Gentrification of Lewes East Sussex

The artists residents and workers at the Phoenix Industrial estate have been battling to keep the development somewhere that the community could remain as the creative hub of the community of Lewes unfortunately the area will be gentrified so that a few people can get their hands on the money.. They put it better than me so for this week’s article I will pass over to Lewes Phoenix Rising ……..

Bitterly disappointing decision from the South Downs National Park Authority yesterday - which was more focused on recording the activity on the Phoenix for posterity than trying to nurture it for the future. Faced with a planning committee that was highly uncritical of the proposed plan and spent more time worrying about giving Willey's Bridge (which isn't even in the application area!) a lick of paint than the loss of facilities used by 1,000s of young people - and was more concerned with saving two windows from the Ironworks than the businesses within them.

Committee members repeatedly voiced "sympathy" for the livelihoods that will be displaced and admiration for the many activities that go on at the Phoenix and hope that businesses can find space "elsewhere".

We call on the SDNP and LDC to make sure that ACTION IS TAKEN to keep creative and manufacturing businesses and social enterprises within and thriving in Lewes - recognising that an industrial park on the outskirts of town with large corporate rents isn't the answer.

Offering makers and artists an opportunity to paint heritage murals in the underground carpark or contribute to the manufacture of street furniture of the new development (especially when they no longer have anywhere to make it!) - is at best crass - and at worst indicative of a National Park hell bent on turning Lewes from a working town into a museum town.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk

The language of the notes

Many of the great musicians of the past were illiterate and obviously not being able to the read and write they were not going to be reading music either therefore their musical learning came from listening to other people play and working things from recording. They also didn’t really have any significant understanding of scales and chords for the most part sand therefore understood music as if they were phrases spoken by famous musician so for instance a line that Louis Armstrong played would have been referred to as something that Louis said.

I once heard the quote by Albert King referring to Jimi Hendrix in which Albert said, ‘Jimi Hendrix plays my blues and he should go and play his own’, at the time I found this a rather ridiculous remark but in hindsight he was referring to something from a completely different paradigm of musical thinking than my with a different understanding of how music was formed. Indeed as Albert King was one of the great sources of inspiration to Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton and many others it was quite true that these people were playing his blues as saying it with his ‘words’.

What is significant here is that we understand these great players were so driven by what they heard and not what they intellectualised; they understood music as a language form which if we can get back to that way of thinking would help our playing to be more musical and not so scale orientated.

  Just express words and rhythms through the notes that you play and by developing ideas of others remembering that these are truly phrases of a language; this is a great way for children to learn to play.

www.bluescampuk.co.uk    Three days of learning to play music in a band. The music summer school  

Children of the world unite and play the guitar

There is a discouraging attitude from government being made towards the arts., this is coming from ministers within government who should know better. This behaviour should stop because the country has always been excellent at producing music and the arts which is on display to the whole world bringing in massive amounts of money but also contributing to the country’s soft power. It is way that the quality arts are very beneficial to the UK and may in some way lead to a more peaceful perspective of us from outside that is of importance but in a subtle way.

It is true that the arts often benefit greatly from difficult circumstances within society; think back to the drama and music of the post war period leading to the 1960’s and beyond each troubled era leading to great innovation in British artistic output. However what worries me is the damage that is caused by people in power making remarks that are disparaging, these are subtle and subliminal and they have a bullying tone of the nanny state.

What seems very evident to me in my teaching and training work is that artistic people require self-expression, if these things are not fulfilled in their lives it can lead to depression and unhappiness and therefore for many people the full and thorough use of arts in their life is absolutely essential in making them happy. The idea of someone becoming scientific irrespective of their inclination or whatever it is that the government is trying to do is quite frankly absurd; so pick up your instrument and play and don’t get fooled again.

Vic

 

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What makes a good player a great player?

If you spend time looking at videos on YouTube of the young whiz kids who can play the most amazing solos, bass lines and drum solos you would be led to believe that the level of their technique is such that they are just about to take over.
The question I like to pose to my pupils is quite simply was Jimi Hendrix the best guitar player? Is Victor Wooten the best bass player? The answer is no if you are looking at technique, but what makes a great musician isn’t technique, it is all about having something to say. When Jimi Hendrix was on the scene, there were players such Wes Montgomery, Pat Martino Tal Farlow and many others including John McLaughlin who dwarfed him with their technique.
One thing that all great musicians have is a memorable way of playing, they are known for catchy and melodic ideas and that is the thing about wild technique it is often not tuneful or catchy. Like lots of jazz and lots of classical music it is not easily remembered, unless you’re a musician of course.
So get across to budding musicians the need for ideas to become melodically interesting not just to be like a jobbing musician’s way of playing, think of the bass line that would be played by someone like Paul McCartney or Sting. Because they are songwriters there is a tendency for them to play more melodically or for the bass line to support the chord sequences.
So try stripping an idea back to the basics and then make it sing a melody to you instead of playing by rote. Another idea is to ditch any idea that you play out of habit, really listen!
Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk learn to play in a band for three days

Food for thought

A few months ago we saw we saw an article about a café in Brighton which was using food due to be thrown away because it was after its best by date. The café takes the food makes it into meals which they then sell by donation. They were crowd funding to find a permanent residence for the café which currently is open one day a week at a church in the city. We pledged a small amount of money to help with the project.

Last week Sue and I went and paid a visit to the church to have a look at how the project was running we met with the organizer Adam who showed us some of the food that was being used and we stayed for lunch. There must have been two hundred  people come in for lunch when they opened the doors and it was all sorts from the homeless to  students and people like myself who realized that this was the best value for money café in the whole Brighton. Lunch was amazing, but what really stayed with me was the discussion that I had with Adam at the beginning when he was telling me how they get the food.

When they first started they would go through the bins of supermarkets collecting anything that had been thrown away but now they have established contacts with the supermarkets who now supply them. But what was truly shocking was the food banks, because of legislation were throwing away massive amounts of foodstuffs such as tinned food that was more than three months old obviously tinned food can last for years but such is the ridiculousness of the wastage due to the capitalist system and the law, where people are starving out on the streets, food is going to landfill.

This idea of wastage in the system is not confined to just the food industry, local councils waste extraordinary amounts of money because of ridiculous bureaucracy and National Health Service waste money because of ridiculous laws passed by governments who want to make their mark.

The Bluescamp project is supporting the café by putting on a concert at the church during March of next year, to us this is something that is an incredibly important aspect of community, where some people are so willing to help and donate their time to such a worthy cause adding a bit of music to their promoting may help in some small way to highlight the work. I have placed beneath the website please check it out.

http://www.realjunkfoodbrighton.co.uk/

Vic

 

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For education creativity is a dark art.

The focus of today’s education seems to be to change one focus away from the arts and on to the sciences,  as a guitar teacher and educator in creative thinking this is become a concern to me.

Over the past few months it has become obvious that pupils and parents have changed their attitude. There has been a general fear of missing any time from academic lessons even for 20 minutes to half an hour a week in order to learn a musical instrument. If they only knew what goes on in the course of a day at school where there are obvious moments where the teaching day is disrupted because of illness and lessons being covered by other teachers or just down time because of some other event like children misbehaving.

I know through personal experience of the 40 years of teaching and playing the guitar, artistic subjects activate areas of the brain which are virtually untouched in academic learning. However the government guidelines to things such as not taking any time off for holidays during the term time has meant parents have become terrified of their children falling behind in academic lessons.

Also statements like ‘we should be like the Chinese, we should work much harder as do other countries children’ this is fine if you want to make them into a number of robots. I have no problem with somebody wanting to be a scientist or engineer if they want to, but trying to turn people who are artistically inclined that way seems to be quite ridiculous.

To me it looks like education targets are being set by the accountants of the world of education with their tick box mentality in order to the next stupid ideology in order to win an arms race of education against other countries.

 

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Grief Molting.

 If you’re a singer and need to make songs, make a different song energized by your being alive again after your grief molting. If you’re a painter, paint, if you’re a dancer, dance if you are a farmer, plant. Just don’t assume you can use what you sincerely sent to the sea, for that is sending it all to the market.
Grief is a form of generosity; which praises life and the people and situations which we have lost. – Martin Prechtel.

The act of making music is a deep movement in the ocean of our consciousness or at least it should be. Music expressed by the great artists is exactly that this is the thing that marks out the musician from the technician.
The colleges are turning out lots of technicians and now the Chinese are getting in on Western music (at the moment Classical) we can multiply one hundred fold the numbers of great technicians.
The true artist is the one that expresses grief and as Martin Prechtel says it is a generosity and a praise of life. Now listen to the songs of Amy Winehouse, Billy Holiday, Bessie Smith and the bluesmen and feel the power; that is what we need to aspire to not just the development of technique that does not give us our true voice, technique is just mimicry.
Technique is nothing but a toolkit and a great carpenter is not great because of his tools it just makes it easier for them to be great.  So be very careful to keep connected to the emotional power that drives you and always make the tools be your servant not your master.
Now listen to the latest pop music and decide who the master is.
Vic
www.bluescampuk.co.uk three days of music, discover what you can do.

A person suffers if they are constantly being forced into a statistical mentality and away from the road of feeling – Robert Bly

The road of feeling is something that is difficult to show someone who is learning to play an instrument. It can be alluded to, hinted at, demonstrated but not given as a defined map reference for someone to find. The road is unique to everyone; the elements required are the same for all but ordnance reference will be different, because we all have differing maps.

The problem with something that lies in the unconscious  world of feeling,  emotion and imagination is that being hard to teach we reach for the things that are easy, statistical, measureable and mark able and that is sadly not helping people grow either musically or emotionally.

The statistical world helps only the accountants and leads to people to suffering emotionally. Imagine that you are told by a doctor that you have a 50% chance of survival from a prognosis, that is cold and unemotional and you might say good that the facts are delivered in this way but wait until you are in that position then you will feel that icy touch of statistics from the learned professionals and experts in their field. We are not Vulcans and Mr Spock may have been able to deal with that statement but humans do not deal well with this because it is devoid of feeling. In Garner Thompson’s excellent book ‘Magic in Practice’ which is about the use of language in health care the importance of choice of words that engages the patient in their healing is very important but is sadly lacking today. The old idea of ‘bedside manor’ has been lost in the pursuit of targets and the magic bullet of Big Pharma. The evidence is that in a world where we are being told that things are better than ever, there are increased rates of mental illness and not just in the elderly but increasingly in the young. The word disease shows us in its epistemology exactly what we experience, dis- ease.

This is just part of the picture it is also true of arts and music, sound devoid of feeling is just sound not music at all however it has been processed through Pro Tools. So in playing or teaching we need to connect to the feeling that is the music, make the sounds connect to your emotions let it mean something and allow the music to set you free.

 

Vic

 

www.bluescampuk.co.uk

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Golden Rule- Those who have the gold make the rules.

 This is a rule that applies to music as much as it does for politics and business.
For a moment cast all of one’s ideas of music to one side and think back to a past that had no Christian Church and no written notation of music, but had the story tellers and music makers, some of whom roamed and others who held sacred positions within the social group such as a village.
Music might have been learnt as sacred songs that expressed something ceremonial within the time of year and the society that it was set. This music may have been learnt from others who held the songs or direct from the source itself as in the South American shamans who would have learn ‘from the plant’ the sacred song.
With the advent of Christianity this all changed and over the years, music become more and more formalised with the idea of improvisation banned in preference of something that had been censored by the church; hence writing music and replaying the music of the masters note for note.
This in turn becomes the bench mark of being a real musician; that you can read and that you can play as a regurgitation of the music written thus taking away a musician’s ability to express their creativity.
We know this is the case because it has been documented again and again, most recently with the indigenous peoples of the Americas and Australia (the latter not even being regarded as ‘citizens’ of the country that was originally theirs). The music and the instruments of the indigenous people were ridiculed or banned from use and the Western instruments brought in to replace them.
In a short period of time something that is instigated as a change in the way that music is produced or performed becomes the norm in a society where we forget the past so easily.
A light in the tunnel is the possibility of crowd funding music and arts projects through the likes of Kickstarter and Pledge. May this be the way of change to something more rooted in human experience, long forgotten in a distant past but like all true music is still echoing in the deepest recesses of our consciousness.
Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk

The Master of Demon Valley

The mouth is the door of the mind; the mind is the host of the spirit. Will, intention, joy, desire, thought, worry, knowledge and planning all go in and out through the door. - The Master of Demon Valley.

This is an ancient Taoist text which was translated by Thomas Cleary some twenty years ago and it tells of how Taoist thought and philosophy of ‘the way’ could be used to influence and control the population.
The premise is that all things move from masculine active to feminine receptive or as they express it as Yin and Yang the Yang being the masculine. Language is used to develop that depending on where you are in that arc and not so much about the reality of language expressing truth as we think of it; more in a way of language as a form of magic and spell casting.
The similarities with NLP are interesting with the language being seen as fluid and influential to the mind of the listener.
So if you want to write a rousing song use rousing words, something about love keep saying love, a song about anger, use words that express anger even if they do not make sense in a literal way use language’s power of poetry.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk

Is in the way you tell ‘em

 A pupil of mine is working on the blues phrasing of Albert King and Stevie Ray Vaughan and the way that the lines from the former are found in the playing of SRV. However there are differences and he also mentioned to me that he was finding it confusing listening to various versions on the internet of transcriptions of Stevie’s Crossfire.

He asked ‘How is it that different versions of the same solo exist from different transcribers?’ The only way I could answer him was to say ‘please pass the salt’ and then ‘please, pass the salt’ they mean subtly different things. It is all in the dynamics and delivery and that maybe the listener will interpret different meanings in what they hear, a little like saying does your seeing of the colour blue match someone else’s seeing of that colour.

Guitar playing is very much like speaking a language and therefore you need to listen and then play what you hear NOT what someone else tells you they hear. When you have a number of phrases speak them in your tongue make the phrases communicate and remember that what you hear may not be what others hear. Hear with your feelings and not with your intellect, this will be more truthful; then hone it down like a child would do with language.

Vic



www.bluescampuk.co.uk

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Giving up ownership of your inspiration

The idea that we are not the source of the songs and that we only act as a conduit for the music is an appealing thought for me.
Leonard Cohen expressed this beautifully in his acceptance speech to the Prince of Asturias Foundation were he said the skills of playing guitar were handed to him by a young Spanish guitarist whom he met in Montreal and his lyrics were inspired by the great Spanish poet Lorca. Here is the link to that speech on YouTube https://youtu.be/VIR5ps8usuo
He said of Lorca that he taught him to find his voice even though he understood well the rules of poetry he did not have a voice until he read Lorca. The young Spaniard who taught him the fundamental chords of the guitar gave him the ingredients for all of his songs in six chords, in essence Cohen passed the ownership of his songs back to the land of Spain because the inspiration was rooted in its soil although he personally has no hereditary link.
There seems something fundamentally magical about giving up ownership of your inspiration; it seems to open the flood gates to ideas, pictures, words and feelings as if brought by the muse’s from somewhere else.
So much of education is about being ‘in your head’ whereas the area of creativity is linked to something less formed and something more abstract.

Vic

www.bluescamp.co.uk

Break the Rules

The successful artist that break the rules of the expected way to do things interests me. They are the ones that point to the answer to what makes a great musician.
These anomalies, the Muddy Waters, the Captain Beefheart’s  the John Lee Hooker’s, the Django Reinhardt’s and the Bob Dylan’s of this world are the ones who do not know scales, cannot read music, they are often the illiterate, the ones who play from the heart, the drug takers, the heavy drinkers, the iconoclasts, the womanisers, the radicles and the ones who think outside the box.
The list of these characters includes the deformed, the mentally ill, the revolutionaries, the anarchists and traditionally the ones who get arrested, thrown into jail, and die young.   The fact that rule breaking and the bending of normality seems to be inherent for these people.
Look at those you teach or work with who are different and you will see something powerfully creative in them and that is something which can be tapped into to.
Jimi Hendrix wasn’t necessary the best guitarist for his time actually that fell to the likes of Wes Montgomery and Tal Farlow but Jimi took what he heard and coloured it through the prism of his experiences and personality.
So let us embrace the different and the awkward and counter intuitive (or counter intellectual) and make something expressive and beautiful and challenging.

Vic
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Language tells the mind what to see and what remains hidden and it is language that makes the world exist in our mind. Without the words we have no way to frame it.

An interesting concept, that words not only reflect but also frame how we think.
We can  see evidence of  this in national consciousness, for instance the poetic language of Iran leads to the rather unusual (to the West) allegorical political statements that we are unfamiliar with, which sound as if the speakers  are trying to hide something. Whereas the rather simplistic English used by the Americans lead to the rather blunt and politically aggressive statements which are more familiar. 
There is a theory that the very essence of language; the words, not only are the tools for expressing our thoughts but may also be the things that create our ability to think in a certain way. So if you have a word for something you can experience it, if you do not then you cannot experience it.
Subjugated people have throughout history had their language and their beliefs taken away or debased in order for ethnic cleansing to happen. We as a nation had this happen to us where the native tongue of the British was taken away by the Romans and then that was taken away by the Saxons to be then taken away and debased by the Normans.
Adding music to words can make the effect of language more potent, think of the religious use of music and language with chanting and song. Lyrics are hypnotically powerful because of the rhythms and it is easily possible for music to induce a religious trance. I am not sure why this is but I would guess that the rhythms impact the unconscious aspect of the memory stopping the intellectual analysis of the words and allowing the unconscious effect to take place.
Words carry an emotional resonance, also the way words are spoken changes that level of resonance. Words such as ‘Love’ and ‘Trust’ carry an emotional resonance which will be different to different listeners depending on their experience. Words such as Hate and Greed are so loaded with emotional meaning and are often used by governments and society to create the organising effect of the ‘Leopard outside’ making a community bond through fear. This technique is being used for everything from Fracking (lack of energy), to Terrorism (fear of the apocalypse from the men with beards) to GM (the lack of food security). The truth as always is more complex and nuanced than that and often the deciding point left out is someone is going to make a lot of money out of the desired result of fear but we are being corralled by the smell of fear or moral panic.
The language that we use frames our personal world and language is the way your world functions. Now it is our turn to use language in a way that is truly powerful, with music.
Vic
 www.Bluescampuk.co.uk

Pre sort clients.

A few years ago I came across a company that used some unusual techniques for marketing.

They started as a carpet cleaning company in America or Canada but their techniques were so effective they took the ideas and franchised them out to other carpet cleaners and then started to teach the marketing ideas to other industries.

The company called itself Piranha Marketing because the idea was to 'eat the competition alive'. Some of their ideas had been taken from other business sectors but they had managed to take them up a gear or two.

One of these ideas was how to pre sort the enquiries so that only the ones of use to you contact you for a booking, thus saving you time and money on unnecessary enquiries.

The idea behind this was novel it was by using a long pre recorded phone message giving all the details of your business. I believe that this was a good idea and by giving a prepaid number no one was too bothered about how long the message was.

The idea was to inform the customer about the business and why they should choose you and not someone else. By the end of the call the 'hot' prospects were leaving their details but the time wasters had already hung up.

We often spend money in the wrong place when we advertise; aiming at the wrong people so even when you get people interested they are often the people who you don't want anyway.

These ideas were pre internet so another way of doing this would be to put something on YouTube that clearly marks out why you are the best and why someone should choose you so by the end of the film they can phone you so leave the details then.

Remember that you will need to leave the details on your site about the YouTube film and make sure that people visit there before they contact you by offering a special deal.

Vic

 

 www.bluescampuk.co.uk for three days of playing in a rock band tuition.