This clever little tune is a great response to Lily Allen’s recent siding with The Establishment and coming over all Legal – which considering all her early tunes were composed around loops, beats and even words (yes, lyrics too) which were collaged, stolen, and re-used to good effect rings rather hollow. Still, who says music can’t be about itself without being up itself?
Take it away, Dan Bull.
The hiatus in this and my other blogs has been due to the death of my father Brian Whitbread, who died suddenly after a stroke on August 1st 2009. Aside from dealing with the bereavement and necessary adjustments to plans, I have found it impossible writing anything more than to-do lists and the occasional few lines of poetry, but eleven days on, the family is preparing for Dad’s funeral, and I have the responsibility for providing music for the memorial service.
I find myself anticipating the memorial with some nervousness, since the event will be held outside in a woodland burial ground. To the rescue: my trusty Peavey battery-powered practise amp, bought from a penniless busker, which should do the job of providing volume without distortion to the assembled.
I have mixed feelings about this obviously, but it will be good to be with my family. The family as a whole is secular and so we are putting together a farewell event with a minimum of ritual. Nonetheless I feel that we do need some ritual elements in our collective farewell.
Funerals are for the living, not the dead. Music should say something about the man as well as about our feelings for him, and music should be able to speak of specific personal history, as well as express and release emotion.
So far I have a shortlist which includes George Gershwin, Lonnie Donegan, Humprey Lyttleton and Ella Fitzgerald, whom both my parents loved. They heard Ella sing in a packed concert at the Ashcroft Theatre, Fairfield Halls, Croydon.
I’m also going to have to add Marty Robbins to the list. He was one of my musical connections to Dad, after listening to his records had conditioned me to enjoy country music and gunfighter ballads.
My family have already decided that there should not be a preponderance of black or gloom, and I know that playing El Paso by Marty will raise a few smiles. The world he conjured up was a desperate one, full of tragedy, love gone awry and heartbreak, much like our own, if only we were prepared to see it.
Performance – Part Two.
You might want to read part one first
I distinctly remember the moment I realised I was singing a song which I had not written down or learned or planned, and which until that time had not existed, at the height of a live performance, during an encore in a small club in south London.
It had been one of those gigs which everything had conspired to wreck, but which despite or possibly because of frayed nerves, fallings out, fears about money, band members not showing up, broken instruments, strings missing and illness, we had collectively pulled off with a triumphant flourish. The audience were ours, dancing and cheering, the bar staff were grinning, the place was packed and people were still trying to come in from the cold outside. We were for that moment the focus of all the happiness in the world.
Being open to the moment, and caught by the spell, the words and the melody arrived without hindrance, and I was the conduit for the music, the singer and the song. It was freedom, and it was wonderful.
I am a writer, a crafter. In my previous collaborations with other musicians I was frequently the one with the techniques born of intense study and the benefits of education, bringing shape and harmonious order to the chaos of creative soup. I had often admired those gifted, confident souls who could just rock up, grab a guitar, and improvise a song on the spur of the moment. My own songs were born more privately and slowly, with much scribbling of pen on paper and the starting and stopping of audio recorder.
I knew that this wasn’t about quality – my crafted works were every bit as good – but I also knew that until then, somehow, I lacked the confidence just to let it out, uncensored and unchecked. It was the difference between swimming and sinking, between diving and a belly-flop. Once I had done it, I knew that I had just opened a door into the past and the future, and that it was not religion, or drugs, or academic study, that was the key, but music itself.
In the many years since finding that true freedom, I have found various ways to get into the zone. Stillness. Listening. Waiting. Trance. Dance. Movement. Playing music, listening to music, depriving myself of music. I still write like I always did, piece by piece, but, many times, I just open the door and let out whatever is in there, no matter what it is. It’s a great way of finding out who you really are.
Art Blakey the renowned jazz drummer said:
Music is a river, it must keep changing and flowing, or it will stagnate
Along with Art’s wisdom goes the oft-repeated theory that the mixed, mastered and released recording never sounds as good as the demo, the popular justification for which goes something like this: working to a script (including the structured, orderly recording process) kills spontaneity. This is not true, of course, per se, and I have heard many demos which, thrillingly inspired and raw though they may be, are far inferior to the polished recording. But likewise, the old adage about not being able to make silk purses from pig’s ears also holds true.
There is also an older concept, which echoes throughout Zen Buddhism, that the writing down of things in order to describe and define them fixes them in one place and thus limits them, robbing them of some essential essence. But even this kind of spontaneity that Zen aspires to requires the rigorous discipline of meditation and mental training to achieve.
So, written or improvised? We have the best of both worlds. Many classical baroque pieces from hundreds of years ago, give directions for soloists to improvise entire passages of play. In all live music at the highest level, variation in interpretation is expected and celebrated, and some for some genres, jazz and rock in particular, improvisation is the mainstay. Musicians treat recordings (either audio or dots on paper) as a point of departure, as a reference, not as the best or most ultimate definition of a piece of music.
To arrive at the best, most of the time, we need to find a balance between the planned and the improvised.
The map is not the territory. No matter how “perfect” a recording may be, every time the music is played, or played back, it is different, for reasons of the human environment, cultural context, acoustics, air temperature, and most importantly of all, because musicians are different.
Children, total beginners, people who don’t consider themselves musically adept can all equally well come up with staggeringly beautiful melodies, and poignant lyrics which express truths at the heart of the human condition, but they will be enjoyed, then forgotten. What differentiates a writer from everyone else is the compulsion to record, to distil and set down the concepts from which the music flows so that it can be repeated. And yet, without performance, there is nothing.
As a writer, I am most interested in what happens when you don’t try to dam the river, but rather, let music be your raft, the vessel to take you and those with you into places which are inaccessible by other means. For me this works well as a balance to the techniques I have learned and invented. The best improvisors have spent all their lives mastering their craft, but in the moment, none of that knowledge is conscious, and it is not actually even necessary.
Performance is creation, and creation is learning, finding out where the music wants to go and going with it, from the beginning of time, to the end of time.
What great fortune musicians have.
In the days before recording changed music forever, performance was ubiquitous. Songs were kept alive by people whose performances maintained, interpreted and adapted the music, yet despite the leaky boat of human memory, the essentials were kept surprisingly constant as they were passed from singer to singer down the generations.
When music was written down, the coded instructions, note pitches, intervals, pace (Andantino, Prestissimo) became an idealised fixed point of reference. When recording became established with the invention of the phonograph, recorded performances of music became the de facto reference point(s) for all other renditions. The song was now tied down, and wandering too far from this location would give the academic cause to make a judgement that the song no longer remained the same.
Now, bringing this into the modern age, we observe fragmentation happening as recorded music moves once more away from “permanent” versions and into multiple. But remixes, mashups both licit and illicit, cover versions and reduxes all rely on the reference back to an original, i.e. a first finished, mixed and mastered recording. Even the rough demo of the song refers retrospectively to a future “perfect version”.
Recordings have done much to spread appreciation of music, to advance cultural exchange and understanding, but placing recordings at the top of the musical (financial) tree has had a major side effect. The invention of the camera caused the once widespread skill of drawing to practically disappear in the broad population, and similarly, recording and playback devices have removed the commonplace playing of instruments and singing together (there is historical evidence for this.) We have diminished the role of music and our collective sense of it by coming to rely on recordings rather than performances as the musical fountain from which we drink.
The recording is only as good as the performance it captures, and the performance is only as good as the song, (mind-blowing jazz versions of “Three Blind Mice” and death-metal cloned blasts of anger being exceptions to this rule) and even if the recording is good and the performance worth studying, it is as stuck in time as a butterfly on a pin.
Recordings are really just snapshots of a particular location, just a single view from the musical hill. Shifting your feet a couple of inches, moving your eyes and ears in another direction gives you a different experience of the same location. Look, there’s a golden eagle, which we wouldn’t have seen if we had kept looking at the sunset.
When we started Rise and Shine, our songwriting show, by writing and recording songs about the news along with our audience, we were letting people into the act of creation. Creative improvisation, songwriting, arrangement and production are fascinating to many people, but the strange thing that happened to me was during this time was that my concept of the centre of music shifted.
Essentially, our live performances were producing the songs, but because we were simultanously broadcasting interactively and recording, the act of writing was captured along with the end results. It made me think about where the song really lives. I felt that adding broadcast to the normally closeted processes of writing and recording restored the energy, and returned music to its natural communal function.
As I produced and worked each song into its “finished” version, I recalled thousands of live performances where a combination of practice, musical discipline and being alive to the possibilities of the moment had produced sizzling, hair-raising, inspirational performances which communicating directly to the audience had a value which words struggle to express.
One of my favourite ever music quotes is from the Incredible String Band:
Music is an energy which runs from the beginning of time to the end of time, and musicians are lucky enough to get to play it
People who follow gurus and teachers call this raised level of contact “transmission” – the transfer which happens in the presence of the master. Listening to a fiddle player down the pub gives you something of this, and watching the best surround-sound video recording does not.
However much you appreciate a wonderful recording, you know that any applause you give will fall on ears deaf to your reaction. In live performance, our responses are registered, responded to, incorporated. Just picture the reactions of those around you if you were to clap and cheer after hearing one of your favourite tracks on an iPod!
Transmission is a two-way process, requiring the ears and eyes of the performer as well as the audience. The simple internet broadcast of spontaneous performance as it gave birth to repeatable musical structure, aka songwriting, did achieve a more elevated state of communication than simple playback to a largely passive audience.
Experimenting with the Rise and Shine show, writing this blog, and reading, has really set me thinking about how music works, and what it is that we are seeking from it on the internet, what it is we are likely to get, and beyond that, the value of writing and recording songs and music in general.
There is more to this train of thought to come in my next post.
Some people have all the luck, all the talent and we are in awe of their creative majesty. Quincy Jones is such a man. His productions are big, sultry, sensual and funky, uplifting, sweet and moving. He imbues his superior musical energy like magic upon everything he touches.
Quincy has worked with at least dozen of my favourite artists, including Count Basie, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Chaka Khan, Paul Simon, and Prince.
Best known for producing Michael Jackson’s Thriller and the African famine fundraiser We Are The World his modus operandum seems to be working with great joy, famously putting a sign on the studio entrance: “Check your ego at the door”.
As well as producing one of the biggest albums of all time, he is a direct and much-sampled inspiration for Trip-Hop, that downtempo, chilled moody genre which emerged in the 1990s, which draws on a far more subtle and intimate musicality than his later Hollywood successes.
I loved Les Nuits by Nightmares on Wax since I first heard its spine-tingling intro and it didn’t take me too long to trace the roots back to Quincy. Listen to the original and then to the music which is inspired by it.
If I could take one thing from Quincy and transplant it into myself, it would be his string arrangements. American Tune by Paul Simon has a haunting, classical chord progression which is elevated by Quincy’s understated strings, turning his muse on the moral collapse of his nation into something far more meaningful than just a protest song.
