ARTIST NEWS

Medical Magical Music

Alive Inside

This documentary, which in 2014 was an Audience Award Winner at the Sundance Film Festival, is intended to capture the impact that music has on stimulating the brains of elderly dementia patients. A social worker named Dan Cohen visits nursing homes in the Nassau County, New York area and, representing his nonprofit Music and Memory organization, he confers with family members for information on songs their parent or grandparent might recognize from their early years. Director Michael Rossato-Bennett filmed Cohen strapping iPods onto these old people and so documented the changes that came over them as they heard the music their children suspected that they would remember. The old people turn back on, get flooded with forgotten memories, get talkative, and sing. It is those captured moments that make this film touching and uplifting, and clips from it featuring single cases (e.g., Henry's Story) are now on YouTube. The documentary in its full version could have been more convincing, through the use of supporting data or testimony, of what seems to be a testament to the power of music on our minds, spirits, and bodies. It is hard to know if these changes that come over these people are authentic, or if they are contaminated by conditioning, or even staging, but whatever is going on, it is unquestionably moving. Music is something we all believe in, with the exception of that character that Thomas Hayden Church plays in Lucky Them, presently in rotation on the IFC Channel. He finds music annoying. See film clip in the right column.

Seriously, if you woke up tomorrow morning to news that Taylor Swift had been revealed to be an android or a robot, would you really be surprised.? There has always been something very strange about this singing mannequin, as if she was designed by some mad scientist, possibly to be a lifelike simulation of a human-sized dress-up Barbie. Her 1989 album, released in 2014, pretty much put the icing on the cake regarding such marvelous possibilities. The album, which is awful in a lot of ways, is clearly not the work of a human being, at least not a thoughtfully programmed one. The robot seems a little lost. READ MORE

Documentary Films - Shining Odd Light on Odd Subjects

Cable television has been a wonderful development for documentary filmmakers, and in this edition the CCJ takes a look at some of what is presently available for viewing on that screen that haunts your own living room. Go to the Cinema page.

Haley Bonar

Haley Bonar started showing up on the playlists of college radio station's back in 2003, when she was only 20 years old and her album The Size of Planets was released. She had then, and still has, just the right voice for that new generation of female singer-songwriters who may have grown up on their parents' Janis Ian records but had some Gwen Stefani lurking in them as well, which they were dying to get out. Perhaps that explains why a dozen years later the very folksy Haley Bonar has gone the way she has with her current band Gramma's Boyfriend. Read more on the Music page.

Phantoms of Dixie

Grace & Tony

The Tennessee duo Grace & Tony have an excellent new album, Phantasmagoric - read a review on the Music page - that they are promoting as a gothic departure from their usual folk-art sound. It sounds to us like more of an extension of their odd and beautifully dark Southern spook music. The video here is from their previous LP, November, and it gives you a feeling for their artistic temperament.

Ancient Warfare

The CCJ likes this band Ancient Warfare, from Lexington, Kentucky. They do a smart sound and they are featured artists in this edition. READ MORE

Raping a Runaway

You know how sometimes you see a movie that you wish you had never seen? All of those Hostel, Saw and Wrong Turn genre of torture entertainment are that way for me. I feel damaged by viewing them, though I've seen them all. They are like potholes in our culture that you fall into if you can't find entertainment alternatives. If you don't believe in Tinkerbell, presented as reality TV, you have to watch I Spit On Your Grave. It is your punishment to have your worst impulses exploited. READ MORE

Marion Walker

Marion Walker is a band we at the CCJ admire for their serious approach to producing, choreographing, performing and filming acts of sonic expression. They are featured artists in this edition, well worth learning about. READ MORE

Battles of 1977

‘Broken Arrow, Repeat Broken Arrow part 2’ is the third full length album by the Dutch crossover/rock/metal-band 'Battles of 1977' and the sequel in the 'Broken Arrow, Repeat Broken Arrow' series. The band consists of members from Urban Dance Squad (Rudeboy) and Silkstone (Frans). Earlier this year part 1 of this chapter was released.

Figuring Out How to Like

Imagine Dragons

The first time I ever heard Imagine Dragons was on the soundtrack to a video sports game: MLB The Show 2013. This is not a great way to be introduced to a band, but the song was "Radioactive", which had an odd counter-culture vibe to it and some clever effects. A couple years passed before I actually knew anything about the band that I was listening to. A couple years hence, their song "I Bet My Life" makes me want to throw things at my radio or whatever device inflicts that awful mess upon me every time I hear it. So who are these guys, anyway?

Weirdly, to my mind, they are a Las Vegas act (already damning) by way of Brigham Young University (already damning). Lead singer Dan Reynolds met drummer Andrew Tolman when they were both students there, before apparently heading off for missionary work in Sin City. Something about that whole storyline seems weird: as weird as the band itself. READ MORE

Cable TV, Madison Square Garden

Jim Dolan - Executive Creative

Jim Dolan, Cablevision Systems CEO and Executive Chairman of Madison Square Garden, looks a little like the off-spring of Eric Burdon and Leonard Cohen. That is appropriate, because after the business issues are all dealt with, including the management of Garden-associated sports franchises (i.e., the Knicks, the Rangers, the Liberty), Dolan is a serious singer-songwriter. He has been moonlighting, in this capacity, since 2000, working his way through a few lineups to arrive at the one he works with today, called JD & the Straight Shot. They do what Dolan describes as "Americana", which is an edgy blend of traditional country, folk, and rock, though the instrumentation on their new album, Ballyhoo!, is all acoustic. To READ MORE, and view a video from the new album, go to the NYC Links page. See the story below on the Cablevision sale.

European Telecommunications Giant Buys Cablevision

The New York Times reported on September 17 that Cablevision has agreed to sell itself to Altice, an acquisitive European telecommunications giant, for about $17.7 billion, including debt, people briefed on the matter said on Wednesday. It is the latest deal to reshape the broadband and cable television landscape. The Times called Cablevision one of the last trophies of the American cable industry and the longtime province of its founding family, the Dolans. The Times further reported that the Dolans had advocated keeping the company’s media properties, including Newsday and the News 12 Networks local news station, but Altice insisted on including them in any deal.  Analysts have long questioned whether the Dolans would be willing to sell Cablevision in a frenzy over cable assets. Now they have chosen to sell their prized asset to Mr. Drahi, an aggressive deal maker who has drawn comparisons to his former boss, Mr. Malone. Born in Morocco, he has long pursued business, gauging his success by his wealth. The transaction with Altice would not affect other companies controlled by the Dolan clan, including the Madison Square Garden Company, which owns its namesake sports arena and the New York Knicks and Rangers, and AMC Networks, the cable channel company.

Rethinking Hunter S. Thompson

By RAR

Somehow it just doesn't seem that funny anymore, and it certainly doesn't live on into the 21st Century as anything profound. In fact, it now all seems clichéd and obvious; an unsubstantial juvenile solipsism, and a cartoonish mockery that cheapened everything it targeted.

I could be writing about the America in which I came of age, in the 1960s and '70s, though I refer specifically to the erratic writing career of "Gonzo" journalist Hunter S. Thompson.

He used to refer to himself as "Dr. Hunter S. Thompson", though the title itself was part of the joke he personified. He was neither a Ph.D. nor an M.D., but rather was a guy who never graduated high school but had ordered a free "doctorate" from the Universal Life Church, a '60s-era counter-culture alternative dedicated to the practice of spiritual beliefs without interference or threat from any government, religious, or societal force.  The title didn't really mean anything at all, which was at the heart of what Thompson himself was all about, though we, his acolytes, didn't really get that in the beginning. I suspect that, deep down inside, neither did he. READ MORE

The Butler Beats

Michael Butler

The very tuneful NYC songwriter Michael Butler has organized a new band, The Butler Beats, which seems designed to support Butler's fascination with the sounds of the Mersey Beat. Fans of the British Invasion sound will find a variety of visual and sonic references in the video below, which is done as a lark but does display Butler's facility with the song type. We at the CCJ have admired Michael Butler for years, considering him one of the unfortunately over-looked among contemporary song stylists. We continue to suspect that if Michael Butler isn't careful he is going to produce a huge hit for someone, possibly even The Butler Beats.

Roberta Donnay

The CCJ is a big fan of Roberta Donnay & the Prohibition Mob Band, featured below in a live performance at Sonoma Plaza Square in Sonoma, California. We have followed Donnay's career for years, as for years she has been a member of Dan Hicks & the Hot Licks while fronting this most authentic jazz collective that performs too little remembered classics from the early half of the 20th Century. Great singer with a great band.

A Capella Science

You want to feel stupid and talentless? Try out this video from Tim Blais, a physicist from Montreal, who produces his videos under the name A Capella Science. He not only has a strong understanding of physics, but perfect pitch as well! Blais adds to the wonderment of science, as with his take on "Bohemian Rhapsody" offered here.

Bonnie Lowdermilk Releases a New CD - Borderless Crossings

It would be nice if the video shown here, of the super-talented singer-musician Bonnie Lowdermilk performing at Cerasco Gallery, had been shot from a more advantageous angle. Still, you get the idea: Lowdermilk is just great. The Colorado artist completed the project with the help of a "Pathways To Jazz" Grant. Players on the album include Art Lande (piano), Ron Miles (cornet), Gonzalo Teppa (bass), and Paul Romaine (drums). The project was inspired by a trip Lowdermilk took to Macchu Pichu in the Peruvian Andes, which involved a climb of 15,000 feet. "It became a musical metaphor for surmounting difficult life challenges. The journey became a song, and the song became a title track", she says. Macchu Pichu is today the storied ruins of the Incan empire, which you would know if you were keeping up with your Ancient Aliens programming. Beings from other dimensions play key roles in the mythology of the place. Lowdermilk is sort of extra-dimensional herself, being a gifted singer and pianist. She got a Bachelor of Music degree (Piano Pedagogy and Performance, with a minor in voice), from the University of Colorado-Boulder, before moving to Paris, from which she performed throughout the '90s. She released albums in 1997 and 2009, which contributed to her success in being awarded the "Pathways to Jazz" honor. She is definitely worth funding. Lowdermilk now lives and teaches in Boulder, and performs throughout the area. Use this link to learn more about her.

Hours of Energy

Corey Landis to Play the Viper Room Oct. 11

The CCJ staff has been a fan of L.A. actor/musician Corey Landis for as long as we have been around. Over the past year he has become best known as the guy on those 5-Hour Energy commercials that run constantly on the cable channels. It would be a shame if that is all that people know him for, because besides being a talented actor - he appeared on "That Seventies Show" and has done number of independent and SyFy Channel films - Landis is one of the best songwriter-composers around today. His stuff is ultra-sensitive, smart, funny, and musical, rather like Billy Joel in some regards, Randy Newman in others. He is also a gifted singer. On his self-titled album, Landis did great work with orchestra arranger Joey Newman, the son of the Grammy-winning composer Thomas Newman, and nephew to Randy. Use this link to see a video of the production of that album. Landis has been recording a new album, Therapy Dog, that he calls "the best thing I've ever done." He will be playing tracks from the album at the Viper Room in West Hollywood on October 11. If you are in the L.A. area around that time, go see the 5-Hour Energy Guy! You may at first consider attending as just a novel lark, but you will leave the show feeling that you have witnessed a significant artist.

This and That

Music and "The Song"

By RAR

There probably is something we can learn from listening to Pop music radio these days, improbable though that sounds, even to me. It has to do with the nature of musical products.

People respond to music in terms of "melody" and "rhythm", which find a balance in all forms of music, but exists in our minds like a bipolar mental condition. On the high end of the spectrum, just for the sake of the analogy, you have melody, and on the low end you have rhythm - the beat. Melody may exist on its own as instrumental music, but it may also be presented with lyrics, which bridge the melody/rhythm divide. Adding lyrics to melodies creates still another bifurcation, and layers within that, because lyrics are words and those things contain messages and nuances that have been screwing up and uplifting mankind since spoken languages were invented. In the context of entertainment, lyrics can be sublime expressions of human experience, or too dumb and clichéd in attempting to achieve that, or too smart for an audience. They can be woven into exquisite narrative forms, or they can be glued together like Post-it notes on a refrigerator, as perfunctory as salutations.

Vocal qualities factor in, when lyrics are added to the melody mix. Voices can very widely in terms of timber and pitch and technical proficiency, but variations in those areas may not necessarily diminish their capacities for expressing the humanity within the lyrics they sing. Or, on the other hand, they might, having everything to do with how much each individual enjoys listening to the sound made by any other. Some people were moved listening to the falsetto of Tiny Tim, for instance, while that same sound made others snicker.

When you think about it, the role of the human voice in any orchestra exists largely because it is the only instrument available to us to express music in words. One could also argue that the human voice has an element of expression that is the envy of every instrument ever created, many of which are designed to mimic qualities of the human voice. Human voices performing in harmony with one another is universally appreciated, which is revelatory in itself, because harmony is something we perceive as beauty. We don't need words to do that, just melody and a connection with other voices. This moves our response to the music we hear from the intellectual to the spiritual.

Much of the music that I hear on the "alternative" radio stations I listen to these days are weighted to the side of rhythm and Post-it note lyrics, or such is my perspective. There is melody and lyric music out there - this thing we call "songwriting" - but I seem to hate everything I hear, so where does one place that on the spectrum of musical appreciation? Music is personal, and no matter where any other music appreciator may place your musical taste on the spectrum it will matter only to them. You may want to dance, and they may want to dream. Or you may want to dream about dancing, while dancing, which probably makes you a Michael Jackson or Bruno Mars fan, but may also make you a fan of the Voodoo-inspired trance music of the Wild Tchoupitoulas Indians. It's complicated, but in this construct presented here the whole thing might create a map of human response to music that looks something like the following, upon which I have plotted some examples, way open to subjective judgment. The map is 3-dimensional by necessity, which can't be neatly represented in this 2-dimensional format, but the red dots represent instrumental music, and the pink are lyrical music, or songs. I, personally, define a "song" by whether or not you can perform it effectively accompanying yourself on an acoustic guitar or a piano. A great deal of what you hear on alternative radio stations is not that, but is more like dance track material, un-reproducible as a soloist unless you happen to be a singing drummer on some sort of an hallucinogenic high. I speak, of course, of Imagine Dragons...

Music Review

It seems like there are a half dozen clips that one could pull of Thomas Hayden Church's performance in the film Lucky Them, which is more or less a Toni Collette vehicle. Church plays a cashed-out IT multi-millionaire who attends a junior college to take classes in documentary filmmaking. His first subject is Collette, who writes music reviews, which is a subject he has no interest in. In the brief clip below he confronts Collette's character with this obvious conflict.

For Your Consideration

The concepts of discretion and judgment are incontrovertibly linked, and how a person deals with that is something of an art form. After all, you get respect for being discreet, but typically only disdain for being judgmental. - RAR

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New on the Music Page

Grace & Tony

Haley Bonar

Andrew Bird

The Warden

Undesirable People

Caustic Cassanova

Katie Trotta

Michael Menert & the Pretty Fantastics

New on the L.A. Links Page

Moonsville Collective

Rock Attire Outlets

New on the NYC Links Page

JD & the Straight Shot

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Day Jobs and Entitlements

Is Taylor Swift Right?

When the Internet came along and music fans were provided with ways to share digital tracks, which killed the music industry as we had known it, the chorus of voices decrying this generation of young people, who saw no problem with getting songs for free, was loud and angry. People who made their livings vending music, and people who imagined doing that themselves, felt robbed, and legitimately so. The argument has never ended, though the threads by which the argument hangs have become a little tattered.

Anybody who has ever known a musician knows that they have one thing in common: they want to make money on music to avoid the necessity of having to work "a day job". Otherwise put, they don't want to have to be like the rest of us. The obvious problem that most of them face is that they are exactly like the rest of us, they are just in bands.

It would be hard to argue for the nobility of the contributions of most musicians and songwriters. When the Napoleonic code was written in France, it singled out musicians, among other questionable citizens, as being unworthy of government support.

Modern society's disdain for celebrity - people claim to hate the veneration of pop stars, which makes one wonder how pop stars are made - has worked as one justification for ripping off recording artists. Most people have come to feel that three and a half minutes of some song that virtually anyone could do, and which are usually mirror images of some previous artistic expression, are not really worth spending money on, even at 99 cents a pop. A current song may be entertaining in some transitory way, but cash doesn't grow on trees and pop songs do. They'll be another one just like this one coming along soon, so why spend money of any of them?

Taylor Swift, who makes a fortune on her published work, has become the champion of stressed-out songwriters everywhere. They see that she is using her influence in the industry on their behalf, to protect their publishing profits, and in the process hers, too. Her defiant stance reminds one of a pampered only child defending her sense of entitlement. It might give wings to others in her position in the industry, but for most everyone else it confirms the growing suspicion that this people receive way more in the way of rewards than they deserve.

After years of watching this revaluation of pop music, one could feel conditioned to feel that none of these pop artists merit any rewards of any kind for their nominal contributions to our shared musical heritage. It sometimes feels that all of the real stuff has already been done, and what we have now is posers sucking the teat of a societal love of music that they inherited from their musical ancestors. It is as if all of our current "stars" have all the credibility of a Donald Trump, who also inherited his fortune. Certainly these changes in the music industry have furthered the notion that the stars paydays should be tied mostly to the proceeds of their live shows. There they are at least working for a living. On the other hand, are those ticket prices money well spent? - RAR

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Why Rehearse?

Why Club Bands Are Club Bands

This edition we discuss documentary films featuring important studio session groups, including the Wrecking Crew, the Funk Brothers, and The Swampers. These guys were all monumentally great at what they did, and what becomes clear in these films is that what they did was to play together all of the time, not in public but in studio settings. Use this link to read the reviews.

What makes this sort of interesting is that it flies in the face of a practical truth known to all working musicians at every level: the only way to get to be good as a player is to develop your skills in front of live audiences.

Perversely, and less often acknowledged, is that this notion of "rehearsing live" has some really deleterious effects on the development of many players. They tend to play what works, gauging the mood of the audience, but that is a many-faceted thing and quite different from those things that work in a studio environment. Club players often struggle just to get the room to listen to them, so players tend to manage that through the way they attack their instruments. That is different from the nuance required in a studio setting.

More perverse yet, you don't necessarily develop personal relationships with your band mates via live rehearsal. Those relationships tend to be the differentiator between people who develop careers as artists and those who spend lifetimes playing in clubs. You develop relationships with key musical collaborators by spending hours with one another, exploring ideas and sharing. This is what gives the world the Lennon & McCartney-type teams. In fact, I doubt that there is a single star level musical artist out there today who was not somehow a part of some similar think-tank approach to music making.

It could be that what is described here are two distinctly different personality types, the career-minded and the worker-oriented. It just seems so obvious that those who make great music are able to do so because they have committed themselves to the wood-shedding of it all, not so much to the stage. One is all about the need for attention and approval, the other the need to create. It may be the difference between making music for eternity, or just for that night.- RAR

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Music Machinery

U.S. Music Places

There is a great blog called Music Machinery that every person with a dedicated interest in music should make a habit of visiting on a regular basis. The website is the work of Paul Lamere, who provides insights on aspects of music technology. These include API for finding music online and hacker tips. Paul is the Director of Developer Platform for The Echo Nest, a Somerville, Massachusetts music intelligence company.

The Echo Nest has an artist API to locates people who identify as "music artists", and in 2012 Lamere plotted this database against demographic data from a number of cities in the U.S. to determine which had the highest density of these music people. The top 25 cities are shown in the table below, which provides an "artist-per-one-thousand-resident" ratio. Beverly Hills, California is identified as the most musical population in the survey, with 3.14 musical artists among every 1,000 city residents.

As Lamere pointed out in his article, the survey found New Orleans to rank no better than 36th in the survey, and New York City no higher than 37th. Detroit ranked 52nd, and most people would probably tell you that those three major populations all have significant music cultures. So, while one can make too much of such data, it's still fun and interesting, particular at the CCJ where we have long divided the world up into creative centers. The city names that jump out for us include Charlottesville, Burlington, Chapel Hill, Princeton, and Hendersonville, all of which probably merit exploration.

Lamere points out that Kansas City, Kansas has the lowest density of self-identifying music artists among the major U.S. cities surveyed. Charlie Parker, Burt Bacharach, Virgil Thomson, and Ben Webster all came from Kansas City, as did Director Robert Altman, Journalist Calvin Trillin, actress Jean Harlow and actor Don Cheadle, along with boatloads of other well-known creative types. It seems feasible that density of personality proclivities found among your neighbors may have only a limited impact on one's ability to be one's self.  - RAR