Reading List

I read these books between September of 08 and 09, intending to write about them here. Of course life has a way of ensuring that some things just don't happen. So for now they can sit there in a pile, looking heavy, full of the stories that make our lives. Some of them were great, a few were truly brilliant, and a couple just sort of there, but they were all good. ( I will list them below as some are hard to read, and if I can muster the time, will write about them soon)

For now, I am fascinated by a piece I am currently reading in the previously mentioned Acrana IV (see a few posts down for link) by David Dunn. He writes:

"The issue of how language may have evolved has long been the concern of philosophers and linguists. A new twist on this ancient question was recently put forth by paleoanthropologist Steven Mithen in his book, The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body. Mithen built upon the work of linguist Alison Wray-whose "holistic" theory of proto-language evolution has challenged the mainstream of "compositional" theories-to assert that early hominid proto-language was a root of communication modality from which both human speech and music bifurcated."

I find the implications of this really quite staggering.

From above photo, in order read:
Middlesex, Jeffrey Euginides.
The Fixer, Bernard Malamud (brilliant).
Atonement, Ian McEwan.
All the Names, Jose Saramago (brilliant).
Arcana III, Edited by John Zorn.
Arcana, Edited by John Zorn.
Wolf Totem, Jiang Rong (brilliant in some entirely inexplicable way).
Why Art Cannot Be Taught, James Elkins.
Ways of the Hand, David Sudnow (quite bad in an odd way).
Wildlife, Richard Ford.
The Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles (brilliant).
The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway (brilliant).
The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene (brilliant).
Mercy Among the Children, David Adams Richards.
Let's Talk About Love; A Journey to the End of Taste, Carl Wilson (brilliant). Through Black Spruce, Joseph Boyden.
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Michael Chabon.
The Shipping News, Annie Proulx.
Amulet, Roberto Bolano (will not leave me in the same odd way that The Sun Also Rises will not leave me.)
A Short History of Progress, Ronald Wright (necessary and daunting though great).
Crow Lake, Mary Lawson.
My Name is Red, Orhan Pamuk (this one will not leave me either though in an entirely different way form Amulet. A strangely challenging read).
Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi. (brilliant)
The General in His Labyrinth, gabriel Garcia Marquez. (come on, it's Garcia Marquez).
Life is Elsewhere, Milan Kundera.
True North, Jim Harrison. (Thank you Jim for rekindling my faith in your wondrous writing.)
Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace. (brilliant. just totally unbelievable and out of this world brilliant.)
Derek Bailey and the Story of Free Improvisation, Ben Watson. (if you already have a certain respect for Derek Bailey as do I, this will likely push him into the realm of deity.)
Arcana II, Edited by John Zorn.
A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway. (dare I say both Hemingway books I read last year were brilliant? Yes.)
Baltasar and Blimunda, Jose Saramago.
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz. (poor Oscar.)
The Lives of Rocks, Rick Bass.
The Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac. (Oh, my beloved Berkeley.)
East of Eden, John Steinbeck. (come on, it's East of Eden by Steinbeck.)

Onward...

From The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski:

"And for a simple factory man like me, an effort must be abandoned once its hopelessness is exposed. Only the artist perseveres in such circumstances."

Does this mean I am an artist?

Builder

My son’s birthday is next month. As he is rather enamored with music and sound making, we bought him a ukulele for Christmas. It seemed like a good idea to buy one that we had to put together (thus adding some love to it) rather than an already assembled, generic ukulele. When said ukulele arrived we were admittedly a bit stunned to discover the amount of work entailed, which includes staining, sanding, assembling the neck and bridge, mounting tuners, etc. With two days until Christmas, this was seemingly impossible. Of course had he been older, I would have been out in the single digit temperature garage, working into the wee hours of the night. Fortunately, we had the luxury of postponing this gift given that the entirety of Christmas is at this point little more to him than any other day when we sit around the house and play. Perhaps we can always keep it as such.

So with warmer temperatures (low 30’s) out to the garage I go to put the thing together. I figured I’d document the process as I’ve often thought about building guitars and this is, well a first step. Maybe this is unknowingly sending me down a new path. I am somewhat excited about this endeavor.

I know that all of this work will quite possibly end up a pile of smashed rubble on the floor, but that too has validity. Perhaps that is the real exercise. You should see the instructions.

No More Shuffle!

Currently reading a piece by Chris Cutler in the new Arcana Vol. IV edited by John Zorn. The piece is about how at one time not so long ago, music could only be experienced live. As soon as the technology was developed to record, our understanding of and relationship with sound was inextricably altered.

As much as I love music, and have for as long as I can remember dating back to my first fisher Price turntable during my single digit years, this troubles me. I don't feel like writing my own long treatise on the matter at the moment, (perhaps in time) but suffice it to say that the more "available" and "accessible" music becomes, ie: always present on the internet with little search needed, and so often present in our cars and our ears and.....etc., the less I find myself really listening.

I have for a long time felt quite a distaste for iTunes for many reasons, the two primary being that digital music allows us to listen less attentively and the existence of shuffle.

So for now at least, I am done with shuffle. Must our lives always be shuffling? Have we that little patience and focus left? So far these last few days, I've really been enjoying listening to entire records again. I suggest you try it.

A Few Thoughts on Guitars

Photo by Michelle McCarron

So while I'm at it, (see post about tubes two below) a few thoughts on guitars: As you will notice (especially clear in the above photo) I do not play a brand of guitar that many folks are familiar with. (Yes, I use the word brand on purpose.)

While there are a good number of reasons for this, the primary being that I just couldn't seem to find one that was right, I have come to feel rather strongly about the matter. I should begin by saying this: in the end, the audience doesn't (and shouldn't) give a damn what kind of guitar a musician is playing. It is a tool after all, and if a musician is happy with the instrument they have, if they can communicate the sounds that they wish to communicate, then all is well. So if you are a guitarist and you are happy with your instrument, then this is all simply the musings of some other guy who plays the guitar. But...if you are unsatisfied with your instrument, or if you are a young person roaming through the vast halls of tonal possibility for the first time, perhaps some of this should be taken to heart.

So as is visible in the above photo, I play an electric guitar made by Creston Lea of Creston Electric. The one pictured above (and in the two following photos) was made for me over a year past. I am still as enamored with the instrument as I was then, if not more. The reason that I ordered a guitar from Creston is simply that I was unhappy with numerous aspects of my other guitars. I also love the idea, generally with all things, of having something made by a real person, one who I can talk on the phone and go out to lunch with. This means a lot to me.

Photo by Michelle McCarron

The truth is, that the most musical instrument companies have become giant mega-corporations and simply do not make the quality of guitar that they once did. The guitars from the fifties and sixties are not only valuable because they are old, they are valuable because they are well made (mostly). At the time those guitars were made, the big companies (I am primarily speaking of Fender and Gibson) were making so few instruments each year, that they were basically handmade and assembled. They may not have all been handmade and assembled by luthiers, but it is a far cry from today's market where machines do most of the work on them.

So big deal...they were better made.

Well, it IS a big deal. Solid body electric guitars should be easy to make, and I suppose that they are, but perhaps not so easy to make well. There are so many small factors that go into their production from the straightness of the neck to the winding of the electromagnetic pickups, that any decline in attention to detail can make a huge difference in playability and tone.

There is a holy grail of tone my friends, and it is VERY hard to find. I guess I should say that they are holy grails of tone, as it is such an individual thing. It sounds lame, but its true. If one knows much about the complexities of sound, one learns fairly quickly that these small details make all of the difference in the world.

Let me remind you though that great hands (and heart) can make a bad guitar sound wonderful. Yes, it is complicated. That said, I feel confident that I can hear more complex overtones with good guitars than with bad. I should say here too that I have owned and have played VERY good guitars made by both companies mentioned above, and I had a Rickenbacker that was just fantastic. It didn't stay in tune if I so much as moved, but.....

They do certainly make some good instruments, but the great ones are often lost in a sea of crap.

Photo by Michelle McCarron

In my opinion (having played many of them) the stock guitars made by Fender and Gibson these days are pretty damn bad. The sound is generally lackluster and the feel is just awful. The ones that come out of their respective "custom shops" are considerably better, and some of those are even great, but my god they charge an arm and a leg. The Gibson custom shop guitars generally begin around $4k and go up to $15K! Fender are considerably cheaper but still a ripoff in my opinion. Don't even mention the "relic'ed" guitars (which are made to look old) for the whole of that situation is just completely absurd, and a little bit sad if you ask me.

So what is it that would compel someone to buy a $5,000.00 guitar made by a giant, monolithic company rather than a handmade instrument by a great luthier for half the price? My best guess is history, advertising, and impatience/laziness.

Yes, these companies have been around for a very long time and have a long history, some of it beautiful. But I wonder how much of that history has to do with the fact that they were of a very small group of companies building these things back in the fifties, and so have built up a list of players that people come to associate with good guitars. It's like this: Joe Strummer played a Telecaster? Well then...fifteen year olds who love The Clash want a Telecaster. Free advertising for Fender. B.B. King plays a Gibson? Well then.....George Harrison played a Rickenbacker? .....

So my thinking goes (went) something like this: I was not happy with my guitars for a number of differing reasons. I could list them, but will refrain as that is a fairly personal thing. I went through a long (though not arduous) process of figuring out exactly what I wanted and ordered one from Creston (after reading about countless other builders). As you may recall from a post a year back. I was (and remain) immeasurably pleased, for his work is just magnificent. So I sold another guitar, and ordered a second.

Of course no one needs more than one electric guitar. You see, I am also of the opinion that limitation in art is a good thing. Yes, I love them and yes it can be a lot of fun/useful to have different sounding instruments, especially in the studio, but there are plenty of players (many of them studio guys in Nashville that no one has ever heard of) who have made a million wonderful sounds with one guitar. I won't really bother to explain why I ordered a second, but suffice it to say that it too is wonderful.

Though similar in look, it does sound quite a bit different from the first, perhaps more than one would imagine. Different wood, a different bridge, and different pickups make quite some pronounced tonal changes.

I ever become a relatively famous player someday (the clock is ticking) I can feel good that Fender won't plaster me all over their website. If I have to advertise anything by chance, at least it should be something/someone I believe in and feel proud to represent. The new Gibson "Dusk Tiger" is enough to make anyone embarrassed.

Anyway...one photo of me with my new guitar below. Pictured at a theater called The Flea in New York, with Cristyn Magnus, and Jonathan Chen. Rumor has it that this image is to appear in Time Out New York! You can see more images of my Creston #2 here.

And while I think of it...if anyone knows Todd Sickafoose, it would be great if you could recommend that I play on his next record. I've been listening to Tiny Resistors of late, and it is just fantastic.

Photo by Alex Lopez

p.s.
If you happen to be reading Creston, I apologize for the duct tape visible in every photo. Yikes! I swear I'm working on it

The art of being in two places at the same time

An article of mine was just published in the online version of Leonardo Music Journal , an annual from MIT Press. The piece focuses around a few specific co-located performances I did with a group of musicians back in 2007-2008. In short (and in layman's terms) a good deal of research has gone into the possibility of musicians performing together, at the same time, with zero latency (no discernible delay at all) in completely different places via high bandwidth internet.

For example, one concert we did included musicians from Seoul, South Korea, Troy, New York, Palo Alto, California, and Montreal, Quebec (Canada) all playing the same score. As you can imagine, this is a strange and beautiful and entirely unnerving experience. Really, think about it for a moment.

So the published piece gathers six perspectives ( me, Pauline Oliveros, Sarah Weaver, Mark Dresser, Jonas Braasch and Chris Chafe) about the experience. The articles range from the highly technical, talking about what kind of hardware and software was used, to my own admittedly luddite-ian thoughts about the time space continuum.

I wrote about how many years ago a very close friend of mine moved to Greece and we missed each other deeply. As this was before the current internet world, we couldn't afford the phone calls and letters somehow lacked the closeness we desired. So we began making audio tapes and sending them back and forth. Anyway, I'll leave the rest to the article if you're interested. The only problem is that I can't seem to find a way to read it for free, and it seems they are charging $12 just for the one article!

They didn't give me access either so, you know.....at some point I'll find out about copyright, and at least get my portion of the piece up hear for any willing minds.

Nevertheless, some links for you here:

you can read (for free!) the first page.. Or pay $12.00 for the article (click the pdf link on the page)

or subscribe to the journal (web and printed) in full.

The Elegant Beauty of Vacuum Tubes

As have many guitar players before me, through the long tunnels and dry valleys of seeking the elusive 'perfect' tone I have gone. I have come to deplore the term 'tone' itself, though in practice it remains equally important to me. Let me put it like this: there are an immeasurable number of variables that make one's electric guitar sound the way that it does. I'm inclined to believe that part of the reason why people feel guitars sounded so good back in the sixties comes down to a few factors. First, the companies that made them were small and VERY different form the corporate machines that churn them out these days. One could even argue that they were (almost) handmade. Secondly, they used better parts. Why? Because the companies that made the parts were smaller, materials were better.....etc. Third, there were less choices. MANY less choices, and most of the choices made resulted in things sounding good. We North Americans with our propensity for choice may be far off the mark. Choice does not mean better folks.

So I do not intend to write some sort of treatise on the manufacture of musical instruments and gear at the moment (though that may come soon). Instead I write about tubes. For those readers who know little about electric guitar, suffice it to say that anyone in any band anywhere that you have ever thought was great, was most likely playing a tube amplifier. my guess would be that 99% of known guitarists use tube driven amps. (the other type of amplifiers are powered by solid state semi conductor circuits as opposed to vacuum tubes and they just don't sound very good. There are scientific reasons for this that I will not explain. And yes, I know that it is subjective. Sort of.) Some jazz players have historically preferred solid state amps, but that is for another discussion.

Anyway, many guitar players thusly develop a bit of a love affair with tubes. Not only do many of the great vacuum tubes come from another era signifying our deep cultural attraction to the past, but the damn things are just beautiful. Something about tiny glowing glass jars that moves us.

So then what happens is this: you come across someone somewhere who keys you on to the fact that you can still find NOS (new old stock) tubes that have been lying around some dark warehouse for fifty years. Yes they cost a fortune relatively speaking, but.....the word is they sound GREAT!

You see, you have to understand that at some point you hear something. This something is the sound of a guitar that you will someday play. It is not quite one that you've heard before, but rather an amalgamation of all of your favorite guitars and songs and recordings and live shows and overtones you've ever heard. So you begin hunting. As some of you may know (all too well) it took me MANY years to finally acquire the perfect little ball of sound that I had assembled in my mind, but I did it. Yes it is still changing in subtle ways, and hopefully always will, but the heart of it is there.

The number of factors that can effect your sound is really rather staggering. Most people would likely believe that it relies on what guitar you're playing through what amp, but I'm afraid it is far more complex than that. Perhaps the most obvious, is that you just cannot believe how different the same guitar will sound in different hands. We should not underestimate biology and the sound of the heart. There are frankly too many details for me to list, going all the way down to the different types of capacitors in your guitar's electronics, the type of magnet used in your pickup, whether it was wound by hand or with a machine, and among an endless sea of other things; your tubes.

Trust me fellow guitar players, don't even start reading about them. The philosophy works something like this: you commence reading descriptions of tubes that are NOT in your amp. The descriptions are dazzling. Then you read about the tubes that ARE in your amp, and the descriptions are bland, if not just plain bad. And you think, "man I'm selling myself short. I have this great guitar and this great amp and.....and I'm running these cheap ass tubes." So then you begin reading in earnest, having decided that you will buy some good ones dammit. You won't buy the set of two for $300 but maybe you'll drop $150. (Keep in mind the current ones in your amp cost $15 each). You get the idea.

So years ago, after WAY too much research online, I bought some NOS tubes. I can't remember how much I paid, but they weren't cheap. I took out the "mediocre" tubes, inserted the great ones and went to it. I played. And played. I could definitely hear a difference. It was not as pronounced as I expected, but it was definitely there. I played some more. Did it sound better? I don't know. Different yes, but maybe not better. So I left them in because I had bought them dammit and I couldn't return them. I toured with them and recorded with them and.....The fact is, that I am quite likely the only person alive on this earth who ever heard or knew the difference. Is that worth it? Maybe.

So after a gig on Sunday that brought some technical problems, I began inspecting my gear. A bit of trouble shooting told me that one of my tubes was not getting hot, which meant that it was probably dead. So I did all of the checking to be sure, and yes it is dead. It broke when I was trying (gently I swear) to pull it out. (No really, my baby was sleeping so I was being super quiet).

Because of the way that vacuum tubes work, I had to put both of the old ones back in. In short they run in pairs and if they are not balanced properly one may draw considerably more power than another, causing all sorts of problems. In many if not most amps you have to set the bias current to deal with the amount of power the tubes are drawing. Fortunately my amp is a "cathode bias push pull operation" amp, which means that it basically adjusts itself when there is a change in the amount of power the tubes draw.

Okay, so this must be boring you. The point is that I have concluded that buying fancy old tubes is a waste of money. Some knowledge about the matter and research is certainly helpful and a good set of tubes can't hurt, but there is a limit for sure. I really didn't mean to write that much. Go look at some photos of tubes glowing. Stunning.

Oh, and for the curious: I play through a Victoria 20112. My rectifier tube is a Bendix 5Y3GT, My power tubes are both (after the death of the 60's era coke-bottle RCA situation) Tung Sol 6V6's, and my preamp tubes are a Groovetubes 12AY7, and a Jan-Phillips 5751. (The 5751 replaces a 12AX7 and cuts the power down a bit, both lowering the overall volume of the amp, and making it breakup a bit earlier.)