When Charles Grimsdale, a British investor, started the Internet music venture OD2 in 1999, he had a hard time persuading large record companies to license their music. But when he approached the rock musician Peter Gabriel about putting his music catalog online, he got a very different response: Mr. Gabriel was not only willing, he also wanted to take a stake in the company.

"When most labels were banging their heads, he got it and saw the liberating value of Internet distribution to artists, and that's what excited him," says Mr. Grimsdale, a partner at Eden Ventures, of Mr. Gabriel. "He has a very good sense technologically of what's going to work."

MR. Gabriel, 58, was born in Cobham, a town in the English county of Surrey. His father, now 96, worked for Rediffusion, the pioneering British commercial television company, and was an early proponent of on-demand programming. But "his company never believed people would pay for television," Mr. Gabriel says.

And while Peter inherited his father's interest in exploring new technologies, he credits his maternal grandfather with his investment activities. "My mother doesn't like me to say this, but her father was a bit of a gambler," he says. "If you feel like you're riding a wave that hasn't hit before, that's a great feeling."

Friends and business associates say Mr. Gabriel has always been entranced by the lure of new ideas.

"In the early days, we'd go skiing together and Peter would have an idea every 30 seconds," says the British entrepreneur Richard Branson, whose Virgin Group includes more than 200 companies. "We'd be sitting on the lift with me scribbling madly in my notebook, trying to get everything down. He's worse than me."

In his article, he definitely makes the case that there are more than just a few of us that are trying to make a political/activist statement with our music. He points out that, although it's not the 60's anymore, it's also not a time of submission: "If this is a fearful, defanged, apathetic period in music and the arts, what would an activist period look like?"

And although it's true that there are a number of us getting the message out - he quotes Wayne Shorter aptly -

"I'm trying to do music that echoes the need for human beings to say, 'Hey, it's time for us to evolve.'"

there's also much more we could be doing. He points out that in a jazz club in Brooklyn there is a poster showing full support for Zimbabwe's tyrant, Robert Mugabe, as if all jazz musicians should support that murderer. It's refreshing for David to point out that not all musicians lie to the left on the political spectrum (there are a handful of ardent Bush supporters here in the New York jazz scene - you know who you are!), but also that the choice for change this election cycle is so abundantly clear as to be almost a foregone conclusion. It would be nice to see a Pew Center poll taken of musicians in America. I'm sure it would find over 90% musicians support Barack Obama.

He concludes:

Of course, the jazz world only mirrors the strengths and weaknesses of the broader left with which it identifies most readily, and this is one of many reasons it's important to push hard for an Obama presidency. (For one thing, he's reported to be a jazz devotee since junior high.) Not only could Obama start to clean up Bush's mess; he could also change the political temperature and help foster a new culture of liberalism. In the creative arts, the vogue for radicalism may never fade. But with effort and luck, come 2009 we all might need to find new licks to play.

As for who's got the hipper taste in music, it's not even close! Check out this NPR story by Jonathan Schwartz which compares the two candidates' taste in music.

Obama's #1? "Ready or Not" by The Fugees...

We played a selection from my trio CD, "Consilience," entitled "Black Fire." It's a tune in 3/4 by Andrew Hill which first appeared on his album of the same title.

The group on that July evening consisted of Anton Denner on alto sax, Chris Bacas on soprano sax, Jon Cowherd on fender rhodes, Gary Wang on bass, and myself on drums.

We have a new CD just waiting to pop out as soon as we make it into the studio, which should happen this Fall. We'll let you know...just sign up for our monthly emailing at the bottom of this page!

Here's the MP3 (14mb). Enjoy!

Mr Gil, 66, has been in government since 2003, but said for some time that he was finding it difficult to pursue two demanding roles. As culture minister, he championed sometimes neglected forms of cultural expression such as indigenous painting.

However it was always clear that he hankered to return to his artistic career, and some critics questioned the level of commitment to his political role, says the BBC's Gary Duffy in Sao Paulo.

It's always refreshing when a great artist such as Gilberto Gil can make the crossover into public policy.If there were more creative people in position of power, the world would indeed be a much better place.

Remember what Albert Einstein said: "Creativity is more important than knowledge."

Music geeks flipping through the CD booklet for Teddy Thompson's "A Piece of What You Need," released last month by Verve Forecast, may be in for a shock. Instead of the names of the musicians and technicians who worked on the album, or any thank-you's to friends, they'll find a photo of a beach, followed by a blank panel. A sentence in small type directs listeners to Mr. Thompson’s Web site for "full album credits and more details."

Says Teddy,

"I don’t think that many people are buying CDs, and they aren't looking at the booklets. I love reading that stuff, but the days of booklets are over."

And yet, as the article goes on to discuss if music lovers are really ready to make the leap into liner-less recordings, Teddy concludes:

"I may have jumped the gun on it a bit," he said. "I was trying to do the right thing. I thought I could accomplish more in the virtual world."

As it turns out, Teddy did receive complaints from fans about the absence of credits in his CD booklet. The article mentions that "to rectify the problem the British version of the album, out next month, will include full track information."

Read the entire article to see if you share Teddy's fear that "it'll go back to the way it was in the '50s, when you never knew who did the string arrangements on a record. It would be very sad if that happened."

Indeed it would...

Johnny Griffin, a tenor saxophonist from Chicago whose speed, control and harmonic acuity made him one of the most talented American jazz musicians of his generation yet who spent most of his career in Europe, died Friday at his home in Availles-Limouzine, a village in France. He was 80 and had lived there for 24 years.

Mr. Griffin's modest height earned him the nickname the Little Giant; his speed in bebop improvising marked him as the Fastest Gun in the West; a group he led with his fellow saxophonist Eddie (Lockjaw) Davis was informally called the Tough Tenor band, a designation that was eventually applied to a whole school of hard-bop tenor players.

In the early 1960s, embittered by the critical acceptance of free jazz, he stayed true to his identity as a bebopper. Feeling that the American marketplace had no use for him (at a time when he was also having marital and tax troubles), he left for Europe, where he became a celebrated jazz elder.

"It's not like I'm looking to prove anything anymore," he said in a 1993 interview. "At this age, what can I prove? I'm concentrating more on the beauty in the music, the humanity."

For a few examples of his beauty and humanity, make sure to pick up some of his CDs.

He will be surely missed...

What happens in a jazz musician's brain during an improv session? Where does all that creativity come from? That's what Dr. Charles Limb, a Johns Hopkins surgeon with a passion for music, wanted to find out.

In a study published this year in the Public Library of Science ONE, Limb reported results of an experiment in which he had professional jazz pianists improvise riffs as an MRI machine scanned their brain waves. The experience offered a peek in the regions of the brain responsible for spontaneous creativity. While they improvised, regions of their brains linked to inhibition turned off, while areas linked to creativity turned on.

Indeed, Dr. Limb is a smart man:

As a jazz player, you often speculate about someone like John Coltrane, and you say, "How did they come up with that? How did somebody just play that right on the spot?" If you listen to jazz over and over, you realize these people are geniuses. They are generating idea after idea after idea. ... They never played the same way before and they'll never play the same way again. That to me is what's so unique about jazz. It's spontaneous, immediate composition.

As I bolded above, Dr. Limb is a very smart man...

The interview goes on, though, and attempts to answer a more fundamental question about creativity:

A lot of the music studies have dealt with music perception, what's going on when we hear something. What I wanted to study is what's going on in the brain of a musician that's jamming, just improvising on the spot. It's a relevant question to humanity on a level that has nothing to do with music. What in the brain allows us to be creative? Jazz is my model to get at that question.

Check it out!

There are nearly 100 photos in the show, many excavated from obscure files in dozens of libraries, then digitally retouched and enlarged by James Hershorn, an archivist at the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University. There's Dizzy Gillespie in 1956, charming a snake with his trumpet in Karachi, Pakistan. Louis Armstrong in '61, surrounded by laughing children outside a hospital in Cairo. Benny Goodman in '62, blowing his clarinet in Red Square. Duke Ellington in '63, smoking a hookah at Ctesiphon in Iraq.

The historical background of these tours is fascinating, too:

The idea behind the State Department tours was to counter Soviet propaganda portraying the United States as culturally barbaric. Adam Clayton Powell, US Representative from Harlem, had an idea that competing with the Bolshoi Ballet would be futile and in any case unimaginative. Better to show off a homegrown art form that the Soviets couldn't match - and that was livelier besides. Many jazz bands were also racially mixed, a potent symbol in the mid to late '50s, when segregation in the South was tarnishing the American image.

The exhibit goes on:

Jazz was the country's "Secret Sonic Weapon" (as a 1955 headline in The New York Times put it) in another sense as well. The novelist Ralph Ellison called jazz an artistic counterpart to the American political system. The soloist can play anything he wants as long as he stays within the tempo and the chord changes -- just as, in a democracy, the individual can say or do whatever he wants as long as he obeys the law. Willis Conover, whose jazz show on Voice of America radio went on the air in 1955 and soon attracted 100 million listeners, many of them behind the Iron Curtain, once said that people "love jazz because they love freedom."

The Jazz Ambassador tours, as they were called, lasted weeks, sometimes months, and made an impact, attracting huge, enthusiastic crowds. A cartoon in a 1958 issue of The New Yorker showed some officials sitting around a table in Washington, one of them saying: "This is a diplomatic mission of the utmost delicacy. The question is, who's the best man for it -- John Foster Dulles or Satchmo?"

Do you think a little be-bop, swing, and blues will win over those bad terrorists that hate us for our freedom? Hmmm....

Musicians scheduled to perform include: Cedar Walton Band, Charles Davis Band, Randi Weston, George Coleman, Sonny Fortune, Benny Powell, Jimmy Heath, Frank Wess, Louis Hayes, Ray Bryant, Gary Bartz, Steve Turre, Akua Dixon, Bill Saxton, Don Sickler Band, John Lee, Claudio Roditi and the members of the Dizzy Gillespie All Star Big Band, Michael Weiss, David Williams,Larry Riddley, Eric Reed, Donald Smith, Neil Smith, Duane Burno, Melba Joyce, Kathy Farmer, Lucy Galligher and Roni Ben-Hur.

If you've never heard of Ronnie, it's because he's been under the radar for so long:

One of the most prestigious pianists of the past 40 years and yet one of those essential contributors to the puzzle of jazz history who has not received due recognition. It seems "Ronnie Mathews" would be more a household name than it is, for his lofty investment into jazz. According to the New York Daily News, "Ronnie Mathews (is) another stalwart figure who has yet to receive the proper recognition." His years of touring and his many albums, both as leader and sideman, are overwhelming in number. Critics have showered accolades upon his name and affectionately compare him to fellow pianists Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell, with a sprinkle of McCoy Tyner. Not that Ronnie ever imitated them, but rather, that he is in league with these jazz greats.

He's really played with everyone over the past 30 years, starting with Johnny Griffin back in 1978:

One of the highlights of his career and longest associations, was with the Johnny Griffin Quartet. In Ronnie's own words, "This was a very, very special group." For almost five years (1978-1982) he was an integral part of Johnny Griffin's Quartet and forged lasting relationships with Johnny, Kenny Washington (drums) and Ray Drummond (bass). The New York Times describes Ronnie as "a constant and provocative challenge to Mr. Griffin...(he) is the energizer of the group..." Never getting enough of a good thing, Ronnie boasts of a possible reunion of the quartet sometime soon. One of the few Johnny Griffin recordings that features Ronnie's original compositions is "To the Ladies" (Galaxy).

Finally, the following was written by bassist Gary Wang who shared the bandstand with him for many years:

Really a cool guy, very funny and sharp, and it goes without saying, a wonderful pianist, a real jazz musician. His comping was really fantastic, the real thing. He could carry the entire rhythm section with his incredible time and feel that was so funky and soulful and in the pocket. Like a lot of the older cats, there were times, especially at first, when he could be tough on me, as a young player trying to figure things out. But I never had the sense that he was doing this out of spite or maliciousness, but rather always in the interest of making the music better. And in the end, he was like the rest of us....just trying to play well and make the best music he could. There was one time - I always saw him as being super consistent and unflappable - he really surprised me one night when he turned to me after a gig, where I thought he had played as good as he always did, shook his head and said "Well, Wangster.....didn't really get the one I wanted tonight!" Huh, I thought....I guess improvising kicks your ass right to the end, even if you're a seasoned, grizzled veteran like Ronnie.

Yeah, looking back, I'm glad that I had the honor of sharing the bandstand with him for all those years - of all the guys in that band, I probably learned the most from him. He'll be missed, by me and many others.

If you live in the New York area, slip on down to Sweet Rhythm to give your support and check out some of the living legends who are still around playing their souls out!

[where:88 Seventh Avenue, New York, NY 10014]

Recorded on April 8, 2008 - again at The 55 Bar here in NYC - it features the guitar of Sheryl Bailey. With Chris Bacas on soprano sax and Gary Wang on bass, this quartet has a great sound and should be playing many more gigs together in the future!

Featuring the guitar of Sheryl Bailey, it's the first time we've used her on a gig and the results were just slammin'! She complemented the soprano saxophone playing of Chris Bacas and the two of them sounded terrific together. Rounding out the quartet was Gary Wang on bass and myself, Vinson Valega, on drums. Although we've all played together in some combination before, it was the first time this quartet performed publicly together. I don't expect it to be the last, either!

Enjoy!

For Claudius Conrad, a 30-year-old surgeon who has played the piano seriously since he was 5, music and medicine are entwined -- from the academic realm down to the level of the fine-fingered dexterity required at the piano bench and the operating table.

"If I don't play for a couple of days," said Dr. Conrad, a third-year surgical resident at Harvard Medical School who also holds doctorates in stem cell biology and music philosophy, "I cannot feel things as well in surgery. My hands are not as tender with the tissue. They are not as sensitive to the feedback that the tissue gives you."

Like many surgeons, Dr. Conrad says he works better when he listens to music. And he cites studies, including some of his own, showing that music is helpful to patients as well -- bringing relaxation and reducing blood pressure, heart rate, stress hormones, pain and the need for pain medication.

Music Soothes the Savage Beast, right? What it does seem to do is stimulate the healing process by increasing the pituitary growth hormone, which in turn "reduces the interleukin-6 and epinephrine levels that produce inflammation that in turn causes pain and raises blood pressure and the heart rate." It's a controversial hypothesis that requires further testing but is an interesting finding, nonetheless, and a perfect example of the potential of combining the right-brain, creative, musical background with the left-brain, researcher's logic of an M.D.

He goes on further to hypothesize why Mozart's music is particularly healing:

Dr. Conrad's music dissertation examined why and how Mozart's music seemed to ease the pain of intensive-care patients. He concentrated not on physiological mechanisms but on mechanisms within Mozart's music.

"It is still a controversial idea," he said recently, "whether Mozart has more of this sort of effect than other composers. But as a musician I wanted to look at how it might."

Dr. Conrad noted that Mozart used distinctive phrases that are fairly short, often only four or even two measures long, and then repeated these phrases to build larger sections. Yet he changed these figures often in ways the listener may not notice -- a change in left-hand arpeggios or chord structures, for instance, that slips by unremarked while the ear attends the right hand's melody, which itself may be slightly embellished.

These intricate variations are absorbed as part of a melodic accessibility so well organized that even a sonata for two pianos never feels crowded in the ear, even when it grows dense on the page. The melody lulls and delights while the underlying complexity stimulates.

And why would Mozart write such beautiful structures?

Mozart's letters and biographies, Dr. Conrad said, portray a man almost constantly sick, constantly fending off one infection or ailment after another.

"Whether he did it intentionally or not," Dr. Conrad said, "I think he composed music the way he did partly because it made him feel better."

Indeed, as any musician will testify, it just plain feels good to play! It's almost a survival mechanism...

Thank god Mozart was such a sickly fellow, eh?

Rock, pop, jazz...poetry? Thanks to PennSound, Ezra Pound, Adrienne Rich and William Carlos Williams can now fill their own play list on your iPod. A project of Penn's Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing (CPCW), PennSound has been giving the world free access to the largest collection of poetry sound files on the Internet since January 2005.

The project is about preservation as well as distribution, as poetry sound recordings are often at risk of deteriorating if they are not converted or copied. One of the founders, Charles Bernstein explains, "The beauty of PennSound is that in the course of preserving these recordings, we are also making available a treasure trove of wonderful poetry performances that we believe will attract a whole new generation to poetry as a performance art."

Check it out, download a few, and start listening!

When I was a teenager, I used to have a neat sort of formula for writing songs. It worked over and over, and I got about 60 songs out of it. Now it doesn't work so well, and I am forced to write in all different ways. But what worked for so long was this:

I would start to write a song sometime late Saturday afternoon. Then, after dinner, when everyone in my family was doing other Saturday-night things, I would go into my room by myself and fool around with the guitar for several hours, usually managing to hammer out some kind of idea. In those days the chords came first, and they depended on what I was singing about. Then the melody, and lastly the lyrics.

It goes on from there, and they've been nice enough to post a demo of her song, "Bound," from the latest album.

Check it out!

The tunes are classic Simone - riveting, passionate, and righteous! Check out the video clips, too. Her protest music is just as cogent and important now as it was then (even if the country has evolved away from policeman with dogs chasing after black southerners).

Here's an example: