Having learned to fly from pilots he befriended, Smith enlisted in the United States Army Air Forces in the hopes of becoming a military pilot. He was invalidated from the flight programme because of imperfect vision in his left eye. Given a choice between joining the military band and being sent to mechanic’s school, Smith opted to join the military band. Smith claimed that they gave him a cornet, an Arban’s instructional book, and two weeks to meet the standard, which included being able to read music. Determined not to go to mechanic’s school, Smith spent the two weeks practicing the cornet in the latrine, as recommended by the bandleader, and passed the examination.
Category: Music
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Johnny Smith Learns the Cornet
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Orpheus-style leadership
This book review reminded me of the conductor-less Orpheus Chamber Orchestra…
…which has forged a successful recording and performance career without the need of a conductor. Their group is not leaderless, members are keen to emphasize; rather, the leadership role shifts among them within a performance and even within a piece. Echoing Peter Drucker, the author writes, “The Orpheus approach may be the harbinger of leadership trends to come in the business world.â€
I love this example of putting power in the hands of the people doing the work, yet I’m still a little skeptical about how much your average classical musician wants to be on the board and schmooze with rich patrons to keep the endowment funded. Still, I’d like to experiment with the model in businss environments, especially in employee-owned companies.
The Orpheus Process is built on eight principles:
- Put power in the hands of the people doing the work.
- Encourage individual responsibility for product and quality.
- Create clarity of roles.
- Foster horizontal teamwork.
- Share and rotate leadership.
- Learn to listen, learn to talk.
- Seek consensus (and build creative systems that favor consensus).
- Dedicate passionately to your mission.
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David Byrne’s Journal
David Byrne always presents something new, something interesting, all wrapped in a consistent and genuine funky catchiness. He’s posted an mp3 of his song My Fair Lady to OurMedia, has a new album of opera-influenced songs and has been writing an online journal. From the latter, there’s introspection and honesty not common among his peers:
On reading Bob Dylan’s book
It’s beautifully written, though I think it should probably be filed under fiction. I always thought his persona, which early on was that of a young Woody Guthrie, was just that, a persona. … (Call me skeptical, but a Jewish guy from Minnesota talking and writing like a backwoods hick/poet, huh? What’s that about?)
On a Pixies show in NYC:
Charles had on some black eyeliner which I couldn’t see from my seat. (Michael Stipe does this too, is this something I should know about?) From the audience I thought it made him look like an Aztec or Mayan God, calmly but loudly issuing baffling cosmic pronouncements mixed with pain and rage.
On traffic in Southern California:
I wonder if people here realize that the rest of the world doesn’t live like this? I wonder if, as all this traffic just gets worse and worse year after year, if people will eventually confine themselves exclusively to their home communities – people in Silverlake will NEVER go to Santa Monica and vice verse, hell, people in Santa Monica will probably eventually stop going to west LA!. The area will revert to little isolated villages. It’s already somewhat like that, but as gas doubles and quadruples in price, as it’s bound to do in the not too distant future, well, then only the wealthy will be able to suffer these hellish commutes.
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Recycle those old CDs
We’re taking the digital+hard drive plunge and getting rid of our CDs. Ulrike discovered Second Spin to buy our used CDs. One just types in the UPC code and they tell you how much they’ll pay. After you’ve entered the discs in their system and get a receipt, you pack them up and ship them off.
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The Postal Service, explained
A lot of bloggers are getting hip to The Postal Service (iTunes), the band behind the infectious electronic The District Sleeps Alone and others from the album “Give Up”. Most don’t seem to know the mind behind the songs is Ben Gibbard, front man of Death Cab for Cutie. To explore Death Cab, I’d recommend starting with We Have the Facts and We’re Voting Yes, although all of their albums are very good. If you like lo-fi, sweet adolescent songs you might also like his early solo album “All-Time Quarterback”, like the track Rules Broken.
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The Flamenco store
Juan Sebastian gives me a heads up to es flamenco, a storefront crafted with care and content. Once spare time returns to my life I plan to study some Flamenco guitar, instead of the pigeon technique I have now.
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That Swatch commercial
Does anyone know which musician created the music for the new Swatch commercial? It’s gets me all dancy and stuff.
Found it: It’s Five for Fighting’s Something About You (.wav) (iTunes). Whew.
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Hamza El Din at Lincoln Center
New York music lovers could do worse than check out Hamza El Din this Thursday at Lincoln Center.
Here’s an older piece, an excerpt from ‘Manami‘ (850K), in what amounts to late 70’s Egyptian pop music. The tempo and rhythm shifts just floor me.
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Flamenco links, Summer 2002
On my list of big things to learn someday is Flamenco guitar. I could start with these resources, which are excellent (for example, the combination of transcription, tabulature, and mp3s of early 20th Century recordings). But I know I would just be reinforcing bad technique, never having learned proper classical finger picking. I’m guessing it’s something best learned from a teacher.
When I listen to the samples, I’m slack jawed at the speed combined with subtle stresses and powerful phrasing. And yet of themselves a writer says this:
For flamencos, it is the ability (at whatever level of skill) to accompany a knowledgeable singer (and knowledgeable dancer) who is performing one of the standard forms in a more or less standard way. You don’t have to be very *good* as guitarist to qualify. Many singers in Spain, for instance, knowing only two or three chords, and playing execrably by anyone’s standards, can crudely accompany themselves or someone else. Most wouldn’t claim to be guitarists at all. But they would claim that whatever they’re doing on the guitar is flamenco, not something else. They know the song, and they know what the guitar needs to sound like to go with that, even if they don’t know the guitar itself well enough to pull it off very well.
In this way it reminds me of vernacular architecture.
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Silence Between Stations
…A silent 60-second track on the album of his latest classical chart-topping protégés, the Planets, has enraged representatives of the avant-garde, experimentalist composer John Cage, who died in 1992. The silence on his group’s album clearly sounds uncannily like 4’33”, the silence composed by Cage in his prime…. ‘As my mother said when I told her, ‘which part of the silence are they claiming you nicked?‘.’
Thanks Adam.
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No!
No! is a new album ‘for the whole family’ from They Might Be Giants. It’s a kid’s album. It’s fun.
Robot Parade (~500k mp3)
And sometimes it’s romantic, in that Narrow Your Eyes sort of way.
Four Of Two
And sometimes it’s scary, ’cause sometimes it’s fun to be scared.
The Edison Museum
In the end it’s very much a They Might Be Giants recording, but with a more simple, gentle approach, reminiscent of Apollo 18. They have a gift for melody that can be enchanting.
Sleepwalkers
The CD is enhanced with interactive stuff from the wizards at the Chopping Block, who also designed the packaging. I’ll be buying copies for all my nieces and nephews. You should too. Music rocks.
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1 + 1
Here’s a Philip Glass composition you can play yourself, as printed in Score: An Anthology of New Music (out of print I assume but probably findable in a university’s library):
Any table top is amplified by means of a contact mike, amplifier and speaker.
The player perfoms 1 + 1 by tapping the table top with his fingers or knuckles.
The following two rhythmic units are the building blocks of 1 + 1:
a) sixteenth note – sixteenth note – eighth note
b) eighth note
1+1 is realized by combining the above two units in continuous, regular arithmetic progressions.
The tempo is fast. The length is determined by the player.
