Of course, the Sept. 3 Story/Stereo with Davis will also include readings—in this case, from author Aryn Kyle and poet Allison Benis White. The series is curated by Beauty Pill's Chad Clark and The Caribbean's Matthew Byers, and netted a National Endowment for the Arts grant last month. When we wrote about it, Clark told Arts Desk that Story/Stereo makes for a great date. True that, but you should probably offer your guest a disclaimer: These days, Davis is all about break-up songs.

The event takes place at 8 p.m. Friday, Sept. 3 at the Writer's Center, 4508 Walsh St., Bethesda. Free.

It Was Easy

While Old Stuff, a new collection of mid-'60s European radio broadcasts by the New York Art Quartet, isn't by any means radical, it's full of genuine free jazz performances. The track "Pannonica" walks the line between polished and chaotic. Alto saxophonist John Tchicai sticks to the melody while drummer Louis Moholo seems caught between swinging or ignoring the time signature. Though the disc's liner notes divulge that two of the members were filling in for absent original band members, the searching flavor reiterates the freedom of the era in a way other bands of the time could not. Read Brent Burton's review of the album here.

His former musical partner, Laura Burhenn, also seems to be in relationship-recovery mode—at least if you're going by her latest project, the Mynabirds, and the reverb-heavy song its label released for free today, "Numbers Don't Lie." If the song didn't occasionally simmer with anxious, electronic gurgles, you'd be forgiven for thinking it could be a lost Dusty Springfield cut, likely from the Dusty in Memphis era. Equal parts bubblegum pop and blue-eyed soul, it recounts an acrimonious split and an aftermath full of recriminations. "Baby if you want to be right/I will let you be right/I will let you be right," she sings in the chorus, refusing to fire back. "You know that the numbers don't lie/Oh no, the numbers don't lie/Two wrongs will not make it right." Like the best soul songs, it takes emotional despondancy and finds gritty, soaring catharsis.

The Mynabirds are named, by the way, for the Mynah Birds, a band that existed briefly in 1966, recorded for Motown, and featured—incredibly—Neil Young and Rick James. A couple of cuts are available on a Motown singles compilation (listen to them here), but most of that group's songs remain unheard.

As for Mynabirds 2010, the group's debut album, What We Lose in the Fire We Gain in the Flood, is out on Saddle Creek on April 27. The Title Track's debut, It Was Easy, drops on Feb. 9 on Ernest Jenning Record Co.

UPDATE: Ernest Jenning Record Co.'s  Peter D'Angelo says the record wasn't leaked by the press. See bottom of post.

There's good reason to be excited for the debut album by Title Tracks, the latest project of former Q and Not U and Georgie James member John Davis. Officially, It Was Easy won't drop until Feb. 9 on Ernest Jenning Record Co., but a digital rip of the record leaked over the weekend to BitTorrent Web sites. Davis, while disappointed, says he's not surprised.

"I suppose you'd like for your album to not be available for free two months in advance of when it's available for sale, but that seems to be the way things go now," Davis wrote today in an e-mail. "I wish that it wasn't the case, but I don't think you can really expect it not to happen once you've started to distribute copies to the press."

Record labels often respond to leaks by releasing an album digitally ahead of the planned street date. Davis wrote that he may suggest such a plan to his record label.

Album leaks aren't new to Davis. He wrote that when Georgie James' 2007 record, Places, leaked, it contained a song that didn't end up on the final release: "We had a few occasions where people would come up to us asking to hear that song and we'd give them the business a little bit for having not paid for the record."

If the Dischord single that Title Tracks released earlier this year is any indication, It Was Easy should contain plenty of infectious, sun-kissed, tightly structured power-pop. Camera Obscura singer Tracyanne Campbell guests on two of the album's 11 tracks, which also include covers of the Byrds’ “She Don’t Care About Time” and Bruce Springsteen’s “Tougher Than The Rest."

"I don't expect any huge success off the bat," Davis wrote. "I just want to get the record out and start playing shows around the world and be building something. Hopefully, we'll have a good year and each year will improve on the last."

Update: Ernest Jenning Record Co.'s Peter D'Angelo sent me this:

Honestly, the biggest surprise was that we HAVEN"T SENT OUT COPIES OF THE RECORD YET! I'm not really sure how this leaked besides someone that we actually work with in one capacity or another passing it along. That said, we are sending the review copies of the record out this week so it is unfortunately inevitable. For a record like John's it has two sides: Sure we want to keep this under wraps and put the record out there on our own terms, but if there are people excited enough about this record and band that they haven't even heard yet to be searching this out, it is a good sign for Title Tracks moving forward.

We react along these same lines every time this happens, and it does happen every time. We definitely try and get each site to take down the record links when we find them, and we do our best to hunt the links down early, but then there's just another faceless kid somewhere else with his album leak blog who posts it up again. At the end of the day we hope people like it enough to go see the band when they come through town.

Welcome to 2010. Maybe we can keep our business from exploding.

Best,
Pete

“I had a laptop stolen from me,” says drummer Andrew Black. “And when I bought a new laptop I decided that since I’m around ProTools so much, I should learn it. So, I started re-tracking all of these drum breaks that I had been playing and cataloging them.”

Black took four of these breaks—minute-and-a-half percussion grooves with minimal instrumentation meant to be sampled by hip-hop artists—and pressed them to a 7” single, dubbing the project AB’s Original Breaks. They’re up-tempo and lightly funky, the kind of thing that might have been snatched out of the middle of a James Brown tune. “I sit down and I try to play them and see if it feels like people would want to move to it,” says Black. “I like to play at about the speed of the human heartbeat—90 bpm. A lot of my favorite go-go is at about 90-95 bpm.”

Surprisingly, Black does mellow and groovy pretty well for a guy who has spent the best part of his career pounding the stuffing out of his kit with punk-rockers the Explosion and defunct D.C.-based power-pop duo Georgie James. Black still gigs frequently with post-George James quartet Title Tracks and with his hardcore band, Domino Team.

But Black put out the 7” for practical, as well as creative, reasons. He is an American studies major at the University of Maryland, College Park, and he received academic credit for pressing and distributing the record on his label, Black’s Records.

Black has also been a hip-hop fan for a long time—his interest blossoming around the time he took up skateboarding as a teenager. “It opened up this whole other world of perspectives," he says. "It made me recognize that there were other people out there with perspectives that were completely different from mine. It changed way I thought at a young age.” Tied to that sentiment is Black’s appreciation for the break. “If you were to go pinpoint the life beat of hip-hop culture, you could argue that it was the drum break,” he explains. “And that stuff has just impacted me so much. I thought, well, maybe this is a little thumb-print that I can put on the face of that culture.”

 As a drum nerd, Black is also into the subtle technical aspects of the music. “When I was older, during my late teens/early 20s, I started paying more attention to where drum breaks were coming from—people like James Brown, Jim Gordon, the Incredible Bongo Band, Buddy Miles,” he says. “I started to think about how intricate [the playing] is.

“I would cut some of the breaks [for the 7”] and think, It’s too simple. But they’re all simple. I mean, it's just drums," Black continues. "Still, the simplest things have become the iconic parts of top 40 hits, like Queen’s "We Will Rock You” or James Brown’s “Funky Drummer.” People instantly recognize that stuff.”

Black tried to carry that old-school aesthetic over to his own project. “I guess I was just trying to create something that sounds a little more lo-fi, or older, in the hopes that more people who were interested in producing and creating hip-hop would step away from glossy productions,” he says. “I was hoping to release something that people would pick up and say, 'That’s sick, that’s all I need.'"

And if somebody wanted to sample one of those grooves, that 45 is pretty much all they would need. Copyright law, it turns out, does not protect drum breaks, so there’s no need to get permission from Black, unless of course, a producer is looking to be polite.

“I called up the people up at SESAC and told them that I was going to issue this 7”. I thought I should get it cataloged,” explains Black. “They asked ‘Is there a melody on it?’ If not, it turns out they can’t copyright it. Old drum breaks existed in between parts of a recording, so those count. But mine is different in the sense that it’s just drums.” So, a sweet royalty check from Jay-Z is probably not forthcoming. “Best case scenario, I’ve been using these as calling cards, since I do studio work as well,” says Black.

But Black has been doing legwork to ensure that should anyone sample his grooves, it will be someone who can put them to good use. “They’ve gotten some really cool places,” he says. “Sean Peoples (proprietor of Sockets Records) has some stuff for an online mixtape. Also, I hand delivered two copies to Questlove [drummer of Philadelphia’s the Roots] two days before Fallon hit the air.”

Fresh off a West Coast tour with Orenda Fink (formerly of Azure Ray) Laura Burhenn (formerly of Georgie James) will be opening for the Whispertown 2000 and the other half of Azure Ray, Maria Taylor, tonight at the Rock N Roll Hotel.

Laura plans to roll out some new material with drummer Elmer Sharp.

Tickets are $12 and the doors open at 8:30.