gonna see some very interesting stuff happening in the next three or four years because everybody that I’ve talked to think that these major label consolidations and acquisitions have made no financial sense at all and, you know, I root for the independent, I mean I will never in my life forget that at one point we at Motown were selling more records than RCA and Columbia! You know, it CAN be done.

The Smashing Pumpkins, who have been a band for nearly 20 years now, are suing Virgin Records for allegedly licensing their songs without their permission. As this article in The Guardian shows, record labels are turning to new sources of revenue, with existing CD and DVD revenue streams declining. It seems that the Smashing Pumpkins believe that Virgin acted outside of its commercial and contractual remit by licensing recorded material.
These sorts of disputes are going to become increasingly common in the future, as record labels desperately try to augment "pure music" revenue streams with money from any source that they can find. Artists will need to be very vigilant and aggressive in ensuring that their works and image are not used in a haphazard and clumsy way that will dilute their brand. In some ways it is a return to the 60's and 70's, when artists were treated as drones by the recording industry, their likenesses and songs were routinely exploited with little of their input, and they were poorly rewarded for the exploitation. Artists may have to fight those kinds of battles all over again.

While researching other subjects, I stumbled across this 2000 interview with Keith Jarrett, who at the time had been suffering from CFS and was trying to recover. It is an interesting insight into both Jarrett himself and the challenges of trying to work through CFS, particularly if you are a musician.

While researching an issue with my borrowed Technics record deck, I came across this nice example of wit on a turntable support forum:

y'know, IF you haven't recently chugged three grande cappuchinos AND if you don't have a hyper-high compliance cartridge with a nude diamond mounted on a cantilever fashioned from the fossilized pubic hair of a (redheaded!) Roman virgin... you can actually cue by hand, without using the little cueing lever dealie. :-)

1. Bill Bruford's Earthworks Live in Philadelphia
Another excellent radio concert, courtesy of the Dime treasure trove. This is from the tour to support the group's first album. Some of the tunes are differently structured live because of the limitations of on-the-road sequencer technology at the time (Django Bates would set up a sequencer pattern on keyboards so that he could play his tenor horn, and some of the sequencer limitations worked against reproducing entire tunes live e.g. "Up North", which comes to a rather sudden end). However, you get the sense that this was a true jazz ensemble, with plenty of improvisation going on.

2. Don Ellis Live in Columbus OH 1977
Recorded for radio use at a local university only a few months before his untimely death at the age of 44, this concert shows Ellis and his big band in full flight.
Ellis was a true innovator - he pioneered the use of (among other things) the quarter-tone trumpet, the echoplex and a whole raft of unusual combinations of time signatures. After his death the following year, he became a forgotten figure for many years, which is unfortunate because, as this concert shows, he had a great combination of compositional and arrangement sense, breathing life into what can become a very stale and somewhat boring musical format. Big bands tend to suffer from the "not enough space" issue, as the arrangers fill in all of the silence with often-cliched arrangements, and often all of the tunes start to sound like each other. Neither accusation could be levelled at this band. The concert ends with the entire "French Connection" suite - a piece of music that still sounds powerful and fresh over 35 years after it was written.

1. John Martyn "John Wayne" (Live)
This track, from the CD "Dirty, Down and Live" (or "Live" which was the original release CD title) begins with Martyn's exclamation "There's some freak on the stage!" which turns out to be his way of introducing David Gilmour, who guested on guitar at the concert (Shaw Theatre London, March 1990) from which this tune is taken. We are then treated to a bone-crunching 10-plus minutes of the classic song, with Martyn growling and roaring the lyrics and taking it in turns with Gilmour to spin off mini-guitar solos. Martyn's band may have been his best 80's and 90's band, comprising Miles Bould on percussion, Alan Thomson on bass, Spencer Cozens on keyboards and Dave Lewis on saxophones.

...the comments area provides insight to the reality that the RIAA is a creature of the record industry, and has no real interest in supporting the interests of recording artists.

For many of us who were listening to jazz as adolescents, the rise of Kenny G has been downright puzzling. How can a guy whose albums consist of the most flaccid, turgid, over-produced re-treads of jazz and pop standards (and which appear to be devoid of anything approaching interesting improvisation) have become so popular? And, more irritatingly, how did he succeed in becoming classified in so many people's minds as a jazz artist? I have lost count of the number of times I have talked to people about music. When I ask them if they like jazz, they say "I love jazz". My initial optimism is then dashed into tiny little pieces when they announce "I just love Kenny G..."
A few years ago, Pat Metheny caused no small amount of controversy when he expressed some trenchant views about Kenny G. As I might have expected from a musician of Metheny's accomplishments, his view was largely unfavourable. I found a full version of Metheny's Op-Ed here on John Harle's web site archives. It is interesting for what Metheny says about the debate on whether Kenny G's work is jazz:

...lately I have been advocating that we go ahead and just include it under the word jazz - since pretty much of the rest of the world OUTSIDE of the jazz community does anyway - and let the chips fall where they may.
And after all, why he should be judged by any other standard, why he should be exempt from that that all other serious musicians on his instrument are judged by if they attempt to use their abilities in an improvisational context playing with a rhythm section as he does? He SHOULD be compared to John Coltrane or Wayne Shorter, for instance, on his abilities (or lack thereof) to play the soprano saxophone and his success (or lack thereof) at finding a way to deploy that instrument in an ensemble in order to accurately gauge his abilities and put them in the context of his instrument's legacy and potential.

The rest of Metheny's op-ed is (as usual) thoughtful, but he certainly does not spare Kenny G from his disdain. I have to say that it hits the mark for me, although many people who profess to be jazz fans may disagree. I used to live in hope that people who started listening to Kenny G might actually move to more interesting and authentic listening (in the same way that many people who bought Steely Dan records ended up listening to jazz - sometimes the music of the jazz players that the Dan used on their albums), but I have gradually been disabused of the notion that this is likely. Most people who like Kenny G appear to be fans of "smooth jazz" - that stylistic cul-de-sac where technical ability meets lack of compositional acuity - GRP-land writ large.

1. Focus "Moving Waves"
I blew the dust off my vinyl copy and remastered it digitally...and was instantly reminded of the reason why I ignored all of the leading English bands like Yes, ELP etc. in favour of Focus, Golden Earring (a criminally under-rated band at the time), American country-rock and jazz. "Moving Waves" was the second Focus album, and the only one made with the quartet of Jan Akkerman, Thijs Van Leer, Pierre Van Der Linden and Cyril Havermans. Shortly after this album was released, Havermans was replaced by Bert Ruiter, and this changed the sound of the band (see below).
"Moving Waves" leads off with the tune that is probably still the Focus signature tune, "Hocus Pocus", which commences with a searing riff by Akkerman, and then drops into a series of driving variations built around Akkerman's guitar riff. In between the re-capitulations of the riff pattern, Pierre Van Der Linden inserts inventive drum fills followed by alternate statements of a theme sung in (impressive) falsetto and elaborations on the theme using whistling, vocalese and flutes. Just over 6 minutes later the whole ride comes to an end. Even thirty-five years or so later, this is still a brilliantly executed piece of music, and you can still pick out subtleties even now, my favorite being Van Der Linden's drag-to-the-off-beat drum pattern mid-way through the first statement of the riff theme; initially it sounds like he fell asleep, but then it becomes an essential part of the whole rhythmic variation base of the tune.
The worst track is the title track "Moving Waves", which features some truly awful lyrics fitted to a melody line which does not seem to work with lyrics.
"Eruption" takes up the whole of the second side of the LP (oops showing my age there...). Once again it is a beautifully-constructed piece of music, featuring endless inventions on several different themes. The highlight is a frenzied Akkerman guitar passage where he ends by quoting from the "Hocus Pocus" riff again.

2. Focus - "Focus III"
After "Moving Waves", Cyril Havermans left the band, and was replaced on bass by Bert Ruiter. This significantly altered the band's sound; Havermans was a lower-register bass player with an almost bottomless bass sound (heard to good effect all the way through "Moving Waves"). Ruiter played with a pick and had a more mid-range tone, plus he tended to play in higher registers. As a result, the band's sound on "Focus III" lacked the bottom end depth, with the bottom end of the band's sound increasingly being defined by Van Leer's Hammond organ instead of the bass. On the upside, Ruiter's bass took a more prominent melodic role, particularly on "Answers? Questions? Questions? Answers" which follows on from "Focus III" in the middle of the album. This track is the highlight. Akkerman plays some beautiful guitar parts both in an accompaniment and lead role, with the middle of the tune anchored by a long flute solo from Van Leer and a gradual build to a guitar-led climax.
After the tight cohesion of "Moving Waves", "Focus III" feels somewhat more of a sprawl, especially "Anonymus II" which lasts for nearly 30 minutes and originally covered one and a half sides of the vinyl version. This tune drags in parts, and could probably have been tightened down.

3. Focus - "Hamburger Concerto"
After "Focus III", and the subsequent tour, Pierre Van Der Linden left the band and was replaced by Colin Allen. This once again modified the band's base dynamics and sound, since Allen was a rock drummer, whereas Van Der Linden was a jazz drummer operating in a highly eclectic context. The recruitment of Allen was supposedly partially due to record company pressure to simplify the band's sound to keep a more rock audience i.e. the folks who bought records, which if true, made the idea dumb from the start.
"Hamburger Concerto" was recorded at Olympic Studios in Barnes, London (with Thijs Van Leer even sneaking out to play some organ parts on a local church organ). The band sound for this recording was more dense and multi-layered, with Van Leer using synthesizers for the first time, but also making more extensive use of piano. On prior recordings the piano was used for occasional colour; here on this album it is an integral part of the band sound. Also present are numerous percussion overdubs by Colin Allen (tympani, congas, cymbals, triangles etc.). The resulting sound is more dense and multi-layered.
Allen was a more straight-ahead rock drummer than Van der Linden, a fact that becomes obvious on the single "Harem Scarem", where his driving backbeat anchors the main theme played by Van Leer on grand piano. Indeed, the main melodic pattern is played in a New Orleans boogie-woogie piano style. "Harem Scarem" is dominated by Van Leer's piano, keyboards, flute and voices, and Jan Akkerman is reduced to a few rhythmic fills, a single lead phrase in the tune's bridge (repeated as the band plays the entire tune form twice), and a rather desultory solo section where he plays nothing of any interest.
Other evidence of Akkerman's disengagement is audible on other tracks, where his playing seems largely devoid of passion and interest, with only occasional bursts of inspiration. The overall feel of the album is that the band was becoming increasingly dominated by Van Leer, both compositionally and playing-wise.
Side two of the album is the suite "Hamburger Concerto", an attempt at a long-form suite in the style of "Eruption", but much less successful. Here, there seems to be a lot of elaborations by way of key changes and repetitions of phrases, and the overall feeling is that the melodic content was being spread too thinly.
After "Hamburger Concerto" the band would rapidly decline and ultimately disintegrate in 1977, after a series of setbacks, the most notable being the departure of Akkerman, and the most bizarre being the link-up with the singer P.J. Proby for the album "Focus con Proby".

4. J.J. Cale - Anyway The Wind Blows
In 1976 my best friend obtained an LP by somebody who I at first took to be John Cale (he of Velvet Underground fame). D'oh! I was swiftly corrected, and we settled down to listen to music quite unlike what we had previously listened to. From the speakers emerged a collection of stripped-down 3 minute songs, played precisely and with swing, many of them derived from 12 bar patterns, but often with different instrumentation to the norm (Cale used beat boxes a lot on his early albums to create a hypnotic backbeat for some songs, as on "Anyway The Wind Blows"). Over the top JJ Cale sang multi-tracked vocals which, often sung in a part-whisper, made it sound like he was speaking to you as the song unfolded. Add into the mix his own understated guitar, and here was a unique, laid-back but warm and deeply authentic sound.
The JJ Cale sound was painstakingly assembled in the studio; aside from the multi-tracked vocals (which to this day cannot be reproduced live, making Cale's live vocals a poor reflection of his recorded voice), Cale spent a lot of time recording guitar parts. I found out many years later that the guitar riff for "Cocaine" was actually recorded using four guitar parts each playing one note. This results in a completely different sound to the normal sound when one plays (or even picks) the notes of the riff simultaneously on one guitar.
Cale's fame spread primarily via other artists recording his songs, and it was not until 1977 that he toured the UK, where he apparently spent a significant part of his debut London concert hiding behind the amplifiers, after he realized that the audience included Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck. To this day he remains an unassuming, shy person who just sits on a stool, sings and plays understated but beautifully tasteful guitar. On the recent "Crossroads" DVD, he remarked that when he started playing, it was expected that you would "get a day job" after 30, and he felt very lucky to still be playing and touring at 65.
This compilation contains nearly every one of his great compositions, and shows that being definably different takes time and effort, but ultimately beats sounding like every other musician from the heartland of America.

...by David Byrne, with help from Brian Eno. In typical, articulate Byrne style, he explains cogently why the music industry business model is broken. Reading this article confirms my suspicion that the recent issues that have emerged at EMI (with Paul McCartney and Radiohead leaving the label, and other acts threatening to go on strike) may prove to be merely the tip of the iceberg, as other artists at other labels determine that their current relationships with their label are not serving them well.

As this Washington Post article explains, the RIAA are now starting to claim that the mere act of copying a CD song to MP3 format on your computer is an act of piracy.
I don't know whether to laugh or cry when I read nonsense like this. It is time that a major court slapped this kind of assertion back in the face of the RIAA along with the legal equivalent of "nice try, now try a real argument". The recording industry really are getting into this "sue your customers" mindset aren't they? Every article like this is another black eye for a broken business model. They also seem to be working on the approach that they will pursue this kind of litigation until they get smacked around the head by the courts and told that it is not valid. In short, they are engaging in abuse of power.
UPDATE - This posting on an EFF blog helps to clarify some of the debate that arose as to whether the Washington Post article mis-stated the RIAA's courtroom testimony. The verdict of the blog posting is yes and no...the RIAA did not explicitly state that copying files is illegal, but their collective statements strongly suggest that they would like it to be illegal. This takes us back to the analogy raised some time ago of the bookseller who sells you a book but tells you that you cannot read it in your car. The whole idea that digital artifacts can be physically tethered is absurd. I refuse to pay for music downloads partly because of DRM "tethers" (the poor sound quality is the other reason).

CDs
1. Joe Zawinul, Arto Tuncboyacin, Fareed Haque - Live in Stockholm 1995
In the last 12 years of his life, in addition to touring with the Zawinul Syndicate, Josef Zawinul played one-off concerts in smaller group settings. He played concerts as a duo with percussionist Trilok Gurtu (and also guested on Gurtu's album "Crazy Saints"), and also played this concert with percussionist Arto Tuncboyacin (who was a member of the Syndicate for a time) and guitarist Fareed Haque. The concert was broadcast on Swedish radio and has become available thanks to the Dime treasure trove. The tunes in the concert were basically sketches by Zawinul on his array of keyboards, with guitar grooves by Haque and percussion and voice punctuation from Tuncboyacin. The highlight for me is a lengthy tune that functions as an extended sketch based on "Scarlet Woman", with Zawinul occasionally quoting the first and second parts of the theme while creating other elaborations on the keyboards. This may not be as tight and focussed as the Syndicate or Weather Report, but it is extremely interesting, showing Zawinul's endless ability to invent and elaborate on themes. It also showcases his ability to create great bass parts out of nothing - he plays a number of inventive and interesting bass patterns in many of the tunes, which results in what was a briefly-rehearsed trio sounding like a full band.

2. Allan Holdsworth - Allan Paqua Quartet - Live in Berlin 2007
In the Summer of 2007, Holdsworth and Pasqua teamed up to tour Europe. They brought along Holdsworth's long-time drum collaborator Chad Wackerman, but also managed to bring along Jimmy Haslip of Yellowjackets as the bass player. This excellently recorded radio concert showcases a fluid yet tight band, with Haslip sounding like he has been playing with them for years, playing great bass lines to integrate seamlessly with Wackerman. The highlight is "Fred", with a long, multi-sound multi-part solo from Pasqua which leaves Holdsworth struggling to match in his solo. Pasqua's keyboard voices in this band are like a cross between retro-funk and guitars in a number of tunes - at a number of points he sounds more like a guitar player than a keyboards player.

3. Jaco Pastorius Word of Mouth
This CD was Jaco's second solo effort, and it caused a number of problems, the main one being that it was horrendously over budget when finally completed. This is perhaps not surprising given the number of players on the tunes, and the fact that they were all top players who were probably not playing for beer money. Jaco's relationship with his record company waqs badly frayed by the making of the CD, not helped by his beginning to suffer from worse symptoms of what would later be recognized as bipolar disorder.
This CD includes the original big band arrangement of "Three Views Of A Secret"; Jaco presented the tune for consideration inside Weather Report, and it first appeared, in a very stripped-down form, on "Night Passage" in 1980. This is followed by "Liberty City", with a tremendous "up" theme, including solos from "Toots" Thielemans on harmonica and Othello Molineaux on steel drums - the first time I can remember steel drums being used on what is basically a big band recording.

4. Philip Catherine Babel
"Babel" was recorded in Paris in 1980 with a top-notch studio band led by Jean-Claude Petit (who today spends most of his time writing film scores). Petit also wrote most of the arrangements, and Catherine has apparently not been complimentary about the album in interviews, feeling that is over-arranged and over-produced. In addition to the base band of Petit on keyboards, Andre Ceccarelli on drums and percussion and Jannick Top on bass, Petit also employed a string quartet for additional embellishments. The final result is a lushly-arranged but still melodically compelling collection of tunes. There are a lot of keyboard parts on the album (perhaps the source of Catherine's frustration), but to my ear they do integrate well into the compositions. Catherine's lyrical, expressive guitar themes and solos still take center stage.

5. Golden Earring Moontan
This 1973 album has largely been forgotten, except for the opening track - the quintessential driving song "Radar Love", which these days has an entire website devoted to it. However, Radar Love is merely the first of five long-form compositions that make up the album. I loved Golden Earring's focus at the time on long-form tunes, and eventually lost interest when they migrated back to shorter (and to my ear, less interesting) song forms in the late 1970's. The album came in lavish packaging, including the painting of the Vanilla Queen (the subject of the last tune on side one of the album). Side two of the album is the best side, opening with the environmental song "Big Tree, Blue Sea", which had already been recorded on a previous Golden Earring album. It is unusual for bands to re-record one of their tunes in the studio, but the result here is infinitely better than the 1970 original; it makes that original sound like a scratchy demo. The second tune. "Are You Recieving Me?", is notable for it's gradual build from the middle based on two bass notes from Rinus Gerritsen, with perfect kit drum entrance and change-ups from Cesar Zuiderwjik.
A lot of music writers and listeners seemed to be puzzled by Golden Earring at the time. I read that they were derivative of The Who (total rubbish; Zuidewjik's groove drumming was about as far removed as you could go from Keith Moon), and other sundry put-downs littered the music press. It seemed that nobody knew what to make of a Dutch rock band writing articulate English lyrics and recording tunes that were 10 minutes in length. However, my CD copy of this album still sounds great over 30 years after it was recorded.

Single Tunes
6. Golden Earring Grand Finale of "Violins"
Following the success of "Radar Love" and the album "Moontan", Golden Earring spent over a year touring the world. They then released "Switch", an album of shorter tunes, during which time they adopted keyboards player Robert Jan Stips as a full band member. Stips had become essential to play the keyboard embellishments in a live setting that had formed a significant part of the sound on "Moontan".
After yet more touring, the band worked on the next album, "To The Hilt". This marked a return to longer-form compositions, including "Nomad", "Latin Lightning" and "Violins". Stips was a gifted arranger of string parts (he had created a swirling string arrangement for the song "Kill me (Ce Soir)" on "Switch", and for Violins, he was given the task of arranging strings for the play-out section of the tune, based around the strummed chord sequence Emaj, Emaj7, Emin11 and Emaj6. The final result is a collection of interlocking, swooping and diving string parts dancing around the chord sequence, which is anchored by a monster drum groove.
I listened to this well before ELO became well-known, and after this, ELO's string sound came across as stilted and cliched. This is far, far better. Accept no imitations!

7. Eric Clapton Can't Find My Way Home
This tune (recorded by Blind Faith before that band split after making one album) appears here on a pre-FM copy of the BBC concert "Play With Fire" from 1991, again from the Dime treasure trove. By his own admission, the high key meant that Eric Clapton could not sing this (it was originally sung by Steve Winwood), so this version is sung by bass player Nathan East, with Clapton providing acoustic guitar solos over a more modern keyboard setting.

Stephane Grappelli Group Live at Great American Music Hall 1978
This was the same group that I saw that year in Ramsgate (5 miles from my home town), with Diz Disley as the musical director. This FM source (brought to you by the good folks at Dime) shows all of the jaw-dropping virtuosity and exuberance that Grappelli always showed in his violin soloing. Additionally, he sits down at the venue piano about two thirds of the way through the concert and demonstrates that he had the same rhapsodic style when playing piano. Towards the end of the concert the group is joined by David Grisman on mandolin, which kicks the soloing up another notch as Grisman shows his virtuosity. I sent this concert to a lady friend along with a CD by her favorite bands, and she promptly spent a week listening to this concert...that's how good it is.

Joe Zawinul Dialects
After dissolving Weather Report in 1985, Zawinul recorded the tunes for his first solo LP in 13 years, which was named "Dialects". The cover art shows a world art montage, signalling the direction that Zawinul would soon consolidate with the Zawinul Syndicate. After recording "Dialects", he even played a short solo tour in the Fall of 1985, performing with rhythm machines and his usual bank of keyboards.
However, after announcing the end of Weather Report, Zawinul and Wayne Shorter were informed by CBS that they still owed them an album; hence the rapid appearance of the desultory "This is This", several of the tunes on which were originally intended for "Dialects". Zawinul also had to fulfill a tour commitment for Weather Report, which he did by the expedient of assembling a band and calling it Weather Update (it could hardly be called Weather Report since Wayne Shorter had gone off to a solo career). As a result, the release of "Dialects" went almost un-noticed in many quarters.
Dialects opens with "The Harvest", yet another one of Zawinul's incredibly catchy melodic hooks, and closes with "Peace", a slow ballad containing soaring synth solo lines. In between the CD is full of rhythmically dense tunes, many of them as catchy as any of the Weather Report tunes that Zawinul wrote.
"Peace" must have been a special song to Zawinul, since it was one of the tunes played at his funeral last month in Vienna.

This thread at Firedoglake discusses the shaky future of DRM (Digital Rights Management) of downloaded music in the light of recent announcements by several music companies that they will abandon it for downloaded music.
I have never downloaded any music from the iTunes store for this reason (leaving aside the fact that the sound quality is still inferior to CD quality). The use of DRM is an example of the music industry failing to address the real issues that piss off consumers, and instead digging itself into a technological, legal and PR mess.
The best posting on the Firedoglake thread sums it up neatly:

What I find particularly funny about DRM is that the music industry could have learned all about it from the software industry (which I’ve been a part of for about 25 years now).
Back in the day, copy protection of software was rampant. Exactly the same rationales were used, with exactly the same results, as now in the music and movie businesses. Now, however, copy protection is not used in a majority of software products. You know why?

1) Copy protection pisses off legitimate customers, costing you sales.

2) Copy protection does not stop actual thieves (people selling copies).

3) Copy protection stops friends and neighbors from sharing. Yes, sharing is a good thing for software! It’s advertising. Most people who get pirated software end up purchasing it in the long run (usually when a new version is released). Those that don’t “go legit” are the ones who would never have purchased your product in the first place, so they don’t represent lost sales.
When someone buys an illegal copy, though, that is theft of a sale from the content producer.
But really, as others have pointed out, all this piracy kerfluffle is not about lost sales. It’s about attempting to regain/retain a monopoly on the means of distribution. If record labels lost that, then they’re out of business — after all, that’s literally the only “value” they add: access to markets.

1. Pretenders The Singles
The Pretenders emerged from the tail-end of the late 1970's punk boom in London, fronted by American expatriate Chrissie Hynde, who crossed over from journalism to start writing and singing on her own account. The Pretenders hit the music world with a string of memorable and unique 3 minute pop songs, delivered in Hynde's unique nasal, seductive voice. The unique voice was complemented in the original line-up by James Honeyman-Scott, who developed a unique guitar style not dissimilar to that of The Edge from U2, relying heavily on open string sounds. Sadly Honeyman-Scott died at only 27 from accumulated drug abuse, and original bass player Pete Farndon followed him soon after. Hynde shuffled the line-up and continued to crank out great 3 minute pop songs through the 80's and into the 90's - The Pretenders were really a singles band whose albums were always uneven.

2. Proclaimers Best Of
The Proclaimers are one of the unlikeliest of pop successes; twin brothers from Leith in central Scotland. Looking like they had been stamped from the same mould that produced the late Buddy Holly, they write short, tight pop songs with great choruses and hooks, all sung in a very obvious Scottish accent - no faux-American affectations here. Every song a classic.

3. Randy Newman Trouble In Paradise
This album from 1983 finds Newman once again spreading irony and acerbic wit across a variety of subjects. The opening song, "I Love L.A." is Randy Newman at his best, starting with a kiss-off to North-Eastern cities ("let's leave Chicago to the Eskimos") and proceeding to rhapsodize on the many assets of Los Angeles ("Santa Monica Boulevard - We Love It!"). The next song, "Christmas In Cape Town" is a savagely ironic satire of complacent white supremacy in South Africa..."My Life Is Good" satirizes complacent, exploitative, hubris-ridden white suburbia, where families employ cheap Mexican labor, and name-drop furiously (the central character of the song finds himself meeting his "very good friend" Bruce Springsteen, who proceeds to plead "Rand, I'm tired...how would you like to be The Boss for a while?", all set to a pastiche of the E-Street Band sound, complete with a fairly convincing impersonation of Clarence Clemons' sax sound). Every song on the album is a timeless classic, proof that Newman is one of the great modern American songwriting treasures.

1. Weather Report “Live in Montreux”
This famous concert, hitherto only available via bootlegged TV broadcasts, has finally been released on DVD. Needless to say, I ripped the audio from the DVD to my iPod…
This release contains the full drums and percussion duet "Rumba Mama" which was released on “Heavy Weather” in 1977. This release confirms that the “Heavy Weather” version was edited almost out of existence, since here we get to see a 7 plus minute percussion exchange between Alex Acuna and Manolo Badrena.
The concert features the transitional band that would record “Heavy Weather”, with Jaco Pastorius bringing his unique bass voice to Weather Report for the first extensive tour. Leter, after the release of “Heavy Weather”, the band would drop Badrena and Acuna and replace them with Peter Erskine for the 1978 album “Mr. Gone” (the title of which could well have referred to the quality of the compositions, which were only occasionally in the same class as those on “Black Market” and “Heavy Weather”).
One fascinating aspect of the compositional process for bands whose musicians are great improvisers is the emergence of compositions from improvisational fragments in earlier tunes. I have not listened to enough of this concert to find out what was here. However, on “Live and Unreleased”, there is an excellent example of thematic development. There on disc 2, 6:14 into a live version of “Directions/Dr. Honoris Causa”, is Joe Zawinul quoting, on Fender Rhodes, part of what would later become the main theme of “Birdland”.
On another live concert recording from Japan in 1978 – during the introduction to the extended version of “Gibraltar” that the four-piece band was playing during the 1978 world tour, Zawinul can be heard playing around at around 1:44 with a melodic fragment on synth that sounds like part of the theme of “Madagascar” (the closing tune on 1980’s “Night Passage”).
The only problem with this re-release is the over-use of a dynamic noise filter on the sound. This works well for louder sections of tunes, but in the numerous quiet passages, the filter keeps cutting in and out, leading to an irritating "hiss - no hiss" transition.

1. Pat Metheny Group “Live in Warsaw 1995”This concert, liberated from the vaults of a radio station, is one of the few examples of a high-quality recording of an entire PMG concert from the 1995 "We Live Here" tour. A number of the tunes here are available on the “We Live Here Live” DVD; however, there are a number of other tunes that show hints of the evolution that would occur with the release of “Imaginary Day” in 1997. The highligt on this concert is a live version of “We Had A Sister”, originally written for Joshua Redman, which starts with a series of crashing staccato chords from Metheny’s acoustic guitar, during which he plays a pattern not far removed from the opening of “Imaginary Day” itself.

3. Mitchell Froom “Dopamine”
Mitchell Froom, like Daniel Lanois before him, was better-known as a producer (his credits including the Crowded House album “Woodface”).. I first heard of "Dopamine" because of the use of an edited version of the tune “Noodletown” as the theme music for “Session at West 54th”. However, the whole album is a highly interesting collection of tunes utilizing different sound textures and palettes.

4. Brad Dutz “Krin”
Brad Dutz played for a number of years with Scott Henderson and Gary Willis in Tribal Tech, where he contributed tuned and untuned percussion and the occasional composition. Here he shows off his quirky compositional style, built around lengthy and intricate themes (shown on “Snowy Egret”, which resembles the theme that Dutz wrote for “Robot Immigrants” on the 1989 Tribal Tech albumn “Nomad”).

...of the sort of mess that consumers can get into when they try to purchase music files that are protected by DRM.
Although there is a religion thing at work in the discussions (many people seem to be virulently opposed to the iPod, making statements that are at best shaky and at worst false about it's ability to load MP3 files - nearly all of my music is on my iPod in MP3 format), the bottom line here is that the mainstream music industry corporations are doing a really good job of pissing off their consumers. I have trouble thinking of any other industry that so often ends up impeding, angering and sometimes suing its customers. Truly an example of biting the hand that feeds.

Eva Cassidy was only 33 when she died in late 1996 from melanoma. At the time she was a well-kept secret, with only a handful of songs released. She was not really a songwriter, being primarily a song interpreter.
Following her death, her work became more well-known, to the extent that three of her CDs, starting with "Songbird" in 2001, reached #1 on the album charts in the UK. Many musicians and singers have raved about her work for some time.

Those folks who have seen my vinyl record collection will know that one of the centrepieces of the collection is a pristine copy of "Gandharva". The second side of this LP was recorded live in Grace Cathedral in San Francisco in late 1971. This article sheds some new light on the recording process for "Gandharva", including Bernard Krause's insights about Gerry Mulligan's approach to song credits:

"We just called him up. Always cynical, with a rather nasty contentious edge to his personality, he agreed to come if we put him up in a nearby 'class' hotel on Nob Hill, [and] provided him with all the room service he could handle [and] an electronic keyboard instrument. We did. He did. And we all hit it off pretty well. Later did a movie score together titled Final Programme, recorded and released in England. We were friends until he retitled 'By Your Grace' and recorded a cover of the same tune under a different name so he could claim our half of the copyright. Turns out others had suffered the same experience while working with him."

"All That You Dream" is the second song on Little Feat's 1975 album "The Last Record Album". I first heard this playing in a record store in Manchester in 1975, when it was still only available on import. (At the time, some albums would be released several months earlier in the USA, often with superior packaging to their UK versions). I remember not really understanding the music at the time, but I bought the album anyway when it was finally released in the UK, on the grounds that other leading musicians of the time always raved about Little Feat, therefore they must be good.
"The Last Record Album" marked the beginnings of a move away from New Orleans-influenced boogie towards more complex, jazz-influenced songs for Little Feat. This trend may have been partly responsible for Lowell George's later decision to leave the group. The shift led to a greater songwriting involvement by Paul Barrere and Bill Payne.
"All That You Dream" is Little Feat, with John Hall (from the group Orleans) playing third guitar. Sam Clayton's percussion is almost totally absent from the track, although his voice can be heard in the vocal mix. The tune is therefore carried totally by kit drummer Richie Hayward.
Hayward has always had an ability (shared by a limited number of drummers including the late John Bonham) to play exactly on the beat, instead of slightly ahead of the beat. On this tune, he exhibits that capability throughout, which gives the whole tune a floating, elastic feel. The overall feel is enhanced by Hayward's minimalistic groove-based playing, with few fills; any drum accents are sparse and intended to enhance other instruments. Overall, the final recorded sound is basically sparse and streamlined, with great use of space.
Throughout the song, Barrere and Hall's guitars interlock and weave complimentary patterns, with Lowell George's slide guitar playing legato lines mostly in the chorus.
"All That You Dream" starts with a twice-repeated 4-bar intro led by unison bass and guitar, before launching into the chorus, which in the song precedes the verses.
After 2 verses, the intro is re-used as a backing for a Bill Payne electric piano and synth solo, repeated 4 times before a lead-back via an instrumental instance of the chorus.
After the lead-back chorus, there is a unique moment as the band instrument collection sound seems to fall away during the first line of the third verse, with only a single guitar accent intruding; the use of space proving the wisdom of Ry Cooder's saying "never play a note where none will do". A harmonically-modified variant of the intro is used to end the song, and the slide guitar vibrato from Lowell George at the end creates the illusion that the pitch of the ending is actually rising. The ending demonstrates that you can often spot intelligent bands by their song endings; a band relying mostly on cliches to end it's songs will often be of limited interest on a more general musical front.
I spent hours playing this tune when I first got the album, and today it remains my favourite song on what is an excellent album. Interestingly, the live version (released on "Waiting For Columbus"), suffers by comparison by being too busy, with both Hayward and the band playing too much, and the "floating" feel of this version is also missing.