A little love

Brick Wahl at the LA Weekly just wrote a nice little blurb on us -- mostly as a preview of our upcoming Temple Bar show, but there's also a sentence on LEEF (so I guess that would be the album's first published review):

Now, you might need a bit of an outish edge to dig The Industrial Jazz Group ... then again, underlying the IJG’s 15-piece in-your-face attack are Andrew Durkin’s solid, Mingus-soaked arrangements. The group’s Industrial Jazz A-Go Go is just terrific, all swinging craziness, like Stan Kenton smoking all his band’s dope and cleaving Mingus’ ax with an ax. We love it. And the upcoming LEEF is from a live gig at home in Portland ... funny swinging stuff with clumps of European music and Zappoid art rock and cabaret tossed in, missing only Joel Grey. They’re at the Temple Bar on Tuesday, at 11 p.m. on the dot. One set only, alas.

A few corrections -- first, LEEF was mostly recorded in Amsterdam, not Portland. Also, there's a typo in the online piece -- "IJF" instead of "IJG" (I corrected it in my cut-and-paste). And finally, for this tour, the group will actually be sixteen people, not fifteen. (More on that later.)

But anyway, big thanks to Brick for this great piece!

And, uh, yeah, so I guess we'll be touring in CA next week. Wow -- I guess it's our CD release tour for LEEF. Who'd'a thunkit?

Here's the itinerary:

Station identification

Hi!

Did you know you can now pre-order LEEF? The album will be ready to ship sometime in the next few weeks. And the online price will go up after our upcoming tour (i.e., on April 1) -- so grab yours now! (You know, if, like, you want to.)

Oh yeah, and there's an added benefit of pre-ordering: you'll help us offset some of our touring costs!

In other words: everybody wins!

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After much discussion and soul-searching, I decided to release LEEF in an environmentally-conscious package produced by a local outfit called Stumptown Printers (and here I must thank Kris Tiner, all the way down in Bakersfield, for pointing out this amazing resource in my own backyard). Stumptown does a lot of good work, but the package I chose is known as the Arigato Pak. It's basically a (CD-sized) all-paper matchbook-like design -- with a spine (hooray!). It eliminates the need for plastic and glue. Plus it's configured in such a way as to protect the CD from fingerprints.

Hope you like it!

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Unlike me, Seth Godin seems incapable of ever blogging about anything lame. He recently posted this excerpt from what seems like a pretty funny book by Dan Kennedy -- an inside look at some kind of archetypal "Record Label Executive Mentality." The question t hand: "How many record execs does it take to screw in a lightbulb?"

First of all, before we change anything, is the light bulb really burned out? Maybe we just need to breathe some life into it; repackage it, maybe the light bulb could do a duet with somebody (Sheryl Crow? Tim McGraw?) in hopes of getting some crossover appeal, maybe it could be in a beer commercial, maybe we could get it out on the road with a brighter light bulb. The other thing to think about is that this summer, Honda is rolling out a 100 Million dollar campaign for a new car aimed at thirty-somethings who consider themselves adventurous/spontaneous but can't really afford something like a luxury S.U.V. and it might be a perfect campaign to tie this light bulb into, at least it would be the perfect demographic, in terms of age.

Also, and this is just an idea: what if we found out what video games are being released in the third quarter and maybe pitched the idea of having our light bulb make an appearance in the video game at some certain level of completion; like, you get to a dark cave, let's say, if it's an adventure game, and if you have enough points you can get the light bulb - and it would be our light bulb, obviously - and then it's easier to see in the cave. The other thing is this: worst-case scenario the light bulb is, in fact, burned out. Is that really the end of the world? I mean, maybe that's actually of more value to us in the long run: Picture this for voice over: "The light bulb is dead. . . but the legend lives on. . . re-released, re-mastered, revealed. . . the light bulb. . . IN STORES NOW." It almost makes more sense than taking the time changing it, plus, if it's dead we can sell it without dealing with it, you know what I mean? No demands from it, no hotels, no road expense, no delays in the project from its end, etc. But, like I said, I'm just thinking off the top of my head here, just brainstorming, and none of this is written in stone. But the first thing we should do is figure out how we want to handle this, because the light bulb's manager is a total nightmare and we're going to have to take a meeting and listen to him sooner or later, and we should know what our plan is before we sit down with him. And let me tell you right now that the first thing out of his mouth is going to be, "This light bulb should be the brightest light bulb in the world, and it could be the brightest light bulb in the world, but you need to support the light bulb, you need to give the light bulb TV ads, you need to be more active in giving the light bulb tour support, we need to have some promotion from your end!" and on and on. And in that meeting, if you're in it, the only answer from our side should be that we're obviously very excited to be working with the light bulb, that we don't think it needs to be changed, that the only problem is people haven't seen how bright the light bulb could be, and our plan is to do everything we can to make this light bulb happen.

I'll send out an email to everyone before the meeting to remind people of our position on this, but the bottom line is we don't have the budgets right now, and basically we need to see something happening with the light bulb before we go throwing good money after bad, but obviously we can't have the light bulb's manager hearing that. I can tell you all that I'm personally very excited to be working with the light bulb, I think it will light up very brightly, and we're not going to stop working the light bulb, in whatever ways budgets will permit, until it does, in fact, light up very brightly. . . the light bulb is a very big priority for us from the top of the company to the bottom. Period. We can talk more about this when I am back from Barbados next week, and I'm going to need everybody's help on this. I know we can do it, but we need everybody working hard.

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And, by the way -- I know that good PR / marketing requires that you have a story, but this is off the charts.

Carl Wilson astutely points out that "the entertainment business's version of whoring remains a hair's breadth away from the literal version"...

Which is true, I think... though I hope it doesn't change how you view the album ad with which I began this post!

Seth Godin video

Haven't had a chance to watch it yet, but it's almost guaranteed to be a winner.

Little victories where you can get them

So I bit the bullet this week (well, last week) and joined Garageband. Actually, I re-joined -- I had submitted a few tracks from our first album, Hardcore, way back in 2001, but because that was such a (relatively) long time ago (and because I "dropped out" of the Garageband scene shortly afterwards), I had to create a fresh account for the new stuff I'll be submitting. Hence the distinction between The Industrial Jazz Group and Industrial Jazz Group (yeah, I know, I should probably fix that at some point).

You can still read the reviews we got for the two Hardcore tracks I submitted: "Plus or Minus Eleven" and "Cozy 'n Tooty". They're kind of, well, funny. (For some reason the word "cute" pops up a lot, which I don't understand, but nevertheless find amusing.) Of course, you can also listen to the songs if you've never heard them.

This go-round, I've started with "The Job Song." Which, now that I think about it, allows me to do an unscientific comparison of the promotional usefulness of Garageband and Amie Street (where I uploaded the same tune a short while back -- as described here).

My first impression is that although both sites rely on user reviews, Garageband (which is, incidentally, connected to the "social music discovery service" iLike, and is the brainchild of ex-Talking Head Jerry Harrison) provides more tangible evidence that people are actually interacting with your work (and of course that's useful from the standpoint of getting to know your audience). This is possibly because the metaphor for Amie Street is "store" -- it is essentially a warehouse for MP3s, where prices are determined by demand (which is in turn reflected in user recommendations, or RECs -- all of these sites simply must have their own lexicon, I guess). So far "The Job Song" has received only one "REC" at Amie Street -- which may partly be because I have done very little to actually promote it on the site. But it may also be because of the site metaphor. I have no doubt that the folks who use the site are passionate music fans, but the M.O. seems less-than-urgent: users are simply browsing an online store.

In contrast, the metaphor for Garageband is "contest," with all of the trappings that entails: charts, the possibility for negative and positive reviews (remember, Amie Street only allows "recommendations"), a comparatively elaborate protocol for reviewing, and "prizes" like "track of the day."

Which, incidentally, is what "The Job Song" is going to be tomorrow (on the jazz page).

I don't know if that little accomplishment means anything beyond the (possibly lucky) fact that our first three reviews were pretty good (and also humorous -- apparently I should be writing musicals), but it does feel nice.

Who are you?

Alright. I'm going to be very picky for a moment.

A pox upon the individual who started the conceit by which bands are described (or describe themselves) in terms of other musical artists confabbing in some kind of hypothetical scenario, all of which is supposed to convince a reader how good the music in question is.

Here's an example that I came across in a recent Entertainment Weekly. The subject is Vampire Weekend, but since they didn't actually write the sentence, I don't feel bad quoting it here:

Imagine New Order sitting down with Paul Simon and talking about the first Talking Heads record, while Pavement plays over the cafeteria loudspeakers.

For one thing, I'm a little confused re: the analogy. The author (Randall Poster, a well-known music supervisor for film) is comparing the music to -- what? A conversation in a cafeteria?

(A cafeteria?)

Like I said, I'm being picky. Maybe grouchy too. But to my ear, this trope (it's a popular one) fails every time. It's what George Orwell would probably have called a "prefabricated henhouse" solution to the (admittedly boring) task of listing an artist's influences and the (admittedly challenging) task of trying to describe an artist's sound.

This is not to downplay the sad truth (for those of us in the "music is the part that matters" camp) that most people are more likely to read (or, probably more accurately, to see) something about a band before they ever hear the actual music. Obviously, the words have to tell.

But why not play with the limitations of language vis a vis music? Make the influences clear, but then come up with something more creative to get the point across? Invent a genre, say?

Hell, VW does this themselves, right on the front page of their freakin' website, when they write

We are specialists in the following styles: "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa", "Upper West Side Soweto", "Campus", and "Oxford Comma Riddim."

That made me laugh. And call me crazy, but it made me far more interested in actually checking out the band.

(Which I just did. Alas, the music is not taking my grouchiness away, but maybe it's just one of those days...)