Best Nate Smith Ever!

"No I wrote it on a Mac. I’ve never used a PC in my life; I don’t like them."

"Maybe people used to think Power-Point and various other things were just tools, like a hammer. But no, every tool, including hammers, is about doing very specific things. With a hammer, it’s easier to hit a certain kind of nail than it is other kinds of thing. And so they lead you, subtly, to do certain kinds of things. At the end of the 1800s, Edison invented a recording system that didn’t use any electronics. There was no microphone: the sound was focused through a physical horn that made a little needle etch a wax cylinder. The technology could record certain things, such as a singer, but percussive things, such as a bass drum, those kind of big bass-sound impulses, made the needle jump in the recording and the playback, so a lot of the time they relegated the bass to the back of the [recording] venue, or sometimes took it out altogether in jazz recordings. Which meant that the jazz ensembles that were recorded were not the same instrumentation as you would hear live. And so what got disseminated, what people heard and recognised as jazz, early jazz, bore almost no resemblance to what was actually being played. The technology limited what could actually be distributed. That’s an early and blatant example, but it continues. It’s a little more subtle. There are other things now that shape the music in other, more subtle ways."