String Theory Media

Tim Tells It Like It Is

Tim DuBois, one of our favorite record execs, is the subject of a Q&A at Business Week.com, in which he talks about the new music business class he'll be teaching at Vanderbilt University. He admits that he's in expert in how things USED to work but that the class will be a real-time exploration of a new industry emerging before our eyes. (Where do I sign up to audit this?) One question focused on Music City:

What do you think is the biggest challenge facing the music industry, in Nashville in particular?

Nashville has been a bit insulated because our major consumers are a little slow to pick up on the new technologies. You don't have as many people who are legally or illegally downloading things off the Internet. That's changing, because more and more people have broadband access and are becoming comfortable with the new technologies that are available. As a result, we get a little look ahead to see what's happening. It's not that we have the ability to change it. But we do see it coming. We see it before we feel it.

I don't think the challenges we face are any different from any other music center. We just have a more cooperative atmosphere in our world. We are a music center, and we have a lot of great rock bands that work out of here. The contemporary Christian music and country music industries are headquartered in Nashville. We have world-class engineers, producers, and executives who make this a very rich community.

Air Castle Lives Large on Morning Edition

Thanks to John Ydstie for a great interview and Steve Munro for a great edit on the Air Castle piece that ran this morning on NPR. HERE is the link to the archived story. Here is a pic of one of the bandleaders from some of the archival tape they played: Beasley Smith conducting a band of WSM All Stars.

More on listening

More and more, I see evidence of a backlash against convenience-based, half-heard, digitally compressed music, and if there's a movement forming on behalf of careful listening, I want in. Here's a sharp column from the U.K. Telegraph by Ivan Hewitt who writes:

When they're heard against a backdrop of silence, sounds and music take on a special glow. When they're mingled with the world's noise and bustle, they shrink down to just another annoying distraction, that has to be filtered out if we want to hang to our sanity. Much of the music we hear in stores or on TV is mind-manipulation, put there to make us feel the right emotion or buy something.

He points to a new project by the Royal Philharmonic Society called "Hear HERE" (That's SO British) that aims to raise consciousness about the rewards of attentive, active listening. The content doesn't go live until January, but you can take their survey, which at least is enough to get you thinking about how you listen and what you listen to.

Air Castle on NPR

Much excitement here at Camp Air Castle. I was interviewed last week for NPR's Morning Edition, and I'm told it's airing Monday morning, time TBA, and all subject to change. You know how NEWS sometimes happens, meddling with PR efforts of all kinds. I hope I get my licks in about Nashville - that it's not a country-only Music City and that WSM wasn't a country radio station. I have to make a point to remember to say that at every opportunity. Not to dismiss country music in the least, but I'd love it see it take its place in Nashville's narrative, rather than dominate it.

Two other book events here in town today and tomorrow. Today (Friday) I'll be at the Country Music Hall of Fame Book Store from 1 p.m. for a couple hours. At the same time on Saturday, I'll be hanging out at Barnes & Noble Cool Springs. I'm bringing a computer full of good WSM images, which I've been meaning to post forever.

Here's one from 1946. Just after the War, WSM invited a who's who of New York journalists to Nashville for a two-day junket, full of booze, hanging out with Opry stars, meeting the announcers and a live performance of the Prince Albert Opry from a riverboat called the Idlewild. The show was transmitted back to WSM and sent up the wire to NBC where it was heard nationwide. This photo shows the guests disembarking after the show.

New Air Castle Reviews

Huge thanks to Eric Banister for his in-depth review of Air Castle of the South at AmericanaRoots.com. It's a wonderful music site with reviews, interviews, a blog, and a radio station. Great music, great look. And from last week, the book got nice coverage in Chet Flippo's Nashville Skyline column at CMT.com. Chet's one of my music writing heroes, so it's especially nice to get a thumbs up from him.

Your ears: priceless

Slate.com has published an elegantly written, accessible and on-point manifesto in defense of audiophilia. Fred Kaplan writes of his conversion moment, many years ago:

The difference between the mass-market stereos I'd been hearing up to then and the high-end gear I heard now was the difference between bodega swill and Lafite-Rothschild, between a museum-shop poster and an oil painting, between watching a porn film and having sex.

There is, no question about it, a whole realm of ostentatious audiophile geekdom that is over-the-top and irrelevant to the concerned music fan. I wouldn't buy thousand-dollar-per-yard speaker cable if I had Bill Gates's fortune. But there comes a time in any music fan's life (and I'd like that to be everybody) when they should feel good about investing in a set of devices that can reproduce sound with the same clarity and accuracy we ask every day of things that we apprehend with our vision. I was having this discussion with a music industry friend just last night who argued he's more concerned with convenience than precision in the reproduction of music. He's usually listening on the go, through his iPod. As Kaplan argues, that's swell for some times and places, but for him and for me, those moments when we can sit and bask in the details of great musical art - the breath and the fingers and the nuances of the wood and metal that make up the instruments - are what we most look forward to. These days you can assemble a breathtaking system for less than $3,000, and if you were a pianist you'd be looking at a lot more than that for just  your instrument. Spread out over many years of service and thousands of meaningful listening experiences, it's really not that much.

Jazz restored at Northwestern

As an alum of NU, a fan of Chicago and a windmill-tilter for jazz and world music, I felt really good reading this in the Chicago Tribune:

Last May, music students at Northwestern University took to the streets to protest the school's suspension of its jazz studies degree program. They organized on the Internet too, launching a feisty Web site to decry what they saw as the beginning of the end of jazz on the sprawling Evanston campus. Little did they know, however, that a seemingly moribund program -- which had educated no less than singer-pianist Patricia Barber, trumpeter Orbert Davis and guitarist John Moulder, among others -- was about to be reborn.

The restored department will be headed by New Orleans native and Lincoln Center vet Victor Goines. I don't know anything about him yet, but it sounds like he's stirred up a lot of excitement in Chicago. The rest of the story HERE.

I thought that Fareed Haque, the most remarkable musician I'm aware of who graduated around my class of 1988, was a jazz grad of Northwestern, but it turns out he studied classical. No surprise when you hear him play.