[Dixielandjazz] Entertainment is changing.

[Steve Barbone]

"The turntable may be the most important musical instrument of the 
current era" See paragraph 3 below. Perhaps this is why "Live Music" is 
having problems?

Cheers,
Steve Barbone

August 8, 2004 - New York Times-By Kelefa Sanneh

Spin Doctorate: Learning How to be a DJ

"A DJ is someone who controls the music, so you're all already DJ's." 
That's what Rob Principe, president and chief executive of Scratch DJ 
Academy in Greenwich Village, told the class on the first day. Anyone 
who had spent time fiddling with an iPod or stuffing CD's into a stereo, 
he reasoned, had already grasped the basic concepts. Now all that 
remained was to follow the technological trail backward, from iPods and 
CD's to turntables and vinyl records.

The class was an intensive one-week program called DJ 101, and the 
instructor, an enthusiastic and  more important  patient turntablist 
named DJ Damage, started at the very beginning. "How many people have 
used a record before, not just seen one?" he asked, and nearly all of 
the 25 students raised a hand. He breathed a sigh of relief, and on that 
note introduced the day's special guest, a stocky, wisecracking guy 
named Grandwizzard Theodore. The Grandwizzard is a turntable hero, 
credited with inventing the art of scratching. Having him stop by your 
DJ lesson was the equivalent of having Bill Gates stop by your Intro to 
Computers class. (Although Mr. Gates, unlike the Grandwizzard, probably 
wouldn't use the phrase "You gotta lick it before you stick it.")

Scratch DJ Academy is the most prominent of a number of young schools 
that provide professional instruction to just the sorts of people who 
might once have spurned it. Until recently, aspiring DJ's had to rely on 
a combination of osmosis and experimentation: you'd take mental notes at 
nightclubs, then you'd retreat to your room and keep practicing until 
you got the hang of it. Now, more and more people are learning how to DJ 
in classrooms. The turntable may be the most important musical 
instrument of the current era  it's certainly the most ubiquitous  so 
it's only fitting that turntable conservatories are starting to emerge.

The University of California, Berkeley, started offering student-led 
DJ'ing courses in 1998, and this spring, after a few years of wrangling, 
Berklee College of Music in Boston began offering formal instruction, 
too. Stephen Webber, the Berklee professor who helped establish the 
school's course, recently published "Turntable Technique: The Art of the 
DJ" (Berklee Press), and the DJ historians Frank Broughton and Bill 
Brewster recently published "How to DJ Right: The Art and Science of 
Playing Records" (Grove Atlantic). Scratch DJ Academy, founded in 2002, 
is the country's best-known DJ school, but other academies  not all of 
them reputable  are springing up.

Oddly enough, the professionalization of DJ'ing seems to be lowering the 
barriers to entry, not raising them. The vast majority of DJ's still 
learn their trade informally, on their own; no club would penalize a DJ 
for not having a diploma. But formal instruction can help novices (and 
veterans) get better quicker. So it's getting even easier to become a 
DJ, and at a time when  as you may have noticed  there seem to be too 
many DJ's already. Could this possibly be good news?

To get to Scratch DJ Academy, you ascend a narrow staircase from the 
Sixth Avenue lobby, stepping over the skinny bodies strewn about the 
hallway. (No, it's not a crack house  the Joffrey Ballet School is 
upstairs, and the students tend to nap in the corridors.) Pass through a 
dingy waiting room and you're in the main classroom, with 17 
workstations arranged in an oval, each equipped with two turntables, a 
mixer and tiny speakers just loud enough to drown out your neighbors.

The crew that had paid $300 each for the one-week class couldn't have 
been more motley, in the best sense of the word. The brothers Byron and 
Brian Pendergraft, both in high school, were hoping to turn a hip-hop 
obsession into money for college. Danielle Polk, a college-radio DJ, had 
traveled from San Francisco to learn new techniques. A beefy mixtape DJ 
named 350 wanted to learn how to scratch. ("The right way, not just the 
sound-right way," he said.) And Tessa Cook (DJ Tickles, she sometimes 
called herself) had recently graduated from the Stanford business 
school, and wanted to cross "learn how to DJ" off her to-do list before 
returning to London.

Monday, the first day, had been devoted to the equipment, but Tuesday 
involved a bit of rudimentary music theory: DJ Damage was teaching the 
class how to count. The students gathered around Damage's workstation, 
solemnly nodding their heads and intoning, "1-2-3-4, 2-2-3-4," while out 
of the speakers came Jay-Z's "Big Pimpin' "  produced by Timbaland, who 
loves to disguise hip-hop rhythms with unexpected syncopations. Damage 
was training his class to find the "one"  the downbeat  on any record, 
and soon the pupils were back at their workstations, learning how to 
stop a record exactly on the downbeat, dragging it slowly back and forth 
under the needle, listening for that dry wooshing sound of a kick drum 
in slow motion.

This emphasis on the downbeat has a funny way of changing your 
perception. Once you start listening for the one, you hear it 
everywhere: a song comes on the radio and instead of noticing the words 
or the tune, you notice a particularly crisp kick drum, or a downbeat 
that arrives a few ticks too early, or a gleaming split second of 
emptiness before the one. That song, you think, is just begging to be 
cued up.

No one who has ever watched a DJ at work would be surprised by the 
seriousness of Scratch DJ Academy (www.scratch.com), which gives its 
students lab time, homework assignments and a 103-page course pack, 
complete with histories, exhortations and practical advice. ("When 
scratching, imagine the fingers and wrist in a straitjacket so that 
movement must come from the arm.")

The academy was founded by Mr. Principe, along with the poet and 
playwright Reg E. Gaines ("Bring In da Noise, Bring In da Funk") and Jam 
Master Jay, Run-DMC's widely influential DJ, who was murdered in October 
2002. Between its introductory and advanced courses, Mr. Principe claims 
the academy has produced more than 5,000 graduates (everyone who 
completes a course receives a certificate) over the last two and a half 
years.

This is a good time for DJ's. Concertgoers are so accustomed to seeing 
one onstage that some stars now bring them along purely for show. 
Aspiring performers gravitate toward turntables the way an earlier 
generation gravitated toward guitars, and to prove that it has changed 
with the times, Guitar Center is currently sponsoring a DJ competition 
called Spin-Off '04. (The final round takes place Wednesday at 
Hammerstein Ballroom in midtown Manhattan.)

At the same time, it's getting harder and harder to figure out what, 
exactly, a DJ is. Most serious DJ's still use turntables to spin vinyl 
records, but some now use DJ-friendly CD and MP3 players, which are 
often built to resemble traditional turntables. (Technics, maker of the 
industry-standard turntable, recently unveiled the SL-DZ1200, which 
plays digital files but has a big, spinning platter that promises a 
"realistic vinyl feel.") Mixtape DJ's can splice together tracks on a 
computer. Radio DJ's often just talk; someone else spins. And at a 
typical house party, the DJ is often a laptop in the corner, working its 
way through a long playlist that was compiled hours or days earlier.

The Norcal DJ and Music Production Academy, a fledgling school in San 
Francisco, aims to pull the DJ out of the analog age. Thoryn Stephens, 
the president and chief executive, says he wants students to learn vinyl 
first, then move on to digital media. He also stresses the importance of 
music theory, noting proudly that the school teaches TTM, a turntable 
notation system. By comparison, Scratch is proudly old-school, 
concentrating on the nuts and bolts of vinyl manipulation.

But whatever the approach, and perhaps without knowing it, more and more 
musicians and listeners are learning how to think like DJ's: hearing 
songs in terms of beats and breaks and vocals and samples and intros and 
outros; thinking about downbeats and backbeats; wondering, what would 
that track go with?

That's exactly the question Damage asked on the third day of school, 
Wednesday. Wednesday was devoted to the fundamentals of beat matching  
the finicky but enormously satisfying art of getting two different 
records to play perfectly in sync. Beat matching may be the most 
important tool in a DJ's arsenal: once you master it, you can turn two 
beats into one, or turn a crate of records into a seamless set, or turn 
a vocal track and a rhythm track into a weird new hybrid. (The recent 
popularity of mash-ups  computer-enhanced collisions that put, say, 
Christina Aguilera's voice on top of the Strokes' music  puzzled some 
veteran DJ's, who had been making old-fashioned mash-ups for years.) But 
though any competent DJ can hear two records and tell you instantly 
which one is faster, beginners do it by trial and  even more  error. 
At one workstation, a couple of pupils were trying to get OutKast and 
the Roots to behave themselves, while not far away someone else was 
trying to pacify the Chemical Brothers and Tiësto.

By Thursday, the day's guest lecturer, Excess, was leading the class up 
from the baby scratch (a simple rhythm created by dragging the record 
back and forth under the needle for a phrase or a beat) to more advanced 
scratches: the scratch release (where you play a phrase, rewind the 
record  with the volume off  to the right place and play it again), 
the drag (which is slower), the stab (which is faster), the chop (which 
is shorter) and the scribble, which is so fast it may cause  or indeed 
require  muscle spasms. A virtuoso scratch routine is the DJ equivalent 
of a guitar solo  just as intricate and, in the wrong hands, just as 
tiresome. After a few hours, you might have found that the four-step 
process of performing a scratch release was starting to sink in, but you 
might also have realized, as one DJ devoted to soul and disco did, that 
scratching wasn't really for you.

Scratch Academy is officially neutral on the question of musical 
preference, although most of the instructors come from the hip-hop 
tradition, which prizes quick cuts and baroque ornamentation. Disco and 
house DJ's, by contrast, love long, seamless segues  the idea is often 
to find records that are somehow compatible, and then beat-match them so 
precisely that dancers don't even notice when the first one gradually 
fades away. Damage says that it doesn't really matter what style you're 
interested in: "The same techniques that are used in hip-hop can be used 
in house, or whatever genre you're spinning."

These classes alone don't make anyone a good DJ: even the most eager 
students know that mere competence requires months  not hours  of 
practice. But just as learning how to play the piano was once part of 
any serious listener's musical education, learning how to DJ, even if 
it's only an introductory lesson, may now serve a similar purpose, 
helping listeners navigate the beat-driven cacophony they encounter in 
the rest of their lives. Not everyone in the summer session of DJ 101 
seemed destined for dance-floor fame, but it seemed as if everyone was 
becoming a better listener. And if we need DJ schools right now, then 
that's why: not because we need more DJ's, but because we need more  
and better  listeners.

On the last day of class, Friday, Damage tried to get everyone to 
combine the skills they had learned  or started to learn  that week. 
When Neil Armstrong, the day's guest DJ, warmed up with a couple of baby 
scratches, Damage asked the class what Armstrong was doing, and Ms. 
Polk, the college radio DJ, immediately called out the answer: "He's 
finding the one."

About half the class stayed late, exchanging e-mail addresses and 
trying, one last time, to make the lessons stick. One eager if not 
talented student (hint: the one with the notepad) had Lloyd Banks on one 
deck and Terror Squad on the other; he was beat-matching furiously and, 
every once in a long while, successfully. Five days at Scratch DJ 
Academy had pointed him in the right direction; now all he needed was 
$2,000 worth of equipment, a soundproof bedroom and 18 months of 
diligent practice.

Sometime around 4 p.m. on that last day, as Neil Armstrong laid 
Beyoncé's "Summertime" on top of R. Kelly's "Step in the Name of Love 
(Remix)," it was getting easier to believe Mr. Principe's claim, and its 
unspoken corollary. In a world where listeners are demanding more and 
more control over the music they hear, we're all already DJ's, whether 
we like it or not. So we might as well get better at it.