Tag Archives: Jazz

Lack of panorama

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Everything was better back in the days. I may sound like a creepy, old man but in some cases I find this quotation true. What I want to talk about is the missing panorama in today’s music. Especially rock music made a large amount of steps backwards when you compare the sound engineering of the music of the 70s and the sound engineering that appears today.

Talking about the old songs. Mainly those songs are mixed like you were actually listening to a band that sits around you. The instruments are well separated and you’re able to “locate” them in your room. When you listen to today’s music, all you get is a giant wall of noise that got mixed in high definition without any soul. I personally see the turning point in the late 80s and early 90s. A period where almost everything got sacrificed to giant marketing and commercialism.

Anyone can play guitar

I also think that this change in production came, when the whole recording equipment became better and more capable. Guitarist for instance were able to record multiple tracks to gain a fat sound. The guy on the synthesizer could act like a whole orchestra. And this is the point. Musicians forgot at one specific point how to actually be a musician. They misunderstood the qualities of their instruments.

I wouldn’t say that the music these days became completely bad, but you don’t have many genres where you can listen to music in a way it was originally meant to be. Jazz is one genre that resisted and survived this trend. Rock music in nearly all kinds of sub-genres became a mess. It’s all about building a giant wall of sounds that rolls over the listener.

Maybe this is also one of the reasons why so many bands fail when they have to play live in front of an audience. They cannot reproduce this artificial sound they created in the studio. Maybe, but just maybe, would it be better when some bands might go back a little and try to record their outputs like a band, live in the studio. Or they try to resists using multiple tracks for their instrument just to make it sound fat.

I really would like to see bands to play and record like this. Or maybe I’m just an old, creepy man.

Legendary rock star death

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The female counter part of Pete Doherty is dead. Amy Winehouse died last weekend and I’m sure I speak for a lot of people, we all expected this to happen. For me personally, Amy Winehouse was like the Jazz singing bride of Frankenstein. Seriously, from the very first moment that I saw her, I thought she’s the sequel to 1980s Elvira, the mistress of the dark. Which is actually good. I loved Elvira back in the days.

Anyhow, her music was okay, but not groundbreaking. It was Soul and Jazz trimmed to fit the mainstream. It’s basicly the same with Janis Joplin, she was icon in her period of time, but after that, she’s mainly known for this one song where she begs the Lord to buy her this special German car. Amy Winehouse will suffer the destiny. In like 20 or 30 years people will only know her by the song “Rehab”. It is a good song, but mentioned before, the rest of her music is meaningless. You can find way more talented Jazz or Soul musicians out there, with way less drug problem and a better attitude when it comes to work and live for the music.

Amy Winehouse RIP

To make a long story short, yes, I find it sad that Mrs Winehouse died and that we’re no longer able to catch her in concert and watch at her debauchery life in the tabloids. I’m pretty sure that we’ll be jammed with tons of B-side crap and rare material that gets released postmortem (Oh, what a surprise, we found some lost tapes on the attic…)

But on the other side, I do not find her that important to fall in a longer period of sorrow. Her management knew how to sell their fancy, freaky, riotous Jazz product and she finally had to pay the price . Her record company is going to make a lot of money with her after her death and will then finally switch to a new Winehouse like product.