bill kopper: News

I finally got something up on Itunes - the Cristina CD that I mentioned on a previous entry and that has some samples on the "music" page. This wasn't as hard as I thought, other than the uploading of the cover photo. That was a total pain in the ass. But it's up there, and should be available this month sometime - this month being march.

I have a my space page. It doesn't cost anything, and when I learned it wasn't just for predators and perverts and was, in fact, originally for musicians, I started a page. Let me interject a little background info: In high school, I was for the most part shy and invisible. At parties I had a strategy of moving rapidly from room to room so no one would notice I wasn't actually talking to anyone. And, the rural part of the midwest being the way it is, these parties had fewer women than the excercise yard at Angola Prison. So I would wander like this for about 45 minutes and then leave (leaving the remainder of the evening for practice). Now, this is kind of story where the protagonist would go on to found microsoft, or a right-wing suburban megachurch, or perhaps even a highly successful chain of strip joints, and much chuckling would be had over a deliriously akward teen phase. But no, this has actually continued on, til now, at the age of 45. I did marry a beautiful and brilliant woman, I have a rewarding career and I'm in excellent health. But I'm still socially inept, I still wander from room to room at parties, and the celebratory yelp from a nearby kegger will elicit a flight responce. So why throw myself into to the hysterically populist, relentlessly shallow, digital teeny-bop party that is myspace? If you peruse the pages of this social wasteland, you will see everyone leaving innane, pointless messages with little more content or heft than "What up dawg!?" or "Yea, we GOTTA hang sometime!", accompanied by a photo of themselves - this photo (if of a female) will be of the "girl next door on four beers and a vicodin" variety; the guys will generally be of the "you WILL get laid if you hang out with me" persuasion. My photo is more like "Man, you need to get out more". I don't get that many visitors, the messages left on my page are generally from the mass-mail promotional sector, and my "friends" are almost exclusively male. I have not gotten a "whatup dawg", or a"dude, you were sooo wasted last night!." By now you might say, "Well, you're just jelous because you're a myspace loser!" You'd be right, too. But damnit, who the hell thought it would be a good idea to drag this crap up on adults. It's like the dream where you forgot about the geology class and the final's tomorrow. This was supposed to have been done with 20 years ago. But eveyone has a page, even dead people; you can't really get around it. You might however ask, 'Just how useful is this Myspace to a musician?" Well, rumor has it that a wildly popular band from L.A., whose myspace page is filled with everything from the absurdly innane notes from pimply-faced adolescent boys to the most graphicly sexual invitations from high-profile models and B-list actresses, announced the sale of their new cd on their Myspace page. Mind you, this page gets something like 10,000 hits per day from rabid fans. This should have been like Haliburton at a contract-bidding session at the white house; they should have sold every copy and caused death and mayhem in the streets, riots, fistfights, and civil disorder. No, they sold, after the first week, exactly 14 copies of the new disc.

Many people recall a time in their youth, a defining moment when they made the decision to become a musician. A great musician may have paid them a compliment, or perhaps they were inspired by a remarkable performance. Sitting on the knee of a parent and gawking at Stan Getz or Vlad Horowitz or Kenny Kirkland, they think, "That's it. That's what I'm doing." For me, I was about thirty-two years old, and I had just been fired from my last day job, as an office assistant for a tree service. I was driving home, weighing my options - there really were none. I couldn't hang as an office assistant, I didn't have the chops for such work. Now, don't get me wrong, I didn't think I was too good to do that kind of crap for a living. But it was the opposite of what most people experience - which is, leaving music after a final humiliation and getting a straight job, a day gig, finally facing the hard fact that they didn't have what it takes to "make it" in the world of music. I had to come to grips with the fact that I did not have the skills, or maybe even "talent" to successfully do a day gig. Oh, I would have wanted nothing more than to be able to sit my ass in a cubicle and make some regular damned money. Get some benefits, wear a starched shirt, park in a regular spot and not have to load in through the kitchen. I look in awe at people that can do that. I can remember the caustic looks my various bosses in those days would give me, similar to the expression a bandleader might have on his or her face if I were to be playing my part a half-step off, or show up to the gig in dressed like Napoleon. As if to say, "This guy is beyond just not getting it. He really should be hospitalized." I often think I should give it another chance, you know, the day job. Get back on the horse, fight the good fight. Or at least try it on weekends, with some friends. Yes, that's it: A GARAGE JOB! For hobbyists only. Set up some phones, a copier, some old computers, and go like there's no tomorrow! Fill orders, pretend I'm Bill Gates. Stay tuned.

For those of you here to listen some cuts from the Cristina Project, welcome. There are two entire songs on the "music page". I'm very excited about this recording - as a matter of fact I've been listening to it almost exclusively since it was finished it two days ago. As far as I have been able to determine, this music has never been recorded before other than some field recordings that were meant more as examples than for an actual listening experience (There've also been some excerpts used in techno interpretations). So, I as the arranger had to interpret somewhat. It was a bit of a balancing act; I wanted the instrumental sections to follow the path of the melodies while not intruding on their integrity. At the same time I didn't want the backing music to be timid and pedestrian. The Icaros are deceptively complex (try counting the phrases - they are almost all mixed meter). They sound folkloric but they resist any straight-forward approach at harmonization. It was obvious when it was right, and equally obvious when it was wrong. A huge blessing was the musicians available to do this project - Raoul Rossiter, Matt Spencer, Bijoux Barbosa, Erik Deutsch, and Rekha Ohal - all of whom were up to the extremely challenging task of rising to the level of Cristina. Wow.
With that said I have the impossible task of expressing how incredible Cristina is - so I'll just leave that to the music. This music is without exception as "deep" as anything I've ever heard and I think you'll find you will not really want to listen to anything else.

About a year ago I got a call to do a gig with a new local band called "Ginga". Ok. I got their book, learned the tunes, did the gig, and it was fun. So I started just showing up, even when I wasn't hired to do the gig, and sitting in. Every week. Then I would make new charts for the band, and I would even write music for them. I would even do rehearsals with them. Now this is a band I wasn't yet a member of. And I was extremely buzy otherwise - I really could have used the time off. The short version of this is, they broke down and hired me, and now it is my favorite project. And it is sounding really good, and people are starting to show up to our gigs. We have a steady, at the St. Julien Hotel in Boulder every tuesday. Check it out.

Three weeks ago I was on the go, playing jazz, for good money. When that wasn't happening I had students and meetings with people that wanted to work with me. And then there were the good paying casuals. Well, with all of the whimsy of a suicide bomber, the deities that dispense good fortune in music will throw a bucket of crap on you and the work will dry up, like within a few days. But this is the way these things work and it's what every parent, even those who have probably never seen a note of live music played in their lives, instinctively knows to tell their aspiring musician offspring: you need something to fall back on. How do they know this? Because if you could really play music all the time and not have to pick dogshit for a lawn service company during the offtimes, then everyone would be a musician. It would not be the choice of life for the unrepentently right-brained, the poets and malcontents. If you could really be gauranteed a life of steady work as a musician then the profession would be hobbled by narrow-minded and frightened shore-huggers, spineless careerists and microcephilic clock-watchers. It's the down time that separates the wheat from the shaff here. The down times make it apparent to even the most dellusional hyperventelating pixie-dust snorting spirit-scribe among us that this is not the way to golden-years security. That thing that seems to prompt everyone else to seek gainful if cement-harding tedium as a way of life got left out of our wiring somehow. Sure, I've driven home from a hell of lot of gigs thinking, this is it, I'm done, I'm looking at some sort of brochure from a technical college or something tomorrow. I'll walk around a factory with a clipboard, wearing protective goggles and a white labcoat; I'll be shaking hands with people at an airport somewhere, closing a deal; or maybe handing a doctor the wrong instruments during a delicate surgery. Then like an alcoholic who eventually breaks that promise he made to the wife & kids after backing over the family dog in the middle of a three day bender, we'll return for just one more gig...

I'm turning a corner. Although the phone has been good to me - ringing often with gigs and such, I have decided to start taking the initiative. In a way it's demeaning, having to schmooze, having to talk to people WHO DON'T KNOW WHO I AM, and worst, having to talk to people who don't know who they are. But it's all in the numbers, and eventually I'll score the gig. Funny thing is, I work all these places anyway, whether or not I book it. I was really good at booking gigs when I first started, back when I was in college. I was not exactly plugged into the professional music scene, so if I didn't get the gig, I would be at home watching Letterman (who was really good back then). Now I have hundreds of channels and really no time to watch anything. Now you could probably have a successful channel called the Gig Channel, where people talk about how to get gigs. I would watch that.

We did a little preview of our sunday show for a benefit concert. Sonya was great; this band should be playing fancy concert halls in
Europe, and staying at places like the Excelsior and the Intercontinental. Soon enough. We are working on a recording of Sonya's originals and that should be finished in the spring.

Firstly this website is pretty goddamned easy to deal with so I hope it's intelligible to the visitor. I'm in CA right now, on vacation but trying to keep my chops up. I have several gigs RIGHT when I return so I can't be scufflin' & twitchin' on stage.