None of These

Sorry, this is no vibes... but wow! I went to a concert last night. Anouar Brahem, the Tunisian 'Prince Of Oud' and his pals got us into a beautiful trip.

This great oriental 12 string kind of mandolin has in itself a magical sound. Anouar was accompanied by lebanese percussionist Kaled Yassine. But to complete this quartet, he chose two instruments and players from the north: German Klaus Gesing on bass clarinet and Swedish bassist Bjorn Meyer.

Hi All,

The recent discussion around Tony's post about Jason "Mallet Man" Taylor has me wondering what people here really think about the balance between letting the music speak for itself and showmanship.

In "check this out" I've put three performances with contrasting levels of showmanship and art. Two are way on the showy side -- Jason Taylor and the Ian Finkel performance on "History of Mallet Instruments". The third, Elio Villafanca, is what I would consider to be the standard "here's the music" style.

Diego Urbano, member from Argentina and "old cyber pal" put this on his Facebook.

I just couldn't resist!!!

Enjoy!

- M

PS: Man I love it all, the expressions, the parodic details, choice of characters and words, and when they sing out of tune they are so funny!!

This is not vibes, but man, it's amazing music!

Louis Winsberg is a great French guitarist. I met him as he worked with my vibist friend Norbert Lucarain, and I already talked on the site about him and his great contribution to the world music and jazz.

A few years ago, I was at a concert and I saw this incredible Saz duet with his pal Jean-Christophe Maillard... It never had been recorded... until now! And untill my friend Bernard found it!

Hi Tony,

I've been thinking about the problem of the amount of labor it takes to run this site, and it occurred to me that we could probably help you out with some of the non-vibes-playing aspects of maintaining things. I don't know where your main time sinks are, but if they could be broken up into discrete, unrelated chunks, then the members could volunteer to do the tasks for you.

This is so deep. The LINES!

ACE OF CAKES

Hi All,

There's been a great discussion on a thread started by Steve Shapiro on the future of the music business (see check this out). I've been enjoying that quite a bit, but I'm worried that it's a bit too esoteric for most of the people here. So I'd like to start another thread about concrete steps working musicians can take in the new environment to optimize their chances of making a decent living.

If you're trying to make a living in music, you absolutely must read this book. Written by Berklee technology maven David Kusek and cyber-licensing expert Gerd Leanhard, this is a comprehensive examination of the state of the music industry and a highly optimistic (from the artists' point of view) projection of its future (far less optimistic from the record companies' point of view).