Mantra
First, I thought I’d start with some funky tunes…
If you’re at work and you don’t have speakers or can’t hit play, you are missing out.
So hit play:
Welcome to Andre 2000, a blog about music, news & current events, politics & technology, the Internet/online media & social media, old cars & great stories, sure a little politics/culture/environment, and even life in general sometimes.
All sorts of stuff is discussed here so enjoy and stay tuned – literally.
As of about the end of 2008, there are 4.8 million blogs out there, so there is a lot of competition. My goal is to keep you riveted to this blog with a stream of music and information that you’d never find elsewhere in a single place. I have my own formula for paying attention to the world; it’s history that led up to today and why I think some things are the way they are, for better or for worse. This site is basically a record of that consciousness, via discussion of all of this stuff. It is a record of how I’ve been able to research/filter/disseminate my own conclusions in today’s culture of hyper-information that increasingly seems to become infinitely more complex. My goal is to, flat out, blow your mind with the information stream here.
Why the site name?
As you probably know, “Andre 2000″ is a play on the name of André Lauren Benjamin, the popular musician/rapper from the band Outkast, otherwise known as “Andre 3000.” While our style, influences, and outputs differ (it would be pretty hard to keep up with Andre3000), he is an awesome representation of the funkiness and diversity this blog will have. Also, because the blog is a discussion about Today (notice Today with a capitol T), the name is appropriate…
To see what kind of music I actually like, check out the blog and click the “music” category. I listen to almost everything but my heart lies in funkier jazz based tunes, funk, or jazz itself; modern translations of old bebop complexity. These songs are later, tunes that can trace their roots to the Bebop, with stressed 3rds and 7ths on the musical scale. These are sort of “indicator” or “message” notes, that accent that the player of that instrument really knows his scales and how to pronounce each one differently. Sort of like saying “Nevada” or “Oregon” correctly, or sort of like someone having a complex conversation, and to doing it cleanly…
..And in this case, doing it funky…
I learned alot of this in high school from an influential jazz professor at the Northfield Mount Hermon school in Massachusetts. Back then I was a saxophone player and was also getting into bass guitar and the upright bass. I stopped playing years ago (and no, I do not play the piano), I’m just a fan. But I am definitely a fan.
But no matter how busy I’ve been, I’ve always found the time to listen to good jazz and jazz based music. There is nothing as amazing to me as a musician who knows his stuff, and can communicate it well. When you are a musician sometimes there are these moments when something sounds right and you get goose bumps. I admit it, I take the easy way out by basically just listen a lot. On a good week I’ll have maybe 2 or 3 of these moments. A large part of my life is my iPod in my car and my hard drive of thousands and thousands of songs, 95% of which are probably “quite rare.” As a result, it is very often that I hear a song on my ipod that I’ve never heard before or maybe only heard once or twice. I keep it on random and skip through a lot so I always have a new succession of new or old music.
Why did I choose these songs for this page?
Why did I even put music on this page anyway?
The tracks I chose for “about this site” are good all around tracks that are supposed to accent the style and feel and goal this blog. Sort of mellow; a little technical, smooth and cool; with lots and lots of info. A little multi-cultural, technical and complicated, but listenable and hopefully able to communicate with the average intelligent soul…
The Songs:
- Transitions by the Beastie Boys.
For a group of white Jewish guys who became rappers turned musician, who actually hardly know their scales (I figure), this song hits home. This shows these guys really actually really do know their stuff. They are well listened, and boy, do they have soul. I suppose this song is already the exception, already, right off the bat as it’s so simple that it really speaks despite its lack of complexity. It really accents the long whaa-whaaa of long upright bass strings, and the funkiness in tone of the Wurlitzer Piano, the Clavinet, and Fender Rhodes piano at the end.
First, I posted a couple recordings of Herbie Hancock when he talks about the Fender Rhodes Jazz Piano and when he first discovered it. Keep reading to see what this is relevent.
Next are:
The Second Song is:
- Enter The Dragon, Charlie Hunter Trio.
That’s right, just three guys. They are so good that they add a level of richness usually missing from any band with three people. Even the famous rock trio Rush had some gaps here and there where parts of their songs felt a little “empty.” The three guys playing in this song & album are: 1) the vibraphone player. The “vibes” are like a funkier, better sounding “xylophone” if you remember those from elementary school. He does just what I’m talking about: heavy stressing of 3rds and 7ths on the music scale. In his first solo in this song you can hear this exceptionally well, which is why I chose this song in particularly. In a scale, there are 7 notes (A through G with a couple half notes). It’s amazing how the guys back in the 16th century came up with this stuff as it works perfectly, sort of like the people who came up with our alphabet. If you are just a half or 1/4 key off it just sounds wrong, like someone shrieking and off pitch. Stressing of the odd notes (particularly the 3rd and 7th, sometimes the fifth – which often are half notes) hits “indicator” notes that are on the far end of “being off key” but being able to communicate. Being diverse, being intelligent. It can also be really difficult because some songs might have 5 or 10 different scales (different orders of A-G and what half notes to play) in as quick as a 6-second period! So the key for the musician is to sync them all together so it sounds fluid and smooth, working hard, but making it sound and look easy and soulful. Once in a while, I’ll also walk into a bar or a restaurant that has some jazz-influenced music and there is a player heavily stressing these notes and it sounds like garbage; so it just like life where just because you can speak complexly, it doesn’t necessarily mean you are doing it well. In my book this blog is largely an attempt to document those guys, who are doing it well.
2) The drummer is also just sick, tight and complex, perfectly appropriate. You should hear his use of the cowbell sometime (don’t worry, you’ll hear it posted sometime). It is jaw dropping cowbell playing…
And 3) the Charlie Hunter Trio has a secret weapon. Charlie Hunter. He plays an “8 string guitar,” which has it’s bottom strings as a bass guitar: (holy cow!!)
So yes, it’s a 3 string bass and a 5 string guitar at the same time. And yes, it is sort of “cheating,” I suppose, to be able to single-handedly add that complexity & richness as a single musician. But seriously, this guy is playing two instruments at once, and actually pulling it off. You cannot imagine how difficult this is; particularly these two instruments.
I met Charlie Hunter once in college in Burlington Vermont at the killer club up there, Higher Ground. He was the nicest guy in the world, sort of hip in a mellow Greenwich Village or Brooklyn type of way and hit personality basically had “nothing to prove.” Honestly, I think he just lets his music speak for itself. He had no business being nice to some random college kid who’d snuck back stage, but he was. He said it was “really, really hard to play.” Imagine that…
This was about the time when Medeski, Martin and Wood were in their heyday (just after their Shackman album – my favorite of all of theirs). [[Seriously, we're going to cover all of this in the blog.]] This is when guitarist John Scofield (“who plays his guitar like an organ”) was also becoming popular with the college kids (though he’d been playing jazz with top musicians for years — I even saw him lately on Letterman with John Mayer). Charlie Hunter suffers from this too (“playing like an organ player”), but in his case it’s technically based; the sound of his instrument actually sounds like a guy playing an organ.
This leads us to…
“The Analog.”
In Transitions, The Beasties are playing a famous old funky instrument called a Hohner D6 Clavinet which was actually designed in the late 60′s to be an imitation of the harpsichord piano, the tiny European piano from the Mozart era that used feathers to pluck strings rather than the hammers of a traditional piano. Little did they know how loud and how funky you could make this funky imitation harpischord. The “Clav,” as it’s called, is possibly the funkiest jazz piano in history.
There is another funky old instrument mostly made famous by Herbie Hancock and other funk pioneers of the early 70′s called the Moog. The Moog is the first synthesizer, but back then even this device was analog as well. It was basically a pile of cables and wires and resistors and knobs and keys, also out of the early 70′s or late 60s, just like all these other instruments. No computers. Computers back then took up 800 square feet and used switches and punch cards and tapes and indicator lights – that’s how you knew what they were doing – blinking indicator lights!
The Beastie’s first collection of their instrumental tunes in one album is called The In Sound from the Way Out, which is also the name of album by some Europeans who made some complete Moog-only albums in the early 70′s. It is really really hard to find this album (and don’t worry, it’s not very good). But it shows, the Beasties were listening and were really listening far and deep. I was so in to the Beastie’s instrumental songs back then that I’d actually made tapes (back when we still made tapes – I was about 14 maybe) of these songs before this compilation album was released. I guess I was maybe onto something.
Another great instrumental song on this album is “Groove Holmes,” which is the nickname of one of the early 1950s black and funky Hammond organ player who was spitting out some pretty cutting edge groove-soul tunes in the era when Elvis Presley was provocative and Rock N’ Roll was the devil music. As you can guess “Groove Holmes” is pretty organ-heavy.
Back then, everything was analog and there was almost no digital. What does analog mean? It means no computers calculate a synthesized sound, it is 100% through wires and resistors and completely mechanical and beautifully inefficient. It also meant that as a player, or a musical-instrument inventor, you honestly didn’t always know what was going to happen when you really turned it up or started tweaking with some of the settings. This is why a lot of the old analog instruments were surprises, and why we’re even still
talking about these instruments that have their origins from 40-70 years ago.
You could take it apart and if you really wanted to, figure it out, fix it and even possibly manufacture new components for it. Beautifully raw as well. Coming from this “environmentalist” you’d think it’s funny I state this, but it was beautiful. Much like a lot of the neat old guzzling trucks that have come back out of the woodwork now that gas prices are cheap again – there is just something about them. This is the rocket era. Man had just Landed on the Moon also using this same technology. Cars, like the famous 1968 Corvette were only a couple years old. Amplifiers back then had bulbs inside of them that took a few minutes to warm up. But once warm yielded a sound so good that good musicians still go out of their way to use this type of amp. It’s just real. Powerful, organic, natural. They yielded that analog sound, a lot like the beauty of listening to an old record. In some cases, it was literally like listening to the direct sound of electricity, basically put through a bunch of filters, to allow it to have a sound. It was when humans and America was crafty and innovative. We took nothing for granted and worked hard. We were diverse, had plenty of problems, but in all that conflict, Life was Beautiful.
* * *
Just a few years earlier, sometime in the 60′s, Miles Davis, the famous trumpet player whispered to his piano player, Herbie Hancock, in his signature raspy, spent-sounding voice:
“Heey man, go check out that thing in the corner.”
They were at Columbia to record a record and this happened to be the only piano in the room. Herbie reluctantly mopes back to a darn new-fangled chunky black plastic cover with chincy-looking steel legs. It was basically a heap of wood, wires, and plastic metal underneath it fairly crappy 60′s-era plastic. It had a couple knobs and cords and a hoaky-looking (yet super beefy – the mantra of this instrument) steel “sustain” pedal. And an emblem with a sharp finish in script lettering that read “Fender Rhodes Electric Jazz Piano.”
(Note: These recordings are now the first two when you hit “play” which I added in October of 2010. These recordings do an awesome job of exactly what I’m talking about).
Those of you who know very little about Fender Rhodes or any of this stuff might remember Riders on the Storm by the Doors; the song that is long and mellow and starts with the sounds of a rain storm. The Rhodes piano is the instrument that gives you goose bumps on that song, back when you were in high school at 2AM one night in a ’83 Camaro with some girl named Heather. The Rhodes is, pretty much, the equivalent of an electric guitar in Piano form. It turned out it was pretty natural-weighted for a fake piano (well sort of) with fast, hoppy action. The keys felt real.
It was only “sort of fake” in that it had actual hammers just like a piano that hit tuning forks, instead of hammers that hit strings. It yielded that poppy action (keys that spring back quickly, but still felt comfortable and natural). Attached to these forks were pickups, just like an electric guitar with its pickups below the strings. What it yielded was the funk instrument with possibly the most soul of any instrument out there. And you could turn it up with that volume knob – it was the sort of instrument you’d gladly walk right up to that huge sound stage speaker and let completely overwhelm you: let it vibrate the clavicles of your heart. It could speak to you.
Not surprisingly, it quickly became the master’s instrument. Sort of how there’s always a B character in too many movies,Last of the Mohicans or Lord of the Rings – the guy that chooses the “battle axe.” But the leader, the main character, always chooses the sword. The Fender Rhodes to the piano player is the Sword. Because of it’s action, could play incredibly fast and technical. Sort of like driving a sports car, allowing you to dive into your wildest dreams of musical complexity, and really actually integrate that jazz into whatever you were playing – provided you know how.
For guys like Herbie, and then the Latin-flared Massachussets born piano player Chick Corea (who would eventually replace Herbie’s spot in Miles Davis band -another major influence of mine who will also be heavily covered in this blog), it was a dream come true. Both of these guys eventually made this instrument their signature weapon, their sword, or at least through the 70′s. To date, it’s a close second behind only the piano itself, the instrument they’d both been playing since early childhood, and really was just a variation of that.
Click here to see a post, samples, & the definition of “The Analog.”
* * *
A couple years later, following these guys, the country quickly transitioned from the early three chord-rips of easy 1968 era pop music (The Beatles, or even Country Joe & The Fish), to the rise of complex musicians like the British Progressive Rock band Yes. I’m not saying that life before then was “different” but the country transitioned. It got more complex, and what we have today are basically the latest translation of that complexity that started then. Before then, there were no computers, no EPA, no fuel injection, and cars still had points in their distributor caps. Since then, this is sort of like adding fuel to the fire of the
According to me, this was the time that the country and nation basically built it’s platform for the world we know today. We would start seeing a new level of technological complexity and this period, these times, this music, and even those politics are what now now see today. Lying became standard political practice. No longer was a person of FDR’s position “feeling compromised” (as he reported) because he told the country at the convention, that “we wouldn’t send troops to that war in Europe” (when it was imminent that he would). This is the beginning of this complexity. It led to 1978, when the origin of the personal computer was beginning. The Apple, the 80′s, and the downfall. Self indulgence. Removing solar panels from the roof of the White House. The modernization of SUVs with smooth power windows and automatic transmissions but still getting 12mpg. The world as we know it…
* * *
Why is it that this is a blog that is about current events but focuses so much on the past? Well, you have to tell the story of how the human got there to tell the story of the human. This is what we’re doing. This is the crux if this blog. Looking at the history of the last 50 years, it’s tunes, it’s origins, it’s pop. The political turmoil. Much of it is long, lost and forgotten; but hopefully completely relevant.
Cheers, and welcome to Andre2000.com…
The question is how you want to proceed:
Do you want to do music only – or just do the straight-up blog.
Enjoy,
Andre Shoumatoff
