Here’s another video of me playing my song “Meow Meow” with San Diego blues player, Mario Armando.
Bluesy grooviness
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Category Archives: Music
Recent performance
Here’s a video of a performance I did recently with a band called Bosen Arrows (Ha Ha – get it?!)
Jazz fusion enriches the emotional landscape
I’ve never been a big fan of the fusion band Weather Report, but I was listening to them today and was intrigued. They have a lot of these amorphous dreamy chords that have a hard to pin down emotional character. Are they “happy” chords? Are they “sad” chords? Sort of… sometimes… but there’s always a bit more to them. A happy chord might have a hint of menace, for example. A sad chord might have an element of hope.
It struck me that this kind of emotional vagueness is missing from most popular music. Happy songs tend to be plainly, “rock on” happy. Sad songs tend to be “woe is me” sad. They’re painted from a pretty limited emotional palette.
Frankly, you can say the same with movies, TV, books etc. They tend to deal in “primal” easy to understand emotions.
I wonder if this has led us to becoming a society with a limited emotional landscape. People are comfortable feeling great, or miserable, or silly, but when they feel hopeful but with a hint of worry, or sad but with a sense of schadenfreude they can’t really identify or experience the emotion. So they take this rich, complex amalgamation of emotion and cram it back into the box of simple primal emotions.
I suspect this is the case. And only a small, select, elite few, including myself, even recognize the problem for what it is.
Update: I think the exploration of controversial, hard to understand, often frightening emotions, is why I like a lot of horror films. That’s where you’ll really see an exploration of the catharsis that comes when, after being tormented by someone for years, you swing the shovel at them and knock open their head. Or the cracking open of reality someone experiences when they see the zombiefied corpse of their own child gnawing at their leg. These are not basic, “pop song” emotions. And the music that accompanies such scenes is often complex and dense — closer to Weather Report than Katy Perry (whom I love.)
Rethinking Tom Morello
I’ve always found Tom Morello — guitar player for hip-hop metal band Rage against the Machine — kind of annoying for his finger wagging lefty nagging. But I saw the guy on “That Metal Show” last night, and I give him a lot of credit for really defending hard rock and heavy metal, as well is clearly having a genuine appreciation for it. A lot of the pinko commie hippies who laud him probably can’t stand AC/DC or Dio, but Morello is unapologetic about his love for the music. For that he gets an official my so-called penis handshake.
Come here, Tom… shake my so-called penis.
Seriously dude, where you going?
Interestingly, some friends of mine opened for Tom’s second band, AudioSlave, a few years back. I remember visiting them when they played in Amsterdam, and having him staring at me while I was eating food in their little commissary.
Speakeasy blues
I’m nearing completion on a jazz influenced album I’ve been working on for several years. I’m also experimenting with the sound cloud music player. I’m enclosing one of the tunes here, for your listening pleasure.
Speakeasy Blues by Wil Forbis
Stem cell therapy for Tony Iommi
I was watching “That Metal Show” recently and Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi was the guest. He mentioned something rather interesting: he’s undergone stem cell therapy to replace some of the worn-out cartilage in his hands. (Also interesting: the process was recommended to him by good friend Eddie Van Halen who’d had the same procedure.) I was curious for details and searched online, finding this article.
“I’ve had this problem with my hand and I’ve had this stem-cell treatment on it,” Iommi told the BBC Radio 2 Radcliffe and Maconie Show. “The cartilage [was worn out between] the joints, and the joints [were] rubbing on the joints. It was bone to bone and it was getting a bit painful.”
Iommi has worn a hand guard to protect the injury but after taking painkillers and anti-inflammatories, he has turned to adult stem cells, which can restore defective muscles and help to regenerate cartilage growth. “This is the latest thing, so we’ll see if it works,” he said.
During his appearance, Iommi seemed pretty positive about the results.
Jani Lane dies
Wow — Jani Lane, singer for hard rock band Warrant, is dead at age 47.
I wasn’t a huge fan of their pop metal sound, but thought their hit “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was a great number.
I’m surprisingly saddened.
The state of rock criticism
I was reading a music review in San Diego’s alternative weekly, City Beat, and the reviewer threw out a side comment slamming David Lee Roth. “Wow,” I thought. “A snide comment dissing the tits and ass obsessed lead singer of Van Halen. How appropriate. FOR 1986!”
It’s pretty obvious if you read most independent music writing, that rock music criticism hasn’t really changed in the past 30 years. It’s basically still selling the same narrative: underground, street-level artists who are a backlash against “the man” should be lauded, anything with a twinge of mainstream should be condemned. Any kind of musical exceptionalism — virtuosity*, real experimentalism — should be ignored.
* On a side note, I was looking through a copy of Ms. Magazine and they made a comment about Joan Jett being a “guitar virtuoso.” I mean, come on — I don’t think Joan Jett thinks she’s a guitar virtuoso. To label her as such is to deplete any meaning from the term virtuoso.
I, of course, have argued that the notion of objective music criticism — the idea that there are universal rules that can be applied to gauging the quality of music — is a farce. A person’s likes or dislikes towards music are a culmination of their experiences and perhaps behavioral tendencies encoded in their genes. Taste in music is like taste in food. You can read a 4000 word diatribe on why you shouldn’t like peanut butter, but it’s going to have no effect on whether or not you like peanut butter.
So as it stands, rock critics are maintaining employment by recycling the same arguments they been using for 30 years. Meanwhile, I toil in obscurity. This is clearly one of the great injustices perpetrated on mankind.
Computer-generated movie scores
It strikes me that an interesting piece of software would be some kind of fully automated movie soundtrack generator. This would be a program which could compose a movie score simply by “watching” the movie.
How would this work? Well, first of all the software would need the ability to compose music. As I’ve mentioned in the past, there are currently software programs writing award-winning music. Basically, the software just needs to know all the “rules” of music — the various available chord progressions, what chord does this chord usually go to, how do you establish tonality etc.
By analyzing the motion on the screen, I think software could then compose appropriate music. A scene with a lot of movement and fast cutaways would obviously need fast, jarring music. A scene of two idiots in love, walking along a river would need serene, calm music.
There’s still a few problems. For example, you could have a scene of two people walking along the river and in one case the guy is breaking up with the chick because she’s too needy and boring in bed, but you could also have a very similar scene where the guy is expressing his undying devotion to this woman. Obviously these two scenes would require different kinds of scores. I would put forth the idea that the software could perform some language analysis to design these scores correctly. If you hear a lot of stuff like, “I love you,” “not as much as I love you!” you know a happy score is appropriate.
Obviously this sort of thing is a long way off, but if anybody ever does design it, I clearly deserve 10% of all royalties because I took the time to write this blog post.
The code to the universe
I’ve been reading this interesting book called “The User Illusion” about… well, I’m not quite sure what it’s about. It’s supposed to be about the nature of human consciousness, but so far the author has been mostly talking about math equations and thermodynamics. There is an interesting section on the mathematician Kurt Godel. Godel examined the statement “I am lying” and noted that it was a paradox. If you spoke the statement truthfully, you were not being truthful and vice versa. Godel examined this paradox in mathematical form, and used it to show that math cannot completely describe the universe. There were mathematical statements that could be both true and false at the same time.
It’s interesting to think about the idea that both language and math can essentially convey the same concepts. And just today I was reading about how composers in the day of JS Bach criticized his music for being too mathematical. This opens up the idea that music itself can describe concepts we might presume to be the domain of math or language.
Thus I think we conclude that language and music and math are all describing some greater truth… some code of the universe. And I’m pretty sure that if you figured out this code you would be all-powerful and any chick you wanted would have to sleep with you.