Posts by Finn Higgins
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In all fairness Marcus, I don't think it's exactly uncommon around the world to hear locally-originated artists given bad reviews when they do something that people don't like. I'd tend to see the ability to do so as a sign of maturity in an arts scene, rather than having to be inclusive and love everybody because the scene is too damn small to survive anything else...
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Uhhh, ok....and you have sold exactly how many records?
Here is Nathan's list (there are many more still to be added or uncredited too). As his publisher for some years I'm privy to communications between him and a legion of musicians and producers around the world, all of whom I imagine would disagree with you as I do.I've sold precisely zero records, which is not particularly surprising given my tendency not to make them. I've also had precisely zero people come to see my non-existent movie and zero people buy my non-existent book. Clearly I've given up all rights to any opinions about music, cinema or literature. I'm sorry, I'll get my coat...
How many records has Kenny G sold? Chris Botti? A considerable amount more than Nathan Haines, I'll wager. Should I go put some posters on my wall?
This is not about getting nasty, I just think you are wrong.
Or rather, you just want to reply to the parts of my posts that you disagree with, as evidenced by the fact that you picked a single line about Nathan Haines from an entire post above. That seems a somewhat consistent pattern here, which I would have to say rather looks like you're after an argument rather than a conversation. I've yet to direct any snide comments at you, they seem to be coming back my way at a rate of minimum one per post at the moment...
Coming into a forum and making blanket statements like "Musicianship here sucks. Sound engineers suck. Etc." do neither the industry, nor yourself any favours.
OK, I was a bit blunt for effect and I'll retract that and soften my point a bit.
Musicianship here doesn't universally suck - if you want me to name names, I'll call drummers as they're what I know best: Guys like Paul Russell, Michael Franklin Brown, Graham Cope etc are all very credible players who've come up locally and continue to work here who'd make a living anywhere. And the guys on tenured positions (Lance at Massey, Ron at Auckland...) are excellent players too, albeit supported by academic salaries now rather than making a living on gigs alone. But on a general trend, the standard of musicianship locally is not particularly strong - and I'm not talking about virtuoso chops here, I'm just talking about confident control over the sounds you make and a bit of understanding of the history and possibilities of your instrument.
As Graham points out in his original post, developing your craft as a performer is something that takes time and live experience - you need to gig, you need to work. That's something that's been getting harder and harder to do in recent decades.
If you don't think it's helpful to "the industry" to be worried about that and want to do something about it then I'd have to question whether the industry has much foresight.
On the "Engineers suck" front... I'm quite willing to be self-deprecating here. There's no way I should get any paid work as a sound engineer. I'm entirely self-taught, for a start, and I've not spent any time working next to an engineer who knows what they're doing. Yet, just because I've owned gear at a few points, I've been repeatedly asked and offered money to help people record or gig on a pub/club level, and bands tend to be pretty satisfied with what I've done. There's two conclusions that can be drawn from this:
1) I'm an innately talented engineer.
2) The general standard of engineering that is considered acceptable around here is pretty damn low.I vote for #2. That doesn't mean that everybody is universally crap, just that the standard that is accepted in many public performances is way below what's right.
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Simon,
I think we'll have to agree to disagree in a few key places to stop this getting nasty. Suffice to say that I have very, very little time for Nathan Haines and that I don't conflate virtuosity with musicianship. I'd like to see NZ music turn into an army of Dream Theater clones about as much as I'd like to suffer an attack of genital herpes.
Going a bit wider and following the direction of the thread...
Musicianship is simply about control and depth of understanding of the basic elements of music, in my book.
You can argue that it is unimportant - which is one of the ways that punk can go, philosophically speaking. But I tend to think that's bollocks in reality, because as punk illustrated very effectively, without developing some musical control and depth of understanding everything starts to get very boring and repetitive very quickly. The punk acts that have achieved lasting recognition are either the ones that broke new ground or the ones who shaped the vitality of punk into something meaningful by taking control of the aforementioned basic elements of music. There have been some fantastic musicians born of punk music, they're generally just not virtuoso players.
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I went because, you know, it's Herbie Hancock and stuff, but yeah it was kind of bleh. It wasn't unbearable, there were moments of greatness, but it just seemed effortless, in a bad way. I went because of the Miles association I guess, but really if you watch those videos then listen to this (Featuring Chick Corea, maybe his concert will be different)...I mean Miles Davis from almost 40 years ago basically blows away any 'new' jazz - defined as "anything that was recorded after 1970 by somebody other than Miles Davis. Hmm maybe that's too harsh - If you disagree please tell me who I've been missing, heh.
John Zorn and the rest of the New York downtown thing, if you ask me. Not that he's "better than" Miles, unless you want to put 90s Masada against 80s Miles... but he's an important voice doing some great and - importantly - vital and alive things. If you're unaware and want a couple of good starting points then I'd suggest Masada, which has three main incarnations: acoustic (Zorn, Joey Baron, Dave Douglas and Greg Cohen), electric (variable) and string (Mark Feldman, Erik Friedlander, Greg Cohen). That's arguably the most consistently jazzy of his stuff in terms of playing idiom, especially the acoustic end of things.
I wouldn't hold much hope for Chick Corea, unless you're unfamiliar with his 80s electric output. I'm not sure what it is with Miles and his great bands. Both Herbie and Chick seem to have gone wrong in a big way as they've aged in a way that, say, the remainder of Coltrane's great quartet didn't after he died. Or Max Roach, who I saw play in London back around 2001 with a fascinating trio composed of drums, pipa and piano playing a mix of jazz and traditional Chinese music.
Oh, and Simon - I wrote a quite lengthy reply to you which seems to have ended up eaten as it hasn't appeared. I don't think we're actually arguing on facts, but on interpretation. I'm not out for a whine, but it seems like plain as day reality to me that the general across-the-board standard of local musicianship and sound engineering on display in public in New Zealand is of a lower standard than would be accepted in more serious markets in Europe and the US. I've even had non-musician relatives make similar comments when they've come over and gone out to see events.
That's not to say that New Zealand is incapable of producing people doing good work - although I'd dispute some of your examples on the musicianship front as in any way seriously internationally competitive, your engineering examples are good. But I would definitely dispute the idea that it has an environment conducive to producing such people. Any achievement is one that can be put at the feet of the individuals who do so, not New Zealand in its nurturing of their development.
The general accepted standard is low, as is the availability of good people to work and study with. Plus the standard expectation that has been generated in NZ is that musicians often just ought to be thankful to be working for free. The fact that you have to go back to the 60s and 70s - a heyday of professional musicianship everywhere in contrast with the present day - for your examples of working bands seems to back up the point. Where are modern counterparts to those show band gigs? And what do they pay?
Engineering in NZ is an interesting one. It's not so much that the work is gone - although the trends towards home recording are the same everywhere. It's more that the acceptable public standard for which people are willing to pay an engineer money are shockingly poor, and I don't really know why considering how many otherwise decent gigs here I've seen ruined by incompetent engineering. Ironically at many of them the engineer was the only one getting paid, too, so it doesn't seem to be about money.
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Oh, and as for Herbie... was it as terrible as it looked here?
http://www.drummerworld.com/Videos/vinnicolaiutahancock1.html
I nearly went just for Vinnie, he's arguably the only serious candidate you could put forward for an objective "best drummer in the world" right now. But watching those videos up there scared me off. That's not jazz, nor even fusion - it's just total bollocks. I do feel a little bad because I missed a very rare opportunity to see Vinnie play in NZ, but if those videos are even close to what happened here then I wouldn't have gone if you paid me.
A friend of mine saw Herbie in Aussie a week or so back and had this to say on the topic...
The concert however, was shithouse. I suspected it would be, and it was. In Australia you have to take what you can get. I would have left at half time but Maiden Voyage was in the last half and I fucking love that thing, I think Vinnie does as well.
I really think Hancock's ego has overtaken even Wynton.
He thinks he is Duke Ellington. Or Gershwin. A living legend??
It was Hancock with strings, with a conductor who spent the night waiting, waiting and then waiting some more for Herbie to finish noodling around so that he could cue the strings. Painful. Indulgent in the extreme. Vinnie and Co looked bored too.
Herbie spoke to the audience very slowly, like he was used to people hanging on his every word. The concert too was long, simply because Herbie seemed to be awestruck by his own brilliance and didn't know when to stop.
His encore was a 20 minute ballad, solo piano version of Dolphin Dance. The song was not apparent until the last minute or so, until then it sounded like a series of slow piano warm up exersises. This encore was played while the entire orchestra, and the group sat there while the great man played. Vladimir Horowitz could do this, Herbie Hancock NO. Indulgent in the extreme.
I have never seen and audience move so fast when it was over. The guy behind me said 'lets get out of here before he plays another one'.
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Yeah I agree fully, I am genuinely interested in why the poor mastering (I'm aware of it) and wondering if it's a cheap studio call?
It's one of the general NZ problems - the infrastructure of a music industry on the actual production side doesn't really exist to an acceptable standard. Musicianship here sucks. Sound engineers suck. Etc. And the reason for this is that, like in any industry, people learn from being able to do the work. Since so little of the work in NZ is actually properly paid (instead going to some mate with a PC for engineering, or somebody's friend from school for musicianship) there's few seasoned professionals living here.
In other countries it's possible to make a decent living off being part of the music production process - either as a musician (one of my teachers in London had two kids and a wife, and successfully quit his job as a bank manager to play music full time) or as an engineer. But in NZ the expectation, for whatever reason, is that music services should generally come at the lowest cost possible. And preferably free.
While there are a few people doing decent mastering, and playing their instruments to an internationally acceptable level... they're the minority. The creme-de-la-creme in NZ is approximately equivilent to the average no-name working pro somewhere like London or LA.
Some of the problem is about the size of the market, but a big chunk of it is also about the lack of a proper union and an abundance of people who think that music should be, y'know, a labour of love and it doesn't really matter if it's a bit crap as long as it's local.
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But it's not just one incident. It happened a few years back in Whangarei, and someone else here suggested it also happened in Papatoetoe (TBC). I don't think it's a case of reacting to one incident that happened last weekend. There's a pattern emerging and either we address it or let it continue.
What pattern would that be? People of variable age driving cars into other people at drunken parties? I'm not unsympathetic to a well-supported argument about the drinking age, but at this point in time I really don't see how changing the drinking age is going to stop a 22-year-old murdering somebody with a car. I don't see how your conclusions follow from the premises.
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Well, in all honesty Jeremy in many rural bits of NZ they could probably do with less of that, too. Or at least a bit of education on the subject of how to go about it without producing babies.
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Oh, and of course fighting, which leads back to the rest of the conversation...
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Finn, fair enough, I was being flippant but perhaps we're both making the same point: unsupervised youth will source and consume alcohol. I think rural parents presume there's not much damage a kid can do to themselves in a rural environment. This point was disproved a few years back when a young girl also drove thru a crowd (outside a rural hall) and killed someone.
Funny enough, I was talking to my other half about this on the weekend - assuming you're referring to the incident up near Whangarei. She knew the girl who died, being from that end of the world.
The conversation was basically along the lines that, in small rural places, people die young for stupid reasons. And it's true - I had a fairly rural upbringing, and when I think back over the people I knew who've died since it's all been for fairly stupid reasons. Getting drunk and falling off cliffs, for example.
But I think the whole problem with rural NZ and teen drinking is really a function of two things:
1) The problem with being a rural or small-town teenager, anywhere. Living in the countryside is fantastic for kids because it quite simply IS safer and offers more opportunities to do kid stuff. But once people hit their teens they tend to start to want to get involved in what they perceive as more grown-up activities while also chasing excitement.
2) The fact that the rural culture in NZ is very heavily organised around drinking, and drinking hard. Most social occasions for adults involve drink, and at basically any of them it's not abnormal to see adults in a state of intoxication well beyond what could be considered healthy.
Trying to cut off the supply of alcohol to the kids isn't going to help, they'll get it somehow - and the more the removal of alcohol becomes about official and parental control the more the drinking will move into environments out of the reach of parents and official oversight. The problem is about providing appealing things to be doing which aren't:
* Getting off your head on a substance of some description, with alcohol being the most socially sanctioned and available.
* Having sex
* Doing stupid stuff in cars.... because basically as a rural teenager that seems to be the bulk of what's on offer in terms of activities in NZ.