paal nilsen-love for president!

no role has been more important for the developement of popular or rhythmic music the last decades than that of the humble back man - the drummer. my personal favorites: mitch mithcell, ginger baker, jon christensen, jack de johnette, brian blade, tony williams. Up in cold Norway there is this drummer called paal nilsen-love http://www.paalnilssen-love.com/ who takes up this noble tradition and adds his own amazing talent. the result can be heard for instance at several recordings with a fantastic band called atomic. please check him out. when pat metheney played in norway a couple of years ago he was quoted in an interview saying exactly what is in the title for this entry: paal nilsen-love for president!

old lps come to life again

paul motians record "psalm" had sat in my basement for 15 years together with a couple of hundred other lps. the house i live in has no room for the turntable. the other day i thought i had found the solution. a box labelled terratec arrived in the mail containing a small box that could digitalize as well as amplifie the signal from a turntable in such a way that my computer would accept the music. the a-d box was nice, but the software just wouldnt start. i gave it up and downloaded something called lprecord in stead. took me the best of 2 days but at least 3 records made it to my cd player. the records were: the mentioned motian recording, keith jarrets bop be from 1978 and a record by the flutist hariprasad charusia made in india in 1968. not many, but a good start. i love to let the old memories flow almost as much as i love the sound of the pick up entering the vinyl groove. of course i did not edit that away. would you?

back in the 1960ties Semie Moseley built a guitar he called Mosrite Ventures. Yesterday, 50 years later, I had the oportunity to try one for the first time. A friend down the street had bought one from Califorinia and at last it arrived after a long journey over the ocean. The guitar is full of history. The design is strange, and judging from its bruises and scratches it has been played a lot. It is a bit big and heavy, but very vell balanced. It did not feel like a strange new thing but like a guitar I had played many times before. Actually it felt much better holding and playing it than my own ESP Telecaster. The sound is open and has a singing quality to it. An open C chord sounds great and single notes high up on the E-string when played through a clean amp sings better than most guitars at any guitar store. The frets are very low and invite more to legato playing than string bending. Go here http://www.modernguitars.com/archives/000231.html to read the history behind the Mosrite.

composition is improvisation

in reality there is no real difference between improvisation and composition. it is our need to understand the world around us and our lives in it that establishes these 2 classes. but they are really only true in language. in fact all music is improvised. when a composer writes a piece of music she is improvising in the most profound meaning of the word. when a so called free improviser improvises he grabs themes and expressions from his "vocabulary" and interprets them there and then. some people believe that they are playing something they call "non idiomatic improvisation", but such does not exist. the idioms are all around and inside us. the fact that you feel your music does not fit into any of the shelves in your local cd store does not mean that your music is freer. very few musicians feel that they fit in to categories. but all of us play on what we carry in our own musical "bag".
best
ivaranz

how flashy is comunication death?

a good friend of mine is also a very active musician and composer. he also has his own record label where he releases his own as well as other creative musicians music. and of course he has his own web site. the only problem is that some months ago he was talked into switching to a much more elegant design by way of macromedia flash. today he sent me an email saying that he could not show me his latest mp3 because his f**** web site does not allow him to upload music himself. he has to get hold of the designer first and he is off studying in scotland or somewhere. this sucks. the web is fantastic beacause of 2 things. first, it is available anywhere whenever you are anywhere. second, because it enables every body to be a publisher and not least because the reader, listener, user can talk back. now, because of this elegant tool, this very creative and active artist can no longer communicate in real time with his fans. if he had had a simple html site he would not have this problem. anyone for a solution (that does not demand of him to go off somewhere to become a macromedia engineer)?

best
ivaranz