A Healthy Sum
The
Health Alliance for Austin Musicians reported last week that its inaugural
HAAM Benefit Day, wherein 105 Austin-area businesses donated a percentage of their Oct. 3 sales to the local musicians' health care nonprofit, raised a cool $50,000. "I think a lot of businesses you don't normally associate with music saw it was good business to support musicians," says HAAM board of directors Chairman
Robin Shivers. Another $50,000 will be matched by a pair of matching grants from Austin's
Topfer Family Foundation and Galveston's
the Moody Foundation. "It was wonderful for us to go out and create income for ourselves, but knowing it would be matched by these two grants we had been working on all year" made all the difference, says Shivers. Presenting sponsor
Whole Foods alone donated more than $14,000. "I think the collaborative nature is very appealing," says Shivers. "You have two major hospitals [
Seton and
St. David's] who have come together for musicians, along with our grassroots partner the
SIMS Foundation, to try to provide a continuum of care. I think we've been able to show through HAAM that this is a business." The 19-month-old HAAM currently has about 650 members, and Shivers says the number under age 40 – more than half – is encouraging: "It gives you a lot of hope that our organization will be able to help keep people well and address some of these problems before they get to the emergency room."
Mash Notes
Since 2003, music blog
Information Leafblower has polled its pasty peers to compile an annual list of "The Top 40 Bands in America." This year, the top three (
TV on the Radio,
Hold Steady,
Decemberists) and Austin representatives (
Okkervil River,
Voxtrot,
Shearwater) are fairly predictable, but the real surprise is local DJ tandem and newly christened mash-up masters
Car Stereo (Wars) at No. 35. CSW, with an assist from Denton-based blog
Gorilla vs. Bear, took the blogosphere by storm earlier this summer with "Ghostface Observatory," its marriage of
Wu-Tang alum
Ghostface Killah's "Be Easy" with local dance-rock duo
Ghostland Observatory's "Midnight Voyage." Besides being the best-named mash-up since
Nirvana/Destiny's Child fusion "Smells Like Booty," "Ghostface" is simply "the best mash-up I've ever heard," gushes Leafblower. "It breathes new life into a genre that was steadily growing stale." Naturally, it took CSW's
Christopher Rose all of about 20 minutes to assemble this masterpiece after a friend hit on the title. "It's weird, all the rest of them take a lot longer," he says. Normally, creating a mash-up takes three to four hours, says Rose, due to his "Girl Talk" approach of splicing several different samples onto one basic track (see "Hip Hop Halloween Mash" on
www.myspace.com/carstereowars). He and CSW partner
Adreon Henry are now investigating ways to take mash-ups live, using unlikely foundations like old country, Sixties pop, and blues. "We haven't really tried it yet, but he's been messing around on this electronic drum kit," says Rose. "It should be fun."
