02010-01-04

First rehearsal of a new, and still untitled piece for the next album. We played it in Florida this past week. For the new album I am writing music that can be played by the trio, without using overdubs or additional musicians.

PS: this piece was recorded for the new album under the title Blue by Blue – track #2

Petals On the Path

SPECIAL SHOW – The Best of Flamenco + Arabic Pop
For the last show of Flamenco + Arabic Pop on WYBC, I culled through the sixty shows which came before it for the best songs we’ve ever played, and the ones most representative of the Flamenco + Arabic Pop spirit. It wasn’t easy, turning over sixty hours into almost two and a half, but I’m happy with what resulted, and I think it leaves Flamenco + Arabic Pop on a good note. It also featured a world premiere of Backwards Firefly, a song from Ottmar Liebert’s upcoming album, Petals on the Path; thanks so much to Ottmar for allowing us that opportunity.

Wednesday Music

Live at the Paramount Theater in Austin, Texas, 2004-10-08.
The band:
OL – guitar
Jon Gagan – fretless electric bass guitar + synthesizer
Ron Wagner – percussion
Robby Rothschild – percussion

This is the entire first half of the concert. The setlist:
Bulerias/Duende del Amor (Solo Para Ti)
Heart Still/Beating (NF and The SFe Sessions)
La Luna (La Semana)
Querencia (In the Arms of Love)/Spring Rain (La Semana)/New Horizon (Transit)
UnderWorld/Cocteau (La Semana)
Sao Paulo (The SFe Sessions and Nouveaumatic)

You can download the 320kbps mp3 file here – the file is 117MB in size.

02010-01-11

If more songs magically appear before me, as has been happening, we might record a new album next month or in March, with a possible Summer release – probably CDs, mp3s via the ListeningLounge, iTunes, amazon and such, as well as HD 24/88.2 FLAC via HDtracks.com…

Stage in Orlando:

Michael Chavez setting up in Naples:

Tuesday in Santa Fe

SPECIAL SHOW – The Best of Flamenco + Arabic Pop
For the last show of Flamenco + Arabic Pop on WYBC, I culled through the sixty shows which came before it for the best songs we’ve ever played, and the ones most representative of the Flamenco + Arabic Pop spirit. It wasn’t easy, turning over sixty hours into almost two and a half, but I’m happy with what resulted, and I think it leaves Flamenco + Arabic Pop on a good note. It also featured a world premiere of Backwards Firefly, a song from Ottmar Liebert’s upcoming album, Petals on the Path; thanks so much to Ottmar for allowing us that opportunity. To everyone who listened for the last three years, for part of that time, or who are discovering this show after the fact, thank you.

Johann Sebastian Bach is an intriguing choice for Flamenco and Arabic pop… :-)
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More armchair travel:

(Via Pop Wuping)
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‘The iPad, the Kindle, and the Future of Books’
Terrific piece by Ken Auletta in The New Yorker from a few weeks ago on the state of the book publishing industry. Auletta covers the shift to e-books mostly from the publishers’ perspective, which is illuminating:

Tim O’Reilly, the founder and C.E.O. of O’Reilly Media, which publishes about two hundred e-books per year, thinks that the old publishers’ model is fundamentally flawed. “They think their customer is the bookstore,” he says. “Publishers never built the infrastructure to respond to customers.” Without bookstores, it would take years for publishers to learn how to sell books directly to consumers. They do no market research, have little data on their customers, and have no experience in direct retailing. With the possible exception of Harlequin Romance and Penguin paperbacks, readers have no particular association with any given publisher; in books, the author is the brand name.

Undoubtedly a difficult shift to make for publishers. But is the music business really any different? Would you buy a music album by artist A only if it came from label B? No, in the music business the artist is the brand name and it does not matter to the consumer whether his/her music is released by a small label or one of the big four. The difference is, however felt by the artist, in that a larger label means more promotion and advertising options.

Like record labels, book publishers will morph into media management companies. At first they will coordinate the publishing, advertising, book-signing tours etc. and then they will collect the royalties at the other end.

The post ends with:

In Grandinetti’s view, book publishers — like executives in other media — are making the same mistake the railroad companies made more than a century ago: thinking they were in the train business rather than the transportation business.
(Via Daring Fireball)