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Eric Hutchinson’s real big break came after he thought he had already gotten it.

About three years ago, the pop singer-songwriter-musician was signed to Maverick Records, the Warner Bros.-distributed label partly founded by Madonna, whose roster included the likes of Alanis Morrissette and Michelle Branch. But just as Hutchinson was about to begin work on his major-label debut, Maverick shut down. The Takoma Park native was back where he started - making music on his own. It took nearly two years to receive a buyout from the company.

When the money finally came, Hutchinson used it to produce Sounds Like This, the artist’s second studio album, which he released this summer on his Let’s Break label. Witty, breezy blue-eyed soul reminiscent of early Billy Joel, the 10-song set became an Internet smash thanks largely to Mario Lavandeira, better known as celebrity gossip hound Perez Hilton. He raved about Sounds Like This on his popular blog.

“Eric Hutchinson has the potential to be huge,” he wrote. Soon afterward, the CD hit No.1 on Billboard’s Heatseekers charts and became highest-charting CD by an unsigned act on iTunes’ album charts, peaking at No. 5.

“I knew the Perez Hilton Web site, but I had no idea the album would get that kind of response,” says Hutchinson, who opens for the hit pop-rock band OneRepublic Thursday at Rams Head Live. “He gave me this big push. The stars were aligned, I guess. It was exciting.”

The week Sounds Like This debuted on the digital charts, Hutchinson outsold such established, multiplatinum acts as Kanye West and Kenny Chesney. It’s the kind of album the artist says he probably wouldn’t have been able to make at Maverick.

“At the label, there were a lot of hands in the soup,” says the 27-year-old performer, who last week was at his home in New York. “It was cool to follow my guts and make the songs sound like I wanted. But I was nervous, too, because if it all failed, it would be on me.”

Artistically, Sounds Like This is far from a failure. From start to finish, Hutchinson, a multi-instrumentalist, engages with exuberant, piano-based tunes glimmering with elements of reggae, gospel and soul. Think Maroon 5, minus the instrumental sleekness. The songs were mostly cut live without much studio tinkering.

“All the stuff I admire was played live,” Hutchinson says. “There’s a little bit of electronic looping in the background, but I try really hard to make the album current and familiar. The big thing was that the vocal performances had a lot of energy behind them.”

His quirky, high-pitched vocals are far up in the mix, pushing the playful arrangements. Hutchinson’s accessible, self-reflecting approach was greatly influenced by the music he heard as a kid.

“I had a normal suburban life,” the artist says. “I always had a strong interest in music, though. I listened to a lot of Billy Joel, the Beatles, Paul Simon and Michael Jackson. I credit my parents with having smart music around.”

His mother, a schoolteacher and his father, a Web designer, encouraged Hutchinson’s musical talent. The artist played in rock bands while a student at Blair High School in Silver Spring, then studied music at Emerson College in Boston. Afterward, he moved to Los Angeles to land a record deal, scoring one with Maverick not long after arriving.

“It’s been nice to live in a bunch of different places,” Hutchinson says. “It gives me a lot of different perspectives for writing.”

He says the most important aspect of making music is connecting with listeners.

“I’ve been told my music makes people happy, which you don’t hear people say much about music anymore,” Hutchinson says. “If you can reach some kind of emotion with the music, that’s a good thing. Ultimately, that’s what you want to do, anyway.”

rashod.ollison@baltsun.com

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Copyright © 2008, The Baltimore Sun

The Beijing Pop Music Award Ceremony is the biggest event in the mainland pop scene. For stars from mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan, it’s a chance to compete for trophies and prestige. For audiences, it’s the chance to see all that the last year of pop has to offer.

On the red carpet: mainland singer songwriter Anson Hu, rising stars Li Yuchun and Zhang Liangying, rocker Zheng Jun, singer songwriter Li Jian and Wang Feng and girl rocker Jiang Xin. Stars from Hong Kong and Taiwan include Jolin Tsai, Lee-hong Wong, Karen Mok, Xin, Kuang Leung, Angela Chang and the girl band Twins.

It’s a thrill for audiences to see their favorite stars receive awards; even more exciting is watching them perform. Onstage this year, many singers spoke of their new year wishes, and of the Olympics.

The album generated six Grammy nominations for the eyelinered, tattooed R&B sensation, whose reckless lifestyle has turned a rising star into popular prey for paparazzi and, increasingly, a punch line.

“The danger of all this bad publicity is that she looks not just like a tragedy in the making, which would actually bolster the sad aura of the songs, but that she’s also being made into a cartoonish figure,” says Entertainment Weekly music critic Chris Willman. “That keeps people from taking the music seriously. The album is still a classic, no matter what happens in her personal life or how sad or ridiculous her image becomes.”

Winehouse, 24, entered rehab Thursday after video of the disheveled British singer supposedly smoking crack sparked a Scotland Yard investigation. Disclosed last week by U.K. tabloid The Sun, the 19-minute clip follows months of stumbles: a pot bust in Norway, a canceled tour, disturbing photos of Winehouse bruised and bloodied or wandering the street distraught, barefoot and in a red push-up bra. Husband Blake Fielder-Civil, who was arrested last June in the beating of a bartender and then again in a suspected attempt to bribe the victim, awaits trial on charges of assault and witness tampering.

Winehouse has confessed to struggles with eating disorders and self-mutilation. She skipped out on a detox stint in August after being diagnosed as alcoholic, she told Blender. Her hit single Rehab (”They tried to make me go to rehab/I said no, no, no”) reflects her controversial posture on sobriety. By contrast, reformed bad girl Courtney Love seems hatched from a Jane Austen novel.

Record label Universal said in a statement last week that Winehouse realizes “she requires specialist treatment to continue her ongoing recovery from drugaddiction.” Yet her father, Mitch Winehouse, told BBC Radio: “She doesn’t think she’s got a problem. She thinks she can do what she does recreationally and get on with the rest of her life.”

Were it not for her titanic gifts, Winehouse’s slide into YouTube’s gallery of imploding celebrities might feel less pathetic. Few pop ingénues have displayed such enormous promise or been met with such breathless accolades.

Frank, the snarky, slurry 2003 U.K. debut that hit the USA in November, revealed the soul siren’s stunning ability to mimic Sarah Vaughan and Billie Holiday. But it was Black’s brave lyrics and retro-hip R&B that unveiled the breadth of Winehouse’s instrument and songwriting skills. After 45 weeks on the Billboard chart, Black has sold 1.5 million copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan. Frank has sold 89,000 copies in nine weeks. She has racked up 1.7 million digital track sales.

“It starts with that amazing, ridiculous, showstopping voice,” says Mark Ronson, who co-produced Black with Frank’s Salaam Remi. “And she writes songs that come from an honest and painful place. You get that darkness in rock bands like Radiohead, but in modern soul, you get generic lyrics across the board. Amy’s lyrics are fresh and modern. Rehab resonates because it could only have been written today. For better or worse, she’s bringing back a spirit of rebellion to pop music.”

Winehouse’s insolence and candor appealed to fans who are weary of calculation and slick marketing, says Monte Lipman, president/CEO of Universal Republic, which introduced Black to U.S. audiences via urban radio.

“We’re living in a world of sell, sell, sell, and here’s a girl who just didn’t care,” Lipman says. “People found that refreshing. We decided not to press so hard on the commercial aspects. We’ve found that urban and crossover formats are more aggressive and adventurous. So here’s this little Jewish girl on (hip-hop station) Hot 97 in New York singing You Know I’m No Good.

“The public responded to her honesty on this album. She and Blake were having rough times, and she exposed her heart in such a vulnerable way that she could say ‘I’m no good’ and ‘I’m not ready for rehab.’ I was so happy to see the Grammys acknowledge her. It’s difficult to pick up those tabloids and see her in such distress.”

The troubled chanteuse has Grammy nominations for pop album and pop vocal, plus in all four marquee categories: new artist, best album, record and song (both for Rehab).

Though her visa status and rehab duration remain unclear, Winehouse has said she intends to appear at the Grammy Awards, which air on CBS Feb. 10 from Los Angeles. She’s scheduled to perform. Will she pick up any trophies? Her likelihood of being crowned best new artist has faded with each lurid headline, says Tom O’Neil, columnist for awards insider TheEnvelope.com.

“Amy’s arguably the breakout artist of the year, but the music industry is a drug-sensitive world,” he says. “Her rebuke of rehab may seem cool over the airwaves, but it strikes a scary chord with Grammy voters. If they excuse it as part of the back story of great artists like Jimi Hendrix or Janis Joplin, she still has the problem of being British.” The last British singer named best new artist was Nigerian-born Sade in 1985; the last non-American act to win was Milli Vanilli in 1990.

Before scandals struck, Winehouse was headed for a deserving sweep, poised to lure older voters with her respect for soul-pop tradition and younger ones with her independence, EW’s Willman says.

“If there’s anything the Grammys love, it’s a cool, young female singer who puts a new spin on classic styles, like a Norah Jones,” Willman says. “But as much as the Grammys like to have a belle of their ball, they want to have one who’s likely to show up to be coronated, not just make it to Staples Center, but be beaming and coherent when posing with all those statuettes.

“Amy doesn’t have a real hunger for awards (and) doesn’t lust after increasingly massive success the way most singers do. That’s admirable, but there is always a subconscious impulse for most voters in any field to want to give a prize to somebody who actually wants it.”

The Recording Academy’s support for substance-abuse programs might give voters pause about handing “top honors to the major artist who’s been in the news the most for alleged drug use,” Willman says. “The only thing that might save her from a shutout is the fact that voting closed (Jan. 9) before the alleged crack-smoking video showed up.

“Let’s face it: Sympathy goes down when you not only appear to be smoking crack, but you’re openly allowing someone to film you, knowing you’re posing for the YouTube video of the week.”

Winehouse’s chemical escapades may not factor into Grammy ballots if voters face the music, says Joe Levy, Blender’s editor in chief.

“This is not a business unfamiliar with the problems Amy Winehouse has struggled with,” he says. “Who knows better than the people who make and sell records that great musicians aren’t always stable? Also, she has the good fortune of going through this while Britney Spears is making her look like Annette Funicello.”

Also in Winehouse’s favor: Back to Black “is what the Grammys absolutely love, a record that sounds like an old record,” Levy says. “It’s a very smart update on classic sounds, applying a hip-hop DJ’s logic to old soul and R&B grooves, very simple and effective.

“She connects with songs about the pains of living and loving, songs that all too evidently have to do with her real life,” he says. “She’s the closest thing to a musical and cultural sensation we have. Whether she wins or loses, she’s the story of the Grammys.”

Her trophy count isn’t a pressing issue. “The real question is what happens next. The Grammys are about a record she’s already made. What about the next one?”

Provided Winehouse defeats her demons to carry on, “she’s going to challenge herself and try to reach new heights,” Lipman says. “She’s always working and constantly collaborating with new musicians.”

She won’t go back to Black, Ronson promises. “We hung out a bit in England recently, playing new songs she’s writing. She doesn’t want to make the same record, and I wouldn’t want to revisit Back to Black. It cheapens the original.”

Describing Winehouse as a “warm person with a sharp sense of humor and a painfully nonchalant Sudafed demeanor,” Ronson declined to discuss her personal crises but expressed faith in her career prospects.

“She changed the direction of modern pop music, and she’ll continue to break barriers,” he says.

Willman concurs.

“If she emerges from whatever psychological and substance-abuse tangle she is in and gets help from people who help her shine as a person as well as an artist, she could be one of our greats, for years or even decades to come,” he says.

When Willman saw her perform an acoustic set at an L.A. radio station, “it was as if all the emotions in the universe suddenly were coming out of her mouth. It was almost like this enormous depth of feeling had nothing to do with her, the tiny figure in ballet slippers and a wife-beater shirt, but that she was somehow channeling it.

“I would never lose confidence in her ability to keep doing that.”

Boosey & Hawkes boss John Minch has revitalised the staid music publisher in his seven year stint - and a bid is in the air

John Minch is talking excitedly about the chickens and bees he keeps in his Sussex garden. Last year’s wet summer, it seems, killed his swarm. Fortunately for his employer, the choir-singing, cider-pressing boss of Boosey & Hawkes, one of Britain’s biggest classical music empires, is just as passionate about classical music as he is about the fauna in his garden.

Minch changed his life when he quit the advertising industry to take an MBA, majoring in corporate finance. “I specialised in that only because I thought it was hard and I was paying for it myself,” he says.

But he has had good value from it. Most of his seven years as chief executive have involved takeover bids - and the tune is the same now. When you consider that Boosey is that rare thing in the music industry - a profitable enterprise - interest from suitors is hardly surprising.

Almost as soon as he arrived the company received an approach from a rival. It rejected the offer and decided to auction its parts instead. Minch knew the company was in a bad way. He had been told of a £2m black hole in its accounts when he accepted the job: by the time he arrived that had exploded to £20m thanks to its factory making unplayable instruments and its star US sales team faking the figures.

As profit turned into loss and the dividend was axed, Minch set about closing factories and selling assets to cut debt. But, as an insider, he was barred from bidding for the publishing division that interested him. A buyer was found for the instruments division - the maker of Sir Paul McCartney’s left-handed Hofner guitars - but Minch carried on with the publishing business while EMI and venture capitalists spent more than two years battling over the company.

Minch backed EMI but it was gazumped by Hg, Warburg’s former private-equity arm. However, Hg immediately asked him to join its bid. The MBA was back in use two years ago when Hg asked bankers at Bear Stearns to seek an exit - and news this weekend of fresh overtures from suitors suggest another change of ownership is close.

“The corporate finance has been a huge amount of use,” he says. During his time at the helm Minch has had the confidence to make half a dozen acquisitions. “With an MBA you do not feel that there are any areas you do not understand,” he says.

Founded almost 250 years ago, Boosey & Hawkes continues to shun pop music - but Minch is determined to make the classics more popular. On a giant screen in his London office he shows John Lewis’s recent Christmas advertisement with its soundtrack of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet - just one of the scores in a catalogue that includes Bartók, Britten, Bernstein and Birtwistle.

“We knew we were not selling to the advertising and film industry very well so we’ve got to know the right people in those sectors and made friends with choreographers, so that when they want to license a bit of music they come to us,” he says. Next he flashes Carling’s “spacemen” lager advert on the screen: that one is accompanied by music written by American Chris Rouse.

Next up is Lloyds TSB’s cartoon-based ad whose high-tech backing by Australian Elena Kats-Chernin adds to Minch’s royalty income. “We nearly sold it to Marks & Spencer,” he says, illustrating how competitive the advertising market is for music.

TSB was one of the accounts Minch worked on in his own career in adland. After university he spent a year in telesales. Surprisingly, he says he enjoyed selling ads but when a client, the giant J?Walter Thomson agency, suggested he join them, he jumped at the chance. “I thought advertising was terribly trendy,” he says.

Advertising did not think that of him, however. He progressed to Saatchi & Saatchi but says: “I was treated with contempt. I was a suit. I did not fit the culture at all.” He recalls being shown the surreal Silk Cut ads - a purple slash in a swatch of silk - and says: “I did not understand it at all. My wife had to explain it to me. I realised I was not cut out for it.” Ironic, then, that he should end up thriving with another, altogether different, B&H.

So he went to Manchester to take his MBA, buying a house in the Peak District with the loan Lloyds gave to finance the two-year course. The second degree got him a job at Reed where he spent 11 years acquiring the publishing skills he would later bring to Boosey. “It’s a completely different sort of publishing but I realised I could add value. “

Minch licensed Boosey’s retail outlet and outsourced the sheet-music printing to concentrate on its intellectual property business. He has 800,000 works by 120,000 composers in his catalogue and is seeking new ways to exploit them.

That Lloyds TSB ad has been remixed in the company’s studio and given vocals by Sarah Cracknell, for instance. “It’s A-listed for Radio 1 and it’s going to be released as a single on February 4,” says Minch.

However, the impending chart release has not encouraged Minch to move into pop. “Pop is expensive,” he says. “And the pop publishing business is pretty crowded. We’ve gone into jazz, some Latin and areas like musicals, but we’ve not tried to find unpublished superstars. The key task for us was making the most of what we had, not trying to diversify.

He dismisses myths that classics are a shrinking business while pop booms. Classical CDs sell while pop publishers wonder how to make money from downloads - though Minch’s music is available for ringtones too and his iPod, bursting with 60,000 tracks, includes The Killers and Joanna Newsom besides all of Shostakovich’s string quartets.

“I listen to a lot of music,” says Minch, who also sings in a local choir. “My main taste is romantic classical - music of the late 19th century - but I also like the kids’ music. I like to be experimental in the pop music I listen to,” says Minch, who turns 51 this week.

It will be his MBA skills, not his classics degree, he needs as he negotiates with potential new owners, however. His 6 per cent stake could be worth £5m but if the new owner wants to keep him, Minch is keen to continue. “If the agenda of the new owner is to rocket-propel this business, then I’ll definitely stay,” he says. “I’m hoping the next chapter is going to be fun. You could make a lot more out of this business: it’s probably the best brand in music.” Pump up the volume: Minch has expanded the business into new areas

Jan. 29, 2008 (Investor’s Business Daily delivered by Newstex) —

John Lennon did more than compose when he wrote songs such as “Help” with the Beatles and “Mother” as a solo artist.

In “Help,” Lennon revealed his insecurities about unwanted weight gain and depression amid the crush of the Beatles’ popularity; “Mother” was about his fractured family life, says Larry Kane, author of “Lennon Revealed,” a biography. “These were not just rock songs,” he told IBD. “John told me that everything he wrote was basically letting his life bleed out into the public.”

Lennon’s work with the Beatles on albums such as “Revolver” and “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” and as a solo artist on the record “Imagine” introduced a level of counterculture that had been lacking in pop music, says Steven Rosenblatt, an attorney and Beatle memorabilia collector.

“The Beatles changed the way people thought, they were rebellious, they were inquiring and innovative and Lennon was at the cutting edge,” he told IBD.

Lennon wrote “Sexy Sadie” to criticize Maharishi Mahesh Yogi after visiting the guru in India.

Other songs, including “Give Peace a Chance,” promoted social consciousness.

Lennon’s willingness to sing his mind made him an enduring historical figure, says Tom Erlewine, senior pop music editor for All Media Guide, an entertainment information database acquired in December by Macrovision (NASDAQ:MVSN).

“People see him as being very honest in his music,” he told IBD. “He searched for answers through his music and art, and that makes him very relatable.”

Lennon And McCartney

What made the Beatles as huge as they were was Lennon’s collaboration with Paul McCartney, according to Peter Brown, who co-wrote Lennon biography “The Love You Make” with Steven Gaines.

“Paul’s mellow, pretty melodies in turn complemented John’s strident rock riffs,” wrote Brown, former director of Apple Corp., the Beatles’ financial parent company. “Their voices complemented each other perfectly, with Paul’s sweet, round tones softening the edges of John’s strained nasality.”

The combination worked.

The Beatles still rank as the No. 1 selling recording group in the U.S. Their album sales topped 170 million in America through 2007, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. Lennon’s solo LP sales reached 13.5 million.

Lennon was born Oct. 9, 1940, in Liverpool, England. His mother, Julia, was a housewife, comedian and singer. Lennon barely knew his father, Freddie, a seaman.

When he was 18, Lennon met Paul McCartney, his future Beatle collaborator, at a gig. Also in 1958, Lennon watched helplessly as his mother died in a traffic accident.

By 1960, John had formed the Silver Beetles. The name changed soon after.

The group played everywhere from church functions to strip clubs in Liverpool before leaving for Hamburg, Germany.

Playing 12 hours a night in German nightclubs helped the band become professional, Lennon said in Hunter Davies’ book “The Beatles.”

“It was Hamburg that had done it,” Lennon said. “That’s where we really developed. We had to try anything that came into our heads in Hamburg. There was nobody to copy from. We played what we liked best.”

In 1961, the Beatles built a large following at Liverpool’s Cavern Club.

A year later, the group, with McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr teaming with Lennon, got its first recording contract with Parlophone, a unit of EMI.

Many bands and singers at the time relied on professional songwriters. But Lennon and McCartney knew they had to follow a new crop of artists such as Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochrane, who were writing their own songs, says Terry Burrows in his book “John Lennon.”

“This inspired a highly competitive period that saw John and Paul each writing new songs as if their lives depended on it,” he wrote.

The Lennon-McCartney duo released their first single, “Love Me Do,” in October 1962. The next single, “Please Please Me,” topped sales charts in the United Kingdom in early 1963. The group’s first album of the same title also topped the charts in England and sold over 500,000 copies by year’s end.

By the end of 1963, the group’s fourth single, “She Loves You,” became its biggest up to that point, with sales of 1 million in England.

Lennon’s suggestion to replace the typical “me and you” subject with something about a third person broadened the song’s appeal, wrote Burrows. “As Paul recalled: ‘We hit on the idea of doing a reported conversation — She told me what to say, she said she loves you — giving it a dimension that was different from what we had done before.’”

The Beatles also became a top draw in America. Their show at Shea Stadium on Aug. 15, 1965, packed in 55,000 hysterical fans and grossed $304,000, a record at the time.

Early in their career, Lennon and the Beatles learned the value of positive press.

“Trying to get publicity was just a game,” Lennon told Davies. “We used to traipse around the offices of the local papers and the musical papers asking them to write about us because that’s what you had to do.”

Later, reporters often pursued Lennon because of his sharp wit.

In 1966, the Beatles stopped playing live. They recorded seven more albums by the time the group disbanded in 1970.

In the recording studio, Lennon became adept at incorporating news and personal bits into his songs.

The inspiration for “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” came from a drawing by Lennon’s son, Julian. “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite” came from a circus poster Lennon saw, wrote Geoff Emerick, an engineer who worked on several Beatle albums, in “Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles,” a book co-authored by Howard Massey.

“He’d often work little phrases or snatches of conversation about something he had been recently reading or talking about into the music he was recording,” he wrote.

Lennon competed for record space with McCartney. When Paul wrote “Penny Lane,” John countered with “Strawberry Fields.”

The pair collaborated on other songs such as “With a Little Help From My Friends” in the studio, with Lennon on guitar and McCartney on piano.

When Lennon got stuck on finding a middle section for “A Day in the Life,” McCartney penned “Woke up, got out of bed …”

Fine Lines

As a songwriter, Lennon played the role of a careful editor. He bristled when his first wife, Cynthia, suggested using the word “just” in the song, “I Feel Fine,” wrote Davies.

“You never use the word just,” Lennon said. “It’s meaningless. It’s a fill-in word.”

In the 1970s, Lennon recorded several hit songs, including “Imagine” and “Whatever Gets You Through the Night.”

Following a five-year break from music to help raise his son, Sean, Lennon released the “Double Fantasy” album with his second wife, Yoko Ono in November 1980.

A month later, on Dec. 8, Lennon was shot to death outside his apartment building in New York City by a deranged fan. He was 40 years old.

Newstex ID: IBD-0001-22588719

Originally published in the January 29, 2008 version of Investor’s Business Daily.

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Shortly after composer Joe Waters arrived at San Diego State University, he articulated his mission:

“My goal is to blow the doors off the academy of music, and to let in all the music of the world,” said Waters in early 2002.

Now in his seventh year as Professor of Music and Director of Electro-Acoustic and Media Composition at San Diego State, Waters hasn't exactly knocked the doors down. But he is broadening the school's focus beyond the European classical music tradition that has dominated music education for centuries.

Waters, whose quartet, SWARMIUS, makes its local debut Saturday at the Neurosciences Institute, has the audacious notion that serious music – and music schools – should be inclusive of contemporary culture.

“It's an idea whose time has come,” Waters said. “So much of our culture now is a mixture of huge parts of Africa, as well as Europe. I mean, for jazz, rock, pop, it's been this enormously potent amalgam.

“But in the classical music world, whenever there's a beat, it's still considered a little suspicious. You can't have a drum, and you can't have a drummer playing with a symphony orchestra. Immediately, it's like: That's got to be pop music. It's not serious.”

There's a beat to Waters' music. In a piece like “Intelligent Designs” (on the self-titled SWARMIUS CD), you could dance to it.

“I'm not the first person to combine Europe and African music,” Waters said. “That's been happening in classical music for a 100 years. There's a whole string of people, Gershwin, and even before.

“But it's still a problem that we wrestle with. And in terms of dealing with contemporary concerns, that's something I think we need to do to move the music forward.”

Waters' interest in other genres of music comes naturally. Now 55, he considers himself among the “first generation” of musicians who came to classical music through rock.

“That was the entry gate, and inside you discovered this whole legacy of classical music, this wonderful legacy,” Waters said. “But the way of getting there wasn't by taking violin lessons at the age of 5; it was by hanging out with my homies in the basement and banging on keyboards and drums and playing 'In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.' ”

With degrees from the University of Minnesota, Yale and the University of Oregon, Waters eventually caught up with the musicians who had taken the more traditional route, but the most important lesson he learned in music school was to ignore his teachers.

“Many of my (peers) had actually played rock, but they they had been taught at some point that they were to leave that now and study the 'great music.' The difference is, I didn't believe my teachers. I did for a while; I tried really hard to listen to Arnold Schoenberg.”

Schoenberg's music earned his respect, but not his affection. Waters even tried playing Schoenberg over and over for his youngest son, figuring that the toddler might be a blank slate on which to imprint the eminent German composer's thorny, dissonant music.

It turned out, not only the kid, but the entire household hated Schoenberg.

“Every time I put it on, the house would break into chaos,” Waters said. “Everyone would be screaming at each other.”

Exactly why Schoenberg's music didn't work for him, or why it seems to be despised by a majority of the listening public, is a question Waters has spent considerable time pondering.

“The answer is, or at least part of answer is, for various reasons we don't get it,” Waters said. “It transcends our ability. It's about pattern recognition. You can't listen to it and understand it in some way that's not analytical.

“And people aren't analytically listening to what's going on. Music has to serve a function that helps them increase their ability to appreciate and enjoy in some way the moment-to-moment passing of their lives. They are not going to go for a piece of music that's like reading a technical journal.”

But increasingly, in Waters' estimation, it's not just Schoenberg, Webern and their modernist peers who are incomprehensible – Bach, Mozart and Beethoven make less and less sense to a younger audience.

“For these kids who are growing up on a diet of hip-hop music, they don't get the music of Mozart and Beethoven, even though hip-hop is built on it,” Waters said. “I mean, Mozart is somewhere underneath Eminem, he's lying there, but they just can't make a connection to it. To them, all that music is, it's categorically, cognitively (unavailable). It's this old stuff, and they don't get further than that.”

Waters is intent on closing the gap between Mozart and Eminem. While in Oregon (where he taught at Lewis & Clark College), he founded the NWEAMO (New West Electro-Acoustic Music Organization), which is devoted to forging “connections between the composers, performers and lovers of avant-garde classical music and the DJs, MCs, guitar-gods, troubadours and gourmets of experimental popular music.”

Since Waters' move to San Diego, NWEAMO has broadened its reach and now presents an annual festival in about a half-dozen cities worldwide, including San Diego (this year in October at SDSU), and has hopes of presenting concerts on the online virtual world Second Life (where the organization's board of directors already holds its meetings).

At San Diego State, Waters collaborated with like-minded faculty members Todd Rewoldt and violinist Felix Olschofka (and “guest percussionist” Joel Bluestone) to form SWARMIUS, which is dedicated to Waters' most potent weapon: his genre-defying music.

And Waters has started a new major at SDSU in Electro Acoustic Composition, intended for composers who, in the words on the university's Web site, began “their creative experiments within so-called 'Popular' genres such as rock, metal, hip-hop, electronica.” The program calls itself “one of the most forward looking in the world.”

Waters believes there is an increasing number of faculty at SDSU who are open to fresh ideas. “There is a group of us now who feel that the underlying principles of what constitutes an academy of music really need to be rethought, so that they in some way address who we are becoming as a culture,” he said.

The School of Music and Dance's new director, Donna Conaty, acknowledges Waters' vision and expects it will be one aspect of the school's focus.

“Ideally, I'd like to see us be known as a school that's really valuing the traditions of the past – whether Western European, African, global music, folk music, American traditional, and so forth,” Conaty said. “But also valuing emerging technologies, emerging musical and artistic visions.”

Maybe Waters won't have to blow those doors off after all. It may just be a matter of opening them ever wider.

The radical makeover of the music giant EMI, which has provoked an irate Robbie Williams to “strike”, is a reflection of the metamorphosis of the global music industry. Top of the Pops may be dead, but CDs, MP3 players and file-sharing have given birth to digital music. It is more mobile and personal then ever, making the listener king, and the music industry is struggling to maintain control.

The music industry is a great topical choice for the classroom. Teachers can hand the mantle of expertise to their students, allowing them to bring their knowledge, experience and opinions to bear on the subject, while the teaching simultaneously develops their understanding and skills. It’s relevant to music and ICT, of course, as well as other areas such as English and maths.

Start with the official charts site (www.theofficialcharts.com). As well as showing the current chart-toppers, it has an archive of the number one singles and albums, so ask students to look for records for significant dates such as their birthday, although be prepared to comfort any year 5s or year 9s who find they were born when the Teletubbies or Mr Blobby topped the charts.

Give them time to explore each other’s taste in music. Explain the concept behind Desert Island Discs by looking at the website, focusing on well-known names such as Ricky Gervais or Nigella Lawson (www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/desertislanddiscs.shtml). Ask students to choose and discuss their top three records. If you can get a colleague (eg the headteacher) to model the process, so much the better.

Once you’ve established their tastes, ask them how they listen to music (eg CDs, radio, MP3 players, phones, internet). Encourage them to conduct a survey of how much music they listen to in one week and by what means. They can create a chart or graphs to show the results. Older students can then compare their listening habits with a wider picture by accessing the IFPI’s Digital Music Report 2007 (www.ifpi.org/content/library/digital-music-report-2007.pdf).

It is technological developments that have brought about the modern music revolution. The advent of MP3 files, for example, which can compress music data by a factor of 10 or 12, allows songs to be transferred and downloaded relatively quickly. Get students to create a poster explaining MP3 files. How Stuff Works provides an accessible video on the process as well as more detail for older students (www.howstuffworks.com/mp3.htm).

These rapid technological advances have prompted a crisis within the music industry, as consumers reap cheap sources of music through piracy and file-sharing. CD sales are declining, but income from downloads is not making up the shortfall. The BPI site (www.bpi.co.uk/index.asp?Page=piracy/content_file_79.shtml) will help students to understand the issues. Ask them to write a guide to accessing music legally and safely. A parents’ guide on the same topic may provide a useful model: www.pro-music.org/guide/pdf-youngpeople-english.pdf.

Encourage students to find out more about the industry by investigating how a record label works (http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/record-label.htm), producing a cartoon strip to show the journey from unknown musician to successful recording artist. Older students can research some of the career options in the music industry, such as A&R, journalism and PR/promotion, and produce a series of card factfiles for a careers display aimed at young people (www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/onemusic/industry).

Guy Hands, who bought EMI for £3bn, is focused on revitalising a business in decline rather than cosying up with pop legends. One of the big four record companies, alongside Sony BMG, Universal and Warner, EMI has an impressive pedigree. Students researching this British company will find the Beatles, Queen and Pink Floyd in its lists (www.emigroup.com/About/History/Default.htm). It currently has a roster of 14,000 artists. But artistic temperaments and lavish advances have led to Hands’s plans for modernisation. Read a range of news reports on the issue, eg www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/jan/16/citynews.privateequity, highlighting the arguments, before debating whether they agree with the hard-nosed businessman or the disgruntled pop star.

Digitisation is not the only music industry innovation. Reality TV has brought us Simon Cowell, and a series of short-lived successes on shows in which fame rather than the realisation of musical expression seems to be the motivating factor. Draw out the conventions of this type of programme (www.xfactor.tv) then have some fun using drama skills to create a parody of the show.

Next month’s Brit Awards should reflect the state of British pop music. Give students a list of award categories, eg best single, best group, and ask for nominations. Compare their nominations with those on the Brits site (www.brits.co.uk). Do they think they are a fair representation of British music? Hold a class vote on the nominations to see whether the class can predict the results on February 20.

Teachers and students will find a complete KS3 lesson pack on the music industry on the Guardian’s daily newsdesk for schools: www.learnnewsdesk.co.uk. The lesson is based on Guardian extracts

The Dylanesque folk of Catch the Wind was all that most American pop fans had heard of the young Scottish singer known only as Donovan before he took his own peculiar spin on psychedelic pop to No. 1 in 1966 with Sunshine Superman.
A second million-seller, Mellow Yellow, soared to No. 2 with vocal help from Paul McCartney. That same year, the Beatles hit with Yellow Submarine, to which Donovan, McCartney’s friend and neighbor, contributed the lyric, “Sky of blue and sea of green.”
But the biggest adventure he shared with the Beatles was flying to India in 1968 to study transcendental meditation with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. It’s in India that Donovan would write another psychedelic classic, Hurdy Gurdy Man, while helping John Lennon develop the style of acoustic guitar that would play such a prominent role in the sound of The Beatles.In the 40 years since then, he’s only gotten deeper into transcendental meditation while the albums he recorded in the ’60s have provided inspiration for the likes of Beck and an entire new folk movement often labeled freak-folk.
The singer looks back on his friendship with the Beatles and discovering the inner light, while looking forward to a day when meditation brings an end to war:In the four-CD Donovan box set, Try For The Sun, you write, “I knew I would challenge hypocrisy and greed, present the Bohemian Manifesto to a delusioned world.” Do you feel you’ve accomplished that?Well, I challenge all the time. When I came out of school, I was very well prepared by my father and my bohemian pals to realize that poetry was going to be the herald of change, and I needed to be part of that. We all did.
As the years progressed, one realized that surely there must be an answer to all this suffering and angst. And 2008 is the 40th anniversary of the trip to India, which I took with the Beatles, one Beach Boy, and the jazz flautist Paul Horn, and discovered this extraordinary method that had been lost to the world called meditation.
So my songs changed from direct challenge to presenting the possibility of entering the inner world. Challenging hypocrisy and greed could, you might say, be a young bohemian’s work. But as you grow into older Bohemia like me, you start looking at what is the actual reason for this suffering.It was to George and I the obvious way of the future. In the ancient Vedic texts, they spoke of a fourth state of consciousness. And once you have it, you will overcome all fear, all doubt, and you will become a superman and a superwoman unto yourself.Superman, yeah, yeah. A friend of mine, I said, “Look, now they’re making feature films of comic books.” He’s a writer himself, and he said, “America is discovering its heroes.” The comic heroes are actually based, or many of them, on true mythological characters from antique literature. Now, Hercules is Superman, doing enormous feats of strength. And I guess I was linking that to Nietzsche’s Superman, the future Superman, one of super-intelligence, super-consciousness and super-understanding rather than super warfare, super-overpowering of other humans.I decided in 1965 or early ‘66 that pop music was going to be my way if I could actually create a quirky new kind of pop where I would put in the possibilities of following the mythological journey of your own life but you could actually think of it, very simply, as a fun, dancing song. So I started to make these seemingly harmless pop songs. And so did the Beatles.Oh no, it was easy to explore it because I’m an experimentalist. It was conscious. If you take a seemingly ambiguous lyric from a haiku poem - first, there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is, which is a kind of a secret question to Zen monks - and Mickie Most produces it and we do it in two minutes, 57 seconds, I was fascinated when I realized that by putting in these lyrics, I was introducing an audience to a concept that would lead them to think, “What is this about?”
And in ‘66, most people my age were basically only reading cereal boxes.Yeah, yeah, yeah. I went to see him when he came to Ireland. And it was very cool. There’s very much a lot of gypsy stuff in Devendra, just like me. I walk out there, the light comes up, and then I play guitar (makes guitar noise), and then when I sing, I’m actually looking at the audience going, “I’m in town. I’ve just arrived.” Devendra does it, too.
The most powerful moment in music is when one voice walks to the microphone and picks up one instrument and the whole audience centers in. It’s in our blood, to want to listen to this one voice and one instrument because we know it’s going to be personal.

Wyclef Jean has never been an easy one to peg musically. But his restless spirit in the studio is better focused on his latest CD, Carnival Vol. II: Memoirs of an Immigrant. Disparate styles — metal rock, reggae, Southern rap, even Indian music — are streamlined into a vibrant, unpredictable mix. His sixth solo album, Carnival pulses with glints of the different sounds he heard while circling the globe over the past few years.

“It’s like when the great jazz musicians traveled and brought different rhythms back to the States — like Quincy Jones or Dizzy Gillespie did back in the day,” Jean said last week from a tour stop in Las Vegas. “That’s what I wanted to do with this album. It was about opening the mind. I wanted to show that there’s more music than what’s on the block.”

But the Haitian-born, Brooklyn, N.Y.-raised musician, who headlines Rams Head Live tomorrow night, didn’t abandon his beloved ‘hood fans. Polished bass-deep rhythms and his quirky rapping and singing still anchor Carnival’s 14 tracks, which feature several high-profile guests. Among them are rappers T.I. and Chamillionaire, hip-hop soul queen Mary J. Blige, jazz-pop chanteuse Norah Jones and pop legend Paul Simon.

New controversy, however, could steer attention away from the solid album. Over the weekend, news surfaced that Jean and other urban pop stars — including 50 Cent, Timbaland and Blige — have been implicated in a steroids investigation, according to a report in the Times Union of Albany, N.Y. A spokeswoman for Jean’s label, Columbia Records, had no comment.

Although Carnival Vol. II is musically progressive, thematically Jean looks back. He revisits the carnival concept of his 1997 solo debut, Wyclef Jean Presents the Carnival Featuring the Refugee Allstars. The album spawned three hits, including “Gone Till November,” and went platinum. He had attracted a fraction of the audience that bought The Score, the 1996 hip-hop classic Jean recorded with high school pals Lauryn Hill and Prakazrel Michel (aka Pras), collectively known as the Fugees. That album sold 18 million copies worldwide and helped launch the platinum-plus, Grammy-winning solo careers of Jean and Hill.

But unlike Jean, the New Jersey rapper-songstress has yet to deliver on the promise of her celebrated 1998 debut, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. Her behavior (missed shows, disjointed interviews) has become erratic since the mammoth success of her first solo album, which sold more than 8 million copies and won five Grammy Awards. However, two years ago, the notoriously mercurial artist surprisingly reunited with Jean and Pras, and a Fugees album was in the works. But the project is on hold — indefinitely.

“I’m putting a lot of great vibes out there, man,” Jean said. “I hope Lauryn gets her act together, you know what I’m saying? It’s my dream to produce another Fugees album. When that’ll happen, I don’t know, man.”

In the meantime, Jean has kept busy as a producer (he was behind Shakira’s ubiquitous 2006 hit, “Hips Don’t Lie”) and a recording artist. On his other efforts — namely 2000’s The Ecleftic, 2002’s Masquerade and 2003’s The Preacher’s Son — he partnered with a diverse range of artists with varying degrees of success. On his last album, 2004’s dazzling Welcome to Haiti: Creole 101, the 35-year-old performer stepped away from pop altogether and gracefully explored the rainbow-hued music of the Caribbean.

But Carnival Vol. II is a full-fledged return to the global urban-pop of his 1997 debut. This time, the expansive musical scope is better realized, and the illustrious guests are well-used. Their voices rise like other instruments in the dense mix as Jean mostly raps and sings about different aspects of immigration issues.

“That’s an issue that’s close to me,” said Jean, who at age 6 moved with his family from Haiti to Brooklyn. “America was named after an immigrant. So why can’t immigration laws be fair? We all deserve to be here.”

Lyrically, the album isn’t preachy or didactic. Subtly at regular intervals, the artist makes references to refuge and protection. For instance, in “What About the Baby,” a standout duet with Blige, Jean croons the line, “I got love for Miami all day/But if my Cubans get to stay/Why you turn my Haitians away?” “The message unifies it all at the end of the day,” Jean said. “We’re all everyday people. This world is one big carnival. We should embrace more than fight each other, you know?”

Jean partly credits his renewed spirit of universal love and rejuvenated musical imagination to his 2-year-old daughter, Angelina, whom he and his wife adopted when the Haitian girl was 3 months old.

“It gave me a fresh breath, man,” he said, and you could feel he was smiling on the phone. “She’s made me feel young again, invincible. She gives me a reason to live, a reason to want to see this world be a better place, man. I can do my part with my music.”

rashod.ollison@baltsun.com

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Copyright © 2008, The Baltimore Sun

The Brit Award nominations have been announced, with pop acts Take That, Mika and Leona Lewis dominating proceedings.

Does the shortlist reflect the best of British music in 2007?

After being ruled by rock acts for the past two years, pop music has regained the upper hand at the Brit Awards.

Fifteen years after their first prize at the ceremony, Take That are favourites to scoop glory on awards night on 20 February.

Their nominations include best British group, where they join Girls Aloud in a face-off with indie heavyweights Arctic Monkeys and Kaiser Chiefs.

“That’s fine, we’re all popular, people are buying the records,” says Kaiser Chiefs singer Ricky Wilson, who said he was a fan of Take That and Girls Aloud. “These awards should go to people who are popular.”

Meanwhile, the Arctic Monkeys are the sole rock representatives in the battle for best British album.

Their competition includes Leona Lewis, the X Factor winner whose album Spirit beat the Arctics’ own record for the fastest-selling debut in UK history.

The Daily Telegraph’s rock critic Neil McCormick said it was “one of the most awful-looking lists of uninteresting, unexciting talent I’ve ever seen”.

“To see Leona Lewis in album of the year is just depressing beyond comprehension,” he says.

“She’s had one decent single, she’s a TV reality star, it’s really got nothing to do with the shape of music in the year.

“But it does kind of show you it wasn’t a very good year for music and therefore these pop characters were the only ones that emerged newly and freshly out of the year.”

Stuart Clarke, talent editor for industry bible Music Week, said there was no shortage of good new music in 2007 - but there were not as many big sellers.

“So when you do get artists like Leona and Mika and they sell particularly well, they dominate to an extent,” he says.

“But certainly compared to the year before, pop in 2007 felt like it was very much on the up. Leona’s [released] a great, amazing album.”

The chairman of the Brit Awards committee, Sony BMG label boss Ged Doherty, describes it as a “very exciting list this year, very varied”.

He says: “It reflects what was going on in music last year - you’ve got everything from Mika, Take That and Leona Lewis on one hand all the way through to the Foo Fighters, Arcade Fire, Kings of Leon and all points in between.”

Several acts were missing, though. Amy Winehouse was barely out of the charts or the headlines in 2007.

Despite having the year’s best-selling album in the UK, it was released at the end of 2006 and earned her nominations last year - meaning she was not eligible this time.

Radiohead, whose In Rainbows was one of the most critically-acclaimed and talked-about releases of 2007, did not qualify either.

The album was not initially eligible for the charts because it was released through the band’s own website.

To be nominated for best British group or best British album, award rules say you must have reached the top 75 by the cut-off date of 26 November.

Radiohead did not reach the charts until In Rainbows got a full CD release on New Year’s Eve - meaning the band may well feature in next year’s nominations instead.

Prince’s hopes of being named best international male were scuppered after he gave his new album away free with the Mail on Sunday newspaper - also not eligible for the charts.

Another theme of 2007 was the number of reformed megagroups, such as Led Zeppelin, The Police and the Spice Girls, who returned to the stage.

They were not considered for best British group because they did not release any new music. They could have been shortlisted for best British live act, but were not.

But Winehouse aside, the list of main Brit nominees is almost exactly the same as the rundown of best-selling British artists in 2007.

And like it or not, the Brit Awards - unlike some other music honours - are largely about rewarding what is popular.