Tag: music_history

EMI’s New Boss Different Than Old Boss

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EMI in the news again (previous discussion from last winter), as more and more high profile musicians decide they would do better negotiating their own deals. The model of music behemoths like EMI holding all the advantages is rapidly changing, and this change is for the better from where I sit.

EMI’s corporate roots stretch back to a pioneer of recorded sound, a German-born American named Emile Berliner, who founded the Gramophone Company. As a result of a merger in the 1930s, it was renamed Electric and Musical Industries Limited.

It was 30 years later that a man named Brian Epstein walked through the doors with a tape from a new band called the Beatles. Frank Sinatra, the Rolling Stones and Marvin Gaye have all called EMI home.

“EMI and the companies that formed it made London a center for musical culture in a way it never was,” said Peter Martland, a professor at Cambridge University and author of “EMI: The First 100 Years. “There is a lot of history there.”


“Since Records Began: Emi : The First 100 Years” (Peter Martland)

But the music business, even in good times, is not welcoming to outsiders. The sensibilities of a financier like Mr. Hands are usually starkly at odds with the folkways of a creative enterprise. Artists’ egos need stroking, and the measurement of success is not the same in music as it would be in running service stations along the autobahn.

“You have to understand the artist’s psyche to make it work,” said Jazz Summers, who manages The Verve, a band signed to EMI, and was present at the dinner last autumn.

The story has even turned comical at times. After Mr. Hands discovered that some employees were laundering costs for things that were illegal (drugs and prostitutes, he said), by itemizing them on expense reports as “fruit and flowers,” he set a strict travel and entertainment policy that required receipts for every expense.

Artists, too, have clashed more openly with Mr. Hands: the band Radiohead has fled and the singer Joss Stone has asked to be let out of her contract. The Rolling Stones, meanwhile, have been talking with other record companies about a new label. (If the Stones left EMI, it would have little impact financially, because the company would still have the rights to the band’s catalog).

“They hate him,” said Hugh Hendry, a British hedge fund manager and former EMI shareholder who had publicly criticized past management, of artists’ opinions about Mr. Hands. “He’s rude. He’s abrasive. He wants to make money. He’s the first to say to artists, ‘We are not going to pay you too much money. Now get out of my office.’ ”

[From EMI’s New Boss Sees Cracks in Music World – NYTimes.com]

Guy Hands reminds me of Chainsaw Al Dunlap; for EMI’s sake, I hope Hands doesn’t use the Sunbeam model as something to emulate.

Alison Krauss And Robert Plant, Together

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“Raising Sand” (Rounder)

Really wish I could have seen this tour of Robert Plant and Alison Kruass, sounds like it was great.

Both vocalists were in extraordinary voice — perhaps not a surprise given how distinctive and commanding they usually are. But they blended so well together, whether they were singing a tight, controlled Everly Brothers-style harmony in “Rich Woman,” the night’s opener, or letting loose during a soaring reimagining of Zeppelin’s “Black Country Woman” that seemed to rattle the bunker-like Roanoke Civic Center.

[snip]

From beneath a cascading mane, the 59-year-old Mr. Plant was in a playful spirit throughout the evening, joking through song introductions and smiling and glancing out of the corner of a twinkling eye at the reserved Ms. Krauss, who did her best to avoid his distractions. Calling her “the most gifted musician I know,” he made it clear he relished the chance to perform at her side, all but laughing in joy after a song in which their vocals intertwined.

As for Ms. Krauss, who is 36 years old, her voice is so pure and potent that she can control a down-tempo number by holding a crystalline note and letting it build in volume, seemingly without effort. If the evening’s version of Tom Waits’s “Trampled Rose” was maudlin to the point of overbearing, Ms. Krauss wasn’t to blame. She sang it with disarming power.

Which isn’t to say that Mr. Plant was outclassed. The duo’s version of Doc Watson’s “Your Long Journey” was a lovely bluegrass prayer, and in “Killing the Blues” their voices formed a flawless two-part harmony. Despite an evening’s worth of resourcefulness and invention, the most magical moments were when the singers sang, together and without reservation.

[From Alison Krauss And Robert Plant, Together – WSJ.com]

Full access to story using this link

João Gilberto’s Pioneering Records In a Legal Limbo

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“The Legendary João Gilberto” (João Gilberto)

This is really a shame, I’ve often wanted to hear these albums, and have hoped eventually the copyright issue would get settled.

A NUMBER of notable concerts of Brazilian music around the world this year, including one by João Gilberto next Sunday at Carnegie Hall as part of the JVC Jazz Festival, are being advertised with the line “50 Years of Bossa Nova.” Mr. Gilberto is considered by many to have defined the musical form, which was embraced internationally and has never really gone away in Brazil. Yet Mr. Gilberto’s first three albums, some of the best music of the 20th century, have largely been unavailable.

For 10 years or so they haven’t been in record stores, nor on Amazon.com (unless you’re willing to pay $100 or more for used copies) nor on iTunes. The only way you may have found them was through illegal file sharing, or, if you were lucky enough, to know someone who had copies. This is a weird turn of events in an age that keeps valuable cultural artifacts at close reach.

After 1997, when Mr. Gilberto sued EMI, his former record label, the company ceased manufacturing the albums. Mr. Gilberto and his manager declined to comment on the specifics of the case, but according to Ana Trajan, a lawyer at EMI Brazil, the music is still caught in a long legal process. There are no plans for its reissue, despite a 50th anniversary being the obvious moment.

Bossa nova, a subtle, rustling music with jazz harmony, chamber-music dynamics, samba rhythm and close-miked emphasis on voice and guitar, began when the Brazilian recording industry, and the Brazilian economy, was at a high. It may have gestated in 1957 in clubs around Rio’s borough of Copacabana, or even a year earlier in the state of Minas Geraes, in the confines Mr. Gilberto’s sister’s tiled bathroom, where Mr. Gilberto played in isolation for eight months, forming his intimate voice-and-guitar sound.

And then came Mr. Gilberto’s album, “Chega de Saudade,” recorded in 1958 and 1959. The songs on that record, and on his next two — “O Amor, o Sorriso e a Flor” and “João Gilberto” — were very nearly the first examples of a new musical style. More important, they permanently defined that style. Bossa nova is the rare example of a music whose lines of history and influence keep tracing, more or less, to one person — something you can’t say for blues or jazz or country or rock ’n’ roll. It’s rarer still that the person is still alive and performing.

[Click to read more of Music – João Gilberto’s Pioneering Bosso Nova Records Are Caught in a Legal Limbo – NYTimes.com]

Glancing at my iTunes library, I only have one João Gilberto album, a extremely listenable collaboration with saxophonist Stan Getz, that you’ve probably heard snippets from in various films:


“Getz/Gilberto” (Stan Getz, Joao Gilberto, Astrud Gilberto)

Originally released in March 1964, this collaboration between saxophonist Stan Getz and guitarist João Gilberto came at seemingly the end of the bossa nova craze Getz himself had sparked in 1962 with Jazz Samba, his release with American guitarist Charlie Byrd. Jazz Samba remains the only jazz album to reach number one in the pop charts. In fact, the story goes that Getz had to push for the release of Getz/Gilberto since the company did not want to compete with its own hit; it was a good thing he did.Getz/Gilberto, which featured composer Antonio Carlos Jobim on piano, not only yielded the hit “Girl from Ipanema” (sung by Astrud Gilberto, the guitarist’s wife, who had no professional experience) but also “Corcovado” (“Quiet Night”)–an instant standard, and the definitive version of “Desafinado.” Getz/Gilberto spent 96 weeks in the charts and won four Grammys. It remains one of those rare cases in popular music where commercial success matches artistic merit. Bossa nova’s “cool” aesthetic–with its understated rhythms, rich harmonies, and slightly detached delivery–had been influenced, in part, by cool jazz. Gilberto in particular was a Stan Getz fan. Getz, with his lyricism, the bittersweet longing in his sound, and his restrained but strong swing, was the perfect fit. His lines, at once decisive and evanescent, focus the rest of the group’s performance without overpowering. A classic.


“Bossa Nova: The Story of the Brazilian Music That Seduced the World” (Ruy Castro)

Oh, and I’ll have to look out for this book:

Ruy Castro’s authoritative history of bossa nova was published here in 2000 as “Bossa Nova: The Story of the Brazilian Music That Seduced the World.” Naturally, its Brazilian title was “Chega de Saudade,” and naturally, a portrait of Mr. Gilberto was its centerpiece

When I make my long-awaited sojourn to Brazil, I’ll have to look for this version, remastered or not:

The three original LPs were collected together on a remastered, three-album vinyl version, called “O Mito” (“The Myth”), released by EMI Brazil in 1988 (a CD version was released in Brazil in 1992). In 1990 the collection was released in the English-language market by EMI’s World Pacific imprint, as “The Legendary João Gilberto.”

Mr. Gilberto sued EMI in 1997, contending that the old music had been poorly remastered. A statement by his lawyer at the time declared that the reissues contained sound effects that “did not pertain to the original recordings, banalizing the work of a great artist.”

There were also other issues. Luiz Bannitz, the legal director at EMI Brazil from 1999 to 2004, said that the royalty rate in EMI’s old contract with Mr. Gilberto, drawn up in the 1950s, was very low by current standards — “less than 5 percent,” he said. The court ruled in 2002 that EMI should raise his royalty rate to 18 percent, but Mr. Gilberto began a series of appeals on other decisions related to the case; the lawsuit is still pending a superior tribunal court decision.

For good or ill, it is the remastered, early ’90s CD version of this music that I keep in my head. I have heard an old, pre-remastering Brazilian LP pressing of the album “Chega de Saudade,” and the remastered version has some perhaps unnecessary reverb and a more spacious sound-picture, a result of turning mono originals into stereo — the standard practice during the early years of CD reissues. As a consequence the balance of instruments sounds slightly reshuffled; the percussion, for instance, is louder.

Levon Helm is back

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“Dirt Farmer” (Levon Helm)

Levon Helm is cool; his voice is a public resource and a treasure. I wish I could have heard him perform, as I liked his recent album a lot.

What remains of that world-weary drawl is a bit frayed around the edges, but it remains a potent instrument, as evidenced by last year’s “Dirt Farmer” (Vanguard), Helm’s first solo album in 25 years. It contains rural blues and mountain-soul laments that he learned from his parents while growing up on a cotton farm in Helena, Ark., as well as more recent contributions from Buddy and Julie Miller and Steve Earle. It’s done up in low-key rustic colors that evoke Helm and the Band in their “Basement Tapes” glory with Bob Dylan. This is the sound of friends gathered in a room to make music of intense conviction at a relaxed pace, and it feels as comfortable as a well-worn flannel shirt, as heart-breaking as a death-bed kiss, as vibrant as a Saturday-night, moonshine-fueled hootenanny.

The cast of co-conspirators includes Larry Campbell, who has served ably as Dylan’s touring guitarist and now plays the role of Helm’s producer, guitarist and fiddle-player. Campbell’s wife, Teresa Williams, contributes sublime harmony vocals, alongside Helm’s daughter, Amy. But at the center of it all is Helm, who plays drums, mandolin and sings with gusto. He brings a wounded yowl to the Stanley Brothers’ “False Hearted Blues Lover,” a lonesome pathos to Earle’s “The Mountain.” These songs are reminders of a rural way of life that is fast fading, as are singers who actually lived through these experiences.

Helm is 68 and has been paying off his medical debts by playing regularly in his adopted hometown of Woodstock, in upstate New York (Helm doesn’t collect songwriting royalties on Band songs, because Robbie Robertson laid publishing claim to most of the band’s material, so he’s largely dependent on live performances for income). His Midnight Rambles in Woodstock, modeled after the traveling minstrel shows of his youth, have attracted the likes of Elvis Costello, Emmylou Harris, Dr. John and Donald Fagen.

[From Turn It Up – A guided tour through the worlds of pop, rock and rap | Chicago Tribune | Blog]

Robbie Robertson screwed his bandmates out of royalties, as far as I can tell, and should be ashamed. The Band were excellent because they were a collaborative effort, not because Robbie Robertson was a genius. Helm wrote a marvelous book on the history of The Band, including the topic of publishing credits, if you haven’t read it, you should.


“This Wheel’s on Fire: Levon Helm and the Story of the Band” (Levon Helm, Stephen Davis)

His voice doesn’t quite have the range that it used to soar to, but it still contains a lot of power. I don’t know enough about drumming to recognize if his drumming skills are still stellar, but some say his drumming is still good:

Helm survived a bout with throat cancer that was diagnosed in 1998, and his voice is noticeably more weathered than it once was, but in many respects the additional nooks and crannies suit this material beautifully; his interpretations of traditional rural folk songs like “Poor Old Dirt Farmer,” “Little Birds,” and “False Hearted Lover Blues” sound thoroughly authentic but with a bracing sense of force and commitment in Helm’s vocals, and if Steve Earle‘s “The Mountain” and Buddy & Julie Miller‘s “Wide River to Cross” aren’t venerable classics, they sound like they should be once Levon’s done with them. Though Helm adds a touch of boogie to “Got Me a Woman” and a jumped-up interpretation of the Carter Family‘s “Single Girl, Married Girl,” in this context they add some welcome spice to the stew, and Helm’s drumming remains superb. Dirt Farmer is a hard-edged but compassionate and full-hearted set of roots music from a master of the form, and it’s a welcome, inspiring return to form for Levon Helm after a long stretch of professional and personal setbacks.

Liege and Lief

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“Liege & Lief” (Fairport Convention)

Liege and Lief has long been a favorite of mine, dating back to the vinyl record era. Still probably in my top 20 favorite albums, if I made a list and checked it twice. Apparently, an “expanded” version is about to come out, with a second disc of crap that wasn’t good enough in 1969, but now will be used to lure suckers like me into repurchasing the album (for the third time!)

John Harris on the story of Fairport Convention’s Liege and Lief:
In 1969, reeling from the shock of a tragic car crash, Fairport Convention recorded an album that would change British folk for ever. John Harris hears the story of Liege and Lief.
… The spark for Fairport taking this watershed turn was the Band’s 1968 album Music from Big Pink, the record that – along with Bob Dylan and the Band’s Basement Tapes bootleg – brought about a widespread musical volte-face, in which what remained of psychedelia was replaced by a new rootsiness. Among the rock aristocracy, its influence was evident in the Beatles’ ill-fated back-to-basics project Let It Be, the Rolling Stones’ purple patch that began with Beggars Banquet, and Eric Clapton’s decision to call time on Cream.

In Fairport’s case, it convinced them that their early dalliance with transatlantic influences was best forgotten. “Music from Big Pink showed us that Americana was more suited to Americans, and we needed to explore Britannicana, or whatever the equivalent of that was,” says Thompson. “They seemed to nail American roots styles so well, and blend them so seamlessly: country, R&B, blues. At that point, we thought, ‘We’ll never be that good at American music. We should be looking at something more homegrown.’”

Just as Big Pink evoked what the writer Greil Marcus later called “the old, weird America”, so Fairport resolved to connect themselves with an arcane, semi-mystical side of the UK’s history that pop culture had left untouched. Regular trips were made to Cecil Sharp House, the traditional music archive near Regent’s Park in north London, where Hutchings in particular spent hours spent sifting through lyrics and sheet music. “You could hear things as well: old tapes, and vinyl – and cylinder recordings, which people like Vaughan Williams and [composer and folk archivist] Percy Grainger made,” he says. “After that, it wasn’t difficult to believe in those songs and kind of live them.”

The result was music full of a drama that oozed from the traditional songs at the album’s core – the Scots ballad Tam Lin, the Victorian press-gang vignette The Deserter – into the smattering of originals. In terms of emotional power, Liege And Lief peaked with Matty Groves, a 17th-century murder ballad in which a female aristocrat goes to church and seduces the titular peasant lad, only to be informed on and find her outraged husband at the end of the bed. The hapless Groves is challenged to a duel that he promptly loses, and his corpse is joined by that of his lover. The song ends thus: “’A grave, a grave,’ Lord Darnell cried, ‘to put these lovers in/ But bury my lady at the top, for she was of noble kin.’” Christianity, sex, class and murder – not many groups, it was fair to say, did this kind of thing.

sort of the anti-Syd Barrett, in other words, though Pink Floyd wasn’t alone in recording twee tunes:

“There was a lot of airy-fairy, very whimsical stuff happening in the late 60s,” says Ashley Hutchings. “We never really felt part of that. When we made Liege and Lief, it was like Bergman was coming in to direct it. It was The Seventh Seal, not Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. It was magical, but the magic was elemental.”

More here, including Richard Thompson saying:

“I haven’t listened to it that much, but I kind of know it. I don’t actually need to rehearse it. I could sit down and play it today – I just remember the whole thing, for some reason. It’s just … locked in.”

Chuck Berry is Cool

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“Johnny B. Goode: His Complete ’50s Chess Recordings” (Chuck Berry)

Can’t go wrong picking up some Chuck Berry, iffen you don’t already have some. The blueprint of a thousand songs is chorded on these tracks, and even fifty years later, they still sound good.

Chuck Berry didn’t invent rock and roll, but he may very well have invented rock’n’roll. His songs fueled and inspired the likes of Buddy Holly, the Beach Boys, the Beatles, the Who, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, the Rolling Stones, and just about anybody in his wake who picked up an electric guitar. In the invaluable rock doc Hail! Hail! Rock’n’Roll, we watch in awe has Berry puts Keith Richards in his place with just a single angry glare, and watch in double-awe as Richards takes it. After all, the Stones guitarist, like countless other musicians of his generation, knows he owes virtually everything to Berry, and has admitted as much, so he gives deference where deference is due.

Berry’s as worthy of hagiography as any rock legend, but he’s not yet ready for a eulogy. In fact, Berry’s 50-plus year career has been marked by one constant– forward motion. Indeed, Berry’s far too stubborn a man to ever give inertia the chance to slow him down, and he still spends a considerable amount of time on stage for an octogenarian. As far as the studio goes, however, Berry hasn’t released a new album since 1979, and even then his songwriting had been in steady decline since the early 60s. His last (and sole number one!) hit, a live version of the juvenile novelty “My Ding-a-Ling”, was released in 1972.

One perverse but still appropriate way to view Berry’s erratic (or non-existent) output over the past three or so decades is as further validation of the enduring strength of the first decade of his recording career, especially the productive, world-changing last five years of the 1950s collected on the self-explanatory Johnny B. Goode: His Complete ’50s Chess Recordings. It was on Chicago’s Chess imprint that Berry would change the blueprint of popular music, and it’s on this 4xCD collection that we can revisit the fruits of his labor.

[Click to read more of Chuck Berry: Johnny B. Goode: His Complete ’50s Chess Recordings: Pitchfork Record Review]

If you want a smaller sampler of Berry, check out the Great 28.


“The Great Twenty-Eight” (Chuck Berry)

Johnny Greenwood is the Controller

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“Jonny Greenwood Is the Controller” (Sanctuary Records)

err, composer

There may be no scarcer commodity in modern Hollywood than a distinctive and original film score. Most soundtracks lean so heavily on a few preprocessed musical devices—those synthetic swells of strings and cymbals, urging us to swoon in tandem with the cheerleader in love—that when a composer adopts a more personal language the effect is revelatory: an entire dimension of the film experience is liberated from cliché. So it is with Paul Thomas Anderson’s movie “There Will Be Blood,” which has an unearthly, beautiful score by the young English composer Jonny Greenwood. The early scenes show, in painstaking detail, a maverick oilman assembling a network of wells at the turn of the last century. Filmgoers who find themselves falling into a claustrophobic trance during these sequences may be inclined to credit the director, who, indeed, has forged some indelible images. But, as Orson Welles once said of Bernard Herrmann’s contribution to “Citizen Kane,” the music does fifty per cent of the work.

[Click to read more of Welling Up: Musical Events: The New Yorker]

I’ll admit that I don’t always pay close attention to film scores. Mostly because there isn’t much going on that interests my ears, maybe because I am a blockhead. I have yet to see There Will Be Blood, but I will see it once it arrives via Netflix. After reading Alex Ross’ paean to Jonny Greenwood, I’ll also be paying close attention to the music

The movie opens with a shot of dry, bare Western hills. Then we see a man prospecting for silver at the bottom of a shaft. He blasts the hole deeper with dynamite, falls and breaks his leg, and, with a titanic struggle, draws himself back up. Finally, we see him lying on the floor of an assay office, his leg in a splint, signing for the earnings that will enable him to drill for oil. The sequence is almost entirely wordless, but it is framed by music, much of it dense and dissonant. At the very beginning, you hear a chord of twelve notes played by a smoldering mass of string instruments. After seven measures, the strings begin sliding along various trajectories toward the note F-sharp. This music comes from a Greenwood piece called “Popcorn Superhet Receiver,” and, although it wasn’t composed for the film, it supplies a precise metaphor for the central character. The coalescence of a wide range of notes into a monomaniacal unison may tell us most of what we need to know about the crushed soul of the future tycoon Daniel Plainview.

As Plainview signs his name, another monster chord blossoms, in the violins and violas. This one is superimposed on C-major harmony in the bass, resulting in a less abrasive, more dreamlike atmosphere. The cellos play staggered glissandos—crying, sighing downward slides. Disembodied major triads rise through the harmonic haze, like mirages on the barren terrain outside Plainview’s shaft. The music is at once terrifying and enrapturing, alien and intimate.

As the movie goes on, Greenwood writes rugged open-interval motifs, which evoke the vastness of the land; mechanically churning Bartókian ostinatos, announcing the arrival of Plainview’s crew; primitivist drumming to propel an apocalyptic scene in which a derrick catches fire; and long-limbed, sadly ecstatic, Messiaen-like melodies to suggest the emotional isolation of Plainview’s ill-fated son. It’s hard to think of a recent Hollywood production in which music plays such an active role. (Unfortunately, Greenwood was judged ineligible for an Academy Award nomination, because the soundtrack contains too much preëxisting music.) When, in the closing scenes, Plainview evolves into an obscenely wealthy ghoul, Greenwood’s score retreats toward silence. In its stead, after a bloody final shot, the robust finale of Brahms’s Violin Concerto ironically fills the air: it sounds more like a radio blaring in an empty house than like music played for human beings.

– Ooops, I forgot to include a link to the soundtrack CD. Doh! Also available on a track-by-track basis.


“There Will Be Blood” (Wea/Atlantic/Nonesuch)

EMI and Blind Acceptance

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Speaking of the slow, painfully public death of record labels, the new owners of EMI (Terra Firma Capital Partners) are not having an easy time. Surprisingly, musicians are much more difficult to manage than generic widgets.

As the chief executive of Terra Firma Capital Partners Ltd., Guy Hands controls companies that lease jets, operate natural-gas pipelines, and, most recently, sell music.

The big difference among those businesses is Mr. Hands doesn’t have to worry about keeping the planes or the gas happy. But the musicians signed with EMI Group Ltd. are a different story — and they’ve been less than pleased with the British private-equity mogul.

The Rolling Stones are considering leaving EMI, as Paul McCartney, has.
“He’s either really stupid, or really smart,” says Jazz Summers, who as chairman of an organization called the Music Managers Forum has found some of Mr. Hands’s statements “not very artist-friendly,” but credits him with taking a big gamble on EMI.

[snip]
People who do business with the company say that Mr. Hands has inadvertently contributed greatly to the alienation among artists and their representatives. A series of missives and remarks by Mr. Hands has given many in the artist community the impression that he is out of touch with many realities of the music business — including the need to carefully soothe the artists who actually make the hits.

On top of that, key portions of the restructuring plan Mr. Hands unveiled last week, which includes as many as 2,000 job cuts, some complain, treats music as an ordinary consumer product that can be marketed and sold in various territories like soap.

[From Can New EMI Owner Strike a Chord? – WSJ.com]

“Suckers and Liars, Get me a shovel” Some CEOs are damn devils.

Music is not an object that can be bought and sold on the open market, it is an art, and thus needs to be treated with a bit of respect.

In an interview, Mr. Hands says the music industry spent too much time fighting piracy with lawsuits and other tactics, rather than dealing with the situation. “Instead of spending millions shutting down Napster, it should have been working harder,” to find new ways to convince people to pay for music, he says.

Mr. Hands got off on the wrong foot last October with an internal memo that found its way outside the company. He wrote that EMI should be “more selective” about which artists the company signs, as many don’t work hard enough to promote their music. These performers, he complained, “simply focus on negotiating for the maximum advance… advances which are often never repaid.” Many artists and managers felt insulted by the comment, which was widely discussed in the music business.

When Mr. Hands tried to patch things up at a series of dinners with prominent artist managers, he got a chilly reception. At a London restaurant he described to several managers Terra Firma’s track record, including its stewardship of United Kingdom movie theater chain Odeon Cinemas Ltd., telling them “the cinema business isn’t the movie business — it’s the popcorn business,” recalls Mr. Summers, of the managers’ group. Mr. Summers, whose clients include EMI artists Badly Drawn Boy and the Verve, found the remark insulting to musicians: “I told him he’s dealing with artists, not popcorn.”

It hasn’t helped that Mr. Hands, having ousted EMI’s senior management, still hasn’t named a new chief executive, choosing to run the company himself on an interim basis and bringing in music-industry outsiders for key roles. At the same time, some key industry veterans have been shown the door, including Tony Wadsworth, a respected executive who oversaw the company’s British operations for 20 years — including the long, steady erosion of the company’s market share on its home turf. Among those brought in was Mike Clasper, the former chief executive of the British Airports Authority.

“They’re bringing in a lot of executives from other industries,” said Dave Holmes, manager of Coldplay, one of the biggest acts left on an EMI label. “I would say that’s worrying. It’s not very comforting to me.”

(Digg-enabled full access to complete article here)


(the Sex Pistols play their song, EMI – who subsequently fired them )

Death of the Music Industry, Rolling Stones edition

Seth Anderson1 Comment

More and more high profile artists are realizing the music labels are dinosaurs who only exist to suck up a percentage of profits. Especially for marquee bands, the labels don’t really bring much to the table.

In what is shaping up to be the latest vote of no confidence from a marquee act, EMI Group Ltd. is in danger of losing the Rolling Stones, along with more than 35 years’ worth of their albums, when the group’s current contract with the London-based music company expires in March, according to people familiar with the situation.

A person close to the Stones, led by singer Mick Jagger and guitarist Keith Richards, said the band members are considering their options after their current recording-and-distribution deal with EMI expires in March. The band has been talking to other record labels and other potential partners, according to people in the music business. The band could still decide to stay with EMI and has until about May to make up its mind.

If the Stones leave, their departure would be only the latest in a string of high-profile defections. Under EMI’s previous management the company lost the rights to release new albums by Paul McCartney and Radiohead. Since private-equity owner Terra Firma Capital Partners Ltd. last summer bought the company for £3.2 billion ($6.28 billion) and ousted the previous management, the pushback from the artist community has grown. Pop singer Robbie Williams’s manager has told the British press his client is considering leaving the label.

The status of Coldplay, perhaps the biggest act left on EMI, may also be in question. People close to EMI had been counting on the band to deliver its still-untitled fourth album in time for release in the first half of this year. But manager Dave Holmes says the band is still working on the album and hasn’t set a delivery date. [snip]

The loss of the Stones could be more damaging than any of the others: Unlike most record contracts, the Stones’ deal with EMI lets the band take all its albums since 1970. The albums in the portion of the Stones catalog currently distributed by EMI — from 1971’s “Sticky Fingers” through 2005’s “A Bigger Bang” — last year sold 395,000 copies in the U.S. alone, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

[From Rolling Stones Might Say Goodbye to EMI – WSJ.com]

[Digg-enabled link to to complete article for non-WSJ subscribers here)

Goodbye three martini lunches! David Byrne wrote an article for Wired Magazine recently discussing the six possible models for musicians to follow, ranging from the 360 (Equity) model to self-distribution. Artists like The Rolling Stones no longer need to be in the 360 model anymore, nor do bands like Radiohead, et al. I think the death of the record labels, as we know them, is rapidly approaching a certainty, and I couldn’t be happier, fitter.

Gram Parsons and The Flying Burrito Brothers

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“Gram Parsons Archive, Vol. 1: Live at the Avalon Ballroom 1969” (Gram Parsons, Flying Burrito Brothers)

Excellent. I’ve long been partial to Cosmic American music, discovering it first through Uncle Tupelo and Michelle Shocked, then working my way backwards in time to Gram Parsons, Dylan’s John Wesley Harding, The Band’s first few albums, and others. Being a musical historian in the age of re-releasing frenzy does have advantages.

Live at the Avalon Ballroom is the rock equivalent of the Jackson Pollock discovered at a flea market, or the first-edition William Faulkner found in the dollar bin at a used book store. These recordings of the Flying Burrito Brothers’ two shows in San Francisco in April 1969 were long buried in the Grateful Dead vaults (which many listeners speak of in the same terms explorers once used for El Dorado) until Dave Prinz, the co-founder of Amoeba Records, tracked them down and worked for more than a year to secure permissions from the Dead’s soundman, Owsley “Bear” Stanley. Prinz compiled the recordings into a 2xCD set (one for each show) and released them on the newly launched Amoeba Records label– its second release, in fact. The title, Archives Volume 1: Live at the Avalon Ballroom 1969, teases with the tacit promise of a second volume– more buried treasure.

For Parsons fans, this constitutes a major event– perhaps more anticipated than even Rhino’s long-awaited reissue of his two solo albums in 2006– not only because it contains numerous unheard covers, but primarily because Parsons didn’t leave a whole lot of live material behind when he died in 1973. Even the supposedly “live” medley from Grievous Angel was just a studio re-creation, and the real live recordings that survive are marred by poor sound quality or, in some cases, poor performances. Live documents of Parsons’ short tenure with the original Flying Burrito Brothers line-up are even scarcer. What makes Live at the Avalon Ballroom so special is that the performance is just as good as the sound quality. As professional hanger-on Pamela “Burrito Sister” Des Barres writes in the liners, “I have literally been waiting for this album for decades.”

[Click to read more about Gram Parsons : Gram Parsons Archives Volume 1: Gram Parsons with the Flying Burrito Brothers Live at the Avalon Ballroom 1969: Pitchfork Record Review]

Grammatical Errors
Parsons died too young.

Works of Igor Stravinsky

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“Works of Igor Stravinsky” (Sony Classics)

Pretty reasonably priced set, I might pick it up.

With Works of Igor Stravinsky, Sony/BMG is offering Sony Classics’ massive Stravinsky box of 22 CDs, which once retailed at a faint-inducing price tag, for less than one-sixth of the original cost. Certainly more of these will get around than the old “Recorded Legacy” box did; so prohibitively expensive, such boxes would sit at the counter of finer classical music stores for years as a never-purchased luxury item. In the new edition, you don’t get much aside from the same 22 CDs in cardboard sleeves and a paper-thin booklet, which contains a highly generalized, four-page-long appreciation of Stravinsky’s artistry and as close to the most basic projection of the recording data as one can imagine.

Aside from the marketing angle, Sony/BMG’s Works of Igor Stravinsky has all the vicissitudes of the original Sony Classical set, apart from the old set’s monolithic dimensions. No other composer born in the 1880s — unless you count Leopold Stokowski as a “composer” — left behind a more extensive body of recordings than Stravinsky. Stravinsky didn’t make his first recording until he was 43 years old, only picking up conducting as an avocation a couple of years after that. The vast majority of Stravinsky’s recordings were made for CBS Masterworks starting in 1957 — when he was 75 years old — and extending to 1967, when he made his last public appearances, and Works of Igor Stravinsky includes, in one way or another, some 90 percent of the music Stravinsky is known to have composed. Save the inclusion of both the Firebird Ballet and its corresponding suite, alternate incarnations of works are not found here; the dreaded, posthumously discovered Sonata in F sharp minor for piano is likewise lacking, but so are several of Stravinsky’s other piano pieces and the Three Pieces for String Quartet.

[From allmusic [Works of Igor Stravinsky]]

Bound to be some good stuff here, $33 bucks for 22 discs sounds like a good cost-per-minute ratio. 433 tracks.

Pentangle Box Set

Seth Anderson1 Comment

Not my most favorite British folk band (prefer Fairport Convention for instance), but Bert Jansch is an excellent, evocative acoustic guitarist.

Time Has Come 1967 - 1973
“Time Has Come 1967 – 1973” (Pentangle)

PlugInMusic.com : News : Pentangle 40th Anniversary Box Set To Be Released On Castle

Pentangle were a ‘60s British folk/jazz ‘supergroup’ that were simultaneously stars of the underground and darlings of the mainstream, gracing the Fillmore East one month and Carnegie Hall the next. The band was formed in 1966 by hip young guitar slingers Bert Jansch and John Renbourn, already leading lights of the folk scene at the time. With folk chanteuse Jacqui McShee on vocals and a rhythm section consisting of Danny Tompson on bass and Terry Cox on drums, the group mastered a breathtaking repertoire that encompassed the traditional ballads, blues, jazz, pop, and re-workings of rock oldies….

Spanning 1967-1973 they recorded six albums, toured and broadcasted extensively.

This lavish and definitive 40th anniversary box set covers the six year career of Pentangle. The Time Has Come features the best of the band’s album tracks, singles and B-sides – newly re-mastered, achieving the best sound to date – alongside no less than 20 previously unreleased tracks. Among the many rarities is a track from their very first recording session (1967); live concert and television performances; studio outtakes from The Pentangle (1968) and Reflection (1971); BBC radio session tracks newly in stereo and previously unheard film soundtrack work. This set features a 56 page booklet filled with extensive liner notes along with unseen photos and rare memorabilia.

Gilberto Gil for head of the RIAA

Seth Anderson0 comment

As discussed previously in these parts, Mr. Gil has my vote to run (and change the corporate DNA) of the RIAA. Copyright law should not be used as a club to keep corporate control of content, for all time.

Expresso 2222
“Expresso 2222” (Gilberto Gil)

Music: Gilberto Gil Hears the Future, Some Rights Reserved :

Gilberto Passos Gil Moreira, part musician and part policymaker, has emerged as a central player in the global search for more flexible forms of distributing artistic works.

ON Wednesday the Brazilian minister of culture, Gilberto Gil, is scheduled to speak about intellectual property rights, digital media and related topics at the South by Southwest Music and Media Conference in Austin, Texas. Two nights later the singer, songwriter and pop star Gilberto Gil begins a three-week North American concert tour.

Rarely do the worlds of politics and the arts converge as unconventionally as in the person of Mr. Gil, whose itinerary includes a solo performance at Carnegie Hall on March 20. More than 40 years after he first picked up a guitar and sang in public, Gilberto Passos Gil Moreira is an anomaly: He doesn’t just make music, he also makes policy.

And as the music, film and publishing industries struggle to adapt to the challenge of content proliferating on the Internet, Mr. Gil has emerged as a central player in the global search for more flexible forms of distributing artistic works. In the process his twin roles have sometimes generated competing priorities that he has sought to harmonize.

As a creator of music, he is interested in protecting copyrights. But as a government official in a developing country celebrated for the creative pulse of its people, Mr. Gil also wants Brazilians to have unfettered access to new technologies to make and disseminate art, without having to surrender their rights to the large companies that dominate the culture industry.

….
After returning to Brazil in the 1970s he made records that urged black Brazilians to reconnect with their African roots, and was an early champion here of Bob Marley and reggae. But Mr. Gil has also read widely in Asian philosophy and religions and follows a macrobiotic diet, leading the songwriter, producer and critic Nelson Motta to describe his style as “Afro-Zen.”

In person Mr. Gil is warm, calm and engaging, a slim, dreadlocked figure with an elfin, humorous quality that tends to disarm critics. As both individual and artist he has always tended to be open-minded and eclectic in his tastes; the poet Torquato Neto once said of him, “There are many ways of singing and making Brazilian music, and Gilberto Gil prefers all of them.”

Rock Snob

Seth Anderson1 Comment

Had a lot of fun yesterday consuming the


Rock Snob Dictionary

in one sitting. Well, I did jump up a few times and add tunes to my new iTunes playlist, Rock Snobs. I guess I am bonafide, as the playlist has several days worth of material already, and I’m not done adding yet.

A few excerpts from the book at posted at snobsite.com. Fun stuff.

At last! An A-to-Z reference guide for readers who want to learn the cryptic language of Rock Snobs, those arcana-obsessed people who speak of “Rickenbacker guitars” and “Gram Parsons.”

We’ve all been there–trapped in a conversation with smarty-pants music fiends who natter on about “the MC5” or “Eno” or “the Hammond B3,” not wanting to let on that we haven’t the slightest idea what they’re talking about. Well, fret no more! The Rock Snob’s Dictionary is here to define every single sacred totem of rock fandom’s know-it-all fraternity, from Alt.country to Zimmy. (That’s what Rock Snobs call Bob Dylan, by the way.)

Haven’t managed to see Cocksucker Blues nor Eat the Document, yet. Though apparently, some of the footage from Eat the Document made its way into

No Direction Home

Clash News I did Not Know

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Made in Medina
Rachid Taha

This album, my only exposure to Mr. Taha, is quite good. Spectacular, in fact.

Salon’s Thomas Bartlett writes:

Rachid Taha

This is the Algerian rock/pop/rai star Rachid Taha’s cover of the Clash’s “Rock the Casbah” — the verses translated into Arabic, the choruses left in English, and the whole thing decorated with the standard trappings of Arabic pop. It’s an intensely charged cover, not a simple tribute, complicated as it is by Taha’s belief that Strummer and Co. got their unacknowledged inspiration for the song from his ’80s French band Carte de Séjour, which they heard after Taha himself gave them a tape in 1981

and from Calabash Music

Rachid Taha, a man that knows the inside story! Never mind the war on terrorism, what about the war on fear, complacency, ignorance, racism, poverty and lies. That’s a struggle that Rachid Taha has been fighting for the past two decades and more, ever since he was a tear-away punk immigrant from Algeria gobbing metaphorically and no doubt literally at the good burghers of Lyon in France.

His band, Carte de Sejour (the French for ‘residence permit’), proved that rock power, punk attitude and Arabic roots could get along famously if mentored by a passionate, razor-sharp and mouthy soul like Taha. Being proudly North African on the one hand and truly rebellious on the other has always meant struggle on many fronts and Rachid Taha has spent his whole career lobbing musical molotovs at the latent and, as recent event have proved, not so latent racism of the French in the form of classic songs like ‘Voile Voile’ and ‘Douce France’ whilst berating his fellow North Africans for lack of ambition, obsession with tradition, cabaret complacency and enslavement to rai.