While it’s really hard to describe and summarize such a complex performance, a section I particularly loved had them doing a somewhat traditional dance to a large chunk of the audio from the video below. The video is of an art installation by Nate Harrison where the viewer listens to the audio on an LP, where Harrison discusses how a drum break from the The Winston’s 1969 B-side “Amen, brother” (often referred to now as the “Amen break”) has been sampled, re-used, and deconstructed in hip-hop and commercial advertising. Harrison’s discussion is a really nice piece of cultural history and analysis, although I confess it was perhaps more compelling with casebolt and smith dancing at the same time.

It would have been interesting in its own right if casebolt and smith had simply danced with Harrison’s commentary. They took it up a notch, however, by following it up with a really interesting dance/discussion of how dancers use and re-appropriate moves and steps they learn in classes and see in performance, effectively “sampling” movements much like a hip-hop artist samples beats. She demonstrated various moves and styles, and he then grilled her about where she learned the moves, and on the appropriateness of re-using these moves without credit or payment. This quickly borders on the absurd, which is of course the point. The courts have allowed labels to charge for re-use of tiny fragments of recordings, where there are no such expectations in dance. Presumably a key piece of this is the ability to record (either on paper or as an audio recording) and distribute music, where dance can’t be recorded and copied in the same way.

In short, it was a cool, funny, intelligent performance. We had a great time, and highly recommend the show.

I found it really interesting to find that the YouTube version of the video above was in fact lifted from Harrison’s web site without his permission, although he says in the comments that he doesn’t care (search for “nkhstudio” in the full comments). So you have Harrison making a commentary on copyright and intellectual property, which is then appropriated by someone else and turned into a YouTube video. Then casebolt and smith use it in their performance, without ever telling us where that audio comes from, as a starting point for a great conversation about intellectual property. And while it’s possible they knew about the Harrison piece before it showed up on YouTube (Harrison was a friend from college for all I know), the odds favor them discovering the piece via YouTube, where it has over 2 million views.

So…

• Now I’ve listened to “Amen, brother” (a song I’d never heard of)
• because of a dance performance
• borrowing parts of an audio track
• which I was able to find via Google
• as a YouTube video
• generated (without permission) from a video by a performance artist commenting on intellectual property and copyright
• using as a springboard the extended and repeated use of a 6 second drum break from The Winston’s “Amen, brother” in hip-hop and advertising

What a wonderful example of how re-appropriation can enrich the world, especially if we worry less about profit and more about gain.

Our iPod works (again)!

Well, wouldn’t you know it, but we happen to have a nice 80Gb iPod Classic (pictured above) that died over the summer with the telltale clicking sound of a stuck head. So I tried out Matt’s trick & whacked quite firmly (& quite loudly) multiple times on an old wooden chest and voilà – it came back to life! We thought we’d be travelling without the benefit of our huge shared pile of music, but it’s worked beautifully for many hours (all the way down to Arkansas & back).

Huzzah! Big thanks to Matt for the suggestion – banging on hardware beats the heck out of having to buy a new iPod. Again, I was only willing to risk this because this puppy was well past warranty, and there was no chance of repairing it. Obviously beating the tar out of electronics is something one should think carefully about and do with some care; your mileage definitely may vary.

Those keeping track at home will note that noon-2pm interacts oddly with our family radio shows on KUMM on Sunday mornings (Sub-Evil from 10am-noon, WeatherGrrrl & I from noon-2pm). Sub-Evil’s show should survive largely intact, but our show may get cut off towards the end.

Sorry for the inconvenience, but even hip radio DJs sometimes have parenting responsibilities :-).

As computation becomes smaller and cheaper and more powerful, the big question remains “What are we going to do with all that?”. Cell phones and iPhones are one answer to that question, but in some sense a boring one because they’re mostly just littler laptops. Siftables, on the other hand, are representative of some of the genuinely new possibilities that these technologies enable, and are therefore much, much cooler :-).

To be honest, it’s not the best talk in the world, and probably not as compelling demo of the possibilities as one might hope for. That said, I can definitely see these being a blast, especially as people come up with cool new ways to use them.

Also, many apologies for the silence here. I’ve been much more active on Twitter than here; things have been super busy, and the 140 character world of Twitter has been much more amenable to my life and schedule than thoughtful blogging here. Lame, perhaps, but the truth nonetheless. Figuring out the balance is going to be a challenge, but that’s not today’s activity.

Now let’s get to work, folks.

I first heard about Glennie several years ago from a student, and I think I filed her (without any data and without hearing any of her work) in the “Novelty Act” category in my head. This film does a wonderful job of shattering that preconception – she is a remarkable talent with truly amazing rhythmic sense and control. More importantly, she has a real deftness to her playing and a wonderful response in her improvisation. I can imagine a person with good coordination learning to bang out patterns, but she has a subtlety and range that would be the envy of most musicians, and her improvisations with other musicians (e.g, Fred Frith, Ondekoza) is a joy to watch and to listen to.

Frith is a particularly apt pairing, as they both share a combination of power and gentle subtlety that make their improvisations together incredibly rich. There’s a CD of their improvisations on that day which has happily flown onto my wish list :-).

My only complaint about the film is really entirely unfair. I (and I suspect most people) would dearly love to better understand what her experience of music is, as it’s presumably quite different from that of hearing folk. As she says in the film, however, hearing people can’t typically give any helpful account of their experience of hearing, so it’s not terribly fair to expect her to give an account either. I happily take her point, but that doesn’t do anything to quell the rush of questions:

• Why does her music sound so “familiar”? Given that her experience of it is quite different, one might expect the music that she makes to have a somewhat alien feel, which it totally doesn’t (for me). I suspect that this is to a large degree a combination of her not going deaf until primary school (so she had significant experience of music as a hearing person) and her extensive “traditional” musical training after going deaf.
• How does she experience harmony and layering? Harmonics are, in some sense the really hard part of the game, and one might reasonably expect that her tactile experience of that layering to be quite different from my auditory experience of it, and I suspect that we could learn a lot about both hearing and tactile perception from exploring the similarities and differences here.

All really fine stuff, and definitely recommended.

Common working people has got to take the seat
in Washington, in Washington.
And I’m gonna tell you workers
‘fore you cash in your checks
they say America first but they mean America next
in Washington, in Washington.
— Woody Guthrie, “Lindbergh”

Is it annoying if we keep wrestling with the same issues, or does it just mean they’re eternal?

photo credit: Unhindered by Talent

Chris Butler is doing a specialty show on KUMM this semester that opens with an hour-long interview segment. He’s asked me to be his guest this week (6-7pm tonight, Wednesday, 17 Sep), and as part of that I was asked to list (and bring) my “5 favorite songs”.

Five.

Just five.

Yeah, right.

My 5 star iTunes playlist here at the office has 388 songs on it and runs over 21 hours, and that’s just based on things I’ve bothered hauling up to the office and ripping at some point, and includes almost none of our old vinyl.

And I’m supposed to choose five.

Five.

I eventually gave up pretty much entirely on the idea of “favorite” songs ’cause there was just no way to whittle things down that way. I instead started to focus on songs that have been important to me (“life changing”?), which narrowed things down a fair bit. There are a lot of songs I adore that didn’t really change me, but there was still a surprising number left even after that – a number considerably larger than five.

So there was swearing, consultation, swearing, trolling through playlists and CD racks, swearing, notes scribbled on battered sheets of paper, and more swearing. And here’s where I ended up, in no particular order. All these are great songs and songs that I’ve enjoyed consistently for many years. Would I make the same list if I had to do this again next year? Probably not, but I don’t think I’d be unhappy with this list.

• “Jelly Roll Stomp” – Skeleton Crew – Hallelujah anyway: Remembering Tom Cora – This album was my introduction to an entirely new world of experimental music, and Cora and Fred Frith (the founders of Skeleton Crew) remain huge faves of mine. (This is the kind of stuff that my family semi-affectionately refers to as my “Weird noise music”.)
• “Can’t truss it” – Public Enemy – Apocalypse ’91: The enemy strikes black – Discovering P.E. was such an eye opener in a totally different way, and their sonic landscape may never be heard again now that the law has made their style of sampling inviable. I was seriously considering “Welcome to the terrordome”, but I came back to this because the combination of massive beats and heavy, heavy history is something I’ve never gotten out of my system.
• “Awungilobolele” – Udokotela Shange Namajaha – Indestructible beat of Soweto – My sad little tribute to the enormous amount of great music outside of the U.S. This is a Zulu wedding song, and conveys a spirit of community that is totally compelling, as is that brilliant shuffle beat. You just have to dance to this one.
• “Death letter blues” – Son House – Legends of the blues, Vol. 1 – Still one of the two songs (along with Blind Willie Johnson’s “Lord, I just can’t keep from crying”) that totally defines the blues for me. The story is so rich and painfully matter of fact, and the guitar work is sonically incomprehensible. Listening to this for the first time lead directly to the writing of the earliest song of mine that I can still remember and perform. (But my song, and my performance of it, sucks by comparison.)
• “Trashman’s shoes” – Shoulders – Shoulders – Much, much, much of my sense of music was developed in the years I lived in Austin, Texas. The scene there was so cool, and I could easily hear great shows every week in an enormous range of styles and genres. It was in Austin that I discovered that there was lots of really great country music, and not just the Nashville drivel I’d grown up with, and where I finally began to understand punk. There are so many great songs that I first came across while I was living there that choosing is effectively impossible. Other tracks were arguably more groundbreaking (“People in the house” by Glass Eye) or more crazy-in-your-face-fun (“Reading” by Ed Hall) or more likely to upset your neighbors (“Sweat loaf” by Butthole Surfers), but in the end I picked this because it’s the one that I’ve always wanted to be able to perform.

And here are a few alternates just ’cause I couldn’t entirely leave them off, again in no particular order:

• “I’m so lonesome I could cry” – Hank Williams – I sing this when I’m sad, or when I’m walking by myself. I sang it a _lot_ when John Peel died. When they say songs are poetry set to music they’re mostly talking crap. Here, though, it’s true.
• “Reading” – Ed Hall – Albert – Hands down the best 2 minute burst of noise on the value of a liberal arts education that I know of. Really.
• “People in the house” – Glass Eye – Bent by nature – This entire album really shifted my head about what “rock” music could be, and was the soundtrack to probably at least two years of my time in Austin. Glass Eye is still one of my favorite bands of all time and one of the most influential on how I think about music. Of all the really hard decisions that I had to make in forming this list, leaving them off the top five was probably the hardest. This song is a great example of their dead pan off-kilter lyrics and their weirdly familiar-but-not approach to music.
• “Sweat loaf” – Butthole Surfers – Locust abortion technician – What a great, great song, going from that deliberately over-the-top “dialogue” into a howl of noise and fun. Their “22 going on 23″ from the live bootleg album is also totally brilliant.
• “Waiting for a train” – Jimmy Rodgers – American roots music – I’ve never performed this in public, but there are few songs I think about performing more often. Unfortunately I can’t yodel, and I’ve never figured out a reasonable alternative. Jimmy Rodgers captures such a wonderful feel of life on a rails, which was already just a memory when I was growing up.
• “Present joys” – Alabama Sacred Harp Singers – Anthology of American Folk Music – A gorgeous example of shape note singing, and a song that opened up a whole new set of music doors for me, especially about the possibilities of singing. One of about a zillion spectacular songs from this remarkable collection; it’s remarkable, really, that none made the final five.
• “The coo coo bird” – Clarence “Tom” Ashley – Anthology of American Folk Music – Ashley’s early recordings are full of a wonderful rough, flat singing style that perhaps didn’t come into its own again until Dylan (perhaps via Woody Guthrie). This is probably my fave of his, in part because it makes no sense. I had the honor of performing this with Eagan Heath while he was a student here at UMM, and I’m unlikely to sing with a better banjo player anytime soon.
• “One road more” – Flatlanders – One road more – Discovering the various members of the Flatlanders in Austin was a key part of the realization that country music didn’t have to suck, and this (their one and only album in their original incarnation) remains a great example of drawing that thread up from Jimmy Rodgers through Hank Williams to the present day without getting lost in Pop Country along the way. Some spectacular writing here, and a wonderful old-time twang.
• “The singing leaf” – Wang Chong Lor – River of song: A musical journey down the Mississippi – A mind-bending performance on a banana leaf by a Hmong gentleman in St. Paul. Apparently Hmong is tonal to a degree that this sort of playing can be heard as “vocals” with lyrical content. This was always the most arresting song for students when I used this collection in FYS years ago.
• “Baked beetles” – Ivor Cutler – A wet handle – An single CD of over 80 tracks, all of which are short little spoken word poems like this. Dozens of absolute gems here; this one is the basis of one of our “liners” with Tom.

Lord only knows what I just gapped in the rush and will slap myself for later, but such is life.

I actually tried uploading this playlist to iTunes, but not surprisingly iTunes only has a handful of these songs (4 or 5, I think), so the exercise is clearly futile and I canceled. So, unfortunately, you’re left with my words instead of the wonderful music that inspired them. Check out the show (89.7 FM or on-line at kumm.org) tonight and you can hear the first five, intermingled with far too much of me talking…

P.S. In reading through this I realized that I never actually mention my wonderful family anywhere in here. This is really weird because my parents, my sister, my wife, and my son all weave through this in all kinds of deep, important, and mysterious ways. But none of that made it onto the page. Hmph.

P.P.S. There’s no jazz or classical on this list in any traditional sense. I made a decision to largely set those huge and important (to me) areas aside for this exercise just because things were already so desperate and thinking about those areas only made it worse. But Miles, Mingus, and Monk (not to mention Ellington, Coltrane, and Louis) all belong here, along with gregorian chants, Bach, Beethoven, Kodaly, and Shostakovitch. Life’s a challenge, isn’t it?

We just finished two consecutive day trips to London (Friday and yesterday) and I’m thoroughly tired, and full of undigested photos. This fellow, one of the few I have processed, is from the Egyptian mummification exhibit at the British Museum (Rooms 62 and 63).

On Friday we started down in Greenwich. It was our first time through the Docklands on the DLR — it would be nice to walk those canals and take photos — and our first time to the Royal Observatory and the Prime Meridian. I wish we’d had more time there – it was a beautiful day and there was a ton of cool stuff one could see. Time was tight, though, so we zoomed off to the British Museum before rush hour hit, and spent the rest of the evening there.

While WeatherGirl wandered the museum, however, Sub-Evil and I snuck off and bought tickets for Avenue Q at the Noël Coward Theatre for the following night. He’s been keen to see that ever sense we got here, and it was nice to finally make that happen, but it did mean two consecutive days into London, which is frankly pretty tiring.

Yesterday Sub-Evil and I started at the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology on the UCL campus. Sub-Evil is very into Egyptian history, writing, artifacts, etc., so he really wanted to see this. It’s a very cool collection, but pretty desperately in need of a new home, with the collection crammed into old victorian cabinets and spilling down an emergency exit staircase! Next was the British Library, which was just tremendous! The King’s Library alone was worth the (free) price of admission, and the display of the treasures (Magna Carta, illuminated manuscripts, handwritten scores, drafts, diaries, and letters by amazing folks) was really wonderful.

After all that we grabbed some dinner and then headed off to Avenue Q! We both had listened to the soundtrack about a zillion times, so there weren’t a lot of surprises. The production was tons of fun, however, and watching the puppet masters sing, dance, act, and run the puppets at the same time reminded me of the line about Ginger Rogers doing everything Fred Astaire did, but backwards and in high heels :-).

Now we pack and organize, for tomorrow we’re off to Methwold Old Vicarage for our first stay in a Landmark Trust property!

Thus it is with very mixed feelings that I am considering changing my FYS topic for next year when I return from sabbatical. I’ve taught this for a long time and feel like I’m running out of steam on it. I also continue to struggle with lifting the subject from being about “entertainment” to being about human life and culture; I’ve found it difficult to convey my belief in the vitality of the subject. Another issue I’ve struggled with has been critical thinking. FYS replaced a course called Inquiry that had critical thinking as one of its core elements; I always thought that was very valuable, but never really felt like I included that in a consistent way in my roots music course.

So I’m considering changing topics.

In particular I’m thinking of something like “Climate change: Global crisis, or a tempest in a teapot?”. I think this is one of the (if not the) major questions of our age, and that it can be damnedly difficult to make sense of all the contradictory things said on the subject. My vision is for the class to be an exercise in critical thinking, using climate change as the underlying source of questions and material.

In a one semester, two credit course it’s clear that there’s only so much that we’re going to be able to address, so they’re not going to become experts on the subject (just as I would never claim to be one). Hopefully, however, they’d have a better understanding both of this subject, and of how to approach complex subjects like this in the future.

Thoughts?

Thanks in advance.