Category Archives: Music

Dolby Atmos through MacBook Pro speakers: DO NOT WANT

What are your thoughts on Dolby Atmos?

More specifically: what are your thoughts on Apple Music automatically playing songs in Dolby Atmos through laptop speakers?

My MacBook Pro has pretty great speakers (for built-in laptop speakers). I’m sitting here listening to Talking Heads’ Fear of Music, and I could tell immediately that there was some kind of surround effect going on. It was very disorienting — it created a physical sensation in my ears and almost started to give me a headache. Then I realized I could turn it off and instantly everything went back to normal.

I’m not entirely sure what kind of dark magic Dolby is employing with this (I’m sure it has something to do with reversing the polarity of the stereo channels or something nerdy like that), but I don’t understand why it’s being foisted upon us. It reminds me of the trend about a decade ago of every movie being made in 3-D, and even 3-D TVs that no one wanted. Eventually they caught on to the “no one wanted” part and now it’s not much of a thing. I hope Dolby Atmos on streaming services follows in short order!

Related: Why Your Atmos Mix Will Sound Different On Apple Music

…And another update on Northern Daydream 3: Future Proof Past

My plans for this album project have ping-ponged around wildly in the 2 years since I first started planning Volume 3 of my Northern Daydream series.

Finally midway through 2022 things started to come into focus, with an emphasis on two vitally important but radically different jazz pianists who both hit their creative stride in the late 1960s and early 1970s: Herbie Hancock and Keith Jarrett.

But even as I began to see that this album needed to have a “Side H” and a “Side K,” I waffled on exactly which songs I wanted to cover, and how I wanted to approach them.

Finally, with yesterday’s accomplishment of “KJ3M” — a 10-minute suite featuring three distinct Keith Jarrett compositions, stitched together with three brief keyboard improvisations, inspired by Jarrett’s own concert style, the project has reached its conclusion.

I had not planned to record any of these three songs when I laid out the project. I hadn’t even heard any of them at that point, honestly. But once I did hear them, I knew I needed to make them the focal point of the conclusion of the project.

“Mortgage On My Soul” and “Common Mama” are an interesting pair. Both are built over a similar bass ostinato — in the same key, no less — and could actually be ripe for a mashup. But I decided that was not the right treatment. I wanted to show the ways the two are different, not the ways they are alike. (Whereas you might see the result of this project overall as showing the ways Jarrett and Hancock are similar even though on a surface level their styles are very different.)

“The Magician In You” kind of came out of left field. It immediately follows “Common Mama” on Jarrett’s 1972 album Expectations, and I really like the pairing. After spending several minutes in a harmonically static, groove-based mode, it’s very satisfying to bask in the rich harmonic textures of this rock/gospel ballad.

I played up the harmonic structure here in ways I kind of wish the original had done, although I know Keith Jarrett’s style, especially at that time, was to leave listeners with only the slightest hints of the true structure underneath, allowing improvisatory group interplay to constantly pull at the loose threads of more predictable musical forms. I don’t slight him for it at all, and yet the composition is just so good that I want to get absorbed in it and let it carry me away.

And this is part of why I’ve decided to wrap up this project here. I’m ready to take on new challenges, including attempting to create a big band arrangement of “The Magician In You” that builds on the elements I put into this version. So, this probably means I will step away from spending 18+ hours on a Saturday, twice a month, on an epic recording/video production session. For a while, anyway.

Here’s “KJ3M”:

And you can listen to — and watch — the entire album here.

Once I’m satisfied that the mixes for the album are final, I’ll post another update with download links. Stay tuned!

An update on Northern Daydream 3: Future Proof Past, my new jazz fusion covers project

A while back I posted about Northern Daydream 3: Future Proof Past, the third album in my series of jazz fusion covers.

This album is going to consist of a set of covers of songs written by Herbie Hancock and Keith Jarrett. With at least one original and a bonus mashup thrown in for fun. And, of course, a YouTube video of the recording of each track.

At the time of that original post, I had recorded 3 of the songs. Now I’ve recorded three more! That’s one each by Herbie and Keith, plus the bonus mashup.

First, there’s Keith Jarret’s “Grow Your Own”:

That was followed by a goofy mashup idea I came up with when I was doing a bass subbing gig with a local big band that was playing “The Chicken,” a James Brown tune popularized in jazz circles by Jaco Pastorius in the early ’80s. The goofy part is that I mashed it up with Pearl Jam’s “Alive”:

And, most recently, I did a somewhat-mashup of Herbie Hancock tunes. Which is to say, I did a cover of his 19/8 space jam “Hidden Shadows,” released in 1973, but I threw in ’80s-style Linn Drum samples, along with shoehorning the melody of his 1983 synth pop hit “Rockit” into that unusual time signature:

What’s next? Well, I’m still working on it… but whatever it turns out to be, it will be a Keith Jarrett composition. Or, compositions? Hmm… we shall see.

Rest assured, however, that the following will not be a part of the album…

Northern Daydream 3: Future Proof Past… the concept for my next jazz fusion covers album project takes shape

In late 2019 and early 2020, I recorded Northern Daydream, a collection of covers of some of my favorite jazz fusion-ish songs. Then in the summer of 2020 I created Northern Daydream Volume Two: Miles Behind, a self-deprecatingly titled album of Miles Davis covers.

Not long after that, I came up with a title and tentative track list for the third album in the series: Northern Daydream 3: Future Proof Past. But I lacked the momentum to see it through. When Chick Corea died, I finished an early outtake from the first Northern Daydream project, 500 Miles High. And then I went off on a tangent with my Senioritis album, which ended up including that Chick track along with Pat Metheny’s Minuano (Six Eight), which I had originally been planning for Future Proof Past.

I also decided a couple of the tunes I had planned for the project were perhaps just a bit too ambitious. As challenging as “Minuano” was, it was no comparison to either Don Grolnick’s “Minsk” or Herbie Hancock’s “Actual Proof.” Was I really going to try to tackle that one???

This summer I decided to take a less structured approach, and instead of preparing an entire album project, I just recorded a few one-offs. A couple of Herbie tracks that had caught my ear, and a Keith Jarrett tune I had already been tinkering with for Future Proof Past.

The thing that got me really interested in revisiting the album concept was a great screenshot from the “Wiggle Waggle” video, which seemed perfect for a new album cover. So, as is often the case, I created the cover before I recorded most of the music:

I had decided I would record a side of Herbie Hancock tracks… then I considered going with all Herbie tracks… but now it seems clear to me that I need to really highlight the contrast between these two great jazz pianists, both of whom were at the peak of their powers in the 1970s.

I find the juxtaposition interesting because both played key (pun… intended?) roles in the development of Miles Davis’s electric style that really represented the birth of jazz fusion, but while Herbie Hancock was always eager to embrace the newest technologies and incorporate them into his music, Keith Jarrett rejected electric instruments entirely after his time with Miles, and ended up being one of the strongest proponents of the continued evolution of acoustic jazz through the 1970s, even though the majority of the genre’s purveyors had firmly embraced electric instruments and the fusion sound.

So, what are we talking about here exactly? This is my planned track listing:

Side H
Sly
Wiggle Waggle
Tell Me a Bedtime Story
Mashup: Rockit / Hidden Shadows

Side K
Le Mistral
Grow Your Own
Sorcery
Mashup: Long as You Know You’re Living Yours / Gaucho (Steely Dan)

“Sly” is from the 1973 classic Head Hunters, arguably the second-biggest jazz album of all time after Kind of Blue. “Wiggle Waggle” and “Tell Me a Bedtime Story” are both from the 1969 soundtrack album Herbie recorded for the first “Fat Albert” TV special, and released on his Fat Albert Rotunda album.

I’m planning a radical de-techno-fying of “Rockit” (from 1983’s Future Shock album), to mix with the esoteric Bitches Brew-esque “Hidden Shadows” from the 1972 album Sextant.

“Le Mistral” is from Keith’s 1974 Treasure Island album. It was the first Keith Jarrett track I heard that made me think, I really want to play this myself. “Grow Your Own” is from Keith’s 1971 album with Gary Burton, and it just sounds to me like music that would’ve been used in a Hanna-Barbera cartoon from the early ’70s that I would’ve heard a lot as a kid, and which makes it a nice counterpart to the Fat Albert Rotunda tracks!

“Sorcery” is an interesting one I’m still researching… I’m only aware of it existing as live version on a Charles Lloyd album. I really should probably consider making it a mashup with Herbie’s track “The Sorcerer,” which appeared as the title track of a 1967 Miles Davis album and a year later on Herbie’s own Speak Like a Child album. (There’s also a small fragment of “Sorcery” that reminds me of Coltrane’s “Impressions” so maybe there’s something there I can work with as well…)

The “Long As You Know”/”Gaucho” mashup is a bit cheeky… Keith Jarrett famously sued Steely Dan over the similarities between “Gaucho” and his own track from 6 years earlier (from the 1974 Belonging album), so why not mash them up?

I really felt I had to include tracks from both Treasure Island and Belonging — both recorded in 1974 — because at the time Keith Jarrett had two working quartets, one in the U.S. and one in Europe, and it’s interesting to hear the different directions the two groups took.

I’m also going to try to compose two new originals, respectively in the significantly different styles of these two artists. We’ll see what happens with that.

My timeline for this project is fairly long-term since I don’t expect to work on any more of it until after I finish playing in the pit orchestra for a community theater production of The Addams Family in October. But who knows?!

Here are the videos for the three tracks I’ve finished so far: