String Theory Media

Beatiful Wreck

Nashville's arranger extraordinaire Al DeLory is featured in a nice photo with Glen Campbell from the 60s atop a meaty piece at American Heritage about the L.A. studio musician cadre known as the Wrecking Crew. The article dwells on the little white lie behind the many hit records played by studio cats instead of credited band members, but the writer also seems to appreciate the rare creative cameraderie that made the Crew and Nashville's A-Team and the Funk Brothers and others so special. He quotes the great drummer Hal Blaine: "Producers knew that our involvement with a production was different. Nine times out of ten the producer or arranger would tell us to use the charts as a guide, that’s all. We were encouraged to go for it, to go beyond what had been written. We had the opportunity to create, to be a team of arrangers.”

Country's Conundrum

The Tennessean has done a pretty good job holding country music up to the light in the wake of the amusingly controversial Grammy Awards. Last week the major label heads sounded off in a Sunday cover story about being ghettoized and discriminated against by the Recording Academy (NARAS), and NARAS chief Neil Portnow expressed his displeasure at their displeasure, especially at the very public nature of criticism that could have been delivered in private. Now this week, NARAS VP Nancy Shapiro takes a stand out of keeping with her overly-politic caution of the past. She enumerates the many country music performances at the Grammys over the past five years as well as the superstars who gladly did tribute segments without complaint. She also gives Music Row a small slap by inviting its brass to take "the high road" in discussing this issue further.

I’ve been pondering all this a lot, partly because I don’t think anybody’s standing up for what I know to be a large constituency who believe that record sales notwithstanding, it’s deeply disturbing to have “country music” represented to the planet by Rascal Flatts and Carrie Underwood.

Here's Hoping...

Neil McCormick asks in this week's Telegraph if the era of the pop music superstar is over and, if so, what will replace it? His only assertion that strikes me as misplaced is that "By promoting interactivity between audience and artist and making available music that corresponds to the particular interests of different types of people, the internet is actually making music more parochial." I don't know what's in his dictionary, but mine says that parochial means "having a limited or narrow outlook." To the contrary, it's the major label system, which assumes its audience is not very curious or bright, that peddles limited and narrow musical choices, while the new grassroots Long Tail music economy is giving us a cornucopia of styles and statements drawn from every corner of musical history and influence. It's a self-expression revolution, fueled by technology. Music participation is up. Music consumption is up. No, the revolution hasn't been effectively monetized yet, but that's largely because the industry's most powerful brokers of content refused to be constructive for years while a wildfire of piracy got out of control.

Rebirth Update

The Times profiled the marching band scene in New Orleans on Mardis Gras. It's a place, as the story says, where being in a marching band is hip and competitive, where, as on the streets and in the clubs, horns and drums rule. I've had the city on my mind. We're editing a video bio of Amanda Shaw, a 16-year old fiddler, singer and songwriter from just outside NOLA. We shot her in December over a few days in a recording studio in the Bywater/Upper Ninth Ward area and driving around a busted up but proud city. Much of the news there remains bad. The nation's attention seems elsewhere. Federal help seems, from my distant perspective, minimal. Anybody going to JazzFest?

Little Big Town, Four Lead Vocalists

I've been too busy working to post new work, like this pair of radio stories I did about outside-the-box country act Little Big Town. Sadly they didn't win either of the two Grammys for which they were nominated on Sunday night. But they've got to like the year they had in 2006. A platinum album. Three hit singles. And the most priceless thing of all, the restoration of their career and their respect in the music community. The stories here offer two takes on Little Big Town's journey from major label flame-out to indie label success. Click HERE to listen to the local piece from WPLN. Click HERE to check out the national piece that ran on All Things Considered last week.

Even though both stories are to some degree about major label nonsense and bad judgement, one bit of music industry BS didn't make it into either story, so here it is:

Equity Records boss Mike Kraski told me that Little Big Town has been under constant pressure, first from Sony (the label that supervised and imaged them to near death) and now from radio programmers to quit being a vocal quartet and pick a lead singer. The dunderheads who program based on obsessive and flawed audience research keep telling LBT that the audience gets confused when Karen Fairchild sings the step-out vocal on one single and Phillip Sweet does on another. Of course they're wrong. LBT has refused to take that advice and has earned three hits with three different lead singers. It's one of most glaring examples I've seen of how thoroughly country's gatekeepers patronize their audience while pretending to serve them. It's just sorry beyond words.

Whitney Balliett, Jazz Hemingway

We've lost some vital spirits just recently, including Michael Brecker, Alice Coltrane and Art Buchwald. But yesterday my music writing uber-hero passed away. Whitney Balliett, who wrote about jazz for the New Yorker for nearly a half century, surpassed anyone I've ever read in his ability to describe music with prose. Indeed he was among the most elegant and exciting stylists I've ever read about anything, a true musician with language. He put the lie to the old adage that writing about music is like dancing about architecture. Through deft use of metaphor and through magnificent close observations, he put you in the room with Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman and scores of others. He showed me that to comprehend or critique music, one must first pay minute attention to the physical, aural and emotional stories at play in the performance space in real time. He was the anthesis of listening passively. Many writers have been posting favorite passages from the master. Here's one of mine, about his jazz analog, Charlie Parker.

Parker had a unique tone; no other saxophonist has achieved as human a sound. It could be edgy, and even sharp. (He used the hardest and most technically difficult of the reeds.) It could be smooth and big and sombre. It could be soft and buzzing. Unlike most saxophonists of his time, who took their cue from Coleman Hawkins, he used almost no vibrato; when he did, it was only a flutter, a murmur. The blues lived in every room of his style, and he was one of the most striking and affecting blues improvisers we have had. His slow blues had a preaching, admonitory quality. He would begin a solo with a purposely stuttering four-or-five-note announcement, pause for effect, repeat the phrase, bending its last note into silence, and then turn the phrase around backward and abruptly slip sidewase into double time, zigzag up the scale, circle around quickly at the top, and plummet down, the notes falling somewhere between silence and sound. (Parker was a master of dynamics and of the dramatic use of silence.) Another pause, and he would begin his second chorus with a dreaming, three-note figure, each of the notes running into the next but each held in prolonged, hymnlike fashion. Taken from an unexpected part of the chord, they would slip out in slow motion. He would shatter this brief spell by inserting two or three short arpeggios, disconnected and broken off, then he would float into a backpedaling half-time and shoot into another climbing-and-falling double-time run, in which he would dart in and out of nearby keys. He would pause, then close the chorus with an amen figure resembling his opening announcement.

Amen indeed. And it's one paragraph that's longer than most articles anyone ever publishes about music today. I hope Whitney can hear Duke Ellington wherever he is.

More links to Whitney Balliett memories are after the jump.