Jared Leto sure cleans up nice — just take a peek at the star on the cover of the new issue of Nylon Guys!
Thirty Seconds to Mars released their new album, This Is War, on Tuesday. To celebrate, Jared sat down for an in-depth interview with the style guide. Here are a few highlights:
Jared’s Early [...]
SAVANNAH MUSIC FESTIVAL ANNOUNCES 2010 SEASON
FEATURING UNIQUE PAIRINGS, ORIGINAL PRODUCTIONS AND INSTRUMENTAL VIRTUOSITY
Highlights include Wilco, Wynton Marsalis, Derek Trucks & Susan Tedeschi
 Wilco |
Tickets are now on sale for the 2010 Savannah Music Festival (SMF), which runs from March 18 through April 3. Opening with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chinese superstar pianist Lang Lang. The 21st edition of Georgia’s largest music festival features its most diverse array of acts ever. Called “one of the best events around the world” by The Times of London, SMF’s 2010 season is comprised of original productions, unique pairings, and a focus on instrumental virtuosity, including world-class artists in jazz, classical, bluegrass, blues, gospel, and a wide variety of other American and international musical traditions. Set in the idyllic atmosphere of Savannah in the early spring, these unique programs combine to create a musical arts event with worldwide resonance. Tickets are available here.
SMF Executive & Artistic Director Rob Gibson remarks, “With the ever widening gap between commercial music and the performing arts, we want to serve as a bridge that connects audiences with a wide range of first-class artistry, while also illuminating musical traditions from all over the world.”
Savannah Music Festival Original Productions
For the sixth year, SMF Associate Artistic Director and acclaimed violinist Daniel Hope has curated an original chamber music series called Sensations. Daniel Hope and friends welcome first-time guests and musical collaborators Gabriela Montero, Gautier Capuçon, Mark O’Connor, and Jeffrey Kahane.
Highlights of the series include performances of both sextets written by Brahms, a program entitled Forbidden Music, featuring works by composers incarcerated in the Thereseinstadt concentration camp including Schulhoff, Schull, Klein and Haas performed at Temple Mickve Israel (the third oldest Jewish temple in America), and an American music program featuring an O’Connor String Quartet, Heifetz‘ Gershwin arrangements, and works by Williams, Copland, and Bernstein. Pianists Sebastian Knauer and Jeffrey Kahane will perform a one-time only duo recital.
The New Orleans Blues Party features the Henry Butler Trio joined by several special guests and jazz greats throughout the evening. Additional jazz and blues productions include the annual Piano Showdown, which this year pits Butler, Marcus Roberts, Gerald Clayton, and Dick Hyman at opposite ends of the stage, on different Steinways, performing solos and duets. Ben Tucker at 80, celebrates the birthday of Savannah’s beloved jazz bassist/composer in a program featuring such jazz stalwarts as Marcus Printup, Wycliffe Gordon, and Kevin Bales. The prolific jazz pianist Dick Hyman plays an all-Fats Waller concert. All Star Swing Summit, the culmination of SMF’s Swing Central High School Jazz Band Competition & Workshop, features the Clayton Brothers, the Marcus Roberts Trio, the Ted Nash Ensemble, and the Georgia Horns featuring Chris Crenshaw, Wycliffe Gordon and Marcus Printup.
A multi-generational gathering of great mandolinists featuring Mike Marshall, Chris Thile, and Caterina Lichtenberg reaches back to the origins of the instrument in Italian music from the 1600s, also spotlighting the mandolin’s history up to the present day. The most formidable husband/wife team in the history of southern rock/blues, Derek Trucks and Susan Tedeschi, perform a set of ’60s and ’70s soul music.
Unique Pairings and Double Bills
· The Big World of Music series pairs innovative American instrumentalists with international virtuosos in Wizards and Gypsies: The Assad Brothers and the Roby Lakatos Ensemble; Mark O’Connor’s Hot Swing! and the Renaud Garcia-Fons Trio; and the Bill Frisell Trio with Bassekou Kouyate & Ngoni Ba.
· Divas of Country Music features two of neo-traditional country music’s biggest talents: Patty Loveless and Kathy Mattea.
· The passionate and gritty blues, rhythm & soul of Ruthie Foster intersects with the intimate and rich sound of Savannah native Kristina Train, whose debut recording is being released this month on Blue Note Records.
· Major Minors: Teenage acoustic music sensations Sarah Jarosz and Sierra Noble share a bill showcasing their youthful virtuosity and their respective trios.
· Jazz elder statesmen Dick Hyman, Ken Peplowski and Howard Alden are paired with the youthful and hard-swinging Gerald Clayton Trio.
· Mike Marshall’s innovative Big Trio and western swing/alt-country rockers The Belleville Outfit perform on the opening night of the festival.
· The “first family of bluegrass,” Cherryholmes, shares the stage with North Carolina singer/multi-instrumentalist Shannon Whitworth.
About the Savannah Music Festival
The Savannah Music Festival presents a world-class celebration of the musical arts by creating timeless and adventurous productions that stimulate arts education, foster economic growth, and unite artists and audiences in Savannah, Georgia. The 2010 festival runs from March 18 through April 3, including more than 100 performances of world-class jazz, classical, blues, bluegrass, gospel and other genres of American and international roots music in intimate venues throughout the historic district of Savannah.
The entire festival line up can be viewed here.
Words by: Kevin
Schwartzbach
Hiromi’s Sonicbloom :: 11.14.09 :: Hangar 11 :: Tel Aviv, Israel
 Hiromi Ueharaby Muga Miyahara |
As if there aren’t enough things being exported out of Japan these days. It’s no surprise, of course, given that the
Japanese have a habit of taking things invented by Americans and making them smaller, better, and more efficient.
First it was cars, then electronics, and now jazz. Hiromi Uehara certainly is small (standing at no more than five feet), certainly is
efficient, and certainly is better than just about any contemporary American jazz pianist. In a genre increasingly
dominated by aging titans, the youthful Hiromi, with her ingenious compositions and astounding virtuosity, is at the
outer limits of what jazz fusion is capable of. Leave it to the Japanese to take the only true American art form and
bring it to a whole other level.
Japanese exports, of course, can be found all over the world, and Hiromi is no exception. Currently in the midst of a
world tour, Hiromi made her lone stop in the Middle East en route to her homeland. Putting all political and
ideological persuasions aside, Israel can actually be quite a fun place. In only a few short decades Israel has become
a bustling economic and cultural center, with Tel Aviv at its heart. The perilous war-zone that the media often
makes it out to be is hardly the reality for most Israelis, especially in Tel Aviv, the city with the country’s most
exciting nightlife. It’s no wonder then that this would make for Hiromi’s third trip here.
Inside Hangar 11, one of the few
venues that regularly draws international artists, they had just finished wiping the blood off the floor from the
previous week’s Opeth concert to
replace the mosh pit with rows of chairs for the more ‘formal’ jazz exhibition that was about to take place. A futile
gesture given that most of the show found the audience incapable of staying seated. When this cute little morsel of
a human being first took the stage, dressed like a doll in her brightly colored dress with a black flower obscured in
her hair, smile unremittingly plastered to her face, it was hard to imagine the onslaught of notes and sheer energy
that we were about to be drenched in.
 Hiromi’sSonicbloom :: 11.14 :: Israel from hiromiuehara.com/blog |
A humorous Gershwin-esque improvisation from the solitary Hiromi started off the show before the rest of the band
joined in on the fusion-y goodness. Englishman Tony Grey (bass) was quick to steal the spotlight,
plucking out a lush solo on his five-string while his bandleader buttressed him with colorful chords. Hiromi’s
current group, Sonicbloom,
proved a perfect compliment for the pianist, with her set largely comprised of songs from their latest release,
Beyond Standard. As a single unit the quartet moved with effortless rapidity from old-school swinging jazz
beats to raucous rock beats to Latin grooves to spacey drifting to intricate melodic lines played in unison. Hiromi’s
Sonicbloom can really bloom into just about anything it wants to at any given moment. Much like her mentor Chick Corea, her compositions are a
fusion of not just straight ahead jazz, but also of rock, electronic, progressive, and even classical music. At times
the quartet sounded an awful lot like Corea’s Return to Forever (which is familiar ground for Hiromi, fresh off a brief stint playing with that
band’s rhythm section in the Stanley Clarke
Trio). It’s not just her compositions but also her playing that Corea has palpably influenced. Both Corea’s
fusion of acoustic piano and synthesizer (an instrument he practically introduced to the jazz world) and his highly
virtuosic style of flying through a flash of improvised notes at remarkable speeds have been absorbed in Hiromi’s
playing.
It’s more than just her speed though that makes Hiromi such an amazing musician, it’s her expressive abilities that
really make her unique. Her deranged, dissonant improvisations still maintained a high degree of melodic form,
giving her playing a kind of thematic aura. In her own arrangement of the Rogers & Hammerstein classic “My
Favorite Things,” she filled in the silent abysses that buffered torrents of notes with just one or two delicately placed
notes that seem to convey as much if not more than the innumerable notes surrounding them. “My Favorite Things”
was also a display of Hiromi’s arrangement skills, as the song evolved from its show tune roots to an upbeat fusion
piece with an impetuous drum solo from Brazilian Mauricio Zottarelli.
 Hiromi’sSonicbloom :: 11.14 :: Israel from hiromiuehara.com/blog |
Hiromi’s take on Jeff Beck‘s “Led
Boots” might very well have been the highlight of the evening. Taking Beck’s funked-up ditty and re-harmonizing
the melody to give it a much jazzier feel built on top of a much faster tempo, this arrangement was hardly
reminiscent of the original, particularly during the extended jams. Hiromi’s cybertronic synthetic madness shrouded
the familiar melody taken by John Shannon‘s guitar. In unison her hands dashed across two different
keyboards. While Hiromi made minced-meat of the original keyboard solo by Max Middleton (who actually
composed the song) Shannon’s guitar work hardly touched that of Beck’s. Not that that’s any insult to Shannon;
that’s kind of like scoring 40 points in a basketball game and then saying Michael Jordan could have done better.
Hiromi continued shredding across all three of her synths at impossible speeds over all different types of time
signature and chord changes until the song erupted into a virtually exact replica of Beck’s version. With a look of
complete elation from the song’s momentous finish, she shyly said, “Sababa,” into the mic, which is Hebrew slang
for awesome, eliciting a round of laughter.
With her limited English skills, Hiromi addressed the crowd before dropping into the encore. “I’ve traveled a lot over
the years, so I often ask myself where is my place in the world? But when I come here that question disappears from
my head. I’ve only been to Israel three times, but when I come here I really feel at home (cue requisite chorus of
awwww’s from the audience). This one is dedicated to you. It’s called ‘A Place to Be’.” “A Place to Be” was an
uncharacteristically somber, deeply introspective piece that seemed to unveil the very being of Hiromi, as she sat
lonely by her piano, though still sporting that great big smile that simply could not be wiped from her face. Soon
Sonicbloom dropped right back into a scrumptious groove, inciting everyone to their feet to end the show with a
bang.
Often musical-lay people tend to get lost in the complexity of jazz, but even those who are not quite aficionados
could enjoy this blend of energetic jazz fusion. With an uncanny mastery of innumerable genres, ghostly, nimble
fingers, and a touch of youthful energy, Hiromi is single-handedly taking jazz into the future. With this gal at the
helm, Sonicbloom has become one of the most enjoyable and talented jazz acts out there.
Hiromi tour dates available here.
JamBase | Israel
Go See Live Music!
Former Playboy model Holly Madison has turned her back on the new season of her old show, Girls Next Door.
The 29-year-old blonde, who shot to fame as the number one girlfriend of Playboy mogul Hugh Hefner, said the new season featuring Hef’s new leading ladies Crystal Harris and the Shannon twins disappointed her.
“I had a [...]
Always a bridesmaid, never a bride: Jennifer Love Hewitt is reportedly living the single life once again after co-star beau Jamie Kennedy dumped The Ghost Whisperer star and returned to his old girlfriend, former Britney Spears assistant Shannon Funk.
Nothing helps Cody Linley unwind after a hard day’s work like a night of Tequila shots and rubbing his wang up against unsuspecting hotties at the club – — too bad he’s only 19!
Star Magazine snitches say Cody, the star of Disney’s Hannah Montana (as child star Jake Ryan), made quite the horse’s behind out [...]
The defenders of noted film director Roman Polanski, who has been charged with raping a 13-year-old girl in 1977 and then fleeing the country, have been trying to redefine what rape is.
Comedian and talk-show host Whoopi Goldberg had on The View on September 29 tried to defend his actions.
“It wasn”t rape-rape,” she had said.
The next [...]
Jennifer Love Hewitt and Jamie Kennedy have lashed out at reports of their break up and said the “lies†have been spread by an annoyed ex-assistant.
Gossips circulating web suggested that the 10-month-old romance between the pair had ended after Love Hewitt found Kennedy was cheating on her with his former flame Shannon Funk.
However, the couple [...]
No matter where you are in your intellectual journey, the ability to assemble and analyze large amounts of complex information is a skill that can pay large dividends both in monetary terms and in terms of your overall satisfaction with life. What follows is a very short guide and template for writing excellent research papers.
Re-Evaluating Road-Crossing: The Chicken Was Pushed
A Short Guide to Writing a Research Paper
The Abstract is usually 100-150 words long. The abstract tells the reader what you have done and why it is important. Your abstract tells the reader what you do, how you do it, and what it implies. Here, you’re saying the chicken was pushed, that you demonstrate this statistically or anecdotally, and that it implies we have to re-evaluate our understanding of chicken road-crossings.
The introduction sets the stage for your analysis. You tell the audience what you are doing and why it is important. An introduction here would say that previous generations of scholars believed that the chicken crossed the road to get to the other side. Your paper shows that the chicken was pushed. In the introduction, you give a brief outline of the argument and the evidence used to support it. As much fun as it is to write long, twisting narratives filled with subtlety and nuance, it is important to remember that a research paper on a technical topic is not a mystery novel. Your readers are not reading for leisure. They are reading because they think your ideas are worth considering and factoring into their own research and decisions.
The literature review places your research in context. You aren’t the first person to ask why the chicken crossed the road. What questions do previous researchers ask? What questions remain unanswered? How does your idea fit? In this case, previous scholars have also argued that the turtle crossed the road “to get to the Shell station.â€Â Is this relevant for your research? Why or why not? As tempting as it is, don’t include too much in the literature review. The literature review is a place to highlight relevant contributions that address the question you are asking and to show how your contribution either fills gaps in our knowledge by answering questions we haven’t answered yet or creates gaps in our knowledge by showing that something we thought we knew is false. What does the reader take from the literature review? Is it a sense of the important questions that others have asked and how your research helps answer them? Or does the reader just come away with the knowledge that you’ve read a lot of stuff? Revise the latter until it becomes the former.
Your theory lays out the logical reasons for why we might believe your hypothesis to be true. It also explains why other hypotheses are unlikely to be true. Road-crossing is dangerous, and people have never explained what was on the other side that would have made it more attractive to the chicken. We can’t rule out the hypothesis that the chicken was pushed, and there are a lot of plausible conditions under which this might be the best explanation.
Here you report and explain the evidence you will use to verify that the chicken was pushed. Evidence can be statistical, anecdotal, narrative, or descriptive. Remember that not all good evidence is statistical, and not all statistical evidence is good. Perhaps you can show that chicken road-crossings are correlated with something, or maybe you find the chicken’s personal papers in which he, in a diary and a series of letters, accuses the cow of pushing him into the road.
The conclusion summarizes your results and lays out very carefully exactly what needs to be done next. It is likely that your conclusion will be tentative. However, a well-written conclusion will elucidate the next steps that need to be taken before we can be absolutely certain as to whether the chicken crossed the road of his own volition or whether he was pushed.
Art Carden is Assistant Professor of Economics and Business at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee and an Adjunct Fellow with the Oakland, California-based Independent Institute. His research papers have been published or are forthcoming in Public Choice, Contemporary Economic Policy, the International Journal of Social Economics, the Business and Society Review, the Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies, the Review of Austrian Economics, and other outlets, and they can be found on his SSRN Author Page. His commentaries appear regularly atwww.mises.org and in newspapers around the country, and he is a regular contributor to Division of Labour. He and his wife, Shannon, had their first child in July, 2008.
Words by: Justin Gillett | Images by: Susan J. Weiand
Stockholm Syndrome :: 09.06.09 :: The Independent :: San Francisco, CA
 Stockholm Syndrome :: 09.06 :: San Francisco |
It’s interesting to see a band that rarely tours actually play live. Going into the show, concertgoers don’t know if what they are about to see will be a sloppy display due to infrequent interaction or a finely tuned act that simply lacks the ability to dedicate itself to the road due to band members’ conflicting schedules. In the case of Stockholm Syndrome, it’s undoubtedly the later.
Using the term super group to define the band almost seems cliche, but for lack of a better word that’s what the band is – a super group. What originally started as a collaboration between guitarist/vocalist Jerry Joseph (Jackmormons) and bassist Dave Schools (Widespread Panic), turned into a serious musical endeavor a few years back with the additions of lead guitar shredder Eric McFadden(EMT), drum wiz Wally Ingram and versatile keyboardist Danny Louis (Gov’t Mule). Even though the group rarely tours, a testament to how busy all the members’ respective main musical endeavors are, when Stockholm Syndrome does announce an off-hand set of dates, the shows are worth attending, if for nothing more than witnessing five musicians at the top of their game perform together. The musical backgrounds and styles of the five artists are quite different, although when playing together the collaborative rock monster that is created is truly remarkable, especially considering the band typically performs less than 10 dates a year. Stockholm Syndrome’s show at The Independent in San Francisco on Sunday night found the band in great form, performing as if the group lived on the road – which, in one way or another, they kinda do.
 Dave Schools – Stockholm Syndrome :: 09.06 |
Opening up the show was local San Francisco blues inspired rock outfit The Stone Foxes. With two guitarists, a bass player and a drummer – all sharing vocal duties – the band displayed an impressive command of the stage. Oftentimes sounding like a classic rock throwback act, the quartet’s sound was consistently driven forward with the solid, occasionally spastic drumming of Shannon Koehler and the steady, rarely faltering bass lines of Avi Vinocur. Even though all the musicians often sang together, they did not seem to be achieving any sort of refined harmonies. Instead, their vocals acted as contrasts to one another, which added to the group’s unique sound.
As Stockholm Syndrome arrived onstage and greeted the slightly older crowd, the band tuned up and launched into a massive set that would persist for the better part of two hours. Schools, playing without his stalwart Modulus Quantum six-string, opting to play a Modulus Funk Unlimited four-string instead, imminently lit up a smoke, one of the countless number he sparked during the show, and looked eager to kick off the evening’s musical ventures. While Stockholm songs are a vast departure from the Panic songs that Schools normally plays, his dominating bass lines are still extremely similar in nature. He’s proven himself a bass player that can perform in several musical contexts, yet still hold onto a characteristic semblance that makes all of his playing unique and unmistakable.
 Stockholm Syndrome :: 09.06 :: San Francisco |
As the band got warmed up with its first few songs, attention shifted to Ingram’s diverse drumming. Attaching hand drums to his drum kit, Ingram occasionally tapped into a sound that deviated from the typically rock driven sound of the band. Apart from Ingram’s remarkable drumming, the songs proved that Stockholm really is the love child of Joseph and Schools. The other three musicians onstage played with as much dedication as Joseph and Schools did but occasionally it felt like they may not have invested as much heart into the songs as the noted guitarist and bass player have. The songs seemed to have been crafted by Joseph as singer-songwriter tunes, then as all the musicians in the band sear their brand onto the songs they morph into something completely different. But, the core of the songs is clearly Joseph’s lyrics, which prove above all else he is a talented storyteller.
At points during the show the two guitarists would harmonize their instruments during solos, which created an amazing sound that worked surprisingly well considering Joseph’s and McFadden’s vastly different approaches. Typically, when the band’s songs called for some sort of solo, McFadden would be the player to step up and deliver. His skill on the guitar was so impressive that it’s astonishing he doesn’t command more respect amongst serious six-string followers. His style is extremely flashy but McFadden displayed such dexterity while playing that his fellow musicians seemed to be in awe of him. His showboat style is no doubt bolstered because he looks like a bad ass when he plays, too. Sporting a sneer, thin dreadlocks and tattoo-covered forearms, McFadden just looks like a dude who plays a guitar really well.
 Stockholm Syndrome :: 09.06 :: San Francisco |
While many of the songs seemed to lack any sort of coherent “hook,” the extended jamming and improvisation more than made up for any sort of apparent lack of mainstream listening appeal. The band brought out several tunes that will appear on their forthcoming new album, which the band claims will drop soon. On some of these fresh songs, Joseph’s voice was extremely pronounced – a welcome change to some of the band’s songs that lacked a characteristic inflection. The song selection as the band neared the end of its set seemed to really capitalize off the musical diversity that Louis displayed behind his keyboards. Ranging from reggae to Texas rock, Louis’ knack for cross-genre competence really proved that he’s one of the more talented and severely underrated keyboardists on the circuit today.
After the unrelenting set concluded, the band bowed off the stage visibly stricken from the massive amount of musical movement all had taken part in. After the crowd cheered for a bit, they returned to the stage and launched into an extremely heavy two-song encore so intense that Ingram broke his snare.
Continue reading for Dave Vann’s pics from the previous night of Stockholm Syndrome in San Francisco…
Images by: Dave Vann
Stockholm Syndrome :: 09.05.09 :: The Independent :: San Francisco, CA
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JamBase | Northern California
Go See Live Music!
We all need someone older and wiser to show us the ropes. We all need firsthand confirmation that life always looks easier when we are the one who is on the outside looking in.
PARIS, Texas — State police in full riot gear rushed a downtown street in this eastern Texas town Tuesday to break up a tense standoff between hundreds of black and white protesters who exchanged screams of “Black power!” and “White powe…
Diva Jennifer Lopez and her salsa-singing hubby Marc Anthony held up Miami Dolphins jerseys with their names and birth dates inscripted during a news conference in New York City Tuesday announcing his minority ownership in the team.
REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton
“I could quite possibly be staring at the first day of the rest of my life,” Anthony said [...]
Environmental Working Group has just released a bottled water scorecard that grades almost 200 brands for labels or websites that disclose their sources, treatment methods and results of contaminant testing
