Music is....

Inside the Abby....

Sitting a half mile off the coast of Normandy, France, the Abby at Mount St. Michel was built over 1,000 years ago.  In 1998 I drove from Paris to Normandy and the small town of Vire to visit my friend Pascal Moru. While I was there Pascal suggested I visit Mt. St. Michel and I spent a day there in late November. Tourist season had past and the town and Abby were mostly empty.  Sitting in the large empty stone hall in the Abby I imagined how wonderful it would be to have a guitar and a small recorder there and to produce something like a cross between a John Fahey record and one of Paul Horn's Inside... albums.

When I came home I recorded this piece on a Martin custom shop 12-string 12-fret slotted headstock dreadnought with ebony fingerboard and rosewood bridge, bone nut, three piece flamed maple back and spruce top using a Neumann U87 studio microphone onto a 2-inch open reel Studer deck.

* Photograph by Australian photographer Fabian Foo

There will be a slight delay....

The CD version of Many Bright Things' Many Bright Friends album has a bonus track, an acoustic guitar played through a delay and with a second guitar overdubbed, also acoustic, played with an E-bow. the E-bow is meant for use on electric guitars, and on an acoustic produced a sort of backwards flute sound that I rather like.  On the CD this is titled "There Will Be a Slight Delay."

Play it LOUD....

Ordinarily I do not record wild thrashing electric guitar noise.  This is an exception. I'm on guitar, Larry is on the Fender 6 string bass and Seth from New York on drums.

The Improvisational Ensemble....

I know how much fun it would be if I could find 5-10 musicians who would agree to play every month and a half or so in an improvisational context.  The problem, however, is that I may be the only one who does know.

My goal is to form an improvisational ensemble, I call it M.I.M.E. -- the Midwest Improvisational Music Ensemble -- I like the idea of a LOUD mime.  The music I am posting on this blog is not so much examples of what it would sound like, bit examples of what it could sound like. 

In 1997 on a sunny Sunday afternoon, a dozen or so musicians gathered at a small studio at the edge of a forest out near the Indianapolis Museum of Art.  We played, without any planning or rehearsal, for about five hours. At then end the engineer did a quick mix of the second piece we played and, when we stood there in a small control room and listened, we were amazed.

Eventually I mixed a series of excerpts from that session, everything live to tape, no overdubs, and assembled a record we called In The Summer Of The Mushroom Honey.  That first thing we heard, later titled "I Am Aware of My Heart," is streaming below, and I use it just as an example of what is possible. 

We play, we record it, we search the performance for sections that are interesting, we edit these into final pieces, we assemble an album, press a small number of vinyl copies and a small number of CDs and watch as it slowly works it's way into the world. 

In The Summer Of The Mushroom Honey was released in a LP pressing of 450 copies and sold out very quickly. A CD pressing of 1000 copies also sold out eventually.  While these are minuscule numbers, the record was heard around the world by people who like that kid of adventurous music and reviewed in all sorts of places, including the All Music Guide where it's listed as an "album pick":

Essentially, In the Summer of the Mushroom Honey is the result of an in-the-studio jam session between members of Faraday Cage, Tombstone Valentine, Many Bright Things and Twin Planet, all psychedelic rock bands from the U.S. Midwest. These improvisations are dominated by Richelle Toombs' bewitching voice. On "I Am Aware of My Heart," her voice has been multiplied, beautifully clouding the meaning of what she says. This is mostly guitar (acoustic or electric) and percussion-driven music; keyboards are few and discreet. "Clouds on Sunday" is a nice trio of acoustic guitar, acoustic bass, and violin. Two feedbacking guitars are the essence of "Thank You, Mr. Bishop!"  "Sweet Water" brings back Toombs' vocals. This CD release includes a longer version of "Deep Beneath the Water" and extra material such as the 20-minute warm-up number "Opening Impressions of the Middle East." This album should be considered by any serious or casual psychedelic rock/space rock fan: the improvising is inspired, rich, and sustained. Strongly recommended. - François Couture (AMG)

Any interested musicians are welcome to contact me at any time.

Other Variations....

This is from sometime in the late 1980s, early 1990s.  Two friends from graduate school had come for the weekend and, after a bottle of brandy and a case of beer had vanished, I set up a microphone, got my wee little Casio keyboard that had a primitive sampler, a Travis Bean electric guitar and a 4-track recorder and said, "It's 4 in the morning, let's make something."

Jenny Nelson has been graduate faculty at Ohio University since the early 1980s.  Dave Sholle is now a filmmaker and Associate Professor at Miami University at Oxford Ohio. But back then they were just some drunken collaborators in the creation of something spontaneous. 

As I recall, I first set up a microphone and recorded my conversation with Jenny.  Then I used the Casio to grab a sample from something we were listening to, I've long forgotten what.  Then Dave and I plugged in some guitars and added some tracks. 

It is called "Late One Evening" and there's something about it I really love, but I am more than willing to accept that maybe you had to be there.  In the end... what is blogging if not self indulgent?

More Guitar Variations....

Still clearing and converting files; this comes from a day I spent in the Fun House Studios with Cincinnati bassist, Ron Esposito. It is the same session that produced our version of "Desolation Row".  Ron plays his stand up acoustic bass and I'm playing a classical guitar in Open C tuning (CGCGCE).  When I mixed it I added the delay and I like the way it sounds. Looking for a title, I just reached out my hand and put my finger on a CD at random. "Friends" it is.

Guitar Variations....

This was recorded sometime five or six years ago on a small portable four track with my 1967 Guild Starfire II guitar on all tracks.  It is played in an Open C tuning (CGCGCE) and one in a series of C Variations.



I was converting some old WAV files to mp3s and found this and liked it enough to share it. I've posted a bunch of music at a site called Reverbnation. I hope you'll click the link and visit it.

Music at Reverb Nation....

I've just created a page at the Reverb Nation site for a sampling of some music I've recorded in the past 10+ years.  Tracks come from all three Many Bright Things albums, the In The Summer Of The Mushroom Honey album, and elsewhere.  I also added two videos from the multi-part video project by Oren Darling - "Three Miles South of Distant" - which features additional music.

The tracks are streaming audio and require no downloading.  There are space limitations which result in time limitations which result in some tracks cutting out before they should, but a Google search for any of these titles will take you to music blogs where all the complete albums are available for free downloads; think of this site then as a kind of musical sampler plate.

I'll continue to add odds and ends at the site so check back every so often and see what's new.

Albums of Magic and Beauty....

The Beach Boys Friends (1968)

While Pet Sounds (1966) is clearly Brian Wilson's most realized work, it is the first in a series of four releases that define the band's best period.  It's taken this long to see this work without looking at it through the prism of the collapse of Brian's Smile album, his "teenage symphony to God."  Released in its wake, Smiley Smile (1967) seemed like someone talking you through a tour of a house they loved, but after a fire. And swept up in the wake of that odd record - an album that the years have definitely redeemed - were two of the best Beach Boys albums of all.

Also released in 1967, and the last of their albums to be issued in both stereo and mono, Wild Honey is the funkiest the Boys ever got, and side one opens with four really strong tracks and is still a blast to put on today. "Wild Honey" "Aren't You Glad" "I Was Made To Lover Her" and "Country Air" are high energy and imbued with a new post-Smile confidence.  Side two opens with "Darlin'", the most successful single off the album (#19 US #11 UK) and the song I most vividly remember from the only time I ever saw The Beach Boys when they opened for the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi at Philadelphia's Spectrum in what would be a mostly disastrous tour in the Spring of 1968 (canceled after drawing only 200 people to their show in New York City). They wore white suits and had a large horn section and played on a stage that was covered in flowers.



In 1968 The Beach Boys released Friends, the album that remains my own favorite to this day. I am a sucker for records with great opening tracks and, at 38 seconds, "Meant For You" is about as perfect as it gets (when I recorded the third Many Bright Things album I opened it with the 26 second track, "Many Bright Friends", as my own private little homage).



The album has twelve tracks and the tenth "Busy Doin' Nothin'" is classic Brian Wilson. Legend has it that the directions given in the song actually led to his house outside of Hollywood. It's also a perfect Bossa Nova.



Here's the title track. Enjoy.

The Creator Has a Master Plan

In 1969 Pharoah Sanders released his LP, Karma. About a year ago the blog Deadly Death: The Diening published a post on the album (including a download of the album that is still working).  Their description of the album's centerpiece, "The Creator Has a Master Plan" reads:

"Creator" comes in at 32:47 and wastes not a single note. Opening with a virtual rush of sound, it then quiets down and drops a brief riff from A Love Supreme. The tune then works itself into a groove that would later be known as acid jazz, working with Eastern percussion and allowing the bass to float close to the front of the mix. This first section relies on a modal two-chord structure that keeps the tone bouncy and meditative. At eight minutes Leon Thomas begins a chant-like vocal that varies lines from the mantra "The creator has a master plan, peace and love for every man." The vocals drop and the third movement becomes an unrelenting Coltranesque blitz that tears the mellow mood apart, only to combine the angst and mellowness in the next movement and settle back into a reprise of the first fourteen minutes.

In April 1998 I assembled a group of musicians in a studio and recorded an afternoon's worth of improvisations that later became the album In The Summer Of The Mushroom Honey. In the late fall of that year I brought together another group of musicians, some who had played on the earlier session, for recordings that became the album Waters Of Life, an album that is still unissued. During those sessions I decided to try and record a version of "The Creator Has a Master Plan" in which the sax is replaced by an electric guitar, played by Portland Oregon-based jazz guitarist and teacher, Daniel Noland. I don't have a complete list of everyone who plays on the track, however, I know that Mark Cutsinger played drums, Vess Ruhtenberg played bass, Barry McCabe played acoustic piano and I did the vocals and played percussion. The track is not part of the finished Waters Of Life album and is sort of a musical Ronin, homeless, wandering the endless plains of cyberspace. Give a listen.

Thirty-nine quotations about music....

"Music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all. Music expresses itself." - Igor Stravinsky

"Never look at the trombones, it only encourages them." - Richard Strauss

"God tells me how the music should sound, but you stand in the way." - Arturo Toscanini to a trumpet player

"One of the perks of being an unemployed musician is that you get to play much less bad music." - Jack Daney

"In opera, there is always too much singing." - Claude Debussy

"Oh how wonderful, really wonderful opera would be if there were no singers!" - Gioacchino Rossini

"Hell is full of musical amateurs." - George Bernard Shaw

"The drummer drives. Everybody else rides!" - Panama Francis

"Some days you get up and put the horn to your chops and it sounds pretty good and you win. Some days you try and nothing works and the horn wins. This goes on and on and then you die and the horn wins." - Dizzy Gillespie on playing the trumpet

"Music is my mistress, and she plays second fiddle to no one." - Duke Ellington

"Jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played night after night but differently each time." - Ornette Coleman

"We never play anything the same way once." - Shelly Manne's definition of jazz musicians

"Someone who knows how to play the accordion, and doesn't." - Al Cohn's definition of a gentleman

"Music is a very hard instrument." - Vido Musso

"The only tune they play in 4/4 is 'Take Five!'" - unknown, talking about the Don Ellis band

"If I could play like Wynton (Marsalis), I wouldn't play like Wynton." - Chet Baker

"I'm too old to pimp and too young to die so I'm just gon' keep playin'." - Clark Terry

"Don't bother to look, I've composed all this already." - Gustav Mahler, to Bruno Walter who had stopped to admire mountain scenery in rural Austria.

"I would rather play Chiquita Banana and have my swimming pool than play Bach and starve." - Xavier Cugat

"Musicians talk of nothing but money and jobs. Give me businessmen every time. They really are interested in music and art." - Jean Sibelius, explaining why he rarely invited musicians to his home

"Only become a musician if there is absolutely no other way you can make a living." - Kirke Mecham, on his life as a composer

"I am not handsome, but when women hear me play, they come crawling to my feet." - Nicolo Paganini

"What is the voice of song, when the world lacks the ear of taste?" - Nathaniel Hawthorne

"Flint must be an extremely wealthy town: I see that each of you bought two or three seats." - Victor Borge, playing to a half-filled house in Flint, Michigan

"If one hears bad music it is one's duty to drown it by one's conversation." - Oscar Wilde [FINALLY! SOMEONE EXPLAINS ALL THE TALKING AT NET SHOWS!]

"Critics can't even make music by rubbing their back legs together." - Mel Brooks

"Life can't be all bad when for ten dollars you can buy all the Beethoven sonatas and listen to them for ten years." - William F. Buckley, Jr.

"You can't possibly hear the last movement of Beethoven's Seventh and go slow." - Oscar Levant, explaining his way out of a speeding ticket

"Wagner's music is better than it sounds." - Mark Twain

"Berlioz says nothing in his music, but he says it magnificently." - James Gibbons Hunekar

"If a young man at the age of twenty-three can write a symphony like that, in five years he will be ready to commit murder." - Walter Damrosch on Aaron Copland

"There are still so many beautiful things to be said in C major." - Sergei Prokofiev

"I never use a score when conducting my orchestra. Does a lion tamer enter a cage with a book on how to tame a lion?" - Dimitri Mitropolous

"Already too loud!" - Bruno Walter at his first rehearsal with an American orchestra, on seeing the players reaching for their instruments

"I really don't know whether any place contains more pianists than Paris, or whether you can find more asses and virtuosos anywhere." - Frederic Chopin

"When she started to play, Steinway himself came down personally and rubbed his name off the piano." - Bob Hope, on comedienne Phyllis Diller

"I think popular music in this country is one of the few things in the twentieth century that has made giant strides in reverse." - Bing Crosby

"A ponderous orchestral absurdity." - Frank Zappa on his rock symphony debuted by the Los Angeles Philharmonic

"The bottom line of any country is, what did we contribute to the world? We contributed Louis Armstrong." - Tony Bennet

Heavy Metal Thunder

It sounds odd today, but for a brief moment in the 1990s I was very fond of heavy metal music. More specifically, a variant of metal called N.W.O.B.H.M. (pronounced as a word, new-WOBE-um) which stands for New Wave Of British Heavy Metal. This has a somewhat sparser, cleaner sound. Still aggressive and definitely guitar-based, N.W.O.B.H.M. had a slight overlap with psychedelic record collectors who were drawn by the omni-present guitar riffs and the promise of a new set of impossible objects. There were some of the very early N.W.O.B.H.M. titles that were issued privately in small pressings, and the better bands recorded for small indie labels which, and these are pre-internet days, were often difficult to track down.

At this point there is literally only one record I still keep in my vinyl collection, a 3-track 10-inch e.p. by the UK band Fireclown on which the side-long track is just kind of perfect (for what it is).

But I bring this up because I went on a sudden cleaning jag in one upstairs closet that still holds a few thousand LPs or more. I hadn't been more than halfway back for a few years and, on a quest for some things to throw up on eBay, I dove in. I came up with about 2 boxes of the last of the heavy metal, records I'd forgotten were still there.

About three or four years ago, maybe longer, I took the bulk of the N.W.O.B.H.M. I'd collected and put together an auction that I ran in Goldmine Magazine, the record collector magazine that was on top before the arrival of eBay. I remember that one metal dealer contacted me and bought the whole listing, every single record. I gave him a nice price recognizing that, mixed in with the really good titles, were some very common records I'd never find buyers for.

Anyway, I thought that was the last of it until I found those crates. The best thing about eBay is that, as long as you know how to word a description, you never have to know what a record is "worth" before you list it. I'd been out of this scene for a long time and had no idea if anything was worth much, so I started all the auctions at .99 cents which turned out to work pretty well. I sold all but 2 or 3 of the 100+ titles with some going for $20-$30.

But not only that - I also found a crate full of records that I forgot I still owned. Records that, if I found them for a couple bucks, I would have bought today. So there's now a crate full of "new records" by the turntable.

This reminds me of a Christmas years and years ago when I knew someone with a shrink wrap machine and for one Christmas, when I was too broke to buy any new records, I took out about 50-75 albums I hadn't ever listened to - just stuff I'd found in thrift shops or got from radio stations when the program director wasn't looking - and resealed them all in new shrink wrap and wrapped them all up as presents to myself.

I know. Look back at the 3rd or 4th post in March for the entry in which I explain in some depth how pathetic record collectors can be.

Anyway, I hope these people will pay for the things they won; so far they have been and about half of the crate has been hauled away.

I was thinking about these things for a number of reasons. One is that I'm hung up at the moment trying to finish the post I thought would be here by now - a review of David Bromberg's new album. Two is that I'm almost finished a very nice little book about Led Zeppelin, specifically about their untitled fourth album, though it really covers everything leading up to that record. It's a refreshing book as well because it has nothing to say about their legendary debauchery or anything that smacks of the narration for a Behind the Music episode. Just the music, and some nice observations on how some songs are constructed. The book is Led Zeppelin IV by Barney Hoskyns (US, Rodale 2006).

It sent me to my Led Zep box set and had me wishing I had copies of the individual albums (something I just may break down and get). During the day I can just BLAST this stuff and it was fun to sit and listen to "Black Dog" and read about its origins.

A good part of the 3rd and 4th albums were written in rural Wales and reading about it reminded me of a trip Cheryl and I took in 1999, renting a car in Oxford and driving all the way to the northern tip of Wales. We stayed at roadside Inns and spent the days exploring old castles and warming ourselves in local pubs.

But I digress.

One pretty strong argument put forth in the book is that it is, in the end, a misnomer to describe Led Zeppelin as heavy metal or "proto-heavy metal" because they swung too much and their sound is too complicated and diverse. What's odd is that, when I think about the band, what I hear in my memory are Page's monster riffs, Bonham's enormous drums and Plant's screeching vocals. But, when I actually listen and pay closer attention, I hear a thousand other elements as well.

To recap: * A box of "new" records to listen to. * A crate of metal LPs sold on eBay. * Led Zeppelin isn't a heavy metal band.

OK then.