Ethan Hein's Blog

Tag Archives: jazz

The Choice Is Yours

Tuesday, July 27, 2010

There’s a commercial on TV right now featuring a bunch of CGI hamsters that reacquainted me with this Black Sheep classic. I knew the song better as the one that goes, “You can get with this or you can get with that.” Thank god for Google, otherwise I wouldn’t know anything about anything. This is [...]

Filed in music | Also tagged advertising, black sheep, funk, hip-hop, iron butterfly, mccoy tyner, nineties, rnb, rock, sampling, soul, tv | Comments (1)

They Reminisce Over You

Saturday, July 3, 2010

Hip-hop at its best is about truth-telling. It doesn’t get any realer than “They Reminisce Over You (T.R.O.Y.)” by Pete Rock and CL Smooth.

Filed in music | Also tagged cl smooth, hip-hop, jefferson airplane, memes, pete rock, sampling, saxophone, slick rick, tony scott | Comments (0)

Moody’s Mood For Love

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

My neighbor and friend DiÃ¨ry Prudent is working on a documentary on the bebop saxophonist and flutist James Moody, best known for his 1949 recording “Moody’s Mood For Love.” It’s an improvised solo over the changes to “I’m In The Mood For Love,” one of those off-the-cuff jazz solos that came out so tightly structured [...]

Filed in music | Also tagged bebop, cosby show, dizzy gillespie, hip-hop, james moody, lambert hendricks and ross, remixes, transcribing, vocalese | Comments (0)

Repetition, repetition, repetition, repetition

Sunday, March 14, 2010

I’ve had a lot of music teachers, formal and informal. The best one has been the computer. It mindlessly plays anything I tell it to, over and over. Hearing an idea played back on a continuous loop tells me quickly if it’s good or not. If the idea is bad, I immediately get annoyed, and [...]

Filed in music | Also tagged beatles, book, country, dance, electronica, fela kuti, hip-hop, looping, memory, modules, recursion, remixes, rza, structure, symmetry, theodor adorno | Comments (0)

Authenticity

Thursday, February 11, 2010

When I was younger I was obsessed with authenticity in music. I wouldn’t even play electric guitar because it felt too easy, like cheating somehow. I expended a lot of energy and attention trying to figure out what is and isn’t authentic. Now, at the age of 34, I’ve officially given up. I doubt there’s [...]

Filed in autobio, music | Also tagged acoustic, alicia keys, authenticity, autotune, bebop, big chill, bill monroe, bluegrass, blues, book, coltrane, electronica, emotion, harmonica, herbie hancock, howlin wolf, jay-z, judaica, klezmer, led zeppelin, lipsynching, michael jackson, motown, nyc, purists, rnb, sampling, soul, synths, thelonious monk | Comments (7)

Open-source music

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Sample-based music isn’t stealing. It’s valuable and important. It shows the way toward a future for recorded music that’s more in continuity with music’s past. Recordings are cool and everything, but they encourage passivity. If I buy a recording, I can listen to it or dance to it, both fine activities, but what if I [...]

Filed in music, software | Also tagged amazing grace, blues, book, copyright, folk, google, improvisation, internet, kanye west, learning, memes, music, music theory, opensource, remixes, sampling, transcribing | Comments (1)

Coltrane was an analog remixer

Saturday, November 28, 2009

The current fetish for originality in music is partially an outgrowth of copyright law. If you write your own songs, you can make more money from the publishing rights in addition to your album sales. The influence of Bob Dylan and the Beatles further created the expectation that popular musicians would mostly be writing their [...]

Filed in autobio, computers, music | Also tagged arrangement, big band, book, chet baker, coltrane, copyright, count basie, duke ellington, frank sinatra, harmony, improvisation, jay-z, lego, looping, memes, miles davis, modules, music, music theory, my favorite things, originality, reharmonization, remixes, sampling, swing, symmetry, the sound of music | Comments (0)

Human Nature

Sunday, November 1, 2009

Enjoy my remix of Human Nature. [Audio clip: view full post to listen] Me vs Michael Jackson mp3 download, ipod format download For a long time, “Human Nature” was not my favorite song on Thriller. It took me many years to wise up to how awesome it is. Maybe it’s a gender thing. I played [...]

Filed in music | Also tagged book, michael jackson, miles davis, nas, pop, quincy jones, remixes, rnb, sampling, swv, thriller, toto, tupac | Comments (7)

Nature Boy

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Hear my remix, electronica arrangement, whatever you want to call it, with beats from Duke Ellington and Ol Dirty Bastard: [Audio clip: view full post to listen] mp3 download, ipod format download Moulin Rouge! is the ultimate mashup movie. It opens with Ewan McGregor’s character singing the jazz standard “Nature Boy.” Here’s the David Bowie [...]

Filed in music | Also tagged classical, coltrane, david bowie, dvorak, ella fitzgerald, hippies, memes, moulin rouge, nat king cole, nature boy, remixes, sampling | Comments (0)

Sampling keybs

Friday, August 7, 2009

One of the greatest weirdnesses of electronic music is the sampling keyboard. You press a key and any sound recording you want pops out, at whatever pitch. The recent passing of John Hughes made me think of the scene in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off when Ferris samples his coughing and puking on an E-mu Emulator [...]

Filed in hardware, music | Also tagged audio, beatles, book, eighties, ferris bueller, grateful dead, john hughes, keybs, mellotron, midi, music, reason, recording, recursion, sampling, synths, tape, yello | Comments (0)

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Tag Archives: jazz

The Choice Is Yours

They Reminisce Over You

Moody’s Mood For Love

Repetition, repetition, repetition, repetition

Authenticity

Open-source music

Coltrane was an analog remixer

Human Nature

Nature Boy

Sampling keybs

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