The Practice Room

San Francisco Jazz Festival

It’s not all free guitars here at The Practice Room. You can win a free vacation to San Francisco for the San Francisco Jazz Festival.

“SFJazz and JazzTimes have teamed up to bring one lucky winner and a guest to one of the loveliest and liveliest spots on earth to experience jazz – San Francisco. Your prize package includes:

- Round-trip airfare to San Francisco for two from a major gateway airport within the contiguous United States nearest the winner's home serviced by American Airlines

- 8 days/7 nights’ hotel accommodations for two

- Seating for two at select Festival performances

- Official San Francisco Jazz Festival t-shirts, hats and art posters for two

- Dinner for two at a San Francisco restaurant."

Click here to enter. The contest ends September 14, 2007. 

[TJH]

You don’t have to pay the usual admission/If you're a cook, or a waiter, or a good noisician

If you like your guitar music to be hard-skronking and ear-stretching, pay a visit to GtrOblq (“guitar oblique”, maybe?). There’s a forum with topics like “Weird Guitars and Fretless Gallery” (my favorite), an archive of resources in a downloadable zip file, and list of links to interesting artists in the world of avant guitar and experimental string music. (Like Buckethead, Bill Frissell, Mike Kenneally, Reeves Gabrels, Sonny Sharrock, Robert Fripp, Elliot Sharp, Fred Frith, and our old friend Derek Bailey.) “GtrOblq aims to focus the popular imagination upon the obscure universe of creative sound production, recording, and performance. The artists profiled at GtrOblq are among the finest composers, improvisers, loopers, microtonalists, noisicians, soundscapers, sound designers, fretless guitarists, and synthetic guitar wranglers.”

[TJH]

Naked

"The creative person shows himself naked, and the more vigorous his creative act, the more naked he appears. Sometimes totally vulnerable, yet always invulnerable in the sense of his own integrity." - Harry Partch

It's not easy being smart

I offer, with no comment about possible relevance to the music community, the following stats from a study conducted by smart people at UNC Chapel Hill and reported at mentalfloss.com:

• Students with IQs above 100 and below 70 were significantly less likely to have had intercourse than those in between.

• Each additional point of IQ increased the odds of virginity by 2.7% for males and 1.7% for females.

• It’s not just home runs they’re talking about, either: a higher IQ decreased the likelihood of romantic contact in any sense, from holding hands to kissing, across the board.

• For males with IQs between 70-90 only 50.2% were virgin, whereas those with IQs above 110 were 70.3% virgins.

And, from a different study of college students:

• By age 19, 87% of college students have had sex. At MIT, it’s only 51%. (Furthermore, only 65% of MIT graduate students have had sex.)

• At Wellesley College, 0% of studio art majors were virgins, but 83% of biochem and math majors were.

[TJH]

musicFIRST

This is news to me: A coalition of artists called musicFIRST is asserting that performers in the United States have digital performance rights when their music is played on satellite radio, internet radio and cable services, but NOT when it is broadcast via AM or FM radio. I don’t know much about this sort of thing, but that surprises me, and it seems ridiculous. Needless to say, musicFIRST is trying to change the status quo.

More tidbits from musicFIRST’s FAQs:

- “… a January 2007 study conducted by the University of Texas at Dallas stated that ‘Radio play does not have the positive impact on record sales normally attributed to it. Instead, it appears to have an economically important negative impact, implying that overall radio listening is more of a substitute for the purchase of sound recordings than it is a complement.’”

- “Currently, when American music is played in foreign countries, they withhold royalties to protest the fact that United States radio stations do not honor a performance right for foreign artists.”

Among musicFIRSTs’s Founding Artists are Aimee Mann, BB King, Brian Wilson, Don Henley, Dr. Dre, Dr. John, Jimmy Buffet, Keb’ Mo’, Pete Seeger, Placido Domingo, will.i.am, and, apparently in a naked attempt to add some heft to that list of musical lightweights, The Pussycat Dolls.

[TJH]

Best flatpicking

Flatpicking Guitar Magazine has just released the "Best of the First Ten Years" on four CD-Roms. The compilations include articles published from November/December 1996 (Volume 1, Number 1) through September/October 2006 (Volume 10, Number 6). The discs include:

Volume One: Cover Story Articles: every cover story article that was published during FGM's first ten years, including the transcriptions and tabs. 

Volume Two: Guitar Builder Articles: fifty Guitar Builder articles, plus 14 guitar reviews and 11 articles about guitar building by Don Gallagher. 

Volume Three: Rhythm Guitar Articles: includes 90 rhythm guitar articles (with tabs) and 29 interviews with rhythm guitar players.

Volume Four: Editor's Pick Song Transcriptions: includes 147 song transcriptions.

All are available through FGMs's web site, www.flatpick.com

[TJH]

Maynard Silva

Me: How often are you surprised by your playing, or what you’re listening to, or music in general?

Maynard: If my mind is clear and it's real music, not Brittany Timberlake Jackson Manilow, then I'm always surprised by it. You never get used to cold showers - they always wake you up.  As for playing, it's the preconception thing…less preconceptions, more surprises, more fun.

Blues singer/guitarist Maynard Silva was the first person I interviewed for WorkshopLive’s profile series. I heard a lot of great stuff doing those interviews, but to me nobody topped Maynard. Beginner’s luck on my part, I guess.

Maynard has been fighting cancer for a while now. There’s a wonderful story about him and his son, Milo, in their hometown paper, the Vineyard Gazette, and it’s well worth reading. Also, because I’m a sentimental guy, I’m posting the whole interview with Maynard in the continuation section of this entry.

Milo, by the way, is a devotee of Tuvan music and all things Mongolian. I interviewed him as well, but found it too hard to connect the Tuvan music he was playing with the guitar/bass/keyboard interests that I expected WorkshopLive subscribers to have. One of these days I’ll give it another shot.

[TJH]

Internet radio – dead or alive?

I can’t get the story straight on what’s going on with internet radio. USA Today says more than 200 internet-based radio stations have shut down, with thousands more to follow – in fact, virtually all 10,000 of them (except the big guys like Yahoo and AOL) are doomed.

But wait. Sound Exchange (“SoundExchange®, Inc. is a dynamic, 501(c)(6) nonprofit performance rights organization embodying hundreds of recording companies and thousands of artists united in receiving fair compensation for the licensing of their music in the new and ever-expanding digital world. Modern technology makes all of our lives a little bit simpler and SoundExchange takes full advantage of its accuracy and efficiency to license, collect and distribute public performance revenues for sound recording copyright owners (SRCOs) and artists for noninteractive digital transmissions on cable, satellite and webcast services.”), in the person of Executive Director John Simpson, says: "For the people who want to comply with the law and are in bona fide negotiations with us, we don't want those people to be intimidated. And we don't want them to stop streaming." And in fact Pandora, which is the only internet radio station I know anything about, is still active.

The issue is royalties. There are new royalty rates going into effect soon, which may make sense for deep-pocket types like Yahoo! but are ruinous for smaller stations and multi-streamers like Pandora. Simpson says Sound Exchange is not going to be filing lawsuits any time soon, so there’s still hope that this can be worked out.

Of course, that was until yesterday, when Sound Exchange and DiMA (“The Digital Media Association (DiMA) is a national trade organization devoted primarily to the online audio and video industries, and more generally to commercially innovative digital media opportunities.”) found themselves in disagreement about capping the royalty fees, which by DiMA’s calculations could put more than a billion dollars into Sound Exchange’s pocket.

Stay tuned. And try Pandora.

[TJH]

Live Downloads

Livedownloads.com was designed to connect actively touring bands with their fans, allowing the bands to sell directly to their fan base without the intervention of record companies (and therefore reap the majority of the revenue). Livedownloads offers soundboard recordings from hundreds of bands. MP3 singles are generally 99 cents, and you can hear a 30-second preview of each cut before deciding if you want to buy. Whole albums or concerts can be $10-$20 or more, depending on format (MP3, FLAC or CD) and length, which you can print with Adobe. Many artists have created printable PDF files for the CD labels, booklet and tray liner. The site is descended from Phish’s download service, launched in December 2002.

Livedownload.com’s catalog is heavy on (but not exclusively) jam bands, progressive bluegrass, acoustic artists in general and improvisers. Examples: The Shins, Yonder Mountain String Band, Grateful Dead (of course), Umphrey’s McGee, David Grisman, String Cheese Incident, Broken Social Scene, Cat Power, Sam Bush, Barenaked Ladies, Charlie Hunter, and Disco Biscuits.

[TJH]

One of the greats

Happy posthumous Birthday to Chet Atkins, who has to be one of the top 5 guitarists of the 20th century however you want to measure it.

[TJH]