My friend and sometime musical collaborater Leo Ferguson is releasing an album of his adventurous jazz compositions and arrangements. Leo Ferguson Ensemble (2011) by Leo Ferguson As part of the album’s extended liner notes, I interviewed Leo on May 5, 2011. Here’s an edited transcript; you can also hear the audio on Leo’s site.
Author Archives: Ethan
Na Na Na Na
If you’ve been following my internet presence, you know how much I love flowcharts. So naturally, I was amused by this Randall Munroe cartoon: I was reminded of it walking down the street the other day, because someone in our neighborhood in Brooklyn was blasting a dancehall track from their car that sampled the “na, …
Bach and Paul Simon
Since it was Easter yesterday, Anna wanted to listen to Bach’s St Matthew Passion while we did stuff around the house. A certain passage grabbed my ear, a hymn called “O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden” — in English, “O Sacred Head, Now Wounded.” This beautiful tune was immediately familiar to me, but I couldn’t …
Facebook and multiple identites
Here’s an alarming Mark Zuckerberg quote from The Facebook Effect by David Kirpatrick: You have one identity… The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly… Having two identities for yourself is an example of …
Lost In The World
This week I’ve been all about Kanye West’s “Lost In The World,” the most gripping track on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. Kanye is one of the few commercial producers with a high enough profile to be able to license whatever samples he wants, so he carries the banner of memetastic collage-based music in the …
The Facebook Effect
Last night I caught a lecture by David Kirkpatrick on his book The Facebook Effect. This post is going to be about Kirkpatrick’s discussion of the book, not the book itself, since I just got it last night and haven’t started reading it yet. But his talk certainly conveyed the flavor. Kirkpatrick had one significant …
Promoting music through social media
As part of New York Social Media Week, I attended a panel entitled “The Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy of Social Media as Music’s Savior.” It was first thing in the morning, which really asks a lot from the music hipsters. I would normally have just live-tweeted this thing, but the wi-fi in the place was …
Diminished chords and the blues
The blues is a good entry path for beginner guitarists. If you learn the standard fifteen chords and the blues scale, you’ll be well on your way. However, there’s one crucial piece of additional music vocabulary you need to fully inhabit blues tonality, and that is the mysterious diminished seventh chord. To make a diminished …
The roof is on fire
My quest to track down the origin of the most persistent recurring hip-hop memes brings me to this chant: The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire We don’t need no water, let the motherf***er burn The chant made its first appearance in the hip-hop canon in “The Roof Is On Fire” by Rock …
White people and hip-hop
A little while back I went to a screening and discussion at NYU of Blacking Up: Hip-Hop’s Remix of Race and Identity, a documentary about the wigger phenomenon by Robert Clift. I’m a very white person who has been heavily involved with “black” music over the years, like for example rapping an Ice Cube song …