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Keiko Matsui

Something quite fascinating is how people have the tendency to categorize. In order to organize this mess of a world, to be able to deal with the chaos and unpredictability humans assign things to boxes: good and evil, healthy and unhealthy, Country music, Metal. Once something has been assigned a category, it rarely gets reclassified. Sometimes it’s quite beneficial, but it can be detrimental too, for instance when people start conforming to the box they’re in, whether they chose to be in there or were put in there by others.

And then there are people like Keiko Matsui. This woman, classical piano wunderkind, became a worldwide star in the world of New Age and later Smooth Jazz, touring the world for 30 years now. This woman made 26 albums before “Journey to the Heart” last year. She now sells 1500 tickets a night in Russia for two weeks straight, a beloved artist at Smooth Jazz nights from the Hollywood Bowl to Java Jazz in Jakarta, Indonesia. But guess what: she keeps growing and innovating, keeps pushing, instead of resting on her laurels and riding this wave into the sunset.

After years of others, mostly men of course, running her life, managers, record labels etc., she has taken control! That album she did last year? Her best one yet, and the most free of all. Produced by none other than Carlitos Del Puerto, son of Cuban bass legend Carlos Del Puerto of Irakere, it’s her first all acoustic project and it’s truly wonderful. She never really was a Smooth Jazz artist to begin with, very few 2 chord R&B jams in her repertoire, but here we have a proper Jazz album, awesome compositions, fantastic playing by a group of great musicians. I’m serious, this is music that would fit in at any real Jazz club in the world and she proved it last week in Napa.

Back in 2000 I did one summer with Keiko and her manager ran the show back then, she would hardly talk to the band. When I joined again in 2013 the situation was much different already. I replaced Eric Baines who was the musical director, so it really was the first time she took on that role, and slowly but surely she realized that she could easily do it! I mean, after almost 30 years of doing your music, you know what you want! Communication across languages can be hard, and explaining feeling in music even harder, but between a group of excellent musicians (JP Mourao, Jackiem Joyner, Dave Karasony) who truly repected her and my above average language skills, we got there. She still had a “Pop”/Classical concept of her show, with strict arrangements and solos that were almost verbatim every night. Doing “Journey to the Heart”, and then touring on it with the Carlitos and Jimmy Branly forced her to adopt more of a true Jazz flow: those guys are UNSTOPPABLE, they cannot be put in a box. They will never play the same thing twice. I heard some of the live recordings and they went for it every time, actually a little too much for Keiko’s fans I’m afraid. Of course Carlitos is the hottest bass player in the world right now, so when Chick Corea called, and Barbra Streisand and Bob James, he moved on and combined with the preference of promoters and fans for the electric band, we got the call again.

Fast forward to last week, when we did 4 nights, two shows a night, at the brand new Blue Note in Napa, CA. I’m not exaggerating when I say all 8 shows where in my top 25 favorite gigs of my life. Keiko was simply outstanding and we played like a real band; I get tears in my eyes again thinking about it, as happened literally every night at some point. The stage is small there, and with the incredible CF6 that Yamaha brought especially for Keiko, we were set up super tight, which is ideal actually for playing Jazz. Keiko played some truly amazing solos, really blew my mind how free and creative, how beautiful, playful and exciting. She improvised stuff on songs I had never heard even a slight variation on. And we were right with her, at all times; it’s incredible what happens when a band trusts itself, when a soloist feels so comfortable. JP went from beautiful whisper quiet Brazilian flavors to screaming rock, rhythmical explorations to surf…. our dynamics as band were incredible, we played so softly a few times, without losing any intensity it shocked me.

Honestly, Keiko became a true Jazz pianist this week. She’s been trying to book shows in Western Europe, but her association with Smooth Jazz has held her back, even though she was always more of a New Age/Pop/Classical pianist. Now, in my opinion, she could and should get booked at any real Jazz club in the world, even with the electric band. It’s beyond inspiring to see a woman of her stature make such a bold and dramatic move, to refuse to stay in a box and boldly go…….. feeling beyond blessed to be able to witness it……

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Of strength and vulnerability

All this renewed talk about the ‘alt-right’ and fascism has had me thinking about strength and where it is found in this universe. The biggest fallacy of Nazis and the like is the notion that a genetically pure people is a strong people; it just doesn’t mesh with the way the universe works. Just look at the difference between pure-bred dogs and mutts: genetic diseases are more common in the former. Similarly, in the world of finance, the most robust investment portfolio is a diversified one. We don’t have the saying “Don’t Put All Your Eggs In One Basket” for nothing, do we? In my opinion it resonates in just about all situations and I have made redundancy one of my main objectives regarding everything that matters: I’d rather have 2 computers than one, even if that means getting less fancy ones perhaps, I have accounts with multiple banks, bought 2 of just about everything that my life depends on. What it means is that half the stuff I own could get stolen and I would hardly be affected! The peace of mind that comes from that position, especially put against the increasing fear I see in others concerning the possessions, is truly priceless. What’s strange is how few people seem to understand it at all…..

Looking forward, digital security and strength is becoming more and more important. In my opinion, trusting one company with your entire digital life is not smart, especially in such a fast-changing world. We’re seeing more and more hacking of digital systems and it’s probably only a matter of time before a major bank will have its systems so compromised that it will become inoperable, at least temporarily. Think about that for a moment, if your checking account is unusable, what does that mean for your day to day life? Do you really want to be late on your mortgage due to no fault of your own? It might sound dramatic, but really we have no way of predicting what’s gonna happen. What we do know is that as everything gets more and more connected, bigger and bigger damage could be inflicted by smaller and smaller groups of people. Just this last weekend hackers broke into a California transit system and allowed everyone to travel for free, demanding a ransom to undo the hack. In this case the IT department was able to fix the system, but in others, notably a hospital here, huge ransoms have been paid. The bottom line is we don’t even know how vulnerable we are! As we move away from cash, multiple credit cards, and even a couple of checking accounts, in SEPARATE banks are the best hedge.

Another example is cellphones! We’ve all seen how people freak out at even just the thought of losing their iPhone or Galaxy; it’s about the $800 they paid for it, but also at the thought of being unable to communicate. Project Fi is just awesome in that regard, as they will give you a second data-only SIM for free, you just pay for the data you actually use. It’s allowed me to get a secondary phone, a Honor 5X I picked up for $170 BTW, which has my business number in it and a slot for a second SIM! Now I can get my texts, voice-mail and data access from my main account on a second device. I can even make and receive calls from my main number on it through Hangouts. Losing two phones is so much more unlikely than losing just one, isn’t it? Result: peace of mind.

The final example I want to bring up is food. Imagine a world in which every single person ate rice from the same patty; and now imagine there’s some kind of deadly contamination of said patty. You get the idea, everybody would die! Diversification is especially important when it comes to nourishment, on ALL levels. When you think about nutrition, the most effective way to make sure you get all the various nutrients you need is to eat a wildly diverse diet. Conversely, the best way to make sure you get deficient in something is to limit your diet to a few sources. We live in times where we have access to more different foods than ever before; for goodness’ sake, ENJOY IT! Because not only is a varied diet the healthiest, it’s the most exciting and interesting, isn’t it? It pains me when I see so many around hereconsuming nothing but salads and chicken breast, while under the impression that they’re being ‘healthy’. And yes, even McDonald’s can be part of a healthy diet.

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Dell XPS 18 review

Two days ago I received my 500GB Samsung 840 EVO SSD and did the upgrade to my beloved Dell XPS 18: let me tell you, it’s better than I could’ve ever imagined! My machine came with the i5-4210U, 8GB of RAM and a 1TB spinning hard drive which I now replaced. Even in its original configuration it was pretty sweet, but now it’s the snappiest machine I’ve ever owned. It’ll boot from being off in 2 seconds after the BIOS screen, browsers (IE or Firefox) open up instantly, searching is blazing fast! One 4GB DIMM is soldered on the motherboard, but the second one I replaced with an 8GB stick for a total of 12GB, the maximum this machine can handle and plenty for what I do.

My primary purpose for it was to read music on gigs; the typical iPad or other 10″ tablet is just so damn small, really barely big enough to display one page at a time, and although it’s mighty handy to be able to carry so much music in such a small form factor, I had always longed for something more. The Dell delivers in spades: it shows two pages BEAUTIFULLY, with room to spare on both sides. I recommend Sumatra PDF for a reader on a touch screen computer because you can open multiple charts at the same time, and do a two-finger tap on the one you need to go full screen. Try it! The Real Book PDFs fly on this thing, and when you properly index any collection of PDFs, standard Windows search (hit the Windows key and just start typing the name!) works instantly. The battery lasts 6 hours, long enough for just about any gig, and it sits on a music stand just fine. Added bonus: it runs Sibelius or Finale perfectly so if you need to make adjustments to a piece of music at rehearsal you can do it. I use the former, and it’s not exactly optimized for touch, but does work. Better is to just bring a mouse….

Speaking of input devices: the bundled ones are not bad actually. They’re made by Logitech and even though lots of reviewers think they are Bluetooth devices, they are not. Inside there is an extra hidden USB port with a Unifying Receiver plugged in, so any modern Logitech device can pair! Opening the unit is quite easy actually, just requiring a T8 torx bit, and one could put a Microsoft receiver in there instead if desired. There are two more USB 3 ports on the side and of course Bluetooth as well, so connectivity is excellent.

The screen is a 1080P IPS panel with an excellent picture, and full 10-point touch, which works well. At first it’s a little overwhelming, but you get used to using it as a tablet quite quickly actually! The built-in feet allow it to stand in two different ways: upright in landscape mode, and also at a much slighter incline, almost like an audio mixer. I use Cakewalk Sonar X3 for my audio recording and it fully supports touch. I haven’t used it that much yet, but this setup enables a hands-on mixing workflow that is very intriguing……..

That brings me to the second thing I was hoping to do with the Dell: running Ableton Live 9. So far I had always brought a laptop to gigs for this purpose, but I always needed another stand or table to put it on. The XPS 18 sits perfectly on my music stand which I bring anyway, allowing me to easily put it wherever I need it. One USB cable to my Kronos and I have a full-fledged rig, because it uses the Korg as an audio interface! I can’t tell you how amazingly well this combo runs, it’s truly a joy. No cut down iOS nonsense, the real deal! I’ve thrown the biggest Ableton projects at it, and even with the original spinning HD it worked fine, now with the SSD it’s smoking.

In addition to the 2.5″ drive bay, there’s a spot for an M.2 SSD as well, and I’ve ordered a 250GB one to put in there. For now I’ve been running the Ableton projects off a 32GB microSD card believe it or not, but this will complete the system with some of the highest performing storage out there. It’s still hard to believe that you can get this kind of machine in such a form factor. It’s easy to work on, really well built (by Foxconn I believe, who build iPads too), and comes with excellent, “Next Business Day” in-home warranty. Truly spectacular………

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Second Keyboard

What an incredibly fun gig last night! Thanks to Oscar Cartaya who got me on board as the second keyboard player for “Singer’s Night” hosted by Delious Kennedy of All 4 One at the Federal Bar. They do this once a month or so, picking a different theme every time. Last night’s was “Michael versus Janet”, as in Jackson of course, and the selection of tunes was awesome. It’s not often that one gets to play “Can You Feel It” or the other “Heartbreak Hotel” …..

The band was top notch by the way, with Andy Abad (Backstreet Boys, Marc Anthony) on guitar, Paul Alexander Gonzalez (Gloria Estefan, All 4 One) on drums, Kenneth Towns (The Jacksons) on first keyboard and Oscar (Spyro Gyra, Jennifer Lopez, Herb Alpert) of course on (synth)bass; all these guys are just excellent, and it’s just beyond cool to recreate those epic productions with a big band. There were a few ringers thrown in, but all the singers were at least competent too, with some being truly world-class. The place was packed and fun was had by all….this is why we live in L.A.!

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Unbundle

As none other than Neil Young, who I just watched on Colbert this morning, sits tables behind me at Starbucks, I want to talk about some good news of the day, a show of progress if you will: HBO has announced it will start an online streaming service of some kind that does NOT require a cable subscription of any kind! Hallelujah! It certainly took long enough, but this is just excellent and I will be one of the first to put his money where his mouth is! It’ll probably be more than the $15 add-on it is now, but hopefully not much; I’m saving $25 by not patronizing Time Warner anymore, and would gladly pay that for perhaps Showtime and HBO on my computers. Now let’s hope that other talented content providers get on-board and we can shake this thing up a little….

BTW, Neil Young was promoting some music player device that gives you “100%” where an MP3 player gives you “5%”. He is of course strictly speaking correct, simply because the bitrate of the latter is normally a tenth of hat a CD has, and the former probably uses 96Khz, 24Bit audio. Of course our brains are so easily fooled, and I bet you 99% of all people would not be able to distinguish between the two formats, especially with the sonically limited material we listen to today.

Well, I decided to look it up: the device is called the PonoPlayer and costs $400. The corresponding Ponomusic service promises to always provide the highest resolution file-formats available for any particular content, with 44 Khz 16-bit as the lowest. The player does many formats up to 192Khz 24-bit….there you have it!

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Neurosynaptic Chip

“Holistic Computing Intelligence” they call it at IBM, the combination of traditional linear, analytical processing, combined with Neurosynaptic chips adressing senses and pattern recognition. You see, old-fashioned computers use an insane amount of power for tasks that the human brain for instance can do almost effortlessly, like recognizing someone’s face, even when it’s not exactly like you’ve seen it before. Our brains can instantly ‘connect the dots’ if you will, spot the parts that are recognizable, throw away the parts that aren’t and then draw the conclusion. Emulating that process, which takes place in what’s called a “Neural Network” in software has shown great promise, but now we’re moving into an era in which the actual structure, the framework, will be built in hardware.

The SyNAPSE chip which was introduced 08_07_2014 is a major step in that direction; it contains the equivalent of 1 million neurons and 256 million synapses, or as some say, about the complexity of the brain of a bee! That doesn’t sound like much, but as we all know, technology moves fast and increases in complexity exponentially. The craziest part is that at full operational speed it only consumes 70 mW. That’s milli-Watts or 1000th of a Watt! A typical Intel i3 chip can draw as much as 60W, or a thousand times as much, without getting close to being able to simulate that kind of complexity. A human brain contains about 100 billion neurons, so we’re a factor 100,000 away, but when you realize that in 2011 IBM was making chips with only 256 you can imagine where we’re going. A mouse has 71 million and that’s a reasonably complex animal, isn’t it?

There’s so much talk about Artificial Intelligence these days, and a lot of ‘information’ and opinion being spread by people who really have very little if any understanding of the matter. One of the biggest holes in the arguments I often hear is that a machine can never be as complex and unpredictable as a human because everything it does is ‘programmed’; this almost always comes from people who have never even programmed anything, yet they feel very confident in their opinion! The truth seems to be that what we see as such typical biological traits comes from sufficient complexity of just about any system. Think about your PC: does it do always exactly what you tell it to? No way! Sometimes it behaves unexpectedly, due to the synergy of its components, in ways that nobody who designed the individual parts planned, or even could have foreseen. And that’s with traditional linear machines! Imagine what happens if we start building them in electrical versions of the way we’re built. Then comes the question: “will those machines believe in God?” Most asking it will immediately answer it themselves with a resolute “of course not!”, but the answer is actually “quite possibly so!” We’ve already seen complex enough simulations of neural networks exhibiting emotional behavior, and that’s no lie. In addition, we must remember that such systems are not programmed in the traditional sense of the word; a much better description would be that they are taught just like children, which means that sometimes they will not do what they were ‘instructed’ to do.

I don’t think we can overestimate the importance of this development, as I promise it will change our world even more than we can imagine. It’s not simple material, and it requires a really open mind. We MUST hypothesize what will happen if we build a machine that is as complex and capable as a human, and then what happens when it’s 1000 times as smart as the smartest human. We MUST speculate on the effects of a conscious machine.

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The Choir: Military Wives (Updated!)

It’s summer so in Holland it’s time for “Zomergasten”, an iconic yearly TV show, which is perhaps my favorite thing on this medium anywhere. Presented by a different host every year, it has only one guest who, for the three hours the program lasts, has total freedom to discuss any topic, tell any story or share any observation, while showing video clips from any movie/TV show/documentary he wants. Mind you, there are no commercial interruptions! This years presenter is Wilfried de Jong, a very smart and truly interested person, and the first guest was none other than Freek de Jonge, a living legend in the Netherlands. A true artist, de Jonge discusses many many interesting topics and makes it clear that he’s as free as a human can be in this day and age: his one-man theater shows are completely and utterly uncompromised,  not by commerce, nor the desire to be liked by everyone which plagues so many these days.

In this 180 minute journey, we see a young Charlie Chaplin, discovering his talents in a time when close-up shots had not even been considered yet! We witness the most unbelievable put by Tiger Woods: the movement of the ball includes what looks like about a 90 degree turn, and then a teetering on the edge of the hole for literally seconds before it seems like the growing roar of the crowd provides the last little push it needs to go in. There are many more very interesting parts, but where it really got me was when Freek showed us a few minutes of a British program called The Choir: Military Wives.

It’s the fourth season of a show in which conductor Gareth Malone rounds up groups of people to form a singing group. This is no populist BS though, he works them, but more importantly, literally makes them better people. I’ve said many times the we westerners don’t sing together enough! I haven’t seen the whole show, but in the 5 minutes we got to witness on Zomergasten, at first we see a few dozen women whose husbands are away at war; these are ladies who know each other, but in England there’s not much socializing between folks of different ranks so they don’t know each other well. Also, most are not singers and visibly uncomfortable with the whole situation. In addition, military wives are probably in a similarly rigid system as their husbands, not used to the ‘cutting loose and letting go’ that music begs for.

By the time that they perform in front of prince Charles at Royal Albert Hall (!!!!) their faces have completely changed; I get tears in my eyes writing this, I can see the unity, the peace, the togetherness, the confidence. It’s like they were girls and now they are women. Freek makes some very fascinating observations: “when their husbands come back from the war, they’re going to have a problem!” The women have now far surpassed their partners in this journey of discovery we call life, as the latter have probably regressed in their understanding of balance and happiness. Wives who acted like they had never been listened to have now learned to wield the power of their voices, in the best, most selfless way possible.

One final interesting thing: even though most Dutch public TV shows are watchable online these days, for free by the way, most of the time Zomergasten is not, but this episode was. You know why? Because the restrictions always come due to ‘geographic’ license issues in this over-commercialized world; but true art is not run by money managers! There were no Disney clips, no major network Amercian TV…….. and the result was another perfect example of the potential of this Medium.

UPDATE: found out that the entire three part series can be watched on Youtube in perfectly fine quality! I watched it last night and was so moved……. Choir Director Gareth Malone is quite an interesting character, and at points all his judgements of these women (“they literally have no voice!”) seem quite pretentious and almost vulgar, but then the faces don’t lie and the incredible joy and thankfulness they experience moved me to tears. Wow!

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Streaming

The river of nonsense based on misinformation thickens every day! From idiotic videos ‘proving’ that no airplane hit the second tower on 9/11 (2.5 million views ladies and gentlemen!) to diet advice stemming from horribly wrong conclusions drawn from questionable scientific research, we are in danger! You see, humans put a value on information based in large part on how many others they hear state it. We are herd animals after all, and so we follow. Before the information age, in order for you to hear thousands of people say something, a very large percentage of folks directly around you would have to do so. These days, even if only 1% of a population believes something, but they are loud and active, it can seem like everybody believes it.

Here’s something I do know a something about: performance royalties for music. If one were to believe the internet, Spotify is taking advantage of composers and publishers, paying them horribly low amounts. Nothing is further from the truth actually. Two months ago I did an experiment: I signed up for a paid membership for one month, at $10, and then proceeded to put XR7 on loop. In the last few days I’ve been getting my regular payments for that period and they’re actually good: 1.24 cents per play! That means every time ONE person listens to ONE song ONE time, I get paid more than a penny. Contrary to popular belief that is WAY better than any terrestrial radio ever paid! Not all the songs have come through for this period, including The Robot Song, which I played on repeat separately, but already my little experiment has brought in $25, or actually MORE than I paid for my membership. How that is unfair is beyond me……

Now, I don’t know what the pay scale is at Pandora and it probably is worse, but still, whenever these musicians around here bitch about the new model, I want to slap them. They post stuff on FB, about how someone had a million plays but only made $400. Well guess what, if your song plays on a broadcast radio station and is heard by a million people, how much do you think you get paid? This is part of the problem caused by the idiotic price of 99 cents that iTunes has instilled on us. It’s outrageous……..

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Brain Machine Interface

What would we do without the VPRO? From before I was born, this Dutch Public Television broadcasting organization has been bringing us arguably the best TV anywhere. From some of the funniest stuff ever made (Koot & Bie!) to incredibly intelligent, truly independent documentaries, if I had to choose only one thing to watch for the rest of my life it would be the VPRO. Time after time, its series called “Tegenlicht” teaches us so much, without ever getting in the way with opinions and the episode from April 10th of this year was another mind-blower.

Called “Het Gretige Brein”, or “The Eager Brain”, it deals with the learning capacity and desires of our most potent organ. My goodness, it was fascinating. Connecting directly to neurons is now part of what’s called the Brain-Machine Interface, or Brain-Computer Interface. Scientists have already literally connected two monkeys’ brains through the internet, one in Brazil and on in the US! Things taught to one, affect the mind of the other. It’s crazy! There are people talking about ‘liberating’ the mind from the limitations of the physical body, something that’s been speculated on for a while, but now they’re throwing in predictions of the year we will start doing it: 2035. It’s been shown that we can teach our grey matter to control robot arms, as if they were original equipment, merely by imagining the movement of a real limb, and reading the part of the brain that normally controls such thing. We’re making some serious progress here…

You know, it’s pretty scary actually, especially because of the proven gullibility of the typical human. We are setting ourselves up for something, that’s for sure. Imagine if we all upload ourselves to some giant mainframe, preferring to live without our fragile bodies. The funny thing is that we could literally be erased out of existence by wiping one system! Seems far more fragile than our imperfect bodies, doesn’t it? Just like we are blindly going headfirst into the progress that digital technology gives us. We are going to give up our POTS (plain old telephone service) copper wiring, to be replaced by VOIP systems that are worthless without all the computers necessary to operate them, ripping out an infrastructure installed over many decades. After the earthquake here in 1994, guess what still worked and what didn’t…….