Getcha Some Productions Podcast Episode 25
https://reverb.grsm.io/GetchaSome
A podcast covering all things related to music production: from the first note to the last fan and everything in between. Our mission is to create music and to inspire others to do the same.
Not your typical podcast, each episode is a live business meeting. We are figuring out how to build a music production company (a media empire) as we go and listeners come along for the ride. This is an archive of our progress or lack thereof.
This podcast is always candid and unrehearsed.
In this episode we discuss:
Just like in the hunger games, this is our quarter quell.
Dan is asking now whether the hunger games is a Gordon Ramsay type of television show.
We talk a lot about gear, as usual. Talking about the ability to find custom instruments on reverb.com. We talk about my 1972/1973 Fender Vibro Champ. Talk about Dan’s 1970s telecaster. And of course his new bass.
We talk a little bit about my Martin guitar (GPCPA4) as well and we talk about Taylor guitars and their new bracing. My understanding is that this new type of bracing effects the sound so profoundly that it actually affects how in tune it sounds. So, there’s something about the bracing that makes the guitar sound more in tune all else equal. Which is crazy.
Settle down Yngwie Malmsteen
OK. This is the quarter quell so we have to get back on track none of this screwing around.
We’re talking about Dan. We’re back talking about Dan and we’re talking about his life story in music and we’re picking up where we left off when Dan went to college and joined his first band in college which was called quartet temple blues. In that quartet they played lots of crazy music: Frank Zappa Indian classical fusion frogs which stands for progressive and music
This is the period of time where Dan was obsessed with Frank Zappa. He was constantly listening to Frank Zappa
We talked about first time we met at Bard College at the Blum music building. I was sitting in the “sitting area” which was basically just a corner of the room at the top of the stairs with a couch. Dan describes me as sitting there and bugging out with our friend Barbara. Of course I probably was bugging out about something I don’t know why it makes sense but it does.
We have to shout out to Ted Hudson who is one of the nicest guys in the universe who was the resident bass player at Bard College until he graduated then Dan moved in on the turf for a year or two.
I said I would shout out Ted’s music licensing business so I have to remember to put a link in the show notes. Called ColorWheel Music.
http://www.colorwheelmusic.com
That’s when Dan and I started working together. This is when our paths collide. We were in a jazz band that played a weekly gig at a café called Café Pongo in Tivoli, NY. The band lineup was Barbara Smith on alto saxophone, Daniel Kutcher on bass Cody [Something] on piano and Ben Gurley on drums but first it was Julius Masri on drums and then Ben took over when Julius left the band.
Dan has a much better memory of what happened to that band. Apparently there was some kind of vacation and pretty much half the band didn’t return to school. Cody moved on to other things and a different school and Ben Gurley was not interested in being at Bard at all, he wanted to go to Berkeley school of music so he left and that band fell apart.
Dan is hilarious. He says that when he’s listening back to really old recordings he’s thinking that he doesn’t recognize anything he played he doesn’t recognize even the person that he was back then. So he’s just like, OK. That’s the music OK. I guess I played that.
Yes Dan is again very hilarious because he’s sometimes listens back to old stuff that he used to play and he’s like what the fuck was I doing. He describes himself as having no filter or having even less of a filter back then so he would just throw something in there randomly, not even sure why.
We talk about how John Esposito‘s jazz workshop that we attended inspired me to create the modes course and www.GetchaSomeGuitar.com. So we decide to get into that in this podcast because why the hell not. But the John Esposito workshop was probably one of the most formative experiences musical experiences of my life and Dan’s as well so it was gonna be on the schedule either way we just weren’t sure if we were going to dedicate an entire episode to it or if we should just rushing into it now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Esposito_(pianist)
I called the workshop the jazz torture chamber. Dan says it wasn’t nearly as torturous for him as a bass player.
We tell the story about how John wasn’t even a teacher at the school but rather the piano player for the dance class. It was only after we had heard him so many times that we realize that he was some kind of hidden master right under our noses. We as students eventually recruited him to teach at the school as an adjunct and he did teach jazz theory I believe. As a formal class. But in addition to that Dan and I and some other people (some Bard students and some not) went to his house and took a workshop with him that I believe was once a week.
John was a disciple of Arthur Rhames. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Rhames
Dan goes on to say that he remembers that John had a very detailed pedagogy about how to approach his instrument and other instruments as well for that matter. He also played drums.
Dan starts talking about the jazz torture chamber. And how Jon would whip a chart out and say here’s something that I wrote. And it was always something diabolical. His songs usually had odd and fluctuating time signatures (mixed meters) and he would often have us do things like metric modulation which is a pain in the ass. The rhythmic stuff was right up Dan’s alley. He loves mixed meter is an odd meters and he feels very comfortable with metric modulation so he loved all that stuff. The harmonic stuff, not so much.
I remembered how he would have us play standard tunes and would call loud different keys every chorus. I confess that this did give me diarrhea.
After we played for a while and he inflicted enough torture we would often just sit around and bullshit and he would tell us stories about all the jazz experiences he had often with fairly prominent folks. He would tell us a lot of stories about Arthur Rhames. He would often make us tea.
My memory is that Jon told us that he had a migraine headache the entire time he played with Arthur. I’d like to ask him if that’s true.
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