Notice how each horn player has his own wireless mic attached to the bell. This allows total freedom of movement and excellent sound reinforcement. They all have single headphones as well so they can hear the live sound in one ear and the mix in the other. The percussionists should be familiar if you remember what you learned in the Latin American music unit as a freshman. To the left of the drum set is someone playing the giant surdo bass drums--note the boom-BOOM boom-BOOM pattern. On the right is the pandeiro player with the shallow and heavy Brazilian version of the tambourine.
My second discovery came courtesy of a podcast called Sound Opinions. This is a weekly program billed as "the world's only rock and roll talk show." You can hear it locally on WBEZ 91.5 FM, but I download the shows and listen to them when I'm working out or running. Greg Kot and Jim DeRogatis cover a wide range of topics, from historical to current performers. A few weeks ago, they had tUnE-yArDs in the studio. The band is led by songwriter/vocalist/percussionist/African music expert Merrill Garbus. Her music features a great deal of live looping, a process by which a musician can play a pattern and have it repeat over and over electronically while adding new parts on top of it in a live setting. When she combines her overdubbed vocals and percussion with a bassist and two saxophonists, it's a truly infectious new riff on 1970s Afropop.
tUnE-yArDs perform 'Doorstep' on Sound Opinions from WBEZ on Vimeo.
Want to see and hear more? Click here and scroll down to Show #294.
My final discovery is something that makes me very happy. There used to be an online music service called lala.com that allowed you to listen to thousands of tracks for free. The only catch was that you could only listen to each track once unless you paid a nominal 10 cents to add it to your playlist. Instead of downloading tracks, it was all cloud-based. Anyway, Apple bought them out and promptly shut them down a couple of years ago. Since then, the only worthwhile free service has been Pandora, which doesn't allow you to specify the track you want to hear. Instead, you specify an artist or a genre or a song you like, and Pandora serves up a non-stop feed of similar music. It's like having your own radio station, 24/7. So if you punch in "Life During Wartime" by the Talking Heads, you might hear Billy Idol's "White Wedding" and "Momma's Reward" by Edgar Broughton Band. But what if you want to hear a specific album or track?
Enter Spotify. Until this summer, it was only available in Europe, but it has now debuted in the US. Like many music services, it has subscription plans, but it also has a free version. Simply apply for an account, wait a few days for the email "invitation," download the app, and start listening. It's a very slick interface, and they have a pretty big collection of albums that you can listen to in their entirety. With the free plan, your album gets interrupted with ads for other musicians hawking their tracks. This can be jarring when you're listening to a quiet, subtle album like Esperanza Spalding's eponymous disc and some loud rock music bursts through the speakers in between tunes, but hey, it's free!
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So, those are my latest discoveries. In the meantime, I've been back at school choosing music for all the bands. I've got some great plans for each group! I've put up my bulletin boards, photocopied a bunch of forms and warm-up packets, and ordered all new marching band t-shirts for everyone! The countdown to the new year continues!
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