String Theory Media

casey driessen's new album

The highlight of last week was attending Casey Driessen's CD release party at the Basement and getting to hear him play some of the songs from the remarkable disc Oog with album-mates Darrell Scott on guitars and Viktor Krauss on bass, with the astonishing Tommy G. playing drums. Last year, Casey and I collaborated on a 10-minute doc about the making of the album, and it seemed like a good time to post it again. A 3-minute edited version is available HERE. We invite you to watch either one and urge you to pick up the album when it comes out May 12 at www.caseydriessen.com.

new writing: chick corea and john mclaughlin

Even if you'd offered me tickets to the Cubs opening day game in Houston last night, I would have turned them down to see the jazz concert of the year at the Schermerhorn Symphony Center. Chick Corea and John McLaughlin, together for the first time since landmark Miles Davis sessions 40 years ago, are two of my musical heroes, and I never dreamed I'd be able to see them play as band-mates. They brought a mind-boggling group: Christian McBride on bass, Kenny Garrett on sax and Brian Blade on drums,  who in some ways stole the show with his freedom, his dynamics and his micro-surgical cut beats. It was a stunning, electrifying show - musicians working telepathically and at the highest levels of technical ease. They reharmonized traditional 12-bar blues in Jackie McLean's "Dr. Jackal" until the chords darkened and stretched into a sort of infinite and beautiful dissonance. Chick's long, multi-layered Hymn to Andromeda sent everyone on a journey.

I was fortunate to write the program notes, so my preview essay is posted after the jump and on the String Theory TEXT page.

moby teeth and the media circus

Yesterday was full of distractions, not least the developing story of country singer Toby Keith uncorking on my friend and former Tennessean colleague Peter Cooper in the press room of the ACM Awards on Sunday night. Music, an irate egomaniac and journalism ethics in one story!? My kind of thing. For background, read this account of the tongue-lashing from CMT.com, but it began with a major story in the new Rolling Stone by actor Ethan Hawke about his hero Kris Kristofferson...

medicine with no side effects ?

Last fall’s Duke conference on music and the brain left me wondering if one day doctors could administer music custom designed to alleviate very specific emotional and psychological problems, or manage complex diseases with sound. Now I see in Sunday’s NY Times that some pretty impressive people are actually trying to refine and test “musical pharmacology” in a clinical way.

A British neuroscientist quoted in the piece: “Physiologically, it’s perfectly plausible that music would affect not only psychiatric conditions but also endocrine, autonomic and autoimmune disorders,” he said. “I can’t say music is a pill to abolish these diseases. But my vision is that we can come up with things to help. This work is so important. So many pills have horrible side effects, both physiological and psychological. Music has no side effects, or no harmful ones.”

There’s evidence already that listening carefully and frequently to recognized classical music can be palliative. But it’s an open and interesting question how much farther we could go if the music wasn’t required to stand on its own as a work of art, or whether music that doesn’t hold up as art can be effective. This new group includes composer/therapists whose aim, the story says, “is not to write concert music of independent aesthetic merit, any more than an apothecary is out to concoct choice cordials. It is to deliver specific stimuli — dosages of rhythm, harmony or dissonance and timbre — at the appropriate time and in an effective sequence.”