Anomale Used Blog

But ragtime is also good in the more austere sense of the professional critic. I cannot understand how a trained musician can overlook its purely technical elements of interest. It has carried the complexities of the rhythmic subdivision of the measure to a point never before reached in the history of music. It has established subtle conflicting rhythms to a degree never before attempted in any popular or folk music, and rarely enough in art music. It has shown a definite and natural evolution always a proof of vitality in a musical idea. It has gone far beyond most other popular music in the freedom of inner voices, yes, I mean polyphony, and of course harmonic modulation. And it has proved its adaptability to the expression of many distinct moods. Only the trained musician can appreciate the significance of a style which can be turned to many distinct uses. There is the sentimental manner, and the emotional manner and so on, but the style includes all the manners, and there have not ...

The blues appeal to the emotions and also make listeners want to dance or move their body in time to the music. The music usually has an underlying feeling of sadness, yet it can be a positive, happy experience as well. In Mississippi blues guitar players often use a knife held in the left hand or bottleneck worn on a left hand finger. As the player slides up and down the strings, he simulates the sound of a human voice crying. In Piedmont blues the guitar is intended to highlight the party and dance feeling of the song. In other instances the guitar is played in a style called fingerpicking, where the guitarist keeps the rhythm and plays the melody at the same time. The first time that a listener hears this style of playing, it sounds as though two guitars are playing at the same time. Most of the early folk blues artists accompanied themselves by playing finger style guitar. Later many of the musicians started to wear fingerpicks, which are worn over the fingernails of the right hand...

The evolution of the blues had to await the mass production of inexpensive guitars, as the first blues musicians bore the burden of racial discrimination and Jim Crow. Therefore, it was the creativity of blues artists, ca. 1900, together with the innovations of the entrepreneurs who developed affordable guitars, that allowed the blues to develop when it did. The Industrial Revolution, first and foremost, was a revolution in productivity. Say’s Law of Markets states that production creates demand, that is, with the move from muscle power to steam power, entrepreneurs and their employees became more productive. Increased productivity permitted people to demand, or purchase, more goods. Also, when factories produce more of something, they can both manufacture and market the products at lower prices. Sears, Roebuck and Company could produce inexpensive goods, including guitars, and still turn a profit by serving the rising tide of new purchasers. Last but not least, by mechanization, the I...

The first meaning of blues refers to a musical selection or performance that conveys a feeling of melancholy, regret, longing or similar emotion to the listener. Hearing it, you might say that the performer has the blues and, indeed, you might be moved some way toward that position yourself if the rendition is sufficiently convincing. The second meaning of blues describes a tune which has a certain type of musical structure. Typically, that structure is a variation on a three phrase, twelve bar chorus, if played in double time, twenty four bars. However, eight bar blues are quite common, as are sixteen bar blues. A sixteen bar blues may have a few extra bars added to its final phrase, called a turnaround or sweet mama ending. Among Blues aficionados, longer works, even when bluesy in feeling and per­formed by acknowledged Blues performers, are not conventionally thought of as blues. Thirty two bar numbers, though often found in the repertoire, tend to be regarded instead as pop songs...

Improvisation of some type is nearly always part of a jazz performance. Even if musicians are reading notes on a page, they can improvise through the way they attack or color a note, or the rhythmic impulse they bring to the music. In early jazz musicians often improvised by creating variations on a given melody. As the tradition developed, it became more common to use a chord progression as the basis for entirely new melodies. In more recent jazz traditions, even chords are abandoned and musicians will simply improvise on a scale, a motive, or even just a tonal center. No matter how they improvise, however, most musicians have a set of phrases, called licks, that lie easily under their fingers and can be used and reused in a variety of contexts. Charlie Parker, for example, had many signature licks that make his style instantly recognizable. In other words, jazz musicians do often play musical lines they have played before, but where they place these lines, and how they pla them, is p...

Record Sales By The US Census All information is provided by the Bureau of the Census. Amounts include the number of records that were in production that year. The U.S. Census Bureau terminated the collection of data for this program as of October 1, 2011. See additional sources below for more information. The changing revenue of the recorded music industry over the past two decades. Year Amount Value Change In Value Notes 2010 5,500,000 $92,500,000 +40.5% *** 2009 4,400,000 $65,800,000 +2.8% *** 2008 4,100,000 $64,000,000 +40.6% *** 2007 4,900,000 $45,500,000 +14.6 *** 2006 4,500,000 $39,700,000 -45.3% *** 2005 7,100,000 $72,600,000 -28.1% *** 2004 9,100,000 $101,000,000 +133.8% *** 2003 5,300,000 $43,200,000 -4.8% 2002 6,100,000 $45,400,000 -22.7% 2001 7,800,000 $58,800,000 +8.8% 2000 7,000,000 $54,000,000 +9.5 1999 8,200,000 $59,700,000 0% 1998 8,800,000 $59,700,000 -13.3% 1997 ...

Festivals can be sites for musical experimentation and hybridity, essential vehicles for the innovation and affirmation of daring artistic practice, where moments of mutual enrichment of the local by musics from elsewhere are commonplace. Headliners may be internationally renowned musicians but festivals also provide platforms for up and coming local musicians, music festival producers/promoters are therefore both cultural importers and investors, the flipside of which being occasional claims of cultural invasion and even elitism. Performance at particular festivals can enhance the status of  amusician and increase the chances of further festival bookings, other festivals include elements of adjudication in which musicians are judged and rewarded. Festivals are often sites for showcasing local talent and for creating a platform for exporting musicians abroad. They can be key tools for developing new audiences for musicians and for genres more broadly. They thus function as trusted...

Folk music has often demonstrated a peculiar resistance to systematic classification, or stated more accurately, to classification systems. Despite the plethora of efforts to discern, describe, and ascribe order in folk music, classification has often been a culture specific or repertory specific endeavor. The systematic description of one repertory, no matter how much tolerance for variation it permits, rarely extends to other repertories. Even when classification systems are modified to account for some aspects of universality, it is usually the accuracy of the specific that suffers, while only a few more repertories yield themselves to the revised descriptive schemes. The history of classification therefore challenges many of the claims to the universality of folk music. At the same time, this history consistently validates and reexamines the boundaries that regional, local, or small group cultures fashion for folk music. Thus, the resistance of folk music to classification is not n...

The Wallflowers - I'm Looking Through You Written by: John Lennon and Paul McCartney Music from and inspired by: I Am Sam motion picture Genre: Rock, Pop First recorded and released: 1965 "The Wallflowers have existed as two different bands, both helmed by lead singer, guitarist, and songwriter Jakob Dylan. Guitarist Tobi Miller, keyboard player Rami Jaffee, bass player Barrie Maguire, and drummer Peter Yanowitz formed the band in 1990." The swing era lasted just ten years, from l935 to 1945. In researching this article... when the Swing Era ended, it also marked the end of Jazz as a Dance and a Popular music. It also marked a change in the culture of this country. What went before was never to be again, the society that created the music from New Orleans Dixieland through this era had changed for good... That past time had been destroyed by the immense social disruption which accompanied the War itself, but it was the foundation, good or bad, for who we are tod...

The history of jazz music is deeply linked to and embedded with the history of New Orleans. As ragtime and the blues began to circulate, New Orleans incubated music that would come to be called jazz, and the unique social construction of the city provided a cadre of musicians as well as an audience to support and sustain a particular form of musical expression. The key element to understanding the early development of jazz relates to its multi dimensional role within New Orleans. The music existed within a fluid spectrum between folk and commerce, with neighbors performing for neighbors in and out of a formal entertainment world. Bars and honkytonks were settings, but so were private gatherings, funerals, dances, and a large array of other events. If the blues reflected a true folk heritage and ragtime connected to the commercial world of selling music, then jazz represented a middle way, a form that helped craft and preserve the identity of the local groups that created this new sound...

Jazz music has often been called the only art form to originate in the United States, yet blues music arose right beside jazz. In fact, the two styles have many parallels. Both were created by African Americans in the southern United States in the latter part of the 19th century and spread from there in the early decades of the 20th century, both contain the sad sounding blue note, which is the bending of a particular note a quarter or half tone, and both feature syncopation and improvisation. Blues and jazz have had huge influences on American popular music. In fact, many key elements we hear in pop, soul, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll have their beginnings in blues music. A careful study of the blues can contribute to a greater understanding of these other musical genres. Though never the leader in music sales, blues music has retained a significant presence, not only in concerts and festivals throughout the United States but also in our daily lives. Nowadays, we can hear the s...

How Vinyl is Manufactured and Processed The process of how to press vinyl records to be played or sold. Let’s assume that the song, or album, has been recorded, mixed and mastered, depending on quantities, vinyl records are produced by cutting on vinyl blank or on lacquer disk and pressing as a result. The audio file will be physically cut into a master disc. Making the Vinyl Blank If it is a single piece record, vinyl dubplate, it will be cut in real time using a cutting machine. The cutting head of the machine cuts the audio information directly into the vinyl blank via the cutting stylus. Manufacturing takes exactly as long as the entire playing time of the finished plate. After that, the record is ready to play. An edition of 5 to about 50 pieces of a vinyl album, mixtape, etc., is done by direct real time cutting on vinyl blanks. Making the Lacquer Disc The audio information is cut on an aluminum disc which is coated with an acetate lacquer layer in real time with a cutting lat...

Musical events and the patterns they reveal ought to present few problems to the historian, once informed about them, he can treat them more or less as he does any other historical data. However, when it comes to dealing with music itself the historian may find himself growing uncomfortable. Even if he likes music, listens to it regularly, perhaps even sings or plays, he may have difficulty finding the language to interpret it with anything near the sophistication that he applies to other historical data. Yet the ultimate value of music is found not in the historical information it generates but in its intrinsic nature, in the special kind of experience that it can create. Precisely because music differs from other kinds of activity, an understanding and consideration of pieces of music could help to provide the historian with access to sectors of past experience otherwise lost. Few historians have undertaken such inquiries, perhaps chiefly because they have felt themselves insufficien...

The most common musical form of blues is the 12 bar blues. The term "12 bar" refers to the number of measures, or musical bars, used to express the theme of a typical blues song. Nearly all blues music is played to a 4/4 time signature, which means that there are four beats in every measure or bar and each quarter note is equal to one beat. A 12 bar blues is divided into three four bar segments. A standard blues progression, or sequence of notes, typically features three chords based on the first (written as I), fourth (IV), and fifth (V) notes of an eight-note scale. The I chord dominates the first four bars, the IV chord typically appears in the second four bars and the V chord is played in the third four bars. The lyrics of a 12 bar blues song often follow what's known as an AAB pattern. "A" refers to the first and second four bar verse, and "B" is the third four bar verse. In a 12 bar blues, the first and second lines are repeated, and the third li...

The region around the Nile is one of the oldest and richest cultural areas in the world. There are documents stating that Egyptian musicians have used harps and flutes circa 4000 B.C., and double clarinets and lyres from around 3500 B.C. Percussion instruments were added to the orchestras around 2000 B.C. Probably there was no musical notation system existing in that period and there are no notated documents about the music of ancient Egypt. Yet musicologists believe that the liturgical music of the Coptic Church is directly deriving from the ancient Egyptian music. Arabs call Egypt "The mother of the world" because of its long and colourful history, which started thousands of years ago. In the recent centuries Egypt has been one of the first countries to create recorded and visual art forms in Arabic world... Cairo has been the dreamland for many Arabic musicians and singers to create a career in classical and pop music. Classical Arabic music has resulted from various style...

And so it goes. In the world of artists of all mediums and disciplines, the musician is most audacious when it comes to altering another’s creation. Imagine an artist taking a palette of paints and a brush to the Museum of Fine Arts and painting an extra nose on a Picasso masterpiece? Or someone putting a hat on Rodin’s timeless bronze and marble sculpture The Thinker? Scandalous, to say the least... and possibly resulting in some jail time! However, the history of jazz performance and arranging, as well as European classical tradition... is filled with players and writers whose creative intention could be distilled down to Tal’s response. There are instances in which the reharmonized song is considered so superior to the original chord changes that the new version becomes the standard harmonic form which, in turn, becomes subjected to further variation. The Victor Young classic “Stella by Starlight” and the Burke/Van Heusen standard “Like Someone in Love” are excellent examples of “n...

Throughout all of the genres explored here, there are musicians who mainly perform their own songs, mainly perform songs written by others, or perform some combination of original and borrowed repertoire. Even in a genre like blues, which is still frequently, and often mistakenly,  construed as a superiorly authentic genre whose performers express their most profound personal emotions through descriptions of their literal autobiographical experience, many musicians frequently perform songs written by others. For instance, Bessie Smith composed many of her own lyrics, but also recorded songs by Percy Grainger, Fletcher Henderson, and many others. Indeed, many of the songs that Taft cites in his study of the blues lyric formula were written by someone other than the performer, but he simply attributes the songs to the performers who made them familiar to audiences. This same mix of borrowing and originality holds true for early country music, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll, and ...

Jazz is the music, not of repression or immorality, but of freedom, our American watchword. In fact, the music itself may be the freedom. The true spirit of jazz is a joyous revolt from convention, custom, authority, boredom, even sorrow, from everything that would confine the soul of man and hinder its riding free on air... Jazz with its mocking disregard for formality is a leveler and makes for democracy. Yet democracy relies on self rule, as a society, and as individuals. We depend on taking responsibility, not on waiting for a king or a political party to do it for us. We depend on using our clear minds to find our own answers. Out of this attentiveness comes personal freedom. Or as the author William Least Heat-Moon wrote after observing boys with kites, “No strings, no flight.” In this responsibility, we make a statement... To solve the lack of order they saw all around them, the founding fathers seized on one of the great, and often missed, ironies in world history, the only thi...

The blues impulse understands a world in which there are no good choices; in which we have made terrible mistakes already; where we have innocent blood on our hands, even though we had our reasons; a world in which we are damned if we go deeper and damned if we duck out; and yet a world in which we nonetheless have to make choices. The gospel impulse takes us one giant step beyond the blues. Gospel begins with a brutal history, too, asking: “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?” In fact, this song in some ways is more blues than gospel, despite its formal genre. The gospel impulse testifies to the same burdens that the blues carries. Rather than simply enduring, however, the gospel impulse seeks to transcend those burdens by expressing itself in relation to others and to God. The gospel impulse reaches out and reaches up and always moves toward higher ground... The gospel impulse bears witness to the burden and upholds the tradition, but it extends a hand to humanity and to God,...

In my system, the form of blues choruses is limited by the small page of the breastpocket notebook in which they are written, like the form of a set number of bars in a jazz blues chorus, and so sometimes the word meaning can carry from one chorus into another, or not, just like the phrase meaning can carry harmonically from one chorus to the other, or not, in jazz, so that, in these blues as in jazz, the form is determined by time, and by the musician's spontaneous phrasing Sc harmonizing with the beat of the time as it waves and waves on by in measured choruses. It's all gotta be non stop ad libbing within each chorus, or the gig is shot. "The Author" speaks its painful content, which is not to exempt him from a responsibility therefore... He spoke no English until he was five. He wrote incessantly, carrying usually a small spiral notebook in his back pocket so as to "sketch" what occurred on the spot. He was in that old way "serious." He really ...

There were only four kinds of country music. One is your gospel songs, your religious songs. The others were your jigs and reels... Your third were your heart songs, sentimental songs that came from the heart, and the fourth, which has passed out to a degree today and was terrific in those days, were the event songs. Now would you like to ask me what I mean by an event song? An event song is something that had happened, not today, maybe years ago, but hadn’t permeated through the South because of a lack of newspapers and no radio and no television in those days, but they had heard of it. For instance, some of the biggest sellers we were ever able to bring out was things like The Sinking of The Titanic. Bring out a record years after it happened and tell a story with a moral. The Sinking of The Titanic was a big seller, but there was a little bit of a moral that people shouldn’t believe that they could build a ship that couldn’t be sunk. That’s the way they talked about it; of thinking ...

Mono vs Stereo Vinyl and how audio channels are used Image by Lena Kudryavtseva What do stereo and mono mean and what are audio channels? Audio channels are a source for sound. A speaker is a channel, a microphone is a channel, two speakers are two audio channels. In the simplest terms, each single-point source of sound is a channel. When audio is recorded, it can be recorded on multiple channels. This is where terms like mono and stereo come in. Mono is recorded in one channel and stereo in multiple channels. Stereo records Stereo sound systems can be divided into two forms: the first is true or natural stereo in which a live sound is captured, with any natural reverberation present, by an array of microphones. The signal is then reproduced over multiple channel to recreate the live sound. The Second is artificial or pan stereo, in which a single-channel sound is reproduced over multiple channels. By varying the relative amplitude of the signal sent to each channel, an artificial dir...