Month: March 2009

Caught Ozomatli (click here to open an Ozo jukebox while you read) again, this time at the 200 seat Grammy Museum in an event to mark the special exhibit “Songs of Conscience, Sounds of Freedom.” It was supposed to be just talk, but the full band, with a sit-in drummer, showed up with instruments totally rocking out a 200 seat theater instead of the overstuffed HOB Anaheim.

We were sitting right in the middle about halfway back…perfect seats. No pics allowed though, so the picture on the page is from their site.

They showed a film from their travels as emissaries of the US State department, jambassadors as they used to be called. It was a complex process, playing on behalf of an administration they disagreed with, but in the end they went for it and did speak out without burning a little Bush piñata on stage. They decided they could knock out some stereotypes about what Americans are like making sure they would be allowed to speak their minds. Not everyone was happy – they got hate mail from the New York Post, which they seemed pretty proud of.

One of them, I forget whom, remarked that they approach their activism through the music rather than vice versa, having the message arise organically from getting the music right, a la Fela Kuti, James Brown, or Bob Marley, rather than taking an aggro, in your face didactic approach.

With success, Ozo have found the they can’t always play what and where they want anymore because of  prior engagements and contracts, but they still try to do benefits and be politically active through the music. They talked about playing the Bowery Ballroom in NYC a week or so after 9/11 and what a powereful experience that was. They talked about playing in a parking lot that stood where the Grammy museum is now for what I guess was a protest against the building of the whole LA Live complex in 1999. I remember talking with Monisha on the way there, wondering what the neighborhood was before the whole Staples Center/LA Live complex was built.

LA provides an ambivalent inspiration for the band. The city’s eclecticism and diversity was like a macrocosm preparing them for meeting musicians and other people around the world by going around LA. At the same time, they grew up in the years of the riots and the peak of gang violence. Living in working class, immigrant neighborhoods they were exposed to a lot of violence growing up and they talked about how they kind of grew more political from experience and circumstance than from any ideological stance. For example, the violence went on until a white kid got killed, then all of sudden, Clinton comes in and says “no more of that.”

The host, Josh Kun from USC, asked about specific social movements and they responded by saying that music cuts across boundaries and unites people in ways that are unique, and that Ozomatli has tried to tap into this power by singing about the daily struggles to do the right thing. Hip hop acted as a huge bridge that people could respond to all around the world, but there were other moments that had to be negotiated even though they were intimidating, like the percussionist Jiro Yamaguchi playing tablas to a North Indian Percussion school, or the band playing salsa in Cuba, where the Cubans were like “well, ok” but then the Cubans tried playing some funk and Ozo could say “well ok” too, which made it easier for everyone to be comfortable playing what they played without worrying about it.

They finished up by talking about how they stayed together, Raul saying it was therapy, which brought a big laugh, but he said it was serious, and that they had to work through stuff and grow as people, and that over time they developed a commitment to each other that they never would have thought they would find with a bunch of guys.

Then they played a half hour set, telling a little story about each of the songs. They started with “Malagasy Shock,” with its message of seize the day. Then they played a song on what looks to me like a detuned acoustic tenor guitar teamed up with Turkish drums. The song was originally based around a Spanish chorus about the sun coming up, but came to be about the Asdru Sierra’s son, kind of like the Teletubbies sun kid he joked. Then came a reggae-ish song I don’t know, no story this time. Then a rapper whose name I also missed came up and pitched in on “City of Angels.” They finished with “Temperatura” They were in the studio during the May 1 demonstrations and decided to hit the streets rather than record. Instead of being a song about Ozo inspiring the masses, this one is about the masses inspiring them, a fitting way to finish up.

We hung out afterwards and talked to Josh a bit and Ozo’s manager, then checked out the exhibit while waiting in line to meet the band. I just got a new stack of rreplay CDs, so I gave them a couple. You can hear rreplay here and the rest of my music on WayMusic. Give it a listen if you made it this far.

If you are interested in digital guitar, check out the Digital Guitarist YouTube Channel. Subscribe here.

n.b., update June 23, 2010: in depth review of Godin xTSA, part 1: as electric guitar.  Part 2: as acoustic. Part 3: as guitar synth with Roland GI-20 and Axon AX50

I decided to get a new guitar for traveling so I would not have to subject my ancient SG and pre-cbs jaguar to airport bumps and tosses.  If you just want to hear what the new Godin xTSA sounds like, here are a quick one, strange attractors, and recession era dreamscape 17, all showing off the synth and acoustic capabilities.

I have been eying up Godin guitars for some time now, and played a neat one with two humbuckers and a single coil in the middle with a little twist…there was also an onboard piezo pickup to emulate an acoustic sound.  The one I played was in Honolulu, at Easy Music Center, and a good deal, but I decided to forgo it and wait til I got to Los Angeles to buy anything, thus saving one leg of travel.  Plus I figured there might be more guitars in LA than in Honolulu.  I sent some emails out inquiring and got back a response from Jon Bingham at West LA Music on Santa Monica Blvd saying he could get the Godin for me.  He got me a great deal.  Go see him for yr guitars!  When we got around to details, it turns out that Godin has stopped making this particular guitar but makes the exact same one with a guitar synth built in as well, the xtSA.

I have been playing synthesized guitar for a while, using first G-tune, a tuning program with midi out, then the widi pitch tracking software.  This has been fun–but tracking is a problem.  Widi did a better job than g-tune (it should, it is made for the purpose while g-tune is primarily a most excellent tuner program), plus you could delimit the note range, taking some stray hits out of the picture.  Still, it was like having a slightly drunk Thelonious Monk wannabe playing something vaguely similar to what you played on guitar but a little later.  It is actually kind of cool sometimes, especially if used as an inexact wash kind of thing…check out rreplay’s round the perimeter, but the problem is something called tracking.  Turning guitar string vibrations into midi notes is computationally inexact and intensive, so the tracking was never more than an approximation.  Plus, neither captures any of the dynamics of your playing.  This is particularly a problem with widi…it would not take much to put in an envelope follower to track dynamics and map it onto a midi control change message…that should be built into the program.

So anyway, Jon said he could get me a sweet deal on the xtSA, basically getting it for the same price as the discontinued model without the synth, so I thought , ok.  Now last time I checked, guitar synths were always multi-thousand dollar affairs that locked you in to a particular set of synth hardware that did not sound so great.  I checked again and found the Roland GI-20, which was just what I needed, basically it just took the signal from the guitar and changed it into midi, which I could then run through my zillion plugins.

After a few mixups which delayed the guitar’s arrival, I got it, the GI-20, a road-worthy case, and the attendant cords and a cool strap.  The guitar is a beautiful flame maple top, black with lighter detailing in the wood.  I also like the cognac flam maple finish, but got the better deal on the black one.

Got it home and spent a week on the acoustic and electric pickups without doing the synth.  Very nice.  The combination of humbuckers and single coil is nice.  I have always played single coils, so it is nice to have that edgier sound available, and I figure when I get back to Honolulu, having something with humbuckers will add to the sonic palette.  The single coil is not so hot, outputting only about half the volume of the humbuckers, but with a nice fendery slinky kind of sound.  I am going to try raising it to see if I can get it to output a little hotter.  I like crunchy single coils a la p-90s, but I am not sure this one has it in it.  The pickup positions, selected via a strat-style 5 position switch are neck humbucker – humbucker/single coil – single coil bridge humbucker – and bridge.  I thought it might be nice if the humbuckers could be tapped, instead of mixing, and a couple of other Godins do that with two pickups, the the LGX-SA and the LGXT, but they are two to three times the price.

The acoustic section is cool sounding, though without some doctoring up, not really acoustic sounding.  It is more like the glassy 80’s Police/Andy Summer kind of tone that sounds really good chorused.  I am playing with running it through a convolution reverb with a guitar body impulse loaded to make it sound woodier, and also mixing it with an octave up signal and a light slow moving chorus to get a twelve string sound…hmm, maybe a delay would be better than a chorus to get that…I’ll have to try it. One down side is that the whammy bar is really microphonic when the piezo is on so usually you’ll want to swing that out of the way.

The guitar plays flawlessly.  It came set up right, and there are no dead spots or buzzes.  It has locking tuners, which I guess I don’t get the point of just yet.  They put on strings with no extra winds around the tuning peg, and I guess the lock is supposed to keep them in place and in tune, but mine slipped when I bent the strings, so I had to immediatrely restring.  Not a good pitch for the Godin strings that they recommend on the guitar.

My setup for while I’m away from home

noise from ground loop

Now on to the synth…this is where things get a little squicky.  The setup is to run an acoustic and electric analog out and a thirteen pin analog to midi cord to the Roland GI-20 midi box.  When I plugged the Roland into the USB, it gave a terrible whining noise through the electric pickups at 1000 hz, 2000 hz 3000 hz and so on (see image above).  I solved the problem by dispensing with the roland usb midi and running a midi cable out of the Roland and into an outboard USB midi port.  Another seeming problem is that the synth volume knob does not work until you program it to work on the roland, as I found out when I RTFM.  Once all that got sorted out, I was able to make some interesing music.  Check out a quick one first if you don’t have much time or patience.  It is the acoustic guitar played with a synth bass tracking the guitar sound.  Next comes strange attractors, and last and weirdest, but showing some of the interesting things that can be done with the synth, is recession era dreamscape 17.  All are recorded in one take in Plogue bidule.  Everything but the drums comes from the guitar.  As always, check out the rest of the music on way music.

OK, just because I am getting so behind here because of all the good music in LA…Ozomatli totally rocked the Disneyland House of Blues two Saturdays ago.  If you have never heard of this LA band, their albums are great, but their live show is amazing, one of the top five concerts I’ve ever been too.  I have just missed them three times at home in Hawaii…they are one of the few good bands from the continent to come through.

It was a packed house, but we got a great spot in the front center of the balcony, where it was not such a mob scene and Monisha could see.  Plus it was right over the sound board, so the sound was great. A woman about my size kept trying to slide in to a space about half my size all during the first band…I moved over but there was still not room and she kept pushing…I thought she was going to pick my pocket or something.  Finally she asked the woman next to me to move over while her husband was away so she could get in, taking hubby’s place.  The woman said no, the spot was her husband’s, and finally the woman gave up.  I would have let her in, she was just too big!  But my wallet was ok.  It distracted me from the first band though.

Ozomatli accurately describe their music as “a notorious urban-Latino-and-beyond collision of hip hop and salsa, dancehall and cumbia, samba and funk, merengue and comparsa, East LA R&B and New Orleans second line, Jamaican ragga and Indian raga.”  They have been working with rappers Chali 2Na (from Jurassic 5) and Kanetic Source.  The songs they were in weren’t just jams with raps over them (except maybe one or two).  They were worked out so the raps fit the music to a “T” even to the point of having the whole band do synchronized dance steps with them which was kinda fun.  I was waiting for them to break out the electric glide or the macarena (not really).

The band, together for fourteen years, seems to be at the top of their game and having fun while still managing to be political.  I’ll check out their politics a bit more when Ozo come to the Grammy Museum in LA on March 24th.  I only tell you cuz I just got my two tix for this 200 seat place—if you can, hustle over to ticketmaster and get ’em — they are only ten bucks (plus all of tixmaster’s fees upon fees).  They’ll be talking, not playing though.

But back to the playing, they covered all the styles they claim to and then some, even having some oud-ish sounding instrument at the forefront for one song.  It was really a family affair, with about 1000 family members present and rocking.  A couple of band members’ kids and partners even took to the stage at the end, when opening band Upground joined them too.  The whole thing ended with Ozomatli setting up a second-line style marching band and wandering around the HOB floor for about half an hour.  I talked about the Ninja Academy’s getting revenge for classical Japanese music lessons….I am sure this was the revenge of the kids who had to play in the high school marching band…who knows, with a band like that in HS maybe I would not have dropped out (don’t worry, I went back and now can’t get out…I’m a college prof)!

Upground was also excellent in their own right, rocking the place with their Latin infused rock and reggae sound.  Check them out too!

Sorry Ozo heads (is that the right term?) for not knowing the songs — I always listen but seldom learn titles. I’d have had more to say on the music if I was able to write a little sooner after the concert while stuff was fresh, but work impinged.

As always, if you made it this far, give rreplay and the rest of way music a listen, especially my “The Revolution will not be on the Internet” which is going on an album with Chumbawamba and John and Yoko among others!

Eric Parker from rreplay has a new Boston thing going…check out the music at his blog, theriex.

Went to hear Ozomatli and an East LA band that I had not heard of before, Upground.  Both were great.  Ozomatli was one of the best live gigs I’ve ever heard.  More later, once I get done with some of my real job.