You know the catchy music they play in the teaser for the movie Wall-E? From the first time i heard it, i thought it was great. I thought at the time that it was part of the film score, written especially for the pixar film. But then, I heard the same music, characterized by the three-note half-step sequence, in another preview of some sort, this time some for some sort of girly situational comedy. First, i thought that the sit com totally ripped off Wall-E. But i figured, at that point, that the music was actually an older composition that caught the attention of music directors for two completely different features. Recently, i saw the movie Brazil, a 1985 sci-fi film. Or, if your name beings with “Wiki” and ends in “Pedia”, its a dystopian black comedy. Whatever. The movie itself is quirky and fantastic, in my opinion, and sure enough, it has its own cult following. Very early in the film, there is a scene in which the camera moves quickly through a bustling office, and what do you know, that SAME fully-orchestrated up-tempo three-note sequence is coming out of the speakers. At this point, i’m convinced that this music, wherever it came from, is very high on Hollywood music directors’ go-to lists for “busy, excited working theme music”.

So this music has been bouncing around in my head for the last few weeks, and i’ve been meaning to find out where it really came from. Thank God for the internet. I tried asking people if they knew where that music came from, and all i get is blank stares. “Do you know that theme music they play in that movie trailer that’s like dum dum dummmm, dum dum da-da-dum… no?” It’s impossible to convey the actual piece of music with just your mouth, because the music has so many great elements that make it unique. It’s not just the 3 notes in sequence, its the building chords behind the sequence, the latin percussion, the crescendo of it all.

The music, as i have found out, is really just a very small beginning of the piece “Aquarela do Brasil” aka Brazil, written in 1939. The movie Brazil that i saw earlier used this song, translated into english, as the main part of its score. The song was recorded a bajillion times in a bajillion ways by everyone, usually as “Brazil”: Django, Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Chet Atkins, Arcade Fire (i know!), etc. The part that got my attention isn’t even prominent in most versions of the song, just the orchestral version as far as i know. Chasing down the origin and uses of this song has taken me so many different places because it’s used so much.

Now i want to show you this:
“Aquarela do Brasil” Samba Cartoon

This 8-minute Donald Duck cartoon comes from Saludos Amigos, a 1942 Disney cartoon with 4 segments, the finale of which is linked to above. This cartoon, the first use of the song in films (by Disney, no less, 66 years before Wall-E), is awesome. It struck me as fantastic even apart from the fact that it uses “Brasil”. Maybe i think its so great because i’m the kind of person that thinks films like Fantasia are the best use of animation ever created. A cartoon that centers around music is a worthwhile cartoon. So many elements present in that cartoon are no longer used in today’s attention deficit disorder sugar-high cartoons. Donald, decked out in his sailor garb, an american icon, digs this Portuguese-speaking stranger. We watch as they take a short stroll through colorful latin-american culture, including everything from Samba music to cigar-smoking and fine local liquors. Cartoons can’t get away with any of that these days, and if they do, they probably were created to appeal to a more mature crowd in the first place. Of course, what do i know… maybe the old Disney toons from the 40′s weren’t for the kids either, showing a suited Walt smoking a little cigarette in his office as he introduces his lovable characters.

Anyways, the next time you hear “Brasil”, you’ll know where it came from.

My friend Rami writes,

I love the way [music] makes me feel, I love how creative I feel when I hear a good song, and I love how my mind comes alive when a good song comes on. It’s insane, really. It’s like for 3ish minutes I’m not even myself. Or, I am myself, just on this whole other level than ordinary Rami. I think that’s why I date musicians. Only. Other people just aren’t as passionate and deep, and if you disagree with me, oh well. Perhaps the thing that makes you feel the way I do when I hear music is the thing your partner possesses, and for you that is the ultimate quality for a partner to have. And that’s cool for you.

I think this is a beautiful articulation of how powerful and touching music can be. I know for myself, music is primarily about playing, as articulated by Derek Bailey and others. My relationship with music comes about through my hands as much as it does through my ears, but I think Rami hits on the salient issue of music as a deepening of ordinary experience.

Playing an instrument is a way of extending the body, of augmenting myself. Through the guitar, I can express things that I cannot say any other way. Often, when I play, emotions and ideas come to me from somewhere other than my everyday consciousness – playing (and as Rami suggests, listening) is a way of being that completely bypasses the ordinary mindfulness of the person involved in the music.

Although musicians certainly aren’t intrinsically better than anyone else (indeed, they can be much worse – has anyone else seen Rock of Love?), the exposure to a different way of thinking and being via music that musicians and serious listeners have, certainly does give those people the opportunity to experience the world in a whole new way.

In my previous post, I outlined my initial musical encounter with Django Reinhardt and the French jazz music he helped to shape from the 1930′s to the 1950′s. Now I’d like to talk about how my technical fascination with the music developed into a full-on romance with early swing jazz, and why I think this kind of music still has something to say today.

First, the part about love.

Most people realize that when you spend any significant period of time working with a person or a thing, you develop a kind of relationship, a bond, with your object of study. What you study, the things and people you work on and work with, become a part of who you are, for better or for worse. As I spent time studying Django’s music, woodshedding my technique and listening to the many guitarists who play in the “Gypsy Jazz” style today, a strange thing began to happen. My musical DNA began to mutate and change; I began to internalize the music. And I began to understand what really drew me to this stuff in the first place, all technical matters aside.

The guitar, the main instrument in this music, is unabashdley “guitaristic”. Django exploited all the natural strengths of the instrument in his playing – arppegiated scales ascending in fourths, chromatic tremolo passages, open string harmonics, dense chordal rolls – here was a player who was not ashamed of his guitar. My main problem with jazz guitarists until I discovered Django (with precious few exceptions), was that they all sounded like they would rather be playing a horn. Now, in some ways that is only natural as the vocabulary for jazz music is horn-based; jazz began, after all, as a genre teeming with brass players. However, a guitar is not a trumpet, and I’ve never enjoyed players who play as if they wished that their instrument had a mouth-piece at the end of the fretboard.

So, Django was for me, at long last, a jazz guitarist who really played guitar, as a guitar.

Just as important as what Django played (the guitar), was how he played it. Listen again to the clip in the previous post – do you here the sense of swing, the playfulness, the intensity, the lyricism? It’s not that these elements aren’t present in jazz guitar players later on down the line, it’s just that I find that there is a unique sense of joy in this kind of playing, a certain kind of swing that is rightly described as “hot”.

Finally, there is the sense of community, the great oral tradition that has sprung up around this music. You can go to Django festivals all over the world these days and find guitarists paying tribute to the Sinti Gypsy Django. As you anonymous blogger wrote about these festivals,

Every year I visit several Django Festivals in France, Belgium, Germany and The Netherlands; I am not only attracted by the music, it’s the lifestyle, the lazyness, the laid back mood, the irony, the steady solidarity, the consistance of the community, making their persistant homages to the great Swing guitarist Django Reinhardt.

Although I haven’t been myself, I get the same feeling from the music – you can almost feel the lifestyle ooze through the improvisations of the great players.

If it were up to me, I could skip straight from swing-era jazz straight to free improvisation and not really miss much that came in between. Django, especially in his few recorded solo improvisations that frequently modulate between unrelated keys and nonsensical embellishments, anticipates this post-modern jump better than any guitarist who would come after him, save for perhaps the rock guitarists at the end of the sixties.

Consequently, in an age where so much music depends on the magic of recording technology to even come into existence, is it not refreshing to hear a bit of unabashed virtuosity spring forth from a box of wood and wire? Call me old school, but I’m glad this music is still around to be heard by those who want it – sure it’s not loud or rebellious or likely to make you rich and famous.

But you know what? It just might make you smile. And that is enough for me.

Further Reading:
An excellent article in the New Yorker about Micheal Dregni’s book Django: The Life and Music of a Gypsy Legend. The article is a great piece of writing in itself, and I highly recommend the book to those with even a passing interest in Gypsy culture, jazz, or France during the first half of the twentieth century. Dregni’s work is captivating, a biography that hits all the right notes. 

I consider myself a musician. I’m not a professional, as in, I do not make music as my profession. I always (since high school, at least) have had a desire to somehow make money with my favorite hobbies, music and recording. I also tend to think that it is much easier to make money in music than if i had a hobby of say, gardening. of course, the money would be small, but it would be something. I think back to Dad and his former Apple computer repair company. It’s not like he paid any bills with it, but he helped out folks and bought some toys.

Radiohead, the avant-garde rock band, (also known as the the frightening noise-making mumblers, if your name is Desiree), released their latest album In Rainbows on oct. 10, just 2 days ago. It’s not really a big deal, except the reason it made news headlines is because of the way they released it: the only place you can get it is off of their website as a download, and the customer chooses how much they want to pay for it. Since there is no “label” or distribution costs, all of the profit goes directly to Radiohead. This decision is a wild departure from any standard business model of music sales, and all the editorials written about the subject have come to the conclusion that it’s brilliant, even if it’s a gimmick and it only works for Radiohead because they’re… Radiohead. I bought it yesterday, offering 4 british pounds, which is about 8 bucks. also, the website is set up to where you “add album to cart”, and “check out”, like a regular online store, with just the added step of typing in the payment amount. So when you get to that step, you kinda feel sheepish if you just leave it blank. It’s not like you’re guilted into paying, it’s kind of letting the customer realize that he is getting a product of wholly subjective value. Since i like Radiohead, I do in fact value their music, and the album is worth something to me. it’s a very unique feeling for a customer… individually choosing the value of the goods, and not by market supply/demand laws, because the physical product is information. I pretty much agree that Radiohead is one of the only bands who could turn this into one of their best-selling albums of all time.

Just by chance today, i found out about TuneCore, and i saw how easy it would be to distribute my music in a money-making fashion. They put your songs on iTunes for you, and you make 100% of the profits. Every song download is a dollar in your pocket! This suddenly got me interested in selling music, since it would be so mindlessly easy to do. I started researching the songwriter royalties, since my most recent music was written by Dad and friend Kevin Smith, and plans are in the works for me & JB to record an upcoming album of Dad’s old folk songs. But the more i thought about it, the more questions i had.

Right now, you can download all of MY original compositions and recordings for free off of my website, because it’s mine and i said so. For some things, like the Newtons’ tracks, Nic Vascocu’s song (from way back when), or Jon Breaux’s original compositions (w/ lyrics), i cut out a short 1-minute clip to post, in order to protect the original creator’s product in case he wanted to sell it later on. If i decided to sell my own stuff, i’d have to take down the full-length versions from my website. That’s a problem for me. I never wanted people to have to pay to enjoy something i made. but, naturally, if i made money, then it would be great! Some artists have websites where you can download their albums for free, and then donate whatever you want into a “tip jar” paypal account. This might be one way to do it for me, but i’m pretty sure the little “donate” button would get 0.0 clicks per year on my website, effectively nullifying the reason to put it on there in the first place. what about the Radiohead way? Radiohead has a fanbase already. people know and like them, as a band. They will get paid because they have proven that their material is worth paying for. This method would never work for me.

Assuming i do record and release the aforementioned album of Dad’s folk songs, we will have to decide in which way we would want to distribute it:
Free for download from DavidComeaux.com is option A.
Paid download from iTunes is option B.
Optional paid download from DavidComeaux.com is an iffy option C.
Traditional CD distribution is option D.

Option “D” might be option “Dad” because he always seems to hint that his buddy Kenny Thibedeaux would hook us up with some local traditional-style distributors. But even if we did option D, i’d push for a digital distribution method as well, probably option B. But seeing as this music is really just a bunch of folk songs, more personal memento and charm rather than profitable musical genius, perhaps the only way we should go would be option A!

Now that i’ve confused you with all kinds of options and letters and lettered options, the next question is, would I do the same thing for my music? Assuming that in the future, i will have written and recorded enough of my own music to constitute an album or EP of some kind, would I want to sell it instead of offer it freely to the masses? Like i mentioned before, the precedent i have set is that i give my music away, and anyone who wants to enjoy it can do so for free with an internet connection. Besides, as a self-critic, i am highly skeptical that there is even a viable market for my musical doodlings. The most i would get would be my close friends and family who want to “help the cause”. The larger public isn’t interested in my music, i’m no star, i’ve never been on “American Idol”. Marketing, selling my music as a product, is something that i am wholly uninterested in. As a result, my personal music will probably remain free for the rest of my life, unless i make friends with someone with experience in marketing who believes that they can sell my music.

And there you have it. from start to finish:
i make music.
i want to make money from my music.
it would be easy to put my music up for sale.
do i want to put my music up for sale?
is this the kind of music that i would put up for sale?
why would i sell my music if i want everyone to enjoy it?
do people enjoy my music enough to buy it?
i shouldn’t sell something that nobody wants to buy.

Some great writing about the seminal frailing banjo records aptly titled “Clawhammer banjo”:

My feelings run along the inverse of old Sam’s: I think Scruggs-style bluegrass flattened out the banjo, the way rocknroll mashed down blues and country musics. Post-Scruggs banjo is flashy impressive fun, but it blows right by me like a circus train. Old-time banjo, though, unreels light as a thread, and its shadow is monolothic, an Appalachian stonehenge. If you can link bluegrass to assembly lines and rush hour traffic and dishwashers, where do you find the material analogue for clawhammer banjo? It’s a gestalt, a confluence of diasporas, trade winds and tragedies. Slavery, potato blight, coal mines. Africa, Ireland, the ragged Blue Ridge.

I don’t like Buell Kazee’s voice — with his theatre-organ vibrato and rolling R’s he sounds to me like the Cowardly Lion — but his clawhammer self-accompaniment is otherworldly. On the old recordings, his frailing on an open-back banjo sounds spectral, detached from the plane of the song. It curls leviathan-like beneath the surface.

Hobart Smith, Roscoe Holcomb, Uncle Dave Macon: their frailing styles work to wildy different effects, all compelling. Ralph Stanley’s clawhammer tunes have a lightning crackle missing from his up-picked stuff. And there’s Clarence Ashley — my favorite by a mile. Everyone loves “The Cuckoo” and “Little Sadie,” and there’s a reason for it. The whiplash tempo, the galloping snap of his thumb off the fifth string, the unhinged alto drone of Sawmill tuning that gives his blues licks almost Asian harmonies. His technique is austere and ineffible, light as breath but old and deep as a limestone cavern.

I’m right there with this line of thought – frailing banjo, with it’s unique tunings and rhythmic drive, often times sounds both incredibly archaic and strangely modern at the same time. A truly beautiful sound, built from the diasporas of so many different groups. As a cajun, and therefore, a member of a diasporatic (is that a word?) group myself, I’ve often felt a deep connection to the stories of misplaced peoples – the jews, the irish, the west-africans, the indigenious americans. although it was a hard road to get here, i’m glad all these people have had a chance to mingle in this country and produce the kinds of music that made me want to be a musician in the first place.

Speaking of tunings and musicians, check out Alex Ross interviewing Yo-Yo Ma. This is a great read, especially Ma’s take on what really constitutes a musical tradition:

One core value, Ma said, had to do with intonation. He pointed out that schemes of tuning are not consistent within Western classical music and that they vary widely from place to place. What matters, he said, is that different kinds of music require idiosyncratic tunings, and that learning the tunings takes you toward the core values of the art.

An interesting commentary – I’ve always played with altered tunings and have always felt that those tunings really reflect what Ma considers the ‘core values’ of a tradition.

Although standard tuning on the guitar is a piece of genius in its own way, it’s also the compromise that allows the guitar to be such a universal instrument that can be adapted to play almost any music. As I believe Chet Atkins once famously said, once you change the tuning of the guitar, you’re not playing a guitar anymore. You’re playing something else.

While I think that is only partially true, I sure have been enjoying the altered (and sometimes bizarre) tunings that a lot of banjo music is played in.

Today is also the first day of fall, the autum equinox, although it didn’t much feel like it outside. I have a feeling that this year it’s going to be a sprint to the winter solstice – time has been passing faster than ever it seems, these past few months.

well, dave asked for it, and now you’ll have it – my ‘official’ notes on the summer recordings posted here, such as they are.

polyrhythm + guitars: this piece was recorded on my four-track cassette recorder with the drums recorded first, then the rhythm guitar, and finally the lead guitar playing little bits of pentatonic melodies here and there, all in the key of E. everything was in one take and improvised, because (as is often the case when I have time to record), I usually have some general idea of what I want to do, but have not planned out the details before hand. Because drum recording time is always incredibly limited (I have OTHER PEOPLE trying to relax in the rest of the studio, erm, house!), I just don’t have the luxury of fussing over mistakes. Fortunately, this track came out pretty clean, although its more a demo than a well-developed recording.

The intersting point of this recording is really the polyrhythm, which as dave notes, is 2/3. This is really the most basic of polyrhythms, and is found in all kinds of really cool drumming around the world. It’s also incredibly soothing to play and is used in some cultures as a ‘beat’ of meditation. The rhythm itself is contained in the phrase, ‘cold cup of tea’, and that’s a handy little mnemonic to remember if you find yourself listening to polyrhythmic music in the future.

Influences for this track – the band formerly known as the Boredoms, does a lot of cool rhythmic oriented music these days, and the track House of Sun (which you can listen to here) is a more developed take on modal electric guitar playing. Steve Tibbetts is really the master of this kind of thing though, and if you enjoyed this little clip you probably will love all the playing and drumming (by the great percussionist Marc Anderson) on his most recent records. One day these demos are going to sound as cool as those guys…

Pop Song like GH – another demo, this time with a pop-oriented song in mind. again, I tracked the drums first, then the rhythm guitar and finally the ‘bass’ which is really just my guitar playing the bass line with the treble knob turned way down – you make do with what equipment you have!

a couple of (possibly) interesting things about this demo – first, the jangly rhythm guitar is strongly reminiscent of an early beatles-like arrangement (although George Harrison was who I had in mind specifically). because the rhythm instrument is so treblely, it sits in the sound field and ‘fills up’ the recording in a way that a more muted instrument would not be able to do. this is a common trick three and four piece bands use to make their arrangements sound ‘larger’ than their limited instrumentation might suggest, and i use it here. the bass line in the ‘chorus’ parts of the song is a classic boogie woogie bass line that comes up frequently in pop music, and the line that transitions the song back to the verses is another classic descending motif that i’ve heard in a number of tunes both new and old. finally, you’ll notice in the chord changes leading up to the chorus a strange harmonic twist in the second to last chord before the chorus – that’s an F chord that is not in the major scale of the key this song is written in, and it kind of gives that transition a little extra ‘edge’ – that is a classic george harrison song writing move – introducing an unrelated chord into the harmony of a song to create dramatic tension and that’s how this fun little tune got it’s name!

Influences for this track: Early Beatles, late george harrison.

Harmonized Guitar: Just another simple pentatonic melody idea, harmonized to give it a little bit of a different flavor. this is a good example of the kind of ideas that run through my playing all the time that are mostly forgotten, but could eventually turn out to be good tunes – i think this line would sound great harmonized with a brass section (Calling all horn players!?) in a kind of jazzy arrangement.

interesting points of note – check out the cymbal playing during the harmonized lines – do you notice how on the fourth hit in each measure the cymbal sound ‘bends’? i learned that trick from watching a bunch of twentieth-century european classical percussion concerts – you can bend a cymbal sound by submerging it in water! although it’s kind of pointless in this context (i recorded it more out of curiosity than anything else) it does sound cool. How did I do it? By filling up my bathtub (!) standing the cymbal over the water, playing along with the track and then trying to dunk it into the water to get the right sound all without trying to knock my microphone off it’s stand into the tub! it was a lot of fun, even if it didn’t really come out to great effect…

Influences for this track: well the allman brothers, sort of, for the harmonized guitar idea. the kind of semi-related drum part at the end has a chord progression that is similar to one of the instrumental interludes on a garden show i sometimes watch on PBS – just realized that on second listen – so also a PBS garden show…

Drone in G : More of a sound experiment, I recorded this one at my apartment on my mac with cubase and a presonus firebox. i recorded the drone instruments first, then the more rhythmic guitar and banjo parts later on.

the idea here was a kind of instrumental sound collage – droning away once again in one key – that had a bunch of really interesting timbres coming from the variety of acoustic instruments being played. all the actual musical ideas are super simple, but together they make a more complex whole. this kind of thing would have sounded a lot better if it could have been recorded live with different people playing all the different instruments – i wish i had a group of readily recruitable friends to come over and jingle bells and such for recording like this, but alas, that’s not the case – so, we’ll all have to settle for multi-tracking instead for the time being (interested bell-ringers, violinist and others should send me a note in the comments – i’ll hire you on the spot for future projects!) this is also the recorded debut of my Tibetan singing bowls!

Influences for this track: without a doubt, the wonderfully named Vibracathedral Orchestra. These folks specialize in super complex droning instrumentals – check ‘em out for a heady dose of psychedelic drone! Also, all kinds of north indian classical music – some nice sufi oriented stuff here – and more 20th century classical composers like Terry Riley (check out those crazy web graphics!). All really cool stuff.

Somewhere: Just a part of the classic melody, played here on my roommate’s Yamaha student model classical guitar with strings that date back to the Mesozoic Era. Its a bit halting, but i think that gives it a nice, quiet, unrushed feeling. Double-tracked and those with bat-like hearing will notice a bit of spotty intonation towards the end of the track – its the strings, i swear…

Influences for this track – french guitarist Noël Akchoté, just a fantastic player and the master of the delicate guitar instrumental (among many other things).

Finally, the classical guitar tracks. I should just mention that dabbling in classical guitar is like dabbling in being an NFL Linebacker, one shouldn’t do it without the proper training and coaching! however, i do it anyway because i enjoy playing the compositions, even if i have no (formal) training to do so. having said that…

minuet in G: a rather complicated little tune, with some neat counterpoint stuff going on in the bass register, adapted for the guitar. this is just an okay version of it, i had only been working on this tune for about a month which is not nearly long enough to really nail it, so there is a bit of fumbling here although it’s not really noticeable. bach can be kind of formulaic at times, and this piece is no exception to that minor complaint, but it is also a blast to play. this is take 7,345 of what felt like a million takes to get this tune right. did i mention that classical guitar is not easy?

lagrima – this is a classical guitar standard, a gem of a piece, perhaps a little too romantic but i’m not going to count that against it… more fumbling here with some serious hesitations and a major fumble in the ‘minor’ section of the piece but i improvised through it and i guess it sounds okay. again, it’s a decent crack at a deceptively simple piece of music that needed another couple of months of work before i really could nail it. i suppose it has a kind of amateurish beauty though. this is also take five thousand of about one million. recorded at my apartment (notice crappy non-verby room sound) with the firebox and cubase.

and that’s it! as you can tell, I’m listening and playing all kinds of music these days because i love playing and doing a bunch of different things keeps me interested. whether it’s rock, jazz, experimental, or classical music, I’m down for it all as long as I can keep playing.

now i just wish I had more time to play and record and practice and a bunch of other non-guitarists to play with! but that’s a whole other story. till next time, enjoy the music!