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- How do you listen to music?
Classic Album Sundays is a London club that invites people to listen to LPs in their entirety. It may sound Luddite, but could it teach us a thing or two about our listening habits?
Yesterday, as sometimes happens, I suddenly wanted – no, needed – to listen to Ricardo Villalobos's track Waiworinao. But how? It's not on my iPod, so digging out the Alcachofa album would have taken ages (my house is full of music, none of it organised). So, I did the obvious – I searched for it on YouTube.
I mention this because I don't want you to think I am unreasonably precious about music. I listen to it while I work, while I'm running, as I read the paper, and I'm happy to play my music through crappy computer speakers, on the TV or via a DVD player. I might listen to an individual song, a random selection of tunes, a full album: whatever.
Consequently, I find Classic Album Sundays – a London club, covered by the BBC today, where people gather to listen to vintage albums in their entirety – just a little bit uptight, a little bit Luddite. Sitting with a group of thirtysomethings, listening to classic 70s albums (on vinyl of course), great as they may be, is not my idea of fun. You can just imagine the conversation in the bar afterwards: about how that grimes music and the dubstepping is all young people are interested in nowadays. With their Facebooks. And their MP3 machines.
Yet Classic Album Sundays makes one important point. Not about the sacred format of the album, but about the way we increasingly treat music as a disposable lifestyle accessory. When organiser Colleen Murphy talks about making people turn their phones off, shut the door and give these "works of art" some "heavy listening", she is surely on to something.
We are all busy people and, as music fans, we now have unlimited musical distraction at the end of a broadband connection. We have increasingly little time to listen to a reserve of recorded sound that is growing exponentially every day. I find this can easily lead to drive-by enjoyment, a kind of panicked attempt to absorb as much music as possible – but without truly engaging with it. This is not the way to navigate your way through what Murphy believes to be profound art.
You might have read Patrick Kingsley's hymn to slow reading in the Guardian last year. I'm not sure what effect it has had on my reading habits, but it made me make a conscious effort to listen to music properly. That is, sit there, do nothing, listen – and play things that might not strike you as brilliant, but which are clearly interesting, more than once. It's unfashionable to say so, but sometimes good music is hard work and you have to steep yourself in it before it begins to make sense.
You get through a lot less music that way, but since when was it about quantity? I would rather take the time to appreciate Marcel Dettmann's Dettmann – an initially forbidding monolithic chunk of dub-techno – than rattle my way through numerous cosily familiar minimal techno tracks that I could enjoy in the same time.
I realise you need a cut-off point. The KLF used to rail against the album format as a self-fulfilling con. People would invest heavily in albums and would train themselves to like them. I can believe that, too. Years ago, I worked in a record shop where we were forced to play the top 10 on a loop. Listen to Simply Red's Life often enough and eventually you even begin to pick out favourite tracks (Fairground, of course).
So how are you listening to music in 2011? Do you still see the album as superior to the single? Can you multi-task and take all you can from a song while cooking, cleaning or writing a blog? Or is time to sit down, turn off the laptop and engage in some serious Slow Listening?
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - 50 great moments in jazz: Carla Bley's Escalator Over the Hill
These days, no one would blink an eye at the thought of a jazz opera. But in 1971, Carla Bley's genre-spanning mix of poetry, country and Indian music was unprecedented
In the eclectic 21st century, the idea of an opera drawing on sources as diverse as jazz, rock and country music, Indian classical forms, hipster poetry and bursts of blistering free-improv doesn't sound that fanciful a notion. But back in 1970, it was unimaginable – until Carla Bley, the majestically eccentric pianist and composer, conjured up a gargantuan, avant-cinematic, cross-genre venture called Escalator Over the Hill, in the face of record company indifference and no financial support.But through her sumptuous compositions for jazz orchestras, her charisma and deceptively offhand determination, Bley persuaded an extraordinary cast to collaborate on a venture that ran to three long-playing discs, laboriously assembled from separately recorded parts. This was long before the internet and digital studio technology made such things a breeze. Escalator became the Sgt Pepper of new jazz, or a parallel to Frank Zappa's genre-busting work in the same era – displaying an imagination and breadth that, for all the project's unevenness and periodically exasperating impenetrability, showed aspiring composers that the old sectarianisms in music could be swept away.
Bassist/vocalist Jack Bruce, from the then recently disbanded supergroup Cream, played a key role in the project, as did country singer Linda Ronstadt. Argentinian saxophonist Gato Barbieri, an admirer of Albert Ayler and Pharoah Sanders, plays with blazing intensity and power. Don Cherry, a cornetist with Ornette Coleman, is at his most jubilant, guitarist John McLaughlin is as fierce, bluesy and exciting as he is on the Miles Davis/Jack Johnson sessions recorded around the same time.
Escalator had slowly come together in the late-60s, after Carla Bley (the daughter of a church musician) taught herself jazz by listening to the giants of the genre as a club waitress and occasional pianist in 50s New York. She also revealed a distinctive melodic talent as a composer for her first husband, piano virtuoso Paul Bley. In the 60s, her work was increasingly adopted by jazz gurus such as George Russell and Jimmy Giuffre, and her powers as a large-ensemble composer in the Ellington-Mingus-Gil Evans tradition surfaced in work for vibraphonist Gary Burton (A Genuine Tong Funeral, 1967) and bassist Charlie Haden (Liberation Music Orchestra, 1969).During the latter period, Bley had regularly been receiving poems from Paul Haines, an old friend and fan living in New Mexico and then India. Bley detected a musicality in Haines's writings that the poet hadn't imagined. The poems slowly coalesced into a jigsaw of a libretto. "I would put them on the piano and stare at them for hours," Bley told Time Out in 1972. "Sooner or later certain lines would seem to have a melody to them. Then it would be just a matter of working at it, with the form and rhythm of the lyric leading the way ... the full meaning of the words would not occur to me until I had worked with them for months, sometimes years. Through this process we eventually accumulated about twelve major pieces of music and I started thinking about Escalator over the Hill."
Set in an imaginary run-down hotel and catching the clamour of voices lost in it, Escalator features a rock band led by Jack Bruce (with McLaughlin on guitar) and an eastern group led by Don Cherry, both offering the hotel guests – including Linda Ronstadt as the character Ginger – a way out. "Jack was our Caruso," Bley said in 1972. "He sang the material better than anyone in the world, we couldn't have wanted anything else."
Since then, Carla Bley has won almost every international award and accolade in jazz. Her work is regularly regarded in the same light as giants such as Gil Evans and Duke Ellington. Her writing has spanned non-improvisational chamber music, a group with her current partner and bassist Steve Swallow, and leading European soloists such as saxophonist Andy Sheppard and trumpeter Paolo Fresu. But she's best known for intricate, harmonically lustrous music for orthodox jazz orchestras in which rich chords, lopsided tangos, thumping swing and a good deal of sidelong irony coexist. Bley has remarked that Kurt Weill, Erik Satie and the Beatles have had as strong an influence on her music as Ellington, Russell or Mingus – and it shows.
Bley once recalled a conversation with Swallow about self-doubt. Swallow told her that there may be only 50,000 people on the planet who really appreciated her music, but if that barely gets on the graph by pop-audience standards, who cares? Bley told the Guardian in 1991: "I'd rather have my 50,000 than a bigger audience that wanted me to do something different." Escalator Over the Hill, and all the many representations of Bley's idiosyncratic eloquence since, are enduring proof of her value.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - Is there only One Direction for G-A-Y?
The promoter of Britain's biggest gay club night has caused controversy by suggesting young female fans would not be welcome at a performance by X Factor boy band One Direction
Visitors to London's gay district, Soho, may have been surprised on Saturday to see the streets thronging with hordes of young teenage girls. They were there not to sample the gay tourism or tuck into an exuberant plate of Chinese food, but with the heart-racing hope of obtaining a G-A-Y wristband to see boy band sensation One Direction.
Jeremy Joseph, the promoter of Britain's biggest gay nightlife brand G-A-Y, had booked the X-factor stars for his Saturday club night at Heaven. But Joseph, who scheduled his birthday party to coincide with the gig, appeared to be concerned that G-A-Y's trademark atmosphere, a camp nightlife funworld that provides a safe place for gay people to go out, would be affected by the influx of One Direction's predominantly young straight female fan base.
He said on Twitter on Saturday: "My birthday wish is for little girls to realise that G-A-Y is a lesbian and gay club so there's only one direction and that's no direction for them". In another tweet, he said: "hoping the name G-A-Y, isnt too Subtle???? It's G-A-Y not Str8".
Amongst a clamour of birthday tweets for Joseph, outraged articles started to emerge. One came from popular gay blogger Electro Queer who told his readers: "Excluding our straight brothers and sisters from a concert is just plain wrong. The fact that Joseph can discriminate based on sexuality is preposterous and as a gay community we have allowed it to go on too long."
A straight female blogger expressed disappointment that Joseph "doesn't want me anywhere near his club" despite the fact that "I love the people and the general scene at G-A-Y."
Club-goer Holly Vennell, 21, and her girlfriend, were refused entry on Saturday night. Vennell, who was not there specifically to see One Direction, told me: "We were turned away because it was too busy to go in and that it was members only, but then the door staff continued to let less 'femme' lesbians in. We spoke to some and they weren't members."
It has been illegal since 2007 in Britain to discriminate on the grounds of sexual orientation in the provision of goods and services. Today, a gay couple won compensation after they were turned away from a B&B. But gay venues can legally turn away anyone they believe risk behaving in a threatening way towards lesbians and gays.
I'm not suggesting that G-A-Y operates a discriminatory door policy, and whatever Vennell's perception of why she and her girlfriend was refused entry, there may have been legitimate reasons for doing so. And G-A-Y does state on its website that priority is given to members. But Joseph's tweets raise a thorny issue for gay venues and their promoters.
Joseph is a popular and admired personality within the gay community, known for his ongoing charitable efforts. He deserves praise for helping to shape and maintain London's vibrant and pioneering gay scene, for decades giving the gay community one of its biggest assets.
Where so many have failed, Joseph has succeeded, and running the world's flagship gay night is clearly no cruise in the park. Gay clubbers in the past have abandoned venues that become "too straight" – Manchester's Canal Street during the 1990s is a good example of this.
Joseph has a right to protect his brand's identity from being diluted, and private clubs do have the right to refuse entry for a plethora of given reasons without explanation. In the 1980s one of London's gay haunts the Blitz, made famous by its unusual cloakroom boy – a certain George Alan O'Dowd – controversially turned people away if they weren't attractive enough.
But if a gay bar wants to keep a gay majority inside, how can it go about enforcing that legally on the doors when the scheduled acts have an appeal that exceeds the perimeters of the desired clientele?
As Saturday was one of One Direction's first performances since their defeat in the X-Factor final, it comes as no surprise that plenty of girls would try to attend, especially when entry was priced at a rock-bottom £4. Sadly though, Joseph's tactics on Twitter appear to have upset some people in the gay community.
Vennell said she could understand the tough decision: "I can see why he wanted to keep so many One Direction fans out, but it's so frustrating, especially as there's no clear door policy. We're not very sceney lesbians, so it's usually a fun treat when we go out. I just felt so embarrassed, with everyone laughing at us."
Naturally G-A-Y has a duty to serve the gay community first, and a straight crowd could damage Joseph's hard-won and long-established brand. Does the answer lie in not booking acts as massively mainstream as One Direction? Being such a recent phenomena, voted for by millions and with a colossal fan base of straight girls it was predictable that booking One Direction might raise a dilemma.
Central London is increasingly rivalled by less commercial and more alternative gay scenes in other parts of the city like Shoreditch and Vauxhall that spare gay clubbers some of this social pressure.
To seamlessly run a club that offers a minority the most mainstream entertainment obtainable is a commendable effort, but near impossible. If all attendees at Heaven had to be paid members, or were given loyalty cards, would this be a better system, alleviating the pressure on door staff?
G-A-Y has always held the gay community's best interests at its heart, and thousands would reaffirm Joseph's slogan on Twitter "Addicted to the drug that is G-A-Y".
But as Britain's flagship gay club, discriminating against straight people would be a disappointing and unacceptable side-effect of that drug, a direction that few would celebrate.
We asked Jeremy Joseph for a comment before publication, but he asked to see the piece first. If he decides to comment later, we'll post it here. After we contacted him, he posted this on Twitter: "Dont U just love the press & how they want to write article based on a tweet, misinterpreting that tweet & wonder why u dont want 2 comment."
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - New music exclusive: David's Lyre – In Arms
The world of baroque pop has a new man of mystery. And his name is actually Paul
First of all, he's not called David, he's called Paul Dixon. Secondly, David's Lyre may refer to a band or just Dixon but no one's really sure. Thirdly, he may or may not have been in some pretty dodgy bands in the past and that may or may not explain why he appears in press shots (and some of his early videos) wearing a mask. Still, one thing we are certain about is that he (and perhaps some mates) have made a wonderful EP, In Arms, and that the title track is a dramatic, horn-bolstered love song that soars and swoops over clattering drums and piano, like Patrick Wolf at his most OTT. This beautifully animated video – a guardian.co.uk/music exclusive – is the perfect visual accompaniment to a song overflowing with love, regret, loneliness and other mushy stuff.
In Arms is out on 21 February on Hideout Recordings.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать
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