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

 

www.bluescamp.co.uk three days of playing in a band at whatever level you are we will take you further

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

www.bluescampuk.co.uk  Learn to play in a band over three days

 

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.

 

www.bluescampuk.co.uk

learn to play in a band in three days

 

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.