Tag: Music

Mississippi Goddamn

Seth Anderson0 comment

youtubery in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAYVaHEMK0I


“Verve Jazz Masters 58: Nina Sings Nina” (Nina Simone)

The name of this tune is Mississippi Goddam
And I mean every word of it

Alabama’s gotten me so upset
Tennessee made me lose my rest
And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam

Alabama’s gotten me so upset
Tennessee made me lose my rest
And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam

Can’t you see it
Can’t you feel it
It’s all in the air
I can’t stand the pressure much longer
Somebody say a prayer

Alabama’s gotten me so upset
Tennessee made me lose my rest
And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam

This is a show tune
But the show hasn’t been written for it, yet

Hound dogs on my trail
School children sitting in jail
Black cat cross my path
I think every day’s gonna be my last

Lord have mercy on this land of mine
We all gonna get it in due time
I don’t belong here
I don’t belong there
I’ve even stopped believing in prayer

Don’t tell me
I tell you
Me and my people just about due
I’ve been there so I know
They keep on saying ‘Go slow! ‘

But that’s just the trouble
‘Do it slow’
Washing the windows
‘Do it slow’
Picking the cotton
‘Do it slow’
You’re just plain rotten
‘Do it slow’
You’re too damn lazy
‘Do it slow’
The thinking’s crazy
‘Do it slow’
Where am I going
What am I doing
I don’t know
I don’t know

Just try to do your very best
Stand up be counted with all the rest
For everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam

I made you thought I was kiddin’

Picket lines
School boy cots
They try to say it’s a communist plot
All I want is equality
For my sister my brother my people and me

Yes you lied to me all these years
You told me to wash and clean my ears
And talk real fine just like a lady
And you’d stop calling me Sister Sadie

Oh but this whole country is full of lies
You’re all gonna die and die like flies
I don’t trust you any more
You keep on saying ‘Go slow! ‘
‘Go slow! ‘

But that’s just the trouble
‘Do it slow’
Desegregation
‘Do it slow’
Mass participation
‘Do it slow’
Reunification
‘Do it slow’
Do things gradually
‘Do it slow’
But bring more tragedy
‘Do it slow’
Why don’t you see it
Why don’t you feel it
I don’t know
I don’t know

You don’t have to live next to me
Just give me my equality
Everybody knows about Mississippi
Everybody knows about Alabama
Everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam

Ella Fitzgerald, Twelve Nights in Hollywood

Seth Anderson1 Comment


“Twelve Nights in Hollywood” (Ella Fitzgerald)

Another glowing review of Ella Fitzgerald’s residency at the Crescendo Club in the early 1960s, this time by Will Friedwald:

June 1962. The Crescendo Club on Hollywood’s Sunset Strip. Ella Fitzgerald and her quartet have settled in for a two-week run in her adopted hometown. In the middle of a set, she starts singing “Too Darn Hot,” which had been a highlight of her 1956 album, “The Cole Porter Songbook.” But a few notes into the song, Fitzgerald is interrupted by the sound of kids dancing the twist in another joint upstairs. She decides to go with the flow: Drummer Gus Johnson and pianist Lou Levy start pounding out a boogie-shuffle beat, and the singer improvises lyrics about how hard it is to sing Porter while everybody’s twistin’. She then launches into the “Kiss Me Kate” show tune with the kind of energy and swing that the young twisters couldn’t even dream about. It’s a brilliant, spontaneous moment, and a wonderful insight into the thinking of one of the iconic interpreters of the Great American Songbook.

This performance is one of the many joys of the recently released four-CD boxed set “Twelve Nights in Hollywood,” and it’s also a microcosm of what was occurring in American culture at the time. At start of the ’60s, Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra were the powerhouses of the record-album business. Rock ‘n’ roll was in the doldrums, and even at its earlier height it was mainly a singles market. No less than Sinatra with his concept albums, Fitzgerald and her producer-manager Norman Granz had transformed the long-playing medium with their songbook and live albums. In 1959 and 1960, Fitzgerald brought both these ideas to unprecedented heights with one project that was incredibly ambitious, her five-LP “George and Ira Gershwin Songbook,” and another that was masterful in its simplicity, “Ella in Berlin—Mack the Knife.”

[Click to continue reading Ella Fitzgerald, Twelve Nights in Hollywood | By Will Friedwald – WSJ.com]
[non-WSJ subscribers use this link to read the full review]

Ella Fitzgerald, Rediscovered Tapes of 12 Nights in Hollywood

Seth Anderson1 Comment


“Twelve Nights in Hollywood” (Ella Fitzgerald)

Finally got my copy of the new Ella Fitzgerald boxed set, Twelve Nights in Hollywood. Awesome. Recorded over a two week stay at the Crescendo Club in Hollywood, 1961, with some additional material recorded in 1962 with a trio1


With all the multi-disc jazz boxes that have come out in recent years — the complete Miles Davis on Columbia, the complete Charlie Parker on Savoy, the complete Duke Ellington on RCA and so on — it’s hard to believe that any significant tapes by any major musician might still be languishing undiscovered in a record company’s archives.

Yet Verve has just released “Twelve Nights in Hollywood,” a four-CD boxed set of Ella Fitzgerald singing 76 songs at the Crescendo, a small jazz club in Los Angeles, in 1961 and ’62 — and none of it has ever been released until now.

These aren’t bootlegs; the CDs were mastered from the original tapes, which were produced by Norman Granz, Verve’s founder and Fitzgerald’s longtime manager.

They capture the singer in her peak years, and at top form: more relaxed, swinging and adventurous, across a wider span of rhythms and moods, than on the dozens of other albums that hit the bins in her lifetime.

[Click to continue reading Ella Fitzgerald, Rediscovered – ‘Twelve Nights in Hollywood’ – NYTimes.com]

I haven’t had a chance to listen to the whole thing yet (77 songs, over four hours of music), but what I’ve heard is just spectacular. Highly recommended for fans of the human voice. The band is good, swinging intimate small-combo jazz2, but the highlight is Ms. Fitzgerald’s emotive expressive voice and utter, relaxed joy.

“Twelve Nights in Hollywood” is not a complete document. (If it were, it would consist of more than a dozen CDs, not four.) But it does include what Mr. Seidel regards as the best version of nearly every song — 76 out of 83 — that Fitzgerald sang on those nights. Six of those 76 songs were also included on the “Ella in Hollywood” album. Because Verve was about to reissue it as well, Mr. Seidel, to avoid redundancy, picked different versions of those songs, which she’d sung on different nights from the ones that Granz selected. On five of those six songs, Mr. Seidel’s choices are clearly better — more spirited, more playful, more passionate, even bluesier.

The blues were never Fitzgerald’s strong point; her few stabs at singing them in the studio came off as lame because it was hard to believe she had the capacity to be sad. But on these recordings she sings several blues songs, most notably “St. Louis Blues,” and, while no one would mistake her for Billie Holiday, she takes them for a bumpy, saucy ride.

When she scats on these recordings, she goes higher, lower, faster, more syncopated, more harmonically complex than usual; it sounds like a really good bebop horn solo, not an affectation, as her scatting on studio albums sometimes does.

And when she sings a ballad, she takes the melody in more — and more inventive — directions while still making it at least as heartbreaking as she ever did in a studio or large concert hall.

Herman Leonard, the great photographer, once took a picture of Duke Ellington sitting at a front-row table in a small New York nightclub, beaming at Fitzgerald while she sang. More than any other album, “Twelve Nights in Hollywood” gives us an idea of what Ellington was smiling at.


photograph © Herman Leonard – Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington at the Downbeat Club

Footnotes:
  1. Paul Smith – piano; Wilfred Middlebrooks – bass; Stan Levey – drums [↩]
  2. Lou Levy- piano; Herb Ellis – guitar; Wilfred Middlebrooks -bass; Gus Johnson – drums [↩]

Reading Around on January 5th through January 8th

swanksalot0 comment

A few interesting links collected January 5th through January 8th:

  • Letters of Note: Art is useless because… – Included in the preface to Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray is the now famous and often misconstrued line, ‘All art is quite useless’. In fact, following the novel’s original publication in 1890, Oxford undergraduate Bernulf Clegg was so intrigued by the claim that he wrote to Wilde and asked him to elaborate. The following handwritten letter was Wilde’s response.
  • The Airport Scanner Scam | Mother Jones – Beyond privacy issues, however, are questions about whether these machines really work—and about who stands to benefit most from their use. When it comes to high-tech screening methods, the TSA has a dismal record of enriching private corporations with failed technologies, and there are signs that the latest miracle device may just bring more of the same.
  • Never Underestimate the Power of Stupid People
  • Buddyhead’s Best and Worst Records Of 2009 | BUDDYHEAD – Animal Collective – “Merriweather Post Pavilion”Lazy music journalists tried to act like these nerds armed with bongos and delay pedals were the second coming of The Beatles or some shit. Everyone from Mojo to Rolling Stone to Pitchdork seemed to have these fruitcakes somewhere in their top five records for 2009. These dudes couldn’t write a song if their lives depended on it, they are to songwriting what “Alvin and The Chipmunks: The Squeakquel” is to cinema.

Robot and Mary Anne

Loudness Wars Redux

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NPR covered the sins of modern musical over-compression, a topic we’ve discussed a few times before.

LaSalle Owers

Robert Siegel talked to Bob Ludwig, a record mastering engineer. For more than 40 years, he’s been the final ear in the audio chain for albums running from Jimi Hendrix to Radiohead, from Tony Bennett to Kronos Quartet.

…

“The ‘Loudness Wars’ have gone back to the days of 45s,” Ludwig says. “When I first got into the business and was doing a lot of vinyl disc cutting, one producer after another just wanted to have his 45 sound louder than the next guy’s so that when the program director at the Top 40 radio station was going through his stack of 45s to decide which two or three he was going to add that week, that the record would kind of jump out to the program director, aurally at least.”

That’s still a motivation for some producers. If their record jumps out of your iPod compared with the song that preceded it, then they’ve accomplished their goal.

Bob Ludwig thinks that’s an unfortunate development.

“People talk about downloads hurting record sales,” Ludwig says. “I and some other people would submit that another thing that is hurting record sales these days is the fact that they are so compressed that the ear just gets tired of it. When you’re through listening to a whole album of this highly compressed music, your ear is fatigued. You may have enjoyed the music but you don’t really feel like going back and listening to it again.”

[Click to continue reading The Loudness Wars: Why Music Sounds Worse : NPR]

Dead 4G iPod

Don’t get me wrong, I love the convenience of digital music, but something has been sacrificed, namely nuance. For CDs I rip myself, I use higher settings1 than the default 128 kbps – which to my ears sounds like a shitty little AM transistor radio.

Matt Mayfield created a little YouTube explanation, check it out…

Big-name CD manufacturers are distorting sounds to make them seem louder. Sound quality suffers.

This video was made with image editing software and a screen capture program for the visuals, and a DAW (Digital Performer 4.5) to process the audio

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Gmex_4hreQ

Footnotes:
  1. 256 kbps Variable Bit Recording setting if you really want to know [↩]

Barry Goldberg and The Only Album Bob Dylan Ever Produced

Seth Anderson0 comment


“Barry Goldberg” (Barry Goldberg)

Michael Simmons reports on a bit of Bob Dylan related obscurity, namely that Barry Goldberg (songwriter of such hits as Devil With A Blue Dress and I’ve Got To Use My Imagination as well as being half of


Two Jew’s Blues

along with Michael Bloomfield) has reissued his mid-70s album with the original vocals restored.

Anyway, this rock ‘n’ roll Zelig also pounded the ivories behind Bob at Newport ’65 when Zimmy stuck his middle finger in an electric socket and his hair frizzed out, after which every one else began letting their hair frizz out (or something like that). When you’ve shared a stage with someone in front of a hostile audience, it’s like sharing a trench. They stayed in touch and jammed together with the Band and Sir Doug Sahm and, of course, Bloomfield. In ’73, Goldberg had a heap of good songs and was gonna record a single at RCA Records. His pal Bob sez “No no Barry, let me take ’em to Jerry Wexler,” the legendary R&B producer at Atlantic Records. Wex agrees to sign him and take Goldberg into the studio but says Bob’s gotta co-produce the sessions with him.

When Bob Dylan is handed to you on a silver platter as producer (co or udderwise), you say yes. With relish. Especially when you’re the only artist he’s ever offered his services to in this role (and ever will).

So everybody descends on Muscle Shoals, Alabama — Barry and wife/co-writer Gail and Dylan and Wex. Waiting for them are the hotshot Southern studio cats with whom one Duane Allman had paid his dues before the Brothers and who’d grooved on Two Jew’s Blues. Eddie Hinton, Jimmy Johnson, Pete Carr, David Hood, Roger Hawkins and friends. If you’ve ever dug an Aretha Franklin tune from the late ’60s, you’ve heard these aces of soulfulness. They tracked Barry’s Gladys Knight tune and one Rod Stewart covered called “It’s Not the Spotlight” and a bunch of others. “…Spotlight” and “Minstrel Show” were damn good songs about being a working musician. “Orange County Bus” is about the kind of legal trouble hippie musicians experienced all too frequently in them days. It’s a song of its time, as is “Dusty Country,” a paean to the earthy rural ideal sporting a lovely dobro. Even the strings on “She Was Such A Lady” and “…Spotlight” sound natural — no cold synthesizers that were beginning to be popular in that period. A solid album. Comfortable. Real. What they now call Americana.

[Click to continue reading Michael Simmons: The Only Album “Bob Dylan” Ever Produced ]

Sounds like perfect Rock snob fodder…

Chicago Independent Radio Project

Seth Anderson3 Comments

I support the mission of Chirp, though to be honest, I never even consider listening to the radio these days. The pool has been brackish and dead for too many years thanks to the corporate radio model utilized by such behemoths as Clear Channel and their ilk. Now I just keep an iPod or an iPhone with me anywhere that I might have listened to the radio in years past- car, walking, biking, riding the CTA.

Ain't Misbehavin' - Joe Daniels and his Hot Shots - Decca Records

What will set Chirp apart, Ms. Campbell said, is not only the sheer breadth of its offerings, which she described as “a diverse array of independent and under-appreciated music from a wide range of eras and genres,” but also its D.J.’s passionate love for the songs they play.

“Maybe I’ll play a great new local band sandwiched between a David Bowie song and a Yo La Tengo song,” said Mr. Drase, who will co-host a show. “You never know what you’re going to turn people on to.”

Unlike most commercial stations, where the average play list might include about 500 songs, Chirp has a catalog of nearly 50,000 albums, which were donated. And the idea, said Billy Kalb, the station’s music director, is to play as many as possible.

“We want to be like the friend with the really amazing record collection,” said Mr. Kalb, 24, as he sorted through donated CD’s. “We want to play enough new music to keep things interesting, and the local bands that other stations probably won’t touch.”

[Click to continue reading Independent Station’s Power Lies With Its People – NYTimes.com]

If Chirp had only been launched fifteen years ago, before we all started carrying around our music libraries1 nearly everywhere we go…

CDs shelf one

Here’s what they say about themselves:

The Chicago Independent Radio Project, or CHIRP, was formed to bring a truly independent music- and arts-focused community radio station to Chicago.

At a time when corporate-owned radio grows ever more bland, repetitious, and commercialized, community radio is more important than ever. The volunteers at CHIRP are true believers in radio that is diverse, exciting, live, and locally-based. Community radio is non-commercial, and is created by regular people from all walks of life, not just broadcast professionals. It is committed to playing music the big stations won’t touch, and to focusing on the vibrant culture of a community that often flies under the radar. This is the kind of station CHIRP is creating.

CHIRP is launching its new service on the web at CHIRPradio.org in the fall of 2009. In addition, we are working to change the law so we can eventually apply for a broadcast license. In order to do this, CHIRP and its allies must convince Congress and the FCC to change rules that say there is no room for new low power FM radio stations in big cities like Chicago.

CHIRP must raise money to cover the costs of its day-to-day operation, which includes costs like rent, streaming, utilities, and equipment. The organization also needs funds on hand so that it is in good position to apply for a new broadcast license at some point in the future.

Fortunately, these goals are well underway. Studio buildout is nearly complete. Congress and the FCC are in the midst of reconsidering the law that limited LPFM to rural and exurban areas. And CHIRP has already raised thousands of dollars thanks to the generous support of individuals, bands, venues, and foundations.

[Click to continue reading CHIRP: The Chicago Independent Radio Project]

Footnotes:
  1. I have over 171 days worth of music in my library at the moment. Of course some of it is shite, but at least I am in control of what song gets played when [↩]

Barrelhouse Words Defines the Blues

Seth Anderson0 comment


“Barrelhouse Words: A Blues Dialect Dictionary” (Stephen Calt)

Ooh, I’m getting a copy of this dictionary. Sounds fun…

Enter Stephen Calt, a blues historian and amateur linguist whose new book, “Barrelhouse Words: A Blues Dialect Dictionary,” published by the University of Illinois Press, is an impeccably scholarly, irresistibly readable guide to the language heard on the recordings of the great blues singers who were active in the first half of the 20th century. If there was ever a time when you found yourself wondering what it means to get a “stone pony” or “make a panther squall,” Mr. Calt is your man. As far back as the late ’60s, he was interviewing aging blues singers and sifting through arcane printed sources in the hopes of untangling the verbal mysteries of the music he loved.

…

All this and much, much more is made manifest in the pages of “Barrelhouse Words,” perhaps the only dictionary on my bulging bookshelf that can be read for pure pleasure from cover to cover.

Part of the pleasure arises from Mr. Calt’s donnish sense of humor. He must have been smiling quietly to himself when he defined “crying shame” as “an exceedingly lamentable occurrence.” No less enjoyable, though, are the examples of contemporary usage that accompany his definitions, all of them drawn from classic blues records. A few are genuinely poetic, while others are drop-dead funny. Look up “business, pork-grindin’,” for instance, and you’ll be confronted with this stanza from Kokomo Arnold’s 1935 recording of “Sissy Man Blues”: Lord, I woke up this mornin’ with my pork-grindin’ business in my hand / Now if you can’t send me no woman, please send me a sissy man. This is a family newspaper, so if you can’t figure the rest out for yourself, turn to page 42 of “Barrelhouse Words.” I haven’t laughed so hard while reading a reference book since the last time I consulted H.L. Mencken’s “New Dictionary of Quotations.”

[Click to continue reading Barrelhouse Words Defines the Blues | Sightings by Terry Teachout – WSJ.com]
[non-WSJ subscribers use this link for full version of article]

postscript: I hope there is an entry on Little Red Bike, as discussed here

I had not heard Kokomo Arnold’s version of this song, only these two, with similar lyric. Connie McLean sings: with my business in my hand, and Josh White sings what sounds like “pork grinding business“, but the words are a bit hard to make out:

  1. Connie McLean’s Rhythm Boys– Sissy Man Bues


    The Copulatin’ Blues Compact Disc

  2. Joshua White– Sissy Man


    Roots N’ Blues: The Retrospective

I’ll have to look for the song. Looks like an album of 24 Kokomo Arnold songs is available at Amazon for $8.99.

Reading Around on December 18th through December 23rd

swanksalot0 comment

A few interesting links collected December 18th through December 23rd:

Sunday Song Survey part 2

Seth Anderson0 comment

Plugged headphone into iPod containing 27,773 songs1, hit shuffle, and here’s what emerged. Added a two mile run on the treadmill to the beginning of this mediation, which did require me to skip an 8 minute cello piece; cannot keep a steady pace unless the music is moving too.

  1. Yardbirds, The– You’re A Better Man Than I


    Greatest Hits, Volume One

  2. Led Zeppelin– Immigrant Song


    BBC Sessions

    One of the few Led Zeppelin songs I just don’t care for. This live-at-the-BBC-studios version is better than most.

  3. Freddie King– Play It Cool


    Atlantic Blues: Chicago

    slinky guitar blues from 1969, about the sexual revolution, or something. Mini-skirts, my baby thinks she was put here forever, so she’s going to love as many (men) as she can, etc.

  4. The Velvet Underground– Rock & Roll (Demo)


    Fully Loaded Edition

    The vocals aren’t quite as tightly wound, and there is a flub in the last minute or two2, otherwise this could have been the final version. Thinner sound, perhaps, were there over-dubs on the final release?

  5. Cooder, Ry– Look At Granny Run Run


    Bop Till You Drop

    is this about a prototype of Viagra? 1979 seems a little early to be singing about a brand new pill that Grandpa takes that causes him to regain his, umm, energy for lovin’. Filled with tasty Ry Cooder guitar licks, of course.

  6. Thomas Mapfumo, The Acid Band– Chengeta Va Bereki


    Hokoyo!

    A favorite concert of recent vintage was in Manhattan a few years ago, at some benefit hosted by Bonnie Raitt. For me, the highlight was Thomas Mapfumo. Such a voice, full of expressive power with a hint of melancholy. A musical hero of mine.

  7. Cale, John– Child’s Christmas In Wales


    Paris 1919

    Buoyant pop tune, you’d never know that John Cale was the glowering rocker clad in black on the Velvet Underground’s first two albums just a few years prior to this album’s release in 1973. Some of the lyrics are obscure to me, but the melody compensates. Also, I’ll have to check, but that sure as hell sounds like Ry Cooder playing some slide guitar. You should probably own this album if you don’t, highly rewarding.3

  8. Led Zeppelin– The Song Remains The Same
    Conspiracy Theory
    Bootleg recording from 1975, to my ears, not recorded from the soundboard, despite. Still pretty good quality, so maybe it is from a soundboard. Not Jimmy Page’s finest guitar solo – it is kind of formless, and John Paul Jones is mostly buried in the mix, but John Bonham sounds fucking loud, possessed, and Robert Plant assures you everything small will grow. If you like Zepp, you should have this.
  9. Fred McDowell– Red Cross Store Blues


    Good Morning, Little School Girl

    Fred McDowell’s voice and his guitar perfectly in tune, limited range, but extremely powerful. In the days before Yelp!, one had record one’s complaints in song form, and hope for compensation. Whatever that Red Cross Store did to Mr. McDowell, they should be sorry. Damn. Probably racial, at least in part, but who knows. All we know is that he’s not going to that store any more.

  10. John Fogerty– Heaven’s Just A Sin Away


    The Blue Ridge Rangers Rides Again

    Speaking of copyright theft, John Fogerty got screwed re: Credence Clearwater residuals for years. This country-pop song is pretty light-weight though.

  11. Akli D.– Azul – Salut à vous


    Anefas trankil
    not quite Raï, but similar in spirit. Tamazight, actually, a Berber language from North Africa4. Hypnotic, insistent, quite spectacular. Worth owning if you are at all fond of desert blues.

  12. Sun Kil Moon– Lily And Parrots


    Ghosts Of The Great Highway

    Really love this song, timbre of the lead vocalist reminds me of Neil Young, and now that I think of it, this could be a Crazy Horse record. Rocking, in other words.

  13. Big Star– September Gurls


    Keep an Eye on the Sky

    Probably my favorite box set of 2009 was the Big Star collection. Remastered, and filled with transcendent moments, including songs like this one. Love the backing vocals going “whoo-oooh”, among other subtle touches.

  14. Damned, The– Noise, Noise, Noise


    Machine Gun Etiquette
    I know The Damned are punk-rock legends, but this song doesn’t do much for me. Not that it sucks, but I’m not picking the needle up to play the tune again

  15. Thompson, Richard– Rockin’ In Rhythm


    Strict Tempo!

    Sprightly instrumental, did Richard Thompson overdub the second guitar? or does he have 25 fingers? Seeing as the only other musician credited on this seemingly out-of-print album is drummer Dave Mattacks, I guess Thompson does have 28 fingers.

  16. Boozoo Chavis– Who Stole My Monkey?


    Who Stole My Monkey

    ?
    Nearly instrumental, as a matter of fact, the lyrics are just variants of You Stole My Monkey, repeated over a danceable zydeco beat.

  17. Little Richard– Good Golly Miss Molly


    Greatest Gold Hits

    even after a thousand plays, still love Little Richard’s whoops.

  18. Helmet– Unsung


    Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas – Radio X

    In Grand Theft Auto, music plays on the radio in any car you steal. As the GTA franchise has gotten older, the soundtrack has gotten more expansive. This box set is actually pretty good, even though this heavy rock song is on it, not my typical listening.

  19. Wire– Strange


    Pink Flag

    such an unusual loping vamp in A and E5. R.E.M. covered the song , but the original is better. Love this song, love this album.

Part of the fun for me of this project is stretching my memory: can I remember what my impressions about a song are later when I am in front of a computer? Listening to music is, and has been, my most favored hobby for nearly my entire life, but I would not assert that I am an astute critic of what I hear. I’ll never get better explaining what I like and don’t like unless I try. Odds are, I’ll tire of it soon enough, and go back to mostly blogging about politics and corporate corruption.

Footnotes:
  1. out of a possible 61,676 [↩]
  2. Lou Reed can be heard laughing [↩]
  3. nope, turns out it was Lowell George, of Little Feat fame. Interesting. Though Ry Cooder did do studio work on Little Feat’s first album [↩]
  4. Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and elsewhere [↩]
  5. if my guess is correct [↩]

Saturday Song Solipsism Part 2

Seth Anderson1 Comment

Haven’t gotten bored with this game yet- lower the lights, go into the sauna-pod, put on the headphones, and hit shuffle on my iPod. Here’s the latest results:

  1. El Rego et ses Commandos– Vimado Wingnan


    Legends Of Benin

    Delightful West African release of Afro-funk etc. If The Talking Heads were not listening to artists covered on this album, I would be very surprised. Chiming arpeggio guitars, funk drums, driving bass lines, infectious poly-rhythms, great fun.

  2. Young, Neil– Through My Sails


    Zuma

    A near-Desert Island disc. Still debating whether to splurge on the BluRay Neil Young archive Vol 1 or not. If it doesn’t include regular audio files that can be converted to MP3 and played on an iPod, will hardly ever listen to it. This lovely song is acoustic guitar, with backing vocals by what sounds like Stephen Stills and maybe even David Crosby.

  3. Observer All Stars, The– Rebel Dance


    Trojan Dub Box Set

    instrumental reggae, not much dub weirdness, thus not a great tune. Good for meditation though.

  4. Weezer– O Girlfriend


    Weezer (Green Album)

    gah what tiresome 1990s alternative rock crap. If I wasn’t an inveterate pack rat, I’d have deleted this annoyance long ago.

  5. Ramones, The– I Don’t Wanna Be Learned / I Don’t Wanna Be Tamed (Demo)


    Ramones

    whew, a welcome palate cleanser after the Weezer dreck. The Ramones only play two or three chords, but more energy in their demos than Weezer’s entire recorded output combined.

  6. Joe Higgs– My Baby Still Loves me


    Life of Contradiction

    I lean towards political reggae more than “sweet” reggae, but this is a decent enough “sweet” reggae tune. Can’t always listen to songs of institutional oppression, right? This is a good album to own if you want to branch out beyond Bob Marley, especially since Joe Higgs was extremely influential on creating the classic Wailers sound, mentoring Marley and Tosh in the early 1970s.

  7. Funkadelic– Hit It And Quit It


    Maggot Brain

    Before George Clinton decided if Parliament-Funkadelic was a rock band or a funk band, they recorded this album. Other than a somewhat annoying organ solo, a great tune. A template for all the Red Hot Chile Peppers and like-minded bands to follow; reverbed-like-crazy rock guitar, coupled with driving New Orleans style funk drums. Still remember purchasing this album from the now defunct Sound Exchange next to Mad Dogs and Beans and Les Amis. Ahh, youth.

  8. Johann Sebastian Bach – Bach: The Well-Tempered Clavier [Disc 1]
    Bach: Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1 – Prelude #12 In F Minor, BWV 857- Leon Berben
    ahh, Bach.
  9. Reign– Padre Nuestro
    Silencio= Muerte: Red Hot + Latin Redux
    am a sucker for the Red Hot + comps. This a latin dance-club tune, or what I would call so anyway. Good in small doses
  10. Garcia, Jerry– Gone Home


    Almost Acoustic

    I don’t know this for a fact, but strongly suspect Jerry Garcia was in the depths of his heroin addiction when this dirge was recorded. Waltz-time, but slower. Though, to be fair, it is a funeral song, and has some fine mandolin bits, and bit of the High, Lonesome wild mercury sound that Bob Dylan is always muttering about. Not a shite song, just wouldn’t be good to listen while biking the lakefront, your bike might keel over.

  11. Dylan, Bob– You Ain’t Going Nowhere
    Genuine Basement Tapes
    I wish these delightfully fun tracks would get a proper release. They float around on the internet, but the bit rate is often low. Bob Dylan and The Band hanging out in Woodstock, having a probably illegal amount of fun. Lots of silliness, like in this track, probably one of the ones where the lyrics were written randomly1 by committee2; Richard Manuel backing vocals, and some classic Robbie Robertson guitar work. Wonder if Robbie Robertson’s copyright theft from the rest of The Band is part of the reason these songs have never been given a proper release?
  12. The Mamas & The Papas– California Dreamin’
    All Time Greatest Hits
    I first heard this band only a couple of years ago, before the whole incestual/attention grabbing news about John Phillips and his daughter, but the song is a classic slice of Americana, evocative of the time in which it was created. Undercurrents of foreboding, minor keys, but so damn catchy.
Footnotes:
  1. just pick up that oilcloth/cram it in the corner/I don’t care if your name is Michael/you’re gonna need some boards/get your lunch/you foreign bib/you ain’t goin’ nowhere [↩]
  2. this particular Basement track was polished up, all that remains on the Genuine Basement Tape version is the chorus [↩]

Friday Musical Free For All

Seth Anderson0 comment

Immersed myself in my meditative tube, put on my headphones, and hit shuffle on the iPod. Here’s what played:

  1. Alejandro Escovedo– Slow Down


    Real Animal

    I won’t bore you with a tale of Alejandro Escovedo, Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew album, LSD and the (now defunct) Waterloo Records Vinyl Annex, as I think I told it before. Glad Mr. Escovedo doesn’t have to clerk at Waterloo Records anymore though: he played at the Democratic National Convention in Denver if I’m not mistaken.

  2. Johann Sebastian Bach – Bach: Cello Suites [Disc 2]
    Bach: Cello Suite In D Minor, BWV 1008 – Gigue- Jaap Ter Linden
    Cello is becoming one of my favorite instruments to listen to
  3. Sir Victor Uwaifo & His Melody Maestroes– Akuyan Ekassa


    Nigeria 70 Vol. 1

    an awesome album, and a great funky tune; guitars, bass, drums, percussion.

  4. Freakwater– Put My Little Shoes


    Feels Like the Third Time

    other than the nice Carter Family-esque guitar playing1, not a favorite. They have much better songs in their oeuvre, some of which are even on this album, like My Old Drunk Friend which is a classic.

  5. Swanksalot Orchestra, The– Dancing Bull
    Swanky Headroom III
    a tune composed, mostly in GarageBand, and not one of my most successful, I’m afraid. Thought it would be fun to record a bunch of guitar riffs and merge them, but it didn’t turn out that well. Oh well, still fun to hear fruit of my labor from 4 years ago. Hadn’t listened to it in a while.
  6. Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark– Enola Gay


    Left Of The Dial: Dispatches From The ’80s Underground

    little bit of nostalgia for the 80s, though this track is not a huge favorite of mine. Love this Rhino 4 disc box set however, tons of good singles on it.

  7. Pearl Jam– Gone


    Pearl Jam

    I like the idea of Pearl Jam: earnest, Pacific-Northwesterners, with political views close to mine, but truth be told, have never really have enjoyed listening to their music. Boring to me, this song included.

  8. Cale, John– Antarctica Starts Here


    Paris 1919

    quiet, melodic pop tune. No idea what the song is about

  9. Lang, Peter– St. Charles Shuffle


    John Fahey, Peter Lang, Leo Kottke

    flashy acoustic guitar instrumental from an album full of them. Is it a dobro? Steel strings at least.

  10. The Melodians– Sweet Sensation


    The Harder They Come

    classic reggae tune from The Harder They Come soundtrack, a Jamaican blaxsploitation film that is worth Netflixing if you haven’t ever seen it. The Melodians biggest hit was Rivers of Babylon, Sweet Sensation is solid, just not as good.

  11. Devendra Banhart– Lover


    Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon

    fun, bouncy track, a homage to early 70s funky-soul, or whatever the hell it called, complete with slightly risqué lyrics.

  12. ChickenFat Klezmer Orchestra– Ot Azoy
    ChickenFat Demos
    Surprisingly good stuff from a local band; need to go see them perform live one of these days. They have several MP3s available at their website, check it out.

Today’s play list had a few duds on it, guess that’s part of the randomizer fun. Better luck next time…

Footnotes:
  1. bass strings of the guitar playing a melody, in other words [↩]

Reading Around on December 16th through December 17th

swanksalot0 comment

A few interesting links collected December 16th through December 17th:

  • The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs : AT&T: Chokehold is “irresponsible and pointless” – It’s their own fault, of course. Go look at their financial statements and open up the Financial Operations and Statistics Summary and look at capital expenditures over the past eight quarters. I’m no math whiz, but it looks like capex has gone down by about 30% over the time period. Scroll down a bit to the Wireless section and check out data revenues — they’re up 80% over the same period.

  • WordPress › Pretty Link « WordPress Plugins – Shrink, track and share any URL on the Internet from your WordPress website. You can now shorten links using your own domain name (as opposed to using tinyurl.com, bit.ly, or any other link shrinking service)! In addition to creating clean links, Pretty Link tracks each hit on your URL and provides a full, detailed report of where the hit came from, the browser, os and host.

  • The Conway Twitty Tribute Pistol (MP3s) – WFMU’s Beware of the Blog – If you’d prefer to remember Conway Twitty for his talents as a singer and songwriter, here are a few MP3s to help you out. All were written by Twitty, with the exception of Pop A Top, which was composed by Nat Stuckey.

Netflixed: Almost Famous

Seth Anderson0 comment


“Almost Famous” (Cameron Crowe)

Held up better than expected on a second viewing, can this movie really be 10 years old?

Almost Famous is a 2000 comedy-drama film written and directed by Cameron Crowe and telling the fictional story of a teenage journalist writing for Rolling Stone magazine while covering a rock band Stillwater, and his efforts to get his first cover story published. The film is semi-autobiographical, as Crowe himself was a teenage writer for Rolling Stone.

The film is based on Crowe’s experiences touring with rock bands The Allman Brothers Band, Led Zeppelin, The Eagles, and Lynyrd Skynyrd. In a Rolling Stone article, he talks about how he lost his virginity, fell in love, and met his heroes, experiences that are shared by William, the main character in the film. Kate Hudson earned an Academy Award nomination for her portrayal of band groupie Penny Lane, while Crowe won the Oscar for his original script. Jason Lee and Billy Crudup co-star.

[Click to Netflix Almost Famous]

Speaking of the joys of vinyl records, this film’s poignancy partially based on nostalgia for a different era, an era where a suitcase full of records1 can be a talisman. If the film were set in 2009, you could not hand off a loaded iPod with the same emotional resonance.

Some Cameron Crowe maudlin moments, but nothing that gets in the way of the film’s narrative flow. Helps, probably, if the lead character’s personality (outsider, unusual family life, passionate music lover) resonates with the viewer.

There is a director’s cut, called Untitled,2 which adds some 34 minutes of footage, but as far as I can tell, this is unavailable in the US. Perhaps Dreamworks is working on a re-release?

Ebert raves:

Oh, what a lovely film. I was almost hugging myself while I watched it. “Almost Famous” is funny and touching in so many different ways. It’s the story of a 15-year-old kid, smart and terrifyingly earnest, who through luck and pluck gets assigned by Rolling Stone magazine to do a profile of a rising rock band. The magazine has no idea he’s 15. Clutching his pencil and his notebook like talismans, phoning a veteran critic for advice, he plunges into the experience that will make and shape him. It’s as if Huckleberry Finn came back to life in the 1970s, and instead of taking a raft down the Mississippi, got on the bus with the band.

[Click to continue reading Almost Famous :: rogerebert.com :: Reviews]

as does the anonymous NYT reviewer:

The power of popular music — its ability to give shape, meaning and intensity to the inexpressible emotions of daily life — is something of a motif in Cameron Crowe’s career as a director. Think of John Cusack hoisting his boombox aloft outside Ione Skye’s window in “Say Anything” or Tom Cruise hurtling down the highway in “Jerry Maguire,” spinning the radio dial in search of a song to suit his mood and happening upon Tom Petty’s “Free Falling.” Mr. Crowe has always used rock not merely as soundtrack decoration but also as a window into the souls of his characters.

In “Almost Famous,” a loose, affectionate look back on his earlier career as a teenage music journalist, Mr. Crowe has devoted a whole movie to the love of rock ‘n’ roll. The soul he lays open — a sweet, forgiving and generous one — is his own. The movie follows the adventures of William Miller (Patrick Fugit), a San Diego 15- year-old whose fairy-tale ascendance from nerdy schoolboy to Rolling Stone reporter mirrors Mr. Crowe’s own life story. But Mr. Crowe is less interested in biographical or historical literalism — he freely mixes real and fictional characters and prefers period atmosphere to period detail — than in evoking the joyful, reckless, earnest energy of rock in the years between 60’s idealism and punk nihilism.

[Click to continue reading ´Almost Famous´: With Sympathy for the Devil, a Rock Writer Finds His Way – NYTimes.com]

Footnotes:
  1. IMDb: The old records William looks through at the beginning are actually Cameron Crowe’s, saved from his younger years. [↩]
  2. Cameron Crowe wanted to call the movie this all along, but the studio balked [↩]

Fela Kuti Biopic

Seth Anderson0 comment


“Fela: The Life And Times Of An African Musical Icon” (Michael Veal)

Certainly looking forward to seeing this, whenever it gets released. Any sour mood can be alleviated by playing Fela Kuti1 at high volume and dancing around, shaking one’s hips with abandon.

Focus Features has set Steve McQueen to direct “Fela,” a feature film based on the life of African musician and activist Fela Anikulapo Kuti — the subject of the recently opened Broadway musical “Fela!”


“Hunger (Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]” (Steve McQueen)

McQueen, the British artist who made his feature directing debut last year on the Irish hunger strike drama “Hunger” will write the script with Biyi Bandele, based on the Michael Veal book “Fela: The Life and Times of an African Musical Icon.” Cine Mosaic’s Lydia Pilcher and Leigh Blake are producing. The musical has spurred a resurgence of interest in Fela, who died in 1997, and his Afrobeat musical style, which is a fusion of American jazz, funk and West African drums.

The musical is not connected to the film project: Focus is basing its pic on a rights package consisting of screen rights to Fela’s music and his life story, plus Veal’s book.

Fela lived large — with some 27 wives — and paid a high price for speaking out against oppression in Nigeria. In one attack on his home, Fela’s 78-year-old mother was killed after being thrown from a second-story window. Fela responded by placing her coffin on the steps of the Nigerian leader’s residence.

“Fela might be the most globally influential pop artist outside the Beatles in the last 50 years,” said Focus topper James Schamus.

[Click to continue reading Focus to film ‘Fela’ feature – Entertainment News, Film News, Media – Variety]


“Opposite People/Sorrow Tears and Blood” (Fela Kuti)

I’ve also heard rumors that all of Fela’s albums are going to be remastered and released, soon, but haven’t run across any details about the release schedule yet.

Footnotes:
  1. Sorrow Tears and Blood, for instance [↩]