I have been a fan of John Schofield ever since Uberjam – that album was some major funk train. He had such a party playing that album – so bent and high energy I can understand why he felt compelled to declare that he had been drug free for a few years to date in the liner notes. Many of his albums have not clicked with me much bar this one due to the straightness of them. I don’t like his clean sound much, I can respect it, like I respect Jim Hall, but I like my music fluid and dynamic and filled with life.

With this in mind, you might appreciate that I am hesitant about trying a modern big band album out. Big bands are usually quite straight – they kind of have to be so that coherence can be maintained. Its hard to imagine a big band both maintaining coherence and being dynamic with individuality coming through. Previously, I have only trusted Dave Holland in putting together a modern Jazz big band ensemble. Now, Vince Mendoza and John Schofield have created something very special. This album is modern big band at its best. Coherent, strong, filled with life and dynamic – this music carries so many emotions straight through me, its fantastic musical sustenance for this year and more to come I’m sure.

54, as its called, is exactly what I’m looking for in John, the energy of Uberjam with a more diverse palette to work with, some of the music almost borders on too much syrup, but no, the credibility given to this work through worthy intricate rhythms, natural emotional playing, shining mutual respect in passing solos, great arrangements and wonderful sound have made the syrup sweet but delicate and subtle rather than corn.

I’m very impressed, John now has my respect alongside Pat Metheny and John McLaughlin as men that created and never stopped creating new ways to weave their increasingly complex lives into their expression.

Listen to Uberjam and 54, it will surely grow on you.

Tags: Music by Corley
No Comments »

A friend put me onto AWS – Amazon Web Services. I had known about it for some time, but had not dabbled in it because I thought it would be too expensive. As of November last year though, Amazon, obviously aware that many people see their web services this way, decided to make a free use tier for basic testing and small production use.

So, I setup OpenVPN on an Ubuntu server micro-instance in the Asia Pacific region of Amazon AWS. I followed the instructions located here to setup the keys and certificates for the server and some local clients. At this stage I am only using the basic tunneling interface, I do plan to try the alternative TAP interface though, which would allow me to bridge my workstation at home with my mobile Internet tablet, the Nokia N900.

I found that using the sample configuration files from the OpenVPN HOWTO was the quickest way to get up and running. Apart from defining the necessary PKI files, These are the things I changed:

• For the server configuration. set or change the following options

push "redirect-gateway"
push "dhcp-option DNS 172.16.0.23"

• For the Nokia N900 client configuration, The DNS must be directed away from the internal proxy on the tablet. add this to the end:

script-security 2
up /etc/openvpn/maemo-update-resolvconf
down /etc/openvpn/maemo-update-resolvconf

• The server must have masquerading enabled as well for the VPN IP range. This involves using the following rules in iptables:

*nat
:POSTROUTING ACCEPT [0:0]
:PREROUTING ACCEPT [0:0]
:OUTPUT ACCEPT [0:0]
-A POSTROUTING -s 10.8.0.0/24 -d 0.0.0.0/0 -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE
COMMIT

• On Ubuntu 10.10 server, one can use “sudo iptables-apply rulesfile.txt” to apply the above ruleset. You may want to add this to a startup script in /etc/init.d – perhaps the openvpn startup script.

That covers the basics and gets me a faster, more open Internet connection from my mobile 3G tablet in China.

Please note that setting up a micro instance in AWS Console is fairly easy, I suggest you be careful not to choose a large image if you want to remain within the 10Gb free limit of Elastic Block Storage. The firewall will need to be opened up for port 1194 as well as the standard ssh.

Tags: International, Mobile, Technology by Corley
No Comments »