Of all the musicians Tim recorded as part of the Streetnote label, the Hypnotic Brass Band was definitely among the most polished and well-known. Back in 2006, the seven-piece band out of Chicago was already getting its own full treatment by the New York Times. And it cut a good story. All of the members of the band are sons of the Sun Ra Arkestra trumpeter Kelan Phil Cohran, “The Oracle,” who helped found of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, a collective of musicians and composers dedicated to nurturing, performing and recording original jazz and contemporary music. Tim recorded them in LA, though at the time the Times reported on them, they were performing daily outdoors and in the subways of New York, and they had independently produced three albums, “The Flip Side,” “Hypnotic Brass Ensemble,” and “Pay Up.” It looked like they were on their way to making it big.
Still, to be singled out as the favorite street band of Sasha Frere-Jones, the music reporter for The New Yorker, as he recently did on his blog, has got to be the sort of endorsement that every street musician is hoping to land—particularly when his word is given that your new ten-inch vinyl release “is worth whatever you pay for it.” Frere-Jones also reports, with a bit of our shared disappointment, that Hypnotic is no longer playing the streets: they are strictly a club act now. And they plan to ride their success all the way to Fela Kuti’s “Felebration” in Lagos, Nigeria this October. Wish we could make it to that show!
While it’s a shame that we won’t be catching them on a public boardwalk any time soon, it’s great to hear that Hypnotic is doing so well. Here is a video for their studio recording called “War.”
Well then, arguably the biggest free cultureish news to hit the mainstream since Radiohead released their massively popular pay-what-you-like album In Rainbows last January has been, er, Radiohead’s release of their “House of Cards” video yesterday, with the video animation released under a Creative Commons license. Admittedly, the whole thing was shot with freakin’ laser beams instead of a camera and it looks pretty rad, which it should because it was issued from the high holy of holy bands. But, you ask, the video animation carries a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license, does that mean the whole thing is free to share and remix so long as I tell who made it and don’t make money off of it? As ever with Radiohead these days: Kinda-sorta. It means that you are free to have your way with the video data, so long as you keep within the bounds of the CC license, but the song and this particular video do not carry a CC license. Chew on that one a while….
And while you do, check out the pretty great video itself.
We’ve just deployed a new set of changes to the site today. As mentioned before, we got a lot of great feedback from our first users, which we’ve put to good use. The site is looking a lot sleeker, the actions are a lot clearer, and generally it’s gotten a lot more fun to use. I’m especially digging on all the new customization possibilities for each user’s profile, song and playlist pages.
Also, we’re totally stoked to see the first music uploads appearing. Thanks for using the site!
Just wanted to extend our thanks to everyone who has given us their feedback about the site this past week. We’re moving ever-forward with your help and things are really starting to come together.
Now, for your viewing pleasure, we suggest you take a look at this oldie but goodie educational video on the ins and outs of copyright.
Calling all musicians, music fans and curious Creative Commoners: We are super pleased to announce that Sutros is live and available for use.
We invite you all to take a look at the site, upload songs, create playlists, and especially, to let us know what you think. Once you’ve created a new account and signed in, you’ll find a Feedback link at the bottom of each page that allows you to comment directly about the content on a page-by-page basis. We look forward to receiving your suggestions. More importantly, we can’t wait to hear your music!
Also, we would like to extend our thanks to Leif Johnson, Pie-making Programmer Extraordinaire, without whom none of this would be possible.
The Sutros team had the supreme pleasure of attending the Creative Commons TechSummit down at The Google’s Honeyplex yesterday. We heard from the hardworking folks at CC about their new and ongoing projects and from a bunch of fellow developers of online music sharing sites and repositories, including Jamendo, Music Brainz, Attributor, and the inimitable Lucas Gonze.
We especially delighted in Ben Adida’s presentation on ccREL, a machine-readable code for licenses, which helps make CC licensing deeds understandable to both machines and humans (and, distantly down the line, even lawyers!) by implementing a language that makes sense to us all. This is especially great for music encoding because it allows people to unambiguously tag their digital song files with the proper title, creator, credits, license, etc. and have those designations carry on to any machine or human that comes across the file. We at Sutros instantly and wholeheartedly joined this bandwagon.
To read a more exacting play-by-play of the conference, check out CC’s own TechBlog, which live blogged the proceedings. It was a great day, with lots of important ideas introduced and exchanged. Thanks, CC!
The Sutros team just enjoyed a very fine visit with Charith Premawardhana, doting violist and chief organizing officer for San Francisco’s own Classical Revolution—an awesome collection of musicians that are often heard around town playing chamber music in unexpected places, such as bars, cafés, clubs and galleries.
It turns out that the concept of accessible chamber music for all has spread like wildfire and there are now Classical Revolution groups forming all over, including Portland and Montreal. Charith had a lot of great ideas about services he is looking to use online and how Sutros will be able to help him to connect with classical musicians worldwide who are looking play chamber music for people that might not otherwise have the opportunity to hear it.
We’re really looking forward to the day when we can get some Classical Revolution tunes up on Sutros. Hopefully it’s very soon!
I have a particular gaggle of musician friends who readily quit everything they’re doing each summer to attend music camp up in the woodsy reaches of Northern California, if only to claim the “One time, at band camp….” line for themselves. If the accounts are true, then it seems that “band camp” is a dreamy place where people of all ages and all musical abilities join together to play lots of music, learn new techniques, dance, make friends, maybe construct an instrument or two and have a generally fantastic time. Sounds great, right?
Well, the New York Times thinks so, and so do I. Check out Hilary Howard’s article, “Taking a Break From Life to Live the Fantasy” to find out more about various offerings throughout the country. Maybe this summer, we should all join them.
Tim and I attended two really terrific events this week where we got to hear from the good people from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Creative Commons and many other representatives from our favorite music and technology organizations.
The first event was the SanFran MusicTech Summit, which took place this past Thursday. Believe it or not, our favorite panelists were the various lawyers on hand—including Zahavah Levine, the Head Counsel at YouTube, intellectual property guru Andrew P. Bridges and Fred von Lohmann from EFF. They seemed to best convey the absurdity of the current situation in the music business—where even the good guys, the ones who want to pay their proper dues to artists in exchange for hearing their music, cannot possibly do so legally online without putting out a massive effort or paying in to the old powers that be.
And generally, as Tim pointed out, there was very little talk about getting attribution and payment back to the artists themselves. Nearly all of the talk was about major record labels, corporate rights holders and the online sharing platforms that have brokered deals with them. We wished that we could have heard more about the musical “middle class,” those of us out there who are less concerned about big business, and care more about sharing our music with friends, family and anyone else who wants to hear it. You know, Sutros-type musicians.
Jonathan Zittrain hailed just such regular Web crawlers last night at a lecture hosted by Stanford Law School, EFF and CC. Mr. Zittrain’s book, The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop It, actually starts out with a history of the Internet, which is full of geeks, goodwill and Hitler cats, and goes on to explain how all this has morphed into a potentially very scary future. He calls upon all of us to develop technologies and online communities that allow users to work creatively and collaboratively on solutions for the future.
