SwiftRanks at 69 in Forbes Celebrity 100

My daughters favorite and country music star Taylor Swift ranks at number 69 as the most powerful celebrity in the world.  This is according to the annual Celebrity 100 list produced by Forbes.  After all the publicity she has gained this year who can be surprised!

Taylor Alison Swift (born December 13, 1989) is an American country pop singer–songwriter, guitarist and actress. In 2008, her albums sold a combined four million copies, making her the best-selling musician of the year in the United States, according to Nielsen Sound Scan.

In 2006, she released her debut single “Tim McGraw”, then her self-titled debut album, which was subsequently certified Platinum several times by the Recording Industry Association of America.

In November 2008, Swift released her second album, Fearless. Fearless and Taylor Swift finished 2008 at number three and number six respectively, with sales of 2.1 and 1.5 million. Fearless has topped the Billboard 200 in 11 non-consecutive weeks, no album has spent more time at No. 1 since 2000. Forbes, ranked Swift 2009′s 69th-most powerful celebrity, earning $18 million.  Swiftranks…

Untitled – Movie

The New York art world does such a wonderful job of satirizing itself that further assistance hardly seems necessary. But with “(Untitled),’’ writer and director Jonathan Parker takes for granted the trumped-up stakes, the humorlessness, and the artists’ capacity for opportunism and willful absurdity. The players in this movie are cynical, but, amazingly, Parker is not. His movie works as a serious comedy in which the assorted players – a couple of artists, some gallerists, and the people who attend (or don’t attend) their shows – discuss what art is, what it should aspire to be, and what kind of people collect, exhibit, and consider it.  Read more…

New York Experimental Music Locations

1. The Stone
John Zorn’s spartan Alphabet City outpost provides a no-frills home for avant-garde music of all inclinations, programmed by different musicians each month. Ave C at 2nd St (no phone)

2. Issue Project Room at the Old American Can Factory
Issue’s current home is temporary, but avant-rockers, contemporary-classical players and electroacoustic improvisers have made the space a permanent destination.
232 3rd St at Third Ave, Gowanus, Brooklyn (718-330-0313)

3. Roulette
Now housed in a comfortable, elegant Soho space, Jim Staley’s long-running venue keeps the downtown-music torch burning brightly.
20 Greene St between Canal and Grand Sts (212-219-8242)

4. Monkey Town
Four-wall video projections make Monkey Town’s back room a haven for multisensory stimulation.
58 North 3rd St between Kent and Wythe Aves, Williamsburg, Brooklyn (718-384-1369)

5. Experimental Intermedia
Twice a year in March and December, composer and video artist Phill Niblock opens his loft to composers, sound artists and improvisers from around the world.
224 Centre St at Grand St, third floor (212-431-5127)

For information on New York hotels click here

Looking at Music

The Museum of Modern Art presents Looking at Music: Side 2, a survey of over 120 photographs, music videos, drawings, audio recordings, publications, Super 8 films, and ephemera that look at New York City from the early 1970s to the early 1980s when the city became a haven for young renegade artists who often doubled as musicians and poets. Art and music cross-fertilized with a vengeance following a stripped-down, hard-edged, anti-establishment ethos, with some artists plastering city walls with self-designed posters or spray painted monikers, while others commandeered abandoned buildings, turning vacant garages into makeshift theaters for Super 8 film screenings and raucous performances. Many artists found the experimental music scene more vital and conducive to their contrarian ideas than the handful of contemporary art galleries in the city. Artists in turn formed bands, performed in clubs and non-profit art galleries, and self-published their own records and zines while using public access cable channels as a venue for media experiments and cultural debates.

Looking at Music: Side 2 is organized by Barbara London, Associate Curator, Department of Media and Performance Art, The Museum of Modern Art, and succeeds Looking at Music (2008), an examination of the interaction between artists and musicians of the 1960s and early 1970s. Looking at Music: Side 2 is on view from June 10 to November 30, 2009, with an accompanying film series in The Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters to commence in September 2009.

The exhibition spans numerous forms of media by a diverse group of artists including: drawings by Patti Smith and photography by Dan Graham, Nan Goldin, and Jimmy DeSana; experimental video by James Nares; issues of influential zines and magazines including Search & Destroy, Interview, and Punk; posters designed by Adrian Piper and Collaborative Projects, Inc. (Colab); prints by Jenny Holzer, Betsey Johnson, and Bern Boyle; music videos with songs by Blondie and Suicide; record covers designed by Kim Gordon, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Raymond Pettibon; music from Television, The Ramones, and Talking Heads; and live band footage from performances at Max’s Kansas City.

Barbara London states: “This exhibition shows how musicians and artists coalesced at a time when New York City, while financially struggling, seemed to incubate innovative ideas and facilitate the phenomenal success of a few, marking the transition into the next, more commercial decade of artists in New York City.”

Outside The Yoshiko and Akio Morita Gallery, Looking at Music: Side 2 is introduced through a title wall designed by the New York artist Laurie Anderson. Within the exhibition James Nares’s video, Game (1975), greets viewers at the exhibition’s entrance. Active in the 1970s on the Lower East Side as a Super 8 filmmaker and member of The Del-Byzanteens, Nares concocted a percussive, imaginary board game, performed with Seth Tillett, which he turned into the subject of his experimental film. Nares’s work is accompanied by a monitor displaying segments from Glenn O’Brien’s late 1970s Manhattan Public Access television show, TV Party. Equal parts party, talk show, video art, concert, and political action, TV Party took live television to a place it had never been before, including interviews with a number of the artists included in the exhibition. Also on display are drawings by Patti Smith and an audio station playing her song Hey Joe/Piss Factory (1974), considered to be the first punk rock record and funded by the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. Two tracks from The Ramones, widely cited as the first punk rock group, play at a nearby audio station, including “Beat on the Brat” and “Blitzkrieg Bop” (1976). In vitrines, poetry from the musician Richard Hell and a record from the German artist Martin Kippenberger’s short-lived musical project with Christine Hahn and Eric Mitchell are on display.

The exhibition next focuses on the work of New York based Colab, a non-profit artist collective distinguished for political engagement and the co-opting of public spaces, including an abandoned building in the heart of Times Square in 1980. In a set of video monitors, works from Colab artists are on display, including Coleen Fitzgibbon, a founding Colab member and instigator of the Times Square Show, which housed socially themed artworks in a derelict Times Square building. With a background in 1960s structuralist cinema, Fitzgibbon’s Super 8 film transferred to video, Time (1975), is a nonstop visual flow of headlines and text, all drawn from an issue of Time magazine, with the effect of an incessant restlessness of the filmic frame. On a nearby monitor, the music video Frankie Teardrop (1978), set to the New York-based band Suicide, is on display. This coarsely-textured film-video hybrid combines super-imposed projector manipulations and high-end video post-production. An insightful collaboration between videomaker Paul Dougherty and Art-Rite zine editors Walter Robinson and Edit DeAk, the work interprets a strident song by Suicide about a poverty-stricken Vietnam vet pushed to the edge. These works are surrounded by posters, audio, and a video by Judith Barry, Richard Kern, and the New York band Sonic Youth and the work of Beth and Scott B.

Looking at Music: Side 2 next examines the cross-influence of hip hop and art in New York City, including the video of Rapture (1981) by Blondie. Rapture, the first video to incorporate elements from rap on MTV, opens with choreographer William Barnes dancing in a white suit and top hat in New York’s Upper East Side. Barnes is joined by Debbie Harry and her bandmates–easy-going, cross-over artists who bridged uptown and downtown scenes. In the final sequence of the music video, the band dances down a street passing Fab 5 Freddy and graffiti artists Lee Quiñones and Jean-Michel Basquiat in action. The video is accompanied by photographs of Basquiat’s graffiti work from the 1970s, by Peter Moore and Stephanie Chernikowski, and a large-scale drawing by the artist, Untitled (1981).

The exhibition concludes with images from five rock n’ roll photographers. Adjacent to a large-scale photographic collage of the work of Bob Gruen, adapted from the 2007 installation Rock and Roll Teenager’s Bedroom and measuring 7.5′ x 22.5′, the exhibition includes vitrines with photographs of Suicide by Godlis and Sonic Youth by Stephanie Chernikowski, along with additional photographs by Roberta Bayley and Marcia Resnick. On a monitor beside these works is Bob Gruen’s New York Death Cult (Live at Max’s Kansas City) (1976), featuring grainy footage from famed music club Max’s Kansas City, which captures the raw, immersive spirit of up-and-coming musicians of that era such as Patti Smith.

How Do You Improvise?

You need to know the following items to improvise and compose in a right and nice way: first you have to know all major and minor scalesand relative keys and all chords in every keys. Then you must play all chord inversionsand the building melody techniques. You have to practice so much so you can play right melodic lines with swing and without thinking about scales, rules, keys…

Phrasing is the following step. You must learn to begin and finish melodic phrases from every point of easure. Ear training, transcribing, music harmony, transposing, voicing, harmonization are other important and fundamental techniques to learn jazz improvisation and composing. These techniques can give you the skill for express the music you have inside.

Learning jazz improvisation is not simple. The theory and harmonic concepts you have to learn are few and easy to understand but the fundamental concept is just one: to learn improvisation you have to play much and practice for a longtime!

I used to compare improvisation with language. Improvisation is a language, you can express ideas, concepts and emotions and sometimes much deeper than language. So, as well as you have to study and practice a lot to learn English or French or Italian so you have to do the same with music improvisation.
You do not need to understand difficult concepts but without doubts you must be patient. Here in this site I offer free resources to learn this art but be patient if my English is not perfect.