Hi David,

A great question! I'll try to keep the details to a minimum. When I first joined the Forum as a jazz musician, I chafed at the provision barring "covers" because the term, frankly, insults the genre just as much as it would if applied to classical music:

The New York Philharmonic will tonight perform a cover of Beethoven's ...


I mean, gimme a break. The whole idea of jazz is to create, spontaneously, on the fly, in real time a new melody that "fits" the chords. Most musicians - even world-class players - cannot do this. Moreover, you better be sure that your improvised replacement melody is more interesting than the original melody of the song. Otherwise, why bother? Just play the original melody over again. The entire emphasis is on the changes, reharmonizing them, and on the solos. I'm not "covering" any other guy's solo, man. That's the whole point.

So the question became: How to stream legally my interpretations of the compositions of others. The oldest and largest institution that manages copyright protection for musicians, composers, lyricists, etc. is ASCAP. Keeping up with the times, they figured out a way to let musicians interpret, perform and stream any of the 9,000,000 or so tunes in their book. My ASCAP license number is found in my signature. It gives me, not ownership of the tune, but the legal right to stream it without download capability.

Nevertheless, some Forum members (who, as far as I know, are not lawyers) have expressed doubts about legality of this license, which costs about $250/year. I'm confident that ASCAP's legal team knows what their doing. And there is also the "fair use" doctrine, which I won't get into, but with which I am in compliance. My posts are intended for pedagogical use only.

Despite all this, the final bend-over-backwards is the unconditional permission I give to Forum members (see below) to contact the moderators or Peter Gannon himself asserting that I am in violation and requesting the removal of the offending post. I endorse any such request. My signature is simply neutral information about my due diligence: neither humor nor warning.

Aleck Rand (aka Dean Clark)

Sweetwater Creation Station. BIAB 2018, Mixcraft 8 Pro Studio, Izotope Nektar 2, Ozone 8, KEYBOARDS: Kurzweil Artis 7, Crumar MOJO, Hammond XK-3, BASSES (fretted & fretless by Ibanez, LTD, Warwick. GUITARS by Guild, Gretsch, Ibanez, Eastwood (12 string)