State of things

Here's an interesting preview of Who Owns The Future?, a new book by tech guy Jaron Lanier, who discusses the current free everything/donated labor/winner-take-all paradigm, and what it bodes for the middle class and democracy in general, using the creative class— you and me— as his Exhibit A.

[A] lot of your book is about the survival of the middle class in the digital age, the importance of a broad middle class as we move forward. You argue that the middle class, unlike the rich and the poor, is not a natural class but was built and sustained through some kind of intervention. Has that changed in the last decade or two as the digital world has grown?

Well, there’s a lot of ways. I mean, one of the issues is that in a market society, a middle class has always required some little artificial help to keep going. There’s always academic tenure, or a taxi medallion, or a cosmetology license, or a pension. There’s often some kind of license or some kind of ratcheting scheme that allows people to keep their middle-class status.

In a raw kind of capitalism there tend to be unstable events that wipe away the middle and tend to separate people into rich and poor. So these mechanisms are undone by a particular kind of style that is called the digital open network.

Music is a great example where value is copied. And so once you have it, again it’s this winner-take-all thing where the people who really win are the people who run the biggest computers. And a few tokens, an incredibly tiny number of token people who will get very successful YouTube videos, and everybody else lives on hope or lives with their parents or something.

More after the break— keep reading:

Groove o' the day: funk samba

Today we have a studio-funk style samba by Ivan Conti of Azymuth, on the tune Manhã, from the group's 1974 self-titled album:

The right hand alternates between the bell of the cymbal, and the regular playing spot. He also plays the hihat with his foot along with the bell notes, but the beat was looking pretty cluttered, so I left it out. Throughout the song he varies this a fair amount— he'll often play the regular spot on the cymbal on the two and four, and play the bell more sporadically.

During the break sections he does this simplified pattern, with the hihat:

From the same section later in the tune, a looser version of that same thing, with some variable ghost notes on the snare drum:

Audio after the break:

Page o' coordination: 5/8 + 5/8 — 01

Another page o' coordination in 5/4. From the amount of time we spend dealing with playing in 5, you might get the impression that I think it's pretty damned important. I really don't, but it just happens to be one of the things I'm working on right now, and there aren't a whole lot of great materials available for that.

Per the title of the piece, the ostinato is composed of two measures of 5/8:

Playing this with a swing interpretation, the second 5/8 sits a little differently than the first one, so don't let that throw you. In fact, you can actually safely ignore the 5/8+5/8 construction when swinging the exercises. This page should also work well with even 8ths, either keeping the triplets, or changing them to whatever 8th-and-16th rhythm makes sense. And be sure to do the tom moves.

Get the pdf

Saul Bass

Today Google is circulating a “tribute” video to the graphic designer Saul Bass— somewhat randomly, since he died in 1996, and would've been 93 today. Bass's work defined American modernist cool circa 1955-75, and it was everywhere during that period: movie titles and posters, book jackets, and some of the most famous corporate logos ever. I'm not embedding Google's advertisement, so instead here are two of the greatest movie title sequences ever, from Spartacus:



And from Grand Prix:



Take a look at his IMDB credits— if a movie from the 50's-60's especially had cool titles, he probably did them.

Todd's routines: 4:3 with Dahlgren & Fine

Hey, we haven't made up a new feature in awhile, so here's one: Todd's routines. I'll outline any of my current practice routines which are unique enough to be worth sharing, but not original enough to merit inclusion in the hallowed Todd's methods series. This is a thing I've been doing with the beginning of the “melodic” triplet section of 4-Way Coordination, by Marvin Dahlgren & Elliot Fine. The first exercise in that section, on page 10:

I've been running the first three lines of exercises from that page in a 16th note rhythm in 3/4 time, playing along with Gal Costa's version of the song Baby, by Caetano Veloso, which we've discussed before— if you follow that link, you'll see that there's a 4:3 polyrhythm built into the song's groove:





So, played as 16th notes, every four beat block of notes from the above section of 4WC will fit into a single measure of Baby. Here is pattern A, played four times:

One of the things I like about this is that the quarter note pulse in 3/4 will fall on each note of the 3-note pattern, giving a strong reference for checking the accuracy of the internals of each pattern. Playing the patterns in their original 8th note triplet format (which you should also do), the second note of each pattern is always in an extremely weak spot— the middle of the triplet— which is difficult to reference for accuracy.

More examples after the break:

Transcription: Dougie Wright — La Décadanse

This makes a nice companion piece to the recent Azymuth thing— they're both pretty cheezy, with a lot of big tom tom fills. The song is La Décadanse, by Serge Gainsbourg. I can't find a credit for the drummer, but I believe it's the great British session drummer, Dougie Wright, who was working with Gainsbourg a lot around 1970, when this was recorded.

The tempo is slow, so don't flip out at all of the 32nd notes, 32nd note triplets, and occasional 64th notes. Have fun with it.

Get the pdf

Audio after the break:

State of Minnesota to artists: drop dead

A couple of Minnesota artists, Venus DeMars and Lynette Reini-Grandell, are the subject of a punitive audit by the state department of revenue, for the crime of not making enough money:

“We’ve had several meetings with the auditor since November, and at the last one he said a preliminary determination had been made that we were hobbyists, not artists, and therefore could not write off our expenses,” said Venus, a visual artist, songwriter, bandleader and performer. “This has been unbelievably demoralizing. He basically is saying that if we really knew what we were doing, we should have been more profitable by now, and should have known to give up.”

“They’re arguing that we’re not intending to make a profit on art, that we’re just pretending to be artists so we can indulge in our hobbies and go on vacations,” said Reini-Grandell, a poet and English professor at Normandale Community College who co-hosts KFAI-FM’S Write-On! Radio. “That’s why they don’t want us to be able to subtract any expenses from our profits. They want us to pay back, with penalties and interest, the refunds we’ve gotten previously. Also, they seem to have put a ton of time into our case. They must be thinking they will make a lot of money from this somehow.”

It's a semi-expected thing for revenue people to go after artists in a given city or region every so often, to keep them on the straight and narrow, and increasingly the IRS has been treating self-employed people as “hobbyists” if they don't turn a profit for 3 out of 5 years, and disallowing their operating expenses. But there appears to be something else at work here— it looks like these people are being singled out and punished for their politics. Or maybe, like police going after marijuana growers because it's easier than going after meth labs, they could just be doing it because it's easy money, since artists are poor and isolated, and are unlikely to have the resources or organization to put up much resistance.

The blog Crooked Timber has some comments on this, as well:

“The tone of all these proceedings have been completely anti-art. There has been an emphasis on creating a product, advertising it for sale, and then selling it. …

 Writers do not write a few lines and then advertise they have a poem for sale, making sure that the poem sells at a break-even point of what it cost monetarily to produce it. But this is what the Minnesota Department of Revenue insists I should be doing. It sickens me to have to participate in this because I know it is deeply wrong.”

Sometimes, these apparent miscarriages of justice loom large in the headlines and then kind of fall apart when you look at the detail. Not this one. The further you get into the taxman’s narrow view of capitalism – large record company: good. Independent entrepreneur: bad – the more apparent it is that he believes so implicitly in the winner-takes-all model of capitalism that it’s not enough for musicians in the long tail to bump along the bottom indefinitely. No, they must be shamed for failure and fined a six figure amount in back taxes.

It all seems to come down to intent. Does running your own independent record label and ‘failing’ to sign to a major mean you don’t want to make money? At the consistent but modest level of success Venus de Mars has, the majors aren’t interested and the musicians keep more of their profits if they run their own show. Does allowing your music to be played royalty-free on public radio mean you just don’t want success enough? (Tell that to the Ariana Huffington business model of ‘blog for me for free – you’ll get exposure’.) It’s a Kafka-esque nightmare where the artists must try to prove they are innocent of just not wanting it enough.

Excerpts from the interview with one of the artists after the break:

Much more to do with 5/4

If you've been using the pages o' coordination we've been doing around here, you're going to like what Sam Nadel has been posting recently— a whole bunch of stuff on playing in 5/4. He doesn't have his labels going, so I can't send you to everything with one link (Sam!); but here's what he's got for us recently. You'll want to page through his archives, too, because there's a lot of good stuff in there. Hit the links to read his explanation and download the pages:

Rolling triplets in 5/4 — Accented triplets in 5/4, based on an exercise from Ted Reed. 

Reed converted to 5/4, with Dawson interpretations — Five pages, and just what it sounds like. 

Jazz ostinato in 5/4 — With left hand coordination. 

Paradiddle warm-up — Not in 5, but a nice daily-user: paradiddles in all inversions, with flams on each note of the pattern. 

Between this and all of the stuff we've been posting, your 5/4 should be pretty cooking by now. If you've been neglecting it, well, time to get on it, kids!

Groove o' the day: Blues in Elf

Here's something from what I'm hoping will be the second volume of books of 100 Grooves, this time dealing with odd meters— we'll see if I can track down enough interesting things to merit a whole volume of them.

This is Don Ellis's Blues In Elf, which is a slow blues in 11/8— it's a slow swing feel with the last note of the beat 4 triplet shaved off. The album is Tears of Joy, and the drummer is either Ralph Humphrey or Ron Dunn:

The snare and bass drum parts are repeated a fair amount, but they do vary— the written groove is a starting place. Regardless of the odd meter, the style of comping on this type of slow blues is a little different from the normal jazz thing— rather than interacting with the soloist, it supports the groove, and the built in tension and release of the twelve bar form.

Audio after the break: