String Theory Media TEXT

Chick Corea and John McLaughlin

A program note preview for the Nashville Symphony's In Concert magazine, published April, 2009

In the fall of 1968, 27-year-old John McLaughlin got the phone call that would change his life. The bass player Dave Holland, a fellow Englishman, was on the line from the United States urging his guitar-playing friend in the U.K. to come to New York to take a band job with drummer Tony Williams.
By February of the following year, McLaughlin was in Manhattan, the Mecca of the jazz music he loved so dearly. And thanks to Williams, he would soon find himself in a recording studio with the world-famous trumpeter Miles Davis, along with a very heavy cadre of other musicians, including saxophonist Wayne Shorter and keyboard players Herbie Hancock, Joe Zawinul and one Armando Anthony “Chick” Corea.

B.B. King's Hometown Museum

The Wall Street Journal, October 16, 2008

Indianola, Miss.

Driving Highway 61 south from Memphis into the Mississippi Delta compels a person to imagine life stooped over a cotton sack from dawn to dusk, deprived of comfort and opportunity. And as the vast fields glide by, a traveler might also reflect on some improbable truths: that music could be a balm for such an existence, that the music of slaves and sharecroppers could evolve into something as mutable and powerful as the blues, and that a man could carry the blues out of that miserable place to enrich the world and be hailed as a king.

Nashville 2.0

A personal essay on how Nashville is adapting to the revolution in the music business.

Northwestern Magazine, Winter 2008

The Nashville skyline pictured on the back of Bob Dylan’s 1969 album of that title scarcely merits the attention. Two modest office towers poke up on either side of a smoggy, low-rise downtown. It’s no wish-you-were-here postcard, unless the idea of Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash working together at Columbia Records Studio A quickens your pulse, as it does mine.

Forty years later, Nashville is spiky with glass high-rises and construction cranes building more of the same, and the city’s Old South/New South contrasts have perhaps never been on starker display.

Scenes From A Rose Garden

Martina McBride found career and family bliss by carefully balancing the timeless and the timely.

The Journal of Country Music

Even in the recording hotbed that is Nashville’s Berry Hill neighborhood, Blackbird Studio is dressed to impress the audiophile. It catacombs from room to state-of-the-art room through doors that seal like air-locks. Parallel walls and square corners are scarce, giving the place a post-modern angularity, a three-dimensional metaphor for creativity that never travels in straight lines. In keeping with the name, Blackbird owner and mastermind John McBride has on display his large collection of Beatles memorabilia: movie posters, old newspapers, Rickenbacker guitars and, apparently, the actual console used to master Abbey Road. In one tracking room, a grand piano sits on a slab of polished black granite etched with Paul McCartney’s lines in billboard size letters: “Blackbird singing in the dead of night. Take these broken wings and learn to fly...”
    It’s a pleasant surprise to realize that one of Martina McBride’s biggest hit song titles, “A Broken Wing,” is secreted within that lyric, because the indulgence and solidity symbolized by the Blackbird floor is something she and John have earned together since moving to Nashville as newlyweds in 1990.

Jazz and Bluegrass - Musical Cousins - Stage A Reunion

The Wall Street Journal, January 2007

Jazz and bluegrass made similar journeys in the 20th century, from maligned to refined. These days, both are celebrated with presidential medals and enjoyed at high-rent festivals all over the world. Still, it is our nature to put music in boxes, and many may assume that the urbane jazz box, with its horns and drums, and the bluegrass box, with its rustic roots and its stringed instruments, would have (or should have) little to do with one another.

In fact, bluegrass and jazz, particularly bebop, are musical contemporaries and cousins—progressive departures from the dominant sounds of their day, forged during World War II.

O Brother and the Bluegrass Boom

How the phenomenal success of a motion picture soundtrack turned the music world on its ear.

Acoustic Guitar, September, 2002

It is fashionable these days in Nashville (and perhaps it always was) to complain that things aren't what they used to be—that country music stinks, that the Lower Broadway honky-tonk district isn't as cool as it was in the 1990s, or that the bluegrass jams pale in comparison to those at the Old Time Pickin' Parlor in the '70s. And, of course, since they moved the Grand Ole Opry out of the Ryman Auditorium in 1974, well, it's a wonder anybody still bothers to call it Music City.

But hold on. One of Nashville's virtues is that it keeps finding ways to revitalize its mythology and refresh its magic. On a night in May 2000, that happened.

The Cowboy Way

Jack Clement made music history by making the music business more fun

The Tennessean, September 14, 2003

"Where's that cat? Eugene!," Cowboy Jack Clement hollers from behind his desk.

He's a jolly, sleepy-looking man in a Hawaiian shirt with a full mop of cotton-white hair and an admiral's cleft chin. He's in the back office of the Cowboy Arms Hotel and Recording Spa, a large, wired-for-sound house on Belmont Boulevard, enjoying a glass of "Coppola" (as in filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola's winery) at about 11 a.m. on a pretty morning. It's the kind of day he'll call "clement" with an impish grin. The other definition of clement, incidentally, is "inclined to be merciful."

Tony Brown's Recovery

The Tennessean, Sunday August 24, 2003

Famed producer Tony Brown believes prayers, luck led to return from injury

Tony Brown doesn't remember the fall that plunged him into darkness or anything about the day before.

He doesn't remember two surgeries or the dire prognoses of top physicians or even crying when his old friend Reba McEntire sang to him in an intensive care unit in Los Angeles.

But Anastasia Brown, wife of the renowned Music Row executive and record producer, remembers vividly. While thousands of friends and fans waited vigilantly and prayerfully with little information, Anastasia confronted hard facts and dreadful possibilities. Her husband of four years, a man she calls her soul mate, faced a slim chance of survival and almost none of emerging from a coma as the same man she married.