Tag: music_history

Reading Around on August 25th

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Some additional reading August 25th from 10:32 to 16:21:

  • Emptywheel » Was John Yoo Free-Lancing When He Approved the “Legal Principles”? –

    “Earlier today, I showed that there is a CIA document on the “Legal Principles” on torture that included legal justifications that had not been in any of the August 1, 2002 OLC memos authorizing torture. I showed that the document changed over time, but that when CIA asked Jack Goldsmith to “re-affirm” the Legal Principles in March 2004, he stated that he did not consider the document to be a product of OLC.

    I have further inquired into the circumstances surrounding the creation of the bullet points in the spring of 2003. These inquiries have reconfirmed what I have conveyed to you before, namely, that the bullet points did not and do not represent an opinion or a statement of the views of this Office.

    It seems–reading Jack Goldsmith and John Ashcroft’s objections to the CIA IG Report–that John Yoo was free-lancing when he worked with CIA on them.”

    Why does John Yoo have a job at Berkley? and why does he *still* have it?

    VoodooFront.jpg

  • AP again advances falsehood that health reform “will mean cuts in Medicare benefits” | Media Matters for America – AP again advances falsehood that health reform “will mean cuts in Medicare benefits” In an August 24 article, the Associated Press uncritically reported that “[s]eniors worry that paying for the $1 trillion-plus, 10-year [health care] overhaul will mean cuts in Medicare benefits” without noting that, in the words of FactCheck.org, “[t]he claim that Obama and Congress are cutting seniors’ Medicare benefits to pay for the health care overhaul is outright false.” Additionally, AARP has also rebutted the notion that health reform will reduce Medicare benefits
  • cross dvd.png


  • “Fela: This Bitch of a Life” (Carlos Moore)

  • Music Monday: Fela Kuti’s Bitch of a Life – Carlos Moore’s Fela: This Bitch of a Life, the newly rereleased 1982 authorized biography of Africa’s greatest musician, Fela Anikulapo Kuti. Well, sexism and police brutality. The book, translated from the French, is essentially a well-organized and very long interview of Fela at his peak. For die-hard fans of the original Black President this may be a enticing read

You Should Own Black Swan

Seth Anderson1 Comment


“The Black Swan” (Bert Jansch)

Listened to this Bert Jansch album over the weekend1

Scottish guitar hero and songwriter Bert Jansch (Pentangle) recording for Drag City, with a host of admirers in tow — Beth Orton, Devendra Banhart, Noah Georgeson (who performed and co-produced with Jansch), Helena Espvall, son Adam Jansch, and more. Black Swan is a collection of original and traditional tunes. Jansch turns in a performance that shows his typical restraint, and within it his wonder as a guitarist. His use of the blues, American, Celtic, and British Isles folk forms is also informed by music from Eastern Europe, and he ties them all together seamlessly. “High Days,” a solo track, uses all three, as he winds out an elegy for a friend. “When the Sun Comes Up” begins with Orton’s vocal and David Roback’s slide guitar and Otto Hauser’s drums, shuffling underneath. Jansch spills it modal and bluesy, Orton grabs onto his changes and effortlessly lets her voice wrap around his lyric lines. Her signing on the traditional number “Katie Cruel” has been brilliantly rearranged by Jansch. Banhart sings in a muted duet with Orton, but his vocal was unnecessary. It’s a spooky track that’s been prepared for by the preceding cuts. The slippery Piedmont blues style Jansch tucks into his British folk on “My Pocket’s Empty” is evocative of an earlier, simpler time, though as revealed by the tune, times were hard then, too. Jansch’s singing is at its most expressive here; he’s moaning in his reedy baritone. Orton makes one more appearance here on the gorgeous and-all-too-brief arrangement of the blues tune “Watch the Stars.” Hers and Jansch’s vocals take the tine out of the song’s Southern American birthplace and brings it into the world, one grainy line at a time. It’s a singalong blues that reveals the sheer expanse of the universe in the grain of their voices.

Ultimately, this disc is not so different from Jansch’s others, but it is wonderfully spirited and loose. It feels live, and backroomish. It’s as informal a date as one can find among superstars — and make no mistake, you may or may not know his name, but his large catalog proves it — Jansch is one. As for the rest, the hardscrabble dirty, slide guitar-drenched English folk of “A Woman Like You” rings as true as a Texas blues love song by Lightnin’ Hopkins. Traditional public domain nuggets such as “The Old Triangle” are almost radically reworked and ring spookily true for the current era. The blues-rock of the humorously political “Texas Cowboy Blues,” complete with keyboards and popping acoustic 12-strings, shimmies and even shakes in places. The last few cuts, a gorgeous instrumental called “Magdalina’s Dance,” and “Hey Pretty Girl” (performed solo), are drenched in historical tropes, but are thoroughly modern and soulful.

[Click to continue reading allmusic (The Black Swan > Overview)]

Really good stuff, highly recommended if you like acoustic guitar playing, and music graceful enough to have space between the notes. This ain’t Wall of Sound crap, this is gorgeous winter music.

from Grayson Currin’s Pitchfork review

It almost seems as though Jansch spent most of his four-decade career preparing for The Black Swan and its cast: His early solo work for voice and guitar staked out a clean, inventive style, focused on high fretting action in the left hand, an integrated system of hammers and drags that gave his instrument a thorough voice. With Pentangle, and later with Loren Auerbach in the 80s, he put that style into collaborative focus. His guitar playing– somehow constantly understated and completely unorthodox– has been the generous, enchanting source of it all.

It’s the wellspring here, too: Helena Espvall’s cello lines on opener “The Black Swan” dress Jansch’s guitar and voice in winter gloves, warming the chill of his melody– “Every day is quiet and calm/ Like a lull before the storm”– with perfectly paired playing. Otto Hauser’s cymbal and hand-drum percussion and Paul Wassif’s slide guitar on “Woman Like You” are likewise just shapely beds for Jansch’s playing. Orton, who handles vocals on three tracks, is flawless and selfless, her austerity informed by each song’s direction. She sounds like a weary survivor on “When the Sun Comes Up” and like a dejected soul on “Katie Cruel”, a traditional folk song about withered glory.

On an album all about meeting maturity with vibrancy, Banhart alone mars the effect when he mismatches Orton’s straightforward nerviness with an ultra-affected, reverb-buried vocal track on the gorgeously unsettling “Katie”. Even though Banhart is attempting to recall the voice of his idol Karen Dalton, who brought this song to proper attention, he sounds like the dilettante, roving unnecessarily for the freak side, still in search of guidance. Perhaps the rest of this beautiful, elegant Swan will help him find his way.

[Click to continue reading Pitchfork: Album Reviews: Bert Jansch: The Black Swan]

Footnotes:
  1. we wrote about it in 2006 prior to actually owning our own copy [↩]

Miles Davis and Jimi Hendrix

Seth Anderson7 Comments

My mom bought me the Miles Davis box set, The Cellar Door Sessions for my birthday a couple years ago.

The Cellar Door Sessions 1970 (Miles Davis)
“The Cellar Door Sessions 1970” (Miles Davis)

In reading the liner notes, I was struck by the thought that one of the greatest musical tragedies of the early 70s was that Jimi Hendrix never got to make an album with Miles Davis. They had talked about it at some length apparently, with Keith Jarrett, and maybe Michael Henderson and the rest of Miles Davis’ crack funk-jazz band of this era, but they never got around to actually recording/playing before Hendrix died, at least that I’m aware of.

Electric Ladyland
Electric Ladyland

Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland1 remains one of my favorite albums, especially in the moody, jazzed up sections. However, Hendrix received so many accolades for being a bad-ass guitar wizard that I think he allowed himself to get lazy in subsequent years, playing down to (or occasionally up to) the level of his jam buddies. If Hendrix and Miles Davis had recorded an album, there would have been no way that Miles, as serious a musician as has ever been born in the States, would have accepted anything other than stellar work, and Hendrix would have obliged.

The Cellar Door sessions

This music reveals a truly muscular Miles Davis at the top of his form as an improviser and as a bandleader with the most intense and nearly mystical sense of the right place-the right time-the right lineup. These shows, played in a club instead of a concert hall, provided a virtual laboratory for possibilities Davis was exploring. The money for the gig was nearly non-existent compared to what he was used to making playing halls, so he paid the band out of his own pocket.

..What happens as the band plays each night is that the sense of adventure grows, while the utter relaxation and confidence in each member is carried through to Davis who pushes the buttons and in strange, nearly wordless ways, communicates what he wants on-stage, and the other players give it to him. There are so few rough moments here where someone drops a line or doesn’t quite make it; when it does happen on that rare occasion, some other member picks it up and goes with it. And DeJohnette’s drumming, in his virtual mind-lock with Henderson, is some of the best playing of his career.

Hendrix would have fit right in. A real tragedy this collaboration never occurred.

Footnotes:
  1. aka Electric Dylan Lad [↩]

One too many mornings

Seth Anderson0 comment

And a thousand miles behind.

As you’ve probably already heard, Bob Dylan was recently picked up by a young police officer who had no idea who Bob Dylan was, and found his story of playing a concert later with Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp implausible, at best.

Exit, Zimmerman
The police officer noted that the gentleman looked nothing like the Bob Dylan she had seen photos of, like this iconic shot from his Wild Mercury days…

Instead he looked more like this:

Dylan 2006.jpg
[Photo by Rich Corzatt]

To police in a New Jersey seaside town, the rock legend Bob Dylan was merely an eccentric pensioner wandering the streets in the pouring rain. According to Dylan himself, he was just “out for a walk”. But now there is growing speculation that when the star was recently questioned by the police, he may have been in search of Bruce Springsteen’s old house, where he wrote the classic Born to Run.

Probing musicians’ backgrounds who influenced the world of rock in the 1960s and 1970s is a hobby for Dylan. Last November he turned up unannounced at a Winnipeg house where the Canadian rock star Neil Young grew up. Kiernan and Patti Regan came home from shopping to find him waiting on their doorstep and invited him in.

Then, in May, Dylan paid a £16 entrance fee and mingled anonymously with tourists at the childhood home of John Lennon in Woolton, Liverpool.

…

The location where he was stopped was close to the house where Springsteen wrote his hits Born to Run and Thunder Road three decades ago. Could he have been on the way to a visit?

[Click to continue reading Rambling Bob Dylan raises police suspicions – The Guardian]

Funny. Who knows, if I toured as frequently and consistently as Bob Dylan, I might wander around strange towns too.

Reading Around on August 16th through August 17th

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

  • Woodstock: even the memories are muddy – The Globe and Mail – David Crosby judged his performance with Graham Nash, Stephen Stills and Neil Young as “stoned and funny and fine.” Yet the recollections of one of his bandmates differ wildly from Crosby’s cozy account. “Woodstock was a bullshit gig, a piece of shit,” Young told biographer Jimmy McDonough. “We played fucking awful. No one was into the music.”
  • Death_of_Marat_by_David.jpg
  • Simpsons Did It: Laid-Off Workers Keep Up Appearances, Pretend To Be Employed – Earlier this week, the Washington Post shared the story of a man who tried hard to keep up appearances, and to carefully choreograph his routine so his friends and neighbors wouldn’t think of him differently. Finally, he tired of the charade, and outed himself. As an unemployed person.

    After he lost his job, Clinton Cole continued to wake up early, dress in a suit, and leave the house. Instead of going to the office, he spent the day in a park or public library. While his family knew about his situation, friends and neighbors didn’t, and he wanted to keep up appearances.

  • [removed link because it was apparently a scrapersite of content generated by The Consumerist. Strangely, the scraper-scum appeared in my Google alert before the original site did]

Bad Like Jesse James

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“Live At The Cafe Au Go-Go (And Soledad Prison)” (John Lee Hooker)

There are certain songs that give you chills, no matter how many times you’ve heard them. John Lee Hooker singing, “I’m Bad Like Jesse James”, from the album, Live at Cafe Au Go Go is one such song for me.

It is one of those tracks you want to stomp your own foot to the relentless and insistent beat.

Simply one of the greatest live blues recordings ever. Hooker plays alone at Soledad, yet the real thrill is hearing him backed at Greenwich Village’s Café Au-Go-Go in 1966 by Muddy Waters and his band, including pianist Otis Spann, unsung harmonica giant George Smith, Francis Clay on drums, and guitarists Sammy Lawhorn and Luther Johnson. All are at the height of their abilities, but it’s Hooker who works like a hoodoo conjurer, making misery rain down in “Seven Days” and “When My First Wife Left Me.” This August night’s reading of I’m Bad Like Jesse James ranks among the most intimidating vocal performances ever taped. His guitar and baritone singing sink to rarely heard depths of the blues–that secret place in the music (known only to its absolute masters) where it becomes an elemental force.

the lyrics go something like this:

A little thing I’m going to do called
‘I’m Bad Like Jesse James’

I’m bad
I’m bad
Like Jesse James, uh-huh

I had a friend one time
Least I thought I did
He come to me
Said, ‘Johnny?’
[I ] Said, ‘What man?’
‘I’m outdoor’
I say, ‘Yeah?’

I taken the cat in
Get him a place to stay
And I found out
He goin’ ’round town
Tellin’ everybody that he
He got my wife

Then I gets mad
I goes to the cat
Like a good guy should
I said, ‘Look man
‘I’m gonna warn, you just one time’
Next time I warn you’
‘I’m gonna use my gun’

‘Cause I’m mad, I’m bad, like Jesse James

I’m so mad, I’m so mad.
I’m gonna ruin you this mornin’.
I’ve got three boys
Do my dirty work
Now, you don’t see me
I’m the big boss
I do the payin’ off
After they take care of you

In their own way
They may shoot you
They may cut you.
They may drown you
I just don’t know
I don’t care
Long as they take care of you
In their own way

I’m so mad, I’m bad this mornin’, like Jesse James.

They gon’ take you right down
By the riverside
Now four is goin’ down
Ain’t but three comin’ back
You read between the line
We’re gonna have a deal

‘Cause I’m mad, I’m bad, like Jesse James.

They gonna tie yo’ hands
They gonna tie yo’ feet
They gonna gag your throat
Where you can’t holler none

An cryin’ won’t help you none
Set you in the water
Yeah, the bubbles comin’ up.
Whoa
Rrrrrrr
Rrrrrrr

Oh yeah, I’m so mad!

So intense. When I saw John Lee Hooker perform at Antone’s1 he stomped his foot to keep time. Hard not to when playing songs like this. When I saw him perform, he was playing solo, but surprisingly, turned up his distortion and played a little proto-grunge on a couple of songs. I’d say circa 19882

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9J3j74R9dbw
a 1986 solo version, not nearly as intense, but still, JLH!3

Footnotes:
  1. the famous blues club in Austin – I think it is closed down now – Clifford Antone had some problems with the law, sold drugs or something, and has since passed away [↩]
  2. I remember being too young to drink, went by myself, and tried to tip the waitress $5 for taking her table and only drinking a coke. Of course, I had my bong in my car, but that’s another story [↩]
  3. playing a guitar with BB King’s name on it for some reason. [↩]

Bloodshot Records to celebrate 15th at Hideout block party

Seth Anderson1 Comment

There’s a lot of good music on Bloodshot Records.

Violence Inherent in the System

Greg Kot reports:

The Hideout’s annual end-of-summer block party will be devoted to Chicago-based Bloodshot Records on its 15th anniversary, the label announced Monday.

The Sept. 12 festival will feature some of Bloodshot’s finest artists, past and present: Alejandro Escovedo, the Waco Brothers, Bobby Bare Jr., the Deadstring Brothers, Scott Biram, Scotland Yard Gospel Choir, and reunions of the Blacks and Moonshine Willy.

A $10 donation to benefit charities is requested. Reservations can be made through bloodshotrecords.com.

[Click to continue reading Bloodshot Records to celebrate 15th at Hideout block party; Wilco adds second show | Turn It Up – A guided tour through the worlds of pop, rock and rap]

I’ll try to make it if I can, will you be there?

[1354 W. Wabansia, Chicago, IL ]

Soul Power Sounds Spectacular

Seth Anderson1 Comment

I can’t wait to see this film, sounds spectacular.

Jeffrey Levy-Hinte, the director of the new documentary “Soul Power,” was a film editor in 1995 for “When We Were Kings,” the Oscar-winning documentary directed by Leon Gast about the Rumble in the Jungle, the 1974 heavyweight world championship bout between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in Kinshasa, the capital of Zaire (now Congo).


“When We Were Kings” (Leon Gast)

That fight had a huge sideshow: Zaire ’74, a three-day music festival of American soul alongside African music, headlined by James Brown and filmed by the same crew that was in Zaire for the fight. “Soul Power” presents that festival from its precarious beginnings to the finale of a shirtless, sweating James Brown singing to an African audience, “Say It Loud — I’m Black and I’m Proud.”

The festival was a striking sociocultural moment. African-American and Latin musicians were being introduced to Africa and African musicians amid Mr. Ali’s black-power politics and a hodgepodge of visiting music, sports and literary figures. “There was a lot of deeper meaning about why people went there and what it evoked for them,” Mr. Levy-Hinte said.

Brown and other headliners, including B. B. King, Celia Cruz and the Fania All-Stars, the Spinners and Bill Withers, performed at their peak, flaunting bright-colored, sharp-collared, bell-bottomed 1970s outfits that are a fashion show themselves. Americans shared the lineup with African musicians, like the South African singer Miriam Makeba and the top Zairean groups T.P.O.K. Jazz (featuring the guitarist Franco) and Tabu Ley Rochereau.

[From ‘Soul Power,’ Documentary on the Zaire ’74 Music Festival – NYTimes.com]

but who knows when the film will ever be released:

His plan was to put out concert DVDs of the festival’s performances, a fairly straightforward process. Then “I committed the original sin of filmmaking,” he said. “I fell in love with the material instead of following this rational business path.

It cost about half a million dollars, including licensing the music, to make “Soul Power.” So far there’s no deal for a soundtrack album. The DVDs will be assembled “as soon as humanly possible,” Mr. Levy-Hinte said, though that may well be next year.

“The vast majority of the material has still not been used,” he added. “There may be a whole other movie in there.”


“20th Anniversaire, Vol. 2” (Franco & T.P.O.K. Jazz)


“1972/1973/1974” (Franco & T.P.O.K. Jazz)

Jackson Was a Wealthy Pedophile

Seth Anderson1 Comment

Michael Jackson may have sold a lot of records, but he was still able to commit on of the most heinous of all crimes, pedophilia, repeatedly (allegedly, but come on, even he knew he was doing wrong), and escape from jail because of his wealth and fame.

Bob Herbert has a theory:

In many ways we descended as a society into a fantasyland, trying to leave the limits and consequences and obligations of the real world behind. Politicians stopped talking about the poor. We built up staggering amounts of debt and called it an economic boom. We shipped jobs overseas by the millions without ever thinking seriously about how to replace them. We let New Orleans drown.

Jackson was the perfect star for the era, the embodiment of fantasy gone wild. He tried to carve himself up into another person, but, of course, there was the same Michael Jackson underneath — talented but psychologically disabled to the point where he was a danger to himself and others.
Reality is unforgiving. There is no escape. Behind the Jackson facade was the horror of child abuse. Court records and reams of well-documented media accounts contain a stream of serious allegations of child sex abuse and other inappropriate behavior with very young boys. Jackson, a multimillionaire megastar, was excused as an eccentric. Small children were delivered into his company, to spend the night in his bed, often by their parents.

One case of alleged pedophilia against Jackson, the details of which would make your hair stand on end, was settled for a reported $25 million. He beat another case in court.

The Michael-mania that has erupted since Jackson’s death — not just an appreciation of his music, but a giddy celebration of his life — is yet another spasm of the culture opting for fantasy over reality. We don’t want to look under the rock that was Jackson’s real life.

As with so many other things, we don’t want to know.

[Click to read more of Bob Herbert – Behind the Facade – NYTimes.com]

I don’t want to know because his crimes sickens me, so I opt to ignore all hagiography of Jackson.

Bach Edition: Complete Works (155 CD Box Set)

Seth Anderson1 Comment


“Bach Edition: Complete Works (155 CD Box Set)” (Brilliant Classics)

One wonders if 155 CDs is really enough Bach. That’s like $0.50 a disc. Reading the reviews on Amazon, the quality seems hit and miss, but then I don’t know enough Johann Sebastian Bach to reliably judge. What the hell. I’ll let you know…

Reading Around on July 2nd

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Some additional reading July 2nd from 13:49 to 19:05:

  • Travel With Your Mind: Sky Saxon Remembered – Sky Saxon, lead singer with 60s garage punk legends the Seeds, died on the morning of June 25, 2009 (or as his official web site put it, he “passed over to be with YaHoWha”); as it happened, he died the same day as both Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett, ensuring that the entertainment press, who might have been expected to treat his passing like a one-line filler item, didn’t even give it that much attention. But Saxon hadn’t been a celebrity in the traditional sense for a very long time. Sky may have been a rock star for about two years on the strength of the singles “Pushin’ Too Hard” and “Can’t Seem To Make You Mine,” but after those twenty-four months as a bargain-basement Mick Jagger, he evolved into Flower Power’s Last Man Standing, a guy who let his freak flag fly with a wild-eyed sincerity that made most of his peers from the Sunset Strip scene look like weekenders, and transformed his story into something far more interesting than the typical two-hit wonder and cult hero.
  • The Perfect Burger and All Its Parts – NYTimes.com – While some chefs have groused quietly about the insatiable demand for burgers, most are philosophical. “All chefs can be frustrated by the buying public sometimes,” said Clark Frasier, a chef with restaurants in Massachusetts and Maine. “In this economy I’m happy to sell anything they want to eat.”

    All this high-powered attention has produced some new ways of thinking about and cooking burgers. Interviews with 30 chefs provided dozens of lessons for the home cook that aren’t terribly difficult and don’t cost much money. And it all yielded the ideal burger.

  • Daily Kos: How a Kos diarist helped spark McCain-Palin infighting – Schmidt put the matter to rest with an breathtaking reply to Palin:

    "Secession," he wrote. "It is their entire reason for existence. A cursory examination of the website shows that the party exists for the purpose of seceding from the union. That is the stated goal on the front page of the web site. Our records indicate that todd was a member for seven years. If this is incorrect then we need to understand the discrepancy. The statement you are suggesting be released would be innaccurate. The innaccuracy would bring greater media attention to this matter and be a distraction. According to your staff there have been no media inquiries into this and you received no questions about it during your interviews. If you are asked about it you should smile and say many alaskans who love their country join the party because it speeks to a tradition of political independence. Todd loves his country

Reading Around on June 26th through June 29th

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A few interesting links collected June 26th through June 29th:

  • Men at Work accused of stealing riff from campfire song – “Australian pop icons Men at Work are fighting accusations that a riff in their 1980s smash hit Down Under was snatched from a popular children’s song.

    Publisher Larrikin Music is suing Song BMG Music Entertainment and EMI Songs Australia for compensation from the royalties the song earned its writers, Colin Hay and Ron Strykert.

    Larrikin claims the flute riff was copied from the refrain in a 1934 children’s song, Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree, written by Melbourne music teacher Marion Sinclair for a Girl Guides competition.

    The song about the kookaburra, a kingfisher native to Australia, has become a Girl Guides campfire standby throughout the English-speaking world.”

    Isn’t it a little late to be suing 1980’s hitmakers? Like 20 years too late? Lame. The song was published in 1934 – isn’t it in the public domain by now?

  • Gapers Block : A/C : Chicago Arts & Culture – Friday Flickr Feature – A fire hydrant made of canned goods on display at the Illinois Institute of Art – Chicago. Captured by swanksalot.

  • Interviews > Moby: Wait For Me – I love a good old Clash record and I love listening to Pantera, I love listening to the Rolling Stones but the music that I adore the most is Nick Drake or Joy Division or Sigur Rós, quieter records and music that really aspire to be beautiful.

    I tend to think of it in terms of there’s social records and personal records. I love the Clash, it’s very social. If you had 20 people over on a Friday night and you’re all drinking beer put on a Clash record and it’s great. Lying in bed at 9 o’ clock on a rainy Sunday morning you want something that is more personal, and, as much as I love social records, it’s those personal records that I tend to really cherish. I listen to a lot of classical music, a lot of quiet electronic music, everything from Nick Drake to Leonard Cohen. I mentioned Sigur Rós, some Radiohead songs, songs where you really feel the artist, whether they are or whether they aren’t, but you feel as if the artist is making themselves vulnerable through their work.

Reading Around on June 25th through June 26th

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A few interesting links collected June 25th through June 26th:

  • Language Log » Ma ma se, ma ma sa, ma ma coo sa – Jackson apparently claimed his version was Swahili, but he eventually acknowledged his debt to Dibango and worked out a compensation arrangement in an out-of-court settlement. In 2007, when R&B singer Rihanna released the song "Please Don't Stop The Music" sampling the line from "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin,'" Rihanna got Jackson's permission but not Dibango's. In response, Dibango sued both Rihanna and Jackson earlier this year, seeking 500,000 euros in damages.
  • The Daily Clog » New Stanford Football Slogan Is … Definitely Something – Image Source: swanksalot under Creative Commons
  • Touched by an Angel | News Lead | Cleveland Scene – Early in the summer of '76, Ted received a package containing 25 shots of Farrah in a red swimsuit. She marked her favorite with a star: gleaming teeth, windblown hair, and . . . her nipple.

    Ted showed the photos around the office. Everyone had a different opinion about which one they should use. In the end, Ted went with the one Farrah had chosen. After all, who knew Farrah's assets better than Farrah herself?

    Soon after the poster hit the streets, it became a sensation. Sales increased exponentially. Seven thousand in September. Fifteen thousand in October. Thirty thousand in November. In December, the poster started receiving national attention and sold half a million copies.

Hypnotic Brass Ensemble

Seth Anderson0 comment

I forget where I first heard of the formerly-based-in-Chicago band, Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, but I bought their CD recently1. The disc arrived a day or so before this New Yorker review by Sasha Frere-Jones, which begins:

The first time I encountered the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, I was walking through the Times Square subway station toward the No. 1 train. It was hard to miss the sound of eight men playing brass instruments—two trombones, four trumpets, one sousaphone, and a euphonium—while a ninth man added drums. The men stood side by side, swaying, looking a bit like James Brown’s Famous Flames. As I listened, the sousaphone player locked in with the drummer, the trombones played what sounded like a bass line, and the rest of the horns circled and echoed the main motif. Certain genres sprang to mind—a New Orleans second-line band, say, or big-band jazz—but the music wasn’t jazz, exactly. The songs set small, compact melodies against a steady hip-hop beat, and everyone played simultaneously and continuously. The band had eliminated one of the dreary commonplaces of jazz, that class-recital rhythm of soloing—you go, I go, and so on, until the main melody returns.

Several months later, I saw the band again, in front of the Whole Foods in Union Square. As I snapped a few photographs, mostly to remind myself to figure out who they were, one of the trombone players walked up to me. “You can’t take a picture unless you buy a CD,” he said, smiling. He held out three albums in slimline cases, each titled “Hypnotic Brass Ensemble” and featuring an identical black-and-white photograph of the band, beneath a field of color—one red, one orange, and one green. I bought all three (ten bucks apiece), and the trombone player slapped me on the back. “Support live music, people,” he called out, stepping in line with his bandmates. “Bring back real music before it’s too late.”

With the exception of the drummer, Gabriel Wallace, the members of Hypnotic are all brothers. Their father is the jazz trumpeter Kelan Phil Cohran, who was a leading figure in Chicago’s black avant-garde-jazz community in the fifties and sixties, and was a member of the Sun Ra Arkestra. In the spring of 1965, Cohran and about forty other musicians gathered in his living room on Chicago’s South Side to form the A.A.C.M. (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians), a nonprofit that supports black artistic expression in local communities. “We had lived through the greatest decline of professional musicians in Chicago and wanted to do something about it,” Cohran says. Some of the best-known members of the A.A.C.M. include the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Anthony Braxton, and the Pharaohs, whose members eventually formed Earth, Wind, and Fire.

[Click to continue reading Serendipity: Musical Events: The New Yorker]

Even better. The album is quite good. If I wasn’t lazy and pressed for time, I might have elaborated on the thought that their sound is jazz music you could dance to. Mr. Frere-Jones concurs, albeit more eloquently:

The music that Hypnotic plays might best be described as highly composed instrumental hip-hop. If it is jazz, it’s closer in spirit to jazz from a hundred years ago: accomplished and energetic music parcelled out in short songs designed for dancing. It stays in key for long stretches, and moves in easy-to-follow periods. In a typical Hypnotic song, the shifts in key and the emergence of themes happen against a sound of massed horn parts that provide a sense of solidity. The music stays rooted to the cycle of the beat and the riff, and the players don’t leave the center behind to leap around as they might in hard bop or free jazz. Unlike the musicians in the avant-garde community that Hypnotic grew up in, these players have no interest in dissonance or “out” passages of squeaking and skronking. They keep their compositions lean and their harmonies broad and varied.

Footnotes:
  1. oh, I remember now, Uncut had a piece about Honest Jon’s records and Damon Albarn. I blogged about it here [↩]

Group Doueh: Guitar Music From The Western Sahara

Seth Anderson0 comment


Guitar Music From The Western Sahara

If you think you’ve heard all the great electric guitar styles in the world, think again. This Saharan sand-blizzard of fine-crushed glass will grind your face to a bloody pulp. Group Doueh play raw and unfiltered Saharawi music from the former colonial Spanish outpost of the Western Sahara. Doueh (pronounced “Doo-way”) is their leader and a master of the electric guitar. He’s been performing since he was a child playing in many groups before finally creating his own in the 1980’s.

Doueh says he’s Influenced by western pop and rock music especially Jimi Hendrix and James Brown. His sound is distorted, loud and unhinged with an impressive display of virtuosity and style only known in this part of the world. His wife Halima and friend Bashiri are the two vocalists in the group. Saharawi songs are from the sung poetry of the Hassania language. The music is based on the same modal structure as Mauritanian music, however, Doueh’s style is a looser appropriation infused with a western guitar scope, one that relies, in his words, as much on Hendrix as it does traditional Sahrawi music. It also adds a playful pop element that rarely filters through in this region. Doueh has turned down countless offers from Morocco and Europe to release his music but he decided to offer us access to his homemade recordings and photo archive for this amazing debut release. This is a CD reissue of the sold-out LP edition and comes with great photos of the musicians and liner notes by Hisham Mayet.

[From Group Doueh: Guitar Music From The Western Sahara CD SF030 Reissue]

Right-o. Face-melting is apt: this music has not been filtered by Auto-Tune that is for damn sure. Hypnotically listenable, full of inventive trills, but not for the faint-of-heart, or those put off by lack of musical fidelity.