great "non-musician" bandleaders: how does this work?

(i imagine the set-up is not the same for all four)

(i am probably least interested in eno, whose process i find it easiest to imagine, since he discusses it a lot)

(i probably do actually know some of the anser but i want to know what other ppl think or dream or have reliably discovered)

but in a more general sense, isn't pop music overflowing with musicians who don't read or write music? isn't that maybe even the norm?

xpost

but the "writers" are in the jam-and-discuss case all intimately involved in the play, so they can toss ideas around and make things happen by playing

what happens when the leader is set apart from this process? esp. in ref really quite intricate music?

i know that CB has said he taught everyone their troutmask parts individually BUT they have all said NO HE DID NOT

fair point re eno

haha i had forgot MES, possibly the most mysterious of all!! he can't even SING in tune!!

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11

LEARN ONE BLUES/AMERICAN MUSIC FFS!!!

let us assume i am a simpleton

we're talkin about GROUNDBREAKING MUSIC so you can't just play em a record and say "like that plz" --- the record doesn't exist yet, you are inventing it

if CB played blues harp like say stevie wonder then i'd know what you meant, but he doesn't—yes of course the parts SOMETIMES merge into one another, other times they totally don't

do JB and GC play piano pretty well—except never on stage—and it all starts from there (boring answer if so)?

also: exclude eno and mes, i think that's a difft ballgame

I mean, didn't the Beatles just hum the string parts, etc., to George Martin, who then wrote them down and arranged/orchestrated/whatevered them? Yet few would argue that John & Paul were not musicians or bandleaders.

I have no musical training, don't read or write music, and have no ear, but when I write something on the guitar I can pretty easily say to the keyboardist, "I want you to do something noodly and descending, based around these notes: [doop dee doop dee doop]." "[drummer], let's try this with an eighth-note feel; keep the high-hat mostly closed, except on the three," that sort of thing. Yet they are still in the largest sense "my" songs.

"Actually the Captain spent large amounts of time teaching the band each little part of TMR" YES BUT HOW? is he actually a secret brilliant guitarist or did he use telepathy?

also the magic band in fact subsequently have said "no he didn't", and that they deserve more credit etc etc (who's lying?)

Beefheart and James Brown seem to have worked through discipline and intimidation, running their band sort of like an army. It doesn't make much sense to call Eno a bandleader though. He certainly wasn't the leader of Roxy Music and he hardly seems to take a dominant "leader" type of role in his production work.

This is a common misconception...just becuase someone has the writing credit on the song doesn't necessarily mean they dictated/thought of every sonic idea you hear on the track. Usually, it's quite the opposite.

The "songwriter" will show up with chords, melody, words: the song. He'll play it on guitar or keys. Then everyone else there builds on that. But this second process is no longer technically considered "writing." I don't think that's actually fair, but that's how it works.

This is why a lot of people in bands (the Band for one) hate each other now--one person got the songwriting credit (i.e. got more $$), but the rest contributed to the sound of the song, but didn't get songwriting credit.

mad puffin IF you play the guitar then it's easy to see how you can teach other ppl parts, it's a good instrument for doing that

son me on clinton someone

He used a piano.

gee thanks i feel i know a lot more now

Of course, he obviously did have a lot of control over what his musicians played and was very specific about it (emphasis on the 1, not playing fills, the syncopation, etc.).

gee thanks i feel i know a lot more now

What's so hard to understand about that? As other people are pointing out just because James Brown's name is on the songwriting credit doesn't mean he had 100% control over composing every little bit. He ran his band as such a tight ship and made sure to always have the best players around because in doing so he knew that they would come up with riffs, melodies, etc. on their own that would enhance his songs and make him look better. This is pretty much the same way that people like Duke Ellington and Miles Davis worked as well. They didn't necessarily come up with all of the melodies and motifs that they are known for.

The whole point is that it's not about virtuosity. On drums for example Beefheart would just pound out a rough idea and then rely on John French (or whatever drummer was present) to catch the drift of what he wanted and play it 100X better.

Duke Ellington = not so much, I think. He (and Strayhorn) wrote parts FOR his specific plays that he knew they would make sound good, but they didn't write their own parts, except for the rhythm section.

hm, guitarist gary lucas still insists/agrees that beefheart - "humming & whistling" - taught him the solo guitar werk evening bell over the course of, like, a month-plus. until he, lucas, finally mastered the thing to beefheart's 'content'...

no idea of how clinton or james b tackle similar task, tho. but beefheart's mode of operating, although sometimes *probably* muthologised/exaggarated, seem to've incorporated besides hummin' & whistlin' & rhtyhm-bangin' also some rudimentary piano and "suchlike"

I may be confusing Ellington with stories I read about Sun Ra and Fletcher Henderson. Anyway, I thought that was pretty much a standard in the big band era. A soloist would improvise a catchy little line one night and the next day that riff would show up as the melody of a new tune that the bandleader had written. And in fact weren't some of the songs that Strayhorn wrote actuallly credited to Ellington?

I got it from Bit Torrent and share it on the ilx0r DC++ hub. You can get it from me when I am back at school.

Here's the way I sort of intuitvely understand it. I don't know if this is the official explanation but it's what seems obvious to me from listening:

In traditional jazz you have a fixed harmonic progression and the piano player generally follows and reinforces the progression while the soloists are playing. If you remove the role of the piano player and use only monophonic instruments (or mostly, ignoring bass for a moment) that solid harmonic foundation is missing. Then when improvising in a group context (i.e. everyone "soloing" at once) new harmonies emerge based on the way that different melodic lines combine. If all of the players are really listening to each other and are tuned into hearing this, they can change chords and keys spontaneously, creating a harmonic progression that moves freely, basically bringing improvisation into an area of jazz that was previously composed (the changes). The bass plays a big role in this as it can basically define the tonal center in lieu of the piano.

i haven't listened to any of the records for an age - i may be completely misremembering

his band practices in the same practice space that I do. I saw them just last night! I didn't see him though.

If I had to guess I would say something like this: There's no reason the concept of harmelodics couldn't work with polyphonic instruments. When Ornette was starting out, the absence of the piano from his band helped create a situation where it was possible to move away from a piano-dominated harmonic structure and develop this harmelodic style. But once these theories were developed in his head and worked out for years in the band it was possible to try to reintroduce a chordal instrument. Perhaps guitar was easier to incorporate since it traditionally had less of a dominant role in jazz than the piano and therefore less baggage. But the guitar would definitely play a larger role in defining the harmonic structure of the piece. In order to play harmelodically, the guitarist would really have to listen to the whole group and resist the reflex to just play the changes. I guess that's not so different from the horns though who have to listen to what's happening harmonically with the rest of the band and resist the tendency to just run the scales.

Again, this is just a total guess and not really based on much but my own impressions on listening to the records. I have no idea if this definition of harmelodics I'm using has anything to do with how Coleman actually thinks about his music.

Also what different things happen when - 'non-musician' leader leads 'musicians' (Beefheart, Eno etc) vs group of non-musicians make music together (e.g The Raincoats)?

No he can't

as i recall the trebly sound of TMR was supposedly down to zappa.

I think it was mentioned before but james brown's dancing might have played a big role in how he conveyed musical instructions to his band, I recalled after looking at this thread last night a TV prog where (one of?) brown's drummers talked abt him tap dancing rhythms that had made no musical sense (from a theoretical POV).

(also like an ans to the eno q)

Indeed I've read interviews /Boosty Collins and other JBs where they described a system of cues and signals tied to the Godfather's stage moves. Including fines for missing one or otherwise messing up...

julio i actually REALLY REALLY like the idea that JB communicated his ideas by dancing, since "being able to dance = YOU ARE TALENTLESS" is one of the grebt ultralame blokememes of music discussion

aha!!: also transcription-as-part-of-process = reading and writing as (part of) communication of otherwise too-new-to-be-grasped musical ideas

(my kneejerk position wd be that "it is contrapuntally intricate" = "it has been at some point PARTLY worked out on paper")

being able to dance = YOU ARE TALENTLESS" is one of the grebt ultralame blokememes of music discussion

strangely, this is not true of the most uberblokey uberrockist movement of all: mods

v: mclaren, m.
vi: morley, p.

"you provide the music, we'll provide the punctum."

I have really poor ears for production but other ilxers have come down hard on the production of 'lick...' (eddie hurt?), I have probs hearing bass on that record but I have problems with it ALL THE TIME otherwise I'm fine with the record. The guitar parts might have been simpler but wasn't there more percussion on decals than on tmr? I'll have to give this another spin soon...

I hate to say I know this, but Yanni can't read music. He just plays and he has somebody sit and transcribe and then give the music to the rest of his players.

I feel so unclean.

it is all about variant layers of cultural power hurrah!

What like Mike Mantler (who plays trumpet but not usually on his own records) yelling at Beaver Harris not to play fahking 4/4 time in my fahking band dumbkopf?

I'd love to hear some studio outtakes from those JCOA Communications sessions. According to the participant I did speak to about them, they would have rivalled that famous tape of Buddy Rich ranting at his band, except that everyone laughed at Mantler as opposed to being scared of him.

(apparently when Cecil came in to do his bit he immediately transfixed Mantler with a "don't try it" look)

Paul Anka at Company Week:

"I don't care if it's Derek Bailey. I'm the only important one on that stage."

(Pause)

"Where's Evan?"

I remember reading re:REM that it wasn't until "Out of Time" that the band even knew Bill Berry could play piano. Also, who would have figured Axl Rose to be some sort of Elton John-styled bombast powerhouse circa the early days of "Appetite?" Musical talent abounds in all sorts of places. You have to at least figure that, on the road or in the studio, many of these guys probably often have nothing better to do than learn another instrument.

x-post Eno can play rudimentary keyboards and guitar, but I think his strengths were as conductor. If you read "More Dark Than Shark" you learn all these neat tricks he used to record his first album. Like, he would have a song, or sketches of a song, then he would group together two bands to flesh them out and record two different versions. Then he would combine the two different recordings into a third version. Ta-dah! The beautiful chaos of early Eno.

but yes, some of it IS about the ultrasecret skeez of the apparently non-contributing leader

I didn't know this; I thought he was tolerably famous for playing no instrument other than his voice. He has been kind of snotty about it in interviews--playing an instrument, yawn, so bloody pedestrian.

The Smiths records were said to have been made with Marr giving him essentially finished music, which he would then put words onto. It's harder to imagine the same deal working on M.'s solo records. Various guitarists are credited as co-writers on them, but one imagines that they were probably less collaborative than the best of Morrissey/Marr.

I mean, I can imagine someone thinking that just-the-instruments of "How Soon Is Now" or "Cemetry Gates" is interesting; less so for "Everyday Is Like Sunday," so I'm suspecting that M. gave some prior direction on "Everyday" and other such tunage.

But when they got down to rehearsals Moz would v.often have put vocals on the *wrong parts*. Marr, great musician tho' he is, had a fairly conventional idea of verse/chorus/bridge that totally went over Morrissey's head. I think How Soon Is Now is a good example.