Tag: authorship

Biting Breaks: Sampling and Ownership

Posted on March 9, 2015 by - Columns

sample break

This is my first post on NewMusicBox, and I’m delighted to be here. Over the next four weeks, I’m going to be looking at music composition through the lens of electronic music production, specifically the kind based on sampling. This music raises some tough and intriguing philosophical questions: Who is the composer of a sample-based track? Are tracks and notated works equivalent? Are producers “composers”? What even is a composer?

All of these questions are brought into stark relief by “They Reminisce Over You (T.R.O.Y.)” by Pete Rock and CL Smooth, a classic of ’90s hip-hop.

The track was inspired by the life and early death of Pete Rock’s cousin and friend “Trouble” T Roy of Heavy D & the Boyz. In a 2007 Village Voice interview, Pete Rock gave the backstory:

I had a friend of mine that passed away, and it was a shock to the community. I was kind of depressed when I made it. And to this day, I can’t believe I made it through, the way I was feeling. I guess it was for my boy. When I found the record by Tom Scott, basically I just heard something incredible that touched me and made me cry. It had such a beautiful bassline, and I started with that first. I found some other sounds and then heard some sax in there and used that. Next thing you know, I have a beautiful beat made. When I mixed the song down, I had Charlie Brown from Leaders of the New School in the session with me, and we all just started crying.

The Tom Scott record in question is his rendition of “Today” by Jefferson Airplane. The great sax riff comes at 1:37.

Here’s a transcription:

“They Reminisce Over You" sax riff

“They Reminisce Over You” sax riff

And here’s the original Jefferson Airplane song at the head of this memetic family tree:

The chain of musical inheritance doesn’t end with Pete Rock and CL Smooth. Their song has been sampled and quoted many times. Hear my mashup of some of them here:

I’ve debated the musical merits of sampling endlessly with my friends and students, musicians and non-musicians alike. “T.R.O.Y.” is a perfect example of why sampling is so valuable. There would have been no other way for Pete Rock to have arrived at his sound, not even if he had hired Tom Scott to come in and play his sax riff live in the studio. They could, in theory, have painstakingly recreated the instrumentation and ambiance from Scott’s original recording, but the result would still not have had the effortless, tossed-off feel of the samples. Playing a riff from a chart sounds very different from discovering it in the heat of the moment. Pete Rock’s looping transformed unprominent pieces of Tom Scott’s shaggy improvisation into laser-beam-focused funk.

In hip-hop terms, a “break” is a short segment of recorded music that can be sampled and looped. The term originally referred to drums and percussion, but it was later generalized to mean any kind of sound. In his book Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip-Hop, Joseph Schloss argues that Pete Rock created the Tom Scott sax break by sampling it:

On a conceptual level, this means that the break in the original jazz record was brought into existence retroactively by Pete Rock’s use of it. In other words, for the twenty-four years between its release and the day Pete Rock sampled it, the original song contained no break. From that day on, it contained the break from “They Reminisce Over You.” Producers deal with this apparent breaching of the time-space continuum with typically philosophical detachment. Conventionally, they take the position that the break had always been there, it just took a great producer to hear and exploit it. Record collecting is approached as if potential breaks have been unlooped and hidden randomly throughout the world’s music. It is the producer’s job to find them.

For a hip-hop fan, listening to ’60s and ’70s soul albums means regularly encountering familiar breaks. When I first heard “Are You My Woman (Tell Me So)” by the Chi-Lites, I immediately recognized the horns and drums from Beyoncé’s “Crazy In Love.” While I understand that, logically, the breaks in the Beyoncé song are really from the Chi-Lites, I still hear them as “belonging” to Beyoncé’s producer Rich Harrison.

Among sampling musicians, discovery has the same creative status as invention. DJs always want to play something that listeners don’t already know but that they will immediately like, and hip-hop producers have inherited this attitude. In a world saturated with recordings, creating more music ex nihilo is not the valuable service to humanity that it once was. I make sample-based music because I feel like it’s more worthwhile to identify existing sounds that have been overlooked, to bring them to fresh ears, and to give them fresh meaning in new contexts.

Theft is frowned upon in the hip-hop community, but the concept means something different from its traditional sense. If I were to use the Tom Scott break in a new track, without intending it as an homage or reference to Pete Rock, I would be “biting” his idea. However I would not be biting Tom Scott, or Jefferson Airplane for that matter. Copyright law disagrees on this matter completely, but sampling artists have never been overly concerned with copyright law, unless they’re forced to be.

Pete Rock’s moral ownership of the Tom Scott break is complicated by the fact that he wasn’t the first hip-hop producer to have noticed it. Slick Rick used it a year earlier on “It’s A Boy.”

Did Pete Rock bite Slick Rick? Is it a case of convergent discovery? Or is Pete Rock’s track just so much better that his ownership overrides Slick Rick’s? I don’t know the answer, but I suspect it’s the latter.

Even after 30-plus years of hip-hop, a lot of people continue to feel moral discomfort about sampling, especially when it happens without permission. Samplers themselves wryly acknowledge the moral ambiguities—see the Beastie Boys’ “Rhymin’ and Stealin’” or Ice Cube’s “Jackin’ for Beats.” Why does sampling need so much defending, when everyone long ago made peace with collage in other media? Maybe it’s because sampling amplifies the unreal qualities that all recorded music shares. Simon Reynolds observes:

Recording is pretty freaky, then, if you think about it. But sampling doubles its inherent supernaturalism. Woven out of looped moments that are like portals to far-flung times and places, the sample collage creates a musical event that never happened; a mixture of time-travel and séance.

Maybe our anxiety about sampling isn’t about ownership at all. Maybe we just don’t like being confronted so directly with the uncanniness of recorded music. While we might like to pretend that recordings are essentially documents of a performance that actually took place, sample-based music reminds us that this is totally untrue. Our discomfort with sampling is probably also the basis for the often-repeated statement that producers aren’t “real” musicians, that sampling is “just pushing buttons.” Having created music both with instruments and software, I can tell you that making good music is not any easier with the latter than with the former.

In the past, it made sense to conflate musicality with technique, because instruments are hard, and music is hard, and by the time you’ve learned to play, you’ve probably spent a ton of time learning the other. Music editing software is comparatively easy to learn, but you still have to master the music. Consider Microsoft Word: any reasonably bright person can quickly learn how it works, but learning how to write well is another ball of wax entirely. So it is with digital audio production. I can take any motivated student and have them chopping up samples in an hour. But are the results going to sound good? That’s where the musicianship comes in, and it takes as many dedicated hours of practice to attain it as with traditional instruments. Hip-hop has made any attentive listener into a potential composer. Now it’s up to us to use our ears.

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Ethan Hein

Ethan Hein

Ethan Hein is an adjunct professor of music technology at NYU and Montclair State University. As a founding member of the NYU Music Experience Design Lab, he researches and designs beginner-accessible interfaces for music learning and creation. He maintains an active and widely followed music blog at ethanhein.com.

The Best Laid Plans

Posted on October 5, 2012 by - Columns

I had planned to talk about bassists this week, especially about the upcoming Interpretations-sponsored performance by John Eckhardt at Roulette on Monday, October 11, but it has finally come to pass that my priorities have veered so far toward the banal that I must appeal to the universe for guidance. Here are the particulars:

I had made plans to attend Brianna Thomas’s engagement at ZEB’S in the Chelsea district of Manhattan (actually two blocks away from the 28th Street location I described in my post about Tin Pan Alley). I had mentioned Thomas in last week’s post as one of the excellent vocalists I had the pleasure of accompanying in a concert where a problem of authorship arose around a composition, “Solar,” that was misattributed to Miles Davis. It turns out that I had first heard Thomas sing at a recital for Janet Lawson’s class at the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music in 2010. Although I was very impressed with her singing then, I didn’t remember the incident until long after the event that we played together, possibly because our contact there was limited to one on-stage rehearsal and the concert itself. We only spoke with each other for a total of two minutes and that was pretty much limited to a discussion of how we would play Duke Ellington’s “In A Mellow Tone,” a piece that Ellington did compose (with lyrics by Milt Gaber), but as a new melody to the chord progression for Harry Williams and Art Hickman’s “In Sunny Roseland” (a. k. a. “Rose Room”).

I emphasize the authorship of “In A Mellow Tone” for two reasons: (1) to show that the practice of remelodicizing chord progressions of popular songs didn’t begin (in case anyone was wondering) during the bebop era, although it was raised to a high art then; and (2) to bring up a point about misattribution in Duke Ellington’s musical output. It seems that Ellington was in the practice of claiming authorship for the music created by his sidemen. Although it was a limited practice, he, nonetheless, did engage in what I will call “contractual plagiarism.” The best-known example of this was with his long-time collaborator, Billy Strayhorn. In this model, Parties A (Strayhorn) and B (Ellington) would agree that a certain work or certain works created by Party A will be attributed in part or whole to Party B, who wasn’t actually involved in the creation of that work beyond hiring Party A to create it. In copyright terms, a “work for hire.” This is a different situation than the one I cited regarding “Solar,” Miles Davis’s plagiarism of Chuck Wayne’s “Sonny.” A case that is somewhat similar to “Solar” is raised around the very popular “Creole Love Call.” The song’s melody was brought to Ellington (who took a co-composer credit) by one of Ellington’s saxophonists, Rudy Jackson, who claimed it as his own invention. King Oliver, who had recorded the melody of the song as “Camp Meeting Blues” some years before, sued Ellington, who won the lawsuit but was so upset that he fired Jackson. But Ellington’s “contractual” misattributions worked both ways, which is clear in his relationship with Irving Mills, who, in return for supplying Ellington with many lucrative performing engagements—including the long-term stay at the Cotton Club, was granted ownership over half of Duke Ellington, Inc. This resulted in many of Ellington’s best-known works being credited to Mills as a co-author.

The case of Ellingtonian misattribution is an example of professional symbiosis where both parties have something to gain from the obfuscation of authorship, the sort that only deceives the public and whatever higher power(s) might have something to say about it in the hereafter. It appears to have been a fairly common practice. I was recently corrected by jazz historian Scott Yanow about what turns out to be an entirely unsupported claim on my part about the music of Paul Whiteman. I once posited that the music he composed and considered to be jazz was “drivel,” but it was pointed out to me that Whiteman actually never composed anything, that he got his name attached to the copyright of a song in return for having his band record it. While it seems a somewhat overly simplistic way to be excluded from any criticism based on aesthetic criteria, Mr. Whiteman’s compositional acumen is now vindicated, since he had none. But that leaves the question of whether or not contractual misattribution is morally right or wrong.

While I believe that anything done between consenting adults is not morally wrong, there is the problem of whether something agreed to vis-à-vis economic coercion is actually a matter of mutual consent. The contractual misattributions of Whiteman and Ellington are prima facie examples of win-win situations once agreed upon. But what if they weren’t agreed upon? Would Ellington have become a household name or even been able to keep his band together as long as he did if he didn’t agree to give Mills equal partnership in his organization? It’s difficult to say. I believe that Ellington would have managed to become very successful without the influence of Mills. In fact, it was his success, or the obvious promise of it, up to then that attracted Mills in the first place. But consider how often the refusal to hand over one’s intellectual property has led to obscurity and financial struggle for a musician. Such was the case of trumpeter and territory band leader Don Albert, who refused to agree to the terms Joe Glaser offered (to reduce Albert’s band to ten musicians from fourteen) and thus lost the lucrative market of New York City as a place to include on his itinerary. (Details can be found on pages 331-33 of this article.) It isn’t a great stretch of the imagination to see how this becomes part of the current trend of underpaying (or not paying at all) musicians for their performances. It seems that there is a misconception that professional musicians are actually hobbyists who play music in their spare time for a spare dime or that musicians should be happy to get a chance to be “exposed” to the public. This translates into a state of affairs where an artist’s best chance of financial success is to not need to work at all! Artistic expression then becomes proportional to class status and rare is the case where a musician of limited means can develop his or her art.

Let’s Go Team!

Posted on September 28, 2012 by - Columns

There is a paradox in Western art music. While the works of Western music are generally credited to specific individuals, it can be said that no music is about a single individual; it’s a team effort. The teams that I usually perform with are small ensembles of three to five musicians who, for the most part, improvise their performances and tend to fall into three categories: (1) where one or more traditional etiquettes are employed, such as the jam-session default I’ve discussed in previous posts (an example would be Fay Victor’s ongoing work with the music of Herbie Nichols); (2) where the principal considerations are vague and overarching, the paradigm of so-called “free” improvisation (which is what I’ll be doing tonight, September 28, at the Stone with vocalist Judi Silvano and percussionist Warren Smith); and (3) where most of what is played is composed but includes specified intervals of improvisation, such as the music of Alt.Timers (who will be performing this Friday, October 5, at Spectrum).

Occasionally I play in larger groups, like last Thursday (September 20) when I had the honor to work in Karl Berger’s Improvisers Orchestra at El Taller in New York City. Berger, along with Ingrid Sertso and Ornette Coleman, founded the Creative Music Foundation of Woodstock, New York, in 1971, but has been a mainstay on the avant-garde scene since the 1960s. (An online video clip of that concert shows how Berger leads his ensemble by cuing sections and individuals in the group to improvise or play material that was taught to them right before the concert in a way that exemplifies the second of the categories listed above.)

The Chicago native Deborah Weisz is a trombonist-arranger who, having studied with Roswell Rudd, Bob Brookmeyer, Jim McNeely, and Manny Albam, takes an approach to leading a large group more in the style of the third category. She writes for that special ensemble known as the “big band,” a congregation of 16 musicians (8 brass, 5 woodwinds, and 3 rhythm section players) that demands an understanding of a peculiarly American orchestration tradition having its roots in the music of James Reese Europe. I don’t get the opportunity to play in big bands very often, although I cut my teeth in them as far back as 1969 in a summer music camp held at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California. Trumpeter Jon Faddis, saxophonists Alex Foster and Marc Russo, and drummer Tom Rainey were part of the camp’s big band led by Bob Soder, who founded one of the first curricular high school jazz bands that was located in Pleasant Hill, California. And it was with the San Francisco Mission Boys Club Jazz Band that I was bestowed with my moniker, so I have a special place in my heart for the big band and am looking forward to playing with Weisz’s group this Monday (October 1) at the Tea Lounge in Brooklyn.

The overlay of the Western paradox mentioned above on the musics of subaltern American cultures has opened the door for a variety of phenomena that would not exist otherwise. One of the most obvious of them reared its head two weeks ago, on September 15, when I found myself playing in a special event, An Evening in Blue, at the Vanderveer Park United Methodist Church in Brooklyn. This is an annual event hosted by the church for the benefit of its local community and includes an evening of dining and music. The ensemble was made up of 4 woodwinds, 2 brass, and 4 rhythm section players that alternated between playing instrumental pieces and accompanying singers Frank Senior, Brianna Thomas, and the Reverend Lori Hartman. The program was comprised of well-known songs, like Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five,” Earth, Wind and Fire’s “Fantasy,” Billy Strayhorn’s “Take the A Train,” and John Coltrane’s “Impressions,” with excellent arrangements by John Wilson, Mark Taylor, Mark Tomaro, and Joseph Roberts (Vanderveer Church’s assistant music director) and conducted by Raymond Trapp (the church’s principal music director). I was told that there is a tradition of having someone in the band introduce one of the numbers and I was asked to introduce a piece called “Solar.” After the dress rehearsal, I told them everything I know about the song and was surprised when they said they still wanted me to do it. The reason for this is that the song is attributed to “The Prince of Darkness,” a. k. a. Miles Davis.

Not that I’d have any problem saying something nice about Miles Davis, there’s quite a bit of good stuff to say about him, but I had a big problem with the song. Recent research has proved that “Solar” wasn’t written by Davis, but rather by Chuck Wayne, a New Jersey-based guitarist who worked with George Shearing, Woody Herman, and Tony Bennett. “Solar” was recorded on a 1954 album of Davis’s, Walkin’, and is one of its most popular tracks. In fact, the tombstone that marks Davis’s burial site in the Bronx’s Woodlawn Cemetery has the first two measures of the piece engraved on it. It’s a staple of jazz jam sessions, concerts, and recordings, and it’s considered a necessary part of the repertoire of any aspiring jazz musician who wants to be taken seriously. But a recent accounting of Wayne’s estate by the Library of Congress proves that the song was recorded by Wayne in 1946 under the title “Sonny” (for Sonny Berman, who played trumpet on the date).

I wound up talking about how a tradition of authorship misattribution exists in the history of jazz; how John Coltrane, through no fault of his own, was erroneously listed as the composer of Mongo Santamaria’s “Afro Blue” on the Impulse! recording, Coltrane Live at Birdland. Other examples of wrongly attributed authorship include: “St. Thomas” (written by Randy Weston, not Sonny Rollins), “Blue In Green” (by Bill Evans, not Miles Davis), “Water” (Pierre Ouellette, not Jim Pepper), and the list goes on. I also mentioned another example that I think strikes to the heart of the matter: “Donna Lee,” a standard-setting melody over the chord progression to the song “(Back Home Again in) Indiana,” which was originally attributed to Charlie Parker but, in fact, was written in 1947 by a journeyman Miles Davis! This shifting of authorship has become a kind of tradition that the jazz community and academy will have to continue addressing for quite a while. I’m not so sure that it’s always a malicious act, though. It’s very possible that cultural differences between a jazz artist and his/her record production team might obfuscate communication to the point that neither is sure of what’s really going on. This can be seen happening in the video clip of Thelonious Monk and producer Teo Macero from Clint Eastwood’s documentary, Straight, No Chaser. But sometimes the impetus for the misattribution of authorship is simply greed, possibly the only vice one can’t overdose from. I believe that such is the case for “Donna Lee” and “Solar.” I finished my introduction by quoting Igor Stravinsky, whose ballet Petrushka has at least one motive from Ravel’s Rhapsodie Espagnole in its possession. He once said, “good composers borrow, but great composers steal”—a saying that may have actually been first uttered by T. S. Eliot! I just hope that nobody at the Vanderveer Church misconstrued the introduction to Wayne’s tune as a slight on Miles Davis’s compositional technique!

There is a larger-scale authorship misattribution for the genre, jazz, that has been argued about for almost a century. Whether or not greed is at the root is a part of a discussion that, while important to an overarching understanding of this uniquely American music and culture, is not very important to understanding its multi-national origins. Current erudition poses a single origin that can only hold true if other and older subalterns are disinvited from the discussion. Over time, many of these groups have been repositioned in their relationship to the Great American Cultural Machine as the history of American music has been (re)written. This is probably most notable recently in the television series Jazz by Ken Burns. It’s been twelve years since the show was first aired, and the gulf it repositioned between those who (as my mentor, Dr. Lewis Porter, might say) “know” and those who “don’t know” jazz has grown, possibly exponentially. This is despite the best efforts of everyone on “team jazz history,” including Ken Burns, to accurately represent the subject in historical documentation. I hope to dedicate more of this blog to an examination of this phenomenon and hope that its readers continue to feel inspired to contribute their thoughts and ideas on it.