Long Miles graduate from the school of reggae-rock
Posted inFeatures, Music+Clubs
by
T. Ballard Lesemann
Four years ago, John Shields was a new kid in town, an 18-year-old transplant from suburban Philly eager to get rolling with a budding band. Nowadays, with almost four years of school under his belt, Shields is at a turning point. After graduation, he could pursue a standard day job and move into a sturdy career. Or he can follow a different path with his bandmates in the Long Miles.
“We’d already played together in high school, writing original tunes and playing parties,” Shields says of his pals — bassist Sam Morgan and guitarists Brett Haenn and James McNally. “We won a battle of the bands before we applied to college. Sam and Brett had already applied to CofC, and James and I weren’t quite sure what we wanted to do. Ultimately, we decided to stick together.
”
The four friends to Charleston at the same time. All are due to graduate in May.
The Long Miles guys initially resided and rehearsed in a four-room suite at McAlister Hall. They became a solid team, refining their technique, songwriting, and on-stage performance along the way.
“Throughout that first year, we wrote and recorded 12 songs in the dorm,” Shields says. “Looking back on it, the quality isn’t that great, but we thought it was spectacular at the time. We enjoyed a little bit of success with it, and people responded well to it.”
During their freshmen year, Shields emerged as the lead vocalist and lyricist. Morgan and McNally provided additional ideas for song arrangements
“I think we came across as best friends on stage,” Shields says. “You could tell that we’ve been living and playing together for years.”
During their freshman year, the foursome picked up a weekly gig at King Street venue O’Malley’s, playing unplugged sets of covers and originals.
They tightened up even more during their sophomore year, recorded with studio engineer Chris DiBeneditto (G. Love) at Philadelphonic Studios, and a released six-song mini album titled A Philadelphonic EP in Dec. 2010. Their popularity in the club scene grew even more throughout 2011.
“It was great because all of our friends in the dorm would come out and have fun,” Shields says. “They’d tell their friends and bring them out, and we started developing a little following.”
Drummer Adam Williams, a CofC grad from 2010, started sitting in at O’Malley’s and at other shows, eventually signing on as an official member. Williams also keeps time with funk band Wadata and a few Charleston-based projects. The most recent enlistment is former Plainfield Project organist/pianist Ross Bogan, who’s currently in his senior year at CofC. Bogan plays with Wadata, Weigh Station, and others as well.
“The band’s sound is still evolving,” Shields says. “We’re still trying to find our main style.
We definitely incorporate a lot of styles. Coming out of Philadelphia, the hip-hop/blues feel of G. Love was a big influence on us. We were listing to hip-hop and reggae a lot. I personally really liked Jimmy Cliff and Umphrey’s McGee, too. Adam has the ability to play all sorts of music and rhythms, which allows us to expand. We got more in to the jam scene along the way, and we tried to get away from the standard formulas.”
All four of the original bandmates developed an interest in the inner workings of the music industry and the process of producing music. They enrolled in media classes and studied marketing on campus. Shields and Morgan attended CofC’s School of the Arts’ introduction to music management course taught by Mark Bryan, the lead guitarist of Hootie and the Blowfish and head of the Chucktown Music Group.
“Mark’s class was very helpful,” Shields says. “Classes like that encouraged all of us to stay in school and wait until we earned our degrees before making a some sort of a big move as a band.
”
Last year, Long Miles raised funds through a Kickstarter campaign to record with acclaimed studio man Rick Beato at Black Dog Sound in Atlanta. The 10-song collection, Shades, hits the street this week.
“I think the sound of this new album is tight and lively,” Shields says. “Rick worked fast and serious, and it turned out better than we’d hoped for.”
Rhythmically, the songs on Shades sound more like a modern reggae/rock band than a funky jam band or hip-hop hybrid. Syncopated reggae/ska beats are consistent throughout the songs on Shades. It fits in well with the post 311/Sublime side of rock.
“We had all always listened to reggae, especially Bob Marley’s album Burnin’,” Shields says. “We are influenced by the reggae/rock movement going on, but I don’t think we’re stuck in that subgenre. We can play with that feel, but we can do other things, too.”
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Tagged: Local Bands, Long Miles, Music Farm
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Jason Miles | Producer | United States
Grammy Award winning producer, keyboardist, composer, arranger and synthesist.
BUY NOW
“Genius” -Miles Davis-1991
“Jason Miles is a Great Musician” -Chick Corea-2021
“Jason Miles is total Gangsta” -Sean Martin-2021
“Jason Miles has raised the level of excellence for the musicians who have had the good fortune of working with him, myself included. He has enriched the lives of the millions of people who have listened to the music he plays, the recordings he produces and the countless musicians he mentors and inspires. The work he did with my friends, Miles Davis and Marcus Miller have helped to define the modern face of jazz music.” – Roberta Flack
Welcome to my website! Here you will find some history about me, some excellent photos in my gallery, various services that I also offer that will make one a better artist and musician and producer. I’ll keep you up to date on my various projects that I’m working on and have some live dates in the future to post as well. Also…look at all the different social media sites that I’m on and you’re more than welcome to join them.
I’m happy to report that my long-awaited book has been edited and ready to move to the next step. I’m going to need your help to get it out there. I will be posting more about this and how you can help me make this reality. The book will come with a new album of solo piano and trio pieces. The first time I’ve done that.
Here is a link that will take you to my Pre-sale site..I am asking friends and supporters to do a pre-order of the book which will be out in the middle to the end of April. By pre-ordering the book you are allowing me to go and create an excellent campaign for marketing and promotion and also raise the quality of the package. It cost money to do these and I appreciate your support to help. There are very fan friendly funding tiers.
Your support is greatly appreciated. Just a reminder with every pre-order you get a digital copy of my new upcoming solo piano and trio album.
Learn More Here
My last album “Jason Miles // Kind of New – Black Magic” came out on March 6, 2020, and soon after that the lockdown happened in all my live shows disappeared.
So, what I did was record some new music for the album. They are digital bonus tracks that are available exclusively on Band Camp under Jason Miles. The tracks feature guest artists Randy Brecker and Russell Gunn.
A very big priority for me will be the launching of my one-man show “The Extraordinary Journey of Jason Miles. A Musical Biography.” I take you through 47 years of my life in the music world and some of the amazing artists and projects that I was involved with over all this time. Mixing stories and music together to bring what my life has been into focus. It’s all part of the package with the book of the same title and solo album so Keep your eye out for it and of course you’ll hear about it on this site and my social media platforms. I’m also going to be releasing music from my vault of music that i have had in the archives for years.
Stay safe and visit often and here’s to a great 2022
Peace, Jason
The Green Mile – soundtracks and music from the movie
Old Alabama
B.
B. and Group
1:00
I Can’t Give You Anything But Love
Billie Holiday
3:27
Cheek To Cheek
Fred Astaire
2:38
Did You Ever See A Dream Walking
Gene Austin
2:52
Charmaine
Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians
2:24
An Offense To The Heart
Thomas Newman
1:09
Billy-Be-Frigged
Thomas Newman
2:09
Boogeyman
Thomas Newman
3:27
Boy’s Eye
Thomas Newman
0:55
Briar Ridge
Thomas Newman
0:43
Cigar Box
Thomas Newman
1:51
Circus Mouse
Thomas Newman
1:29
Coffee On The Mile
Thomas Newman
5:12
Coffey’s Hands
Thomas Newman
1:59
Condemned Man
Thomas Newman
1:34
Danger Of Hell
Thomas Newman
2:28
Done Tom Turkey
Thomas Newman
1:01
Foolishment
Thomas Newman
1:50
L’Homme Mauvais
Thomas Newman
2:22
Limp Noodle
Thomas Newman
1:04
Monster Big
Thomas Newman
1:51
Morphine & Cola
Thomas Newman
2:57
Night Journey
Thomas Newman
2:12
No Exceptions
Thomas Newman
0:58
Now Long Gone
Thomas Newman
1:08
Punishment
Thomas Newman
1:52
Red Over Green
Thomas Newman
2:58
Scared Of The Dark
Thomas Newman
1:04
Shine My Knob
Thomas Newman
0:54
That’s The Deal
Thomas Newman
1:38
The Bad Death Of Eduard Delacroix
Thomas Newman
3:49
The Green Mile
Thomas Newman
3:39
The Mouse On The Mile
Thomas Newman
1:31
The Two Dead Girls
Thomas Newman
3:02
Trapingus Parish
Thomas Newman
0:52
Two Run Throughs
Thomas Newman
1:19
Wild Bill
Thomas Newman
1:16
How Artists Invented Pop Music and Pop Music Became Art read online by Mike Roberts (Page 2)
John Lennon experienced both scenarios: his studies (albeit not too hard) at the Liverpool College of Art were followed by a deep immersion in the Hamburg art scene.
His character and worldview were typical of an art-pop representative; he also became one of the first and by far the most influential musicians from the art college during the music boom of the 1960s. In addition, a little later it was he who brought together art and popular music – and in his performance this combination became discouragingly public and yet deeply intimate. For this reason, we will start with a long story about the young Lennon. As an ordinary artist-musician, in some ways he speaks for everyone else, and his personal history helps to define the emerging era of art-pop.
Klaus Forman, Lennon’s mentor in the early 1960s, shared with Philip Norman this impression of the musician during his stay in Hamburg: “He loved to sing, he loved songs <…> but I was most impressed by the attitude of this guy. All he wanted was to be different from everyone else. He wanted to do something special, something outstanding.”
This simple, burning desire to “be different” has been the main motivation for dozens of artist-musicians from art colleges (including “real” musicians who defected to their side, both formally educated and self-taught) from those very since rock and roll and pop art were born at the same time.
This is where our story begins.
Part I. 1950s, 1960s
1. Tomorrow in post-war Britain: 1956 and all that
There is no one else on my wave – I mean, it is either too high or too low.
John Lennon. From the lyrics to the demo version of the song “Strawberry Fields Forever”
Between the end of World War II and the advent of rock ‘n’ roll, Britain was, as the jazz singer George Melley put it, “a colorless seedy world where studious boys played ping-pong.” At the end of 19For 56 years, the British Empire was breathing its last because of the Suez Crisis, only recently food rationing was abolished, and only lemonade was associated with the word “pop” denoting, among other things, a carbonated drink. – Note here and below. per.]. However, in the suburbs of Liverpool, something inspired optimism. John Lennon persuaded his mother to buy a guitar.
“There was nothing before Elvis,” Lennon would say later, but, of course, there was still something before Elvis.
In addition to revival jazz and modern jazz, there was folk and popular song. There was even rock ‘n’ roll as imagined by Bill Haley & His Comets, whose song “Rock Around the Clock” (1955) became the soundtrack for the outrageous teddy fights in theaters across the country. Thanks to the improved communications of post-war Britain (i.e., press, newsreel, radio and television), changes that previously would have affected only local fashion now quickly spread throughout the country. This is how the paradox of mass individualism arose, which underlies the youth subculture. Bill Haley, despite all his liveliness, was just leading another show group. And only together with Heartbreak Hotel (1956) Elvis’s music players poured unheard, thrashing, sexually charged sounds of teenage rage and rebellion.
Elvis’s arrival coincided with the rise of British skiffle, a musical style that applied a homemade punk aesthetic to a mix of American folk, blues, country and traditional jazz. Thanks to the success of Lonnie Donegan’s “Rock Island Line” (1955), the genre became wildly popular, and Lennon (like many boys his age) realized that you can grab a piece of the pie without years of musical training – all you need is a guitar and a couple of chords.
But even before Elvis and even before Lonnie Donegan, there was art in Lennon’s life. Contrary to the pose of a rebel, he called himself a homebody and loved not only to read, but also to write stories, and especially to draw. According to John’s aunt Mimi (his de facto guardian), when he sat at the table in his room, there was such silence that a fly could be heard flying by. “I was crazy about Alice in Wonderland and drew all the characters,” the musician will later recall. This passion for caricatures, for depicting grotesque, ridiculous creatures, Lennon will keep until the end of his life, often ridiculing government officials in caricatures.
The mid-1950s were also the heyday of BBC comedy radio programs and especially The Goon Show (1951-1960) starring Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan (another artist-musician). The broadcast exposed and ridiculed the foolish tenacity with which society attempted to maintain pre-war sobriety and obsolete patterns of respectful behaviour.
For Lennon, the show became more important than the surrealism of Lewis Carroll and the nonsense of Edward Lear: in his teenage years he was simply obsessed with the transmission – until it gave way to no less subversive rhymes to the rhythm of rock and roll.
Be that as it may, by the end of the summer of 1956 Lennon, thirsty for rebellion, began to glance towards the United States. “In America there were teenagers, in all other countries they were just people,” he later remarked. Even the skiffle paled against the Elvis-led rock procession of delightful troublemakers such as Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Jean Vincent and Fats Domino.
Paul McCartney (whom Lennon was yet to meet) said: “I turned on Elvis and felt great, just amazing. I had no idea how records were made and it was pure magic.” McCartney, then barely fourteen, on his way to school on the bus with his friend George Harrison (who was even younger) endlessly drew guitars – of course, American ones. As in the case of Elvis, they were attracted not only by the sound of America, but also by its style.
In Liverpool, the cult of modern America was mostly teenagers, but two hundred miles south, in East London, a group of fully grown men and women, consisting of artists and even intellectuals, at the same time prepared the altar for everything new, modern, technological and mass (that is, American).
The Independent Group was a loose collection of artists, architects, designers, photographers, art historians and critics who met at the London Institute of Modern Arts from 1952 years old. Among them were artists Eduardo Paolozzi and Nigel Henderson, brutalist architects Peter and Alison Smithson, film composer Frank Cordell.
They were mainly interested in the growing mass media culture based on new technologies – that is, mass-produced products, films, magazines, advertising and – more recently – television. They developed aesthetic strategies aimed at appropriating and exploiting the ubiquitous images of the mass media. The main idea of the “independents” was that the enjoyment of the low visual culture of consumerism is no worse than the enjoyment of high art, and that the works of both cultures can – regardless of origin – be considered parts of the same aesthetic community.
Following the Dadaists, the Independent Group believed that the overwhelming art of the past needed to be seriously reconsidered, if not thrown into the dustbin. By 1956, they had coined the term “pop” for the nascent aesthetic movement. London’s Whitechapel Gallery soon hosted the exhibition This Is Tomorrow, and its both ambitious and populist approach accurately reflected the spirit of reverent optimism that prevailed in Britain marching towards the sixties.
Twelve different teams took part in the development of the exhibition (along with artists, architects and designers, they included a musician, an engineer and an art critic), each of which came up with a “pavilion”. The organizers hoped that such a curatorial approach would be able to reflect the diversity of views on modern realities. The biggest buzz was caused by the pavilion “House of Fun”, created by Team B (architect John Walker, theoretical artists John McNeil and Richard Hamilton).
The contents of the pavilion looked more like a PR campaign for a record company than an exhibition.
At the entrance, visitors were greeted by a fully functioning three-meter Robbie robot, borrowed from MGM, which the film studio used to promote the sci-fi film Forbidden Planet, which was released at the same time. There was also a huge poster showing Robbie carrying lead actress Anne Francis and, side by side with the poster, a huge cardboard cutout of Marilyn Monroe from The Seven Year Itch (1955). Dizzying op-art panels towered in front of the gallery entrance, the sounds of what was happening inside could be heard from speakers installed right there. In the pavilion itself, audiences were attacked by looping videos, reproductions of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, a strawberry-scented rug, and a jukebox from which hits blared – an extremely populist device for that time.
The members of the Independent Group were not the only participants in the This Is Tomorrow exhibition, but it was their ideas (and in particular the intellectual audacity of Richard Hamilton) that made the exhibition famous.