String Theory Media

new work: jack white's third man records on npr

 My piece on Nashville's Third Man Records aired yesterday on All Things Considered. It's a fascinating operation that blends the best of old school independent recording companies like the old Sun Records with a modern awareness of fan interaction. Interviewing marketing guy Ben Swank in his vintage suit on midcentury modern furniture, I felt like I could have been in Nashville circa 1967. Jack White's office had a more eclectic vibe, dominated by a big portrait of Mississippi bluesman Charlie Patton. At the time, the TMR folk were getting tons of vinyl ready to take down to  SXSW to sell product out of a mobile store. More recently, the label held a big party at its headquarters for Record Store Day. It's unclear whether a business model like theirs, based on tangible product, lots of events, creative promotion and fan networking could work for a company that didn't have a valuable catalog to sell (Jack White owns all of the White Stripes masters), but it seems like any music company that doesn't pursue these basic tenants in the 21st century is bound to fail. 

music as the antidote for fear

 An important doc made a brief appearance in Nashville yesterday, and it’s a shame it’s not engaged for a longer run than its two Sunday screenings at the Belcourt Theater. The film is Soundtrack For A Revolution, an inspiring look at how music informed and infused the Civil Rights Movement. Executive produced by Danny Glover and written/directed by Bill Guttenberg and Dan Sturman, it mingles archival footage with contemporary performances of key songs by artists such as Wyclef Jean, John Legend, Angie Stone, The Roots and the Blind Boys of Alabama. Commentary comes from leaders such as John Lewis and Julian Bond, musician/activists like Harry Belafonte and veterans of the major Civil Rights events, from the lunch counter sit-ins in Nashville to the fateful march on Selma Alabama.

This is not to be confused with the 2009 release Let Freedom Sing: How Music Inspired The Civil Rights Movement, which I have not seen and which appears to span a longer period of time, covering pre Civil Rights Era records like “Strange Fruit” and others. Soundtrack focuses tightly on the years 1960 to 1968 and on the way songs and singing buoyed the protesters during the many trials of the movement. Even now, forty years after the fact in some cases, the protesters and organizers simply glow when they talk about how the songs became an antidote for fear in the face of angry mobs, dogs and unhinged cops. This testimony is an invitation to contemplate the complexity and profundity of music when called on for this special purpose. The groups needed to feel united, and music did that, allowing them to literally breathe as one. Individuals needed that cocktail of dopamine and other chemicals in their brains to negate the natural fight-or-flight response of being attacked, with words or actual violence. Music gave them that, and it’s doubtful that anything else could have. Music has been part of many social and political movements, but generally as a kind of propaganda or abstract symbol. But black Americans may have staged the most musical protest movement in history, and it’s testimony to the integrity of their relationship to music that the songs and sounds of their struggle went on to infuse our popular music with much of its soul at almost every level and in every genre.

At the screening, I caught a preview of a somewhat related film that gave me shivers. Not a documentary but a sort of half-improvised guerilla feature film shot with real musicians on location and out of sight of authorities, No One Knows About Persian Cats depicts the travails and repression of a rock band in contemporary Iran. It looks stunning, and with it comes another example of how music may sometimes be mightier than the sword or the pen.

the trouble with tuning

 I'm re-reading a wonderful book called Temperament by Stuart Isacoff, about the surprising battles that raged during and after the Renaissance over how to tune a piano. Sounds dull, but far from it. It's nothing less than the complicated history of what's called the tempered scale, on which virtually all the music you've ever heard is based. There's a newer book out there on the same subject by Ross Duffin called How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (And Why You Should Care) that I need to pick up, since it obviously comes from a more pointed place than the serenely told Isacoff work. But in the meantime, for a fast, entertaining explanation of equal temperament (and how it liberated Western music without ruining it) check out this recent Slate article by Jan Swofford. She writes:

 The anomalies of tuning are the musical equivalent of the uncertainty principle in physics, which says that you can tell where an electron is located or how fast it's moving, but not both at the same time. Another example of the gods' sense of humor. For me, it's all a clue to the nature of the gods, which Pythagoras and the Greeks understood supremely well: The masters of the universe don't make much more sense than we do, but they are all-powerful and they sure love to play with our heads.

This subject is on my list of the things they rarely teach people about music theory that they should. If you can get your head around the 12-tone scale and the idea of keys and the circle of fifths, then the music of Bach, Beethoven, Debussy and even the atonal music of Schoenberg and friends becomes more wondrous and impressive. 

nashville film fest: a music doc roundup

 The Nashville Film Festival is underway. In fact it's winding down to its last two days, but I finally got to spend some time over there to sample the music docs. After the jump, I review The Bass Player (A Song For Dad), about jazz and family, Do It Again, about a music journalist's quixotic quest to reunite the Kinks, and Waiting For A Train, about an endearing Japanese man who adopted bluegrass music and the nation that gave birth to it. Hopefully more to come in the next couple of days.

'there's going to be a lot of amplitude'

 Salon.com features an interview with George Prochnik about his new book, In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise. I've got to get this. He's into some of my favorite territory. We think of sound as entirely benign if it's not painfully loud, but he argues otherwise. He talks about the relentlessness of the urban soundscape and whole populations completely unfamiliar with the experience of silence (largely the same people who have never seen stars because of light pollution). He talks about the founding fathers' need for quiet as part of their deliberative process, versus the caterwauling of today's political scene. And he deals with sound branding and retail sound design.

One of the things that I found scary was how much thought is put into making these sonic store environments. Starbucks was one of the first to do this -- to be sonically consistent. They put you into a cone of brand identity, with certain sets of associations they've focus-grouped a million times, to create a sense of rebellion, melancholy, or whatever. We are being very comprehensively manipulated.

He reminds me of a clipping of a strange headline from my student newspaper back in college that I kept on a bulletin board for a long time: "Sometimes I wish my Walkman could play silence really loud."

the peculiar problems of music bio-pics

Variety offers an interesting survey  of music biography features in the works and the hurdles faced by producers in dealing with estates and licensing.

Like any film, music bio-pics face the typical Hollywood headaches -- agreeing on a script, nailing down a workable budget, finding a marketing hook -- but they're also laden with particular biopic baggage, such as securing the cooperation of the subject or their estate, clearing performance rights issues and enlisting an actor to fill some awfully big shoes.

And there sure are alot of these movies being developed, including films about Jimi Hendrix, Marvin Gaye, Frank Sinatra and Miles Davis (a Don Cheadle project that could be exciting). What the article doesn't address is even if you get all the cooperation and permission you need, you're faced with the eternal problem that music bio-pics seem to be excruciatingly difficult to pull off. 

music is medicine

Posted below: L.A. Philharmonic violinist Robert Gupta's brief and beautiful TED talk about his encounters with and insights from Nathaniel Ayers, the schizophrenic musician profiled in the book The Soloist by Steve Lopez. I did not care for the feature film with Robert Downey Jr. and Jamie Foxx, though I appreciated how the director tried to use innovative techniques to convey Mr. Ayers's inner experience. Gupta's talk it seems to me is a more vivid and insightful account of this now famous friendship.

And for fun, an uncanny little video on the same subject. Hat tip: the Music Matters blog.

licensing, fair use and a baffled filmmaker

If you care about music history and modern music composition, read this indispensable essay in The Atlantic by filmmaker and educator Kembrew McLeod who's spent the last few years in licensing hell. McLeod was executive producer on a film I'm dying to see called Copyright Criminals, about the strange, arbitrary and punitive evolution of sampling law and its effects on creators. By all appearances, the film is not an anti-copyright screed but a balanced look at the plight of artists, largely hip-hop producers and DJs, who work with bits of sampled sound or records to make music that has collage-like qualities. The article here describes the larger problem of making a documentary about samplers that uses lots of samples (both esthetically and instructionally) to get its points across. Here's a sample (oh the irony).

When we started making Copyright Criminals in 2003, I approached a film music clearance professional about working on our project. When I told her that it was a documentary about the history of musical sampling, she said flat out that we wouldn't ever be able to legally distribute our film.

I've long argued that the current legal standard that every sample, no matter how brief or how manipulated by the artist, must be licensed one by one, at the discretion of multiple owners, is fundamentally out of balance. Why do I care so much? Because documentary is a hugely important tool for transmitting our musical culture, history and values across generations, and the current system of synch licensing (when songs are matched with video images) makes it prohibitively expensive to allude to well-known songs, even very briefly. But McLeod explains it better than me.

Here's the trailer for the film.

Copyright Criminals from IndiePix on Vimeo.