Salutations From The Land Of Cows

Over the past few years I’ve been deeply mired in the process of making my acoustic double bass sound great loud by electricity.  It’s a process that has been fun and exasperating.  The irony is that this is a 150 year old double bass that for most of its life has had no trouble expressing itself without electrical assistance.  What I have discovered after spending thousands of dollars and god knows how much time is that nothing electrically created or reinforced sounds better than then my 150 year old double bass acoustically.  It is warm, complex, round, full, and sweet in a way that is sublime and amazing.  The work required to create such a thing in 1860 would have been quite a labor of love.  The fact that it’s still around making music is a testament to its creators long since dead.  Any attempt to make it louder via electric means diminishes it.

The opportunities for me to use that bass in contexts that don’t require electric sound reinforcement are few and far between and frankly these days hardly ever attended by people spending their daily bread.  While I search for them their absence is profound to me. 

Modern expectations of volume and crowd coverage require electricity and frankly I think we are not better off for it.  They say volume allows for nuance where acoustic performance sacrifices nuance for power.  Bing Crosby vs. Pavarotti.  Perhaps, but Pavarotti was full of dynamic range in a way that Bing, although beautiful, could never match. I think maybe the listener has gotten lazy. I would suggest that it’s the listener that has been beaten up by electric volume rather than the performer enhanced by it.

 
Our attempts to make this beautiful natural sound loud to compete with subwoofers and THX certified surround sound have diminished its richness.  While we are not to be faulted for it, the music listener is surely shortchanged from it.  Over the last 80 years as the modern hi-fi arose from the ashes of the Victor Talking Machine, the last true acoustic sound reproducer, we have become more and more subject to the demands of electric sound reinforcement.  True acoustic performance has less value as listeners loose their patience for it and frankly don’t have the hearing for it anymore.  This is evolution.  Technology is developed to help us experience music performance without having to actually go to it and also help us hear it when it’s hard to while we are there.  Then that same technology develops a life of its own.  People start using the technology to make the music.  Hence the rise of the electric guitar, then the electric bass; pretty soon you’ve got rock bands in stadiums with PA’s that can be heard with clarity from miles away.

My Grandmother used to bitch about how loud everything was.  She loved to go to the Met in New York, and small clubs to experience acoustic music in all its forms during her time there through the first half of the 20^th Century.  When she moved out to Ohio to spend her last years with her son and us pesky grandkids, she couldn’t come to my rock band performances.  To much noise, she said.  She loved us and wanted to see what we were doing but I know now the electric sound was too much for her.  Her ear was trained to listen for the subtleties and beauty of acoustic performance and the electric pounding was so offensive to that training it caused her more pain than the joy of seeing her grandbabies do something special.

I now understand that.  After decades of classic rock that were the mainstay of my teens, twenties and thirties, when experiencing music as a listener I find myself more and more eschewing electric performance for acoustic.  Symphonic, chamber, small combo jazz with no electrics have replaced the barrage of electric guitars and drums that I’ve spent my life studying.  I sold my huge Ampeg SVT bass amps for a 150 year old double bass.  Why?  Because electricity is killing my hearing and I now realize some of the spirit of music too.  I think my grandmother had it right.

The folly is as a professional musician I spend scads of money and time and energy converting that beautiful old instrument’s sound into electricity to keep up with the demands of the people coming to hear me perform.  I reduce this glorious old box to 600 watts and a handful of small speakers so it’s loud as hell but sounds like shit.  As I sit in the bar and warm up acoustically I inevitably get people coming up saying things like “my god that thing sounds beautiful”.  After the show the comments are “you rock”.

The next great technological advancement is happening in music with the computer and the internet.  It has removed acoustic sound creation entirely and is in the process of changing the way music is distributed, marketed, heard and experienced.  Progress marches forward and for the first time in my life I can’t keep up anymore.

All the while my old bass sits there watching I think.  When it started playing there were no computers, no cars, no phones, no electricity, no Bing Crosby not even my grandmother.  When it made music the performer had to carry it to the performance space and everyone who came to hear had to travel to do so.  The first devices for recording sound had just started to be conceived.  It was already 60 years old by the time electric recordings started being made and modern sound reinforcement had it’s beginnings in the military during the First World War.  By the time the Beatles played Shea stadium and nobody could hear it that old bass was over 100 years old.

I wish it could talk.

Maybe it is and that’s why I felt compelled to write this.

The polarizing attitudes in this country over the last 10 years are very disappointing.  The divides in attitudes about politics between people have gotten larger and larger fed by media rhetoric, often untrue, dispensed by talking heads that rarely use fact to back up their opinions.  This doesn’t help anything.  It feeds the hysteria and widens the divide.  Glen Beck and Bill Marr are both extremists asking us to move further away from each other in their own ways.  It’s not helpful, it’s not useful, it’s surely not Christian as I understand it if that matters to anyone at all.

There are some monumental issues confronting the American public these days and instead of information and data we get “news entertainment”.  We get polarizing talk shows none of which give us data, they just give opinion on data they cherry pick to interpret in whatever way suits their target audience.  That is not informed discourse, it’s pandering; it’s bullshit served up on a huge platter in HD and then taken as fact by the sheep that can’t tear their eyes away from it.

Bill Marr isn’t fact.  John Stewart isn’t fact.  Keith Obermann isn’t fact.  Glen Beck isn’t fact.  Bill OReilly isn’t fact.  Rush Limbaugh isn’t fact.  They are all opinions with very little factual information to back up their rants.

I want real information and exchanges uncluttered by the ratings of the lunatic fringe on both sides and I’m afraid we’ll never see it.  Mostly because it won’t fit into a sound bite.  Mostly because people don’t want to spend the time to make up their own minds, they just pick a side and look for the propaganda that supports it.

It’s disappointing.  It makes us look like stupid people. 

He’s a star!

Man he’s a cute little rat.

They messed up the order of things in the blog and killed my Gallery in their move to another server.

To be continued….

Edit:  I fixed some of it.  At least the order is right.  Now on to the Gallery.  Thanks Ipower.  You suck.

I had many requests for the context of my parents eulogies given at their funerals. I have made a page for them separately you can access from the tabs above.

Your comments are welcome.

Joseph Maneri passed away Sunday October 7, 2007
He died of Cancer early that morning at the health center in Friendship Village in Columbus Ohio.

Calling hours are Friday October 12 from 2pm to 4pm and 6pm to 8pm

Southwick-Good & Fortkamp Funeral Chapel
3100 N High St
Columbus, OH 43202
Phone: (614) 267-0362

http://www.southwick-good.com/

The Funeral Mass will be celebrated on Saturday October 13 at 10am at

St. Anthony Parish
1300 Urban Drive
Columbus, OH 43229

http://www.saintanthony.catholicweb.com/

The graveside service to follow immediately at

Resurrection Cemetery
9571 N High St
Columbus, OH 43085
(614) 785-0964

Following the Cemetery service there will be a gathering at our house approximately 1pm or 2pm to 6pm
There will be catered dishes and beverages but covered dishes are encouraged.

Email or contact family directly for details.

This is the truth. There are cows less than a mile from my house and business. I snapped this pic with my phone just so you could see the skyline of downtown Cowlumbus from on top of this bunch of cows.

The ’59 Cadillac, the ’62 Fender Stratocaster, and the ’54 O’Keefe and Merrit Range all share a common link. They are icons of American popular culture from the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s that have become fixations in the minds of people from Wisconsin to Tokyo. They are the stuff that American Baby Boomers grew up with. As the Boomer gets older the value of these things have increased far beyond their original disposable culture beginnings.

I am very familiar with the prices of old Fender guitars and find them to be ridiculous. They have ceased to be musical instrument prices and have become part of the Antique and Collectible trade. It’s unfathomable that they command prices approaching those of Master built old Orchestral instruments. The talent, energy, materials, and labor required to originally construct a ‘57 Fender Strat is nowhere near that of a professional orchestral instrument. Yet the prices are creeping closer together.

Pathetic and foolish priority if you ask me.

I’ve watched that change drastically in my last 20 years of doing business with them. It has completely changed what I do forcing me to consider detail that two decades ago we would have laughed at.

Fwiw I think pre war Martin Guitars are somewhere in between orchestral instruments and 50’s Fenders and should command more respect than the similarly priced vintage strat. Even they are creeping closer together.

I have fond memories of the cars I rode around the neighborhood in and worked on in my youth. The ‘69 Chevelle, ’65 Mustang, ’70 Camaro, and ’72 Charger. I have similar feelings towards Fender Guitars, Basses, and Amps, Hammond B-3’s and Ampeg SVT’s. I still have 50’s dinettes and wacky 40’s lamps in my house. These are the sights and sounds of my growing up. My comfort food.

They have become cultural icons whose current dollar value far eclipses their original disposable construction. It indicates to me a weird trend in human consumption that overvalues sentiment over craftsmanship. While I too have fond attachment to all those Baby Boomer toys I find the rapidly escalating dollar values of those playthings disturbing and sad. They have quickly escalated out of my reach and any of those things that I have still held on to require different treatment than I was hoping for when my Son gets old enough to appreciate what they mean to me.

A fellow on Talkbass was bashing Jazz.  This was my response.

Jazz is a rich and subtle art. At it’s best it is an interplay of time melody and harmony with relation to a standard form that creates on the spot composition that is different each and every time it is performed. It is best enjoyed at the moment of performance in the room where it happens. Many listen and have no understanding. It requires quite a bit of energy to listen at the level where the musicians are trying to communicate. It has taken me decades of listening to Jazz to begin to appreciate the complexity of what I’m hearing.

If you wish more understanding continue to listen and study. If not you can return to it later in life and perhaps see things you can’t at the moment. There are several fellows that work with me ages 16, 20, 26, 50. We are all musicians and all hear Jazz differently. Admittedly the youngest of those have no patience with it and the oldest of us at times stop working for moments when caught up with the sublime.

Take it or leave it as you choose. To diss it as ego driven selfishness is to miss all the good stuff. While I’m sure you will find ego driven stuff in there, you will also find the depth of the human soul in all its power, frailty, ugliness and beauty, revealed moment by moment as the players work around each other in reference to this often silent structure swimming underneath.

The bass player’s role in Jazz is exactly what he makes it. No more, no less. If you are a metronome and that’s it, I’d get bored too. I suggest a bass player listen and practice enough that they can transcend their role and speak clearly with their instrument in a conversation of equal weight with their playing partners. The subtle dance is to understand the form, understand the role and then dance around both with whatever feeling is in you at the moment. It is in those moments you will be truly connected to the muse.

I am working a lifetime to achieve this and will never do it as well as I’d like. When I look back in the mirror from whence I came I can see the growth and it’s reflection in my life around me.

Thats how it is for me.