George Harrison’s Brain

Save $5.49 on George Harrison’s ‘Brain…”

I checked my email today and this is what greeted me…a note from amazon.com.
I couldn’t help myself and had to check it out….it turned out to be an album called “Brainwashed” and the window of my pop monitor had cut off the end of the title…

Copyright

Our world keeps turning faster and yet the government extended the duration of copyright ownership to near a century. How does that make sense? Does an artist really need to hold on to his work for that length of time? Does an inventor? Does anybody?

The big record companies and film studios want copy protection on all CDs and DVDs. Instead of writing more and more complex copy pretection schemes they should spend money on an awareness campaign. It’s simple really, if everybody steals an artist’s work the artist cannot make a living and cannot spend time on his art. That’s all. If you like somebody’s work you should support their efforts by purchasing a CD so that they can create more works that you might enjoy. Ah, but I suspect therein lies the problem not! I get the feeling the public would support artists they like…..it’s the corporations they might have a problem with. I suspect people like to take music for free because they know that most of the money goes to big multinational corporations and not to the artists. With all of the corporate excesses of the last decade it is hard for the public to feel sorry for the losses that these companies take.

Let’s face it copying has always been around. Probably even more in the analog world. I remember meeting a fan after a show in 1990 and she proudly proclaimed that she had personally made 75 cassette copies of my album Nouveau Flamenco for her friends. We are no more at the mercy of people copying our work today than we were a decade or two ago.

iPod

These days I listen more to mp3 files than CDs. Either with my iPod (using the custom in-ear monitors I wear when we perform LIVE because the earbuds that come with the iPod are pretty bad) or with a laptop (I use an older G3 PowerBook because they run cooler and it very rarely needs to use its cooling fan) that is connected to my stereo via a “Quattro” digital-analog converter by M-Audio which is connected to the USB port of the computer. Attached to the FireWire port is a 40GB harddrive (a drive that does not need a cooling fan) that holds about 6,000 songs (I encode mp3 files at 192kbps or VBR with a minimum of 160kbps). The best fun is putting playlists together…this morning I made a playlist with Satie and Mompou solo piano music that I am enjoying right now. There are better D/A converters out there, but at under $300 the Quattro sounds quite impressive. It certainly sounds so much better than the computers built-in sound!

Grandmothers

Here is a little something I found on plastic.com this morning….the whole article appeared in the NY Times

‘The surprising result to us was that if the father was alive or dead didn’t matter. If the grandmother dies, you notice it; if the father does, you don’t.’ ‘There’s a new mystery which has flummoxed biologists and anthropologists: grannies. It seems these researchers have been blown away by the discovery that the presence of maternal grannies offers an unexpectedly potent boon on the lives of their grand kids. Consider the positive influence of grannies in rural Gambia: ‘The anthropologists found that for Gambian toddlers, weaned from the protective balm of breast milk but not yet possessing strength and immune vigor of their own, the presence of a grandmother cut their chances of dying in half.’

‘Interestingly, paternal grannies instead have a neutral or even negative influence on their grand kids. Researchers working on Japan found that ‘when a maternal grandmother lived in the household, boys were 52 percent less likely to die in childhood than if there was no grandmother present. Conversely, when the father’s mother lived in the house, boys were 62 percent more likely to die than were those without a resident grandma.’ But how do grandmas work their potent powers? Alas, the frustrated researchers have no clue. Clearly the grannies are doing something; exactly what this is is anybody’s guess.’

Best of….

At last I received some “Best of Ottmar Liebert” CDs from Epic Records. I must admit that it is a nice compilation, although it would have been nice if they had asked me and we could have added one or two unreleased versions of these songs to make the package more special.
Ten years of life unfold for me when I listen to the album. Different versions of the Luna Negra band, different studios, countless tours in the USA, Canada, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, South America…ten years are a long time and it is strange to have it summed up on one CD. I do think the guitar sound got better with every album and the last three songs (from “Little Wing) on the compilation SOUND the best to me although there is always a special place in my heart for the songs from “The Hours between Night + Day”.