What is the Organic Drum Machine? full post>
Throwing Darts
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Dmitri Shostakovich dressed as a fireman, 1941. Images such as these were intended to inspire the Russian people during WWII.
During my August vacation I listened to Michael Jackson’s Off The Wall quite a bit. It’s really good.
“Cheek to Cheek” as performed by Ahmad Jamal, piano, Israel Crosby, bass, and Vernel Fournier, drums. Recorded at the Spotlite Club Washington DC September 1958. Originally released as Argo LP636, available for download at Amazon (99¢, what a deal!) as part of Ahmad’s Blues.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser. An example of symbiosis and transmogrification between popular song and jazz
I have installed Sugar Labs’ sugar on a stick learning environment (called “sugar”) on an aged dell computer. This is the OS used on the one laptop per child dedicated machines. To boot this onto a windows machine requires a specially formatted USB stick and some patience. The applications native to this environment, and the other applications that can be downloaded from Sugar Labs’ site, are influenced and/or created by Seymour Papert and his team. They offer an alternative logic based intuitive learning environment, including Tam Tam, a suite of audio programs inspired by max/msp and ableton. It’s fun to play with, but a bit buggy, and the networking and interface capabilities are intriguing. Particularly interesting are the online “community” views (left). When this view is activated a randomly placed display of icons shows who is online and using sugar, as well as what they’re up to. This would be a great functionality for future telematic music applications, showing users who is on the network and interested in making music.
Many years ago I took a lesson with Ben Allison. We were discussing practice with the metronome and walking bass. Of course, at all but the slowest tempi the metronome has to click at a half note value or less, otherwise it gets irritating. Thus an age old question: when practicing “swing” time should the metronome be set to click on 1&3 or 2&4? Some answers become obvious right away such as: sometimes set it on 1&3, and sometimes on 2&4, do what you like, put the metronome on 2&4 as these are the “strong” beats, or just beat 1, or beat 2 etc. Ben’s insight was something like this: set the metronome to click off the beats that you the player are learning to feel. In walking bass, for instance, beat 1 is very important. When the bassist provides a strong 1 the syncopation native to swing time is thrown into relief. In other words, a powerful beat 1 allows a high hat on 2&4 to sound like a funky syncopation rather than a contender for “primary” beat. So, as a bassist, set the metronome on 2&4 most of the time to aid development of a strong sense of where your 1 is, and set it to 1&3 when it’s time to investigate where your personal 2 and 4 are. |
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Copyright © 2010 John Crooks - All Rights Reserved |
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