Category - Digest

“The Epicenter of The New Music Business”

July 30, 2014
Paul Schatzkin
Digest, photography
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#SaveMusicRow I found it! The #Epicenter of the #NewMusicBusiness. It’s right there in my backyard. It’s probably in your backyard, too. Or your front yard. Or your basement or garage. Though it may not be as prominently marked…
My friend Mark Montgomery likes to boost Nashville as “The Epicenter of The New Music Business.” I appreciate the sentiment in that designation and don’t disagree at all with its intent. From the standpoint of pure creative energy, I think it’s entirely arguable that there is not another city on the planet that has the concentration of pure musical talent that Nashville has.
But I think that on some fundamental level the whole idea of a “New Music Business” is one that has no actual “center.”
What digital technology has done is diffuse the “center” of all cultural creation. In music in popular and/or “roots” music in particular, there are “centers” all over the country and the world.
To try to find the “epicenter” of the new music business is to see it through a rear-view mirror. The business used to be centered in a few places. In the US, in particular, it was New York, Los Angeles, and Nashville. And in Nashville it was “centered” around Music Row.
But digital technology has obviated the need for there to be any one “center.’ Now the center is everywhere, and music belongs to all of us again.

Nashville Starry Night

July 20, 2014
Paul Schatzkin
Digest, photography
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With all due respect to Mr. Van Gogh:

This is an idea that I’ve been trying to get to for months: blending a Hubble starscape with the Nashville skyline.
When I posted this to Facebook somebody made a comment about the contradiction of a sunrise skyline against a nighttime sky, but hey, it’s a fantasy, right?
Besides, it’s not a sunrise skyline, it’s a sunset skyline.
So there.

New “Portals of Stone” For Your Desktop : Beauly Priory

July 15, 2014
Paul Schatzkin
Digest, photography, travel
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Follow this link to get “Beauly Starscape” for your computer desktop.

Regular visitors to this site will recognize Beauly Priory as the place where, in a real sense, this whole “Portals of Stone” business got started.

Beauly Priory - a small abbey ruin on the Black Isle near Inverness in the Scottish Highlands

Beauly Priory – a small abbey ruin on the Black Isle near Inverness in the Scottish Highlands

It has been almost a year since I’ve created a new “Portals” piece. For much of that time, I’ve been scanning my photo libraries looking for suitable candidates for the “Portals” treatment. I noticed this shot from our (brief) stop at Beauly during our trip to Scotland in the fall of 2012 several months ago and have had it on my “to-do” list ever since.

I finally got around to it this past weekend. and after struggling through re-learning all the software that I need to create these images, I finally came up with the image above.

It’s actually quite fitting that I finally got around to creating a new “Portals” piece over this past weekend, and very much in keeping with the “coming full circle” quality of this particular experience: I’ve been thinking seriously about it for several weeks, and two days after creating and posting this, I booked flights to return to the UK for the singular purpose of expanding on this theme and growing the catalog.

I did not know that I would be creating the “Portals of Stone” series until several weeks after I returned from my Celctic Pilgrimage to the UK in the spring of 2013. And now that the idea has taken root (and seems to be spreading some), I’ve been jonesing to back to that part of the world with that specific purpose in mind.

So come October 7, I’ll be returning to the UK for two weeks. I’ll be flying into Glasgow to see the Cathedral there, which is one of the more spectacular creations of this kind of architectural still standing intact in the UK (so many others were destroyed in the wake of the Dissolution).

From Glasgow I will be heading into Dumfries/Galloway to see (at least) the ruins of Sweetheart Abbey and Caerlaverock Castle, and then I’ll head east to Aberdeen to see St. Andrews Cathedral and Dunnottar Castle. After that, I’m not sure. I might even hop over to Tipperary, Ireland to see the Rock of Cashel.

I mention all this because, after I post this download, I suspect it’s going to travel some. If you’re a new visitor to this site and perhaps live anywhere near the areas I’ve just described, please get in touch with me, perhaps I can visit and avail myself to some of your local knowledge.

 

New Venue for Music City Roots

July 9, 2014
Paul Schatzkin
Digest, music, photography
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If Nashville is the world’s center for “Country” music, then nearby Franklin is in the midst of a bid to be the center of “Americana“

That effort started a year or so ago when a tobacco billionaire from Kentucky named Brad Kelly acquired The Factory a sprawling retail and entertainment complex not far from the center of Franklin.
Not long after the acquisition, he did whatever it took to get Americana/roots music mainstay Sugar Hill records to move its offices from Nashville to Franklin. Not long after that the Americana Music Association moved its offices from Nashville to The Factory, too.
Now Music City Roots has relocated from the Loveless Barn on the outskirts of Franklin to Liberty Hall, a large performance space also in the Factory.
The new venue was kicked off Wednesday July 9 with a show that included Verlon Thompson, the folk/roots band Humming House, and the national treasurers Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell. seen in the photo above (shot with iPhone’ I wasn’t working that night).
@NashvilleTN @InstaNashville @nashvillemusiclifeFULL HOUSE @MusicCityRoots debut at The Factory in Franklin TN with Rodney Crowell and #Emmylou

#nashville #music ©2014 [email protected] aka @driver49

“A Matter or Life And Death”

July 9, 2014
Paul Schatzkin
Digest, photography
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A client who purchased a print asked for the story behind the photo:

"A Matter of Life And Death" - Vanleer, TN - March, 2014

“A Matter of Life And Death” – Vanleer, TN – March, 2014

Fittingly for a photo entitled “A Matter of Life and Death,” it begins with the Civil War.

Well, not the actual war, but the contemporary, re-enacted Civil War.

For the past several years, I have served as the Executive Producer for The 1861 Project – a series of three CDs released in observance of the Civil War Sesquicentennial. As the project started ramping up in the winter/spring of 2011, I started attending and photographing re-enactment events; some of those photos have been used as album cover art for the three CDs we’ve released.

Over the years, Ann and I have compiled quite a catalog of Civil War e-enactment photos; One prominent re-enactor has done me the great honor of referring to me as “the Matthew Brady of the re-enacted Civil War.” There are so many excellent photographers at these events that I’m not entirely certain that I deserve such a lofty recognition, but I haven’t gotten tired of hearing it yet…

In March of 2012, I drove up to Erin, Tennessee for the re-enactment of the fall of Fort Donelson in 1862 – a pivotal event in the war that not only secured Union control of Nashville and the surrounding region, but also marked the ascendance of Ulysses S. (aka “Unconditional Surrender”) Grant among the pantheon of Civil War military leaders.

I left Erin in the mid-afternoon the Sunday following the re-enactment. As I came around a bend about 12 miles south of Erin on Vanleer Highway (TN Rte 48), I saw an abandoned and derelict farm house giving way to the elements amid a stand of not-quite budding oak and hickory trees.

That site alone would have been enough to stop and make a photograph, and I started looking for a place to park. But once I drove past the house, I couldn’t believe what was on the other side: a field filled with thousands of daffodils in the peak of their bloom – a veritable sea of yellow flowers, easily the most daffodils I have ever seen in one location!

And, as luck would have it, there was a small church across the street not 100 yards past the house with plenty of off-the street parking.

At the risk of stating the obvious, the visual juxtaposition of a decaying home against the reborn, not-quite-spring landscape was sufficiently compelling that I spent more than an hour working different angles and exposure settings.

I returned to the annual re-enactment of Fort Donelson in March of 2014 and found the setting once again much as I remembered it from two years earlier. This time the lighting conditions were a bit more favorable, with fewer clouds punctuating another wise sparkling blue sky.

“A Matter of Life And Death” is one of the frames exposed at “The Daffodil House” during that re-visit to the site in March, 2014.

More “Joy of Making Music” – Ron “KrashOBang” Krasinski

July 8, 2014
Paul Schatzkin
clients, Digest, JOYMM, music, photography
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Too bad he’s not Irish, then he could be “Krash O’Bang”

krashobang

Back in April, I had the good fortune to spend an afternoon at Azalea Studios in Brentwood photographing singer/songwriter Joy Zimmerman and a terrific group of session players as they laid down the tracks for Joy’s new CD.

Among the players was drummer Ron Krasinski. I got a good chuckle when Ron and I exchanged emails and I discovered that his email address starts with “KrashOBang@….”

I”m pretty sure “Krasinski” is not an Irish name..

More at TheJoyofMakingMusic.com

 

Deep Thoughts on #SaveStudioA / #SaveMusicRow

July 8, 2014
Paul Schatzkin
commentary, Digest, music, music 3.0
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In which I ponder the endangered Nashville species called ‘Music Row’

(originally posted on July 1; reposted July 8)

“The past went that-a-way. When faced with a totally new situation, we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past. We look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”
–Marshall McLuhan – The Medium Is The Massage

Here’s a little-known fact about me:

nashville-trolleyThe first summer I spent in Nashville (1994), I had a ‘job’ as a tour-guide and entertainer on the Nashville Trolley.

For several hours on weekend afternoons, I’d sit with my guitar in an alcove-like space next to the engine housing in the front of one of those tottering, wheeled behemoths as it lumbered along a serpentine course from Riverfront Park, up Broadway to Music Row and back.

My job was to recount the history of the landmarks along the route, and between the landmarks and history lessons I’d play my guitar, sing songs from the Nashville canon – and try to be heard over the roar of the diesel engine beside me.

I don’t remember much about my repertoire now but I’m pretty sure that somewhere along Music Row I’d sing Alan Jackson’s Chasin’ That Neon Rainbow (Spotify):

I made it up to music row
Lordy, don’t the wheels turn slow..

It must have been quite a sight: a by-then middle-aged Jewish kid from New York singing country songs from a perch alongside a whining diesel.

I’d had to pass an audition and some vetting to earn this lofty position, but the job only payed whatever tips I could wheedle out of the tourists as they got off the trolley. So on the floor in front of me I placed a large jar with a label that read, “Garth Brooks and them play for millions – the rest of us play for tips.”

Little did I know at the time what a prediction that was for the future of the music business.

Needless to say the jar was never very full after a shift… and I didn’t last very long at that particular ‘job.’ I guess my ambitions lay elsewhere… Read More

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