TAKE THE "Z" TRAIN

As the troops pour into the Middle East for the invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq, it brings to mind a conversation we had in July 1999 with master bassist Charlie Haden when he was promoting his Quartet West recording, The Art of the Song.

Our question to him was simply put, "Charlie, aren't we due for another Liberation Music Orchestra record sometime soon?"

Liberation Music Orchestra records have always been synonymous with turbulent political times. We remember the first LMO album in '69 on Impulse! during the Viet Nam era, the cover picturing a ragtag line up of jazz musicians (Haden, Carla Bley, Mike Mantler, Gato Barbieri, Paul Motian, Roswell Rudd, Don Cherry, Dewey Redman, etc.), united under a funky cloth banner, blasting free-form tirades like "Song for Che" and "War Orphans."

If you count Haden and Bley's 1983 Ballad of the Fallen on ECM, there have been a total of three LMO albums on three different labels. The "third" LMO, Dream Keeper, was released on Blue Note in 1991, right around Desert Storm. It's always an inspiration to revisit this material. They feature poignant but uplifting marches and ballads that reflect the ugliness of war that affects not only the "gods and generals" behind the battle zones, but the common folk, the foot soldiers, and the natives in the line of fire as it rains missiles and bombs.

Those of you in Jazz radio, how are you going to respond on the air to the drumbeats of war? You might consider bittersweet Liberation Music Orchestra tunes like "The Ballad of the Fallen," "Silence," and "Rabo De Nube."

Music with a political bite. Charlie Haden's 1970 version of the Liberation Music Orchestra.

Haden's response to our query was something akin to, "I usually wait until there's a Republican in the White House. If George W. Bush gets elected, then maybe it will be time for another Liberation Music Orchestra record." There's no doubt about it, Charlie. You might as well get cracking and start writing and arranging LMO #4, if you haven't already started. We need it, like, yesterday.

Norah Jones swept the Grammy Awards. No big mystery. People love and will always buy good, old-fashioned, honest-to-goodness, under-produced music with roots. Perhaps many of the same millions who plopped down eighteen bucks for the O Brother! Where Art Thou? soundtrack also purchased Norah's Come Away With Me album. Those six million fans are part of the lost demographic the majors have back-burnered in favor of launching lousy teen pop acts and watered-down Alternative bands. Well, six million fans have spoken with their pocketbooks, and as Elvis once said, "they can't be wrong."

Congrats to Blue Note Records and the musicians for using a Jazz formula by releasing a complete album as opposed to stringing together a couple of potential hit singles. Back in March 2002 (http://www.jazzweek.com/feature/article/7_000252.html), JazzWeek hailed Ms. Jones as "A young singer you can't conveniently confine in a box. The label wisely chose to nurture Jones more in the direction of musicianship rather than strict style." That was written a few weeks after watching Jones perform onstage at Yoshi's, singing a couple of her songs backed by the Charlie Hunter Band. That night she stood her ground. The rest, as they say, is history.

Speaking of the Grammy Awards, (not that we actually watched them since most of the awards we were interested were presented off-camera), there was a minor skirmish surrounding the possibility that winning artists might actually use their acceptance speeches as a forum to espouse their political views. Perish the thought! NARAS and the CBS television network denied the Drudge Report's allegation that "top CBS executives" were "deeply concerned" that the festivities might turn "into a giant anti-war political rally." However it was revealed by Sheryl Crow backstage that her management got a call urging her to "keep it all neutral." Grammy officials "categorically" denied her charge.

If there's a grain of truth here, then shame on the TV and Grammy organizers.

As CD sales are expected to drop at least another 10% in 2003, isn't it time to present less vapid and more thought-provoking music? Then it's alleged that the cream of the music crop is told to keep their mouths shut and their political opinions to themselves. Oh really? Music should no longer be a radical force for change and self-expression? Wrong. The music certainly needs to be more socially relevant, not less. And it's okay to have artists soothe the masses after tragedies like 9/11 or Columbine, but when war enters the picture, they're are told to shut up?

What a mess.

Isn't it bad enough that the business has already lost a large portion of the youth market to file sharing because the format the music is released on and packaged in isn't considered worth paying for? Maybe NARAS and the RIAA ought to consider ways to enthuse or regain the fan demos who grew up on music that mattered socially.

Twenty-year-old CD technology has become old hat. People who buy DVDs run home to check out all the extra audio-visual goodies pressed onto the $20 disc, replete with splendid artwork and modern packaging. Whereas chumps like us who still buy CDs get shrunken graphics and liner notes we can't read without eyeglasses, packed in dull, breakable plastic packaging for an overpriced $18.99. To add further insult, there are those miserable inventory stickers glued along the top. You need an extra half-inch of fingernail just to peel off those suckers in order to get to the music. Sad fact: buying CDs has become an old school, borderline annoying experience. No wonder people are grabbing the first available new technology.

Okay, so let's get positive. Business 2.0 ran an interesting column (http://www.business2.com/articles/web/0,1653,47161,00.html) by Jimmy Guterman entitled How to Save the Music Industry. As a producer and writer, Guterman is somewhat of an insider. His suggestions include:

Reduce CD prices. "The labels could maintain their margins by adopting new distributions schemes, digital and real, that sidestep the current bloated structure. And maybe think twice before spending $3 million on a promotional video."

Abandon copy protection. "Invest in consumer-friendly technologies. Why cut into margins by developing dead-end technologies that alienate customers and inevitably fail?" Guterman cites technologies such as SACD and DVD Audio as consumer-friendly, value-added innovations.

Abandon current online efforts and buy Kazaa. "Give up. The RIAA should have learned from its dealings with Napster."

According to Wired magazine, Kazaa, during its off-peak hours, are servicing millions more users than Napster ever dreamed of in its peak. In our opinion, if the industry had invested in new technology instead of using the money to litigate against it and the hi-tech concepts that could have helped promote and recommend new and exciting music, they wouldn't have half the problems they have today. Instead, the business continues to support and finance a "legal" payola system that limits the exposure of its very own artists. All genres of music, including Jazz, should be pulling more than their share of sales. Instead, we're still stuck with an outmoded business model and a guerilla music-swapping entity that's eating away at the profits of companies, musicians, and their intellectual properties.

Not long ago, an era was ushered in where music fans and technology users by the millions voluntarily turned their computers into jukeboxes. It was a beautiful concept, indeed; music recognized as software. Of course, the RIAA responded with lawsuits and threats and only succeeded in pushing entities like Kazaa and Lime Wire further underground into unenforceable territories. A screenwriter couldn't have invented a worse scenario; overpriced merchandise, disillusioned artists, file-sharing technologies and electronic equipment manufacturers as adversaries. It used to be that music was immune to a soft economy. Not now.

On second thought, why wait for the next invasion of Iraq? Pass us over those Liberation Music Orchestra CDs. We're already at war.