Connor performed his first Indie/Dance/Mash-Up set last night at a downtown hole-in-the-wall called the Soundlab. It was a guest-list only event featuring three DJs. Unlike the two turntablists, Connor did an Ableton Live set – a seat-of-the-pants high-wire act where all the musical pieces are prepped on the computer and then selected, beat-matched and spat out in real time – the all important groove totally dependant on split second jabs at a bewildering collection of knobs, buttons and faders.
He’s been creating mash-ups (digital re-mixes wherein one or more popular songs are mashed together) for fun for months, but started working on his set in earnest when he learned there might be an opportunity to try it out live on a room full of drunk and dancing twenty-somethings.
He’s posted three early mash-ups and an original electro/club/pop track on his “Pack Mentality” MySpace page – where he has quietly but steadily been building his Nu Disco persona.
This is another musical left turn for Connor – but probably a welcome and rewarding antidote to the frustration of trying to assemble a band of great players and then keep them together for more than one or two cash-challenged shows. His MacBook Pro, Reason, ProTools and Ableton Live allow him to create and perform solo – not with an acoustic guitar like Rev. 1, but with the power and the glory (and the block-rockin’ beats) that only an infinite collection of digital samples can deliver. Add to that the undeniable ear-candy of layered iconic pop slices and you can begin to see the appeal – both for him and the dance floor.
For a long time now, I’ve kept my camera, my flash drives and my noise-cancelling headphones in my backpack, which resides under my desk here at home, so it’s at hand for road trips. I use it as an auxilliary desk drawer.
I also keep doubles of my computer power cables, adapters, USB, ethernet and audio cables in the backpack so I can ready my laptop for the drive to the airport in the time it takes to unplug it and pack it away. Since the camera, drives and headphones are stored in there already, I’m less likely to leave them behind.
Jumping up and leaving town is such an expected part of my everyday reality, this routine seems eminently logical …
Until this morning, in the early days of Trooper’s traditional winter break, when I paused for a confused moment wondering where to put my camera.
I might never have known about Jonah Smith if we hadn’t walked into that square behind the church in Barcelona in September 2007. We assumed, not unreasonably, that the band sound-checking on the large outdoor stage was from Spain, and it took some time to realize that the words being sung were in English. The band was tight and the singer, playing a groovin’ Rhodes piano, was great. Before we left I asked the sound guy who it was.
“Jonah Smith from Brooklyn New York” he said.
Jonah hits on pretty much all of the qualities that I think a great songwriter and singer needs. And his band is one of the most empathetic I’ve seen – leaving lots of space for the best parts.
Here’s a live vid of Jonah playing my current favourite song, “Little Black Angels”. This is not the original arrangement, which I also recommend. I couldn’t find a vid of “Stay a While”, which is another favourite, but your instructions for today are to go and buy both of these tracks, now, on iTunes.
Here’s a clip of the song they were playing at soundcheck:
When I was young, I believed there was an agency that monitored TV commercials in order to ensure that all of the claims made were true. As time passed, I began to realize that advertising was simply an unregulated free-for-all battle of competing claims, at least one of which was not true.
In 1962 I went to see Little Stevie Wonder at the Gardens Auditorium in Vancouver. Stevie was 12 years old at the time, and so was I. He stood awkwardly at centre stage and sang along with his records. There was no pretense about it. You could hear the needle drop on each track, and Stevie was the only performer on the stage. Everyone knew that he was just singing along – you could hear both his voice and the recorded original – but the audience understood that he wrote the songs and sang them on the records. He was the heart and soul of the tunes we loved, and we were honored to be in his presence.
Last week we opened for CCR. The week before we did the same for The Sweet. Both bands were paid very large sums of money to headline these shows. Neither of them featured the singer who sang (and in the case of CCR, wrote) their hits. (continue reading this post …)
The Roxy is on Granville street in the heart of Vancouver. Jordan is also the singer for Cozy Bones, one of my (and Connor’s) favourite Canadian bands.
When I started posting on Twitter a couple of weeks ago, I blatantly stole Bob Cesca’s routine of posting an interesting video as the first post of the day. He calls it “Morning Awesome” and I chose to call it that too. Hopefully, the fact that I’m hipping you to Bob’s excellent political commentary site; “Bob Cesca’s Goddamn Awesome Blog” will go some way towards earning his forgiveness – and help to avoid an ugly internets lawsuit. As if Bob knows I exist.
Bob posts the vids right there on his site but, because of Twitter’s 140 character limit, I can only supply a link and hope that my fellow twitterers will click through to what I want them to see. In my case, these are songs by favourite artists whose careers, for one reason or another, have played out somewhere slightly below the popular music radar. I’ve kept a list of all the links with the intention of sharing them here on my site, where an unlimited spew of characters is possible (and often, in my case, probable).
I’ve been experiencing an overabundance of mental disarray this week – with both taxes and an out-of-date contract rider calling for my undivided attention – so it took until last night to realize that I could probably embed the youtube videos the same way my good friend Bob does.
Once I learned how, I couldn’t decide what song to post first, so I experimented with a random (but very sweet) video of two teenagers singing the first verse of a song I wrote forty years ago. Sarah and Kayla are the least well-exposed artists on my list, so they’ve turned out to be a very good place to start.
Today I’d like to present John Gorka, singing “Love is Our Cross to Bear” in what looks like someone’s basement, but is probably a small club. Please notice his amazing songwriting and captivating voice.
If you like this one, check “Armed With a Broken Heart” and “Gypsy Life” – which contains one of my favourite observations on life as a gypsy: “People love you when they know you’re leaving soon”.
Thanks, in part, to Twyla Tharp, who I hopefully will discuss in a later post.
Connor has posted two amazing new demos (“Be the One” – with his amazing new band, and “Brother’s and Sisters” – on his own in the studio) here at his MySpace page. He’s finishing up a third demo, “Give it a Name”, right now. I can hear him mixing it upstairs. I went to see him at the Media Club in Vancouver last night *playing drums!!* with his good buddy Dylan Hossack. Turns out he’s a great drummer too!
I miss meeting at the van every morning in some gravel parking lot and waiting my turn to hoist my big Tumi suitcase into the back. I miss making the passenger seat my home for hour after mindless hour. I miss the quiet van talk and the willfully obscure in-jokes that get funnier and funnier from repetition, week after week. I miss the casual camaraderie that comes from spending so much time together.
I’m not crazy about taking planes to every gig. Airports are boring. The drivers who meet us in each new city are nice, but it’s not ‘our’ van, it’s not one of us driving. And we only go a few miles to the hotel.
I miss rowdy bars and small town shows where the haying schedule could easily blow out the Trooper gig. I like walking around in new places. I don’t seem to have time for that anymore. I miss it.
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A powerful and personal book about God by one of Canada’s greatest writers. “I believe that all of us, even those who are atheists, seek God — or at the very least not one of us would be unhappy if God appeared and told us that the universe was actually His creation. Oh, we might put Him on trial for making it so hard, and get angry at Him, too, but we would be very happy that He is here. Well, He is.”
I have failed in my first attempt to read this much-acclaimed magnum opus. The same thing happened with Ulysses. I’ll try again one day, once I have steeled myself to not be so annoyed by it.
An important book about the food we eat and the difficult choices we face in a world suffering from what Pollan describes as a “national eating disorder”.
