![]() Cartersville, GA: 5/11/2010: – The Daily Tribune has a nice feature interview about Joseph and Blue Canoe Records. BLUE CANOE RECORDS FOUNDER RELEASES CD, HELPS PROMOTE FELLOW JAZZ ARTISTS Author: Marie Nesmith Features Editor Date: May 10, 2010 Section: Local News In his CD “To Africa with Love,” jazz musician Joseph Patrick Moore draws from his fascination of Africa for his inspiration, fusing the continent’s rhythms with his own Southern heritage. “It’s mostly instrumental but there are four songs that feature four different vocalists,” said Moore, a resident of White since 2003. “This is my eighth CD and this was something that I’ve really never done before in that I pretty much recorded, mixed, engineered, produced. I really [wore] all the hats in putting the project together and it took quite a while to do that. But that being said, there are 13 songs on it.
“Eleven are original tunes and two are cover songs. I did play all the bass. If you listen to some of the songs there’s a lot of multi-takes or multi-tracks going on, where I might play like the lead bass line or the melody line underneath the bass chords sprinkled in with I have some other musicians who participated with it as well,” he said, referring to Brian Carl, guitar; Wayne Viar, drums and percussion; and Tyrone Jackson, keys. To be released on Tuesday, “To Africa with Love” is being physically and digitally distributed by Moore’s record label, Blue Canoe Records, which the 40-year-old musician co-owns with Travis Prescott. The CD currently is being pre-sold on Amazon.com for $11.99 and an MP3 album is available at the Amazon MP3 Downloads store for 99 cents. “I would say [he’s] pretty versatile. It’ s kind of hard to pin down his sound,” said Prescott, who lives in Austin, Texas. “He started out years ago like a lot of guys playing rock music and pretty quickly moved to jazz. But he’s always kept his finger in a lot of different pies and you can tell that if you listen to his latest release coming out. It starts out doing a very upbeat version of a classic song and then goes quickly into smooth jazz and then he does straight-ahead jazz, which a lot of guys steer away from.” Founded by Moore in 2003, Blue Canoe Records is based out of his residence and represents nearly 30 artists from across the globe. Along with distributing the CDs, the label puts it into the hands of radio DJs, searches for song placement in TV shows and provides materials for social media, such as electronic press kits and videos for YouTube. “He understands what artists need and what they want and that’ s kind of how I think he got interested in it was he wanted to start a collective or sorts where musicians could draw on each other for inspiration and actual physical support when they were doing recording and performing,” Prescott said. “But it grew pretty quickly because the way he sets it up is he lets them keep all their earnings, which is very unusual. You [generally] don’t see that. “The very stereotypical bad record label thing — he steered away from and because of that I don’t think either one of us is going to get rich. He just loves what he does and he’s passionate for it. I think artists are drawn to it and I think with all the Grammy Award winners that we’ve got on the label performing or actually being out front in some of the releases that we’ve done is kind of evidence of that.” For Moore, Blue Canoe’s ability to provide musicians exposure who previously were “under the radar” is one of his favorite aspects of being the label’s artistic director. “… some of these artists that we’ve taken on we’re able to provide them a little bit maybe more than they could themselves,” Moore said. “Partly because we have the distribution. We have the radio and press contacts. It really is rewarding and the other side of it is, [it is] rewarding on an emotional and spiritual level. The reality is because Blue Canoe is mostly jazz-based music, jazz typically only sells about 3 percent of the marketplace, so the audience for jazz is not very strong, just to put it mildly. “So on a financial level I think for any jazz label [it is] kind of a challenge. There’s not as many opportunities with that, that might come with a rock or a country artist. So I don’t know necessarily if financially it has been rewarding. But outside of that, on just a personal level and seeing some of the positive things that have come [to] some of these artists’ careers, that has been extremely rewarding.” For more information about Moore, visit JosephPatrickMoore.com or BlueCanoeRecords.com. In the near future, he also will be releasing a DVD documenting the making of “To Africa with Love.” Copyright 2010 The Daily Tribune News, All Rights Reserved. |
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