thinking: relating- celebrating :-)

Is Kaki King a guitar god or not? The really interesting thing about music and other art is that we as viewers get to spin off in a multitude of directions and the real answer is that all of those opinions are correct and valid. There is no right answer to the musical question – there are only opinions about who we like better at the time.

I wrote this post as a comment after watching the video below.

“Kaki King, the first female on Rolling Stone’s “guitar god” list, rocks out to a full live set at TED2008, including her breakout single, “Playing with Pink Noise.” Jaw-dropping virtuosity meets a guitar technique that truly stands out.”

I once watched Leo Kottke in concert and while he is technically brilliant for me it was kind of sterile and neither the music nor the songs connected with me. Kaki is clearly one to watch as she is youngish and by the sound of it has some new music since this performance.

I have seen other virtuoso players before and so maybe this is not so surprising as it is to those for whom this style is a new thing.

Technical excellence is a great starting point for a musical conversation. Last year I watched Rufus Wainwright in concert and

I wanted him to hit some wrong notes so I knew I wasn’t watching a hologram.

He did make some connections but sometimes he was just playing the piano (fantastically well.) I was there for the songs – & not the tricks. That video eye thing in the first half was a bit much and the Elizabethan dress was OTT but we never got a good look at it really.

Regarding Rufus – his concert was gobsmacking nonetheless and his new album Out of the Game is his best yet – but I digress.

When we listen to music the brain makes instant associations and connections with our prior experiences so we all come to new musical experiences with our own filters & comparisons. That is how we are wired. Daniel Kahneman and Daniel Levitin have great research into this type of thinking.

Kakis mentor Preston Reed would say he is influenced by John Fahy & others who are largely forgotten by the music business. It seems surprising that no one has mentioned Bruce Cockburn who has been playing for 50 years now and is famous not because of his guitar style which is impressive but because he has written songs that make meaningful connections with many. ( Below is Bruce with Ali Farka Toure)

I’m personally more of a blues fan and that is a great clip. BTW Ali Farka Toure made 76 on the list. Bruce didn’t make any of these lists but is a personal favourite of mine – I actually got to have dinner with him a long time ago so that was a bonus.

There are other RS lists and Bonnie Raitt ( “Hello I’m the 89th best guitarist in the world” sounds more like a line from a future episode of Flight of the Conchords.

Musicianship is not really a competition and those lists by magazines are just easy ways to write a story that the magazine can sell ads around. I did have a look at a list of the “100 greatest guitarists of all time” on Rolling Stone and was amused to see that Joni Mitchell came in at 72 and Joan Jett was at # 87 (the only women in the list) – all of which tells us more about Rolling Stone than it does about music.

Joe Sullivan thought so to. Robert Johnson at 71 is just plain wrong.

Obviously the guy making the list never saw Jennifer Precious Finch play in L7 and there are many other female guitarists who should be on these lists but they are mostly only good for Bill & Ted style pub quizzes.

In my book Joni Mitchell’s work with open tunings and with Jaco Pastorius in particular marked her as a standout on any list. I had the very great pleasure of hearing Jaco play live but according to her wikipedia entry Joni is now

“A blunt critic of the music industry, Mitchell quit touring and released her 17th, and reportedly last, album of original songs in 2007. Now based in British Columbia, she describes herself as a “painter derailed by circumstance.”[6]

Is Kaki anywhere on that scale? Not in my view but she is one to watch as the video above dates from 2008. Enjoy.

There are not many ( if any) lists of ”painters derailed by circumstance” but there are a lot of other lists. Here is a top 15 acoustic guitar  players list (video.) More context for Kaki whose tapping is really not that unusual when seen in this group – she is #11 on this list.

(On this acoustic guitar list: Petteri Sariola 15. Kotaro Oshio 14. Justin King 13. Erik Mongrain 12. Kaki King 11. Peppino D’Agostino 10. Antoine Dufour 9. Andy Mckee 8. Stephen Bennett 7. Steven King 6. Don Ross 5. Chet Atkins 4. Lenny Breau 3. Tommy Emmanuel 2. Michael Hedges 1.)

The parliamentary elections in NZ last year will be remembered for having the lowest voter turnout since 1887

At the time a lot of commentators opined that this was the result of Labour Party voters staying away in droves because they knew they couldn’t beat John Key & the Nats.

“A total of 3,070,847 people were registered to vote in the election, with over 2.2 million votes cast and a turnout of 74.21%^[4] – the lowest turnout since 1887.^[5] The incumbent National Party, led by John Key, gained the plurality with 47.3% of the party vote and 59 seats, two seats short of holding a majority.”

Except that low voter turnout and “too close to call” elections are also happening in the UK, Australia and other places. Political parties now are so au fait with focus groups and polling that they have swapped a genuine passion for change and inclusive public policy thinking for facsimile results and so end up holding cardboard elections.

Many voters see through the card board characters and have lost faith in the voting process.

Somehow PM John Key has interpreted this as a big win* and is now proceeding on an idealogical path of asset stripping and other exploitation of natural resources.

Have a look at Partial privatisation numbers ‘don’t add up’

“Sustento director and economist Raf Manji said. It was admirable for the Government to lower debt, but the numbers around selling stakes in energy firms to do so did not add up, he said.

New Zealand debt servicing was at record lows and the energy firms were trading well, returning between 5 and 11 per cent, he said. It looked like the nation was heading into a prolonged period of low interest rates, he said.

“It’s never been so cheap for the Government to borrow money and the demand for Kiwi debt has never been higher. If the New Zealand Government was a business, there would be absolutely no reason why it would be selling.”

Diluting the public’s hold on the firms would risk lower investment in power generation infrastructure and higher prices, he said. No more important public good existed than energy, as it was essential to people and businesses, so it was dangerous to raise the firm’s focus on profits.”

Rafs Sustento website is over here and he is on twitter here @rafmanji

One Big Voice would be very useful in helping to change the governments mind about those asset sales. I’m old enough to remember Capital Markets and the BNZ fiasco / bailout.

Shortly after that the heroes scurried off to Switzerland to roll around in the cash they got from the NZ government. It is another story for another day but please excuse me when I say John Key is a former money market trader and a leopard does not changes its spots.

“1989: Government reduces its share to 51% by selling 34%; with 30% sold to Capital Markets Ltd, and the remainder to the general public”

It is time to make politicians accountable.

What to do about this?

A local Grey Lynn based project is helping to make it easier to to make your elected representative more transparent, accountable and responsive to you, the people that put them in power. It is called One Big Voice and it represents a new way for citizens to show politicians what we really care about.

“Have you ever felt you weren’t being listened to?

Governments have vast economic and political resources which means they set the agenda. The average citizen on the other hand has one vote, no real voice and few other ways to exert any influence over what goes on in the world. In short, if you don’t have the means to make yourself heard your needs are often overlooked or ignored altogether.

That just doesn’t seem fair to us so we’re on a mission to help place the power to shape the world back into the hands of the people. Yep, we know it’s a ridiculously grandiose ambition but we really want to help make the world a better place to be for everyone.

To get the ball rolling we’ve chosen to focus on improving the quality of communication between voters and their elected representatives.”

or you can watch the video below.

The team says

“We’ve researched our idea, figured out how to make it work and finally we’re at the stage where it’s ready to build. So far we’ve donated our time for free, that’s what you do with love projects, but to develop it further and start coding in earnest we need financial support.”

Pop on over the One Big Voice page on indiegogo and login with your Facebook id to get involved.

You can find OBV on twitter at  @oneBIGvoice or on http://www.facebook.com/oneBIGvoice

P.S Your question is- OBV looks just like Standup which is another excellent changemakers project They also would love your support as they need to find a new name for Standup.

“we believe we can come up with an even more descriptive and unique name for our organisation using ‘the power of the crowd’ Feeling creative? Suggest some other names for us>>> Help us choose a cool new name ”

What if David Attenborough could sing? How about Stephen Hawking? Brian Cox? Well thanks to John Boswell at Symphony of Science they can and the results are surprising, delightful, educational and musically inventive.

When my daughter was younger we watched hours of Attenborough to the point that she talked about David as if he were a member of the family. We replaced TV time with documentary time instead and we still watch plenty of docus today from TED and other sources.

Of course it would be just wrong not to watch Big Band Theory but we have the DVD’s right next to our Flight of the Conchords DVDs because they are very much mockumentaries in our world.

As brain researchers uncover more about the brain and learning we discover from Donald Ford in an article called How the Brain Learns”

“What does this neuroscience research suggest about learning?

We need to ensure that learning engages all the senses and taps the emotional side of the brain, through methods like humor, storytelling, group activities and games. Emphasis on the rational and logical alone does not produce powerful memories.

A third recent discovery at the University of Michigan’s Biopsychology Program confirmed that the brain behaves selectively about how it processes experiences that enter through our five senses. The brain is programmed to pay special attention to any experience that is novel or unusual. It does this by making comparisons between the new information brought through the senses and existing information stored in our brain’s long-term memory. When the brain finds a match, it will quickly eliminate the new memory as redundant.

When new information contradicts what’s already stored in memory, however, our brains go into overdrive, working hard to explain the discrepancy. If the new information proves useful to us, it becomes a permanent memory that can be retrieved later. If this new information does not seem useful or if we do not trust its source, we are likely to forget it or even reject it altogether, preferring to stick with the information we already possess.

Since learning inherently requires acquisition of new information, our brains’ propensity to focus on the novel and forget the redundant makes it a natural learning ally.

In fact, our brains are hard wired to learn, from the moment we are born. Our native curiosity is driven by our brain’s inherent search for the unusual in our environment. “

Ok lets skip to the video now – so here you are…

“[David Attenborough]
All life is related
And it enables us to construct with confidence
The complex tree that represents the history of life

Our planet, the Earth, is as far as we know
Unique in the universe; it contains life
Here plants and animals proliferate in such numbers
That we still have not even named all the different species

Darwin’s great insight revolutionized the way in which we see the world
We now understand why there are so many different species”

And so it goes.

We also like Physics so here is one called “The Poetry of Reality (An Anthem for Science)” Just so you can say you’ve seen Stephen Hawking sing. By the way almost no one read that book of his but it was the Harry Potter of it’s day and they did make a movie of it called “A Brief History of Time”.

Want to see Brian Cox & Morgan Freeman sing about “atoms and subatomic particles, the jiggly things that make up everything we see”. Try “Symphony of Science – the Quantum World!”

What do you think NZ teachers, musicians, educators and other creatives – should we be mashing up the curriculum into musical brain sized memes ?

Do check out the other Symphony of Science clips as well.

“The goal of the project is to bring scientific knowledge and philosophy to the public, in a novel way, through the medium of music. Science and music are two passions of mine that I aim to combine, in a way that is intended to bring a meaningful message to listeners, while simultaneously providing an enjoyable musical experience.”

Onward to the Edge! + Yoda – Feel the Force (Yoda Remixed)

Enjoy learning and “love the questions themsleves.”