Last night’s class at Kintock, the halfway house in Newark where I teach a music course, was one of those that makes the effort worthwhile. The current group has been tough to connect with. Beethoven’s Appasionata Sonata and Mozart’s Piano Concerto #24 elicited limited response during our last two sessions.

At the conclusion of our discussion on Mozart I told the guys that it would be helpful if they’d bring in music they love and explain to the class why it’s meaningful to them. Two men volunteered to do so. I showed up with Bill Evans and Herbie Hancock CD’s and planned to sandwich them around this other material.

I started out by playing bits of a half dozen or so tracks off the Evans CD and asked what the emotional constant, if any, was in his playing. I was surprised how many people sensed a melancholy throughout, even in the up tempo tunes. Bill’s death at the age of 50 was precipitated by extended drug abuse. Noone seemed surprised to hear it.

One of the prisoners took my place at the front of the room and put the Rick Ross disc Teflon Don into the CD player. As I was walking to his seat I mumbled “Why I got to be in this class, man?” and followed up (wittily, I thought!) with, “When’s smoke break?” The guys laughed.

I don’t remember the name of the track- it was either the third or fourth; the “teacher” was following my example and playing snippets at first- but we listened to one piece in its entirety. Wait, I just went online and retrieved the information. It was Free Mason, the fourth cut. I asked the guys what Ross’ message was and got some pro forma responses: “He’s talking about the ‘hood,” “He’s telling you about his environment,” and so on.

I may be confused, I said- I couldn’t hear every word, but wasn’t he comparing himself to JFK- the ultimate white player? And didn’t he mention those nice houses that people out in the suburbs live in? (*) I get the sense that he feels caught between where he’s been and the allure of what’s now available to him. No?

First one man, then another, and then a third said, “You listenin’, you listenin’.” The energy level spiked. People started talking animatedly, multiple conversations erupted and overlapped. Something had changed.

In 1993, Khalid Muhammad, a Nation of Islam minister, gave a speech at Kean College, just a couple miles down the road from my New Jersey home. In this homily Muhammad referred to the Pope as a “no good cracker.” He also called Hitler “a great man.” The national press picked up on the event. Eventually, the United States House of Representatives passed (unanimously) a special House Resolution censuring him.

Shortly thereafter I assembled a panel of music industry heavyweights in Wilkens Theatre, the Kean College auditorium where Muhammad had spoken. We had a frank conversation about racism in the music business. Fat Joe, a prominent rapper then and now, agreed to sit on the Beyond The Labels panel. Joe made his mark as a bad ass rapper, a real no nonsense guy. His autobiographical track, The Shit Is Real, contains these verses:

This story takes place back in the South Bronx
where at the age of 14 I was already knockin’ off punks…

See I just didn’t give a fuck, and if you had a C-skin
-a leather bomber- you was gettin’ stuck;
that was the way it was.

One day I went to visit my aunt and stuck up my cuz.
See shit was fucked up back then,
No matter what the fuck I did I never had no ends.
And my moms was on welfare,
I knew I had a father but the nigga was never there.

So what the fuck was I to do?
© Fat Joe, all rights reserved

Joe had to cross through a valley of doubt, he told the audience sitting in the Wilkens Theatre, when his work began attracting fans beyond the borders of the Bronx. He’d perform in Cincinnati, or Cleveland- Paris, eventually- and white teenagers would scream for him. They knew all of his lyrics and showered him with mad love. How could he hold onto hatred for the haves? But if he let it go, what would fuel his art?

Fat Joe could relate to what Rick Ross is going through, I thought. One prisoner, new to the group, said that Ross reminded him of some people in his neighborhood. “You got to understand that even in poverty areas like many of us come from, not everyone grows up bad. Some people come from stable families where there’s always food on the table. You get some people who come out of these good homes and try to make it on the street. Then, when they get caught, they turn into snitches. Why? Because they don’t have the strength to live the street life, they were just playin’. Rick Ross reminds me of them, and yeah, I guess he makes me feel a little bitter.”

“Wait a minute,” someone else said. “Wes Craven, Steven Spielberg- you don’t expect them to have lived the stories they tell, do you? Rick Ross is just an artist. Who cares what his own life experience is? We should only be judging his art.”

Then, 56 year old John M., the guy who grew up with Sinatra, Dean Martin, and the entire Rat Pack as his babysitters, a good guy, took the floor and asked the group if they ever felt embarrassed having their kids, or nieces and nephews, listen to the language that’s in these records. The guys laughed, everyone was talking at the same time, huge amounts of energy spilling all over the room. I told the “teacher” that he was losing control, and everyone started laughing again.

It really was a phenomenal moment. Eventually, I went back to my seat and the guys calmed down. I reminded them that the purpose of the course was to search for connections between artists (Beyonce and Beethoven, say, Stravinsky and Shakur), to look for common ground where it might not seem obvious, and to leverage that insight when they get out of prison to establish connections with people who might have something positive to offer- a good paying job, for example.

“Am I the only one who feels that Bill Evans and Rick Ross have something in common?” I asked. “Both of these artists seem to be struggling, trying to come to grips with where they are in life, and I hear conflict and pain- expressed in different ways, to be sure- in the work of both.” A collective murmer- the sound of involvement, bonding even- emanated from the group. I ended the session without playing Herbie Hancock or the other prisoner’s CD, and was surprised to find that we’d spent less than an hour together.

(*)
New Rolls Royce
Guess you made it, nigga
All white neighborhoods, you they favorite nigga
My top back like J.F.K.
They wanna push my top back like J.F.K.
So, so I J.F.K.
© Rick Ross, 2010, all rights reserved

4.19.11

Our nephew got married in Philadelphia this weekend, so the whole family- including our puppy, Troy- trucked down to the City of Brotherly Love for the weekend. For the record, yes I did feel a bit strange parading a miniauture poodle through the hotel when he needed to go for a walk, so please, no snide comments!

The trio at the rehearsal dinner read through the up tempo jazz standards play book brilliantly. Catherine Russell has clearly absorbed the ouevre of Billie, Ella and Sarah, but she put her own spin on the material. Check out her website (www.catherinerussell.net) when you get a few minutes.

I thought about visiting Baker Sound, one of the oldest and most well established audio post productions studios in Philadelphia, but didn’t get around to looking up their address until Sunday afternoon. The next time I walked out the door of the Westin, located at Chestnut and 17th, I found myself staring directly at Ranstead Street… wow, there’s Baker Sound!

I called up the studio at around 9 a.m. on Monday morning and was fortunate to get Rick DiDonato, Baker’s President, on the phone. Rick invited me over for a quick tour.

I love working out of my home, but it’s always great to walk into a working recording studio. Baker’s got three Pro Tools rooms. One of them serves as the composition hub for Chuck Butler, who pens original scores through Monster Tracks, his wing of Baker Sound. Chuck joined the Baker staff back in 1987, the same week, in fact, that Rick DiDonato was hired.

DiDonato says that while the industry has shifted, business has remained solid for Baker Sound. “Radio work seemed to pick up during the economic downturn,” he says. “Radio spots are cheaper to produce than television ads, and I think that was a big factor.” DiDonato says that e books voice overs now account for a substantial number of billable hours.

I felt the need to ask Rick what the string of RDAT tapes were doing sitting on a tiny shelf above Chuck Butler’s workstation. “We keep them around for old times sake,” he laughed. “I can’t remember the last time we fired up the DAT machine!”

Liberis- first impression

Is there a need for a well-recorded children’s chorus sample library? Well, damn- what do you think? Tonehammer is a fabulous company, no doubt about that. They scour every aspect of the source, and “deep sample” with great results. My initial reaction to “Liberis- Angelic Choir,” is that they’ve once again filled a gap impressively.

We’ll conduct a detailed review of this library at a later date, but on first impression, the most expressive feature is the one that lets you assign a controller to cross fade between the “low” and “high” layer syllables. Let’s face it: current technology limits the degree to which you, the author, can direct any choir to intone a text. The ability to cross fade between syllables while a note or chord is being depressed adds measurably to the realism of a track… nice job!

My wife’s cousins grew up in Beverly Hills- on Rodeo Drive, as a matter of fact. Gene Kelly lived across the street; the boys were friends with Carl Reiner’s son Lucas, who lived a few houses down. Not to go overly ballistic on the tennis thing again, but all three Schwartz kids ended up being pretty fair players. Jon Schwartz, a film producer whose latest project, “Like Crazy,” won some impressive award at this year’s Sundance Festival, hits regularly with John McEnroe.

Stravinsky ended his life as a resident of LA- terribly shunned, he was, on his 80th birthday by the city- and I had thought about googling the address and checking out his home on earlier visits. I did it last month.

Snake around Sunset Boulevard slowly; it’s easy to miss North Weatherly, a narrow street that twists steeply up a winding hill. Climb up just a little way and there it is, a beautiful ranch home nestled above the hurly burly of LA. Wow, S. wrote “Agon” here!

I left Jerri in the car while I wandered around, hoping to find a neighbor who could shed some light on this long ago resident. A few houses up I ran into a couple standing outside their home. Flanking a highly polished white Porsche Cayman, the middle aged couple- the guy from Jersey City, originally, and his pretty blonde wife who clearly had spent a little too much time under the knife- seemed surprised when I asked how often musicians roll into the neighborhood to get a glimpse of the great man’s abode. Apparently, not often- at least they’d never seen anyone on such a mission.

Then the woman floored me by saying that only a year or two earlier a piece of mail had been delivered to her home. The note, written in the 1950’s to a film critic who once lived there, was composed by… Igor Stravinsky! Apparently, Igor and his wife Vera (man, she was fly back in the day) were vacationing when the missive was misplaced by the postal system.

Excited, I asked the woman if I could see the note, but she declined, saying she had no idea where it was. I told her it was a historical document and urged her to find it and turn it over to a musicologist. I hope she does!

My wife and I spent a week in California recently. Have you ever hit on the courts of the La Jolla Beach and Tennis Club? A tennis player’s dream! I took a lesson from a hot shot young teaching pro out of San Diego State and then played a set and a half against him before throwing in the towel.

We went to a slick restaurant in Pasadena… don’t remember the name but the theme was “Hawaiin fusion,” which was new to me. Our waiter, a guy in his 20’s, spotted the Average White Band T shirt I had on and asked a few questions: “Are you in AWB?” No. “Are you famous?” Regretfully, no.

Our new friend became visibly excited when I told him that Onnie McIntrye, the guy who played the in the pocket “chink a chink” guitar part on “Pick Up The Pieces,” was an old friend. He asked me to tell Onnie that a generation of kids grew up listening to their parents’ favorite soul groups- AWB included- and still count them among their favorites. Onnie got a kick out that one, and we started talking about the good old days, today’s music, and the current state of the Average White Band.

GE: “Before you start ranting about how technology has ruined groove music, let me remind you that you had an original Drumulator!”

OM: “I thought it was the bee’s knees at the time! The Drumulator was half of the price of the Linn drum- which was only 8 bit, by the way- and the Linn cost what, over $4,000? If you remember, the idea was not to record with the Drumulalator, but to use it to put down ideas for demos. Trying to write songs is difficult without a groove. Drum machines are a great help.

Drum machines have taught me to have better time. I’ve worked with guys who grew up with drum machines and their time is fantastic… you get used to the quantization. Sure, your playing can become stiff, but the challenge is to have both tight time and forward motion. I love trying to figure out where the sixteenth note high hat hits should be placed, for example, and the variety of pushes that bring a track to life. Take a well-programmed drum track and give it to a drummer and he or she has got a great reference point to work off of.

I can’t listen to much hip-hop or rap, and it’s not because I object to the technology. Most of the beat box and bass parts are simply boring, and that doesn’t have to be the case. Maybe it’s got something to do with the standard that lives inside your head. Pull out an old James Brown record… every part works on its own, with plenty of space in between. Take the guitar part in “Sex Machine.” It never wavers! Everyone finds their own little space on that track, and it’s the space between parts that makes a groove. If you grow up playing live you learn how to get out of the other person’s way. A whole generation has come of age with only the experience of programming machines, and I think the effect is detrimental to the groove. Again, it’s not the technology itself that’s the problem; it’s the way it’s used, in my judgment. By the way, a lot of the great soul music of the 60’s and 70’s wasn’t tight, but it had magic.”

GE: “What’s the AWB been up to over the last five or ten years?”

OM: “Gigs, mostly- 80 to 90 per year. Studio albums have gotten too expensive, especially since we’re completely self-funded. Our last studio album, “Living In Color,” was recorded in 2004.

Fans kept asking us for CD’s, so we recorded a live album, “Soul In The City: Recorded Live at B.B. King’s” in 2006. That venue is set up for recording, so we brought in Pete Moshay to engineer the project. Response was very good- we paid off the investment in about three months and are still selling the CD at our gigs- so we recorded a follow up, “Times Squared: Recorded Live at B.B. King’s,” in 2009. We have to play “Pick Up The Pieces” at every show, so that song is a repeat. Otherwise, the two CD’s have separate play lists.

We have a large back catalogue, which we have to play, but we’re able to introduce new material at our shows, and that keeps us stretching as musicians. We’ve got a great band now. Alan (Gorrie) and I are the only two original members of the group. The new guys do a lot of doubling; Fred Vigdor plays keyboards as well as horns, our lead vocalist Clyde Jones also plays keys, as well as guitar and bass. Rocky Bryant is our drummer. We’ve eliminated one of the two horns we used to carry, but Fred does a great job with his harmonizer creating multiple parts out of one.”

GE: “Has the audience make up changed over the years?”

OM: “It’s funny, you mentioned the young guy you met out in Pasadena. A lot of people his age show up at our gigs and they tell us similar stories about listening to the music when they were kids. We also get a lot of the older people, the ones who followed us when they were in college, or were just entering the work force. We get a nice blend. And it’s great that when we go to overseas- Japan, for example- we’re still able to attract full houses, two shows a night at a large club or small theater, for six or seven days.”

GE: “How long will the Average White Band keep touring?”

OM: “It’s hard to say- ‘til something happens, I suppose. Someone will get sick, circumstances will change, or something unforeseen will happen. A couple of years ago we were playing in Miami. We finished our sound check and went to the dressing room. Less than 10 minutes later we heard a commotion, looked out the window, and saw the entire stage collapse! One of the staging props landed directly on the drum seat. Rocky would have been dead if he’d been sitting there!

But it’s still good fun! Alan makes all our travel arrangements. He negotiates with hotels, gets us the best prices on flights, and so on. We don’t make a fortune. But we’re making it work and doing something we love, so we all consider ourselves quite fortunate.”

I met choreographer Daniel Gwirtzman (http://www.gwirtzmandance.org/) at the intersection of samples and the digital highway. Several years ago I immersed myself in “Agon,” Stravinsky’s last great work. S. collaborated with George Balanchine on this endlessly fascinating piece, and I started thinking about how it would feel to work with a choreographer.

“Balletica” (http://garyeskow.com/balletica.html) came out of my effort to imagine what it would be like to be both the choreographer and composer of a ballet. Of course, I know nothing about dance other than to shake my booty a little bit when the DJ cranks out “September Song” and calls the ancients out to the floor. Still, the exercise- letting the composer and the inner choreographer vie for primacy and eventual settle into a balanced relationship- was quite rewarding.

VSL’s solo woodwind samples are beautiful and the articulations are extensive, so setting this woodwind quintet with them yielded quite satisfying results. In fact, my friend Steve Epstein (mondo heavyweight record producer, as you probably know, with about 13 Producer Of The Years grammies under his belt) told me that a single squeaky oboe note in the upper register was the only telltale sign that this recording wasn’t tracked with live musicians.

After tossing “Balletica” up to my website I googled “choreographers” and started sending out emails referring them to it. Daniel responded that he was quite busy and asked that I stay in touch and remind him to have a listen when he had the time. Eventually, he did.

And now we’re talking about collaborating. I just got back from Washington Heights, where I met Daniel (and the four young student dancers from the University of Michigan who he’s been commissioned to set a dance on) in person. Wow, doesn’t that sound like I know dance chatter!

Ah, the internet, and the constantly escalating quality of sample recordings!

Do you own Omnisphere? Yes, right? And you haven’t downloaded the free 1.5 update? What are you waiting for?! Spectrasonics founder Eric Persing gets it right in the video that can be found on the company site (www.spectrasonics.net)- most users will focus on the new “Orb” page. The Orb introduces random variations to the presets and sounds you create, imparting movement and coloration that you can capture.

Omnisphere 1.5 includes a ton of new sounds, and iPad users- particular those who use Omnisphere in live performance- will be sure to take advantage of the new ‘Touch Remote” concept that 1.5 features. TR turns your iPad into a full bown Orb control surface.

Atmosphere was cool, the initial Omnisphere release was a major advancement, and Spectrasonics seems determined to keep pushing the bar forward.

Those of you who own the original version of Fable Sound’s Broadway Big Band, distributed by SONiVOX MI (www.sonivoxmi.com) may have had an experience with this product similar to mine. The initial release included features- particularly in the brass and reed sections- that allowed you to create powerful and soulfully expressive legato lines along with the crackling hits you’d expect from a well sampled brass library recorded any time after the turn of this century. The sheer playability and intelligence of these instruments placed BBB at the top of the class.

But the developers tethered BBB to the Halion player, and for many of us- at least for Cubase users like me- significant work flow problems came along for the ride. Fable Sounds hunkered down and ported BBB over to the Native Instruments Kontakt 4 player. They also came up with a subset of the original release, “Broadway Lites” that costs far less than the full product.

We’ll have more to say about BBB in the near future. I wanted to let you know that I installed the full Kontakt 4 version yesterday and spent several hours playing with BBB.
Wow, what a pleasure! If you own the original version I’d strongly recommend that you consider crossgrading.

Sibelius user, eh? Great, it has a loyal user base and I’m sure the app does an outstanding job for you. I’ve been with Finale for the last five or six years and am sticking with it. Each year makemusic (www.makemusic.com) releases a Finale update. For the last several years much of their work has focused on ramping up midi playback, which doesn’t interest me at all- my scores are ready to roll by the time I hit notation software.

“Staff Drag” is the go to feature for me in Finale 2011. In earlier versions it was difficult to select a single staff- the bass clef on the third page, second system of the piano gem you just finished writing, for example- and nudge it up or down. The program was geared to grouping all staves together, and you had to go through a few hoops to execute this simple procedure.

Finale 11’s “Staff Drag” lets you grab an individual staff without disturbing any others. If you’ve decreased the distance between a staff and its neighbor you might (depending on the dimensions of your newly repositioned set of staves) also see a system hop over from the next page.

A simple but elegant advancement!

We all know that the model for distributing recorded music is undergoing profound change. Produce a CD, talk it up on Facebook, build a website- bam, you’re an artist, a label, and your own management company.

But what if you had a different goal in mind when you made your last recording? I produced “Not Forgotten: Three Scenes for Vioin and Piano,” last year hoping that a well known fiddle player or two would hear and want to perform it.

Once the tracks were on my website I took the obvious next step and Googled “violin players.” I was also looking to present the demo of my string quartet, “The Amazing X-Ray Machine” to ensembles of that type, so I also searched for “string quartets.”

It was easy to compile fairly extensive lists of both soloists and quartets. The next step was to compose a couple of generic e mails that contained a brief bio and links to the music- which could be tailored to the intended receipient- and send them out. I expected limited feedback and that’s exactly what I got.

Interestingly, one of the responses came from the Emerson String Quartet’s management company. The Emerson (http://www.emersonquartet.com/), who just won their ninth Grammy, have been one of the world’s most highly regarded string quartets for about a quarter century.

The e-mail suggested that I send a CD directly to Phil Setzer, one of the group’s founders. I burned a disk with the two compositions mentioned above plus several others, and included a letter that told Phil a bit about myself and thanked him for the extraordinarily gracious act of accepting unsolicited material from a writer unknown to him.

After not hearing anything for about a month I took it upon myself to look up Phil’s telephone number and phone him. His wife answered, told me that the group was in Copenhagen, gave me his e mail address and suggested that I e mail Phil, which I did.

To make a short story shorter, Phil listened to the CD when he returned home, sent me an e mail that was extremely positive, told me that he wanted to perform “Not Forgotten” but that commitments precluded him from doing so in the near future, and asked if I would be interested in having some of his top students read the works immediately.

I’m putting together a package of CD’s and scores and sending them to Phil today.

2.26.11

PS: Marketing is important, right? I just emailed Phil asking if he’d be willing to provide a quote for my website. Here’s his response:

“As a member of the Emerson String Quartet, I receive dozens of scores and recordings of new music every year. I try to listen to everything. Some things I like, some not, but every once in a while I pop something into the CD player that really impresses me. That was my experience with Gary Eskow’s Not Forgotten: Three Scenes for Violin and Piano. The music is very well crafted and the writing for both instruments idiomatic and intriguing. I have recommended these beautiful, touching pieces to my students and I hope to play them myself in the future. Bravo, Gary!”