review

New review for Jambase is up on The Long Blondes, I did not hold back on this one and figured if Shitfork can tear apart "Jambands" then we can tear apart crappy no talent indie rock "bands." The review link should be in the RSS feed to the right.

Interview with Matt Buttler

read the full story atthis appeared at http://www.gratefulweb.net/gwebNews/gwebDesign/interviews.asp?articleid=1594&zoneid=7

Recently I had the opportunity to talk with Matt Butler, the musician and conductor behind the Everyone Orchestra, who I also discovered can add, “great orator” to his list of talents. Never one to shy away from leadership, you could say Matt conducted the interview, as he energetically and expressively weaved eloquent science and philosophy. From his experience with EO to conducting as an instrument the maestro lays it down for you.

The Everyone Orchestra will play at the upcoming Bear Creek Music Festival on November 14-16, a funk and soul leaning Florida festival with a touch of bluegrass, adding this years DNC performers Yonder Mountain String Band as a headliner. Matt didn’t have much to say when I asked him about suggestions for the Bear Creek Super Jam other then questioning what super jam really meant; he mentioned that he was still putting the EO lineup together, which is a whole process unto itself, as Butler acts as both band leader, musician and agent. I followed up with Matt recently and he released the full lineup,

“ Bear Creek Line up: Super funky EO....
Jon Fishman, Michael Kang, Eric Krasno - guitar, Nigel Hall - vocals/
keys (Lettuce), Kofi Burbridge - Flute/keys, Janis Wallin - Bass
Avis Berry- vocals and more TBA...”

Bear Creek could possibly be Fishman's last festival before a potential yet still hypothetical reunion with Phish, and I got to sneak in a question about that as well. Regardless of whether this theory will prove true, expect Fishman, Butler and the rest of the Everyone Orchestra to bring their A game down to Suwannee this November.

AB: How much of what you do is improvised and how much is written down or memorized.

MB: The amount of improvisational music versus songs that we perform really depends on what the makeup of the group is, I would say at the festivals that I've done recently, the last one I did with Fishman was once hundred percent improvisational, but then again I also just facilitate people leading something. Ryan Montbleau led something, I don’t know if it was a song or what but no one had ever heard it before except for his keyboard player, and they just kind of rocked it with him, each one is different in that sense.

I've done shows before with my old band mates Jambay and Steve Kimmock, where we’ll do an improvised set, then we do a complete set of music of all songs, and conducting is playing a different role throughout; whether it’s improvised or part of the song, conducting plays a different role as far as the utility of it. Most of the time its not a rehearsed thing, its about being off the cuff and a little bit pressurized, and the musicians need to be ultra kind of aware and on their toes and communicating in a hyper way, I don’t mean hyper but ultra aware and sensory.


AB: what’s the process for putting together a lineup for an Everyone Orchestra show.

MB: Basically each Everyone Orchestra at this point is pretty much different, they don’t have to be a different lineup all together I'm not married to that idea, but I'm definitely interested in mixing and matching different personalities, instrumentation and genres, and kind of keeping it interesting for everyone in more ways then just improvisation, just meeting new people, and kind of being a beacon of people coming together, musicians coming together and performing in a way that’s kind of raw and real; that’s the crux of how I put the lineups together and how each different one is coming together. I build the lineup each time around someone that’s kind of a catalyst or an anchor for the show, it will be built with either a band or someone like Fishman or Kimmock, or some of my old friends, there’s all these different ways that they come about. I just did one this summer with this promoter who puts on sacred music events and he introduced me to like 13 new musicians that I had never met before from a world music, kind of sacred music/yoga music, type of genre and we did an EO with them, and it was phenomenal, it was just kind of fun to do it with people outside the jam scene as well as with people inside of the jam scene.

It’s pretty wild.



AB: Besides your charity work for the Patagonia foundation, given these crucial political times and the upcoming election, what are some thoughts on Headcount (the youth voter registration effort).


MB: I've known them for years, when they were first kind of starting out; I don’t know it’s kind of all blurry, I’ve done a couple different things with them. We’ve done a couple of things, Brownstein's a good friend, kind of looking for some collaboration kinds of things, I’d really like them to invite me to one of the Headcount All-stars, to be a guest conductor.

That’s the whole idea, of conducting as an instrument, in the jam scene, it’s a little different, it’s kind of new I think, and the idea of like sitting in and conducting I don’t know who's done it quite like this, it’s kind of a new concept to share out there.


read the rest at grateful web

EO in CO

The Everyone Orchestra will host a late night jam session at the Boulder Theatre. The line up so far includes Aron Magner and Allen Aucoin from the Disco Biscuits, Dave Watts and members of the Motet, Michael Kang and Billy Nershi from SCI, Tye North, Scott Law, Chantel Mead, Janet Guenther and more.

Everyone Orchestra News, and Bear Creek

check out the Matt Butler review i did at Grateful Web

here for last years review, un revised by jambase, with an extra paragraph about some other bands

Fishman - pro-rep-banjo pickup installation

Believe me this thing has been a pain in my ass, but mostly due to a crappy installation at mad music, then the bluegrass shop both in st pete. Once I sucked it up and started to learn something about it myself, I figured out it definitely needed some more love and care. First of all a very thin magnet is attached to the banjo head, it has adhesive on one side, and the magnet/surface of the banjo pick up is fixed against it, the theory is that the sound waves are picked up by the magnet. he is some more on the single coil pickup theory. and here
"Single-coil pickups

The first electric guitars all used single-coil pickups. A single-coil pickup has only one coil of wire. It may have a single magnet, a single magnet with screws for adjustable pole pieces, or a separate magnet for each string. Regardless of the number and arrangement of magnets, it is still a single coil pickup if it has only one coil of wire.
Unfortunately, in addition to producing an electrical signal from a vibrating magnetic field, a coil of wire is a very efficient antenna. A coil of wire will "pluck" electromagnetic radiation out of the air, and we are surrounded everywhere by this radiation - most notably the sixty-cycle hum from building wiring, electrical noises from fluorescent lighting, and the most recent source of noise troubling guitarists with single coil pickups: the computer monitor. In short, single-coil pickups are susceptible to hum.

"The single-coil sound

Single-coil pickups have a thin, clean, and transparent sound. These pickups are usually about 3/4th of an inch wide and 2-1/2 inches long. Single-coil pickups are common on Fender guitars such as the Stratocaster and Telecaster, two guitars that are very common in rock, country, and pop. Some of the most notable users of the Fender Strat single-coil sound include Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, and Stevie Ray Vaughan. Famous Telecaster players include Bruce Springsteen, Buck Owens, and Johnny Paycheck."

I ended up cutting up another thin magnet and fixing it to the banjo head, because I found the one installed was too small and that a bigger one helped pick up the volume and tone from all the strings equally, this was a problem, as some strings were much louder then the others.

change, change, change spare change.

Horizons Perspectives Conference NYC

from right to left
enyclopedia pictura guys 1 and 2, don't know, don't know, Dimitri Mobengo Mugianis, Dan Merkur, Rick Doblin, Daniel Pinchbeck, Alisson Grey, Alex Grey, Don't Know.

For the don't knows check the list of speakers on their website, it's not Alexander Shulgin I know because he left before this super panel.

a letter to my friend who told me about Horizons Perspectives

Horizons was amazing, I got some video below. there was a top secret conversation with Albert Hoffman disclosed, where he said to someone on the panel, I forgot who, this... the dude said he thought 911 was caused by the government, so then Albert said that it was his opinion that it was part of a Jewish conspiracy, then the panel went on to discuss about how no body is perfect and all that. Then Alexander Shulgin was talking about how he really likes the fly chemicals right now, and his wife wouldn't say her favorite compound because she said one time she did, and a Chinese lab went and synthesized it and put it on the streets before the government even knew what it was.

Hhorizons was great, lots of word about working with the legal and political system, and the progress made with playing by the rules and following proper FDA guidelines, for phase II trials .

Palin Comes to NYC

we are organizing a palin welcoming committee, with lots of signs telling her and the world how dumb and horrible she would be for our economy, email borsodas@yahoo.com to get involved

death of pink floyds keyboardist

pink floyds keyboardist died look it up, he was the driving force behind the band

Allman Brothers Sue Record Label over royalties.

The Allmans get pigeon holed as pacifist hippies, but they won't roll over and take it from a record company like so many others are willing to do, they stand up to their right to get a fair share from new forms of media, primarily digital downloads from iTunes. Here is the full story.

http://www.billboard.com/bbcom/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003837855

another camp bisco post

go to the camp bisco website to fill out the form
check out Telepaths new album Contact

July 2009 • Indian Lookout Country Club

the Disco Biscuits are one of the most down to earth bands and there for can help save it. Brownie was right about the flow of ideas and they are some of the only rockstars not detached from normal people and what their fans are into. These guys are the real deal, and great at keeping their ear to the street. Big up to Brooklyn!

http://newsroom.mtv.com/2008/07/21/disco-biscuits-marc-brownstein-recruits-young-voters-at-camp-bisco-with-headcount/

a case to question

There's Dubya now, still rewriting laws via signing statements. Still creating and destroying laws with executive orders. And still violating laws at his whim. Imagine Bush continuing his policy of extraordinary rendition, sending prisoners off to other countries with grim interrogation reputations to be held and tortured. I can even picture him formalizing his policy of preventive detention, sprucing it up with some "due process" even as he permanently removes habeas corpus from our culture.

I picture this demonic president still swearing he doesn't torture, still insisting that he wants to close Guantanamo, but assuring his subordinates that the commander-in-chief has the power to torture "if needed," and maintaining a prison at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan that makes Guantanamo look like summer camp. I can imagine him continuing to keep secret his warrantless spying programs while protecting the corporations and government officials involved.

If Bush were in his third term, we would already have seen him propose, yet again, the largest military budget in the history of the world. We might well have seen him pretend he was including war funding in the standard budget, and then claim that one final supplemental war budget was still needed, immediately after which he would surely announce that yet another war supplemental bill would be needed down the road. And of course, he would have held onto his Secretary of Defense from his second term, Robert Gates, to run the Pentagon, keep our ongoing wars rolling along, and oversee the better part of our public budget.

Bush would undoubtedly be following through on the agreement he signed with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki for all U.S. troops to leave Iraq by the end of 2011 (except where he chose not to follow through). His generals would, in the meantime, be leaking word that the United States never intended to actually leave. He'd surely be maintaining current levels of troops in Iraq, while sending thousands more troops to Afghanistan and talking about a new "surge" there. He'd probably also be escalating the campaign he launched late in his second term to use drone aircraft to illegally and repeatedly strike into Pakistan's tribal borderlands with Afghanistan.

If Bush were still "the decider" he'd be employing mercenaries like Blackwater and propagandists like the Rendon Group and he might even be expanding the number of private security contractors in Afghanistan. In fact, the whole executive branch would be packed with disreputable corporate executive types. You'd have somebody like John ("May I torture this one some more, please?") Rizzo still serving, at least for a while, as general counsel at the CIA. The White House and Justice Department would be crawling with corporate cronies, people like John Brennan, Greg Craig, James Jones, and Eric Holder. Most of the top prosecutors hired at the Department of Justice for political purposes would still be on the job. And political prisoners, like former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman and former top Democratic donor Paul Minor would still be abandoned to their fate.

In addition, the bank bailouts Bush and his economic team initiated in his second term would still be rolling along -- with a similar crowd of people running the show. Ben Bernanke, for instance, would certainly have been reappointed to run the Fed. And Bush's third term would have guaranteed that there would be none of the monkeying around with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that the Democrats proposed or promised in their losing presidential campaign. At this point in Bush's third term, no significant new effort would have begun to restore Katrina-decimated New Orleans either.

If the Democrats in Congress attempted to pass any set of needed reforms like, to take an example, new healthcare legislation, Bush, the third termer, would have held secret meetings in the White House with insurance and drug company executives to devise a means to turn such proposals to their advantage. And he would have refused to release the visitor logs so that the American public would have no way of knowing just whom he'd been talking to.

During Bush's second term, some of the lowest ranking torturers from Abu Ghraib were prosecuted as bad apples, while those officials responsible for the policies that led to Abu Ghraib remained untouched. If the public continued to push for justice for torturers during the early months of Bush's third term, he would certainly have gone with another bad apple approach, perhaps targeting only low-ranking CIA interrogators and CIA contractors for prosecution. Bush would undoubtedly have decreed that any higher-ups would not be touched, that we should now be looking forward, not backward. And he would thereby have cemented in place the power of presidents to grant immunity for crimes they themselves authorized.

If Bush were in his third term, some of his first and second term secrets might, by now, have been forced out into the open by lawsuits, but what Americans actually read wouldn't be significantly worse than what we'd already known. What documents saw the light of day would surely have had large portions of their pages redacted, and the vast bulk of documentation that might prove threatening would remain hidden from the public eye. Bush's lawyers would be fighting in court, with ever grander claims of executive power, to keep his wrongdoing out of sight.

Now, here's the funny part. This dark fantasy of a third Bush term is also an accurate portrait of Obama's first term to date. In following Bush, Obama was given the opportunity either to restore the rule of law and the balance of powers or to firmly establish in place what were otherwise aberrant abuses of power. Thus far, President Obama has, in all the areas mentioned above, chosen the latter course. Everything described, from the continuation of crimes to the efforts to hide them away, from the corruption of corporate power to the assertion of the executive power to legislate, is Obama's presidency in its first seven months.

Which doesn't mean there aren't differences in the two moments. For one thing, Democrats have now joined Republicans in approving expanded presidential powers and even -- in the case of wars, military strikes, lawless detention and rendition, warrantless spying, and the obstruction of justice -- presidential crimes. In addition, in the new Democratic era of goodwill, peace and justice movements have been strikingly defunded and, in some cases, even shut down. Many progressive groups now, in fact, take their signals from the president and his team, rather than bringing the public's demands to his doorstep.

If we really were in Bush's third term, people would be far more active and outraged. There would already be a major push to really end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan/Pakistan. Undoubtedly, the Democrats still wouldn't impeach Bush, especially since they'd be able to vote him out before his fourth term, and surely four more years of him wouldn't make all that much difference.

mario on guitar

if you play guitar you will watch every one of these

phish reunites for old road managers wedding

fishman looks tanked !

poor older women getting shoved and maced 3 times

poor older women getting shoved and maced 3 times, this is a slightly chunky very non threatening women in her middle age getting shoved and attacked brutally with tear gas at the RNC

The Dead To Tour In 2009 Obama Benefit on October 13

Word on the Web is that the surviving fellas from The Grateful Dead — bassist Phil Lesh, guitarist Bob Weir, and drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann — are getting back together to tour in April and May of 2009.

rumor mill

My best friend works at the Wachovia center, I asked him Tues. if he heard about dates being held for the Dead.He asked his contact in the front office-the guy looked suprised and said it was the first he heard about it.The guy called hinm Thurs.and said the Dead put a hold on the Spectrum for 2 nights, my buddy asked if they were in April,he said "no,in October" I see someone gave me a thumbs down vote on my last post.Hey don't shoot the piano player!Stay tuned.

No blacks at the RNC

African Americans lacking in Republican delegation at this year's convention | World news | guardian.co.uk

Deborah Honeycutt ardently opposes abortion rights, wants the government to give parents vouchers to pay for parochial schools, and has a hard line on illegal immigration. And she is black, one of a tiny number of African Americans at the Republican national convention being held in St Paul this week.

A glance around the Republican national convention this week shows a sea of white faces. Only 36 of its delegates are black, less than 2% of the total. At the Democratic convention in Denver last week, 1,087 delegates were black, about a quarter of the total.

The Republican party has no African Americans in the US House of Representatives and Senate, while the Democratic party has one African-American US senator -- Barack Obama -- and 42 in the House. The Joint Centre for Political and Economic Studies, a research group that studies African-American politics, has identified seven black Republican nominees for federal office this year -- out of more than 460 races -- and said none are likely to win.

The major reason for this phenomenon?

There are relatively few African-American millionaires, and those who are 'Republican-wealthy' are Democrats!

-gregg king

Election 08 WTF Short Story Teaser

by conor sullivan

So, I thought I would test the system. As I went to vote, I dressed up in black face and wore a huge jacket with Obama's face on the back; I carried a small boombox and blasted Lil John's 2003 summer smash "Get Low". The crowd was intense, so I pushed the other voters around and yelled, "BLACK MAN COMING UP IN THE WORLD!" Even before I could even get into the voters booth, the cops came and tried to calm me down. I told them I was just here to support Obama, and screamed "ALL HAIL KING OBAMA!" I was then shoved to the ground and a boot went into my back. I couldn't move and I kept screaming "OH BAMA OH BAMA OH BAMA!" and they slapped cuffs on me and removed me from the voter area. This was in rural Mississippi where everyone is white. I was thrown in jail and was not allowed to vote in this "free" country. The instant they realized I was a white man, and I said that I would vote for McCain, they all laughed and said I could vote in "four to eight years". So much for democracy.

Yonder Mountain String Band Rocks the DNC

this from a Colorado local:

"there are rumors of secret shows that are popping up- last night aparrently z-trip, cold war kids, and sonic youth played somewhere at an art gallery but none of us could find it."

Rage Plays the DNC, organizes a sit in and plans for an RNC show? heres the AP story
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5gfOXiN57YrRQXDKWunSxana5SkDwD92QSIR00