Hawaii, part two

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Lovely as it is here in Kona, it does have kind of a Disneyland quality. Anna did a great job of getting us out of the tourist rut for our second day here. She was poking around food web sites looking for interesting places to eat. That led her to a discussion of sustainably-sourced fish, and from there she started reading about aquaculture. It turns out there’s some interesting stuff going on with fish farming right nearby, so being the colossal science dorks that we are, we thought we’d go check it out.

Kona Airport is on a big lava plain sticking out into the ocean. It’s surrounded on three sides by an industrial park owned and run by the awkwardly named Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii Authority. It’s the site of a former alternative energy project that now is home to all kinds of aquaculture and related ocean science. While an industrial park next to the airport might seem like an odd place to visit during a tropical vacation, know that it’s still Hawaii, so there are the same incredible black rock beaches and palm trees and exotic foliage as everywhere else.

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Hawaii, part one

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First of all, what are we even doing here? Anna’s dad had been sitting on a timeshare for years, and he finally concluded that he was never going to use it. So he offered it to us, and we thought, great, Hawaii. Anna’s been before, but I haven’t been anywhere remotely tropical, much less here. So we decided to use up the last of Anna’s frequent flier miles from her former life working for international NGOs, and here we are.

We flew out of Boston because there weren’t any mileage flights available from NYC. Besides, it was a chance to see my cousin Jen and meet her new baby. We spent a jolly night, and the next morning Jen took us to Logan. We landed in Kona after our twelve hours of plane and airport time. Kona doesn’t have jetways; we walked down stairs to the tarmac. It’s been a while since I did that, it made me feel like one of the Beatles. Kona’s airport is open-air, with a roof but no walls. It was nice waiting for our luggage at the baggage claim in a gentle tropical breeze.

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The mystical tritone

I’ve picked up some new guitar students lately, so I’m once again doing a lot of explaining what a tritone is and why people should care. Whenever I find myself explaining something a lot, I like to encapsulate it as a blog post. So here we go.

A tritone is the interval between the notes C and F-sharp. It’s also known as the flat fifth or sharp fourth. It’s two minor thirds, three whole steps, six half steps, or half an octave. On the piano, count six keys up or down. On guitar, count six frets.

The tritone is the heart of the entire western tonal system. The clearest way to define the key center of a piece of music is to look at how tritones create tension and resolve it. Tritones are also central to the sound of the blues and blues tonality, which form the basis of most of the music I like.

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Capturing sound

I was doing a frivolous Google search for the Simpsons episode where Bart, Nelson, Milhouse and Ralph form a boy band. They’re in the studio singing, and they sound terrible, until the producer pushes a huge button labeled “studio magic.” Then suddenly they sound like the Backstreet Boys. While I was digging through the Google results, I came across a book called Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music by Mark Katz. He references the Simpsons gag as an example of how recording technology has undermined our notions of authenticity in music. There are a couple of chapters of the book online, and it’s great stuff.

It’s hard for us now to imagine a time when recorded sound was a wondrous technological novelty.

Those gathered around the phonograph were experiencing music in ways unimaginable not so many years before. They were hearing performers they could not see and music they could not normally bring into their homes. They could listen to the same pieces over and again without change. And they ultimately decided what they were to hear, and when, where, and with whom.

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Improvising electronica

The other day Brian Eno was on NPR talking about his process. He likes to have people walk into the studio without any preconceived ideas or written out material. Then he has the musicians improvise within certain constraints. Usually these constraints are more about a mood or a vibe than a particular musical structure. After recording some improvisation, Eno edits and loops the high points into a shape. Miles Davis used this same process for some of his electric albums, like In A Silent Way.

Miles and Eno seem radical, but in a way, they’re just boiling the usual compositional process down to its raw essentials. Really, all composition and songwriting consist of improvising within constraints and then sequencing the best ideas into shape. Usually this improvisation happens in short spurts, inside the composer’s head or alone at an instrument. Using a recording device instead of a sheet of paper can make the process more bodily and immediate, and can help get at playful ideas that might not squeak past the mind’s internal judges and editors during the relatively slow process of writing stuff on paper. Michael Jackson wrote his best stuff by improvising into a tape recorder. There’s something about improvising a performance while being recorded that focuses the mind wonderfully.

Since 2004 I’ve been writing and recording with Barbara Singer in different configurations. The first version was her idea, a band called Blopop. She had some techno versions of pop songs programmed into her MC-909 groovebox, and the idea was that she’d sing and DJ, and I’d improvise guitar on top.

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Empire State Of Mind

Hip-hop isn’t usually big on chord progressions, but “Empire State Of Mind” by Jay-Z and Alicia Keys has an awesome set of changes.

Because Alicia Keys was involved, I thought she might have written the chord progression. But no, it’s built from samples of the intro to “Love On A Two-Way Street” by The Moments.

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Busta Rhymes has got you all in check

Sampling has the power to bridge gaps between seemingly widely different musical styles. You can take something lame, sample it, place it in a new context and make it hot. Busta Rhymes’ classic “Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Can See” is a prime example.

The devastating beat, produced by Shamello and first-timer Buddha, is based on sped-up samples of “Sweet Green Fields” by Seals and Crofts. Listen at 0:17.

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Music in The Social Network

Over the weekend I went to see The Social Network, and totally enjoyed it. Hurray, movies that glamorize angry nerds! My friend Alex asked me if it’s better than the classic Pirates Of Silicon Valley. Nothing could be better than Anthony Michael Hall as Bill Gates, but Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerburg is good too.

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The Mad Men theme and Autumn Leaves

Mad Men’s obsessive devotion to period accuracy has one conspicuous exception: its hip-hop theme song by RJD2. The track plays under one of television’s all-time great opening title sequences, which I can’t embed because AMC doesn’t understand how internet marketing works. Click this collage I made to watch on YouTube.

The theme song is an edited-down version of RJD2’s backing track for Aceyalone’s “A Beautiful Mine.”

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Cold Sweat in the Terrordome

The internet is home to a lot of questionably legal breakbeat collections like Drumaddikt and Cyberworm’s Sample Blog. “Cold Sweat” by James Brown is always included in these collections. It’s beloved equally by hip-hop and drum n bass producers. The break is at 4:30.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=pyijSTJ_BCo

There’s probably a whole generation of producers who have sliced and diced this beat without having heard the actual song. I’m sure the same is true of “The Funky Drummer” and “Apache.” Beyond the break, “Cold Sweat” is a remarkable piece of music, way out ahead of its time. On James Brown’s album of the same name, it’s sitting alongside jazz standards like “Nature Boy” and some boilerplate blues and R&B. Compared to those more traditional songs, “Cold Sweat” sounds like it belongs in another era entirely. It has a radically simple two-chord structure and an African-influenced intricacy to its rhythmic groove, and it still sounds pretty fresh more than thirty years later.

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