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- How New Band of the Day ruined my life
What's not to love about New Band of the Day? Paul Lester, who's not had a holiday for five years and receives a steady stream of hate mail, has some answers ...
It seems like only four and a half years ago – what you might call 5 BC (Before Chillwave) – that I left my job at Uncut and had to invent new ways to make a living. One of the things I came up with was a regular column in which I would write about a new band or musician every day, except for weekends and high holidays.
So I asked the nice gentleman at guardian.co.uk/music if I could do just that, and those being expansionist times, he said yes. Since then, New Band of the Day (because life's too short to be oblique) has served me well. But I have to be honest: writing the world's longest-running column (AA Gill? AA Schmill) hasn't been all good. How so? I hear you ask. Let me count the ways ...
1. It's been terrible for my health. I've discovered that the column takes exactly the amount of time that I have to write it. So on days when I have four hours, I'll do it in four hours. When I only have 40 minutes, that's how long it takes, factoring in an extra five minutes for hyperventilation and sundry other manifestations of the anxiety attack.
2. I've become obsessed – OBSESSED – with new music. I mean, I was always keen to hear the latest stuff, but now we are talking about something that surely would be recognised by a doctor as a syndrome, conceivably with a Latin name.
3. Holidays? What holidays? (Paul isn't lying here, I've not known him take a day off from the column in the three years I've been in charge – Ed.)
4. Let's not be too dramatic about this. It is, after all, only a job. But let's just say that having to file 600 words every day was partly responsible for the collapse of my marriage. No biggie.
5. I've missed numerous weddings, bar mitzvahs, even a funeral to get it written on time.
6. New Band of ohe Day doesn't recognise time zones. Belgium was fine, France, too. When I went to Israel, I had to write it two hours earlier than usual. In New York, I set my alarm for about six in the morning. More fun was LA, where it had to be finished by 4am.
7. I get to Get It Wrong in public on a regular basis. What was it I said about Lady Gaga?. Something about her being too artful for mainstream acceptance? It was a bit like that famous screen test report that dismissed Fred Astaire with a withering "can't sing ... can dance a little". Only obviously wearing a dress made out of meat.
8. Then there are the bands I've praised to the skies, only for them to crash and burn months after a brief period in the sun (and other weather metaphors). Whatever did happen to Black Kids? Are you reading me, Sky Ferreira?
9. I face scorn and derision, either in "print" or in person. It is assumed by some that New Band of the Day means Free Plug of the Day. It doesn't. I don't like all the music of all the people I write about and, when I don't, the artists can take it personally. And they don't hesitate to use all of the many modern communication methods to say so. I often get cornered at gigs, and I hate corners. Better to do it in a field or a park next time, potential detractors.
10. I've even been dissed in song. One chap by the name of Theophilus London wrote a rap about me in which he threatened to do something exotic if not downright illegal in some countries to yours truly, presumably incensed by my willing him to become the "black Morrissey or Elvis Costello" of my fevered imaginings. It was a compliment, silly.
11. Sometimes the negative reactions to the column leave me wracked with guilt. Like the letter I got from one former new act in which he complained that my article on him had "appallingly misfired", as a result of which his "professional life" had become "a chain of trying to convince people that I'm not some kind of charlatan, making it far more difficult for me to get work ... and far more difficult to pay the rent". If it's any consolation, fella, I'm not exactly high on the hog here with my inbox full of hate mail and another 1,000 new bands to find by 2015 ...
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: Pat Metheny
More than any other jazz guitarist, Metheny has given the instrument as prominent a place as a trumpet or saxophone
Pat Metheny, the guitar star from Missouri, is one of the most commercially successful instrumentalists in jazz. But while such an achievement is not always regarded as a compliment, Metheny has never ditched jazz spontaneity just to please the crowd, winning him a wide auidence as well as reputation as a sophisticated and respected guitar improviser.
By the 1980s, Metheny albums hit six-figure sales, usually unthinkable in jazz. He toured the world every year in the 80s and 90s, filling rock venues with a mix of Latin grooves, pop hooks, jazz improv and electronics, and builing a repertoire of memorable original themes for audiences to burst into whoops of recognition at the first few notes of any of them. When he took his group on tour last year, with three of its four current members (Metheny, pianist Lyle Mays and bassist Steve Rodby), older fans tapped their toes to tunes they'd first heard as twentysomethings, while teenagers air-drummed percussionist Antonio Sanchez's fills and hits as if they'd somehow absorbed them from an earlier life.
Here's the track that turns audiences on more than any other, and defines the Metheny Group sound: Are You Going With Me? from 1981's Offramp.
Like Keith Jarrett, Metheny is that rare jazz musician who combines a pop-composer's instinct for an anthemic melody with a virtuoso ability to play extended spontaneous solos without repeating himself. Detractors have complained that some of the guitarist's hummable, soft-grooving fusion gets close to elevator music. But if the easygoing repertoire of the Pat Metheny Group has brought him worldwide fame outside of jazz circles, Metheny has also recorded cutting-edge music with free-jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman (Song X, in 1985), with minimalist composer Steve Reich (Different Trains, 1987), and free-improv British guitarist Derek Bailey (The Sign of Four, 1996), written Grammy-winning movie scores, and partnered post-bop stars including Herbie Hancock, Brad Mehldau and the late Michael Brecker. He has also found time to develop the one-man-band Orchestrion Machine – a stage-filling collection of robot percussion and keyboard instruments, self-strumming guitars and electronic effects that he would both co-ordinate and improvise with in the course of typically marathon-length performances.
Metheny was born in Lee's Summit, Missouri on 12 August 1954, and learned trumpet until the age of 14, when orthodontic treatment forced him to switch to guitar. In his second semester at the University of Miami, having already mastered the bebop-based guitar technique of the virtuoso Wes Montgomery, he was given a teaching job. Influenced by Montgomery and Ornette Coleman, but also by the Beatles, Metheny joined vibraphonist Gary Burton's proto jazz-rock group aged 19, then worked in a trio with bass guitar legend Jaco Pastorius and drummer Bob Moses. He formed the first version of the Pat Metheny Group in 1977 with former Miami alumni Mark Egan on bass and Danny Gottlieb on drums, and the Bill Evans-inspired pianist Lyle Mays, who became a lifetime collaborator and a powerful compositional influence.
From then on, the guitarist successfully balanced parallel lives – maintaining and developing the popular appeal of the Pat Metheny Group, while forming ad hoc partnerships with some of the most powerful improvisers in jazz, including fellow guitarists Jim Hall and John Scofield, saxophonists Michael Brecker and Joshua Redman, and many others. Metheny has also worked in small ensembles with bassists of the class of Charlie Haden, Dave Holland and Larry Grenadier, and in a flat-out post-bop trio with Holland and bop-drums veteran Roy Haynes. Perhaps one of the most intriguing apparent contradictions of his complex and restlessly curious musical sensibility is the devotion of this pop-savvy tunesmith to the impulsive and freewheeling music of Ornette Coleman, a revelation that hit the guitarist while still in his teens. More than any other, this might be the quality that has sustained his jazz-playing edge, and given his career such longevity and diversity.
Unlike those rock-influenced post-bop guitarists whose contribution has principally been to lend the jazz ensemble a soul, blues and r'n'b-influenced sound, Metheny has explored a lifelong fascination with technology (a quality he shares with a similarly broadminded innovator, Herbie Hancock) to give the jazz guitar many new textures, in particular the voice-like and sax-like sustained sounds made possible by digital-delay devices, the Roland guitar-synth and the Synclavier. He has also transformed acoustic ballad-playing through his devotion to the multi-stringed Pikasso harp-guitar. More than any other jazz guitarist of the post-bop era, Pat Metheny has given the instrument as natural and prominent a place in jazz as a trumpet or a saxophone.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - 'Tonight Matthew, Jared Leto's going to be ... Kurt Cobain!'
As tributes to the Nirvana legend go, dressing up as him and covering one of his songs is certainly different
There's always a whiff of gap year-style indulgence whenever a Hollywood actor declares they're going to slum it as a rock star (River Phoenix, Keanu Reeves, Juliette Lewis). It's a criticism Jared Leto is more than familiar with.
Credit to the 30 Seconds from Mars frontman, then, for sticking at his second career choice; his band have been going for 13 years, their last album reached the top 20 and they have a co-headline slot at this year's Reading and Leeds festival. So he's doing something right.
Substantially less credit to Leto, however, for posting this distinctly odd tribute video of him doing an unnerving – and rather convincing – impersonation of Kurt Cobain.
"I heard today (5 April) was the day Kurt passed away 17 years ago," Leto wrote on his website. "I can't believe it's been that long. I'm so grateful for his contribution and inspiration. I'm not sure I'd be doing this if it weren't for him. He gave us all permission to create, no matter what our skill set, and reminded me that dreams are possible.
This made me recall a short piece of film I shot when I heard they were making a film celebrating his life. I made it to explore the character and explore creative possibilities. I never sent it to the studio or to anyone but thought I'd share it now."
Courtney Love was unavailable for comment.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - New music: Gazelle Twin – I Am Shell I Am Bone
This singer's doom-laden pop arrives just in time for summer
With Fever Ray between albums, there's a gap in the (wait for it) doom-laden-gothic-tinged-drone-pop market and Brighton-based visual artist, photographer, singer-songwriter and producer Gazelle Twin, aka Elizabeth Walling, seems like the perfect candidate to fill it. I Am Shell I Am Bone – the follow-up to last year's debut single, Changeling – creeps out of the speakers, all oddly pitched vocal harmonies and bass rumbles, with scatter-gun beats and an imposing sense of dread. The video – a Guardian exclusive – was filmed and edited by Walling, its black and white images of blurred faces and Sea Life setting enhancing the song's otherworldly quality.I Am Shell I Am Bone is released on 25 April 2011 by Anti-Ghost Moon Ray Records.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - New music: Kate Bush - Deeper Understanding
After a six-year absence, Bush returns with a Bulgarian choir and a song about a lonely computer lover. Sounds about right
When Kate Bush announced her first album since 2005's Aerial would be out in May and was called Director's Cut, the majority of the music world thought "At last!". When said album turned out to consist of revisits and revisions of tracks from 1989's The Sensual World and 1993's The Red Shoes, those same people went, "er, what?". Still, the fact that Kate Bush has been near a recording studio is always worth getting at least mildly excited about and this morning Radio 2 played the first single, Deeper Understanding, a track that originally appeared on The Sensual World.Written as a conversation between a lonely person and a computer, the original clocks in at four-and-a-half minutes and features typically bombastic drum sounds, creeping synths and a Bulgarian vocal ensemble. Like many Bush songs, it has an atmosphere all of its own. The 2011 retwizzle is two minutes longer, seems to have a new vocal and, naturally for the music climate of today, a lot of vocal processing and vocoder. The chorus is much more explicitly meant to be a conversation between human and computer: "I bring you love and deeper understanding" croons the machine like a malfunctioning ZX Spectrum. It's not a disaster, in fact once you get used to the vocals it's still a great Kate Bush track, but if revisiting songs is going to mean adding an extra minute and a half of harmonica solos to each one then we may have problems.
Director's Cut is released on 16 May.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать
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