E. Doctor Smith's Blog

Everyone agrees these days; the music industry is changing. But San Francisco based band Ten Mile Tide saw the writing on the wall years ago. "We've been positioning ourselves for this change for years," says lead guitarist Jason Munning. In 2003 Ten Mile Tide rode the file-sharing wave by becoming one of the first bands to encourage music fans to download their music for free. While bands like Metallica and Britney Spears were suing their fans for illegally sharing their music, TMT went from a part-time local band to a full-time touring national act, fueled by the support of Kazaa fans who downloaded over 10 million TMT songs worldwide. Meet the new music industry, as independent band Ten Mile Tide releases it's newest album, "Riverstone", with a series of grass roots promotion strategies. Filesharing scared the industry though and the RIAA began suing individual music fans, a campaign which resulted in both the decline of filesharing and p

September 11th is indeed a tragic day for many, and just last year, the jazz world saw the departure of the legendary Joe Zawinul. My earliest memories of Zawinul were from the mid 1970's, during his days with the enigmatic group Weather Report, featuring the incomparable saxophonist, Wayne Shorter. Among them, my fondest were his first shows at Washington, D.C.'s Kennedy Center with percussionist Dom Um Romeo and bassist Alphonso Johnson; with drummer Chester Thompson and Alex Acuna at G.W.'s Lisner Auditorium; to a surprising double bill with John McLaughlin's Shakti, and the debut of the bass wunderkind, Jaco Pastorius. With Weather Report, Zawinul brought the electronic keyboard and synthesizers to jazz like no one had before. Zawinul, alongside Shorter, took us to new musical heights, imitated by many, but surpassed by none. Herbie Hancock wrote of Zawinul's passing, “Joe Zawinul is one of my oldest friends in the music business. He was a force as