“Dwarfed Punk, Daft Punk’s epic song set to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.”

Link (Thanks to Neatorama)

With college costs continuing to soar and more college graduates struggling to make their student loan payments, the Reduce The Rate Petition is urging lawmakers to extend the benefits of the federal bailout to students.

Rev. Jesse Jackson has launched a new website to bring attention to the Student Loan Crisis in America.

He also recently appeared on Democracy Now! alongside Alan Collinge, author of the book The Student Loan Scam: The Most Oppressive Debt In U.S. History And How We Can Fight Back.

If you have student loans or have a family member with student loans, here’s how YOU can learn about this issue and help:

1. Visit Jackson’s new website ReduceTheRate.org, which advocates reducing the interest rate on student loans to 1%.

2. Visit StudentLoanJustice.org, which advocates restoring standard consumer protections to student loans.

3. Watch Rev. Jackson and Alan Collinge on Democracy Now! for full details.

4. Read The Student Loan Scam: The Most Oppressive Debt In U.S. History And How We Can Fight Back by Alan Collinge.

5. Listen to Alan Collinge interviewed on the Michael Savage Radio Show.

Cool song from the 1994 album Rock Animals.

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I wrote this article years ago for a website that is unfortunately now offline. Luckily, I had a back-up copy in my archives. It will probably seem a very simplistic explanation to a serious jazz lover, yet I think it might be a good start for a person who knows nothing about jazz and is interested in dipping his toe in the water. Hope to post a few other “lost essays” from that website in the future, as the fresh content seems to be decreasing lately here at the Spiddlement office while we work on a few unrelated projects.

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How To Understand Jazz Music

For much of my life, I was needlessly intimidated by jazz music. A lot of people who come from a pop music background are. I mean, I liked jazz music a lot, thought it sounded great, but I never understood it.

Whenever I would see a live jazz band playing in the park, it was easy to enjoy the groove and notice the proficiency of the musicians. But what kind of structure were they using? It certainly wasn’t the “verse-chorus-verse” structure of pop tunes like “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” and “Be My Baby”, or even the Tin Pan Alley structure of early pop and show tunes like “Come Fly With Me” and “‘Til There Was You”.

Sometimes I heard songs that I recognized played by jazz bands, songs like “Night and Day”, “Stella By Starlight”, “Georgia On My Mind”, or “Midnight At The Oasis”. I could relate to the great melodies, but was amazed at the way the players would totally deconstruct these songs and create new interpretations on the spot. How the heck did they do that? I finally decided that I would try to solve the mystery of jazz music.

Traditional Structure of Jazz Music

You don’t have to know how jazz music works to enjoy it, but it certainly makes things a lot more fun. The explanation I will offer here is probably not technical enough for some jazz lovers; that’s OK, I am writing this for newbies as a stepping stone to get further into jazz.

OK, down to brass tacks: The most important part of a jazz song is the beginning. A jazz song is like a newspaper story; the band gives you all the important information in the “first paragraph”, and then expands on the information and reveals more details if you decide to “keep reading”.

A traditional jazz song opens with the whole band playing the melody first. Sometimes this is called the “theme”. If a band does a cover of “Georgia On My Mind”, for example, they would start by playing the main melody (the part of the song that the singer would usually sing) together. If you are seeing a live jazz band, listen for the beginning to hear the theme – during the rest of the performance, the musicians will be expanding and improvising around that theme. Also, some jazz songs feature a short introductory riff played just before the main theme.

Improvisation: What Makes Jazz So Cool

After the main melody is finished, here comes the fun part. The rest of the song features each of the individual players improvising around the theme. This involves playing their own original melodies, usually created live as you hear them, around the notes and chords in the melody. This is where jazz musicians really have a chance to shine and show their chops. This is why no two jazz performances are ever totally the same.

For example, after the beginning of the song is concluded, the guitarist might play a solo. He will take some of the elements of the song’s melody and rearrange them in his own way. This takes a lot of skill and is really fun to watch. Next, the saxophone player might do the same thing. Then, the organ player, the bass player, and sometimes even the drummer will take a solo.

While each member of the band is soloing and improvising, the other members of the jazz band will continue playing, but will be more in the background. Mostly they are playing chords, rhythms, fills, etc. This is called “comping”, short for accompanying. It may seem like they are not doing as much as the soloist, but their contributions are very important to hold the structure of the song together. It takes a lot of skill to stay in the background, not drawing attention to themselves, while still being creative and adding little flourishes that make the song more interesting.

If a member of the band plays a really good solo, the audience will often clap after their part in the song. One of the fun parts of jazz is hearing each player’s interpretation of the melody, as well as how the individual instruments sound both alone and together. A typical jazz band usually consists of guitar; piano, organ, or keyboard; bass guitar; drums; and brass (saxophone, trumpet, trombone, etc.), but may have almost any instrument you could imagine (marimbas, jazz banjo, flute, clarinet, etc.)

Now For The Big Finish

At the end of the song, when all the players have shown their stuff, the band will usually return to the main theme and play it again, often exactly as they did at the beginning of the song. It’s always fun to hear the original melody repeated after they have played it in many different ways. The band might also repeat the introductory riff. When you hear the main melody again, you know that the song has come to an end. At this point, you can applaud loudly and know that you have not only enjoyed a jazz song but also understood its structure.

Jazz is not just limited to the traditional structure, of course. There are many variations. A lot of “vocal jazz” or “jazz pop” has a structure similar to a regular pop song, but uses more complex jazz chords, jazz-style melodies, or jazz chord voicings. Jazz pop is even easier to understand than the traditional jazz structure, so it is a natural entryway into jazz for a lot of people. One of the first jazz pop bands I really liked was Steely Dan, who practically invented the genre. Other kinds of jazz may have different structures or no structure at all (and these can be fun too, once you get over your initial fear of jazz!), but most jazz will follow the structure I have described above.

With A Twist of Lime

Jazz originated in New Orleans at around the start of the 20^th century. It was originally a musical form played by and enjoyed by regular people, mostly blues musicians inspired by African musical traditions. It’s funny that so many people are intimidated by jazz today and think it’s so complicated. It is complicated to play and requires talent, but it’s fun, fun, fun to listen to and easy to appreciate.

Now that you understand the basic structure, go enjoy some jazz music! Be sure to get a table in the front row of the jazz club, where you can really hear the band. Order a Cuba Libre to sip while you’re enjoying the music – and I recommend ordering one with Malibu rum since you’re cool.

Miho Hatori’s video for “Barracuda”, 2006.

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Email is great for business, short notes, attachments, and links.

But it’s incredibly bad for detailed personal communications. More than about five sentences and no one has time.

I keep finding myself in the same situation: I want to send a nice update to family overseas, but don’t have time to write a long email. Or someone sends me a long email — the kind of thing that would have been a telephone conversation in the old days — and I don’t have time to respond to everything in a way that I would like without taking forever to reply or responding with another long email.

When faced with this situation, most online etiquette advice I’ve read says, “Just pick up the phone.” But what if your family and friends live in another time zone? Isn’t there a way to send a personal message without having to type out a long email or wait until you are awake in the middle of the night– and they are available too — to Skype?

An idea hit me the other day: Voice Email. Of course I had already heard that term years ago. For some reason, it hadn’t seemed that great an idea then. But these days, considering I’m a podcast addict and listen to recordings of people speaking all the time,  it suddenly seemed to be a pretty natural thing to try. Why not just record my “update” to MP3 and email that? The recipient of the email could just listen at their convenience. Not only can I speak faster than I can write, but the recipient can probably listen a lot faster than they could wade through a long, formidable email.

You don’t need any elaborate set-up to create a voice email. I sent my first one tonight. I used a simple Skype type headset with a microphone to speak, and an extremely simple audio recording software, Audacity, to record. I just pressed RECORD, told my story, saved it as an MP3 file, and sent it as an email attachment.

To avoid inconveniencing the sender, I tried to keep the voice email (v-mail?) at about 4 minutes. I wrote: “This voice email is just over 4 minutes. Please listen at your convenience.”

Are there any drawbacks to voice email? Well, it does feel a little weird to audio record your thoughts. It feels a little more formal and permanent. I kept thinking, “Do I really want a recording of myself talking about whatever’s happening this particular week permanently recorded for posterity?”

But regular emails also document your thoughts for all eternity — assuming anyone bothers to save them. So I think the weird feeling that comes with recording a voice email is only there because it has not been a regular activity for me. If I sent and received voice emails regularly, recording one might feel as natural as typing out a message.

And, on the good side, hearing someone’s voice is probably a plus, especially if it’s someone you miss talking to who’s far away.

Don’t get me wrong — I don’t hope that voice emails totally replace standard emails. Can you imagine anything worse than spam voice emails? I think voice emails are probably too casual for business, and unnecessary for short notes. But for updating family and friends, they seem a lot more warm and personal, kind of like the digital equivalent of a handwritten letter. Meanwhile, they are much easier to complete — especially if you always go back and proofread all your emails for typos like I do — because all you need to do is press RECORD and tell your story, in your own voice, naturally.

I’m going to test this idea on some family and friends, some who do not regularly listen to MP3s. It will be interesting to see what their reactions are. If you’ve had experience with voice emails, good or bad, I’d enjoy hearing your comments.

I learned the adjective for “easy” today at my Japanese lesson, and found myself singing this song for some reason.

Living definitely is easy when you’re in love with the things you do.

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This is a gem from McCartney’s underrated 1986 Press To Play album. It was playing in a dream I had the other night.

I was surprised to find that there was a video, which I had never seen before today, for the song. This video mix is slightly different than the album version.

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I could easily link to Seth Godin’s blog several times a week. He’s always brilliant and inspirational — and I’m not just saying that because he included my picture in his new book.

But his latest post, “The Goals You Never Hear About”, was particularly great:

“It’s not stupid to have a stated goal of starting several ventures that will fail, or asking three stupid questions a week, or posting a blog post that the world disagrees with. If you don’t have goals like this, how exactly are you going to luck into being remarkable?”

When I look back at my adult life, the great info/advice/chances I’ve gotten were  usually from taking the initiative to ask someone a question. It’s amazing how often just asking open doors or gives you some great insight into a problem.  And most people I’ve asked have been more than happy to share information.

Seth’s post reminded me that I’m not asking enough “stupid questions”. So my new goal will definitely be to ask those three questions every week.

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