Voilà and please enjoy - for the 21st time - Said the Gramophone's favourite songs of the year. One hundred remedies for the year two thousand twenty-five: selected by me, Sean, up in Montreal. Songs I love more than demon-hunters,...
Song two.
The story of the album Tête-à-Tête, by Annea Lockwood and Ruth Anderson
The great practitioners of Broadway and Hollywood – composers, arrangers, orchestrators – spawned catalogues of what might be considered more ‘legitimate’ music that the world rarely saw or heard. Broadway’s ‘Music Man’ Meredith Wilson’s symphonies, Hitchcock’s Bernard Herrmann’s operas – and the figures featured here: Robert Russell Bennett whose orchestrations enhanced the tunes of Rodgers, … [Read More]
Keysound is 20 this year; Dusk + and I have been producing together for longer. Turns out I've started to notice there's some underlying patterns…Workflow: over time maybe our music making follows an underlying pattern?What if this is the workflow for how Dusk and I write music?Influences & inspirationValuesArchetypes (sometimes)Jamming x visionTracks 1/ Influences & inspirationWe
I continue to expand my Rudy Van Gelder discography for collectors. When I first created the discography, it was less than half the size it is now and I was really only focusing on titles from the ’50s and ’60s I considered “collectible”. This meant albums that were initially unreleased at the time ... More→
This is the fifth year I've done Looptober, a Fediverse exercise where you post a little track every day for all of October. Last year I did as much as I could with the Arduino which made it a bit musically uninteresting. My technical constraint this year was that I …
I often get asked by my students and their parents which drum kit to buy, so I’ve put together a guide covering acoustic kits, electric kits, and practice pads.Written from a drum teacher’s perspective, it’s primarily aimed at those buying their first kit. The advice is useful for anyone buying a drum kit, but if you’re looking to purchase one for gigging or recording, these recommendations aren’t tailored for that.You can read the full guide here → Drum Kit Buying Guide
Every talk leaves a lot of scraps, and Beyond the Machine is no exception. I read a couple books, watched about 20 hours of interviews with Brian Eno, listened to 10 hours of podcasts with Rick Rubin to make sure I wasn’t being uncharitable. (One podcast was a discussion between Rubin and Eno. A really nice listen!) I clocked some serious headphone time with Holly Herndon’s discography, which I’m eager to do again. Listening to all three of her albums in one big gulp was a trip. There were ...
Right at the end of that fabled partnership, more than any other Smokey/Temptations joint, is a song that sounds more like the Miracles than the Miracles themselves. (9)Continue reading →
In 2024 I have crossed to the dark side twice, meaning i built two double tops. Of course, maximum volume at any cost has never been my goal, so on both I did my best to boost the response of a traditional guitar without sacrificing the tone. First one has two cedar skins with a secret wood (not balsa) core and Madagascar rosewood body. 7 brace fan reminiscent of Santos or Romanillos, lightweight overall construction (single sides, active back). Recordings have: nylon strings for the video,…
I am incredibly fortunate to get to meet and write about people and places that have always fascinated me. This is particularly true when it comes to the musicians whose music I fell in love with as a teenager – … Continue reading →
Recently I had been noticing a number of artists, often very popular ones, were not having their catalogs available on Napster. I was trying to curate some playlists for my gym time, and I just couldn’t always find what I was looking for. I then found out and realized that Sony is suing Napster (again, […]
Even after all these years, nobody really knows the lyrics to Seal's Kiss From A Rose.
The Idea Thanks to my dad’s good taste in music, my childhood had a killer soundtrack: classic rock, 70s folk music, and 80s new wave. At home or in the car, a constant rotation of The Beatles, Cream, Simon and Garfunkel, Talking Heads, and The Human League. Things were off to a good start. Then in 1995, I encountered something completely different - techno: I had never heard music like this: blatantly artificial sounds at a blazingly-fast BPM.
The conventional wisdom is that there are no shortcuts to becoming a good musician. On guitar, that is patently false. In this video, I share three shortcuts that dramatically accelerated my progress and have been working well with my students. If you’ve been following my videos for a while, the first two shortcuts won’t be […]
Two decades ago today, I walked into an unassuming converted collection of terrace houses, somewhere in Wandsworth, South London, and began working in the music industry. It was purely by chance that I ended up there, really. Growing up, I had always wanted to work in music, but I never really knew how, or even where to start. I had no connections, no understanding of the industry beyond a vague notion of what a record label was, and certainly no resources to work as an unpaid intern — the “...
The late-1974 departure of guitarist Dominique Gaumont may have returned the band to the septet configuration it had honed to perfection throughout much of 1973, but the band that emerged here at the start of 1975 was an altogether different beast. The smaller lineup certainly allowed saxophonist/flautist Sonny Fortune more room to stretch out and … Continue reading Live Miles: The 1975 Recordings
It’s hard to overstate how rapidly Miles Davis fell off the cultural radar beginning in 1974. In comparison to the wealth of images and live footage covering his activity from 1969-73, the stretch between January of ’74 and his retirement in mid ’75 is documented in a smattering of photos and a brief B&W video clip. And though the year saw the release of the excellent compilation LPs, Big Fun and Get Up with It, Miles’ extraordinary live albums recorded during this period – Dark Magus in March…
Miles Davis reached both a personal and critical nadir in the fall of 1972. Returning to New York following a brief but thrilling tour with a revamped nine-piece ensemble, he totaled his Lamborghini Muira and broke both legs in a gruesome, cocaine-strewn accident on the West Side Highway. The same week, his On the Corner LP was released to near revulsion from the music press. Yet, in the throes of his most fertile creative period since the spring of 1970, Miles refused to end the year a broken…
While dicey health kept Miles from the road throughout much of 1972, his studio activity during the spring and summer was a revelation, producing the still-futuristic On the Corner album, providing much of the meat for his Big Fun and Get Up with ItLPs, and collected in part on the Complete On the Corner Sessions box. Much like his 1970 sessions documented on the Complete Jack Johnson Sessions set, Miles’ 1972 studio ensemble featured a rotating cast of familiar faces (Herbie Hancock, Chick…
The Miles Davis sextet began 1971 much in the same way it closed out the previous year: with a steady, albeit scarcely documented run of live performances. And though 1971 saw the release of the Tribute to Jack Johnson LP in February and Live/Evil in November, Miles made no studio recordings for the first time since 1964, and there’s just one official live release documenting this pivotal year. Despite the paltry “official” record, there remains plenty of evidence of the exceptional music…
1970 wasn’t just a pivotal year in the Miles Davis electric timeline – it was a universe away from what the quintet was up to just 4 months prior. Three main factors contributed to the drastic change in tone: Dave Holland switched over to electric bass, Chick Corea began running the Fender Rhodes signal through both an Oberheim ring modulator and Echoplex tape delay, and Brazilian percussionist extraordinaire Airto Moreira joined the live lineup. The effect was stunning: a deeper, harder, more…
The 1969 “lost quintet” (Shorter, Corea, Holland, and DeJohnette) was the pivot point on which Miles’ career would turn. Sure, the ‘70-‘72 groups were funkier and the gigantic ‘73-’75 ensembles took abstraction to its limits, but the ’69 quintet was the first and only to delicately balance the frantic bop of Miles’ pre-electric period with the heady psychedelia of Bitches Brew. 1969 was the year Miles broke free from his previous self – setting off on one of the most thrilling career stretches…
