Tag: Interviews

Canaries in the Coal Mine: Punk icon East Bay Ray talks about artists being exploited online and why that is just the tip of the iceberg

east_bay_rayI interviewed punk legend and Dead Kennedys guitarist East Bay Ray for the August issue of Premier Guitar. For the most part, we talked about guitar playing, recording, and songwriting—as you’d expect. However, our conversation went off on a fascinating tangent when I asked Ray about his work as an artist advocate. The material wasn’t appropriate for Premier Guitar, so I am posting it here.

Two points to keep in mind when reading this interview:

  1. Obviously, the opinions expressed by Ray are his own and not necessarily the opinions of the Retro Chicken blog.
  2. I did not fact check the assertions Ray made about sources of funding, motivations, or quotes attributed to various corporations/institutions. Do your homework before accepting them as fact.

What projects are you working on now?

Right now I am mostly doing artist advocacy stuff. I am talking about how Google has turned artists into sharecroppers. Music is making money on the internet, movies are making money on the internet, books are making money on the internet, but that money is going to the middleman—the new bossman—which is Amazon, Google, Facebook. I live in the Bay Area—and there are 30-year-old billionaires here—and meanwhile independent artists can’t pay their rent.

And the billionaires are living on the backs of the independent artists?

Yeah. It’s a plantation system. Think about the 1890s, sharecropping got you cheap cotton, but it was based on exploitation.

The problem is they’ve also eliminated real journalism. Now what we have are opinion pieces and things paid for by corporations—like climate change and that stuff. I am real concerned about how we are going to have a democracy if people aren’t informed. Everybody has an opinion, but if the opinion is not based on facts and reality then it’s insanity. The University of California Berkeley Law School just put out, quote, “A study,” on the take-down notice system, which is where Google profits from. And guess who financed that study.  Continue reading Canaries in the Coal Mine: Punk icon East Bay Ray talks about artists being exploited online and why that is just the tip of the iceberg

Thinking Differently: An Interview With Harvey Valdes

Harvey_Valdes_by_Peter_Gannushkin-06Harvey Valdes likes pushing limits. He challenges conventions, breaks rules, innovates new concepts, and is on the lookout for alternatives. But don’t consider him an oddball iconoclast inventing systems to mask his limitations—he’s the opposite of that. He boasts prodigious chops on guitar and oud, is a master player in a variety of genres, has first rate compositional skills, and collaborates with many of NYC’s most progressive and innovative thinkers.

A New Jersey native, Valdes’ first exposure to music—aside from the salsa and cumbia in his Columbian household—was ‘80s MTV. “One of the first cassettes I bought was Guns N’ Roses’ Appetite for Destruction,” he says. “That got me hooked right away. MTV at that time was a big product of metal and hair metal, so there was a lot of guitar that I was being exposed to. I wanted to know everything about it. And once I discovered Metallica I thought, ‘Oh my God, this is guitar music.’”

But Valdes didn’t join a metal band or wear spandex; he broadened his horizons, discovered new styles of music, and eventually earned a degree from New York’s New School in Jazz and Contemporary Music. Post-college he joined the ranks of the City’s progressive music scene and worked on notable projects like Karl Berger’s Improvisers Orchestra, Butch Morris’ Luck Cheng’s Orchestra and Nublu Orchestra, Harel Shachal’s Anistar, and toured as part of the Wooster Group’s production of Francesco Cavalli’s 1641 baroque opera, La Didone. His trio—featuring Sana Nagano on violin and Joe Hertenstein on drums—released PointCounterPoint in April and that was preceded last fall by Roundabout, his collection of recomposed jazz standards for solo guitar.

We spoke with Valdes about his influences, his experiences on oud, the parallels between baroque music and jazz, odd meters and polyrhythms, his idiosyncratic approach to composition, and ergonomic guitar design. Continue reading Thinking Differently: An Interview With Harvey Valdes