Blue Morris Blog - Music and Guitar

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Simply adjust the happy and jazzy sliders

Microsoft is working on new software that I believe will hurt music education around the world: it's called Songsmith and their webpage has a nauseating video that demonstrates how it works.

Songsmith generates musical accompaniment to your voice. To create a song, you just choose a musical style from reggae to big band, sing into your PC's microphone, and Songsmith will create backing music for you, even changing the underlying chords as you sing.

Andrew Dubber at New Music Strategies is hoping that technology like this might bring back a resurgence in parlour music -- amateurs who play music for the fun of it. Maybe now instead of buying your kids their first guitars, or paying for piano lessons, you can just buy them Microsoft Songsmith and be done with it.

But wouldn't people be better off if they just learned how to play an instrument for real? Learned how to write songs themselves? It's not that hard. I would argue that it is far more rewarding, and of course the music would be better, too.

Read more: Simply adjust the happy and jazzy sliders

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LIFE magazine photos released though Google

Thanks to the Burlesque Daily blog I learned that LIFE Magazine has just released millions of photographs from the LIFE archives to Google:

"Search millions of photographs from the LIFE photo archive, stretching from the 1750s to today.

Most were never published and are now available for the first time through the joint work of LIFE and Google."

The LIFE archives can be searched from the main LIFE/Google Webpage. If you search for "burlesque" you'll get 77 great images from the past. This includes photos of June St. Clair demonstrating "how to undress before your husband at the Allen Gilbert School of Undressing."

Or try searching "jazz" and you'll get some 200 images, most of which have never been published before. Some of the first photos that show up in that search are from the Jazz At the Philharmonic series of concerts.

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Who is Blind Joe Death?

In 1959 an album was released with one of the simplest cover art ever published, next to perhaps the White Album. On one side it read "Blind Joe Death." On the other side was printed only "John Fahey." Only 95 copies of the LP were pressed. There were no liner notes and no obvious credits given to the musician playing the music. And it's arguably one of the greatest solo guitar albums ever recorded.

John Fahey was a guitarist and avid record collector. In his collection Fahey had a scratched old 78 RPM record from 1927 of a song called "John Henry" by a man called "Blind Joe Death." It is Blind Joe Death's only known recording and it's quite possible the recording was never actually released because it is not listed in the Paramount label's catalogue.

That old 78 record was so influential to John Fahey that in 1959 he released his own album under that name: the cryptically titled album with only the words "Blind Joe Death" on the cover. That album has since garnered such a cult following that the name "Blind Joe Death" is more often thought to be John Fahey himself....

Read more: Who is Blind Joe Death?

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The futility of flogging music

The discussion about the music business and making money has been heated for years. But it's getting even more desperate as musicians around the world struggle with trying to make money for the love of it and trying to make money from the music.

Music Think Tank is a blog that carries on this discussion, and this week published a particularly poignant article that holds no stops. It's a good summary of the way it feels to be a musician these days.

The internet has entirely switched the focus from making music to sales and marketing. While some might say that this is just the harsh reality, it's what you have to do to survive, I say bollocks. I'm not just being romantic about this. There's a choice: play gigs, experience that peculiar bonding you get with fellow band members, feel that curious mixture of love and antipathy you get from an audience--and make no money. Or obsess about selling mp3s--and make no money....

Read more: The futility of flogging music