Me and Mr. Miller

This past week I had a rather unique experience. One of my childhood friends works as a sound engineer at main studios for NPR in downtown D.C. and he invited me to a mini-concert with bassist/composer Marcus Miller. It was something going out over the airwaves and NPR wanted to stack the house with people they knew would applaud at the right moments and laugh at the right jokes.

I worked on radio talk shows when I was in undergrad, both for the college station and the local NPR affiliate. But the setups I worked with was nothing like NPR has. The main recording room is a rather large area, about the size of a small classroom, and a second room just to the side for the drums. A third room acted as control central for the engineers, large mixing board and computer audio equipment used to mix everything on the fly as it went out over the air.

It ended being a live broadcast for the NPR show Talk of the Nation. The host Neal Conan sat at a small desk in front of the audience, a laptop open so he could read files and ask Miller questions between musical numbers. The also had a phone line setup so fans from around the country could call in and ask questions, and a man in a suit kept running back and forth bringing listener emails for Conan to read.

Seeing Miller play was amazing. He did things on his bass I barely understood and he did them so effortlessly. It was probably as easy for him as walking across the room is for the average able-bodied person. In between bits when they took a break for local station id's, MIller lightheartedly jammed to the 1980's smooth jazz NPR pumped out. This is a guy who loves, lives and breathes music. Miller was also a great interview; his responses to questions were thoughtful and often funny. Inevitably, one caller asked how to improve his speed and technique in his own bass playing. The question led to another from Conan, who asked about his three stages of being a musician. These are, btw, paraphrased and should not be taken as verbatim quotes from Miller.

Level One: This is the learning stage, where the musician is learning the foundations of technique and theory. Fingering, scales, how to play with other musicians.

Level Two: In the stage, the musician has mastered many, if not all, of the techniques of his/her instrument. The musician can churn out complicated solos and impress everyone with how well they play their instrument, but the overall reaction will be "I bet he practices a lot".

Level Three: This final stage, the musician internalizes everything learned and uses it intuitively to express a feeling or tell a story. While they can play complicated solos, they may also choose to play things simply when it's called for. Instead of thinking about the . Miller used Miles Davis as a prime example, saying a Miles solo will make people step back and say, "Yeah, I had a girlfriend like that once." You don't think about the notes but what's behind them.

It certainly works for writers, too. Who gets to that third stage, though, can be a bit subjective. While I might be powerfully moved by Pynchon, other readers might fight him inaccessible. I still think it's a cool model, though.

If you're interested, you can hear the whole show onlinehere. Just remember when the applause come, one of those pairs of hands was mine.

Excelsior

Review: Beats, Rhymes and Life: What We Love and Hate About Hip Hop

After more than 30 years of pumping out rhythms and rhymes, there’s no arguing that Hip Hop has made a huge impact on popular culture. And much like Jazz and Rock before it, Hip Hop is now moving through the growing pains of just being a popular form of music to becoming a genuine art form with a respected place in cultural history. Editors Kenji Jasper and Ytasha Womack have done an excellent job with their book Beats, Rhymes and Life in collecting a variety of essays and opinions exploring and deconstructing the music, lyrics and imagery of the music videos surrounding Hip Hop and Hip Hop culture as they try to answer the question of its place in the world.

Several of the essays examine the image of Hip Hop and its obsession with bling, violence towards women and glorification of drugs; are the artists providing social commentary by portraying the worst of inner city life or are they adding to the problems by glorifying it? Other essays, like the forward by critic and academic professor Michael Eric Dyson, remind readers of Hip Hop’s early connections with the civil rights movement but express some regrets over its more recent developments. In fact, if there's one general thrust to most of the content of the book it probably follows Dyson's opinion that Hip Hop, by and large, was about personal artistic expression and serious commentary. The title of the book, after all, comes from an album by Tribe Called Quest, one of the more socially active Hip Hop groups around. But there's a general feeling that Hip Hop's left this behind for the glitz, bling and bank rolls it now generates by way of Mtv.

Along with the essays, the volume also includes a number of pointed interviews with well-known Hip Hop performers like Ludacris and Too $hort as well as Rob Marriot, co-founder of the Hip Hop culture magazine XXL. The interviewers are obviously well informed fans but don’t shy away from asking difficult questions. Too $hort’s interview is particularly interesting as he expresses his opinions of trends in the industry. "My personal theory” he said in the interview “is that rappers don't really lose it lyrically, they just don't pay attention to the production. That first album, when you was broke, came out the bomb, but then [with] that next one you've got some jewelry. You got a car. The girl wants you. And then you go into the studio and you got the ego and the ego can't make records. Records gotta come from within."

Despite the contributions coming from a number of academics and high-minded cultural critics, Jasper and Womack make this book accessible by keeping the hyper-critical jargon to a minimum. Readers should be aware that this is not a history of the music like Jeff Chang’s Can’t Stop Won’t Stop (Picador, 2005), but a collection of writings that assumes readers at least know the big names and events of hip hop. My own knowledge of Hip Hop is pretty limited. I know a good bit about the early days because of its connections with electronic and improvisational music. And I know the early to mid-90’s stuff, because that’s when I was in college and Hip Hop was the party soundtrack every where you went. So while I felt lost at time with the references to names of performers and albums I’ve never heard of, I still got the gist of what the writers and editors wanted to get across.

Smart fans of the art form, though, will get the most out of this. They will find a thoughtful, balanced book that gives them the opportunity to think about the medium and make their own decisions about Hip Hop’s place in history.

Excelsior