You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘music’ tag.
I was sitting in a restaurant last night when I spaced out and started listening to the jazz they were playing. The song sounded familiar. Perhaps the singer was Diana Krall?
I was wrong on the singer. There’s no way Diana K would stoop so low as to sing the song I recognized – “Everybody wants to rule the world” by Tears for Fears. It was followed by “Every breath you take” by the Police and, amazingly, “Boys don’t cry” by the Cure. All songs from my youth. I never listen to them now. They seem too childish.
In jazz format, (and I’m not kidding!) they initially take on the patina of sophistication. Plus they transport you back to key events in your life – underage drinking, smoking etc….- that were accompanied by the songs. So, doing Cure covers in a jazz format is going to open up a huge market if you do it right. Wistful middle-aged adults with disposable income. The problem is that listening to ten or more of these covers is going to make you throw up. This was the flaw in the CD playing in the restaurant. You have to mix things up with some real jazz. You have to get Dina Krall to do the covers. She’s married to Elvis Costello and has already compromised any purist principles she may once have held. I want to hear her do some Dr Dre or Gnarls Barkley. I’d buy that.
- The music of H1N1
- Justice Souter retiring?
- Hobbits.
- DOJ investigating Google Books settlement.
I listen to Pandora most of the time I am in my office. Pandora is a free internet radio that personalizes musical selections based on feedback you give it. For example, you can specify a song by an artist and it will find other songs that have similar qualities. I thought it would be fun to listen for a little bit and write down my thoughts about the music that Pandora suggests.
I recently discovered (on Pandora!) the music of Patrick Moraz and Bill Bruford, a drum and piano duo that plays something between jazz and prog-rock. I decided to use them as my starting point. Here is what I heard: (you can listen to the same “station” by using this link. the tune selection is not deterministic so you will hear different music than i did, but in my experience it won’t take long before there is duplication.)
Omjhonz by Satoko Fujii and Tatsuya Yoshida.
this is my kind of music. improvising the form and not just within the form. its hard to coordinate this with more than two musicians. given my choice of two, i go for piano and drums. it works here because the pianist leans toward classical rather than “free jazz” which in settings like this usually skates off into dissonance. I am thinking Cecil Taylor here.
Bekei by Dewey Redman/Cecil Taylor/Elvin Jones
Speak of the devil! But this one was just a drum solo by Elvin Jones. A nice one, typical Elvin Jones, but still just a drum solo. Never knew these three played together. Have to bookmark this album for later Pandora fun.
Windy Mountain by Charles Lloyd and Billy Higgins
Duet of sax and drums. More grounded in Jazz than any of the previous. Charles Lloyd is good at this. His work with Zakir Hussain is very similar. Here Billy Higgins is playing very standard jazz rhythms. A bass would fit in here.
The Drum Also Waltzes. Patrick Moraz and Bill Buford.
Another drum solo. Short. I like it better than the Elvin Jones.
Double Image. Joe Zawinul.
Whoa, how did this get here? This is essentially Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew carried on through Zawinul, Wayne Shorter and Miroslav Vitous who also went on to form Weather Report. I like this much better than Weather Report. Wait, Herbie Hancock too? And I love the Vitous bowing on this tune. Cool, but hard to see how it fits with the theme here. Wondering about Pandora.
Ran Blake “Thursday”
Never heard of Ran Blake. Looking at the above link I see I am probably not alone. But this is nice. Solo piano. A little Monk, a little Chick Corea. And although that sounds like a recipe for disaster, it works for me.
Bottom line: no keepers on this round. I like Ran Blake, but its generic enough that I don’t imagine ever having a real craving for it. I was glad to learn that Zawinul had some outings between Miles Davis and Weather Report. The Japanese duo were the most interesting. I will check them out again. (on Pandora!)
According to a recent study, those who illegally download music are also significantly more likely to purchase music online legally via services such as iTunes. It follows that the record labels should fight even harder to stop pirated music. Explain.
The Bad Plus is a unique piano trio that straddles jazz, rock, and classical and at their best combines all three. In their most recent album, For All I Care, they are joined by vocalist Wendy Lewis who sings on a number of rock covers. (Here was my review of the album.) Wendy Lewis is joining them on their current tour and Sandeep and I saw their Chicago show at the Old Town School of Folk Music on Friday 4/17 (the early show at 8PM.)
The show began with the trio alone playing some older tunes as well as the three classical pieces on For All I Care, Stravinsky’s Variation d’Appollon, Ligety’s Fem, and Semi-Simple Variations by Milton Babbitt. This was an enjoyable mini-set and worth the price of admission, although in my opinion the band was not in top form. The pianist Ethan Iverson was having somewhat of an off-night and failed to find the main groove on the improvised parts of “You Are” and “Dirty Blonde.” His trademark foundation-shifting flourishes lose their punch without a smooth and deliberate buildup from the point of departure. On the other hand, the classical pieces were all very tight and were the highlight of the show. There was one new tune, an Ethan Iverson composition entitled “Bill Hickman at Home.” This was a blues number with a very nice extended bass solo from Reid Anderson and some great playing from Iverson too.
Wendy Lewis joined halfway through the set and the band began with Lithium which also opens the album. She successfully navigated the tempo changes that add an additional slant to the Nirvana original and her usual flat delivery worked well in this tune as it did for Kurt Cobain. Up next was the Yes classic Long Distance Runaround, another very clever arrangement in which the jazzy instrumental part dissolves into a slow backdrop for Lewis’ powerful vocals. Unfortunately these were the last successful combinations until the fiery encore of Barracuda which was also the best tune on the album. The pretty chorus on Wilco’s Radio Cure could not recover from the dull, almost spoken-word delivery of the opening verses. (Fortunately, at the end of the song the trio left her behind with a searching group-improvisation that began with drummer Dave King mysteriously massaging his skins with his elbow, built up to Iverson’s hands flying all over the keyboard and finished with a very satisfied audience.)
The next tune, Blue Velvet (not on the album) was a puzzling choice. Wendy Lewis is a skillful vocalist and she can sing big on tunes like Barracuda, but her voice is not right for this song: too flat and emotionless. Finally, Comfortably Numb is one of the strong points of the album but on stage it was straightforward, uninspired rendition.
The Bad Plus are making some of the most innovative music in jazz today. They are to be commended for experimenting, however in my opinion this experiment did not pay off. I am looking forward to the next one.
Why did we decide to do this blog? I’m not really sure. A creative outlet? A way to throw out random ideas? A vague hope that something fun might come out of it? A replacement for endless websurfing?
Well, the “vague hope” rationale has already worked out. Jeff and I had a wonderful time at our appearance on the Interview Show at the Hideout. There are a lot of dimensions to why we enjoyed it and I’m sure we’ll both blog about it. The thing I want to talk about now is the club itself and its owners. It is a little west of the big Home Depot on North Av. There is weird industrial stuff all around and a large filling station for trucks. And slap bang in the middle of all of it is a little house which has been turned into this club. I thought it would be full of truckers and instead it is weirdly middle class. I had a Bell’s Oberon, definitely in the microbrew category. I could have been ironically postmodern and had a Hamm’s but I did not spot it in time. I love the crappy end of American beer!
Jeff and I are too old to know about clubs but the Hideout gets rave reviews among the cognoscenti. The owners, Tim and Katie Tuten, are very interesting. You might expect some ex rockstar to own it. Maybe, Tim and Katie have this history in their deep, dark past. Now, they have regular day jobs – Tim works in the Chicago Public Schools and Katie for a charity. They’re also a little older than you might expect. (I hope they do not mind me saying this! ) They more than make up for it by having the extroversion and energy of twentysomethings. Tim did a little stand-up before Mark Bazer came on. They also have incredible taste in music – that night’s act Anni Rossi was transporting. Tim worked for Arne Duncan in Chicago and will join him in DC doing special events. As we left, Katie ran to the door and said all economist number-crunchers were welcome, except those from the University of Chicago. I’m sure if she met Phil Reny, Roger Myerson etc she would welcome them too.
And I’d never have met them if it weren’t for this blog! I also got to hang out with Jeff on his own, a rare thing as we’re so busy nowadays. I enjoyed his humor while he dealt with my depression with grace.
I should think about some clever econ thing to blog about and see if it leads anywhere.
Because we hate them both, it is instinctual to hate the idea of a merger. And indeed it is being looked at by the Justice Department. There is a clear economic benefit of this merger: eliminating double-marginalization. A monopoly causes an inefficiency because it sets price over marginal cost, resulting in too little output. Live Nation is a monopoly but it sells its product through an intermediary, Ticketmaster, which is itself a monopoly. That means that the “price” charged to Ticketmaster becomes Ticketmaster’s marginal cost, and Ticketmaster will fix an additional Monopoly markup over that. This second source of inefficiency would be eliminated if Ticketmaster and Live Nation were to merge.
(This is somewhat over-simplified because they most likely use a more complicated contract than a price, but unless they use a very clever kind of contract, there will still be elements of double-marginalization. And this very clever contract effectively creates a merger anyway.)
So when you read this post from Trent Reznor you should downplay his worries that the merger will result in an increase in ticket prices. The auctions he imagines are already happening. Nevertheless his other points are very interesting and worth a read.
And I would not worry that this vertical merger will shut out competition for ticket distribution. First of all, Ticketmaster was doing fine at that already, and second, the only reason we cared about the Ticketmaster monopoly was the double marginalization.
The only argument I can see against the merger is that it throws up an barrier to competition with Live Nation for concert promotion. You could certainly draw some graphs and show that this is a concern theoretically, but I don’t believe that the merger would be held up for this.
I went to see a jazz concert in Evanston a few weeks ago. The band leader, a sax player, is a high-school friend of a colleague of mine at Kellogg. The band did a Coltrane tribute. All jazz players are in awe of Coltrane it seems, and none can escape his gravitational pull. They also did a few songs of their own that were quite good. There was little that was really original. But I still left feeling moved because the sax player played with deep emotion with no hint of self-consciousness or cynicism. On an extremely cold and snowy night, it left me with a feeling of melancholia that felt just right.
The Bad Plus makes “postmodern” jazz, the reverse of music played by the band in Evanston. It can be original, very clever, self-knowing and ironic. It is emotionally detached. For it to work, all these sarcastic elements have to come together, otherwise you feel bored or disgusted by your own cynicism for listening to the stuff.
This CD is not successful. Jeff is right – the recording is muddy and the singing swamps everything else. It belongs in the same category as the Barolo I described below.
One song, a cover of Pink Floyd’s Comfortably Numb, sticks out for me, for a personal reason. I saw it performed by Dar Williams at the Steppenwolf. I got dragged to the show but in the end I really enjoyed it. I do like Dar’s songs but I also enjoyed the audience which seemed to be made up largely of lesbian couples. Apparently, Dar maintained a sexual ambiguity for a few years. This allowed her to satisfy listeners of all sexual orientations. (It’s related in some way to paper I have on Saddam’s use of ambiguity about his weapons’ status to prevent escalation of war and also deter enemies at the same time. The same principle is there but I can’t see the formal connection.)
I know Jeff would like to hang out with more lesbians but as economists, we never really have the opportunity. So the Bad Plus took me back to that night and I was happy, till the next song began.
I have been enjoying reading the blog of Seth Godin. In a recent post he wrote the following.
It’s quite possible that the era of the professional reviewer is over. No longer can a single individual (except maybe Oprah) make a movie, a restaurant or a book into a hit or a dud.
Not only can an influential blogger sell thousands of books, she can spread an idea that reaches others, influencing not just the reader, but the people who read that person’s blog or tweets. And so it spreads.
The post goes in another direction after that, but I started thinking about this conventional view that the web reduces concentration in the market for professional opinions. No doubt blogs, discussion boards, web 2.0 make it easier for people with opinions to express them and people looking for opinions to find those that suit their taste.
But does this necessarily decrease concentration? If everybody had similar tastes in movies, say, the effect of lowering barriers to entry would be to allow the market to coordinate on the one guy in the world who can best judge movies according to that standard and articulate his opinion. Of course people have different tastes and the conventional view is based on the idea that the web allows segmentation according to taste. But what if talent in evaluating movies means the ability to judge how people with different tastes would react to different movies? A review would be a contingent recommendation like “if you like this kind of movie, this is for you. if you like that kind of movie, then stay away from this one but you might like that one instead.”
In fact, a third effect of the web is to make it easy for experts to find out what different tastes there are out there and how they react to movies. This tends to increase centralization because it creates a natural monopoly in cataloging tastes and matching tastes to recommendations. Indeed, Netflix’s marketing strategy is based on this idea and I am lead to hold out Netflix as a counterexample to the conventional view.
Talk about smashing boundaries. Here is video of that de-trendy trio playing backup music to the Isaac Mizrahi fashion show in New York’s fashion week. The tune is apparently the new Dave King-penned “Really Good Attitude” (listen for the hand claps.) See if you can see any effect on the models’ expressions when the improvisation really goes off the rails.
Here is Ethen Iverson’s account of the event from his great blog Do The Math.
The new CD from the 21st-century-defining trio The Bad Plus was released in the US yesterday (for some reason it was available in Europe for a few months now.) The big news is that they have added a vocalist, Wendy Lewis, and the album is exclusively covers (rumor is that their next album will be all originals, presumably back to the trio.) The covers are mostly rock-pop tunes in a spirit similar to the covers they have been doing since the beginning, but they have added classical music to the mix, like a Stravinsky that they re-work to sound like very conventional jazz-pop, and something called semi-simple variations. Partly because these tunes shed the vocals from the other tracks they come closer to the style of music the Bad Plus has been doing succesfully in their previous records.
The recording is not ideal. To make room for the vocals, the other instruments are mushed into the background. The drums seem sometimes badly miked and even the piano loses definition at moments where you really want to hear it, especially on the last tune “Feeling Yourself Disintegrate.” On the other hand, the bass stands out beautifully and really sits right in the middle of the music. In some of its best moments the CD feels like a duet between the bass and the vocals.
Wendy Lewis has a good voice which is ideally suited for many of these tunes, but not all. The ballads are the weakest because her voice is not always “pretty.” I am not knocking her here, she is truly a “vocalist” in the sense that she uses her voice as an instrument and she is doing surprisingly well at integrating her instrument into this already dense music. But in ballads like “Lock Stock and Teardrops” and “Feeling Yourself Disintegrate” nothing complicated is going on and it comes across more like a coffee-house poetry reading than singing. By contrast and proof that she really has command of different vocal styles, in “How Deep is Your Love” she takes on a sultry, breathy voice which adds a dimension to the music which is missing elsewhere on the album. Her voice soars over Iverson’s arpeggios in “Comfortably Numb” and she flat out rocks on “Barracuda.”
What is the verdict on this work? For sure there are many reasons to applaud the Bad Plus for experimenting with vocals and these covers. In some ways they are being brilliantly opportunistic because pop musicians inexplicably refuse to try and build a canonical repetoire and these great tunes are therefore just sitting there waititng to be reinterpreted for the first time. If “Long Distance Runaround” was “jazz”, it would be a standard. Still, I come away disappointed with the CD. Largely this is because of the recording, but also because with just a few exceptions this doesn’t advance what the Bad Plus is doing, instead it feels more like a side project.
But what’s really important to me is what this CD suggests the live performance is going to be like. I can imagine that on stage the trio will open up more behind and in between the vocal passages and this could make the whole thing pay off. We’ll see.
Cheap Talk 