These are two artists from Antigua you have to know about. Slowly, Justin “Jus Bus” Nation and LogiQ Pryce, co-founders of the F.R.E.E. (Freedom Rebels Emancipating Earth) movement, are emerging as two of the more in demand musicians in the Caribbean. Aside from being a prolific Indaba participants, F.R.E.E. music has helped shape the sound of up and coming artists like Killer Mike, Verse, and of course, LogiQ Pryce. And yet, the F.R.E.E. collective is more far reaching than simply music, they also work as as graphic designers, and have amassed an incredibly impressive portfolio. Jus Bus and LogiQ Pryce are both fans of bright, loud colors, that work in tandem with dark figures; a juxtaposition that complements well. These two different branches of art are inextricably linked. The vibrant, tropical, colors of their graphic designs shine through in his production. Jus Bus’ treatment of beats, harmony, and melody all embrace a Caribbean/Miami twang which sets his artistry apart from the plethora of producers that exist.

Most recently, Jus Bus and LogiQ Pryce have written and performed a new song entitled “Sometimes I (Alone)”, developed in collaboration with German producer Torsten (T-Dog). The duo describes this song as largely biographical, about the struggles they went through as children, and how they rose through it all to start successful careers. Jus Bus says, “it’s new territory for us as a creative individuals” and that they’d “been going through a rough time” and wanted to share their story. Listening to the lyrics, it’s easy to grasp the difficulties Jus Bus and LogiQ Pryce went through while growing up. They paint a dark picture, one which shows the need to rise up and push through the difficult times for yourself and others who depend on you. Coupled with these deep lyrics, is a song with an incredible emotional depth. The darkness of the piano, keyboard patches, and understated drums, really work to set the tone of the song. 


Check out Jus Bus and LogiQ Pryce’s new effort below!

Indaba Playlists

Indaba Playlists are the latest and greatest way to share your Indaba self and creations with the rest of the world. Playlists allow you to share your profile songs or sessions on your favorite social network  and are embeddable into any website. 

To get started, go to your profile and click on the “Edit Your Songs” link. This will bring up the normal song management page. However, you’ll notice there are a few new additions. 

This box, when checked, will create a playlist of all your profile songs. To share, click on the two eighth-notes on the right. A lightbox will pop up:

This lightbox will show you a preview of the playlist and will give you clickable options to share it on your favorite social networks. You can also copy and paste the HTML embed code into any website. 

IMPORTANT: Any songs from your profile made shareable can be shared by any member on Indaba Music.

Playlists will also allow you to embed single songs from your profile. To accomplish this, open up your song management page and on the right side you’ll see these options: 

Note, you’ll have to manually click on the “make this shareable” toggle, as songs, by default, are not shareable. To share your song, click the eighth-notes on the right and follow the steps above. 

Finally, playlists will also allow you to share the Preview Audio from your sessions. To share your sessions, go to the session page. 

Open up your session info. When the lightbox opens, you’ll see a new feature:

Make sure your session is public, click the “share this session’s preview track” toggle button, and click save. 

Then, click the blue eighth-notes at the top right of the page and share it! 

Here’s an example of what an embedded playlist will look like:

Happy sharing everyone!    

Hey Indaba Members,

You may notice that the site is down for a while in the near future. Don’t stress – everything is A-OK!  We need to take the site down briefly to prepare for the transition to the next phase of Indaba Music.  Our new launch is just that big…

We will be down for approximately 48 hours, so be sure to check back as soon as you can to get started using the new Indaba Music. We hope you’re excited. Goodness knows we are.

Sincerely,
Indaba Music Team

Getting your song onto a major label record release is no easy task. While we have worked hard to present you with opportunities to connect with and impress the movers and shakers of the music industry, the task has still been yours to create high quality tunes worthy of release. You have not disappointed. World class artists like Linkin Park, Peter Gabriel, and Weezer will be including music from our community on their own releases. Check out which songs from Indaba have made it onto major albums of some of the world’s best selling musicians.

Not impressed?  Check this out – Indaba members are being released on all 4 major labels!

After months of toil, the Peace Partners collective has finally released their first album. Over the past several months, dedicated artists from all over the globe have been collaborating, crafting, and pouring their souls into a compendium of songs on Indaba Music with one purpose: to spread the word of peace. Yet, it’s not enough to simply talk of peace. Often it takes selfless action to retain the public’s attention. Therefore, the Peace Partners have decided to donate the proceeds from sales of the album Many Countries, One Sky to two charities, Amnesty International and War Child Canada. Amnesty International is a privately funded organization committed to researching and ending human rights violations. War Child Canada is a charity that provides assistance and life shaping programs to children in war torn countries.

The mastermind behind this collective is Patrick Lajeunesse, seen in the video below. Patrick had his first Indaba experience in the session “Ocean”. By posting a piano track, he initiated a session with a few other Indaba users, and soon had a fully realized song. Grasping the potential of the platform, Patrick soon embarked on his mission of peace by establishing the Peace Partners group, which currently has a membership of over 200 people, and by calling on the Indaba community to contribute songs to the collective. After several months, and a bit of elbow grease, the songs were in- over 100 musicians had participated completing 40 tracks. From these 40 Patrick, along with his fellow producers Jack Nimersheim and Selena, picked 13 for the final album.

Each of the 13 tracks on Many Countries, One Sky are beautifully selected. Mastered and organized by Mr. Nimersheim, the polish present on this album is uncanny for a compilation of such diverse crowdsourced material. One of the most impressive traits of the album is its remarkable consistency. No track seems out of place- each fits into its own corner of the album, helping to perpetuate the message of peace. It’s this feeling of totality, along with some very solid songwriting, that transforms this album from a composite work into a fully realized idea.

Help the Peace Partners and donate your money to two great causes by purchasing Many Countries, One Sky. The album is for sale at CD Baby for $9.99. Single tracks are available for $0.99.

Emily Greene Is This What You Had In Mind

By Rick

New York City is home to one of the densest and greatest populations of singer/songwriters in the world. Peppered throughout this massive musical subculture, you can find everything from the absurdly obscure to the excessively commercial. Yet, there exists a select group of standout singer/songwriters who have the artistic vision and passion to slip through the cracks of New York’s concrete jungle and emerge on a firm foundation on which to start their musical careers. One of these artists is Emily Greene, whose new album In This What You Had In Mind dropped June 1st. One of the most refreshing qualities of Emily’s sound is her vocal delivery. Emily mixes the depth and warmth of an old soul singer with the phrasing of a folk artist, a blend that translates brilliantly throughout the album, and, coupled with her frequent motifs of nature and heartbreak, affords the album a great personal quality. In addition, Emily provides all of the keyboard parts for the album, favoring the darker textures of a Wurlitzer and a Rhodes- two instruments which help to enhance the the timbre of her voice and really help drive the overall sound of the album.

Is This What You Had In Mind grabs you from the onset with the track “Lily Twill”, as the ambiguous rhythms of Wurlitzer pads keenly melt into a chilled out 6/8. The opening track showcases Emily’s penchant for the arrangement; her ability to paint a poetic picture while allowing the music to stand on equal footing with the lyrics is a rare and welcome gift (and even allows you to forgive the egregious bass fill at the 1:36 mark). Besides the opening, there are several standout tracks on the album. One standout track, and the obvious “hit” (it is the most poppy in any case), is the second track, entitled “Starting Fresh”. The track is a cool amalgamation of drum heavy groove, sing-songy melody, and surprising rhythm. The chorus of “Starting Fresh” is particularly strong; Emily relays the songs message of heartbreak through a confident and ultra-catchy hook. Immediately following this Rock and Roll track, Emily shows she can also be a little bit country and embarks on another journey called “Mercedes Benz”, an apparent allusion to the Janis Joplin song of the same name. What makes this track great are the melodious vocal arrangements, which are always placed exactly where they should be and are never excessive nor overly sparse. Another standout track is the album’s title track. The most lovely thing about this track is its pace. It starts meditatively, the noise from the piano’s pedal producing an ethereal and natural pulse, then it flows into a waltz accentuated by a piano lead line and Emily’s eerily romantic lyrics. It’s a track that must have taken patience to write, and demands a certain patience in return from the listener. Moving toward the end of the album, the track “Oceans and Waves” showcases Emily at her lyrical best. The whole album contains recurring thematic material about nature and love, yet “Ocean and Waves” is completely driven by the prettiest concrete images on it (though the lyric “Traded hopscotch for Jim Beam” in the song “Easy Days” is also favorite).

To close, Is This What You Had In Mind is an album that is well crafted, beautifully executed, and solid in its aesthetic from album cover to song concept. Should you wish to pick up a copy of this fine piece of audio, you can download the album in iTunes here. Also, Emily will be playing a few shows to celebrate her album’s release. On June 3rd, she will be performing in Philadelphia at Tin Angel; on June 8th, Emily will be appearing at Maxwell’s in Hoboken, NJ with Indaba Music’s Artist in Residence Sydney Wayser; and finally, on June 9th, Emily will be having her official CD release party at the world famous Joe’s Pub.

 By Rick

Buy you tickets for Phish 3D here!

Phish is a singular band. They embody the jam band, their fans are the most loyal and devoted of any modern band, they headline festivals, have managed to turn the letter “f” into the letter “ph”, have jammed with MCs like Jay-Z, and have even leant their name to a psychedelic Vermont ice cream. After a five year hiatus while band members were pursuing solo interests, Phish returned to the touring circuit last year. To their fans, it was if they had never left; the live recordings kept flowing and the crowds kept coming. Now, Phish is poised to do something few bands have done before them: an in theaters 3D concert opening as a limited engagement on April 30th. 

Shot last October at the large Festival 8, Phish drew a crowd of 40,000 and stuck true to their past traditions. The 3D experience will draw from 6 full sets of music, including their first full length acoustic set and their full length performance of the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St.  Here at Indaba, we’ve managed to get our hands on an official track from the new movie, “Back on the Train”. In honor of Phish’s normal dive into different and unexpected harmony, we’ve decided to guide you through a lesson on this tune by parsing the harmony and form so you can take it home and practice jamming over it.

Phish- Back on the Train (3D Movie Official Mix)

Download the track here.

So, onto the musical discussion. “Back on the Train” is a blues tinged, piano driven, rock tune. Form-wise, you can call the basic structure a modified 16 bar blues in F:



What prevents this from being a true blues is the exclusion of the V chord, which in F would be C7. Instead, Phish creates a turnaround (or the sequence of chords that leads back to the root) that substitutes chaining dominants for chaining plagal cadences moving b3-b7-4-1 (Ab-Eb-Bb-F). A plagal cadence is a cadence that moves IV-I instead of the ubiquitous V-I. Plagal cadences are extremely common in traditional gospel, country, rock, and pop music. To me, they tend to make songs sound more “pastoral”, or “peaceful”; though, you can certainly think about them differently if you hear them differently.  

The 16 bar blues is something you’ve probably heard many times (for examples, in songs like Cream’s “Sleepy Time Time”, and Herbie Hancock’s “Watermelon Man”). What makes Phish’s version a bit jarring and different is the inclusion of “non-blues” chords, like the Ab major that the Bb major cycles through to get back to F. What this does is give the impression of the flatted third of a “blue” note, while explicitly making it major. Most ears are brought up to recognize major so distinctly that this chord, even though it passes quickly, creates a very effective harmonic feeling.  

In terms of jamming, this song is pretty simple to attack, however, there is no “omnibus” scale that you can play over the whole thing. Here, it’s good to begin thinking about “chord/scale relationship”, which is choosing scales that fit over each chords. In this respect, it is a good tune to start bridging the gap between one scale improvisation into a higher level of thinking about improvisation. So, let’s approach this chord by chord.

F7 makes up the majority of the tune, and is the chord which presents the most possibility. F7 is shorthand for F dominant 7th, which is a 7th chord with a flatted 7th (for a more detailed discussion of 7th chords go here. The scale most associated with the dominant 7th is the mixolydian mode, in this case F mixolydian:



This is, essentially, an F Major scale with a flatted 7th degree. Two other scales that work well over this chord are major and minor pentatonic scales.

F Major pentatonic (also known in the vernacular as the “major blues scale” when there is an added b3), is a simple and great sounding scale. Adding the b3 gives this scale a color too few musicians utilize.



F minor pentatonic is a decidedly darker timbre, yet it is another scale that works tremendously well. Experiment switching between each of the pentatonics and see what you come up with.

For the remaining chords, luckily, they are all major, which means the options are simple. The best way to approach these chords in a Phish context is to use the major scales and the major pentatonics:    



Two more pieces of advice: don’t be afraid of simplicity, and don’t be afraid to copy. There’s something to be said for originality, but when you’re first approaching a tune, especially if you’re a beginner, it’s sometimes best to copy what you can. So, listen to Trey and the rest of the band play over the chords and see what you can do with them!  

The Coltrane Project

John Coltrane is, without question, one of the most innovative and iconic American musicians to ever grace the ears of listeners. Though he only lived to the age of 40, his body of work has become some of the most influential music ever produced, serving as inspiration for every jazz musician to follow. Coltrane had a sound which none could emulate, a sound completely distinctive and unique. In addition, ‘Trane (along with Miles Davis and Bill Evans) progressed the intellectualizing of harmony to another level with his extensive use of exotic modes and augmented based changes. In so doing, he help mold the sound of 1960’s music in a unique and lasting way.

If there wasn’t any evidence that Coltrane’s music had staying power in the Hip-Hop world, Philadelphia hip-hop producer St. Paul has just unveiled his titanic effort The Coltrane Project, a full length release paying tribute to John Coltrane and other artists from the 1960’s with samples from songs by Gil Scott-Heron, Herbie Hancock, and Alice Coltrane. St. Paul began this project back in 2000, and he spent a lot of time conceptualizing how to adequately fuse the lyric driven Hip-Hop with instrumental Jazz. St. Paul says, “since it was an instrumental album, it had to be like a jazz album.” And therefore, he, “was mimicking Elvin Jones’ African influenced rhythms, so (he) could get a feel for how (Elvin) was rocking it.” And thus, St. Paul began shaping his arrangements into The Coltrane Project. In a style akin to J Dilla, St. Paul has sampled, chopped, and composed a beautifully composed album of beats. However, don’t make the mistake of calling this a simple beat CD, it is a story, a symphony, with purpose in every track. One of the most subtle tributes to Coltrane’s memory are the sources St. Paul chooses not to sample from. A Love Supreme, widely considered Coltrane’s magnum opus, and Giant Steps, one of Coltrane’s most striking and revolutionary albums, are noticeably absent from the 13 tracks. However, St. Paul does choose tracks in which the classic quartet of McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, and Elvin Jones feature prominently.

From the outset, the album has a specific feel, one which continues to the end. The “Intro” is a sample chopped over a beat of an announcer presenting Coltrane, which then seamlessly transitions into the following song with a McCoy Tyner piano intro. St. Paul uses this McCoy sample to build the next track “Wonderful”, which features Johnny Hartman’s vocals from the Irving Berlin tune “They Say It’s Wonderful” sampled from the classic album John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman. Then St. Paul makes the transition into some heavier fare. Directly from the standard based track “Wonderful”, he transitions into a darker sound, featuring Coltrane’s signature meditative solo sound from the song “Alabama”, which Coltrane wrote about a Ku Klux Klan attack on a church in Birmingham, Alabama that claimed the life of 4 school girls. This is followed by a call for “Peace”, which, in addition to featuring more meditative Coltrane on the soprano saxophone and Jimmy Garrison on the Bass, features the very fitting vocals of Gil Scott-Heron. At over 8 minutes, “Peace” shows off St. Paul’s great ability to slightly change up the flow of the beat by adding a groove altering coda. One interesting track is entitled “…And It Goes Like”, which features the vocals of Nina Simone. What gives this track such an interesting feeling is that its driven the whole way through by a very rhythmic, tribal drum sample, and lain on top, providing juxtaposition, are airy pad swells and string samples. Another standout track on this album is entitled “Central Park West pt. 1”. St. Paul uses, to great effect, the melodic material from Coltrane’s beautiful composition “Central Park West”. However, the following track “Central Park West pt. 2”, doesn’t follow part one particularly well, and the beat on part two falls a bit flat when compared to the rest of the album. After two more tracks, including “Tide Rising”, which features Coltrane’s band, Saint Paul closes the album out fittingly with Elvin Jones bashing away and McCoy playing dreamy whole-tone scales, placing a cap on the long musical journey.

This is one album very worthy of a download. You can listen to some samples of the material below, visit St. Paul’s blog to stream the whole thing, or download it for free here.