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Bebop Spoken There

Simon Spillett: “ Bebop and hard bop came naturally to him [Tubby Hayes]". Morning Star, March 28, 2024.

The Things They Say!

Hudson Music: Lance's "Bebop Spoken Here" is one of the heaviest and most influential jazz blogs in the UK.

Rupert Burley (Dynamic Agency): "BSH just goes from strength to strength".

'606' Club: "A toast to Lance Liddle of the terrific jazz blog 'Bebop Spoken Here'"

The Strictly Smokin' Big Band included Be Bop Spoken Here (sic) in their 5 Favourite Jazz Blogs.

Ann Braithwaite (Braithwaite & Katz Communications) You’re the BEST!

Holly Cooper, Mouthpiece Music: "Lance writes pull quotes like no one else!"

Simon Spillett: A lovely review from the dean of jazz bloggers, Lance Liddle...

Josh Weir: I love the writing on bebop spoken here... I think the work you are doing is amazing.

Postage

16287 (and counting) posts since we started blogging 16 years ago. 169 of them this year alone and, so far, 41 this month (Mar 18).

From This Moment On ...

March

Fri 29: FILM: Soul @ The Forum Cinema, Hexham. 12:30pm. Jazz-themed film animation.
Fri 29: Classic Swing @ Cullercoats Crescent Club. 1:00pm. Free.
Fri 29: Rendezvous Jazz @ The Monkseaton Arms. 1:00pm. Free.
Fri 29: New Orleans Preservation Jazz Band @ The Oxbridge Hotel, Stockton. 1:00pm. £5.00.
Fri 29: Abbie Finn Trio @ The Vault, Darlington. 6:00pm. Free. POSTPONED!
Fri 29: Thundercat @ Newcastle City Hall.
Fri 29: John Logan @ Prohibition Bar, Newcastle. 8:00pm. A ‘Jar on the Bar’ gig.
Fri 29: True Colours @ Barrels Ale House, Berwick. 9:00pm. Blues, jazz & swing.

Sat 30: Papa G’s Troves @ Prohibition Bar, Newcastle. 8:00pm. A ‘Jar on the Bar’ gig.
Sat 30: Pete Tanton’s Cuba Libre @ Whitley Bay Library, York Road, Whitley Bay. 8:00pm.

Sun 31: 4B @ The Ticket Office, Whitley Bay Metro Station. 3:00pm. Free.
Sun 31: Ruth Lambert Trio @ Juke Shed, Union Quay, North Shields NE30 1HJ. 3:00pm. Free. Lambert, Alan Law & Paul Grainger.
Sun 31: Sid Jacobs & Tom Remon @ Prohibition Bar, Newcastle. 7:00pm. Free. A ‘Jar on the Bar’ gig. USA/London jazz guitar duo.
Sun 31: Bellavana @ The Globe, Newcastle. 8:00pm.

April
Mon 01: Harmony Brass @ Cullercoats Crescent Club. 1:00pm. Free.
Mon 01: Ray Stubbs R&B All Stars @ Billy Bootlegger’s, Ouseburn, Newcastle. 3:00pm. Free.

Tue 02: Jam session @ The Black Swan, Newcastle. 7:30pm. Free. House trio: Dean Stockdale, Paul Grainger, Abbie Finn.

Wed 03: Vieux Carré Jazzmen @ Cullercoats Crescent Club. 1:00pm. Free.
Wed 03: Darlington Big Band @ Darlington & Simpson Rolling Mills Social Club, Darlington. 7:00pm. Free. Rehearsal session (open to the public).
Wed 03: Take it to the Bridge @ The Globe, Newcastle. 7:30pm. Free.

Thu 04: FILM: Soul @ Forum Cinema, Hexham. 2:00pm. Jazz-themed film animation.
Thu 04: Vieux Carré Jazzmen @ The Holystone, Whitley Road, North Tyneside. 1:00pm. Free.
Thu 04: Funky Drummer @ The Globe, Newcastle. 7:30pm. Free.
Thu 04: Eva Fox & the Jazz Guys @ Prohibition Bar, Newcastle. 8:00pm. Free. A ‘Jar on the Bar’ gig.
Thu 04: Tees Hot Club @ Dorman’s Club, Middlesbrough. 8:30pm.

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Listening Through the Noise: The Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music

Even people who admit to being tone-deaf could once tell the difference between radio static and music. Not anymore. “We live in an era where all types of sound in art have become equally legitimate,” explains Joanna Demers, associate professor of musicology at the USC Thornton School of Music. “I don’t make this claim lightly: Electronic music has precipitated an end of music.” In a timely new book, Listening Through the Noise: The Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music (Oxford University Press: October 2010), Demers offers the first comprehensive assessment of electronic music and how our approach to listening has radically departed from the last 500 years. Beginning with philosopher and composer Pierre Schaeffer, who lugged a turntable engraver around Paris in the mid-20th century to record the sound of trains, Demers shows how recent experimental electronic music destroyed the conventions — such as tonality, tempo, timbre and harmony — that once helped identify music and demarcate it from the sounds of everyday life. “Even though people will no doubt continue to use the word “music,” the experience of listening will be markedly different from what it meant a century ago,” Demers says. As Demers explains, electronic music introduced the possibility that the sounds of the outside world could be treated with aesthetic consideration. Building on a “rhetoric of difference” and the work of avant-garde composers such as John Cage, experimental electronic music embraced previously undesirable sounds such as feedback, field recordings and silence. “When the framing devices of Western art music began to disappear or undergo critique, so, too, vanished many reasons for regarding music as separate from the outside world,” says Demers, author of Steal This Music: How Intellectual Property Law Affects Musical Creativity (University of Georgia Press: 2002). But in the absence of any musical parameters, how do we listen to previously nonmusical sounds, say, a recording of waves lapping on a beach? Theorists have postulated that the end of music might enable listeners to hear all sounds as if they were music. Or, conversely, we might begin to listen to sounds without context or meaning. Others offer the idea that music is no longer music at all, but a form of art incorporating sound and space. “Just as photography instigated a philosophical crisis in visual arts, so did the introduction of electricity into music making at the turn of the twentieth century change musical aesthetics forever,” says Demers, who teaches classes at the USC Thornton School of Music on intellectual property and music, hip-hop, music videos, and popular music history. In Listening Through the Noise, Demers distinguishes among types of listening: hearing, listening for meaning and comprehension, and aesthetic listening, that is, appreciating the characteristics of sound as aesthetic objects. Whereas once listening to music might have required full attention, Demers notes that aesthetic listening allows for listening in intermittent moments without beginning or end, reflecting the way many of us actually listen to popular music now, while doing other things. “While insiders still might still insist on the distinctions among various genres, outsiders might well perceive in electronic music a whole not only new musical experience but a new medium in which sound is aesthetic but not especially musical,” Demers says. “These sounds are strange in the real world, but they also succeed in making the real world strange.”
From a press release sent to me by OUP (USA) - What do you think?
Lance.

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