May 1999 Articles
Who Cares if You Have a CD? - Part I
Monsters of Glass
Space is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra
by John F. Szwed reviewed by Michael Monhart

Who Cares if You Have a CD? - Part I
Northwest creative musicians discuss the state of the artifact

Not so long ago, making a record seemed like an impossibly lofty goal to aim for. Having your name on an LP symbolized one's arrival as a musician, and hopeful musos everywhere dreamed of the day when they would finally hold in their hands the black vinyl disc that marked their rite of passage as a creative artist.

Recording artists were an elite community, not least because of the prohibitive cost of recording, manufacturing, and distributing LPs. But as recording and reproducing technology became increasingly affordable and portable in the 1980s and 90s, and as compact discs replaced resource-depleting vinyl as the standard medium, production costs became practically negligible. Today, any ambitious closet musician with a few hundred bucks can buy a CD burner and manufacture their own discs, or make their music available as downloadable files on the Internet. As a result, the marketplace is now awash in inexpensively produced CDs and sound files, presenting listeners with a bewildering array of choices.

For musicians working outside of conventional genres, the advent of inexpensive recording and reproducing technology has been liberating. With the technological means now in the hands of the artist, it's no longer necessary to suck up to an indifferent music industry in order to document and distribute one's music, no matter how uncommercial it may be. But what ultimately becomes of the flood of self-produced CDs? Do they reach their intended audience, or succeed in leveraging the musician's career? In a word, is the effort worth it for the adventurous musician?

The Tentacle asked a range of Northwest musicians to talk about their experiences producing and marketing CDs of creative music. Some of the interviewees released their CDs themselves, others through small independent record labels. We'd like to thank the following musicians for their thoughtful responses to our questions: Eric Amrine, Christopher DeLaurenti, Kevin Goldsmith, Jeff Greinke, Doug Haire, Sue Ann Harkey, Bill Horist, Tucker Martine, Dan Moore, Aiko Shimada, and Doug Theriault.

What was your primary motivation for making a CD? Profit? Promotion? Documentation? A feeling of personal accomplishment?

BILL HORIST: A CD is a facet of the desire to pursue music. Even the most casual teenage fantasies of 'being in a band' involve the production and release of recordings. The motivation for producing a CD, or any type of recording, is almost synonymous with the motivation for making sound. A recording enables a performer to experience their work as a listener would perceive it; in other words, outside the experience of making the work. It is only through a recording that a performer can take the work in on its own merit-sound.

Also, the CD acts as a permanent record, an unmalleable representation of what otherwise is an event that lasts an instant. This document can also represent, to a listener, a certain context in which the recording was made, like a photograph (another permanent record of an instant). When that recording is reproduced as a CD, it takes on new attributes. Sound now has a physical home that exists in senses other than hearing (synesthesia notwithstanding). It becomes something one can enjoy through touch, sight, even smell. This tactile sound document can then be disseminated-as a gift, for commerce, as part of an application process, and so on.

According to the U.S. Copyright Office, a CD is considered published when it falls into the hands of someone who is not a part of the production. This can give an artist a sense of validation. The thought that others own (and maybe even appreciate) this physical record of an artist's work can be prime motivation. The artist is freed from hoping that an audience will remember every sound in a live performance as time transfers the event to memory. "Soylent Radio" was actually the result of an interest Unit Circle Rekkids took in my work. I had done a piece for the Unit Circle compilation "Nocturne Concrete," and the result was an offer to produce a full-length CD. I am currently completing a new solo record that I will submit to various labels. I would consider producing independently provided that I could get connected with an established distribution network. Not only for retail, but for promotion as well (i.e., radio, periodical reviews, and concert promotion).

DOUG THERIAULT: My primary idea for releasing a CD was to document a period in my (or our) development that I thought was mature. I sent my CDs to labels to show them that there are people in Portland that are promoting new music also. I could care less if someone wanted to put out my music or not.

DOUG HAIRE: The motivation for "Wigwam Bendix" was to commit to disc a feeling and a sound to define a community of players in a span of time. Profit and promotion were not motivations.

TUCKER MARTINE: The "Mount Analog" CD was assembled so that I could mark a certain period of my work and move on. At no time during the making of it was I thinking "I'm making a CD." It was just a collection of work that started to reveal itself as a cohesive entity with release potential. At that point I hooked up with Adam Hervey in San Francisco, who was leaving Too Pure records to start his own small label, Pehr. There is always hope that it might end up in the hands of some folks that will really connect with it.

JEFF GREINKE: The only album I've released myself was the LP "Cities in Fog" in 1985. Everything else I've done has been released on various labels. My primary reason for releasing my own record was to get my music out and about and to establish myself somewhat, enough so that I might find someone else to take on my next project.

KEVIN GOLDSMITH: (as owner of Seattle's Unit Circle Rekkids) Each CD that Unit Circle releases is for a different reason. Each album is a special case. Mostly the label puts out music that I feel needs to be heard and would have a hard time finding another outlet. If I don't make the album, no one will hear the excellent work of the artist, and that would be terrible. In some cases I put out records that could be on other labels, but I'm excited to work with an artist I admire. Profit isn't a major factor, but as a business owner, I can't completely ignore it or I wouldn't be able to continue doing this.
(as musician) The work I have released is much more for promotion than profit. I have no illusions about my music. I don't expect many financial rewards no matter how popular it becomes. I want to get my music out so that others will hear it.

ERIC AMRINE: I had some really good music that needed to be preserved and refined by the mastering process, plus it made a great present for friends and family. I can't deny that I thought a lot of the public would like the Suction CD, but it wasn't my ultimate goal to inflict it on the world. For the hell of it, I sent out four or five to KCMU and some tiny labels, and one in Seattle called me on it. It began as an end in itself but ended as a real beginning.

AIKO SHIMADA: Promotion and a feeling of personal accomplishment. Documentation of my work. I also made the CD for people who wanted to listen to my music. I was also hoping that someone else would be interested in putting in some money for me to make the next CD.

DAN MOORE: Primarily, it was a business decision. Anyone trying to make a living in the business of music must be presented in a professional manner in order to be taken seriously, and cassette tapes just don't cut it anymore. I would say that my reasoning fell into the promotion category, since all of Kilgore Trout's previous recordings were on cassette. Plus, I took the responsibility upon myself to produce the entire thing, so it was a learning process as well.

In the case of our band, we had already attracted major label interest but there was a lack of categorization in our sound. Majors weren't sure how to label us, so we used the CD production to be our own label. It was released under Kitchen Table records (BMI), a division of KGT Enterprises, which is our own label/publishing company. We legally collect 100 percent of all revenues generated by the disc.

SUE ANN HARKEY: A personal accomplishment, I guess. An end in itself: get it down, out of your system and move on to the next thing. A document. Being a musician, you are compelled to put out your music somehow; like a painter does a painting, it is your medium. I don't think every painter's motivation is to sell each and every painting they do; we artists just have to produce. My motivation has never been money, I found a capital venture to be a futile approach. In some, I've seen it skew the type of music they played or where they played it. My main motivation has been to express myself and have something to give to my friends.

Did you recoup your initial investment through sales of the CD?

DOUG HAIRE: Costs were not recouped. If Craig Flory and I had done "Wigwam Bendix" in 1999, we could have broken even because of the smaller runs now available.

DAN MOORE: Yes. We have sold over 1,200 copies of the "Kilgore Trout" CD worldwide to this point, through stores and offstage sales. We have been "picked up" by two catalog distribution organizations as a result of producing our own CD. Our initial investment of 1,000 copies sold completely within a year or so. The CD sold steadily at first, then dropped off a bit. We have always experienced better sales off the stage than through stores. Usually groups need major label promotion and advertising to generate sales in stores. We are still selling the original CD, even though it sold more frequently when it was released. We are working on our next 1,000 and will be releasing our second CD this spring.

BILL HORIST: Monetarily, I haven't (nor will I) recoup my initial investment in "Soylent Radio." I hope this will start to change with future releases. I can't attest to the actual percentage of discs that have been sold, but I know it's small. The CD has received several great reviews and a reasonable amount of airplay. The actual sales have gone up and down a couple of times. There was a steady decline in sales after the official release; however, a resurgence occurred several months later, after I was on tour. I received a percentage of the final product to sellon my own instead of a cash percentage of sales. Many of these were given away. The result, however, was that certain "freebies" afforded me opportunities that far outweighed the cash value of the product.

SUE ANN HARKEY: Never. It's a tax write-off. I always produce the minimum amount I can, 500 when manufactured. I sell anywhere between 10 to 100 copies and give away about 200. The sales take place within the first six months after release and then stop. I am not ambitious anymore.

DOUG THERIAULT: Yes, I have recouped my investment in the CDs, because I only press CD-Rs. I make limited editions and sell them when I play or to distributors who have confidence in what I do. I see no reason to press 1,000 or 500 of anything-why would I want that clutter taking up my space!

How did you distribute your CD? Where did you sell most of your CDs: mail order, at shows, or in stores?

JEFF GREINKE: By all of those means plus distribution from medium-sized distributors like Rough Trade, New Music Distribution Service, etc.

DOUG THERIAULT: Most CDs I sell in stores.

DOUG HAIRE: Distributed locally through Tower, Wall of Sound , Cellophane Square, etc. This is exclusively how we have sold it, beside the release party.

CHRISTOPHER DELAURENTI: To really sell CDs, it is essential to get distribution. As a rule, distributors will not touch single releases so it is best to fabricate a company and release other CDs simultaneously or convince a reasonably successful label with concurrent releases to release the disc.

Most of my CDs ["Three Camels for Orchestra"] sold through my Web page, which allowed me to more than recoup the money invested in manufacturing and printing. Note that I did this in 1996 before everybody and their dog was selling CDs on the Web. Now, I would not recommend it to anyone. Remember, everybody has a CD these days, so it is imperative to make the release distinct.

Incidentally, reviews mean nothing. Option printed a full-color reproduction of the cover; although it helped attract some distributors, few wrote to purchase the disc. A brief blurb in The Wire, however, along with a spotlight on BBC Radio 3, got folks smuggling American dollars to me from England! A focused www marketing campaign could work but is too detailed to discuss here.

SUE ANN HARKEY: Almost every recording I have sold, I sold it directly to the person buying it, usually at gigs or mail order. I haven't even tried getting a distributor for my last CD, "Fulcrum." I can count on one hand the copies that make it into a store, and they usually end up in the cutout or used sections. If a distributor does gets wind of my work somehow, they buy about four or five copies.

My main vehicle has been radio airplay and live performances. When I put out a release, radio is my focus. I love the idea of an anonymous audience and the various venues radio broadcasts find themselves invited into. There is also activity happening in those venues, people doing their own artwork, housecleaning, workplaces, etc. Radio is where I find new music. Radio has also been a live performance venue for me.

Forget labels. If people relied on labels, their music would never get heard. Like most people in the "experimental or other non-mainstream creative music" scenes, I started my own label in 1980, Cityzens For Non-Linear Futures. Back then, they were all cassette releases, a medium I could produce myself, on demand.

TUCKER MARTINE: Mostly at stores. I've never been too good at hustling CDs at shows or arranging for somebody to set up a table, even though I always show up with some. The Internet is becoming a legitimate way to sell low-profile music as well.

AIKO SHIMADA: I do consignment at local record stores, but sell most of my CDs at shows.

DAN MOORE: I have done most of our distribution, between my day gig and other projects. It is a business in itself, and like all businesses it requires full-time attention. I have gotten the disc into more stores around the Northwest than others across the country, and have used our Web site to sell a bunch as well. Using Internet audio techniques to sample our music has been extremely helpful in generating online sales. But we still sell the greatest numbers off the stage at shows. For example, we sold almost 40 copies at the 1995 Bumbershoot Festival within a period of about one hour.

KEVIN GOLDSMITH: (as musician) 100 percent at shows, so far.
(as label owner) The bulk of our sales come from stores, but mail order is increasing a lot. I prefer mail order because we get more per disc and we get to establish a more direct relationship with our audience. Also, we've never had a distributor who hasn't been lame about paying, so mail order is the only income we can rely on. To be honest, we should be selling a lot more CDs through shows, but for some reason, most of our artists are shy about hawking their wares at their performances. This is just silly from my perspective, because the bands could be making a lot more money this way.

BILL HORIST: Unit Circle Rekkids has several established relationships with various national distribution agencies, in addition to its own direct mail-order operation, which deals on an international level. Most of the sales, as would be expected, are at live performances. An audience seems more likely to procure the CD, even if only as a memento of an event that moved them.

See next month's Tentacle for Part II of this article, in which these recording artists discuss the rewards and frustrations of making and marketing CDs.

Catch & Release

Monsters of Grace @ Paramount Theatre, Seattle, April 9
by Gavin Borchert

Robert Wilson and Philip Glass's latest collaboration (billed hypefully as a "digital opera") was basically a Bumbershoot act-the sort of thing they set up in the Opera House, where you can go and spend an hour out of the sun and watch something moderately cool and interesting and then leave and get a gardenburger and get in line for Bonnie Raitt. As an evening's show unto itself, it was a disappointment. (If I'd had to pay for it, I'd call it a rip-off.)

It was dismaying how little there was to look at-how few of the episodes, some abstract and some representational yet lightly surreal, provided any moments of beauty or emotional power or, as promised in the title, grace. The movement within each animation-the show was essentially just a bunch of videos-was uniformly slow (OK, it's Robert Wilson, but still) and rarely compelling. Pretty at best. Even the 3-D effect was not that great. Did Wilson just scribble some sketches on a napkin over breakfast and hand them over to a Computer Animation 101 class?

Glass's music was attractive enough-"Songs From Liquid Days," only with world music samples. A little more richly textured. The P.G. Ensemble and the four singers sounded fine, though I heard a lot of complaints about the latters' diction. The song texts could just as easily have come from Emily Dickinson or a "Baywatch" script as from Rumi, for all they had to do with Wilson's arbitrary images.

Andrew Bartlett very charitably ascribed the low visual interest to the nascent technology. I'm not convinced. It's hard not to be cynical and dismiss "Monsters" as an easy way for Wilson and Glass to squeeze a few bucks out of their presold audience, with Wilson, especially, exerting the minimum possible imagination and effort. Then they threw it all together, booked some halls, and charged $40 a head. To put it in perspective, let's look at the Tentacle performing community's usual resources: These are musicians who often play in coffeehouses for an audience that fits on two couches, with proportional box-office receipts, and when their central venue-a cement-walled storeroom-shuts down, it's a sledgehammer blow. Yet with these limitations they still manage to make magic, or at least hold the attention. Wilson and Glass, on the other hand, had the money and name recognition to do anything they liked-and they gave us that?

Gavin Borchert is a composer and music writer.

Littoral Zone

A Tentacle Book Review by Michael Monhart

Space is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra by John F. Szwed
Hardcover: July 1997, Pantheon Books, ISBN 0679435891
Paperback: September 1998, Da Capo Press, ISBN 030680852

Say, for the sake of argument, that one dates the jazz tradition back to the King Oliver recordings of the early 1920s, where Louis Armstrong, through sheer, abundant creativity added the dynamic expressiveness of a soloist to the stew of collective improvisation that was New Orleans jazz. That gives us over 70 years of a tradition that has continually reshaped itself, has spread around the world, and in some monikers is known, strangely enough, as America's "classical" music. This would seem-particularly in an age of hyperbolic retrenchment of style-enough time to also generate research and reflection on the nature of the music, on its significant creators, and on its relationship with American society through these 70 years. However, with the exception of a few quite notable exceptions (Gunther Schuller's masterful analyses of early jazz and the swing era, Thomas Owen's recent work on bebop, and Lewis Porter's insightful musical biography of John Coltrane spring to mind) jazz scholarship has too often been anecdotal, fawning, or more concerned with myth than fact (Eric Nisenson's life of Coltrane for one example). In view of this, John Schwed's Space is the Place is an extremely welcome addition to the canon of keen, penetrating, and diligent analysis of jazz.

The fact that Szwed has chosen as his topic one of the most irreducible figures in a tradition quite full of quirky and eccentric individuals makes his work all the more remarkable. Sun Ra-born Herman Blount, a Gemini, on May 22, 1914, in Birmingham, Alabama-is an anomaly among anomalies. In the parlance of the times, he resists closure. Claiming a cosmic origin, singing of space travel, leading an ever-mutating communal band playing at one moment the outest of jazz and in the next careening into lovely (and disciplined) readings of Fletcher Henderson tunes, he remains a mostly marginalized figure in the jazz tradition. Sure, he's always in the history books, but always as the odd guy from Saturn. Szwed does the excellent job of both demystifying Sun Ra and at the same time conveying just how complex a thinker he was.

The biography is divided into six chapters that chronicle Sun Ra's life from his earliest years to his death in 1993. (It's also accompanied by a discography compiled by the expert on Sun Ra recordings, Robert Campbell). After leaving Birmingham in 1946 at age 32, he methodically and deliberately obscured his personal background, claiming Saturn rather than Birmingham as his place of origin. Szwed unearths revealing stories and facts about these years in Birmingham, citing his prodigious musical gifts and curiosity, his voracious readings in the Bible and Egyptology, his contact with spacemen, and most significantly the traumatizing effects of racism and his induction into the Army (the latter despite his eloquent and forceful protests of pacifism).

From Birmingham, Sun Ra followed the path of many musicians from the South northward to Chicago. There, after a stint with Fletcher Henderson, he started to gather musicians around him, grouped in a family-like atmosphere marked by endless rehearsals. He continued his reading, moving from Egyptology to space. The recordings from this time reveal a composer conversant in traditional forms but increasingly moving toward the use of odd intervals, expanded textures and timbres, and a sound that was out yet swinging. Sun Ra was one of the first to adapt electronic instruments to jazz and to fully utilize the additional musical possibilities presented with the instruments. Szwed quotes from liner notes written by Sun Ra at the time: "All my compositions are meant to depict happiness combined with beauty in a free manner. Happiness, as well as pleasure and beauty, has many degrees of existence; my aim is to express these degrees in sounds which can be understood by the entire world. The mental impression I intend to convey is that of being alive, totally alive. The real aim of this music is to coordinate the minds of peoples into an intelligent reach for a better world, and an intelligent approach to the living future... My rule is that every note played must be a living note... My watchword is precision... We rehearse every day on new sounds and new approaches to projection... Some of the songs I write are based on poems... I consider every creative musical composition as being a tone poem."

In this excerpted description can be found many of the significant aspects of Sun Ra's approach: the importance of beauty, the universality of his thinking and music, the didactic nature of his music, the emphasis on living notes, on discipline and precision, on endless rehearsal and finally the importance of his poetry in his life and the degree to which it formed a bedrock for his music.

In 1961 the band hit New York City, taking up residence there until 1968, when they moved to Philadelphia. The band's performances increasingly took on the aura of mythic spectacles, blending multimedia presentations of music, lights, dancers, painters, slide shows, and assorted arcana. Szwed ably situates this period of Sun Ra's life in the wider intellectual currents of the Village in the 1960s. With Sun Ra, however, there was always the tension of the opposites, and it was at this time, when 'freedom' was the buzzword, that he began the move back toward including swing tunes in his repertory. His approach was thorough, leading the band not only through detailed transcriptions of Fletcher Henderson's tunes (including the mistakes), but also incorporating lectures about Henderson, his times and the racism prevalent then, and the spirit that informed the Henderson band's performances.

The pace of the book picks up after the band moves to Philadelphia, their home until Sun Ra's death in 1993. Szwed discusses the band's communal living situation, Sun Ra's authoritarian control over finances, lifestyle, and the music. He includes a close reading of the poetry. While the band never came near to any commercial success, they toured incessantly through the late 1970s and 1980s. It was an active period, and I would like to have seen more attention paid to this era in the book. It is rather remarkable to consider that in 1974, Sun Ra, at 60, was just picking up steam, continuing to change and to proselytize what was for him the utterly redemptive power of the music.

Szwed has written a great book; it's well researched, insightful, respectful yet critical. I finished it wanting more information, anecdotes, interviews, and discussion of the music. I say this less as a criticism of its length (389 pages) and more as a reflection of its fascinating readability. Szwed does discuss recordings and concerts and reveals some of the process by which Sun Ra led the band and composed his pieces; however, this is primarily an intellectual biography, not a musical analysis. It gives the background of the life experiences, readings, and thinking of a multifaceted musical genius. Hopefully, someone will complement this work with a study that illustrates the music in more depth.

When Sun Ra passed from this earthly plane in 1993, jazz lost one its most creative, expressive, knowledgeable, and thoughtful practitioners. The Sun Ra Arkestra's concerts were events that find little parallel in today's jazz world. Conceived as mythic-ritual occasions, they encompassed the range of human (one might add stellar) experience, the joys, the beauty, the sorrow, racism, the good and the evil. Musically, they captured a profound reverence for past traditions of jazz, yet anticipated future sounds. In my own experience they were certainly performances of a different order. Szwed's book is inspiring reading for anyone who wants to understand more about a man who used his music to try and help humankind come to a fuller understanding of our place and responsibilities in the cosmos. F or more on Sun Ra, I recommend exploring the excellent reissue series on Evidence Records. Jazz in Silhoutte, The Magic City, and Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy are three discs that provide a good introduction to the many sides of his music. Two good starting points on the Web are www.fusebox.com/~jimr/ and www.dpo.uab.edu/~moudry/. Peter Hinds has been publishing a fascinating series of Sun Ra interviews that he conducted over the span of many years. It's raw, unedited Sun Ra. His Web site is www.sunraresearch.com.

Saxophonist Michael Monhart plays with the groups Stinkhorn and Outland and has organized the periodic Earshot Jazz Festival Tributes to Sun Ra. He really does believe Sun Ra came from outer space.