Posts Tagged ‘music’

Alon Nechushtan “Words Beyond” radio success

Tuesday, March 15th, 2011

Alon Nechushtan’s new recording “Words Beyond” has been receiving great feedback in radio station across North America. We now have 50 stations all over the U.S.and Canada that have been responding enthusiastically to our latest release “Words Beyond” by Alon.

  • We’re still spinning the disc. He has a fresh, engaging sound. We’ll keep him going for awhile yet.  -Dennis Diener WNHU
  • “Words Beyond” was no. 3 on our jazz charts this week WXDU
  • Yes, I have recieved Alon’s album.  I liked it, and will be adding it to the playlist in the near future. Callie Lackey KNTU
  • It’s always lovely to get something that deviates from our regular format WIDR
  • The CD sounds great. Jazzradio DC
  • Added Words Beyond today, I’m really digging it. JD Blank WIDR
  • Listened tonight! We dug it and added it. Adam Weinger WOBC
  • Yeah, I gave Words Beyond a listen and was impressed. He has a distinctive quirky bite that spices up the standard jazz trio. The disc has been on my CMJ top 10 for several week Dennis Deiner WNHU
  • Please keep the good music coming our way! Alex Michaelson WMFO
  • I’m sure it still has a lot of play time in its future. The DJs here are big fans of the progressive jazz interplay that Alon Nechushtan’s music exemplifies. David Clair KWLC
  • started out fairly well, and so again, thanks very much for sending it to us, we like playing it on the air. it’s just getting started here Chris Merrick KBOO
  • It has definitely been getting some play time among our jazz DJs. Really fresh and interesting compositions. Derek Zuk WXJM
  • We have received it, and I just added it to our jazz playlist today. What a great sounding CD! Thank you so much for sending it along. Ken Irwin WMUA
  • This is an outstanding new release, I am looking forward to adding this one to the KSJS playlist as soon as room permits – it will go straight to heavy rotation. Right “up our alley”! Cheers, KSJS San Jose CA
  • Hi- I put Alon’s cd into rotation at the end of last week. KBCS WA

Here are the radios that have confirmed that the CD is being played:

WMNF Tampa, FL
KOOP Austin TX
WHUS Storrs CT
WNHU West Haven CT
WICN Worcester MA
CJSW 90.9 FM Calgary Alberta
KMST Rolla MO
Jazz 90.1 Rochester NY
WDCB Glen Ellyn IL
CKM-FM St-Anaclet Québec
Jazz After Hours,  (syndicated) PRI
WCDB Albany, NY
WVUD Newark, DE
KFAI Minneapolis/ST Paul MN
KSDS San Diego CA
WVGU Grand Rapids MI
WDNA Miami FL
KCBX San Luis Obispo, CA
KVNF Paonia CO
WXJM Harrisonburg VA
KBOO Portland OR
KTSU Houston TX
KUMD Redway CA
KHSU Arcata CA
WXDU Durham NC
WNUR Evanston IL
KBCS Radio Bellevue WA
WICB Ithaca NY
WEGL Auburn AL		 WLRN Miami FL
JAZZRADIOdc Washington DC
WIDR - 89.1 FM Kalamazoo MI
WSIE-FM y Edwardsville IL
WEMU 89.1 FM Ypsilanti MI
WMSE Milwaukee WI
WYCE Grand Rapids MI
WOBC 91.5 FM – Oberlin Coll. Oberlin OH
WMUA 91.1 FM U. of Mass. Amherst MA
WVPE Elkhardt IN
KIOS Omaha NE
KSJS 90.5 FM, San Jose CA
WESM Princess Anne MD Jazz Excursion
WARP Radio Parker CO
WNCU Durham NC
KCCK-FM Cedar Rapids IA
WJSU FM Jackson MS
KRVS Uni. of Louisiana Lafayette LA
KWLC Luther College Decorah IA
WAER Syracuse NY
Rock Evolución Calexico CA
WRTI-FM Philadelphia PA
KUCI Irvine CA
WICR - FM Indianapolis IN
KRFC Radio Fort Collins CO
WUCF Orlando Longwood FL
WMNF Tampa, FL
KMHD Portland OR

You can share these tracks or just listen to them for your pleasure:

Words Beyond

Alon Nechushtan
“Muppet Shock” (mp3)
from “Words Beyond”
(Buckyball Music, Inc.)

Words BeyondAlon Nechushtan
“Dr. Masterplan” (mp3)
from “Words Beyond”
(Buckyball Music, Inc.)

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Music has been with us for a long time

Thursday, September 24th, 2009

Imagine a long early summer sunset, and the only sounds heard are from some late crickets, and the crackling of the fire a few yards away. Venus is shining just under a young moon crescent. Other bright stars are slowly appearing, and the first to be seen is the brightest in the sky, which leads to the coldest parts. As the sky grows darker, a bright milky band shines from where the sun rises to where the moon sets.

A light breeze is blowing; you are thinking of today’s hunt, and tomorrow’s festivities celebrating the sun rising again at that point on the horizon when its path moves back to where it first came six moons ago. A big bird flies off of a nearby tree, and the coming darkness leads you into a dream.

The beauty of the still twilight inspires you to reach into the leather pouch you always keep close to your body. You take out your magic flute and start to blow into it; softly at first, recalling one of the melodies you heard at a gathering long ago near the big ice wall over in the direction of that brightest star in the sky. Then you feel the melody could sound a different way, and you go more deeply into the sounds you are producing.

Others gather: someone has brought a hollow piece of trunk, on which he has stretched a piece of abix skin held tightly by some wood pegs. Its pulse lays a foundation for your improvisation. Some of the people who have gathered around you start to move in unusual ways. Not walking, not running, not expressing a particular feeling– but just moving to the pulse generated by the sounds you and your acolytes are producing.

It is something new, these movements, that previously were static and meant either anger, love, hunger, or danger. But with these sounds you are producing, all of these movements become blended, in a complex meaning that is not so clear but much more nuanced. there were even some that were completely new. They must have meant something, but it was yet not clear to anyone; could it be that these movements could be combined into groups? Everyone was feeling calm, and someone even started making sounds with her mouth in a sequence, repeating the same sound over and over, synchronized with the movements and mysteriously related to your melodies….could that have meaning?

There is so much to discover and understand; somehow that evening it became just a little bit more clear. Definitely a night to remember.

This fictitious but, I think, possible scenario happened a Platonic year* and a half ago in what is now called Ulm in Germany, where Professor Nicholas Conard of Tubingen University found in one location three flutes made of bird bones.

“We report the discovery of bone and ivory flutes from the early Aurignacian period of southwestern Germany. These finds demonstrate the presence of a well-established musical tradition at the time when modern humans colonized Europe, more than 35,000 calendar years ago”.

Experimenting with the replica, he found that the ancient flute produced a range of notes comparable in many ways to modern flutes. “The tones are quite harmonic,” he said (they were pentatonic in nature: a five tone scale which skips the fourth and the seventh degrees of the diatonic scale). He adds:

“It’s becoming increasingly clear that music was a part of day-to-day life,”…. “Music was used in many kinds of social contexts: possibly religious, possibly recreational – much like how we use music today in many kinds of settings.”….”Music could have contributed to the maintenance of larger social networks, and thereby perhaps have helped facilitate the demographic and territorial expansion of modern humans…” his team wrote.

In fact, it is hard to imagine the development of musical abilities without the parallel development of spoken language. There are strong indications that language has its root in singing (I will develop on this concept in a future post).

It so happens that the Hohle Fels flute, as it is called, was uncovered in sediment a few feet away from the carved figurine of a busty, nude woman, which was also estimated to be around 35,000 years old. Now, I’ll let you make your own deductions about this synchronicity.

* A Platonic Year is 24,000 solar years. It corresponds to the period it takes for the earth axis to wobble, like a spinning top in one complete turn. This phenomenon has resulted in a shift of constellations. To an observer on Earth, Vega was the north star, and the Milky Way was flowing in a different direction.

Relevant links:
Science News
The New York Times

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Music and brain recovery

Wednesday, July 29th, 2009

It is now more and more fashionable to talk about the effect of music on the brain. As I had mentioned it on an earlier blog, books are coming out about the subject, and now the PBS show Nova has an episode on the subject, centered on Oliver Sack’s book Musicophilia. But it is another PBS show that struck me, and although I usually don’t watch it, P.O.V. showed a 80 minute film about the story of the struggle of guitarist Jason Crigler overcoming the debilitating effect of a stroke, which occurred while playing a gig in a club.
Jason basically lost all normal higher brain functions, and had to re-learn how to function as a human being. The movie describes the hardship Jason family went through to help him recover his brain function. Against many odds and the prognostics of doctors, Jason made a full recovery. But what did fascinate me is that obviously music, and of course all the love and patience of his family, was very much instrumental (no pun intended) in his recovery.
Jason’s insurance eventually ran out, leaving him in a state where he was totally dependent on outside help. The ‘normal’ route was to go into hospice care, but his family decided against it and decided to take him home where he could be in a more stimulating environment. There he would be able to reconnect with familiar things, like all of his music making tools, and in particular his guitar.
As Jason’s dad recounts it, after a while in the house, Jason got drawn back in his music room, and the moment Jason picked up a guitar and began to play again was the milestone that seemed to validate the family’s faith. Jason started with small ostinato phrases of four or five notes that he would repeat as he was practicing. A few months later he sat in at a friend’s gig, then a whole set, and then his own gig in downtown NYC. After the gig where all his friends came and were quite impressed by his control of the instrument, Jason recalled: “I had trouble connecting,” but at Jason’s first concert in New York, something clicked and he suddenly connected with the music. “It’s the first gig I played that I felt really good,” he later said. That was the moment, a year and a half after his brain hemorrhage, when things turned around.
Jason is now fully recovered, although he does have a somewhat deeper relationship with music.
Well this is quite an amazing story, and I have to say that I kept thinking, at the point he picked up his guitar, that since music involves so many areas of the brain, it must be the way to recovery. And off course there is no way this would have happened without the incredible support from his family. But, some regions where damaged, on the other end there also must have been some other regions that still functioned well, and it was a matter of remapping them all back together. Some of the good parts of Jason’s brain must have been involved with music, and they could act as some kind of crutches to his healing brain, that led to recovering the damaged part.
It seems that the ability for repair exists in anyone with a brain injury, but the challenge is to find the crutches, and in this, music seems to be unique, since music stimulates so many areas in the brain, rendering those areas potential crutches in the event of a brain injury. I would be interested if other examples of recovery are linked to other kind of activities of the brain. It might not be that music has a monopoly on this but, to me, it seems self evident.
Here’s a few links to the movie and the P.O.V. site:

http://www.pbs.org/pov/lifesupportmusic/film_description.php

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Music and memories

Monday, April 6th, 2009

Here is a change from all of the nebulus topics I’ve been consumed with recently. Music has a very deep relationship with the brain, especially when considering how many regions of the brain are put to the task when music is experienced. Therefore as the tools to look at the brain become more sophisticated, to the point seeing its functioning in real time, so the effect of music on the brain comes to the fore front. There is seldom a week that passes without some bit of news about it. A recently published book by Oliver Sacks (Musicophilia) is making everyone aware of the influence that music has on our “control module”.

 

Recently I listened to a radio show with the topic of how one could help Alzheimer patients use music that they learned during their youth to help them recover some of their lost memories. People working with them (most of them from another generation) are actually learning about the music of their patients’ youth in order to expose them to tunes that could help them. I think that as the baby boomers come to age, the Beatles will come as an unexpected rescue to the unfortunate ones who suffer from these kinds of diseases of the brain.

 

I use my own experience as an example: in my youth, I listened to a particular recording while reading a particular book. I had not listened to this recording in at least twenty years, but when I rediscovered the music, and heard the first notes played on my stereo after all of that time, it was as if I was in the middle of that book, the memory was so clear.

 

Now one can suggest that we create some of these memories. But since the brain, as we recently discovered, is the only part  that does not lose growth potential in our body, the chances are pretty good. It would be more of a conscious effort than the free-association we make in our teens, but it might be worth it; as when memories are recalled this way, it always gives us a warm feeling of connection.

 

I am wondering if any of you reading this might have made some of these connections and what kind of interesting, except the summer of …. ( fill the blanks) association you’ve made with a particular recording or song. Let me know, we can compare experiences.

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The Power of Sound

Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009

Most of us understand that sound needs a medium to transmit itself, but not, at least in my case, that this includes any form of matter that constitutes our Baryonic universe. It turns out that this has monumental implications in how fundamental sound waves are in the universe we live in.

When I am talking about a ‘medium’, this applies to all matter in its many forms:

- gases, the most common of which make up our atmosphere in which sound travel at 1,235 meters per second;

- liquids, water from which we are made mostly, in which, due to its higher density, carries sound waves at 1497 m/s;

- solids of course of still higher density, for steel the most dense of solid, the speed is 5930 m/s. Another less well known form of matter is:

- plasma found in extreme invironment like stars or the early universe, but nevertheless does conduct sound waves, like other states of matter, as of the sound speed in a plasma, it must vary as in the other medium as the pressure or temperature changes I could not find a actual number, but I can assume that the speed in it is higher still to many magnitude. if you have the knowledge to figure out the formula here it is:

 

Baryonic matter, is anything that constitutes our visible universe, which is about 4% of its composition. The bulk of the universe is made with 23% Dark Matter, and since we do not know what it is made of, we do not know how sound waves behave in it; but since sound is so instrumental in the shape of the universe, there is no reason to think that it is not affected as well. The rest, 73%, is made up of Dark Energy, an even more puzzling phenomena but on which sound could help shed light.

All this brings me to the point I want to make: sound waves have an influence on matter of all kinds. They have an elastic or kinetic effect due to the slow rate of their frequencies, compared to the electromagnetic spectrum (light, etc.) which, due to the shortness of their frequencies only have influences at the atomic level.

What is the loudest sound ever created in this universe? Well, it has been very adequately named, as we are all calling it the “Big Bang”– just think about what it means!

The Big Boom, right? But we all have seen those science fiction movies with silent explosions, as being in space, there is no medium, so no sound. That is right, except for the fact that in the case of the Big Bang, it is sound that created the empty space. The Big Bang was infinite pressure, so sound must have traveled infinitely fast, its wave spreading to every corner of the young universe, pushing matter with its peaks and valleys in clumps and creating voids, engineering stars, galaxies and galaxy clusters, and somewhat its own demise– empty space or vacuum.

Now, sound is left vibrating, isolated in the islands of matter that dot the universe, where the original Boom still resonates from all directions. It can be measured and it has a name. It is called the “Baryon Acoustic Oscillation” or BAO. The following is a quote from an article by Richard Panek in the February 2009 issue of Sky & Telescope:

‘Early in the Universe, sound waves (“acoustic oscillations”) coursed through the primordial gas, creating peaks at intervals of 436,000 light-years. As the universe has expanded, so has the spacing between these peaks; today they are 476 million light years apart. And because galaxies tended to form on the peaks of these large waves, astronomers can measure galaxy distributions at different eras, allowing them to see how the peak spacing changed over time, and thus how fast the universe has expanded.’

This will help us measure the effect Dark Energy has on accelerating the expansion of the universe, and help predict its ultimate fate… And fittingly this all was discovered about forty five years ago with the use of a giant ear! (see picture below)

 

This is only the genesis of the much under-reported fundamental influence that sound plays in our existence that we shall explore in future postings, so tune in (you have no choice).

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Feed-back loop, the groove, and other earth shattering phenomena.

Tuesday, February 17th, 2009

Feed back is a term that musicians who use amplification, like myself, are very familiar with. For those who might not be used to the phenomena, an audio feed back can be quite annoying, in particular for singers who walk around concert stages with a microphone. When a mic gets too close to a speaker, it picks up the resonant frequency of the room and sends it to the speaker after being amplified by the P.A. system. This is then picked up by the mic again which sends it a second time (feeding it back) through the system around the same loop. Soon enough it amplifies itself out of control and produces a loud whistling sound. By moving the mics away from the speaker you break the loop.

On the other hand musicians, in particular electric guitarists, have learned to use this to their advantage, and have created a unique blend of guitar tones and controlled feed back into the rich sustained sound that is so unique to the instrument. One example would be the tone of Carlos Santana’s guitar.

So there is two sides to the feed back loop- the Dr. Jekyll and the Mr. Hyde.

There are many examples of feed-back loops, and one of them has to do with bridges, which I’ll get to in a minute, but in thinking about this it came to me that this could also explain another musical phenomena. I am thinking of the one we call “groove”. As a percussionist I am always concerned about it; is it good, or is it not good? What makes it good, or what makes it lame? What is a groove, anyway? I’ve never seen a definition of it; the only thing I know about it is if it is there or not. I then read this story about the London Millennium walking bridge and as an analogy it made perfect sense…..

The closest thing to a string in the everyday world in which we live is the bridge; it is long, stretched, and subjected to all kinds of vibrations.

When the London Millennium bridge was open to the public, people enthusiastically started to walk on it in great numbers, but it wobbled a little bit, which then fed back to the people, which made them want to synchronize their footsteps to the bridge’s motion, which made the bridge’s motion worse. In other words, the situation created a feed back loop between the bridge and the foot steps of the people. It is not a new phenomena, it has been well known for a long time; military parades have to break their lock step while walking on a bridge, because they could create such a feed back loop that they could collapse it.

So, to me, a groove does behave in a similar way. There is no physical bridge or amplification system as previously, but only the sympathetic relationship between the different elements that constitute it. They re-enforce each other by feeding back in a looped pattern. The common denominator is the down beat, which can be present or only suggested by the interlocking parts. A groove is made of at least two parts (bridge-steps or mic-speaker), or, in this case, down beat and syncopation. But it can include many different parts.

When a groove is locked in, and it is important to stress that this word is a paraphrase helping us describe the “groove” phenomena the best we can (there is no lock on a groove), in this case the analogy is the lock step of the aforementioned parade. When a groove is locked, it means that the feed-back loop is enabled and is re-enforcing each part in relation to the other. To make another ‘bridge’ to the scientific lingo, you can say that the synergy is at its highest, the whole become larger than the sums of its parts.

Just listen to African, Latin American, Jazz and Funk music, and when the feed – back loop is enabled, feel your step locking with the groove, and as with the Millennium Bridge– shake your whole body.

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Welcome to this discussion

Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008

To every musician and scientist, this discussion is dedicated to you!

The links between science and music (and art to a wider extent) is by far not a new concept, you can actually hold an argument that they were united in most of their history, as science and art were both considered as philosophy. The root of the western scientific method can be traced to Aristotle who as he explored the physical world created the scientific method, which led him to study scales, modes and harmonic relationships, with the use of weights. from this it is not far to see the relationship: weight = mass = creative energy = emc2.

Yes, it is quite a short cut from one to the other; even absurd. But this kind of thinking is needed now, since the recent (about the past 100 years) trend is to compartmentalize the creative thinking process. But the history is on the other side. Besides Aristotle, Galileo’s father was a famous musician, Einstein played the violin and Richard Feyman played the bongos (quite well, I can attest, as a percussionist).

Another fascinating recent development, is the rise of techniques to study the brain. Neurology is opening a window in the process how music is understood by conscious and unconscious.

I think this is a fascinating subject, where there is still a lot of unknown that deserves to be explored. I also think that the answers can be explored by the people who are at the forefront of each discipline.

So please be open to offer your opinion and observations.

Marc Wagnon

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