You know, WordPress has some handy features.  One of them is I can actually see how people found my blog if they used a search engine.

One of the things I’ve learned is that a lot of people come here after having searched for information on jazz chords or scales.  Yesterday I was looking at this and thought, you know, why not?  I know a decent bit about theory, having studied and practiced it for the past seven years.

It’s also true there are other theory sites.  However, I want to approach it from a more practical end.  Years ago, for example, I spent a lot of time figuring out some jazz chord voicings for guitar.  I’ve also developed some good rules of thumb for making chord voicings in general.

And so it begins.  Over the next few months, I’m going to try to post some elementary theory, leading up to more advanced topics later on.  One of my challenges will be developing a method to display this information effectively.  At home, I use GNU lilypond, but the output is typically PDF or postscript format — hardly effective for online reference, especially in a blog.

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SharashkA - From Lincoln to Continental on Jamendo

OK, I meant to make this a bilingual review as I have in the past, but what I am about to say is as far beyond my French abilities as going to the Moon is beyond cavemen.

I believe I have found need for a new tag on Jamendo. I’m just going to go ahead and use it. Don’t like it? Don’t use it. But it’s here now.

The tag is “Ecto.” As with most of my stories, there is a long story behind this. However, I’m not the one who wrote it or came up with it. Check out the following links for more of the story:

The Ectophiles’ Guide to Good Music

The Ecto Home Page

[Je fais des excuses à mes amis français ; ces sites ne feignent pas pour être internationaux et ils sont en anglais seulement.]

The definition of “Ecto” is, unfortunately, self-referential and circular. An “ecto” album is one which ectophiles tend to like; and ectophiles tend to like ecto albums.

LOL, internet.

A better definition is to define by example: “ecto” artists include Beth Orton, Eleanor MacAvoy, Tori Amos, Sarah MacLachlan, Joan Armitrading, Cocteau Twins, Dido, 10000 Maniacs, the Indigo Girls, Innocence Mission, Kirsty MacColl, Animal Logic, and so on.

There are a few guys — ecto also includes Peter Gabriel and Frank Zappa, for instance — but the vast majority of “ecto” artists are female.

Now, how did I find all this out?

Simple. The list I just gave you is not from their website, it’s from my CD collection! I was an ectophile before I even knew what the term meant!

In the case of this album, the vocalist SharashkA / Jayne Hartman clearly sounds as if she belongs on my CD shelf. Her voice is very similar to Deborah Holland from the band Animal Logic.

I really like this album, and it almost made it to 10 out of 10. However, there is one minor point:

Tempo. This album needs a barn burner, a song that just finally rips it. As it stands, it’s pretty, but after listening to the entire album, one ends up aching for a bit of contrast. When I played it in the car, on the way back from Jacksonville airport, I found my eyelids were getting sort of heavy. It can’t all be lullabyes. The closest to an uptempo song is “Aurora.”

Nevertheless, if you’ve never heard of the term “ecto” before, let this album be your introduction. It was good enough to immediately remind me of all the above artists — and that’s saying a lot.

As far as downloads go, my two Jamendo albums haven’t been doing too bad. Here are the totals as of today:

I look at these numbers and always get the surreal feeling that I’m dreaming; that any minute, I’m going to wake up. Isolated as I am, it’s hard for me to imagine my work has been dowloaded 578 times world-wide!

Well, when I look at the reviews, I come back down to Earth quickly

My first album, evolution, received overwhelmingly positive reviews, typically 9’s or 10’s. Not so for my second album. The consensus seems to be that handmade was only a 5 to 7, probably a 6.

It was an experiment. Part of the charm of being independent is being able to leap down conveniently placed elevator shafts of your own free will

The percussion on handmade was all natural — conga drums, cowbells, maracas. But most of the reviews pointed out something important: it’s difficult to innovate in the style in which I was playing.

So what next?

Clear the board and start over.

As I’m at the second stage of my Woodshed project, I think my next step is to develop a concept I’ve been working on here lately. Not drum machines, not pure hand drums, but a new concept for me — hybrid drums. That is, some of the drums produced electronically, and some of them played by hand.

I also need to go back to those bizarre and fantastic rhythms I used on evolution. Many of the songs on that album were in odd time signatures — something I excel at improvising over, but which annihilate many other musicians.

Maybe it’s time I start finding my strengths and focusing on them. I want the third album to be something so personal, so powerful, so unique, that no one can even begin to classify it as anything but mine.

[English; la version française ci-dessous.]

Unfortunately, my car has not caught up to the digital age. Although most of the music I listen to is in direct .ogg format, played on the computer, my car only understands actual, physical CDs. So, from time to time, I have to pick the best of what I have and burn it to CD. This is especially important considering I have a 30 minute drive back and forth to work every day.
I completed one such “superburn” project this weekend.

So, folks, allow me to present my picks for the best albums on DMusic and Jamendo. They’re in alphabetical order; I also created a LaTeX track listing that I print out to go with the CD binder. I just copied and pasted the table of contents — however, I then went back and turned each of these into links, so you can follow the trail and find great music. Enjoy!

NOTE: By rights, the excellent jazz musician Henri Roger should be on this list. However, he is in the process of rearranging his music folders right now.

[Français]

Malhereusement, ma voiture n’a pas joint l’époque des ordinateur. Elle ne comprend pas des fichiers de .ogg ; elle exige des CD. Donc, le jour vient quand je dois faire beaucoup de CD. C’est très important quand on considère que je dois conduire 60 minutes chaque jour.

Ce dernier week-end j’ai fini de faire quelques nouveaux CD. Ainsi, s’il vous plaît me permettre de présenter le suivant. Ce sont mes choix pour les meilleurs albums sur Jamendo et DMusic. J’ai lié le nom de chaque artiste à la page où ils peuvent être trouvés et écoutés. Amusez-vous bien!

Note: Je regrette que j’aie ne pu pas inclure mon ami Henri Roger. À ce moment il réarrange ses chemises de musique. Il est un musicien incroyable de jazz !

The List

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Well, things have happened in a few hours.

My last post here was about a bad review I got on Jamendo; well, soon after posting it, this became two bad reviews — by the same reviewer, one for each of my albums.

I was pretty upset.

Now, I’m in a bad situation here. Right now, except for my two dogs, I’m all alone. My wife is away, out of town on business. Where to turn?

I posted my situation in the DMusic forums. I figured with all the great musicians there, someone surely had gotten plugged unfairly once or twice and could offer coping strategies.

Well, instead, a fellow musician named leedsquietman saved the day, singlehandedly.

Here is the thread I started on DMusic: Damnation. If you scroll down to the sixth post, you see he did something I didn’t — he considered the source. In fact he did a bit of detective work and looked up the other reviews this person had made on Jamendo.

When I looked myself, I saw that just as leeds said, 2 out of 3 of this person’s reviews were arrogant, abusive, condescending, and blatantly troll-like. As leeds said, it was as if he wanted to be the Simon Cowell of the online music world.

So what now? Not certain. Keep practicing and hope the wheel of karma spins full circle, I suppose.

I should have known that this day would come; I just wasn’t prepared.

Well, it happened.  Only two days after posting my own review policy to this blog, I found myself totally hammered on Jamendo.  Someone gave a fairly crappy review of handmade.

Now, as I said, it is not my policy to give bad reviews.  If I don’t like something, I move on.

I don’t really have anything in place for being bombed to the stone age myself, since this is the first time.

I’m reminded of one of the articles I posted as a reference in my review policy:  Ignorant criticisms (freejazz.org).  There’s a lot of anecdotes on that page that make me feel a little bit better, but not much.

I see one grain of truth in the reviewer’s comment, that, yes, I need more practice — it’s why I started my Woodshed project.  But the reviewer also said, “If you take every instrument separately - it sounds ok, but mixed all together they create a very messy sound, because they don’t live space to each other. Imagine a bunch of people, everyone’s speaking but no one’s listening.”

Nice.  How exactly would that work, me being only one person, and having that almost autistic ability of mine to focus on a task for hours on end?  There’s no one on the album but me, not even a machine.  Did I grow a few multiple personalities over the winter?  I have listened to the album again and again, and I just can’t see the merits in this statement.

So what now?

No idea.

I’m disappointed, I’m depressed, and I’m just shutting down things for a week.  Catch you guys after March 25th.

Some of you might have noticed my reviews are almost always positive. There’s a reason for that. I’ve written a detailed explanation in a new page on this site:  My Review Policy

Back when I was first learning to play jazz, I played a lot of standards. I’ve already written about this period on Dandelife — I called it “The Standards Era.” There was a time when I had about 200 tunes in memory, chord changes and all.

That’s nothing compared to real jazz musicians, of course — they may have thousands. Of course, if I’d kept up with it, I might have thousands in memory by now, too.

So why didn’t I?

Burnout.

A lot of those tunes — well, they’ve just been played to death. I can hardly listen to “All of Me” or “Autumn Leaves” without giving an involuntary shudder.

Plus, as you can tell from my albums on Jamendo, I’m more into originals than covers. Learning someone else’s material just isn’t as fun as creating my own.

However . . . .

Now that I’m in “The Woodshed” I’m going back and learning more standards. This time, I have a different strategy.

Before, when I was running a local jazz band, I focused on the songs everyone expected to hear. As I’ve said before, in the United States, jazz has become museum music, with neotraditionalist musicians ignoring everything recorded after “Kind of Blue.” Small wonder when I go to hear jazz in town I hear such a limited repertoire — their world ended in 1959. It’s all just historical reenactment now.

So this time, I’m deliberately choosing obscure jazz tunes, ones that, hopefully, unless you’re a total jazz head, you won’t have heard or even know the title. I’m calling this “The New Standards Era,” and it begins today with “Laura” (According to a standards site I found, this is the 35th well known standard; however, I’ve never, ever heard it played in town, and the only recording of it I’ve heard is on Clifford Brown with Strings).