Today is the anniversary of the recording session for the best Miles Davis album, and in its honor, I did a podcast two-parter. In A Silent Way, side A: “Shhh/Peaceful” by Dr. Ethan Hein The conceptually weirdest Miles Davis album is also the best one Read on Substack In A Silent Way, side B: “In …
Continue reading “Happy In A Silent Way Day to all who celebrate”
Recently, I went to see a performance by my NYU colleague Ramin Amir Arjomand, whose counterpoint class meets on the opposite side of the wall from my pop theory class. Ramin’s concert was an hour and a half of extremely intense free improvisation on unaccompanied piano. It wasn’t jazz; Ramin is a classical composer and …
How do you create a bassline? This question is not just for bass players. It’s for producers and songwriters, who are likely to be programming their own bass parts in their DAW. Keyboard players can do basslines in their left hand; guitarists do them with their thumbs. And even if you never create or play …
A student in my Song Factory class at the New School a couple of years ago has just released his first album. His style is outside my usual listening tastes, but I admire how personal and specific his tracks are: the found sounds, the synth bleeps, the noisy analog tape recording, the layered vocals. Carson …
Continue reading “I love when my songwriting students drop albums”
I am normally resistant to writing about this kind of overexposed Boomer anthem, but it occurred to me that it would be an interesting tune to analyze on the first day of pop aural skills class, because it’s both simple and harmonically interesting.
In 1972, James Brown produced a single for one of his backup singers, Lyn Collins, called “Think (About It)”. If you listen to this without any context, it sounds like a perfectly fine funk song with an unusual rubato introduction. But then, at 1:22, there’s suddenly that break, followed immediately by that hook. Sing it …
I drew on some of my previous Grateful Dead analyses for my newest MusicRader column, Bob Weir in Five Songs and a Jam.
This semester I am once again teaching pop theory and aural skills at NYU. I have done some previous reflections on these classes. The students are undergrads, mostly studying instrumental and vocal performance, songwriting and music technology. They range in stylistic background from pop to rock to jazz to R&B to hip-hop to musical theater, and there …
Continue reading “The plan for Pop Theory II and Pop Aural Skills II this semester”
Bob Weir’s organically quirky songwriting is one of the central building blocks of my musical understanding. Here’s a solo guitar rendition of my favorite of his tunes.
I grew up with a cassette copy of Bringing It All Back Home. It was the first Bob Dylan album that I remember hearing, and I knew that my Boomer parents and classic-rock-loving peers revered it. That said, people definitely respected Bob more than they enjoyed him. I did enjoy a lot of Bringing It …
