10 Vocalists Using Loop Pedals to Make Extraordinary Collages of Melody
Artists are using loop pedals to improvise with themselves and bring out a new, diverse spectrum of vocal textures and tones.
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What the Heck Is a Bouzouki?
A few years ago when I was on tour more often, I used to stay at a friend’s place in Boston every time we rolled through. Across the street there lived a friendly, half-senile old Greek gentleman. He’d be so excited when we arrive — running out of his house offering shots of ouzo and…
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Composer Erik Satie Was So Much Weirder Than You Realize
Erik Satie (1866-1925) is praised by historians for helping to provide the pre-war pathway to minimalism in classical music. His piano compositions, most famously the Gymnopédies suite of 1888 and the Gnossiennes suite of 1893, set the tone for experimentation within the next century of composers. These composers traversed new understandings of tonality, space, and emotion, even as academic trends in…
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The Alchemy of the Blues: Turning Guitars into Vocalists
One of the greatest secrets about the blues is that it’s not primarily about the “blue notes,” or the structure, or the instrumentation. Those things are all heavily associated with the blues and appear in most blues songs, but at its core, the blues is all about storytelling. And the guitar is one of the…
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Why Every Piano You’ve Ever Played Is Too Small
+ Bridge the worlds of theory, improvisation, and jazzy hip-hop, and improve your piano chops with Grammy-winner Kiefer in his course, Kiefer: Keys, Chords, & Beats. Beautiful, versatile, and astoundingly complex, the piano holds a key place in nearly every form of music. It can be found across the globe in the back corners of smoky nightclubs, the…
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Pulitzer Prize-Winner Yusef Komunyakaa on the Poetry of the Blues
Few people I’ve ever met speak with the gravitas of Yusef Komunyakaa. A conversation with him can be a meditative experience. The words wrap themselves around ideas rather than simply standing in for them. Rhythmically, he speaks in spacious jazz solos, allowing pauses to be as significant as the words themselves and letting the meaning…
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The Art of the “Escalating Dance” in Music Videos
Tons of things can make a great music video. Epic drama, quirky graphics and animation, innovative camera techniques and coloring, elements of humor and even horror; these have all produced some memorable videos. But I’d like to talk about the most innately human, natural thing music makes us do — dance. However, watching people just dance,…
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My Sonic Weapons: 4 Online Tools for Discovering New Music
We all have that one friend that we rely on for new music. The one who is always the designated DJ at the parties. The one who tells you which album to download and what concerts to go to. We rely on said friend… and occasionally we envy her… How is she always up to date on the newest…
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5 Online Tools to Help You Create the Perfect Mixtape
These 5 sites are perhaps also useful for compiling playlists, but there’s really no gift that can communicate pure ’90s love quite like the mixtape.
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Uncovering the Jazz Influence in Pop, Rock, and Hip-Hop Classics
+ Bridge the worlds of theory, improvisation, and jazzy hip-hop, and improve your piano chops with Grammy-winner Kiefer in his course, Kiefer: Keys, Chords, & Beats. Jazz music is daunting to wrap one’s ears around. It is safe to say most Americans have a complicated relationship with one of our oldest art forms. Jazz is chronically…
