From The Basement

Here are some fresh, live acts From The Basement.

This site is a great example of what happens when you synergize design and performance. It’s not enough to have a website full of exclusive clips of great artists. Here are some reasons From The Basement engages the viewer, besides the quality performances:

• The link to each performance is a screenshot of said performance, and the photo is LARGE. Large photos are inviting and compelling, and the fact that it’s a screenshot gives the site an honest, transparent quality.
• The look and feel of each screenshot (and, therefore, each performance) is consistent. This is not a collection of random performances at different venues. Each act performs in the same space, giving the whole site cohesion.
• There are not a lot of words. Actions and visuals  speak louder. The site is as immediate and up-front as a live performance.
• The artist selections were clearly governed by taste and preference, not charts and numbers. I find it appealing that the selection of artists is not Top 40, and not strictly independent, but a carefully chosen hybrid of the two. This site is not trying to please the masses, they are trying to please themselves.

There is an inherent sense of quality in the choices made on this website. Content is not always king. The way in which you deliver content matters.

JFK on Art

Too often in the past we have thought of the artist as an idler and dilettante, and of the lover of arts as somehow sissy or effete. We have done both an injustice. The life of the artist is, in relation to his work, stern and lonely. He has labored hard, often among deprivation, to perfect his skill. He has turned aside from quick success in order to strip his vision of everything secondary or cheapening. His working life is marked by intense application and intense discipline. As for the lover of arts, it is he who, by subjecting himself to the sometimes disturbing experience of art, sustains the artist — and seeks only the reward that his life will, in consequence, be the more fully lived. — JFK, 1962

I nicked this quote from an article in the January 2009 issue of Esquire Magazine: The Kennedys: What I’ve Learned

Wisdom Bits

Take a minute to check out Wisdom Bits. It’s a neat little diversion of a site that simply, and stylishly, reveals wisdom through pop music. Just hover over an artist’s colored square to reveal the nugget of truth inside…

The Business of Wine and Music

Check out the latest offering from Crushpad, a San Francisco-based company that lets people create their own barrels of wine. It’s called TinyBottles: 50ml pours of wines that can be purchased for as little as 10% of a full bottle. Here’s the reasoning behind this new wine sampler size. From the Crushpad newsletter:

“In our ruminations on the future of online wine, we started thinking about similar “long tail” industries and how the internet has impacted them.  To me, music is probably the closest to wine – zillions of products, subjective evaluation criteria, and historically controlled by a small number of distributors.  While wine and music started on the internet about the same time, the music industry has completely transformed while wine is just about the same.  There are several reasons for this (and I’m happy to chat about them), but certainly one reason is that, online, consumers are able to listen to songs before they buy them.

Trust

At a jazz history seminar in college, my professor worked his way through the canon of standards and artists. From ragtime and stride piano, all the way through bebop and the “cool” period and beyond. But it was Miles Davis’s 1970 release Bitches Brew that drew the most controversy of all.

A bearded man in his 50’s felt, confidently, that this album is full of noise, not music. He dismissed it as indulgent and pretentious. Some other students agreed to some degree, while others defended the work as a stroke of genius and a pioneering leap in the history of jazz, influencing countless other musicians.

Regardless of opinion, Bitches Brew was one of Miles Davis’s best-selling albums. From Wikipedia:

“Upon release, it received a mixed response, due to the album’s unconventional style and revolutionary sound. Later, Bitches Brew gained recognition as one of jazz’s greatest albums and a progenitor of the jazz rock genre, as well as a major influence on rock and funk musicians.”

My contribution to the jazz seminar discussion was this: an album like Bitches Brew requires a certain level of trust from the listener. When a popular musician releases a different, challenging album, it usually shakes things up. The album may merely be a self-indulgent experiment and a mess of sounds with meandering concepts. But the thing that will bring you past the first-listen opinion of “I don’t get it” to the fifth or sixth listen of “now it makes sense,” is trust.

You need to trust that the musician you loved before did not lose his mind and go off the deep end. You need to trust that his good taste and insight you loved before is present in the new release as well. You need to trust that the album does, in fact, make sense and that it will reward repeated listenings. If you don’t trust the artist, and have good reason to believe there is no sense beneath the experimentation, then the first listen will likely be enough and you can dismiss at will.

The point is this: if you trust the artist, then make an effort before drawing a conclusion.

The Rise of the Artist.. or, Ayn Rand’s Music Industry

This graph is from a recent entry over at the Times Labs Blog called “Do music artists fare better in a world with with illegal file-sharing?“

“This is the graph the record industry doesn’t want you to see… The most immediate revelation, of course, is that at some point next year revenues from gigs payable to artists will for the first time overtake revenues accrued by labels from sales of recorded music.“

The article’s logic and data parsing looks sound, though its analysis is confined to the UK music industry only. It validates an opinion I’ve held since the beginning of the demise of the music industry: that the demise would favor the artist and frown on the record men.

This will only be the case, however, for artists who were not only releasing a consistent stream of quality product, but whose careers were centered around their ability to perform. The traditional record industry was founded on the premise that artists want to make music and not negotiate deals, find distribution channels, or haggle over merchandise profit margins. And this remains true. Which means the industry in its current state favors the resourceful, talented, motivated artist, and incentivizes the remaining lot of musicians to get their act together and take the reigns of their career.

We lose, of course, the lazy but undeniably brilliant musicians who need the maintenance, guidance, and hand-holding of a great manager or producer to bring their talent to the masses. These gems are the ones we should mourn, if only slightly, as the music world shifts toward an “Atlas Shrugged” reality where the suits can no longer hop a free ride on the talent.

The Tao of Music

I was flipping through the book Everyday Tao and came across the entry for Music:

There was once a zither student whose master, frustrated by his pupil’s lack of musical progress for so many years, pronounced him unsuitable for learning. To understand how devastating this was to the young man, one must remember that playing the zither was considered a very high and demanding art, practiced only by refined and learned people. In addition, one’s master was like a parent. He or she was usually as dedicated to teaching as a parent is to rearing a child. So to be rejected by his teacher was a great shock to the student.

The master abandoned the young man on the shores of an island, leaving the student only a zither. Left to his own resources, the disappointed pupil provided first for his survival. The island, although uninhabited, had enough wild fruit and vegetables to sustain him. In the time that followed, he listened to the singing of birds, the chorus of the waves, the melodies of the wind. He spent long periods of time in meditation and musical practice. By the time he was rescued, several years later, he had become a virtuoso player and composer, far greater than his master: he had entered into Tao.

And so it is with us. We need teaching. But there is a point beyond which teaching cannot provide for us. Only direct experience can give us the final dimensions we need. That means learning from nature, and learning from ourselves. As long as we remember that, there can be no mistake.

So start playing.

Tracks on a Map

Tracksonamap.com is a new interface for interacting with music from around the world. It’s definitely worth a quick go-round to get a feel for the timbres and rhythms that make up the global sonic landscape right now.

For more on the soundscape concept and defining locales by their sounds, check out my related post, “Travelsong“

Dreams as Art as Business

“Everyone must begin to trust their dreams because out of that trust is born the artist, and the artist is the role model for the entrepreneur we now need.”

- Ernest Hall (entrepreneur and musician) from The Creative Economy: How People Make Money From Ideas

Your First Song

It’s my life.  It’s my pain and my struggle,

The song that I sing to you it’s my everything.

Treat my first like my last, and my last like my first

And my thirst is the same as when I came.

It’s my joy and my tears and the laughter it brings to me

It’s my everything

– Jay-Z, “My First Song” from The Black Album

Always treat your first project like it’s your last, and your last project like it’s your first. This guarantees quality.