Tag: Music

Funkadelic Cosmic Slop Video Promo

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A weirdly wonderful film promo from Funkadelic, circa 1973, found on YouTube. Yes, I would hazard to guess there were a lot of drugs involved.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cp4pgMOugbo

(via @joem500)

from the album of the same name.


“Cosmic Slop” (Funkadelic)

If memory serves, this was the first Parliament/Funkadelic album I bought – a gatefold LP from Westbound Records on heavy, archival vinyl. I even remember where I purchased it: a funky little record store next to Mad Dog and Beans and Les Amis on The Drag near the UT campus in Austin. Sadly, all three of these fine establishments, who have a cameo in the film, Slacker, are defunct, replaced by a Starbucks, a Subway, and a crushing sameness, so common to America in the 21st CE.

John Cale and The Velvet Underground

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“The Velvet Underground & Nico” (The Velvet Underground, Nico)

Like a lot of musical obsessives, The Velvet Underground was essential listening when I first began exploring music.

Jonathan Jones had the good fortune to check out John Cale’s exhibit in the Venice Biennale. Sounds like an interesting exhibit, but of course, The Velvet Underground’s history is always on the agenda:

It sounds at first like an electronic whine, a build-up of noise in the amplifier. Then there’s Lou Reed’s voice, young but hardened: “When the smack begins to flow, and it shoots up the dropper’s neck, and I’m rushing on my run, then I feel just like Jesus’s son.” Behind it all, there’s that strange keening, humming note. Listen to the Velvet Underground’s Heroin on headphones and you realise it’s not feedback after all, not a synthesised warble, but the rich timbre of a violin playing a single note, held for a disturbingly long time. It’s the darkest thing in the darkest of songs. If Reed sounds as if he’s made a pact with the devil, then the musician who plays that buzzing fiddle – John Cale – must be the devil himself.

[From The Velvet Underground’s John Cale on reconnecting with his Welsh roots at the Venice Biennale | Art and design | The Guardian ]

and doesn’t sound like any feel-good reunion between Lou Reed and John Cale will ever occur

Andy Warhol produced the Velvets’ first album and designed its banana peel cover. No figure in modern culture is more misunderstood than the Velvets’ manager, and nobody speaks up for Warhol more eloquently than Cale. He won’t hear a word against Andy. The Factory, he insists, was a true underground – “it was outrageously creative and vital” – and Warhol cared about, and properly curated, the Velvets. A rare bit of footage Warhol shot in the Factory shows Cale fiddling with the amplifier, while Reed strums and drummer Maureen Tucker knocks out her steady, dry beat. Warhol listened carefully, and remembered it all. “He was the one who’d remind us of an idea we’d forgotten.”

Cale is still smarting from what he sees – amazingly – as the tragic waste of the band. Warhol took them to the west coast, he tells me. While they were away, Bob Dylan’s manager took out a lease on their Manhattan venue. This was part of Dylan’s feud with Warhol, whose world is caricatured in lyrics on the 1966 album Highway 61 Revisited. Then Reed sacked Warhol and Cale. A new manager, says Cale, “appealed to Lou’s desire for glory”. In the years since, Reed and Cale have occasionally got back together – but from the furious way he talks, I’d say any further reunion was unlikely.

All through the solo career that followed, Cale has returned again and again to his Welshness. He has recorded Dylan Thomas poems, and in the early 1970s composed a nostalgic Thomas-inspired song, A Child’s Christmas in Wales. And apart from the Thomas obsession, there is a lyricism to his music, one that struggles with his severity and evokes all those years in the Welsh Youth Orchestra.


“Paris 1919” (John Cale)

If you own just one Cale solo album, Paris 1919 is my favorite.

One of John Cale’s very finest solo efforts, Paris 1919 is also among his most accessible records, one which grows in depth and resonance with each successive listen. A consciously literary work – the songs even bear titles like “child’s christmas in wales,” “macbeth,” and “graham greene” – paris 1919 is close in spirit to a collection of short stories; the songs are richly poetic, enigmatic period pieces strongly evocative of their time and place. Chris Thomas’ production is appropriately lush and sweeping, with many tracks set to orchestral accompaniment; indeed, there’s little here to suggest either cale’s noisy, abrasive past or the chaos about to resurface in his subsequent work – for better or worse, his music never achieved a similar beauty again.

Reading Around on May 6th through May 7th

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A few interesting links collected May 6th through May 7th:

  • Amazon.com Knee-Jerk Contrarian Game – Waxy.org – “Kenny G., for instance. His rythmic session is much more regular, whereas Coltrane’s session seems sometimes to loose the beat.”

    FAIL!!

    Umm, for one, “lose the beat” instead of “loose the beat”. And for second, bhwah-ha-ha-ha, Kenny G!!

  • MenuPages Blog :: Chicago: The Green City Market Is Open! Celebrate at Bonsoiree – “The Green City Market opens for outdoor business today! ”

    photo by me

  • BLDGBLOG: How the Other Half Writes: In Defense of Twitter – “Again, I fail to see any clear distinction between someone’s boring Twitter feed – considered only semi-literate and very much bad – and someone else’s equally boring, paper-based diary – considered both pro-humanist and unquestionably good.
    Kafka would have had a Twitter feed! And so would have Hemingway, and so would have Virgil, and so would have Sappho. It’s a tool for writing. Heraclitus would have had a f***ing Twitter feed.”

ThruYou mashup

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I think I linked to this lovely YouTube mashup a few months ago. If you haven’t seen it, you are in for a treat.

This spring, the radical dissonance at the madhouse YouTube was — for a moment, at least — subdued. Did you feel it? The cacophonous video-sharing site was briefly brought to harmony in March by a composer, animator and musician known as Kutiman. Born Ophir Kutiel in Jerusalem in 1981, Kutiman created a minor masterpiece with an online project called ThruYOU that makes both sense and music of YouTube’s warring tendencies of compartmentalization and community.

ThruYOU is an album of seven original songs, each built from dozens of fragments of video clips of (mostly amateur) musicians, selected from among the seemingly endless footage of music lessons and private recitals archived on YouTube. (You can watch and listen on Thru-You.com, Kutiman’s cleverly custom-designed site.) Over what must have been a grueling two months, Kutiman collected an array of striking sounds and images, some no longer than a split second, and pressed them into musical service. Each one now furnishes a note or two, or a groove or a sensibility, in Kutiman’s audiovisual medleys. He has put the fractured universe of musical YouTube in concert. The housebound noodlers of the world now miraculously jam together.

…

But whatever its standing as ideological object, ThruYOU is also just stunning. Using and refining the technique of “video scratching,” ThruYOU builds fully orchestrated songs from Kutiman’s selected digital excerpts. Most of the clips show musicians in modest domestic spaces, improvised studios, barely finished basements and bunkerlike bedrooms. The videos almost always feature one musician in a soliloquy tableau that’s by now familiar to YouTubers: somewhat sheepishly, a soloist plays into a self-monitored camera and cheap microphone.

[Click to continue reading The Medium – World Music – NYTimes.com]

Here’s the first track: Mother of All Funk Chords

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tprMEs-zfQA

Though really, you should spend a few moments and watch all of the cuts from this “album” directly at Thru-You.com (the track selections are on the right of the screen). I shudder to think of how much time was spent compiling and cross-referencing these clips, but the results are just stupendous.

And You Shall Know Us By The Trail of Our Vinyl

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“And You Shall Know Us by the Trail of Our Vinyl: The Jewish Past as Told by the Records We Have Loved and Lost” (Roger Bennett, Josh Kun)

Ha, what a great idea for a book. I want to go to this, though $15 a person seems a little expensive.

An affinity for kitschy album covers became a quest as Josh Kun and Roger Bennett scoured attics and garage sales to collect once-loved gems. In Jewish recordings from the 1940s-1980s they discovered sacred songs, Jewish mambo, comedy, folk tunes, and the “holy trilogy” of Neil, Barbra, and Barry. Their book includes commentary from writers and performers including Aimee Bender, Michael Wex, Shalom Auslander, Sandra Bernhard, Motown legend Lamont Dozier, and TV pioneer Norman Lear. With music and visual images, Josh Kun will share how these recordings speak across generations to tell a vibrant tale of Jews in America.

[From Spertus | Author Event | Booksigning]


“Hot August Night (Remastered / Expanded) (2CD)” (Neil Diamond)

The Amazon blurb says:

What started out as a mutual affinity for kitschy Jewish album covers–think Neil Diamond baring his chest hair on the cover of Hot August Night or Barbra Streisand in hot pants on the cover of Streisand Superman–soon became a quest for identity, history, and culture between the grooves of LPs.

Together, Roger Bennett and Josh Kun embarked on a thrilling journey, scouring the world to collect thousands of vinyl LPs from attics, garage sales, and dusty archives. Pieced together, these scratched, once-loved and now-forgotten audio gems tell a vibrant tale: the story of Jews in America. And You Shall Know Us by the Trail of Our Vinyl spans the history of Jewish recorded music from the 1940s to the 1980s, weaving an account that begins with sacred songs and ends with the holy trinity of Neil, Barbra, and Barry. The LPs found here are also a love letter to forgotten moments in Jewish American pop history, celebrating well-dressed cantors singing Christmas tunes, Long Island suburbanites dancing the mambo, and Chassidic prog-rockers.

The music, much of which is no longer available in any format, is brought to life through commentary from writers Aimee Bender, Etgar Keret, Michael Wex, and Shalom Auslander; performers Sandra Bernhard and Motown legend Lamont Dozier; music critics Oliver Wang and Anne Powers; and TV pioneer Norman Lear. A gateway to a forgotten kingdom of sound, the good, the bad, and the ugly of Jewish vinyl gives this aspect of Jewish culture the attention it so richly deserves.


“Streisand Superman” (Barbra Streisand)

Reading Around on March 30th

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Some additional reading March 30th from 14:16 to 19:48:

  • jimmy's cocktail hour: Whiskey for the People. – "Pikesville Rye is widely distributed, and is usually available for around $11.99. Some parts of the country get it for $9.99. Let's call it $12. This is good rye at a bargain price. If you have a bottle of bitters on hand, you're all set. "
  • Cocktail Hacker » Blog Archive » MxMo XXXVI: Recession Gin and Tonic – So how hard is this cocktail going to hit your wallet? It’s not going to hit it hard at all. It’s going to be like a kitten falling on a pile of pillows.

    Burnett’s Gin (1.75 L) $15.99 -> 2 oz $0.54
    Realime (15 oz) $3.09 -> 1 tsp $0.04
    C-Dry Tonic (6×12 oz) $2.99 -> 6 oz $0.25
    Total Cost Per Drink $0.83
    Eighty three cents. Try to wrap your head around that number. That’s cheaper than a soft drink nearly anywhere. It’s cheaper than a crappy cup of coffee from the vending machine in my office.

  • The Cocktail Chronicles » MxMo Hard Times: Drink Like a King(sley) – Need to read this book!
    "Vital requirement: prepare pre- and post-dinner drinks in some undiscoverable pantry or broom-cupboard well away from the main scene. This will not only screen your niggardliness; it will also make the fetching of each successive round look like a slight burden, and will cast an unfavorable limelight on any individual determined to wrest additional drinks out of you. Sit in a specially deep easy-chair, and practise getting out of it with a mild effort and, later in the evening, a just-audible groan, though beware of overdoing this."
  • Twitter Blog: Replies Are Now Mentions – Seems like this should pick up on re-tweets too (RT @swanksalot for instance). Good tweak to the API.
  • The Art of Sampling | TheFrontloader.com – "Sometime late last year, I was looking through the new releases when I came across a sincere tragedy. Hilary Duff was back, and THIS time, it was personal… “Personal Jesus”-personal. It seemed that, for her “Best Of” album, she needed a new song and thus decided to sample Depeche Mode’s 1989 hit “Personal Jesus” for her single, “Reach Out.”

    At first I couldn’t believe it because I consider Depeche Mode music sacred ground, but then I found a link to the music video and decided to see if it was true. For those of you that have been lucky enough to miss this, consider yourself very unlucky right now"

  • The Washington Monthly -IF IT'S SUNDAY, IT'S JOHN MCCAIN – John McCain has appeared on Meet the Press – just one of the multiple Sunday morning talk shows – 54 times, and I would guess that most of them have come in the years since announcing for President in 1999, since before that he was a more obscure figure in Washington. I can't imagine there's anyone else even close to that number. And yet McCain is an easy guy to find on the Rolodex and get to appear on your show. It points to a staleness in the official discourse.

Jimi Hendrix reality TV footage to be released by his estate

Seth Anderson2 Comments


“The Jimi Hendrix Experience” (The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Jimi Hendrix)

I’d watch that, if it isn’t horrible.

Candid, “reality TV”-style footage of Jimi Hendrix at home, backstage and “hanging out” will soon be released, according to the late musician’s sister.

The footage dates from 1969, when a camera crew followed Hendrix for a month, catching him both on and off stage. The Hendrix estate will release the footage in a DVD later this year, as part of a new deal with Universal Music Publishing Group.

[Click to continue reading Jimi Hendrix ‘reality TV’ footage to be released by his estate | Music | guardian.co.uk ]

and I wonder why the Hendrix estate is blocking the making of a bio-pic? Are they working on their own? or what?

Experience Hendrix have “10 more years of Hendrix music” in their archives, according to Janie. “Currently I am in the studio transferring tapes of Band of Gypsys performances that have never been released before,” she said, referring to Hendrix’s final band. The company plans to release at least two albums this year, and a Jimi Hendrix Experience concert DVD of the band’s Royal Albert Hall gig in February 1969.

The Hendrix estate has continued to block attempts to make a Jimi Hendrix biopic, most recently refusing to license any music to a proposed film starring Outkast’s Andre 3000.


“Electric Ladyland (w/dvd)” (Jimi Hendrix)

plus there is this:

Fourteen acoustic demo songs by Hendrix, recorded in 1968 and traded to a neighbour in exchange for milk and sugar, are to be auctioned in April. The battered, coffee-stained green box contains 1,800ft of quarter-inch tape, from when Hendrix was working on his third album, Electric Ladyland.

The songs mostly feature Hendrix playing solo acoustic guitar. Though he covers Dylan, he plays Tears of Rage and not the now-classic All Along the Watchtower, which appeared on Electric Ladyland. A few tracks include an unnamed harmonica player.

Hendrix gave the tape to Carl Niekirk, who owned a photography studio beneath the rocker’s Brook Street, London flat. “It was a constant stream of people coming and going and partying,” Niekirk told the Independent. As the flat and studio shared an entrance, the photographer would often have to let in Hendrix or his guests – including George Harrison.

One day, Hendrix asked Niekirk if he could borrow some sugar. When the photographer took it up, the rock star gave him the tape. “Because I asked him, he just gave it to me,” Niekirk said. “As simple as that.”

[From Jimi Hendrix’s acoustic Electric Ladyland demo tape to be auctioned | Music | guardian.co.uk ]

which took decades of legal wrangling before it could be released

More Satchmo

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More Satchmo is a good thing, an essential thing, in fact.

After virtually inventing the lexicon for jazz soloists with his epochal Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings, Louis Armstrong set up shop at Decca Records in the mid-thirties. The Armstrong Deccas have not fared as well as their forebears, having been knocked about on compilations of dubious legality and dogged by various aspersions—mainly, that Armstrong had become a puppet for his manager Joe Glaser, who had turned Armstrong into a happy-go-lucky song-and-dance man ready to ham it up on cue.

     But as “The Complete Louis Armstrong Decca Sessions, 1935-1946” (Mosaic Records) attests, Armstrong wasn’t one to be intimidated by his past. The corking take on “Struttin’ with Some Barbecue” makes the Okeh version seem positively weak-kneed, with Armstrong’s big band ripping through the breaks. Armstrong the vocalist is arguably at his apex here, and it was through his vocalizations that Armstrong’s chamber jazz took on a second life as pure pop manna. “On the Sunny Side of the Street” is a glorious hybrid: a mix of Stephen Foster-esque Americana and unprecedented vocal inflections that must have pricked up the ears of Elvis Presley and Bob Dylan. The Decca sessions even venture into hardcore R. & B. terrain, once the drummer “Big” Sid Catlett turns up. A fleeting discographical presence over his career, Catlett was at his best with Armstrong, his offbeat accents on “Baby Won’t You Please Come Home” presaging soul’s infatuation with syncopation.

[From More Satchmo: Recordings: The New Yorker]

Looking forward to my copy of this, once the CD becomes available.

The Black Hebrews

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Fascinating article about the Black Hebrews who left Chicago (and the US) to settle in Israel, often under duress. The African Hebrew Hebrew Israelites persevered and flourished in the desert village of Dimona1 long enough to become assimilated, and even nearly accepted by the Israeli citizens.

Elyahkeem Ben Yehuda could have become another statistic, growing up poor, black and fatherless on the west side of Chicago during the 1950s.

But he never had a run-in with the law, nor did he see the inside of a jail cell, until he moved to Israel to join the African Hebrew Israelite community. “I had to come to Israel to get my first experience in jail,” he said. “But in those days, that was like a badge of honor, to be arrested for God and His people.”

Last month, the 62-year-old Ben Yehuda — father of 10 children and husband of 3 women — became the first member of his community to gain full Israeli citizenship. Looking back on the hurdles he overcame since his 1971 arrival, Ben Yehuda mused, “I can only describe this journey in relationship to my forefathers,” referring to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. “They were able to endure. As long as we put fulfilling the will of the God of Israel first, there’s no challenge that we can’t overcome.”

The African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem — or Black Hebrews, as they are more commonly known (though not all members are black) — have sparred with the Israeli government for decades over their right to immigrate to Israel under the Law of Return. It is a right they still do not have. But presaging Ben Yehuda’s achievement last month, Israel granted the community permanent residency status in 2003, offering its 3,000 members a five-year path to apply for citizenship on an individual basis. It’s a process that many others are now undertaking.

[Click to continue reading Once Reviled, Black Hebrews Now Fêted – Forward.com]

via Michael Hawthorne‘s Friday afternoon twitter feed

DNA Bricks

The African Hebrew Israelites web page offers a bit of their history:

In 1966 our spiritual leader, Ben Ammi, had a vision that it was time for the Children of Israel who remained in America (the land of their captivity) to return to the Holy Land (the land of their origin).

In 1967, after almost two thousand years in the Diaspora, four hundred Hebrew Israelites were inspired by the spirit of God to make an exodus from America. According to plan, they settled in Liberia’s interior to purge themselves of the negative attributes they had acquired in the captivity. After spending a two-and-one-half year period in Liberia, The African Hebrew Israelites were prepared to make the last portion of their journey home, returning to Israel in 1969.

In today’s world, man has created so many diversions from and substitutions for the true worship of God that the people have lost their way. We realized just how far we had been led away from God and were astounded by the drastic changes required for those of us who desired to fulfill our responsibility to God as Hebrew Israelites. Nonetheless, we have committed ourselves to the high degree of courage and discipline required to establish an alternative lifestyle that is in harmony with the cycles of God.

[Click to read more of Our Philosophy]

I don’t know if the Black Hebrews have done any deep DNA study, but they explain their origins thusly:

Prior to the excavation of the Suez Canal (1859-69) the entire Arabian Peninsula and what has become known today as the ”Middle East” were physically connected with the African continent. African people lived and moved freely throughout this region of the world.

After the invasion of the Romans in 70 C.E., remnants of the Hebrew Israelites were driven from Jerusalem. For more than 1,000 years many of them migrated across the continent, eventually reaching West Africa.


“Soul Messages from Dimona” (Various Artists)

Update2 via Kumar303’s twitter feed, the African Hebrew Israelites have put out an album called, Soul Messages From Dimona:

Following a path blazed in Belize and the Bahamas, The Numero Group finds yet another stop on the soul diaspora tour: Dimona, Israel. Between 1975-1981, a group of American ex-pats took their native sounds of Detroit and Chicago and intermingled them with the messages of the Black Hebrew culture. The results are a heavenly mix of spiritual soul and jazz with an undercurrent of gospel psychedelia. Featuring the Soul Messengers, the Spirit Of Israel, Sons Of The Kingdom, and the Tonistics, Soul Messages From Dimona is the only living document of a thriving community at both the center and fringe of the world.

Deluxe CD and 2LP set comes stuffed with rare photographs, sleeves, and expansive liner notes about the African Hebrew

sounds fun.

Footnotes:
  1. דִּימוֹנָה [↩]
  2. gotta love Twitter [↩]

New Bob Dylan Record Imminent

Seth Anderson1 Comment


“Tell Tale Signs: The Bootleg Series Vol. 8 (Deluxe)” (Bob Dylan)

Bob Dylan -Together Through Life album cover

New Bob Dylan record imminent, untitled as of yet1

I’m listening to Billy Joe Shaver/And I’m reading James Joyce/Some people tell me I got the blood of the land in my voice, Bob Dylan sings in a leathery growl, capturing the essence of his forthcoming studio album — raw-country love songs, sly wordplay and the wounded state of the nation — in “I Feel a Change Coming On,” one of the record’s 10 new originals.

Set for late April, the as-yet-untitled album arrives a few months after Dylan’s outtakes collection Tell Tale Signs, and it “came as a surprise,” says a source close to Dylan’s camp. Last year, filmmaker Olivier Dahan, who directed the 2007 Edith Piaf biopic, La Vie en Rose, approached Dylan about writing a song for his next feature. Dylan responded with “Life Is Hard,” a bleak ballad with mandolin, pedal steel and him singing in a dark, clear voice, “The evening winds are still /I’ve lost the way and will.” (The song appears in the film My Own Love Song, starring Renée Zellweger.)

[Click for more details about Dylan Records Surprise ‘Modern Times’ Follow-up : Rolling Stone]

I’m sure every music critic will rave about the album soon enough, regardless if it is any good or not. And I’m sure I’ll buy it as soon as it is available, regardless if the album is a spicy Texas border-town musical pozole like a second coming of Doug Sahm or just wheezy accordion tunes played by somnambulists.


“Modern Times (Special Limited Edition)” (Bob Dylan)

His Bobness says the album will be “in the spirit” of classic Chess and Sun Records, and different than Modern Times:

The new record’s very different from Modern Times which was a number one hit. It seems like every time you have a big hit, the next time out you change things around. Why don’t you try to milk it a little bit?

I think we milked it all we could on that last record and then some. We squeezed the cow dry. All the Modern Times songs were written and performed in the widest range possible so they had a little bit of everything. These new songs have more of a romantic edge.

How so?

These songs don’t need to cover the same ground. The songs on Modern Times songs brought my repertoire up to date, and the light was directed in a certain way. You have to have somebody in mind as an audience otherwise there’s no point.

What do you mean by that?

There didn’t seem to be any general consensus among my listeners. Some people preferred my first period songs. Some, the second. Some, the Christian period. Some, the post Colombian. Some, the Pre-Raphaelite. Some people prefer my songs from the nineties. I see that my audience now doesn’t particular care what period the songs are from. They feel style and substance in a more visceral way and let it go at that. Images don’t hang anybody up. Like if there’s an astrologer with a criminal record in one of my songs it’s not going to make anybody wonder if the human race is doomed. Images are taken at face value and it kind of freed me up.

Footnotes:
  1. update: according to bobdylan.com, might be called, “Together Through Life” Still seems a bit cryptic, which translates as – might have a name change [↩]

Reading Around on March 3rd through March 4th

swanksalot0 comment

A few interesting links collected March 3rd through March 4th:

  • Warnings: Going To The Doc? Be Sure You Don't Sign A Gag Order – "ateMDs.com says it's planning on creating a "Wall of Shame" that will list all the doctors who are known to use the Medical Justice waivers—around 2,000 so far, according to Medical Justice.
    John Swapceinski, co-founder of RateMDs.com, said that in recent months, six doctors have asked him to remove negative online comments based on patients' signed waivers. He has refused.

    "They're basically forcing the patients to choose between health care and their First Amendment rights, and I really find that repulsive," Swapceinski said."

  • Johnny "Red" Kerr: Man of pleasures and passions — chicagotribune.com – "This disclosure sparked a discussion about our shared love of music. When Red asked for some of my favorite artists, I mentioned acts as varied as Uncle Tupelo, the Clash and Alejandro Escovedo and didn't give it much more thought.

    About a week later, Red arrived at the United Center for a game with a stack of CDs in his hand.

    "Here," he said, handing them over. "I burned you a bunch of your favorite artists. I really like that Uncle Tupelo. Thanks for turning me onto them."

    He was 68 at the time."

New U2 Album No Line on the Horizon

Seth Anderson0 comment


“No Line On The Horizon” (U2)

If you didn’t already download the bittorrent of U2’s album, No Line On The Horizon, Amazon is offering it for $3.99 at the moment. I’m not the biggest of U2 fans, but $4 is a pretty good sweet spot.

The band’s 12th studio album calls on the production talents of long-time collaborators Brian Eno and Danny Lanois, with additional production by Steve Lillywhite.

Click here for the MP3 download page New U2 album No Line on the Horizon.

Blue Event Horizon

Stephen Thomas Erlewine of Allmusic mostly likes it:

After scrapping sessions with Rick Rubin and flirting with will.i.am, U2 reunited with Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois (here billed as “Danny” for some reason), who not only produced The Joshua Tree but pointed the group toward aural architecture on The Unforgettable Fire. Much like All That You Can’t and Atomic Bomb, which were largely recorded with their first producer, Steve Lillywhite, this is a return to the familiar for U2, but where their Lillywhite LPs are characterized by muscle, the Eno/Lanois records are where the band take risks, and so it is here that U2 attempts to recapture that spacy, mysterious atmosphere of The Unforgettable Fire and then take it further. Contrary to the suggestion of the clanking, sputtering first single “Get on Your Boots” — its riffs and “Pump It Up” chant sounding like a cheap mashup stitched together in GarageBand — this isn’t a garish, gaudy electro-dalliance in the vein of Pop. Apart from a stilted middle section — “Boots,” the hamfisted white-boy funk “Stand Up Comedy,” and the not-nearly-as-bad-as-its-title anthem “I’ll Go Crazy if I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight”; tellingly, the only three songs here to not bear co-writing credits from Eno and Lanois — No Line on the Horizon is all austere grey tones and midtempo meditation.

It’s a record that yearns to be intimate but U2 don’t do intimate, they only do majestic, or as Bono sings on one of the albums best tracks, they do “Magnificent.” Here, as on “No Line on the Horizon” and “Breathe,” U2 strike that unmistakable blend of soaring, widescreen sonics and unflinching openhearted emotion that’s been their trademark, turning the intimate into something hauntingly universal. These songs resonate deeper and longer than anything on Atomic Bomb, their grandeur almost seeming effortless. It’s the rest of the record that illustrates how difficult it is to sound so magnificent. With the exception of that strained middle triptych, the rest of the album is in the vein of “No Line on the Horizon” and “Breathe,” only quieter and unfocused, with its ideas drifting instead of gelling. Too often, the album whispers in a murmur so quiet it’s quite easy to ignore — “White as Snow,” an adaptation of a traditional folk tune, and “Cedars of Lebanon,” its verses not much more than a recitation, simmer so slowly they seem to evaporate — but at least these poorly defined subtleties sustain the hazily melancholy mood of No Line on the Horizon. When U2, Eno, and Lanois push too hard — the ill-begotten techno-speak overload of “Unknown Caller,” the sound sculpture of “Fez-Being Born” — the ideas collapse like a pyramid of cards, the confusion amplifying the aimless stretches of the album, turning it into a murky muddle.

[Click to continue reading The Allmusic Blog » U2 – No Line on the Horizon]

Meanwhile, Pitchfork’s Ryan Dombal hated it:

Meanwhile, the album’s ballyhooed experimentation is either terribly misguided or hidden underneath a wash of shameless U2-isms (the three-note ring Edge nicks from “Walk On” for “Unknown Caller”, the “oh oh oh” outro from “Stay” apparently copied and pasted into “Moment of Surrender”, etc.). While Eno used to work his unique sound-bobbles and ambiance into the fabric of U2 songs, he seems content to offer spacey intros totally disassociated from their accompanying tunes here (see: “Fez – Being Born”, “Magnificent”). And oftentimes the band mistakes risk-taking for ill-fated arrangements and decisions. “Surrender”– reportedly improvised in one seven-minute take– comes across as lazy indulgence, and the title track’s hard-nosed verse is torpedoed by its deflating fart of a hook. As the go-to sonic innovator of the group, the Edge dials in a particularly dispiriting performance throughout; his rare solos usually pack in enough panache to fill stadiums but his bluesy blah of a spotlight on “Surrender” would barely satisfy a single earbud.

“It keeps getting harder. You’re playing against yourself and you don’t want to lose,” Adam Clayton told Q last month. And he’s got a point. After nearly 30 years of chart crashing and sell-outs, starting afresh can’t be easy. There’s only one “One”. In a way, U2 spoiled their followers by consistently questioning themselves while writing songs that straddled the personal and collective consciousness. But Horizon is clearly playing not to lose– it’s a defensive gesture, and a rather pitiful one at that.

[Click to continue reading No Line on the Horizon | Pitchfork]

Monk with mikes: A jazz history

Seth Anderson0 comment


“The Thelonious Monk Orchestra at Town Hall” (Thelonious Monk)

On the short list of American musical geniuses, Thelonious Sphere Monk is certainly included.

The cardboard boxes are everywhere, stacked almost to the ceiling, in the Manhattan loft where W. Eugene Smith, the renowned American photojournalist, once shared living space with Hall Overton, an obscure composer and pianist. Inside the boxes are wigs, maybe thousands, the inventory of a Chinese business that now holds the lease. Nothing about this nondescript building in the flower district betrays its decade-long history as a bustling clubhouse for the jazz scene, beginning in the mid-1950s.

So it takes some effort to picture Thelonious Monk, one of jazz’s great composers, pacing these floorboards early in 1959 as he prepares for his momentous large-group debut at Town Hall, which would help lay the groundwork for a career beyond clubs. It takes imagination to place him and Overton at a pair of upright pianos, hashing out chord voicings for one after another of his songs. But these things did happen; that much we know from an extraordinary cache of tape recordings made by Smith, who had wired most of the building with microphones.

The Monk-and-Overton tapes account for just a fragment of some 3,000 hours of material amassed by Smith from 1957 to ’65. Because of the light they shed on both musicians, their value is inestimable. Monk, famous for his cryptic silence and cavalier methods, comes across as exacting, lucid, even voluble — an eccentric genius, yes, but also a diligent one. Overton, enlisted to orchestrate Monk’s knotty compositions, is revealed as a patient amanuensis and a brilliant foil.

“What’s obvious is their mutual respect, and the extent of their precision,” said the pianist Jason Moran, 34. “It’s crazy to hear how specific everything was.”

Moran is among a handful of people to have listened to the loft recordings at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies, which is in the process of cataloguing all of Smith’s tapes. On Friday, as part of a 50th anniversary celebration of the Town Hall concert, Moran will perform a postmodern tribute, complete with excerpts from the tapes. Together with a concert on Thursday — a more literal re-enactment led by the trumpeter Charles Tolliver, which will be broadcast live on WNYC-FM in New York — it’s among the more anticipated jazz events of this year.

[Click to continue reading Home life with mikes: A jazz history – International Herald Tribune]

I assume these recordings will find their way to a box set at your local jazz store: I know I’ll be anticipating listening to them.


“Complete Prestige Recordings” (Thelonious Monk)

Reading Around on February 21st

swanksalot0 comment

Some additional reading February 21st from 09:24 to 11:36: