Steve Lawson has spent much of his career exploring the front edge of musical and technological possibility, in terms of the sounds that one bass player can make, the ways that musical recordings can be constructed, the ways that musicians can talk to listeners, and the ways that recordings can be distributed to them. He’s not the only one out there ahead of the curve: much independent hip-hop is released straight to YouTube, making the actual audio file something of an irrelevance, and poverty has been a great impetus for innovation in various parts of the world, with mobile phones…