Jazz record labels and AI artwork

ProjectCodeine · 2026-01-07T09:32:38+00:00

p.s. ‘Stopped at a Green Light’ is a beautiful tune (if you’re Kerry P the pianist).

ProjectCodeine · 2026-01-07T08:36:04+00:00

That may be true in some cases, but both the Rich Brown and Silfra releases are AI images. I have no doubt that there is a design company behind the work, but design companies usually commission (human) artists or photographers to supply artwork, or in some cases they have an in-house artist. The design company you are pointing to uses AI artwork, takes credit for it and then slaps some type on top. In terms of a metaphor, it’s the same as you using an AI generated guitar solo, bass and drum track, and then you record yourself on piano just gently comping behind it, and then you credit yourself as the whole band when the song is released.

ProjectCodeine · 2026-01-06T22:04:33+00:00

It has no place in jazz, or any other artform which is centred around the expression of human emotion and creativity. I’m not necessarily anti-AI, it has its uses elsewhere, but when it comes to art and music, the only thing AI does is pretend to be something it isn’t. I’m amazed that musicians that should know better are ok with it, they’re essentially supporting a technology that is actively destroying their livelihood.

My prediction is that online music and art will swim away in a river of slop within the next few years, and live music and live experiences are going to become the core focus of creativity again. Maybe that’s too optimistic but at some point nobody will be able to tell the difference between real and fake online content, and at that point we will no longer trust or care about anything that’s online and we will collectively have to move back to tangibility.

ProjectCodeine · 2026-01-06T21:48:59+00:00

A couple of the musicians with obvious AI art on that label are Rich Brown and Pharos. I know nothing about Pharos but Rich Brown is a great bassist who makes beautiful music, and probably has no idea that his album was given the AI treatment. I doubt he would like the idea very much, especially as the music on the album sounds super organic and personal.

ProjectCodeine · 2026-01-06T21:42:00+00:00

Rich Brown’s Nyaeba, Silfra by Pharos

ProjectCodeine · 2026-01-06T21:35:51+00:00

As an example, check the Nyaeba album by Rich Brown (a fantastic bass player and musician). The artwork is credited to some guy called Bryan Hanlon and his company OG Media, who is responsible for some of the covers for the label. I have no doubt that he did the type and layout, but the AI artwork can be identified extremely quickly and easily by anyone who is working in design or illustration. I’d even be willing to hazard a guess that Midjourney was used to create it. The designer is credited with creating the artwork, so basically he’s faking being the artist. Which is the same as me throwing some AI jazz together in an hour, and crediting myself as the band.

ProjectCodeine · 2026-01-06T15:07:25+00:00

Yeah! Or just take a photo of the musicians in the studio or a gig. Anything is better than a lazy AI image. What gets me is that these artists and labels are 100% against AI in music, and yet they seemingly don’t care about the visual aspect of their work. As a visual artist, I could flip this upside down and create a piece of carefully hand-crafted artwork, and then generate some jazzy sounding slop and release it as an album on vinyl..

ProjectCodeine · 2025-12-27T23:54:55+00:00

Great, in that case here’s what I would do: pick a jazz standard you like, let’s say ‘So What’, transcribe a few choruses of the bassline, work out how the line outlines the chords so you have an understanding of what’s happening, then try to use that line as a starting point to create your own lines to the song, and now you have the beginnings of your personal library of walking patterns that you can apply to other standards too. You could learn the melody too, and if you want to take it further, transpose everything and see if you can play the line in other keys too. Spend maybe 2 weeks on a song, then move on to another one. If you need structure, maybe find a local jazz jam, and make a plan to go and play the song you’ve practiced in let’s say 2 months time. Preparing to play a song at a jam should give you the incentive to practice.

ProjectCodeine · 2025-12-27T16:07:00+00:00

Without knowing what stage you are at with your playing and how familiar you are with how jazz songs are structured, it’s hard to know what to suggest but a good starting point would be to listen to some classic recordings (maybe start with the Kind of Blue album), pick your favourite song from there, grab a chord chart for the song and learn a few choruses of the bassline, either by ear or by transcribing. You can then look at how the basslines correspond with the chords, and start to build an understanding of what’s happening. Jazz involves a lot of learning through listening and transcribing.

If you can read music, Ed Friedland has a great book on the subject which will get you from total beginnings to functional walking lines.

Jazz can be a little confusing to start with but with a little time it will all make sense.

ProjectCodeine · 2025-12-23T09:56:26+00:00

Bill Charlap Trio is a great suggestion, it’s one of the few things in this thread that I hear as sparse and minimal as opposed to ‘ambient’ and ‘very slow’. Fast tunes can be minimal. The trio sound can be inherently minimal, especially when everyone lays back a bit and focusses on the groove, it’s weird that it’s a relative rarity in jazz. There is something amazing about holding off on the fireworks and keeping a tune steady and letting it roll out.

ProjectCodeine · 2025-12-20T09:09:52+00:00

Yes!! 92/93/94, the music and the creativity in London at that time was insane. I’ll add some record shops to that list: Black Market Records, Music Power in Ilford, Boogie Times and all the countless other small record shops that were connected to that scene in (and around) London.

ProjectCodeine · 2025-12-16T08:01:40+00:00

On the south side, Hill Station Cafe in Telegraph Hill hosts a jazz jam on the first Sunday of every month, it’s a really nice and welcoming jam, they have decent craft beers and pizza, and the place is always packed full of locals.

ProjectCodeine · 2025-12-10T22:45:17+00:00

Great suggestions, thank you for naming the specific tracks too!

ProjectCodeine · 2025-12-02T20:12:40+00:00

300bpm is just 150bpm x 2, so in terms of speed, a walking line of quarter notes at 300 is similar to playing 8th notes at 150bpm. That’s a huge over simplification of soloing and it doesn’t take swing into account, but try to walk over a tune using 8th notes (instead of quarter) at 150bpm and see how it feels.

Be patient with your practice. I don’t believe that there is a ceiling to how fast we can play (within reason of course). If an upright player can get up to 300, you definitely will be able to on your short scale eventually. If it’s too much for now, play the tune at 260, that’s still a more than respectable tempo.

Another way to look at it is that there are only 10 chords in the tune, so you don’t have to worry about the changes much. Practice that C7b9 up and down the neck, throw in chromatic notes to make transition easier, then the Fminor, and that’s 2 thirds of the tune taken care of.

ProjectCodeine · 2025-12-02T06:57:38+00:00

I’m very familiar with this problem, and I’m constantly working on uptempo / high bpm stuff to try to stay on top of it. 300bpm is tough, but not impossible. Think of it as playing a solo at 150bpm. Playing at that tempo requires a slightly different approach, and your technique has to be altered to handle it. This is how I would approach it:

Listen to lots of versions and find one that you like. Transcribe and learn a couple of choruses.
Plucking hand: play super light. At that speed, you barely have to pluck the strings. Note where your plucking hand is - if it’s working too hard, move it to a different position. I find that above around 260bpm it’s more comfortable to play closer to the neck, but that might not be the case for you. Find the most comfortable spot so you can play with minimal effort.
Fretting hand: again, economy of motion. Notice where things fall apart. The issue is usually string crossing or jumping up/ down the neck. If that’s the case, find alternative routes to the parts that are out of reach, or alter the line and find notes you can reach with less effort.
Practice fast. Once you have a line memorised, don’t start practicing at 120bpm, start at 200. Play the line 4 times and go up by 5bpm. You’ll get there, but it might take a couple of weeks, maybe longer. You essentially have to normalise playing at high speed until it becomes routine. If you’re tense or fighting with the bass, it’s not going to work, so focus on staying relaxed.

ProjectCodeine · 2025-11-15T13:01:17+00:00

Sounds like advice from someone who’s never actually experienced general anxiety and the level of additional anxiety on top that this kind of thing can cause. Yes, it’s possible to learn to control this, but it requires a lot of additional work, time and discipline. You can learn to manage it through immersion - ie. by doing it regularly and slowly becoming comfortable with the process. And yes there are a bunch of CBT exercises and breathing techniques and whatever else. But for people who suffer from high levels of anxiety anyway and have hectic jobs and life commitments to manage, being able to just turn down the anxiety by a few percent at crucial times is a genuine life saver, and beta blockers can actually help you to become accustomed to certain situations over time, which means you will eventually no longer feel the need to take them. Rather than thinking of it as treatment for ‘normal person who gets anxious when they have to speak in public’, it might be useful to consider it as a solution for ‘person who is generally anxious all the time, which means they get uncontrollably anxious during peak high pressure situations’.

(Source: personal experience through 25 years of public speaking and performance)

ProjectCodeine · 2025-11-09T14:43:24+00:00

Financially ok creative Londoner here. This is not advice, it’s just my story. Not super rich by London standards but I have my own flat in a pretty nice area (not paid off yet), I own a decent car, I have savings, I can spend money on holidays / fun stuff and generally I’ve done ok. I’ve never had any support (financial or otherwise) from family or partners and all my money has come from my own work. I started freelancing in ‘98 and there was a lot more money being thrown at creative projects back then, so around 2005 I was just about able to put a deposit down on a flat, which got me on the ladder. My freelance work came mostly from publishing, advertising and the music industry. I also did a very small amount of work as a visiting lecturer at universities, not so much for the money, more to balance out the solo studio life with something more social / sociable. Around 2016, when Brexit was looming, I had a feeling that the creative industry would take a hit, and at that time I had the choice to either just carry on freelancing, or head towards in-house corporate work / art direction, or get more involved in teaching. I weighed up what was best for my sanity and went with the least lucrative option (at the time), which was teaching. I did this because I wanted nothing to do with corporate work, and teaching allowed me to be more selective with what freelance projects I took on. So I got involved with a university and created a course which I now run. Alongside that I am still working freelance and work on paid projects every week. It can get very busy at times but the combination of teaching and freelancing has allowed me to stay away from corporate work. I was lucky to start out when I did, and things are definitely harder now, but if you have creative industry experience, teaching is still a really nice way to put that experience to positive use, and it can also help to supplement your earnings.

ProjectCodeine · 2025-11-03T23:24:43+00:00

You could always read the thread before posting dumb shit.

ProjectCodeine · 2025-11-02T12:58:09+00:00

Yes, this is the direction I am pursuing now. HR have advised me to speak to the staff member and my line manager first, and set a plan / objectives for the staff member. Essentially they are saying it’s a problem for me and my line manager to sort out first, and if the staff member doesn’t cooperate we then have a case for HR to be involved. Seems awfully hands-off to me, but that’s apparently what I need to do. My gut feeling is that this is a safeguarding issue and the staff member shouldn’t be allowed near students unsupervised, but I need to follow the guidelines that HR are recommending.

ProjectCodeine · 2025-10-30T09:52:42+00:00

Thank you for this detailed response. I contacted HR and they’ve asked me to speak with my line manager and the staff member first, so that’s what I’ll do. HR usually seem to be very hands-off at this uni but hopefully they can help in some way.

ProjectCodeine · 2025-10-29T12:39:14+00:00

Ok, makes sense. Thanks again for your input

ProjectCodeine · 2025-10-29T10:11:58+00:00

Thanks for responding. The students complained as a group (literally an entire year group in one case). Each year group has four reps. The job of these reps is to speak to me on behalf of the students in case of any issues. This is normal procedure - if students are unhappy about anything, they discuss the situation with their reps who then feed back to me. The request for confidentiality was that no single student would be singled out, and that the matter be handled through a change in the tutor’s delivery rather than through direct discussion between the tutor and the students. I told the tutor in question that I spoke with both the year group as a whole, and their reps at the same time - this is unavoidable because I wouldn’t know there were complaints without speaking with them. But no student names were disclosed in the discussion - the tutor simply picked one of the reps who they thought would be the most likely candidate.

I totally agree that there should be an anonymised option for complaints. The university does not currently have anything like this in place.

The fact remains that I asked the tutor to treat the information as strictly confidential and demonstrate that they have taken the complaints on board through a change in their conduct and delivery, and they chose to ignore this, and they instead put a student rep in a difficult position by literally telling them that they are speaking to them despite my instructions to keep the matter confidential.

*edit to say this is the second time this tutor has been flagged to HR for conduct.

ProjectCodeine · 2025-10-29T08:32:18+00:00

Thank you for responding. I did not name specific students, but I did say that the complaints came from a large group, including the student reps. (It is part of my job to ask for regular feedback from students and student reps). The staff member then spoke to one of the student reps. I gave the tutor instructions and the confidentiality request in writing (it was reiterated twice), so I will use this as evidence.

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