Drummers and clicktracks, again...

A few weeks back, John found the following out on reddit:

http://musicmachinery.com/2009/03/02/in-search-of-the-click-track/?rss

We found this fun, and e-mail discussion ensued. I'd offered this:

When I first read that article, the drummer I thought of was Steve Gadd: a favorite from my fusion-listening youth who I always thought created a great groove. I suspect that going over the studio albums I owned back in high school - Chick Corea, Brecker Brothers, Steve Kahn, etc - would reveal early click-track use, but who knows.

And Dan responded:

Steve Gadd is well-known in the music community, both for deep groove and drug use. The song "Aja" on the album of the same name is legendary.

...which led me to:

I've read stories of Gadd's Aja session that describe him as all business, showing up and burning through the track in one or two takes. He was in his drug-using years, so who knows how altered he was - I suppose he was to some extent through all those years.

Anyway, I downloaded the package referenced in John's linked article and had it look at some tracks. Four of them are Gadd (Steely Dan - Aja; Paul Simon - Late in the Evening; Steve Khan - Daily Bulls & Tightrope), and one should be from the pre-click-track era: Gene Krupa on Goodman's Sing, Sing, Sing.

Gadd tracks:

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Gene Krupa - Benny Goodman. Probably 60-70 years ago is before the click-track age...

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The Khan pieces (Daily Bulls, Tightrope) have very steady tempos, so you'd expect quality players to maintain a solid groove, but even so I guess there was some artificial help. Beyond all the coke they might have been on...

The Simon piece feels like click-track too: the slowdown in the middle is when all the horns come in (edit?). Aja and Sing, Sing, Sing look more organic, and I'm pretty impressed by Krupa and the Goodman band keeping basic tempo solid for eight minutes.

BTW, I also tried to capture tempos for a live version of Weather Report's Teen Town, but it crashed the program. Not a Pastorius fan, I guess.

The Case Against Clowns

Clowns are bad. My daughter has given me insight into clowns and their sordid ways. My daughter is terrified of clowns. At first I didn't understand why, but I fully understood that her fear was real, not feigned.

When I'd take my daughter with me to the grocery store she'd ask "there aren't any clowns there right?" I'd laugh and say, "no, of course not". One day, to my surprise, and to my daughter's horror, there was a damn clown at the grocery store! I think the store's management, in their ignorance of clown ways, might have hired the clown to make stupid balloon wiener dogs and amuse the kids. The unintended consequence was a significant degradation of my daughter's trust in me.

Having recently become aware of the problem I now see clowns everywhere. Good luck having a parade without those S.O.Bs. You may see a mini-cooper and think "Wow what a cool little car." I think, "I bet there are 8 or 10 clowns somewhere that can't wait to jam their bulbous nose, goofy painted clown butts in that little car."

Research has shown that Coulrophobia, the fear of clowns, is common in children, and is well known in adolescents and even adults. The fear is related to not being able to discern a clown's sometimes malicious intent from his facial expressions which are hidden by his ridiculous painted on smile.

I say jump back Bozo. Get your big shoe wearing ass a real job and leave us alone!

RFC standard white socks

I was sorting laundry today, and had a geek moment. Sometimes I have fun socks, but mostly they're just white. Target white. However, as I have bought them at different times, there are fourteen different kinds of white: gray or not at the heels, gray or not at the toes, various sized little ripples at the top. I am spending considerable mental effort matching little ripples and various grays! I would like an RFC for plain white socks. Then they would be standard and I wouldn't have to do all the damn matching.

Computing wattage

I am pondering a new computer for gaming. The dudes I game with all have recently replaced their rigs, so I'm the holdout. They're PCI Express, I'm still AGP. Many are the reasons I don't want to buy something new: $$, time, and abusing the earth. To address the last, I pulled out our Kill-A-Watt and hooked the computer power bar into it.

Network-only: 22W
Computer on but screen off (or in "I'm off" blinky mode): 106W
Computer in normal mode (or with screen saver, which is equivalent): 174-200W (usually 174)
Computer while playing video games: 200-220W

I suspect if I buy a newer computer, it'll be much higher wattage. In particular, Tom's Hardware says powerful video cards are not very good at dialing themselves back when rendering Firefox or Word.

What is your computer rig, and what is its wattage?

DF

A song

I enjoyed this cover of "How Deep is Your Love" by The Bad Plus.

They are a band, united in musical purpose. Wendy's singing is wonderfully spare.

DF

I'm not really into poetry

I don't get most poetry. Maybe I'm not creative enough, imaginative enough or thoughtful enough. That said, I do like Billy Collins. You just can't beat Litany. The Revenant isn't too bad either.

Thought versus emotion

Here is an experiment in the telepatch. I am attempting to write liner notes for my almost-complete album (tentatively titled "Thought versus emotion"). I can't think of anything I'm interested in writing that others would care to read. So, I just started writing, with the result below. Reactions?

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In Al Gore's book "The Assault on Reason" he starts by asking, "Why do reason, logic and truth seem to play a sharply diminished role in the way America now makes important decisions?" In our historic 2008 election, Barack Obama said, ".. children can't achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white." The truth is, a white youth with a book also stands accused, or at least they did when I was in school. I was called "four-eyes" because I had glasses, and "professor" because I was smart. How many people have you heard say, "I was never any good at math" to the smallest demand on their numeracy, and everyone smiles and laughs! My personal favorite is having someone hand me the check at a restaurant, saying, "You were a math major" .. as if math were years of study of how to figure 20%. (It's not.) I am saying we don't think, and our society says it's okay to not think, by now encourages us not to think. What we do is feel.

Feeling is cool, feeling is gangsta, feeling is great. Movies make you feel, music makes you feel, advertisements, and definitely politicians make you feel. Liberal politicos simply "raise awareness" of issues, as if being aware of soul-killing tragedy #837 is as good as doing something about it. Conservatives like Rush Limbaugh or the mercifully banished Sarah Palin do the same (though they don't call it that), inciting their followers to rants and bigotry through feeling. I am claiming, then, that reason is good and under attack, while feeling is used for ill but widely admired.

However, it's easy to tell the opposite. How many good ideas died quietly because something should be studied more carefully? Many talk of "death by committee", but there is also "analysis paralysis" at the individual level. (I know something about that.) Feeling bursts through barriers. It focuses our attention, makes us respond "without
thinking" as they say. Feeling is a call to action. You don't think alive, you feel alive.

So where does music lie in this spectrum? The media and common wisdom describe it easily as feeling. Great artists are always quoted in emotional terms, and often judged that way as well. However, anyone who has actually studied music or performed it should recognize the power of thought. Technique is often gained through rigorous repetition, but also through painstaking, compulsive analysis of physicality. Even deeper, the reason that music evokes feeling is often a combination of intuitive understanding of what universally makes people respond, and a knowledge or mastery of the underlying vocabulary of a particular musical discipline. Jazz sounds like jazz, punk sounds like punk, because the performers have picked up the right accent for that music.

And what of the ultimate challenge, to create your own vocabulary, or at least your own dialect, of a musical language, one that makes logical sense and inspires great feeling? Well, wouldn't that be something.