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.
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, na na na na, na na na naaah na na na na na na” part from “Land Of A Thousand Dances.” Then I got to thinking, this cartoon is actually an inspired recipe for a mashup.
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 quite place it. Anna says she’s sung it many times in church. Bach didn’t write it; the text is an older Latin poem translated into German by Paul Gerhardt, set by Johann Crüger to a secular love song called “Mein G’müt ist mir verwirret” by Hans Leo Hassler.
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 a lack of integrity.
How nice for Mark Zuckerberg that he doesn’t feel the need to keep any part of himself private. Zuckerberg doesn’t have an identity outside of his work, which is common enough in Silicon Valley startup culture but is neither possible nor desirable for most of us. When family members have illnesses, or friends are feeling down, or I’m thinking or feeling something that doesn’t reflect well on me in that moment, how is that any of my coworkers’ business? Zuckerberg understands human psychology very well within the context of college and startup culture, but Facebook is an increasingly poor fit for the complexities of my social life.
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 mainstream, and god bless him for it. Click through for the song on YouTube.
There’s nothing going on in contemporary music that interests me more than the vibe of this track. The blend of electronic and tribal drums and Auto-tuned singing draws on the same sonic palette as “Love Lockdown,” which continues to be my favorite song of the 21st century, but “Lost In The World” is much bigger and denser.
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 advantage over the makers of The Social Network: participation by Mark Zuckerburg. Kirkpatrick loves Facebook and reveres Zuckerburg, so his book isn’t exactly a hard-hitting expose. Techcrunch accompanies their review of the book with this image:
I don’t think Kirkpatrick is wrong; Facebook is an undeniable phenomenon and Zuck is a remarkable guy. I just don’t love FB as unreservedly as Kirkpatrick does.
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 too weak, and besides, I figured it deserved a blog post. So here’s the more coherent, edited version of what I planned to post on Twitter. Since the event was dominated by Kanye West from the title on down, I’ll be featuring Twitter-centric pictures of him.
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 seventh chord, you start on any note, go up a minor third, then another, then another. Here are the notes in Cdim7:
You can also derive this chord from C7: take each note in the chord except for C and slide it down a half step.
This video explains how dim7 chords relate to other seventh chords. Here are some good guitar fingerings for dim7 chords.
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 Master Scott & The Dynamic Three, the B-side to their 1984 single “Request Line.” “The Roof Is On Fire” ended up being way more popular.
The recorded version of “The Roof Is On Fire” leaves out the mofo line. In 1984 people mostly weren’t using curses in hip-hop recordings, which now seems charmingly quaint. In live shows, Rock Master Scott and the Dynamic Three were less demure, and when they led the crowd in the chant, the mofo was included.
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 in public on more than one occasion. So this is an issue close to my heart. Here’s the trailer:
And here are the first three minutes of the film:
