May 2014
Comet Come To Me- Tour dates
19/05/14 22:51
Meshell N'degeocello Tour early June 2014
I'll be playing with the tremendously gifted Meshell N'degeocello and her band this summer. We will be touring behind her great new record, Comet Comet To Me, out June 3rd.
This is a beautiful recording, captured and mixed by Pete Minh. Longtime band mates Chris Bruce, Jebin Bruni and drummer Earl Harvin all contribute mightily. Also on board are guest vocalist Shara Worden aka My Brightest Diamond and guest bassist (and writer of Conviction,) Kaveh Rastegar of Kneebody fame.
A few East Coast Dates below: Come out and see us!
Friday May 30: Santa Monica CA
Tues June 03: NYC, NY, Poisson Rouge
Wed June 04: Baltimore MD, Soundstage
Thurs June 05: Alexandria VA, The Birchmere
Friday June 06: Philadelpha, PA, World Cafe Live
Saturday June 07: Cambridge MA, The Sinclair
Full list of Dates HERE
I'll be playing with the tremendously gifted Meshell N'degeocello and her band this summer. We will be touring behind her great new record, Comet Comet To Me, out June 3rd.
This is a beautiful recording, captured and mixed by Pete Minh. Longtime band mates Chris Bruce, Jebin Bruni and drummer Earl Harvin all contribute mightily. Also on board are guest vocalist Shara Worden aka My Brightest Diamond and guest bassist (and writer of Conviction,) Kaveh Rastegar of Kneebody fame.
A few East Coast Dates below: Come out and see us!
Friday May 30: Santa Monica CA
Tues June 03: NYC, NY, Poisson Rouge
Wed June 04: Baltimore MD, Soundstage
Thurs June 05: Alexandria VA, The Birchmere
Friday June 06: Philadelpha, PA, World Cafe Live
Saturday June 07: Cambridge MA, The Sinclair
Full list of Dates HERE
Oryx And Crake
14/05/14 18:15
"Download an app to your necktop"
14/05/14 17:35
I like to turn my brain off as much as the next guy. My main tools for thinking until very recently have been (personal) classics like: “Ignore it and maybe it will go away”, or “Time for a glass of scotch”. Daniel Dennett’s book, Intuition Pumps strongly makes the case for thinking as a fun activity. It’s a shame that it is a big heavy hardcover or I would just keep it in my bag and carry it around constantly to chew on.
(Click on Einstein)
Intuition pumps are tools to analyze the logic of an argument or as Dennett calls them- ‘handy prosthetic imagination extenders’. “All really serious thinking is interpersonal; we think by challenging each other with our ideas,” he says. These ‘candidates for fixed points’ give you a focus on a topic that is very useful.
Each device is described in short one or two page chapters (sometimes longer for the trippier ideas- and there are deeply trippyideas.) Simple, proven devices like the classic ‘Occam’s Razor’ share the page with examples of bad tools such as ‘Boom Crutches’: props for misguided thinking that eventually explode and leave one flat on his back. Anyone who has a passing acquaintance with Deepak Chopra’s particular brand of blarney will laugh having finished the ‘Deepities’ chapter, a term invented by the teenage daughter of a colleague: “A deepity is a proposition that seems to be profound because it is logically ill-formed. It has at least two meanings and balances precariously between the them. One reading is false and on the other it would be earth-shattering if true.”
“Love is just a word.” Yes, “love” is just a word. True and trivial. As Dennett puts it, “Cheeseburger” is also just a word. Minus the quotations, love is just a word is false. As Dennett writes, “Whatever love is, it isn’t just a word. Love may an emotion, it may be the most wonderful phenomenon in human psychology or it may be just an illusion… but it isn’t a just a word.”
(Relatedly, I love this Random computer-generated Depak quote machine someone linked to on Facebook: http://www.wisdomofchopra.com)
Sturgeon’s Law is fun too and immediately applicable to music. With the tremendous amount of musical and artistic static out there these days, Sturgeon’s Law has been popping into my head much more frequently. Thankfully. “When people talk about the mystery novel, they mention The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep. When they talk about the western, they say there’s The Way West and Shane. But when they talk about science fiction, they call it “Buck Rogers stuff,” and they say “ninety percent of science fiction is crud.” Well, they’re right. Ninety percent of science fiction is crud. But then ninety percent of everything is crud, and it’s the ten percent that isn’t crud that is important, and the ten percent of science fiction that isn’t crud is as good or better than anything being written anywhere.” -writer Robert Sturgeon
Dennett observes: “A good moral to draw from this observation is that when you want to criticize a field, a genre, a discipline, an art form,… don’t waste your time and ours hooting at the crap! Go after the good stuff, or leave it alone. This advice is often ignored by idealogues intent on destroying the reputation of analytic philosophy, evolutionary psychology, sociology, cultural anthropology, macroeconomics, plastic surgery, improvisational theater, television sitcoms, philosophical theology, massage therapy, you name it. Let’s stipulate at the outset that there is a great deal of deplorable, stupid, second-rate stuff out there, of all sorts. Now, in order not to waste your time and try our patiences, make sure you concentrate on the best stuff you can find, the flagship examples extolled by the leaders in the field, the prize-winning entries, not the dregs.”
Maybe more simply: Don’t waste your time on garbage, or “If it isn’t worth doing, it isn’t worth doing well.”
(Click on Einstein)
Intuition pumps are tools to analyze the logic of an argument or as Dennett calls them- ‘handy prosthetic imagination extenders’. “All really serious thinking is interpersonal; we think by challenging each other with our ideas,” he says. These ‘candidates for fixed points’ give you a focus on a topic that is very useful.
Each device is described in short one or two page chapters (sometimes longer for the trippier ideas- and there are deeply trippyideas.) Simple, proven devices like the classic ‘Occam’s Razor’ share the page with examples of bad tools such as ‘Boom Crutches’: props for misguided thinking that eventually explode and leave one flat on his back. Anyone who has a passing acquaintance with Deepak Chopra’s particular brand of blarney will laugh having finished the ‘Deepities’ chapter, a term invented by the teenage daughter of a colleague: “A deepity is a proposition that seems to be profound because it is logically ill-formed. It has at least two meanings and balances precariously between the them. One reading is false and on the other it would be earth-shattering if true.”
“Love is just a word.” Yes, “love” is just a word. True and trivial. As Dennett puts it, “Cheeseburger” is also just a word. Minus the quotations, love is just a word is false. As Dennett writes, “Whatever love is, it isn’t just a word. Love may an emotion, it may be the most wonderful phenomenon in human psychology or it may be just an illusion… but it isn’t a just a word.”
(Relatedly, I love this Random computer-generated Depak quote machine someone linked to on Facebook: http://www.wisdomofchopra.com)
Sturgeon’s Law is fun too and immediately applicable to music. With the tremendous amount of musical and artistic static out there these days, Sturgeon’s Law has been popping into my head much more frequently. Thankfully. “When people talk about the mystery novel, they mention The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep. When they talk about the western, they say there’s The Way West and Shane. But when they talk about science fiction, they call it “Buck Rogers stuff,” and they say “ninety percent of science fiction is crud.” Well, they’re right. Ninety percent of science fiction is crud. But then ninety percent of everything is crud, and it’s the ten percent that isn’t crud that is important, and the ten percent of science fiction that isn’t crud is as good or better than anything being written anywhere.” -writer Robert Sturgeon
Dennett observes: “A good moral to draw from this observation is that when you want to criticize a field, a genre, a discipline, an art form,… don’t waste your time and ours hooting at the crap! Go after the good stuff, or leave it alone. This advice is often ignored by idealogues intent on destroying the reputation of analytic philosophy, evolutionary psychology, sociology, cultural anthropology, macroeconomics, plastic surgery, improvisational theater, television sitcoms, philosophical theology, massage therapy, you name it. Let’s stipulate at the outset that there is a great deal of deplorable, stupid, second-rate stuff out there, of all sorts. Now, in order not to waste your time and try our patiences, make sure you concentrate on the best stuff you can find, the flagship examples extolled by the leaders in the field, the prize-winning entries, not the dregs.”
Maybe more simply: Don’t waste your time on garbage, or “If it isn’t worth doing, it isn’t worth doing well.”
Woman Of Heart And Mind
10/05/14 07:46
An Affair To Remember
09/05/14 19:42
Even though I am exclusively an electric bass player, I don’t really listen to electric bassists all that much. There is of course a huge list of electric bassists who I love and are a deep part of my playing, it’s just not all that often that I hear a electric noise downstairs that makes me get out of bed to go investigate to see if someone has broken into the house.
I do listen to tons of music, both new and old. Nowadays the things that draw my ear are more often ‘the other’: a song form, drums, piano, the harmony, mysterious sonics of one kind or another, a great mix. If I think about bass it’s more likely to be how electric bass playing (my electric bass playing specifically) might work within whatever music I am hearing. I practice. I work with my sound. I scheme to get what’s in my head to come out of the speaker cabinet. I am just busy with my own thing and by now I suppose the die is cast in that department.
However, I do zero in quite often on the acoustic bass. A sizable majority of the music I listen to has upright bass as it’s anchor. This has always been a bit of a personal paradox as I am an electric player who loves to play improvised music. So why not play upright? I have always felt that you kind of have to choose one or the other, acoustic or electric- or it chooses you. The sheer amount of time that it takes to really develop your own voice kind of makes this choice a necessity. And there are few bassists if any that I can think of whose playing on both instruments I care about equally.
It seems that Ron Carter feels this same way about doubling to some degree:
He only briefly dabbled on electric in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, approaching it in a way that I absolutely love (including improvising using harmonics with Joe Henderson on Power To The People as early as 1969- Jaco fans step back!) While everyone knows what a master musician he is and the stunning breadth of his work on acoustic bass, I have only recently come to really love his brief turn around the room with the red-headed stepchild of jazz music. Earthy and elegant, just like his upright playing.
With Joe Henderson:
With Gary Bartz:
I do listen to tons of music, both new and old. Nowadays the things that draw my ear are more often ‘the other’: a song form, drums, piano, the harmony, mysterious sonics of one kind or another, a great mix. If I think about bass it’s more likely to be how electric bass playing (my electric bass playing specifically) might work within whatever music I am hearing. I practice. I work with my sound. I scheme to get what’s in my head to come out of the speaker cabinet. I am just busy with my own thing and by now I suppose the die is cast in that department.
However, I do zero in quite often on the acoustic bass. A sizable majority of the music I listen to has upright bass as it’s anchor. This has always been a bit of a personal paradox as I am an electric player who loves to play improvised music. So why not play upright? I have always felt that you kind of have to choose one or the other, acoustic or electric- or it chooses you. The sheer amount of time that it takes to really develop your own voice kind of makes this choice a necessity. And there are few bassists if any that I can think of whose playing on both instruments I care about equally.
It seems that Ron Carter feels this same way about doubling to some degree:
He only briefly dabbled on electric in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, approaching it in a way that I absolutely love (including improvising using harmonics with Joe Henderson on Power To The People as early as 1969- Jaco fans step back!) While everyone knows what a master musician he is and the stunning breadth of his work on acoustic bass, I have only recently come to really love his brief turn around the room with the red-headed stepchild of jazz music. Earthy and elegant, just like his upright playing.
With Joe Henderson:
With Gary Bartz: