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Bebop Spoken There

Van Morrison: ''Basically, I'm coming from jazz. Not pop, not rock, not what's commercial. That's where I started, and that's still where I am. I feel the same as I did when I was listening to Louis Armstrong, Lead Belly, Jelly Roll Morton''. (The Northern Echo, 12 June 2025).

The Things They Say!

This is a good opportunity to say thanks to BSH for their support of the jazz scene in the North East (and beyond) - it's no exaggeration to say that if it wasn't for them many, many fine musicians, bands and projects across a huge cross section of jazz wouldn't be getting reviewed at all, because we're in the "desolate"(!) North. (M & SSBB on F/book 23/12/24)

Postage

18037 (and counting) posts since we started blogging 17 years ago. 458 of them this year alone and, so far, 36 this month (June 11).

From This Moment On ...

JUNE 2025

Sat 14: Mr Wilson’s Second Liners @ Northumberland Miners’ Picnic, Woodhorn Museum, Ashington. 10:00am-5:00pm. Free. At intervals during the day.
Sat 14: Spanish City Rollers @ The Brae, Cullercoats. 11:00am & 1:00pm. Free. A Cullercoats Festival event.
Sat 14: Front Porch Three + Hoodoo Blues swing dance workshop @ Cullercoats Crescent Club. 3:30pm. A Cullercoats Festival event.
Sat 14: Tyne Valley Big Band @ Tynedale Beer & Cider Festival, Tynedale Rugby Club, Corbridge. 4:15-5:30pm.
Sat 14: Jeff Hewer Trio @ The Vault, Darlington. 7:00pm. Free.
Sat 14: Mark Williams Trio @ Yamaha Music School, Blyth. 7:30pm. £15.00. at the door; £14.35. (inc £0.35 bf) online, in advance.
Sat 14: Lindsay Hannon: Tom Waits for No Man @ The White Room, Stanley. 7:45pm.
Sat 14: Eva Fox & Steve Chambers @ Prohibition Bar, Newcastle. 8:00pm. Free. A ‘Jar on the Bar’ gig.

Sun 15: Lewis Watson Quartet @ Queen’s Hall, Hexham. 3:00pm.
Sun 15: 4B @ The Ticket Office, Whitley Bay. 3:00pm. Free.
Sun 15: Pasadena Roof Orchestra @ Alnwick Playhouse. 7:00pm.
Sun 15: Under the Wellie @ Prohibition Bar, Newcastle. 7:00pm. Free. A ‘Jar on the Bar’ gig.
Sun 15: Hannah Brine Quartet @ The Globe, Newcastle. 8:00pm.

Mon 16: Harmony Brass @ Cullercoats Crescent Club (1:00pm). Free.
Mon 16: Giles Strong Quartet @ The Black Bull, Blaydon. 8:00pm. £10.00.

Tue 17: Jam session @ The Black Swan, Newcastle. 7:30pm. Free. House trio: Alan Law, Paul Grainger, Abbie Finn.

Wed 18: Vieux Carré Jazzmen @ Cullercoats Crescent Club. 1:00pm. Free.
Wed 18: Darlington Big Band @ Darlington & Simpson Rolling Mills Social Club, Darlington. 7:30pm. Free. Concert performance (open to the public)..
Wed 18: Take it to the Bridge @ The Globe, Newcastle. 7:30pm. Free.

Thu 19: Gareth John & the SOS Big Band @ The Forum Music Centre, Darlington. 7:00pm. £25.00.

Fri 20: Classic Swing @ Cullercoats Crescent Club. 1:00pm. Free..
Fri 20: Rendezvous Jazz @ The Monkseaton Arms. 1:00pm. Free..
Fri 20: New Orleans Preservation Jazz Band @ The Oxbridge Hotel, Stockton. 1:00pm. £5.00..
Fri 20: Strictly Smokin’ Big Band @ Alnwick Playhouse. 7:30pm. £21.50. ‘Time After Time’..
Fri 20: Alexia Gardner Quintet @ Sunderland Minster. 7:30pm. .
Fri 20: King Bees @ Billy Bootleggers, Ouseburn, Newcastle. 8:00pm. Free. Superb Chicago blues band.

Reviewers wanted

Whilst BSH attempts to cover as many gigs, festivals and albums as possible, to make the site even more comprehensive we need more 'boots on the ground' to cover the albums seeking review - a large percentage of which never get heard - report on gigs or just to air your views on anything jazz related. Interested? then please get in touch. Contact details are on the blog. Look forward to hearing from you. Lance

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Listening Through the Noise: The Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music

Even people who admit to being tone-deaf could once tell the difference between radio static and music. Not anymore. “We live in an era where all types of sound in art have become equally legitimate,” explains Joanna Demers, associate professor of musicology at the USC Thornton School of Music. “I don’t make this claim lightly: Electronic music has precipitated an end of music.” In a timely new book, Listening Through the Noise: The Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music (Oxford University Press: October 2010), Demers offers the first comprehensive assessment of electronic music and how our approach to listening has radically departed from the last 500 years. Beginning with philosopher and composer Pierre Schaeffer, who lugged a turntable engraver around Paris in the mid-20th century to record the sound of trains, Demers shows how recent experimental electronic music destroyed the conventions — such as tonality, tempo, timbre and harmony — that once helped identify music and demarcate it from the sounds of everyday life. “Even though people will no doubt continue to use the word “music,” the experience of listening will be markedly different from what it meant a century ago,” Demers says. As Demers explains, electronic music introduced the possibility that the sounds of the outside world could be treated with aesthetic consideration. Building on a “rhetoric of difference” and the work of avant-garde composers such as John Cage, experimental electronic music embraced previously undesirable sounds such as feedback, field recordings and silence. “When the framing devices of Western art music began to disappear or undergo critique, so, too, vanished many reasons for regarding music as separate from the outside world,” says Demers, author of Steal This Music: How Intellectual Property Law Affects Musical Creativity (University of Georgia Press: 2002). But in the absence of any musical parameters, how do we listen to previously nonmusical sounds, say, a recording of waves lapping on a beach? Theorists have postulated that the end of music might enable listeners to hear all sounds as if they were music. Or, conversely, we might begin to listen to sounds without context or meaning. Others offer the idea that music is no longer music at all, but a form of art incorporating sound and space. “Just as photography instigated a philosophical crisis in visual arts, so did the introduction of electricity into music making at the turn of the twentieth century change musical aesthetics forever,” says Demers, who teaches classes at the USC Thornton School of Music on intellectual property and music, hip-hop, music videos, and popular music history. In Listening Through the Noise, Demers distinguishes among types of listening: hearing, listening for meaning and comprehension, and aesthetic listening, that is, appreciating the characteristics of sound as aesthetic objects. Whereas once listening to music might have required full attention, Demers notes that aesthetic listening allows for listening in intermittent moments without beginning or end, reflecting the way many of us actually listen to popular music now, while doing other things. “While insiders still might still insist on the distinctions among various genres, outsiders might well perceive in electronic music a whole not only new musical experience but a new medium in which sound is aesthetic but not especially musical,” Demers says. “These sounds are strange in the real world, but they also succeed in making the real world strange.”
From a press release sent to me by OUP (USA) - What do you think?
Lance.

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