String Theory Media

Black Music in the White House

I read about Stevie Wonder playing the White House (the occasion was his receiving the Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song) and thought that was pretty cool, but then last night I saw the broadcast of the event on PBS and realized I hadn’t realized how cool. Michelle Obama gave Stevie a glorious introduction and the idea that THAT was our first lady just blew my mind and filled me with pride. Stevie played “Sir Duke” with full horn section, backup singers, rocking bass, the works.

But then the surprise. The wow. I am astonished in the extreme when the introducer voice intones, “ladies and gentlemen, the most promising young artist in jazz today, Esperanza Spalding.”

I first heard of Esperanza on NPR. She’s a singer, player, arranger, composer who pursued a poly-chromatic style of jazz that’s both modern and traditional, New York meets Deep South meets Latin America. I was a little worried that Barack Obama was going to overlook jazz in setting his cultural agenda, but there she was, with her bass and her huge afro and an awesome smile, singing (hot) and playing the bass (hotter) and laying those fears to rest. It was actually a moment of clarity and dare I say it, hope, for me, seeing the beginnings of how American art can and must be a huge part of our national healing, coming from the top, the living room of our healer in chief.

There were other superb performances. Tony Bennett came on right after Esperanza and she played bass behind him as he smoked it, making me glad I have my TV run through my stereo system (you’re not going to actually hear a bass player any other way outside of live). Paul Simon was spellbinding. Not so much Diana Krall. But what a great thing to do, and what great people to invite. Stevie getting the Gershwin Prize was inspiring, and nobody deserves it more. Obama really has a chance to shift the culture, and the more black music, folk music, R&B, jazz and swing he can steer to our public places the farther he’ll take it. This is our American heritage, and it is good and worthy, and it will leave us if we don’t perform it and share it. Can’t wait to see who Michelle and Barack invite over to play next.

There's a wonderful and like-minded perspective column about Stevie's event from Sky News HERE.

New stuff: Introducing Donna Ulisse

We had the pleasure of working with singer/songwriter Donna Ulisse on this short profile. It focuses on her new album Walk This Mountain Down, but she's got a track record that includes a release on a major label and an increasingly successful songwriting career. She's a bold lyricist and her songs come from a robust tradition while offering a fresh twist on bluegrass forms. And she's a delightful person. The album is climbing the Americana charts and with good cause. It's mountain music for modern times.

Introducing Donna Ulisse from Hadley Music Group on Vimeo.

Let's be done with Muzak

The economy isn't whacking only arts non-profits and jazz institutions, it's weeding the garden of music itself. What use do we have, or did we ever have, for Muzak? The eight-decade old company has filed for bankruptcy, and what really is going to come along to save it? Ubiquitous music is not a market niche any more. It's pretty much the default result of technology, marketing and portable entertain-me centers.

So the company that sold us music atmosphere and music productivity enhancement is about to die, and while I don't like to see anyone lose their jobs in tough times, Muzak is expiring from having lived a life of crimes against music, exhibiting willful disregard for the cerebral health of the human race and lethally awful A&R. You see Muzak wasn't just a programmer of existing popular music for communal places, it produced that crap -- tens of thousands of arrangements of  songs (ranging from the great to the horrible) that so completely sucked the life and meaning out of the original compositions that the bands might as well have been out torching libraries. They AIMED to make music less surprising or communicative. Can you imagine being hired to play that dreck in some florescent studio day after day, making original recordings that you knew were going to be pale shadows of "Sailing" or "Ebony and Ivory"? I remember my Dad actually pointing out to me in my impressionable years that what I was hearing in the Kroger or wherever was actually sawed out on violins by some very tired and weak sounding humans. We laughed about it.

I'm not sure if George Owen Squire (and if you can believe it, the name's pronounced 'square'), the founder of the company back in the 1930s can be said to have invented the very idea of music as wallpaper, but he certainly figured out a way to commodify music so malicious in its design as to make even today's FM radio and American Idol seem artist-driven. And just because I'm feeling cantankerous about it, I'll blame him at the same time for laying the groundwork for the Napster calamity. Yeah, it's a stretch, but when you grow up literally surrounded in a commercial-music-everywhere culture, can you really be expected to understand when powerful guys start telling you that music is scarce private property?

Please Help Save WMOT

Tomorrow (Sunday, Feb. 15) at 3 p.m., the Limelight in East Nashville (Woodland St. across from LP Field) will host an all-star concert benefiting our great jazz radio station WMOT out of Murfreesboro. The 40-year-old station is owned and operated by Middle Tennessee State University, and the school is seriously considering eliminating it as part of sweeping budget cuts. This would be an unmitigated disaster for the life and culture of Music City, not to mention the educational mission of MTSU. We are amazingly fortunate to have a serious jazz station in our market, when most major market so-called jazz stations are fountains of smooth Kenny G pabulum. I'm astonished how often I'm swept away by flipping to 89.5 FM and hearing something familiar or something fresh, somebody local or somebody historic. I can't imagine life without it and I can't fathom that this recession could wipe something so great away forever. Please come to the show and please write to MTSU President Sidney McPhee. My letter to him is after the jump.

The Acoustic Electric Chimera

Maybe you have to be a guitar player to grasp how cool this is. I doubt there's ever been a hybrid of acoustic sound generation and electronic processing quite like it. Those MIT folks sure get to have a good time for a living. From the always amazing MIT Lab Cast series.

Now that's Americana! Or Gram-ericana.

The Grammy Awards are so frigging frustrating. It used to be a pageant of the sublime and the ridiculous. This year it seemed like a bunch of forced duets between the sublime and the ridiculous. Jonas Brothers and Stevie Wonder? What did either one ever do to deserve that? The commentary I'm reading lines up with my impressions: that Radiohead was hands down the best performance of the night and Sugarland actually reclaimed some dignity for country music after Carrie Underwood's performance, which sounded like four jets idling with a beat. Coldplay is driving fast to Neil Diamond territory (yawn). Katy Perry had a cute, naughty summer single, but how did that justify a performance, let alone arrival on stage in a giant banana? Usually they reserve a little token time for classical music and/or jazz. Did I miss it? Was it per usual right before or after that Portnow guy's sanctimonious blather? And am I supposed to feel good about a mere cameo by the Dirty Dozen Brass Band and Nicholas Payton? Wasn't that Nicholas Payton?

Anyway, after all that, it just doesn't make sense that they'd give album of the year to the actual album of the year. I guess I have to remember that the producers have their own agenda and the Grammy voters, usually, seem to have at least some semblance of sense. And sometimes great albums just assert themselves so decisively that there's no choice. Yes, America, Krauss  and Plant reign supreme. What an album. What a call. It was a victory for independent music (yay Rounder Records!) and for the Americana format, which if I hear anyone else run it down, malign it, sneer at it or ghettoize it, I'm gonna uncork on em. Backstage our intrepid Peter Cooper recorded Plant's immortal endorsement:

"To me, it's great to be considered to be part of the movement that is healthy and has some discrimination. My exposure that was begun by these two (gesturing to Krauss and Burnett) continued through the Americana Association in Nashville. There's some great stuff there, and I'm so pleased to be associated with it."

Ah discrimination. The good kind. The kind the music industry has warped to mean 'anything that sells really well.' The Americana Music Association sent out a press release noting that the Plant/Krauss album Raising Sand is the first ever album in the NARAS "Contemporary Folk/Americana" category to be nominated for or win album of the year. But that's just semantics, and the category is only a few years old. In this decade, the top album Grammy has gone to O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Norah Jones, the Dixie Chicks and now RPAK. All four fall easily under the Americana tent. Original, exceptional music deeply informed by American roots traditions. Everybody always seems to want a definition of Americana. Well there it is.

One last thing. We can't resist observing that String Theory Media co-produced the video bio or EPK about RAising Sand, which gave it its first push into the marketplace. Here it is, for old time's sake, the Grammy winner for EPK of the Year!

Happy Birthday Blue Note

The NY Times visits with Blue Note artists and long-time president Bruce Lundvall on the occasion of the 70th birthday of the iconic jazz record label. I can't even count the artists who have meant something to me on Blue Note: John Coltrane, Freddie Hubbard, Wayne Shorter, Jimmy Smith, McCoy Tyner, Charlie Hunter, Medeski/Martin/Wood, John Scofield, Dianne Reeves, Herbie Hancock, Art Blakey and Soulive to name just a few. In the article, Lundvall offers a philosophy that used to be part of the major label mindset back when the majors had the audacity and the chops to market music to the masses and the niches at the same time.

“With the serious jazz artists, you look to break even or make a small profit. You keep the budgets in line, do the best marketing job that you can, and stay with the artists as they develop.”

And then what happens? You develop back catalog that sells robustly year after year and sometimes stumble on a phenomenon like Norah Jones. It means you go down in history and help great musicians realize their potential. Thank you Alfred Lion for showing the way and thank you EMI for keeping this only slightly profitable but epically important label open and thriving.

iTunes is selling classic Blue Note titles right now for $7.99, but more exciting is the celebratory tour by the Blue Note 7 featuring Bill Charlap, Nicholas Payton and Ravi Coltrane touring cities that don't often get top-flight jazz. They visit Vanderbilt's Langford Auditorium on Feb. 18. See you there?

O blogger, where art thou?

Blogging is all about momentum, and baby I lost it. After a calm December, the new year has roared out of the gate, and I've hardly thought about the old web site in weeks. But there's a lot to talk about in music and here at the STM garage. We're finishing up a video project for the IBMA and working on a video profile of the wonderful bluegrass singer/songwriter Donna Ulisse. And I'm writing a short piece about flatpicker Tyler Grant for Acoustic Guitar magazine as well as a feature on the improbably fascinating subject of new metrics and web analytics in the music biz. Watch for all of this soon.