miscellaneous
telematic music for peace
Telemusic mastermind Chris Chafe brought this new project to my attention last week. The same concept-project I worked on over the summer is now flourishing with a huge global consciousness arising as a result. This concert is sponsored by the United Nations, and featured some of today’s most respected creative improvisers. This is truly breakthrough technology being used for all the right reasons – bringing people together to create. Featuring such luminaries as:
Jane Ira Bloom
Oliver Lake
Samir Chatterjee
Mark Dresser
More info from their website:
telematic performance and entering the matrix
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
photo by al kay
Dave Douglas invited me back to the 2009 Banff International Workshop in Jazz and Creative Music where I led a number of the “telejazz” ensembles. These ensembles were very unique – we played live with remote musicians all over the world in real time. Envision this: half the musicians interacting live to another team of musicians simultaneously across seriously fast network lines, we used the CAnet4 network, that’s uncompressed audio traveling about 70% the speed of light yielding incredibly low latency. In fact, the latency was so minimal that at a medium tempo, the lag was barely noticeable, it even felt as if it were part of the swing of things:
I know what you’re thinking, you’ve heard of this sorta thing before – it’s true, remote tele-conferencing has been around for awhile, but this is different than protocols like ISDN and SourceConnect, it’s way more simple, not to mention free & open source. It really was unlike any other long distance studio connection I’ve worked with before. Professor Chris Chafe from Stanford University is paving the way for this new new technology, and if you want to try it out with your friends, you can! Give it a shot - it’s called JackTrip and can be easily found on Google Code. A huge shot out to the team at CCRMA and the SoundWire group for getting it as stable as it is today!
The production for these “telejazz” events was unbelievable – we used over twenty audio engineers for each rehearsal and performance, and upwards of 10 musicians at each location. Just to make things more complicated, we made these virtual performances open to the public. It was quite the space-age/pioneering feat.
You will be hearing of this kind of thing happening more and more – just think of its application in rehearsing: If your band is spread out across several cities, a telematic rehearsal could be the ticket to bring everyone together. You don’t have to be a huge tech nerd to make this work either – it’s really easy to navigate.
The most difficult obstacle was the lack of visual eye contact with the remote musicians. Quite often form changes, ends of solos and vamps are easily cued with a head nod or a look straight in the eye but with only an aural reference, learning how to play with musicians in a completely different city than you took some getting used to! It’s kind of like playing with someone in a different isolation booth in a studio, but you can’t see them at all.
We tried to compensate a little and hooked up video cams on each side via Skype. But the video lag on skype was far greater than the audio, so we couldn’t functionally use the video reference for any inter-musician communication.
Below is a an excerpt of a podcast of the telejazz series (be sure to check out other free banff centre music & sound podcasts on iTunes U. The music playing in the background is from the telejazz performance – it’s a tune of mine called “Opalesque” – the bass player and the tenor saxophonist were in a different city for this particular tune.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
For a great NPR Jazz post written by Dave Douglas on Jazz and Broadband technology, Click Here!
using technology and still being jazzy
There have been a lot of questions lately about jazz, technology, composing, performing and what it takes (and means) to create music in this day and age. The thoughts and questions in this post highlight a few interesting tidbits on music composition & production:
nothing new: ‘recorded’ jazz is much different than ‘live’ jazz.
Many jazz musicians today only record a live performance, it makes sense – the feeling of a performance is best suited on a stage in front of an audience. The reasoning is simple: there is a special energy on stage.
There is also another kind of energy that exists within a studio. Instrumentalists spend years developing a ‘sound’ on their instrument, but many seem to only spend hours when it comes to the sound of their music on album. Don’t these musicians realize that the studio is also an instrument?
The recording studio is, of course an artificial environment. Yet because it is artificial certain rules can be broken. Those musicians who ‘break the rules’ creatively gain an entirely new canvas on which to paint their music.
The studio is a place where time, space, pitch and timbre can be manipulated:
It’s a place where you can compose using sounds.
Classical music recordings undergo hundreds of tweaks to ensure the most flawless, virtuosic performance possible. Jazz dogma states that this is a sin punishable by death, yet musicians have been utilizing current technology to broaden the scope of their music for centuries – example: harpsichord -> piano. I think people get scared of the word “edit”.
You can still be improvisatory, you can still be creative and compositional – the studio is just like any other instrument, all it needs is practice.
thoughts on ‘doing it live’
If the studio becomes your instrument, you too can use it live.
I had an email conversation not long ago when someone asked me about doing some of my studio stuff live, I confessed it was a topic that I have spent great deal of time contemplating but have not spent much time perfecting. There are many good ways of incorporating audio production live, and below are a few common pitfalls:
Death by vamps:
If you want ‘background tracks’ on stage, the trick is not to generate loopy material but to create loads of composed sounds & forms that can develop and be interactive, the goal here is avoiding the trap of over-repetition. If the musicians are playing to a click, the flavor of live spontaneity can go out the window very quickly. However, if you give musicians something they can relate to, they will easily vibe to it: Instead of click-based tracks, make whole parts for a band to play around with.
Death by quantization:
You can ‘program’ live-sounding bits and bites using real sounds, with a real, human rhythmic feel. Jazz has always been about the groove, feeling time, feeling swing – you can actually make a computer groove, but it takes a helluva lot more thought and effort than a few quantization settings – in fact, quantization can be quite musically devastating by itself.
Instead, try sampling yourself.
To do all these sorts of things live, there has to be a strong focus on the composed/designed material. Even the best electronic musicians start with ideas they have already spent much time polishing. Improvisation will ensure if you build libraries of mini-forms and/or sounds that you can freely execute and arrange on-the-fly. It’s just like building your own vocabulary.
inspiring reads
Often I post the latest gig or recording I’m scheming, but perhaps it’s time for an expansion of perspective. I subscribe to about 100 blogs and so far this past week I have come across a few remarkable paragraphs that are worth sharing:
Here is composer Eric Whitacre’s post on composition competitions and losing:
As a composer you are going to get turned down a lot, by conductors, by music publishers, by critics; it’s all just part of the gig. Entering competitions and not winning is a great way to get used to the lifestyle, the drive to just keep writing, forging ahead. For me, it’s been a way to develop an ‘inner-compass’, a sort of quiet confidence that it doesn’t really matter if I win or lose; the work alone is it’s own reward.
If you are unfamiliar with Eric’s work, particularly his Choral pieces – I highly recommend. Truly gorgeous, beautiful writing. I’ve been following him for quite awhile now. I was particularly stunned when he said he never won an ASCAP Young Composers Award… I thought everybody gets those things! He goes on:
But here’s the thing: I’m glad I’ve never won. It makes me feel like an outsider, makes me feel misunderstood, keeps me hungry, all the things that are essential tools for being a composer. You’ll be better for losing, because in your heart you’ll know you should have won, and the injustice will help drive you forward.
That’s an important point to remember: it is injustice. Composition competitions are hopelessly biased. The juries do their best, but they are just human beings looking at a lot of scores, all through their own personal opinion of what constitutes a ‘good’ piece. (Years after a student competition at Juilliard I was told by a jury member that they had rejected the score to my string transcription of Water Night – without even listening to the recording – because it looked too ’simple’ to be a sophisticated piece. I remember thinking, “but the simplicity is the whole frickin’ point!”).
Over here, Roger Bourland writes about leaving behind the comforts of academia:
I love being a composer and what it has afforded me in this life and this world. I have loved the time spent composing it, playing it in progress for my close friends, and most especially, having premieres of new pieces. I went into this profession knowing I would not ever be “famous” like the Beethoven club, and have accepted that.
It shouldn’t be relevant to anyone as to whether what you’ve done in our life lasts beyond your lifetime. You’ll be dead, or at least, not here. Your music is important here and now, and that’s enough.
