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

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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, as presented on real 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

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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.

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Gary Swan Band

- A tip of the hat on the L.A. Links

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

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 the stage. 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. - RAR