waka waka waka

So distracted am I, and so out of touch with the world of music just at the moment, that I didn’t know it until I read it in today’s Times: the incomparable Manny’s, midtown Manhattan’s Mecca of musical merchandise, has closed its doors.

This lavish emporium, set in “Music Row” on West 48th Street amongst the theaters and recording studios, was where everyone who was anyone went to buy everything. You never knew who you would see in there, but you were bound to see someone, and on the walls were thousands of signed photographs of the pantheon of music-biz luminaries who had passed through to shop and shmooze over the decades.

I know all things must pass (which, by the way, reminds me of the time I saw George Harrison in the shop, sometime back in the early Eighties), but this is awfully sad news.

You can read the Times article here, and take a little tour here.

From our friend Sarah Zimmerman comes a link to an article by Steven Van Zandt about just what it is that ails the music business.

Readers will know Steve as Bruce Springsteen’s long-time associate in the E Street Band, and as consigliere Silvio Dante from The Sopranos. I got to know Steven myself during the making of the Springsteen album The River at Power Station Studios, where I was a member of the engineering staff, and I later worked on some of his solo projects. He is an enormously thoughtful, passionate and articulate man, and in this essay he examines the etiolating effect on the music of the way records are, by and large, made these days: by solitary individuals working in little private rooms, without any of the social interaction and specialization of responibilities that were, he argues, essential to the process during the golden age of record-making. As much as appreciate the value of the tools that the digital revolution has given us, I think he’s right on target.

Read the article here.

Our friend G. Orcalimbo Jones, during the course of his radio show last Friday, tipped off his listeners to a marvelous Internet resource: a compendious archive of live recordings from the glory days of the old Fillmore and the King Biscuit Flower Hour. It’s called Wolfgang’s Vault, and you can find it here.

A little while back I confessed my infatuation with Porcupine Tree’s extraordinary drummer Gavin Harrison, who is, I still think, pretty much the bee’s knees when it comes to tapping the tubs. In that recent post I encouraged readers to go have a look for themselves, and linked to a YouTube clip of one of Mr. Harrison’s dazzling performances.

Commenter “Chris G.”, however, soon offered a dissenting opinion. He explained that Mr. Harrison “plays like a girl”, and said that in order to see “how you do it” we should all watch this clip of the tattooed urbanite Travis Barker (formerly of Blink-182) adding a few percussive touches to a haunting little tone poem by the American composer Soulja Boy Tell ‘Em. It was beautiful, sophisticated playing, and we were all duly impressed.

Well, Gavin and Travis, I have bad news for the both of you: there is a new king of the hill. Have a look here.

I’ve mentioned that I have sort of a drummer’s crush lately on Porcupine Tree / King Crimson batteur Gavin Harrison — who, I have decided, may not be human (I’m well acquainted with others of his alien species: Dennis Chambers, Keith Carlock, Peter Erskine, etc.). Here he is again.

One of the enjoyable quirks of the Outer Cape is Provincetown’s own radio station, WOMR (”Outermost Radio”). The station is everything you might expect from a place as full of artists, writers, musicians, eccentrics, oddballs, and misfits as the far end of Cape Cod is, and the playlist is eclectic, and seldom boring.

A particular treat is the show “AOR”, which airs every Friday evening from 9 until midnight. The host, “G. Orcalimbo Jones”, is a connoisseur and collector of lesser-known recordings from the long and ramified history of rock music, and each week’s program is a little guided tour of some of the curiosities in his collection. His show also features a call-in segment in which listeners vie to identify the week’s Mystery Guitarist.

I realize most of you are not within radio range of Provincetown on any given Friday, but take heart: you can listen to a live stream of the show here. Nine to midnight, Eastern time.

New York City is a crowded, chaotic place. The public transit is bad and getting worse, and the weather is, generally, awful. Housing is cramped and expensive. The Mets and Jets collapse, like clockwork, year after year. But there are times when I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else.

This evening the lovely Nina and I joined the Tuesday-night crowd at Avery Fisher Hall, where the Philharmonic, under the guidance of maestro Lorin Maazel, treated us to a splendid and eclectic program.

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I haven’t written much about music lately, and have almost never, I think, written about my own musical background, other than as a recording engineer. But I have played the drums and the guitar since I was a boy, and before I landed my first job in a recording studio and began a career at the console, my plan was to achieve mega-stardom at the drum-kit.

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We must note with sadness the death, from cancer, of one of the founding members of Pink Floyd, keyboardist Richard Wright. His Times obituary is here.

We note with sadness the death of bassist Dennis Irwin. I didn’t know Dennis well, but I had met him on many occasions, and did record him once or twice. He was, in addition to being an outstanding player, a wonderfully sweet-natured man. Dennis died soon after having been diagnosed with cancer late last year, and will be missed by all. Read his New York Times obituary here.

We respectfully pause to note the death of Norman Smith, the EMI engineer who not only recorded the Beatles’ audition tape, and went on to be the lead engineer on all of their recordings up to and including Rubber Soul, but who also signed to EMI a band called “The Pink Floyd”, and produced their first two albums, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn and A Saucerful of Secrets, as well as the later double album Ummagumma.

He was one of the greats, and all of us who have spent our lives behind the console owe him a tremendous debt.

Read his story here.

Another sad note: from my friend Pat Goldsmith I have just learned that drummer Buddy Miles, best known for his playing in Jimi Hendrix’s Band of Gypsies, has died.

Not having finished a couple of longer posts I am gestating, for this evening I can only offer lighter fare: everything you ever wanted to know about lockgrooves.

Well, your humble correspondent had an album up for a Grammy this time around: Borrowed Time (Tiempo Prestado), by guitarist Steve Khan, which was nominated in the Best Latin Jazz Album category — but the award went to another outstanding artist, Paquito D’Rivera.

Sorry Steve! We’ll get ‘em next time.

Putting aside the pressing issues of the day for a moment, it’s time for a personal item. My 19-year-old son Nick, having taken up the guitar about three years ago at the urging of his old dad, has been writing music like mad. He spends most of his time playing his Dean Evo, but has just sent me a clip of himself playing a little Celtic-style ditty that he wrote a little while back on the 6-string acoustic. (Think Bron-Y-Aur Stomp.)

Following a link from Bill Vallicella, I’ve just read a review of the movie Pete Seeger: The Power of Song, in which the reviewer, the historian Ronald Radosh — who knew Seeger personally, and admires him as an artist and a man of peace, generally — nonetheless calls attention to the unrepentance of those of the American Left, including a great many beloved folk musicians, who strove on behalf of the Communist Party for much of the 20th century.

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I was gratified today to learn that the album Borrowed Time, which I recorded and mixed last winter for my old pal, the great jazz guitarist Steve Khan, has just been nominated for a Grammy in the “Best Latin Jazz Album” category. Steve is an outstandingly creative musician, and he certainly deserves this nomination. The record is a splendid example of his talents not only as a player, but also as composer and arranger, and the performances — by Steve, John Patitucci, Jack DeJohnette, Randy Brecker, Bob Mintzer, Manolo Badrena, Ralph Irizarry, and other luminaries — are of exceptional quality. I’m proud to have been at the console for this project.

You can read a typical review here.

I’ve been a fan of Don Van Vliet, alias Captain Beefheart, for a very long time. Though you may not be familiar with him, he is one of the more influential figures in late 20th-century American music, and without question one of the oddest.

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I have been busy this weekend with a two-day Iron Wire seminar (which is turning out to be one of the most interesting and esoteric experiences I’ve had in 32 years of kung-fu training), so for tonight I’ll just leave you with an engaging little diversion. It’s an online test of your ability to perceive and remember musical tones.

A tip: pay attention! Here it is.

I was saddened to see in today’s news that the great Joe Zawinul has died, of cancer, at the age of 75.

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Many, perhaps most, fans would, if asked, name Sgt. Pepper’s as the greatest Beatles album of them all — and it was, without question, a work of coruscating brilliance. But many of us who grew up during that extraordinary period in musical and cultural history feel that it was the album immediately preceding that was the Beatles’ most significant creative breakthrough — the most audacious departure from all that had come before, both musically and technically. I’m talking, of course, about the 1966 release Revolver.

Why am I bringing this up? I’ve just stumbled upon a marvelous little book about this revolutionary recording, and I wanted to share it with you all. Go and have a look here.

Kevin Kim, in today’s edition, outlines the typical career arc of a successful stand-up comic, from early aspirations at the microphone to washed-up Hollywood star.

After spending many years doing freelance recording for the music-for-hire houses here in New York, I can offer a similar timeline, The Life of a Jingle Singer.

Let’s say his name is Kyle Simms. His career unfolds as follows:

Yes, it’s a brutal life, friends. But at least it’s short.

With a hat tip to my old pal and fellow Power Station alumnus, engineer extraordinaire Larry Alexander, comes a mesmerizing animation of this John Coltrane classic, one of the high-water marks of Western civilization. Tommy Flanagan, piano; Paul Chambers, bass, Art Taylor, drums, and of course John Coltrane on tenor. If there is anything more sublime than music of this quality, I don’t know what it is. Heraclitus would have loved this one, by the way.

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There’ll be nothing in this space today about dualism, Darwin, Iraq, religion, or any of the rest of the tedium that usually plumps up these pages. No, today was a day to set all that dull and dreary business aside, because the Incredible Casuals were kicking off their 27th season at the legendary Wellfleet Beachcomber.

Nobody sounds quite like these guys — as their Wikipedia entry explains, they “meld a passion for 60’s garage rock and surf music, pop hooks, brilliant lyrics and beach life into their own completely distinctive sound.” And there is no better place to see them than the ‘Coma: an old Cape Cod lifesaving station, sitting high atop a sandy cliff, this raucous bar overlooks Cahoon Hollow Beach and the mighty blue Atlantic from one of the easternmost points in the USA (which is why Guglielmo Marconi chose Wellfleet for the first trans-Atlantic radio transmission, back in 1903).

Anyway, the Casuals — Chandler Travis, Johnny Spampinato, Rikki Bates, and Aaron Spade — tore the place up, as expected. There’s more to life than consciousness.

As long as I’m shirking serious duties here today, I offer another amusing item, courtesy of my son Nick.

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Well, I promised you all some froth, and here it is. Tonight we have, courtesy of my childhood friend Nick Nicholes, who now lives in a scenic vale in remotest Montana, a polka band that does Pink Floyd covers, and pretty well too. No quadrophonic mixes, though; you’ll just have to use your imagination.

Saxophonist Michael Brecker, who died most unjustly a few weeks ago, was remembered tonight in a memorial service at Town Hall, which was filled to capacity by the people who knew and loved him.

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From trumpeter John McNeil, who’s been through a lot:

I don’t often recommend recordings in these pages, as people’s tastes vary greatly — but maybe I should, as I have, in the course of thirty years as a recording engineer, been exposed to an awful lot of good music. So here’s one, if you’re interested.

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From my friend Eugene Jen comes an item about one Dmitri Tymoczko (Harvard ‘91), who has come up with a way of mapping musical tonal clusters into the topological space known as an orbifold, with interesting results.

The question, of course, is how the orbifold mapping would represent “Oh, Pretty Woman”, or perhaps “Only the Lonely”.

Read all about it.

The musical community suffered an irreplaceable loss this weekend: saxophonist Michael Brecker has died at the age of 57. He had been fighting MDS and leukemia for years, and finally lost the battle.

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Readers visiting waka waka waka this evening confident that yesterday’s service interruption must have been due to the gestation of a particularly expansive discursion upon some fascinating topic or other are, I’m sorry to report, mistaken. While there is as always no shortage of topics, events, and cultural foibles about which an essayist might comment, tonight I am unequal to the task, and must refrain.

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We must mark, with sorrow, the death of James Brown, progenitor of an entire species of music, an awful lot of which has been running through my head, and through my speakers, these past couple of days. He was no saint, especially if you happened to be married to him, but the man invented funk, and we mourn him.

It might seem odd, given my background as a recording engineer, but I don’t own an iPod or similar device. I admire their sleek and efficient design, and the sound quality is acceptable, but I haven’t got one.

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Here’s something wonderful, brought to our attention by my son Nick. From YouTube, it’s a clip of the Hawaiian ukulele master Jake Shimabukuro playing George Harrison’s While My Guitar Gently Weeps.
Enjoy.

If you enjoy music, and have a broadband Internet connection, then I must recommend an outstandingly clever website, Pandora. The site allows you to create virtual streaming “radio stations” that you seed with music you like — after which the system analyzes your choices and uses its proprietary algorithms to scan its vast collection to find other music that it thinks you will be likely to enjoy as well. It’s a smart idea, and done very well, with a simple and intuitive user interface. Take it for a spin. One caveat: no classical music yet. Apparently the analysis and assortment of classical music is a more difficult problem. They’re working on it.

One of the little pleasures of growing older - and they are admittedly not numerous - is that you hold things in living memory that, as far as the hyperkinetic larvae who seem to be taking over the world these days are concerned, never even existed. One of these, for doddering old fossils such as your humble correspondent, is the musical satire of Tom Lehrer.

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My lovely wife Nina and I spent the evening in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, where the New York Philharmonic Orchestra kicked off their summer concert series with a program of Tchaikovsky and Dvořák.

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The other day I had a familiar tune repeating itself in my head (an irritating phenomenon sometimes called an earworm), and couldn’t for the life of me remember what it was. Convinced that the Internet had to be able to help me somehow (my answer for everything these days), I got online and started poking around. I quickly turned up a website called SongTapper, where the idea is that most tunes are distinguishable by their rhythm alone. All you have to do is find your way to their song search page and tap out the rhythm of the song on your space bar. I was skeptical, but lo and behold, out popped the correct answer: Mozart’s Turkish March.

Try it yourself.

I don’t spend a lot of time in the recording studio these days; one of the reasons that I took up software development after twenty-odd years of making records for a living was that the long and irregular hours were beginning to get to me. It was not a big deal, really, to do multiple consecutive sixteen-hour sessions when I was in my twenties; I’d just collapse for a day after the project ended, and I’d be fine. But as I got older it got harder to bounce back, and I’d spend days in a fog after such marathons. Now I’m 50 (50!), and I have to say that after putting in 32 hours in two days on Tuesday and Wednesday over at Right Track I feel about as focused and articulate as Ozzy Osborne on a fistful of ‘ludes. So instead of the usual piercing analysis and trenchant commentary on the passing scene, I’ll just have to leave you today with something else to worry about: Giant Hogweed. It’s big, it’s phototoxic, it looks like a cow parsley on steroids, and it’s coming your way. Learn more here, and here.

Once again, waka waka waka has been experiencing service outages. The reason this time was a six-hour drive home to New York on Monday evening, and a 14-hour day in the recording studio today (just got home at one a.m).

I spent the day at Right Track Recording on West 48th Street - one of my favorite places to make records - to do basic tracks for an album by a very talented young woman from Australia, a bassist by the name of Tal Wilkenfeld. Joining us in Studio A were tenor player Seamus Blake, pianist Geoff Keezer, and the astonishing drummer Keith Carlock. Tomorrow we will be joined by an old friend, guitarist Wayne Krantz.

So I hope you understand; I’m just too worn out to write a post today. Back soon.

As sometimes happens, it’s late, and I may have to shirk my bloggardly duties for today. After a late night Wednesday, an early morning today, hours in the office reviewing mind-numbingly opaque Internet-protocol documents, and then a long drive from New York City to Wellfleet, MA, I am simply too zonked to opine about anything.

Well, almost. As I write I am listening to a 1965 recording, by the incomparable Arthur Rubinstein, of Chopin’s Nocturnes, in particular Opus 9, No. 3, in B major.

The ‘A’ section of this piece is a simple melodic figure, in waltz time, played with infinite tenderness by the great master. The structure repeats several times, and each time the second half of the figure is reinterpreted with increasingly intricate variation. It is sublimely, heartbreakingly beautiful.

Listening to this music, sometimes I feel that even if this were all the human race ever accomplished, it would be enough.

We had a little Steely Dan playing on the PubSub office jukebox today, and as we listened to Jeff “Skunk” Baxter’s outstanding guitar playing on “Reelin’ In The Years“, I had occasion to reflect on what an extraordinary fellow he is. Not only is he one of the most capable rock musicians of the last several decades, always in demand as a producer and sideman (and one of my favorite soloists), but he is also a self-taught defense-technology expert, who has become a widely respected D.O.D. consultant on such matters as counterterrorism tactics and missile defense.

If you’d like to find out more about this remarkable autodidact, Baxter’s Wikipedia entry is worth a peek.

Sorry not to have posted anything yesterday; I spent the whole day in the ‘B’ room at Avatar Studios, doing some mixing with my old pal, guitarist Steve Khan. We were mixing two takes that didn’t make it onto last year’s album The Green Field (which featured Jack deJohnette, John Patitucci, and Manola Badrena). At the tracking dates, back in May of 2005, we wound up recording more material than would fit on a CD, so the two songs we mixed yesterday - Henry Mancini’s Dreamsville and McCoy Tyner’s Blues for Ball - will just have to wait till next time around.

Studio B is a nice little room, with a cozy live area that’s just right for a small rhythm section (among others, Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards recorded a string of hits in there, back in the 80’s) and an expansive Solid State Logic 9000 series console.

I was a staff engineer there from 1979 until 1987, back when the place was called Power Station, so I always feel right at home.

I’m in California still, looking after my gravely ill mother, and opportunities for thinking the longish thoughts needed to generate an interesting post are scarce. I shall be back in harness soon, and I thank you all for your patience and kind words and thoughts.

I would, however, like to take a moment to remember, on the first anniversary of his cruelly premature death, my good friend, the gifted bassist Wayne Pedzwater. Here is the post that I wrote immediately following his memorial service.

If you should see this, Patty, know that you are in my thoughts.

I found a note in the mail the other day announcing the demise of yet another outstanding recording studio. This time the decedent was O’Henry Studios (this link might not be good for long, so click it now), in North Hollywood, California. It was one of my favorites, and one of the best.

When I started out in the recording business, back in the late 70’s, things were very different. There were no desktop PCs with digital audio software, there was no MIDI, no samplers, no digital reverbs - pretty much no digital anything. When people wanted to make a record, they had to go to a studio, and they actually had to play musical instruments. In order for the sound to make it onto the tape (yes, we used 2″ 24-track analog tape back then), the services of an engineer were required. That was my job. I worked at a studio called Power Station, on West 53rd Street in Manhattan, where I worked my way up through the ranks to become a staff engineer.

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Do you have a recording of Chopin’s Preludes? I listened to them today for the first time in quite a while. They are an odd collection, not preludes to anything really, despite the name, but each a unique meditation. About them, Liszt said:

“Chopin’s Preludes are compositions of an order entirely apart. They are not only, as the title might make one think, pieces destined to be played in the guise of introductions to other pieces; they are poetic preludes, analogous to those of a great contemporary poet, who cradles the soul in golden dreams, and elevates it to the regions of the ideal.”

and Schumann:

“I would term the Preludes strange. They are sketches, beginnings of Etudes, or, so to speak, ruins, individual eagle pinions, all disorder and wild confusions.”

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Yesterday’s Times carried a sad notice: renowned bassist Niels-Henning Oersted Pedersen has died at age 58 in Denmark. I in no way intend this space to be devoted strictly to remembrances of deceased bass players, but Niels deserves a mention. He was one of the great ones, and played, in his long career, with the best of the best.

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On Thursday, the 24th of March, New York City’s musical family assembled at the Church of the Tranfiguration on East 29th Street to say goodbye to the gifted bassist Wayne Pedziwiatr (a.k.a. Pedzwater), who had died the previous week after a long and grueling struggle with gastric cancer. To know Wayne was to love him, and since pretty much every professional musician in New York knew him, the gathering was not small.

Wayne was a remarkable figure; he seemed to glow from within. He was tall, athletic, and strikingly handsome, with the sort of physical presence that one might imagine could only be the result of a carefully managed eugenics program. He had a dazzling smile, a nimble, curious and capacious mind, and a splendidly pungent sense of humor. Above all, though, were his extraordinary musicianship and his dedication to excellence.

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