For my dissertation on hip-hop educators, I’m creating a mixtape of remixed interviews with my research participants. Here I talk through the process of remixing an interview with Toni Blackman that I recorded on August 20, 2020 in Prospect Park. The remix is made from the eighteen most interesting/pertinent/relevant minutes of an hour and a quarter worth of audio.
Continue reading “Toni Blackman interview remix – What is hip-hop education?”
For my dissertation on hip-hop educators, I’m creating a mixtape of remixed interviews with my research participants. In this post, I talk through the process of remixing an interview with Martin Urbach that I conducted on July 30, 2020 in Prospect Park. The remix includes the highlights of about two hours of recorded audio.
Continue reading “Martin Urbach interview remix – What is hip-hop education?”
My four-year-old daughter is currently super into “Children of Production” from Parliament’s classic 1976 album The Clones of Dr Funkenstein, their followup to Mothership Connection. If that album called down the holy mothership, this one introduces you to its occupants. This is the kind of groove that sounds effortless until you try playing it.
Here’s a live version, a bit more spaced-out:
On the studio version, the groove announces its subtle strangeness in the very first half second of the track. It begins with Jerome Brailey’s drums, Bootsy Collins’ bass, and (I assume) Bernie Worrell’s electric piano bumping together on the downbeat. Except they aren’t playing the downbeat, they’re playing the sixteenth note before the downbeat. The downbeat itself is silent! Then the rest of the band kicks in on the eighth note after the downbeat. That is a lot of rhythmic information to pack into a single beat’s worth of musical time! Let’s unpack.
Join me and Will Kuhn every Sunday at 5 pm on Twitch! We talk lesson planning, music tech, beatmaking, songwriting, and the joys of teaching music in a pandemic.
There is no corpus of music I know better than the albums and concert recordings of the Grateful Dead. Some people memorize the works of Shakespeare; I, for better or for worse, spent my youth memorizing the works of Jerry. This puts me in a great position to sample and remix them. However, while I’ve learned approximately all of the Dead’s songs on the guitar, until recently I hadn’t done much with their recordings. As it turns out, the Dead are hard to sample. Their music is full of cool ideas, but they didn’t often realize those ideas cleanly in sound. This did not stop John Oswald from making his breathtakingly ambitious Greyfolded album, and it didn’t stop me. But it is a challenge.
When I was analyzing “Help on the Way->Slipknot!->Franklin’s Tower,” I started by warping out the recording in Ableton Live. In other words, I aligned the track to the bars-and-beats grid, which makes it easier to loop and annotate sections of it. Once you’ve got a track all warped out, then remixing it becomes effortless. So I did, and it was so much fun that I felt inspired to do a bunch more Dead songs. My self-imposed rules: use drum machines and breakbeats, but otherwise only use samples of the Dead and their side projects. Here are the results:
Before he wrecked his brain with heroin in the 1980s, Jerry Garcia was my favorite guitarist in the world. I was so saturated in his music during my key guitar-learning years that now everything I play tends to sound like him, up to and including Bach violin partitas.
Here’s my single favorite four-bar passage of Jerry’s, from “The Music Never Stopped” on Blues for Allah. Listen at 3:47.
In high school, my friend Aubin, who was much cooler than me, told me I needed to go listen to some Parliament. I bought a cassette of The Clones of Dr Funkenstein, probably just because of its title. I liked it immediately, how could you not? But thirty-ish years later, I am still struggling to wrap my head around its implications. George Clinton’s playfulness can easily mislead you into thinking he’s a clown, but he is really more like a prophet.
There’s plenty of good analysis out there of the P-Funk mythology and its place in Afrofuturism. That is fascinating and important material. But I don’t see enough written about the actual music. So here I will do my part to rectify the imbalance, starting with the song that calls down the landing of the Holy Mothership.
For proper context, check out this live version of “Mothership Connection” from Halloween 1976–start at 37:25. It’s almost twice as long as the studio version, even though the tempo is faster. The lead vocalist is the incredible Glenn Goins, who died of cancer just two years after this was filmed.
In fifth grade, my class studied the Middle Ages, which my fantasy-nerd self adored. I have a memory from that time of playing “Greensleeves” on the recorder. This memory is probably not accurate, though, because “Greensleeves” was much too hard for me to play. There are some tricky non-diatonic notes, and the two halves of the tune are connected by a leap of a minor seventh. On the other hand, those same features make it an ongoing object of fascination for me as an adult musician. Before we dig into the harmony, first let’s clear up some of the mythology. Sorry to be a buzzkill, but no, Henry VIII didn’t write the song, and, no, Lady Greensleeves was not a prostitute.
Here’s a plausible-sounding period rendition of the tune, with some anachronistic anime graphics.
Like any centuries-old folk song, there is no single definitive version of “Greensleeves.” Instead, there are endless variants, all of which emerge from an undocumented aural tradition. (From Ian Pittaway’s invaluable blog, I learned that there was a 17th century version called “Greene Sleues and Countenaunce in Countenaunce is Greene Sleues.” That wins.) Most variants of the tune use broadly the same melody, but with one key difference: sometimes they use the boring scale, and sometimes they use the cool scale. I explain what I mean by that below.
Music theory is hard. Its naming conventions make it harder. Scale names are especially confusing. For example, the diatonic modes are named after places in and around ancient Greece. I’m sure that Aristoxenes found these names memorable and meaningful in 300 BC, and maybe medieval European theorists felt that way too, but now they are no help at all. The names “harmonic minor” and “melodic minor” are a little better, because they at least try to describe the scales’ respective functions. But those functions only apply in historical music. It’s routine in current music to make melodies from harmonic minor and harmonies from melodic minor. You can see why people hate music theory.
So, here’s my proposal: let’s rename the scales so that their names give you a better idea of their function and/or cultural context, and to advance the larger goal of decolonizing music theory.
Continue reading “Let’s rename the scales something more memorable”
For the past year or so, Will Kuhn and I have been writing a book for Oxford University Press called Electronic Music School: A Contemporary Approach to Teaching Musical Creativity. Late last night, we submitted the finished manuscript to Oxford. There are still multiple rounds of copyedits and page proofs to do before it hits the shelves, but the hard part is over.
The book is for music educators who want to develop classes in music technology, production, beatmaking, songwriting, or film scoring. It includes a full curriculum’s worth of project plans that Will created for his wildly successful music tech program at Lebanon High School in Ohio. We also talk about methods for developing your own projects, keeping your material current, purchasing and maintaining gear, budgeting and fundraising, selling the idea to your school, teaching music tech online, and the radically progressive educational philosophy animating our work. I’ll keep you posted about the release date.
