Get yer spend on

'Nuff said.

End Of Tour Party, Los Angeles

...Not at the Sunset Hyatt though, sadly.
The past few days were a bit rugged- played in Kourtrijk then left at 4am or so for 2 planes to Bari. Played that evening after a typically hellish Italian soundcheck/gear experience (and typically amazing food followed), only to leave at 5am for 3 more planes home. Normally we'd have taken a direct Frankfurt-LA flight on Lufthansa, but this wasn't possible due to the scheduling, so it meant an awful YouNighted "Airlines" experience and a layover in Dulles. Next time we'll stay the extra day to make the nonstop possible. In any case, Kourtrijk and Bari were ok gig-wise, though Bari suffered from a very boomy hall, along with all the other problems. I think it's pretty much impossible to have a smooth concert experience in Italy unless you eliminate the Italians themselves from at least 90% of the production process. They've still got it goin' on in the food department though, which goes part of the way toward making up for the other glaring shortcomings one always encounters there in the concert world. In a general sense however, for a group like this where a significant amount of technology and logistics (and not enough money) are involved, playing live these days is pretty difficult. The combination of lack of money for a road crew (despite the Herculean efforts of our fantastic tour manager/FOH man Arnaud "Arnocito" Mercier) and the draconian airline overweight baggage policies and their attendant costs makes for grim scenarios pretty much every time. Photos from top: Johan (left) from Einsturzende Neubaten, who's a big JH fan, turned up to see us in Kourtrijk. Bottom: Me at soundcheck in Bari.

The video show...

People keep sending photos of our shows over the past few days, and while some of them
are (IMNSHO) truly horrible, there are the occasional good ones that seem postworthy.
We are actually doing two different shows on this mini-tour: The main JH music one and another which is "live scoring"
to the video of Belgian video artist Kurt d'Haeseleer. We've did one performance of each in Genk (the other concerts
have all been the normal music set), and we're doing the second tomorrow here in Kortrijk.
The photo above is from the Genk video performance.

Kortrijk

Day off, thank Jeebus. From top: Street scene, one of the venues used by the festival (not the one we played at, though), an astonishing warm goat cheese salad, chocolate mousse.

Uppsala post-mortem

The Uppsala gig was good- nice reaction from the audience. Spanking-new venue with great gear as well. However, the building was severely overdesigned in the tech department. The CCTV flatscreen view of the stage (top photo) was nice, and the electronic sign next to the dressing room (second photo down) was cool as well, but the dressing rooms had card-key entrance and immediately started locking us out for no readily apparent reason. You really have to wonder why a dressing room needs card key entrance- So unnecessary. They ended up calling the maintenance guy in charge of the system to get us sorted out. Anyway, not a bad gig at all. Back to Belgium tomorrow.

Last London stuff (no, really!)

Right as we were about to leave the hotel to fly to Sweden, I managed to organize the first in-person meeting between myself and my friend Rainer Brüninghaus. I've been a fan of his work since about 1980, first interviewed him for a magazine in '87 and kept in touch sporadically since then. However, he never comes to the USA on tour anymore, and I wasn't over in Europe all that much so we never actually met face-to-face. It turned into a fun little "ECM summit" of sorts when JH and Jan Garbarek turned up.
From top: Rainer and I, Jon/Jan/Rainer, Jon and Rainer.

Last Day in London...

From top: The hotel, my old hero Rainer Brüninghaus playing with Jan Garbarek, my friends Andy and Guy working on A Major Record Project™.

Random Londonology

The QEH London gig went very well.
From top: The QEH stage setup (sorry 'bout the blur), the giant sightseeing-ferris-wheel thing, Steve and Jan, Brian after the show.

...and we're off.

The view from the hotel. Genk, Belgium.

Off again...soon.....

Jet lag here I come....

Food Pr0n

Clockwise from upper left:
Dried cantaloupe, Unie Kaas Robusto cheese (it's an aged Gouda), dried figs and Mitica Marcona almonds.
Credz to Jessica Grindstaff (link at right), who inspired this basic combination.

Whole Foods pwnz me.
Yes yes, they're killing local small shops and producers, blah blah blah corporate behemoth etc etc and so forth but it's NOT MY FAULT. I'm sick of people whining about this- I feel as bad about it as anyone, but WF offers something that's hard to compete with: A gigantic selection of Really Good Stuff™ under one roof, so take it up with them, not me. There, I said it.

Frankfurt

....was good. Great venue and crew, good sellout crowd. The concert was simulcast on Frankfurt radio, apparently in Dolby surround. Also, I got a chance to see the Gaudi Unseen show at the Deutsches Architekturmuseum, which is quite a good document of the ongoing construction of the Sagrada Familia. In an unrelated note, I was totally smitten by these awesome Saab ethanol concept station wagons that the company (being one of the Jazz Festival's corporate sponsors this year) lent to the festival for shuttling the artists to and from the venue. Absolutely fantastic, and maddeningly unavailable in North America. Anyway, a few video stills:

From top: Rick and Jamie at soundcheck, the hall- (Hessischen Rundfunk) and the audience view of soundcheck.

Might be time for another one of these...

About ten years ago, I bought a NeXT Color Turbostation and it became my main machine at home for about five years thereafter. Performance-wise, it was basically the equivalent of a Mac Quadra 650 (also a good machine for its time) but with a futuristic, beautiful and rock-solid Unix-based OS. I only sold it because I was moving to LA and needed to lighten the load, but I never lost admiration for the NeXT design aesthetic and elegant user experience. I think it may be time to get another one of these...NeXTstep has an enduring brilliance, and is in some ways more elegant than its descendant, Mac OS X. If you're into computers (particularly if you're a Mac enthusiast) and are not familiar with the NeXT story, check out the above link. The machine was another example of Steve Jobs's vision and taste, qualities all too rare in the computer business. Also, it seems someone's managed to get OpenStep running on an Intel MacBook Pro. Gotta love Parallels Desktop. Considering how zippy OpenStep was on a PII/300 PC, I'd imagine this scenario would perform quite well, even with the virtualization overhead...

Back To Work...

It's the usual combo platter of TV/film with Charlie (Las Vegas and Numb3rs are back) and some JH group stuff at the moment.
JH, Jamie Muhoberac and I rehearsed today for the upcoming Frankfurt concert (jonhassell.com for details) in my front room, as evidenced by the poorly-lit vidcap.
Gonna be fun though...

Beware, I Live

So I've had this Atari Major Havoc since 1995, when it was originally a Tempest. Everyone loves Tempest, but I eventually got tired of it and installed a factory Havoc conversion kit. MH is, after all, the best color vector game and one of the greatest classic video games of all time. Possessed of a rich gameplay unmatched by any other vectors (and few raster classics), it exemplifies all that was fantastic and special about the "golden age" (1977-84) games. It's fun, it's challenging and it clearly pointed to the way things could have gone if the video game industry hadn't unceremoniously crashed in '84.

Mine worked swimmingly until a few years ago, when it suddenly, catastrophically didn't anymore.

Stumped, I sent the board to my learned and esteemed friend Jeff, world-renowned expert on "the bideo games" who bafflingly determined that nothing was wrong with the board after all. I'd already tested the power supply, so this left only one other possible culprit: The actual wiring harness in the cabinet. This seemed highly unlikely, as a harness actually going bad is pretty much unheard of, but Jeff supplied me with a known good harness anyway as an experiment. And after an unreasonably long (> one year) interval, I finally installed it, and wouldn't you know, IT WORKS. There was much rejoicing.

Giant

Joe Zawinul died today. He was one of the most important and influential musicians of our time, and a huge inspiration to me and countless others. I possibly can't express how much Weather Report's music affected me during their heyday.
It's important to mention that I am not a jazz musician; The group's appeal was wide-ranging and their music transcended the artificial constructs of "style" and "genre". If you've never heard their music, or weren't fortunate enough to have seen them live in their prime, go get a copy of one (or all) of these:

SX-70

I am an SX-70 fanatic. They've always been dead cool as both an engineering marvel for their time and a snapshot (sorry) of quintessentially early-70s design aesthetics. Oh, and they take cool-looking photos that one could manipulate by hand during that brief period between taking the photo and before the emulsions fixed by exposure to the air. The thing that rekindled my interest, though, was their "SX-70" promotional film, which can be seen as part of this collection. Made by the legendary design couple Charles and Ray Eames (check the 'leet MySpace friends!) in 1972 to coincide with Polaroid's release of the SX-70, it is itself a work of considerable artistry. The good news is that SX-70s aren't hard to find in good shape these days, and that Polaroid has started making viable SX-70 film again after a disappointing lapse for awhile.

Otherworldly

Screensavers are generally awful, not to mention pointless.
This one, however, is noteworthy for a number of reasons. First, it's open-source and there's a sizable community of people writing modules for it. Second, the modules are fractal flames-
They can be very hypnotic. Get it now, it's free.

Beautiful genius

I've just added a link over on the right of this page to the site of my dear and brilliant friend, Victoria Faust. She is simply the most fantastic, evocative visual artist I know, and one of the most important people in my life. Go look.

UI Design Didn't Always Suck

I hate the fact that people using technology to make music these days have simultaneously more creative and transformative power and fewer well-designed physical instrument interfaces at our fingertips than ever before. This is due to a number of factors, chiefly money. It costs considerably less to make any software than hardware, so now we have this design philosophy permeating the industry of "Fuck 'em, we'll put every possible feature we can into the software- Let THEM make the interface they want!" So we've ended up with a world of cheap, plastic MIDI controllers with tons of assignable knobs, pads, buttons and sliders, but very few actual self-contained, well-thought-out hardware musical instruments that are physically satisfying to play and don't force the musician to design their own interface.

I resent this.

While it is a valid approach on one hand (since most professional music software has many more possible onscreen controls than any single piece of hardware could feasibly be equipped with), it falls apart with things like softsynths and samplers, where you really benefit from being able to simply grab one parameter knob with one hand and another control with the other and see what happens if you twist them in opposite directions while the sound is being played.

Fuck these people and their lack of commitment to inspiring creativity (you remember "musicians", don't you? The people who actually have to use your products, ultimately?) Don't force me to be an interface designer. If you really want to make inspiring instruments that are fun to play, do the work, think it through, build the hardware and make it simple, seductive and easy to use, like the venerable, fantastic Sequential Prophet T8 pictured above.

Fortunately, some modern designers do occasionally get it right: