Concert in the Park: Free Jazz with Joe McPhee

On a mellow April afternoon, a most unusual performance was scheduled to take place in Manhattan's last remaining natural forest, in Inwood Hill Park at the northern tip of the island. The veteran avant-garde jazz composer and improviser Joe McPhee, in town for a concert at the Brecht Forum, planned to wander among the park's old growth oaks and tulip trees, playing the saxophone unamplified, Pied Piper-like, his audiene trailing behind.

Directions to the meeting place, near the park's natural rock caves, left something to be desired, so a cluster of concertgoers found themselves at the edge of the Harlem River, staring at the Henry Hudson Bridge in confusion. No McPhee, only a Little League game in full swing. "Maybe the 'C' stands for caves," said a man with a French accent and a long goatee, pointing at the Columbia University logo painted on the cliff across the river.

A friendly park ranger at the nature center provided directions and a map, encouraging everyone to hike to the top of the hill for a view of the New Jersey Palisades after the show. The group meandered towards the woods under a benevolent spring sun, the sounds of shouts and batted balls echoing through the park. "I've lived in New York for eight years and I've never been up here," said one attendee, who'd taken the subway up from Williamsburg. "So what better to do on a day like this?"

Just beyond the tree line, a crowd of about 70 was gathered in a circle beside the path. The audience included both graybeards and strollers, with several whole ragged families in attendance. McPhee, a heavyset middle-aged black man with a graying mustache and mirrored sunglasses, stood at the far edge, greeting arriving guests and occasionally checking his watch. At the last minute he scuttled his plan to roam, instead climbing the hillside to stand atop a massive boulder, where he raised a slim gold soprano sax and began to play.

A plane thundered overhead as he sounded his first tentative, gentle, carefully enunciated notes. Passersby walking dogs and bicycles slowed to see what was happening. Rocking a bit, McPhee began an intricate series of little runs, fingers flying over the keys. His high notes were often manic, twittering, breathy moans that sounded like the birds in the trees, while his lower register was all molasses and caramel, drifting lazily through the warm, leaf-scented air. Some listeners nodded rapturously with half-lidded eyes; others looked very somber. The park was quiet, but not quiet: besides the chattering birds, digital camera shutters beeped, leaves crunched underfoot, a little girl cried out, "Mommy!" And the planes kept coming, one every few minutes. McPhee played under and around their roar, stopping only once to stare up balefully at the sky.

After half an hour, he lowered his instrument and said a few words about Steve Lacy, the late soprano saxophonist whose outdoor recordings had inspired McPhee to play outside himself. "Maybe we can do this again sometime," he said. "I'd really like to. Enjoy this day -- it's a great day."

The audience applauded, then slowly began to disperse. A well-wisher approached, joking, "You couldn't get LaGuardia to impose a flyover ban?"

"I thought the planes made it great," responded an organizer from April Is the Coolest Month, which had sponsored the event, with a patient smile. "And he was definitely playing with the planes."

Looking a bit drained, McPhee sat on a low rock wall, accepting congratulations from his guests. "I was so nervous," he said. "I started shaking, and then I got goose bumps. This little tree kept hitting me in the head, and I thought it was a little kid saying 'stop.'"

He stood to put his sax back in its case, then paused. "I love these ambient sounds," he said, gazing off into the woods. "It started with this recording I did. It was so hot, and I heard the birds chirping through the window, and I said, 'Don't close the window! Let's go out there!'"

McPhee looked like he might like to spend the rest of the afternoon in the forest, but it was time to leave -- he had to head downtown to teach a master class in improvisation at the Brecht. His entourage began walking down the path towards the entrance. A late arrival had chalked "McPhee" on the pavement, an arrow pointing up at the trees. "McPhee, your name's all over this park!" someone hollered. The saxophonist chuckled and strolled towards a waiting car.

www.joemcphee.com
    New Directions: Aaron Stewart-Ahn on the Future of the Music Video
New Directions: Aaron Stewart-Ahn on the Future of the Music Video
The Editors

Aaron Stewart-Ahn is a co-operator of Seattle-based production company Otaku House and director of the Plug Award-winning video for the Decembrists' "Sixteen Military Wives." He recently curated Directions, a companion DVD for Death Cab for Cutie's latest album, Plans, which gave a dozen talented independent directors, including Lance Bangs, Cat Solen, Monkmus, Ace Norton, and Stewart-Ahn himself, complete creative control in directing videos for each of the 12 songs on the album. Stewart-Ahn, who has a long-standing relationship with the band and collaborated with Death Cab bassist Nick Harmer on Directions, was inspired to undertake the project by his observations on how music videos are changing, and where he thinks they could head. Here, he shares his thoughts:

I believe that videos have become accepted by the broader public as an art form because a great video has a completely different effect than a feature film or an episode of television. Videos are immediate and instant, they recall personal memories, they make you reconsider how you perceive the world and recognize sensory input isn't divisible. Videos are like pop music itself. And for better or for worse, they're the closest thing we have to a properly funded experimental short cinema in America. Everyone's wondering though, with budgets continuing to shrink and a misconception that digital technology is making filmmaking cheaper, how to find funding for the videos that strive to be art.

To me it's about subverting the typical hand-in-hand relationship between art and commerce -- taking capital and finding a way to fulfill the needs of whoever is providing it, while doing something more interesting with it at the same time. A little over a decade ago, I read an interview with Peter Greenaway in which he suggested that the future of filmmaking was as a patroned art. I thought it was silly nonsense at the time. But given the evolution of the music video, I've come think it's not only applicable, it's what we should be striving for, especially in the United States. I mentioned the frustrations of finding music video budgets for bands I really like to some Canadian musicians recently, and they suggested I apply for government funding grants. If only...

I believe there is very little point anymore in making videos whose primary obligation is to promote a single that isn't one of the 20 or so really huge pop songs of the year. I can tell you all about the performance-to-story ratios required to get a video played on MTV, or what kind of lighting is preferred, and these rules his is doing nothing but make videos boring, lifeless, stagnant. Audiences recognize that.

Meanwhile, with the emergence of video on the Web, MTV isn't the only game in town anymore. When something blows up, it happens in a way that's unlike any other distribution medium. Word of mouth and heavy linking leads to instant and frequent viewing. The viewer makes an active choice to watch, and if they like what they encounter, they feel empowered. It wasn't shoved at them, it didn't just try and blast them while they were flipping channels. So it makes sense to me that if you're a creatively minded band on a major or indie label but you're not one of acts with one of the 20 MTV-approved songs, it's a waste to take the label's capital and produce a by-the-numbers retread through the stagnant power of committee, just to gamble on the chance of getting 10 seconds of your video shown during the credits of an MTV? It doesn't make financial or marketing sense, and so it seems far more prohibitively risky than a patronage model.

In a patronage system, on the other hand, a band can choose to make the best video possible by sponsoring an interesting filmmaker it respects and coheres with, letting them go to work, supporting them creatively, and not interfering. Hopefully they'll make a beautiful little piece of film art and the quality will drive people to watch it online. MTV is not the outlet for this on television, hasn't been for many years, and it's about time people stopped being so sheepish about suggesting that music videomakers should disengage from that channel if they aren?t working with the enormous artists of our time. They have a massively influential future as a lifestyle channel. They'll be fine.

Now that encoding quality has increased so dramatically, the music video is perfectly situated to feed audiences' enormous, demonstrated desire to share music online without destroying businesses. People can share a song along with an example of the band's aesthetic. But it?s not the song itself, it doesn't go in the car or get played at the party the same way.

If artists have access to capital, and are being driven in this day and age to generate content, shouldn't they use their resources to promote the creation of work they enjoy as much as they enjoy creating their own music? I don't know a single musician who isn't interested in other mediums, and many dabble in them from time to time. If musicians have access to a budget, they should approach them as producers, creatively and supportively, to share the things they themselves appreciate with their audiences and with the larger world. That's generally how the best videos come into existence, I think.

I hope more than anything that other bands recognize the intention of what Death Cab for Cutie has done, and what was hoped for when this project began: given the opportunity to make videos, they decided to do it with the same sense of ambition and freedom with which they made their own music. They shared that creative spirit with thirteen filmmakers. How is that anything other than wonderful?

deathcabforcutie.com/directions
www.otaku-house.com

   
A Hefty Decade: An Interview with Hefty Records' John Hughes A Hefty Decade: An Interview with Hefty Records' John Hughes

Hefty Records turns a decade old this year. Founded by John Hughes of Slicker, who was working on his own music while at Ohio University, the label began to take off after Hughes moved back home to Chicago following graduation. Hefty's sound is naturally an assortment of its leader's musical tastes -- IDM, downtempo, post-rock and electronic variations of funk, hip-hop, jazz, and dance -- bringing together a diverse group of genres that have all likely provided inspiration to the other artists on Hefty's roster, who often bend genres in their own music. The current slate of talent includes Eliot Lipp, Plus Device, Telefon Tel Aviv, Some Water and Sun, L'altra, Phil Ranelin, and Retina.IT, plus new new additions under contract: Samadha, Solo Andata, radicalfashion, and Victor Bermon.

Hefty is celebrating its anniversary with March and April compilation releases: the two-part CD sets History is Bunk and Hefty 10 Digest (the bonus disc is curated by Prefuse 73's Scott Herren, who has released albums on Hefty as Savath & Savalas), and the Hefty 10 EP, plus recent parties in Berlin and New York, and an upcoming party in Chicago.

Hughes spoke to Epitonic about life at Hefty, and explained why this anniversary will be a turning point in the history of the label.

Q: When you began Hefty, what vision did you have in terms of genres and how has that changed? Hefty does cover a lot of ground.

A: Yeah, definitely, and it's always going to be that way. There'll always be a shift in the ground we're covering, but the overall aesthetic and the way we handle it and present it is always going to remain the same. That is something that was defined pretty early on, at least by the time we put the first 10 records out. Then we really got a feel for the way we wanted to make these records look, and [what we wanted] the production quality to be like, and all those sort of things. I think we kind of locked what we're doing. But when I started it, obviously my vision was totally different, because I was just putting out my own records. And it's now become less about that and more about giving opportunities to new artists who haven't put any music out before. That's something that I take a lot of pride in, that most of our -- I think all of our -- artists pretty much haven't put out any records before they come to us, and we really build people from the ground up.

Q: And then some of them end up on other labels eventually, but they continue to work with Hefty.

A: Yeah, Scott Herren [of Savath and Savalas and Prefuse 73] is a good example of someone who we've maintained a good relationship with. But at the time Warp Records was the way to go; they could do more for Scott than we could, we just weren't that far along... But now I think we're at a point were we can retain artists and really take them to the next level.

Q: Taking Immediate Action into the immediacy of the digital realm with IAtunes [the digital corollary to Hefty's Immediate Action series] seems very much in line with Immediate Action's intentions from the beginning. Do you feel like it's a big move for Hefty's future?

A: In a way, it was sort of a compromise for me, because I've always had some resistance to the strictly digital format, just because I'm sort of traditional. I like album artwork, release dates, actually owning a record -- all those sorts of things. But at the same time, I looked at the digital format and thought, I'm sort of tired of how long lead times are and I feel like our music isn't so fresh as it can be. And at the same time, vinyl manufacturing is so expensive, and you really can't make any money on vinyl at all, so we were having a tough time with our vinyl releases. So this is sort of a perfect solution to that.

Q: Will you continue to put out vinyl?

A: Yeah... but it's the sort of thing [where] we're, like, breaking even on our vinyl. So it's more just like a novelty almost. If we sell enough, we can make money on it. But there are certain records that just aren't going to sell enough on vinyl to make it worth it. But we want to keep that side of the label going. But I think the whole IAtunes thing is a pretty good compromise for getting our music out there quickly. And [artists] like Eliot Lipp or Retnia.IT, those guys are just constantly cranking out music. Since were working with them exclusively, they want to keep getting their music out, and I can relate to that. The other thing that's nice is, my EP -- I just finished it and didn't think about it, and put it out, and it's kind of nice... The audience is starting to react [at] the same time you're starting to [react] to your own music, and it's good. The idea is, we tell our artists, "Okay, we have a mastering date booked in two weeks. Give us what you can, we'll master it, and then when we get it back we're going to upload it right away."

Q: Is the Aestuarium imprint still part of Hefty?

A: Yeah, but we sort of scaled off. We've had major problems with distribution over the last couple of years. And actually we just lost our US distributor [Studio Distribution, who, almost literally overnight, filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy] so that's been a really big blow. So we were kind of forced out of helping with other labels. But Aestuarium is still officially part of Hefty.

Q: Do you think your loss of the distributor might end up being a positive thing, as you'll find other creative distribution avenues for your releases?

A: Yeah, that's the way we're looking at it. Traditional distribution is going to bust at some point.... Maybe there's something good in it happening to us first. We thought of [the IAtunes idea] right before, and we were kind of like, "Well, maybe there's a reason for this happening." We're not as concerned about it as we probably should be, just because things have to change. The other thing too is that a lot of these major distributors now are forcing labels to give them their digital distribution, [taking the ability away from labels] to have that direct relationship with iTunes or whatever service. So obviously they feel a little bit threatened by the way the industry's changing... Our international distribution is really strong. It's a really weird feeling not having distribution in the U.S. and having this great distribution internationally... I think that's the case with [much of] electronic music right now. We sort of feel like we're hanging in there. I think the pendulum is going to swing back to us.

www.heftyrecords.com