New Releases and other bits

I happen to actually like the composition of the Star Spangled Banner, and prefer it performed instrumentally: This has to be one of the more inventive off the cuff renditions I have heard/seen. Good for you Bobby.

Also, for all of you M.I.A. fans, I think the next in line has arrived: Lady Sovereign.

And now for new releases:

1. 50 Cent re-releases The Massacre. Because now as a CD/DVD combo with bonus track you can see and hear why this man is worth less than his name.

2. The Metropole Orchestra of the Netherlands has worked with non-classical musicians before, most notably Mike Keneally (ex-Zappa) and Vernon Reid (Living COlour, Yohimbe Bros.) but now they are actually releasing an album with drumming colossus Terry Bozzio (ex-Zappa, Missing Persons, Polytown). Considering Bozzio's tendencies as a percussionist, this is a potentially stunning match up. The album is called Chamberworks.

3. There will be previously unreleased live albums from Soft Machine and Gong (I'd skip the latter and take the former, because Gong's vocal tracks are just awful).

4. There is supposed to be a Lindsey Buckingham DVD coming out, but I do not know if its archival or something more recent. He really needs to put out another solo album, as the last Fleetwood Mac LP was just not satiating.

5. Drums & Tuba release their next one on Ani DiFranco's Righteous Babe records. I managed to catch a small part of their set at the Squaw Valley Brews Jazz and Funk Festival without even knowing it fully (basically I watched them play and wondered if they were the same D&T whose debut I owned, since they sounded quite different, but still good). Battle Ole it is.

Blentwell Ill

It would appear one of the better mp3 blog/podcast sites out there, Blentwell, has experienced a catastropic failure and is in need of technical (and I would guess financial) assistance.

Do help. They provided some of the best grime and dubplate action out there.

Wynton Marsalis - Marsalis Plays Monk

Marsalis Plays Monk

1999 Sony Classical/Columbia<

Produced by: Steve Epstein

Personnel:
Wynton Marsalis - trumpet
Walter Blanding - tenor saxophone

Victor Goines - tenor saxophone
Wessell Anderson - alto saxophone
Wycliffe Gordon - trombone
Eric Reed - piano
Ben Wolfe - bass
Reginald Veal - bass
Helin Riley - drums

I have a love/hate relationship with Wynton Marsalis. I enjoy listening to much of his recorded catalogue, but I have rarely been deeply moved by it. But I hate Wynton the revisionist, Wynton (as one of his former band mates referred to him as) the "Jesus of Jazz", Wynton the 800 pound temporally impaired jackass. Along with his sidekick, the equally pompous, overwrought and generally alzheimered after 1968 Stanley Crouch - who writes the liner notes for much of the Marsalis clan (and at one time, was an actual music writer that mattered) Wynton has been trying to "save"Jazz, a position I would argue is not his to have; not to mention unecessary. Mr. Marsalis would have you think that Jazz - that ever evolving and mutating thing - stopped with Coltrane's My Favorite Things and Miles's My Funny Valentine. He has been on a mission to make all jazz that does not "swing" the way he likes disappear or be forgotten, all the way down to helping Ken Burns make his special Jazz mini-series a marathon of boring histrionics and very little of the actual dirt, grit, beauty, glory, filth and fame that i should have been.

Wynton is good because he is technically an adept player, and he can make above par interpretations of material, even if his own compositions are mostly mediocre. This is bolstered by keeping a steadystable of good sidemen that actually play really well and with conviction. Wynton has on occasion made some really great albums (I recommend J Mood and Levee Low Moan), but this one is not one of them. Marsalis Plays Monk is the first in a series of albums by Marsalis called Swinging Into The 21st, and as a lead-off, good old Wynnie plays it about as safe as he can, which is sad. Sad not only because by playing material from the Thelonius Monk canon not only lends itself to spontenaity and being radical, but Monk would never have 'played it safe' or done it by the numbers. Monk would have said "Pick a cheek and pucker up." while going in whichever musical direction suited him, damn the consequences.

Monk danced with, attacked, ignored, coddled and seduced the piano - usually all at once. He played with dissonance in a way that took the rest of the world a few decades to catch up. Maybe Wynton is a little slow or something...beats the hell out of me. With this group Mr. Marsalis assembles, the result is a beautiful sounding album, but all the daring that permeates Monk standards like Evidence, Thelonius, Green Chimneys, and Four in One is restrained to a phrase of a solo here or there, and an occasional dash of inspiration from Eric Reed, who makes a few musical breaks for it by digging into some of the intervallic insanity that is Monk. He comes close on Brilliant Corners, but that isn't enough to satiate for a whole album. Lord knows, we cannot envy Mr. Reed, as being the pianist on a Monkathon is a big throne to sit in. Unfortunately, Reed in general lacks the sensuous twistedness and disturbing ecstacy that made Monk who he is. Wynton's sole contribution to the album In Walked Monk makes a valiant attempt, but falls quite short of the mark - more travelling of the road more crowded. To top it off, players who have shown the ability to stretch and play up to material of this caliber like Reginald Veal and Herlin Riley just play along to Wynton's half-assedness.


One has to wonder if maybe Wynton ghettoizes himself into his little musical world because he lacks the natural ability of brother Branford (sax), the aggressive smoothness of Delfaeyo (trombone), and the 'I don't have a damn thing to prove' cool laid-back comfort of father Ellis (piano).* He has never shown any real daring, and has viewed actions like Branford' forays into pop and funk (Sting, Bucksho LeFonque, Widespread Panic) as blasphemous and an insult to Jazz. Maybe his heavy-handedness causes his own work to seem so leaden and dull sometimes. He constantly seems to be wanting to prove something...alegitimacy that lingers.

All this being said, it is not a *bad* album, just not a particularly adventurous one. It is still miles ahead of 99% of smooth-jazz sop, and most bop would sound better if it was recorded as well as a Marsalis album, not to mention that Wynnie has a pretty good tone, particularly on ballads and any work that involves a mute. If you are looking for something with a larger sonic codpiece however, I'd say skip this and move to trumpet players like Tim Hagans, Erik Truffaz, Roy Hargrove or Nils Petter Moelvar (or go with the real deal - Miles Davis, Clifford Brown, et
al). If you are a Monk fan, get his new 3cd box set from Columbia...its worth the investment to get the original over an imitation.

* There are others in the Marsalis clan, just those are the ones of major note, although Jason (drums) is moving up the ranks.

Newsbits

I am really getting sick of hearing that every new Rolling Stones album is a revitalized return to form. Let's be really bloody honest, the STones have not had much of a form since around 1981, and all albums subsequent have been generally ploys to push off another pickpocketing tour to see the now almost fully dessicated frame of Richards and the weird perma-gurn of Jagger's mug.

I found this one on Fark, and they stated it pretty much as I would: Green Day wins "Best band on planet" award, but organizers refuse to say what planet that is or which one they're from. Oddly enough, Kerrrang! (the organizers) showed a clue when they gave Iron Maiden a Hall of Fame induction while Killing Joke received the lifetime achievement award. But whatever in God's cosmos were they thinking about Green Day is beyond me. I still remember watching their pitiful performance at the forst BFD show at Shoreline Amphitheatre many years ago. They were shockingly whiny & dull then, and have not improved since.

Dear Tennessee Attorney General. Drop it. It's just bad music, not advertising for bad habits (unless you consider listening to bad music a bad habit).

Yohimbe Sister

So this is really just a small aside: Latasha Nevada Diggs has a blog. I first had heard of LND with Yohimbe Bros (she is on both their Front End Lifter and The Tao of Yo! releases), and later picked up Open Rhythm Society by the Beat Kids (a Guillermo K. Brown joint or high quality) and even a brief spot on a Ryuichi Sakamoto album, Sweet Revenge.

I have seen her live with Yohimbe, and she is a wild ride indeed. Singing, slamming poetic, whooping, hollering, digitally-on-the-fly-processing and generally running a wide gamut of taking the voice from its most standard to abstracted into an experiement in disconnected sound. Her blog is not anything too off the beaten track, but it is a personal narative without being self-absorbed, so it makes for an interesting distraction from time to time.

Basically I just wanted an excuse to play up how cool I think she is.

This Weeks Releases

This week is also a pretty thin one for good albums coming out, but there is at least one good one and several re-issues worth investigating:

1. Heavy hitter of the week is sadly being released in conjunction with Fourbucks...er...I mean Starbucks. Herbie Hancock releases his latest mainstream oriented album, a collection of pop yunes taken through the Hancock zone and with collaborations from as far afield as Trey Anastasio (ex-Phish, Oysterhead) to Christina Aguilera working the vocals on a rendition of a Leon Russell classic. It's Herbie, so it has to at least be decent. I am betting there will be some so-so tracks, but overall I'd bet this will be a great pop album from a master. It is titled Possibilities.

2. There are several Brian Eno reissues out, most importantly his collaboration with Talking Head David Byrne, on My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Ambient at its finest.

3. Speaking of fine ambient, two other artist reissues worthy of eartime is Harold Budd's Luxa, & Through the Hill (the latter with XTC's Andy Partridge) and Jon Hassell's City: Works of Fiction. While not the strongest that either has put out, they never really do badly. Budd has now retired from music altogether, and Hassell's releases seem to becoming more and more infrequent (although it is nice when he does the occasional guest spot, as he has for Peter Gabriel and Frou Frou among others).

4. Opeth releases Ghost Reveries. Granted, I only pay attention to them because of their connection to Porcupine Tree.

5. There is also rumor of some multi-cd collection of dubplates from the Trojan catalog. That cannot be anything except good. Much respect.

Up on the Downbeat

So on the way home from a wedding in Lake Tahoe (where I was annoyed that my room did not have a cd player, so I could listen to my brand new Brand New Heavies) the missus and I stopped in Davis at the local magazine rack and picked up the latest issue of Downbeat (September 2005). I admit the immediate draw was a rather well done piece featuring Vernon Reid, Dave Fiuczynski, Doug Wamble and Ben Monder in a Guitar Innovator Roundtable. It was good to finally read Reid waxing philosophical about any number of topics. I love Reid's playing, and have had the pleasure of meeting him briefly. His presence is very serene off stage and even onstage he appears utterly at peace even when producing cascading sheets of powerful noise. He is the Coltrane of electric guitar, and more power to him.

At one point he ranted that "...unbrandable individualism is a target of assault by the guitar industrial complex. There's a culture of guitar playing that's thing oriented, and not just in terms of gear--also manufacturing ways to be with the guitar. Methodologies. Things you have to do to be considered a good player, though how to find a way with your instrument isn't something you can get from an instructional video by the guy who just came out with the most chops, who everybody's talking about. Playing guitar is difficult. To find your way with the instrument is a life pursuit."

Reid of course is admittedly a gear freak (having seen his stage setup live with Living Colour and Yohimbe Bros, he would be lying if he claimed otherwise) but he makes another rather critical distinction, "...certain things--your quality of soul, quality of hearing--are not determined by what you have plugged in."

It then progresses with the rest of the group developing a rather classic but still seemingly misunderstood concept: that music can (and maybe should) transcend the player and the equipment. It is more than the fastest sweep picking technique or the most precise triple ratamacue or having a 5 octave vocal range. It is about what happens when it is applied in a context of some kind.

They also covers topics like categorization (or the problems that come when your playing sits in so many categories) and the arbitrary barriers between jazz and popular music.

----

There is also a good write up on Sonny Rollins, who looks pretty healthy at 75. The Missus and I managed to watch him at the Masonic Auditorium a few years ago, and while he is not the Saxophone Colossus he once was, he is still not a trivial presence. An imposing figure who is focused, and still with a formidible endurance and prowess on his instrument. A booming tenor with a softness around the edges that gives his even most blitzkrieg solos a certain warmth.

I always thought they were chicken....

Slipknot is suing Burger King for having an ad that has some faux circus metal act made of folks with horror chicken masks to promote some clucker product. The ad band is called Coq Roq. Apparently the band looks too much like Slipknot and infringes on their trademarks.

If it is not immediately obvious, this is funny on so many levels, not the least of which being:

1. You would think at this point that these kinds of metal acts (which are the ugly, monotonal-distorted, retarded variation of boy-bands) would be happy that they have become so saturated with society that they now are being used in advertising for food that tastes as bad as they sound. Hey, even Target has warped Sir Mix a Lot's Baby Got Back into a back to school product anthem.

2. If they are willing to sue BK, why not sue the many bands that also use or have recently used stupid level of facepaint and costuming to mask the fact that their musical usefulness is limited, like Marilyn Manson, Mushroomhead and Insane Clown Posse?

3. Better yet, why hasn't Alice Cooper and Gwar sued Slipknot?

4. From the article, "Slipknot fans have expressed confusion and criticism over what they think is Slipknot endorsing Burger King." Slipknot fans are stupid. Slipknot is stupid. Slipknot fans do not express confusion...they are confused by default.

This weeks picks

Amy Winehouse - Frank Equal parts bloozy delivery, jazzy soul, Nellie Furtado style urban pop and loose limbed funky fun. This woman needs to put out a follow up to this 2003 debut standout.
Osunlade - Paradigm plus a few single mixes I have laying around. Ascetic house music crossed with Yorubafied street griot soul. Everything the man touches turns to slinky funk.
Thinkman (aka Rupert Hine) - The Formula. Arty 80s project helmed by the producer of Suzanne vega, the Fixx, Saga, Rush and Duncan Sheik.
Tuner - Totem A duet of Markus Reuter and Pat Mastellotto follows a similar duet of Mastellotto and another Warr guitarist, Trey Gunn, who worked under the name TU. A dense soup of articulated weirdness over broken and frankensteined beat madness.

Tiffany vs. Hootie to the Death...of aisle 5

So it's Tiffany vs. Hootie and the Blowfish for mall show supremacy. Tiffany wins because the stunt was clever marketing to the tween cute contingent during that period of the 80s (she has aged better than I would have suspected). Hootie was never cute, and will not improve after their big comeback concert...at a Walmart. Hootie's new album is called Looking for Lucky.

They added an unecessary Y to that title.

This Week's Releases

This Weeks Releases

I am late this week with this one, but I am busier than all get out.

1. Anyone remember K's Choice? They were a one-hit wonder in the US with I'm Not and Addict, but were successful in their native Benelux region for some time. Vocalist Sarah Betten now has a solo album out, and I hope it is as well crafted as her K's work was.

2. Blood of Abraham has the cleverly titled Eyedollartree, and includes guest spots by Kool Keith (aka Dr. Octagon) and the way too underutilized Divine Styler, who I had not seen on record since his spot on 60 Channels (aka The Angel) No Gravity full length.

3. My Chemical Romance guests on the new Every Time I Die record, which tells me to hope that this record dies in obscurity fast.

4. Yet another Bill Bruford re-release, this time for the almost blemishless Stamping Ground, a live effort with some extra bonus tracks on this reissue. Still some of the best electric, bleeding edge jazz of the last 2 decades.

5. A postumous live collection from Jerry Garcia is supposed to be coming out. I'd like to be grateful, but I can't really stand Garcia's tinny little voice and tepid guitar playing.

6. They are reissuing Bob James's Touchdown. You may recall what i has to say about this not too long ago.

7. Shanachie is now distributing the long out of print (and originally a Japan-only release) Live album by Swing Out Sister. Yes SOS were a touring concern and actually lasted longer than their token US hit Breakout would have one suspect. They actually are (present tense) a decent jazz informed dance-pop act. This is probably their best material, with a tight backing band and well recorded.

8. Apparently this month will also sport a gaggle of archived live footage on DVD, including volumes by Selecter, The English Beat and Devo. Those sound quite tasty. There will also be one out for Smashmouth, which will most likely be completely stupid, much like the rest of their catalog. Is that the best San Jose can muster, when it completely ignored real talents like Soda, Jalopy Taco Stand and Sandbox?

9. New live Joe Zawinul. Caught him last year with the Missus. If this sounds anything like that show....buy it.

Natalia M. King - Milagro

Natalia M. King
Milagro
2000 Sunnyside/Universal Music France

Produced by Natalia King & Pierre Walfisz

Natalia M. King - vocals, acoustic guitar
Pierre Fruchard - electric guitar, bouzouf
Etienne Bonhomme - drums

A few years ago I found this album in the cutout bin for the tune of 3.95 (taxes not included). I found it worth the price, and maybe a bit more. And considering how much attention the female singer-songwriter has gotten in the past decade, I am surprised this artist didn't get more attention, as she has all the basic components for bigger success.

Natalia is apparently of Afro-Dominican extraction, living in France by way of Brooklyn. This is not really of any consequnce musically, but it never hurts to add some weightless trivia to help flesh out a profile. She is a striking figure of athletic build and flowing dreads and an unassuming manner in images and interviews. She also has a lot of talent based on this debut.

While not in and of itself very groundbreaking, Milagro is very well done, and a welcome departure from the typically overproduced tendencies of some (think Sarah Maclachlan or the last two Jonatha Brooke albums). The ground covered by the nine tracks here is not broad, but it is not entirely repetitive; this is closer to a recorded live date, with a strict trio format and a minimum of studio mutitracking. The result is a bluesy roots-rock center coated in folk and some light psychedelic trappings, and the quite powerful vocals of Ms. King, which never get used in an offensive manner the likes of which is common in the larynx-seizures of MTV mainstays Mariah and XTina.

Songs like Drag have a Ani DiFranco sensibility about them, and others veer closer into the grounded folk funk realm of the softer side of David Ryan Harris. Tracy Chapman this is not. The songs are more conversational than confessional, and the sparse arrangements give them an added vibe of a relaxed casual feel. The one surprise is the jam-band like closer; a fifteen minute opus called Beautiful. It is like the same song recorded in two different stages and conceptual bonded with a loose bridge into a drawn out narrative. It is its namesake.

You might like this if you like:

Ani DiFranco - Out of Range
David Ryan Harris - David Ryan Harris
Dave Matthews Band - Before These Crowded Streets
Suzanne Vega - 9 Objects of Desire

This Weeks Releases

Well, I am currently at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in San Francisco, but figured I would throw this quick one out there:

1. 311 has a new one, Don't Tread on Me, and I suspect it will be like every other 311 release in that there will be a small number of standout tracks, and a whole lot of filler. Rarely is the filler *bad*, but rarely is it attention-grabbing either. It sort of just disappears into slightly funky elevator backdrop sound. Kind of like when I went with the missus to the Florist and they were playing an instrumental version of Genesis's In Too Deep, the original of which didn't need to be sanitized for muzak. OK, 311 isn't that bad. I still suspect this isn't the kind of album you buy, but pick up the better tunes off of iTunes or from the single releases.

2. The Click Five are an act I have never heard of before, but rumor is they have guests like Elliot Easton from the Cars and some guy from Fountains of Wayne. This might be worth looking into.

3. Forever, a postumous release from Rick James, will hopefully be a good last statement from the ambassador of skanky funk and soul. I hear that Howard Hewitt guests on it though, which makes me wonder if RJ was softening up in his later years.

4. Steve Lukather is usually best known as the occasionally lead singer and always lead guitarist for Toto, which could be seen as not a great pedigree for a guitar album. The fact is, when he is off the Toto clock, a bit of a shredder (I have seen some footage of him from the mid 80s with Jeff Beck, Santana, Doug Wimbish and Simon Phillips, and the guy was stylistically a little off-kilter but technically held his own). Well, he has made a X-Mas themed album of guitar noodling with some friends: Slash, Steve Vai, and Eddie Van Halen among them. It might be a stupid album, it might not. The title however, is very stupid: SantaMental.

5. There is a Madness release of some sort this month, but I don't know if it is a re-issue, new material, or just Sugg's mining the vaults for odds and ends.

6. Pras, formerly of the Fugees, has his sophomore release due, and like you all...I also do not care.

7. In other news about no one should give a damn about -especially metaphysically- Stryper has reformed and is releasing Reborn. I'd like to forgive the hambrained lyrics, cheesy -even by hair metal standards- posing and those God-awful bumblebee leather fetish outfits they sported throughout the 80s, but that is something beyond the realm of man. How they ever ended up with any airplay on Headbanger's Ball is still a mystery. I have heard that they one recorded a cover of Shining Star by Earth Wind and Fire. *That* is a sin.

Stewart Copeland has a Gizmo

So, I have been mentioning Stewart Copeland a lot lately, so why not keep that trend going, seeing as he is actually worth listening to and relevant, instead of others who keep blabbering about the latest emo rehash or the headlines-drawing non-issue of a anything related to Britney Spears procreating.
Stewart has finally got a decent online presence, and probably reflects his recent returns into the world of rock and jazz fusion, as well as continuing his soundtrack and symphonic works. He has been doing work with Les Claypool (of Primus) and Trey Anastasio (of Phish) in the power trio Oysterhead, did a few guest live spots onstage with the Foo Fighters and Incubus, and is apparently starting another band based in Italy with some local talent, and with dionysian avant-funk guitarist David "Fuze" Fiuzcynski (Kif, Screaming Headless Torsos, Me'Shell N'degeocello), called Gizmo. Just the pairing of those two onstage is enough of an eyebrow raiser, that I could care less who else is there. I just want some footage!

The site itself has some decent content, including samples from his recent orchestral shows, and even some Klark Kent audio. There is his video with Adam Ant for the film Out of Bounds as well as a 19 track collection of officially "un-releasable" tracks with Police outtakes, strange snippets of incidental music from Desperate Housewives and collaborations with folks like Jeff Beck. All worth at least one listen.

Related to this is the unofficial UK fansite with even better footage, including the video of Andy Summers and Stewart playing with Incubus, various Police performances never seen on MTV, interviews, and even his spot on VH1 show The List. Of note are the tour diary entries, where he is quite prone to not soft pedalling around what he likes and dislikes about...well, pretty much everything.

And finally, he recently did the score for some new Cartoon Network show, The Life and Times of Juniper Lee and the now very classic Syncronicity concert video from the last Police Tour in 1983 is finally getting a proper DVD release. That is when you get to see what made Stewart such an influence on almost every rock drummer that came up in the 80s and 90s of any repute. The man is inimitable, and that concert shows why.

Shuffling About

So a few months ago I signed up for a new credit card, and I did not realize in doing so that I was somehow in on some kind of promotion scheme -- I received a brand spankin' new Apple iPod Shuffle in the mail. So, me being infinitely interested in gadgetry (especially when it costs me essentially nothing and arrives at my door complete with warranty), I have gotten the guy loaded up; 400 MB of new album goodness by Jamiroquai, Porcupine Tree and Roisin Murphy(vocalist for Moloko). I also threw in a re-issue of Dub Syndicate & Adrian Sherwood's Fear of a Green Planet, because there is always a place for On-U-Sound in my world. So far everything is sounding quite good, quite good indeed. I still do not see the reason to buy from the iTunes Music Store, but then again, I am one of those rare animals that still deeply enjoys the physical exercise of going to the record store and digging through the stacks. It is a bit of cultural anthropology I enjoy practicing.

So far I am impressed with the Shuffle as a well engineered piece of tech, but this is probably largely skewed due to its price point (free in my case).

SWF Drum Machine

I am not a fan of flash shorts. 98+ percent of them are abjectly interesting. The following is from the other 2 percent; pithy, a bit odd, but well animated and is basically a great short instrumental video with a great theme. Drum Machine.

More Mutant Audio

So recently I have been returning to weekly sessions of electronic noise generation at Greg Kucharo's Mutant Audio Lab after a month and a half away. After today, Greg seems to be convinced we have rough structures/ideas for four tracks of any substance. He hooked up a Korg Kaoss Pad (basically a touch-sensitive effects processor and on-the-fly sample utility) through my Alesis D5 brain, but have yet to do anything with it.

I had initially entertained the possibility of adding some organic parts, namely a real high-hat and ride set-up, so that I could get the natural feel and sound possibilites from them, but the problem of micing and the sheer loudness of them compared with the sound levels we play at through the monitors/headphones is too wide a gap (I am not a quiet player to start with, and prefer the ringing crispness of big Paiste 505, 2002 and 404 lines). That being said, I think I am starting to understand aspects of the Pintech gear to get some more subtlety out of them, so maybe I won't need the metals, but I will definately need a different kind of pad for use as a hh, since the cylindrical Pintech pad does not cater to my wannabe Stewart Copeland style approach. I basically keep cracking my own fingers and wrists.

But enough of that. We ran through some mid-tempo material featuring mostly straightahead beats from me, and heaploads of synth washes and Greg's near endless string of interesting sounds: grimy bass noise, Keith Emerson on bennies lead lines, and some cool drones. We ended with more drones, ambient noodling, and claustrophobic effects from the Roland pad setup attached to my kit, into a kind of sountrack theme for a movie about walking through an open field of tall grass slowly, knowing it is full of potential danger and something is about to bite your elbow. Greg tends to lead, since he actually knows what he is doing, but seems unbothered by my rather naive attempts at polyrhthmic usefulness.

By Way of Zaire

So I find the Sub-Saharan pan-ethnography of Stewart Copeland's The Rhythmatist release from the mid 80s, one of the best true world-fusion albums. It didn't just try to slap the random vocal bit and percussion fill with a disco beat and call it worldbeat. It really mixed various African structures and styles with jazz, rock and avant-garde. Needless to say, almost no one knows about it. One of the standout persons on the release is Ray Lema (from then Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo). Well, I have one of Ray Lema's solo albums; 1989s Nangadeef. I can't say it is as good as his collaboration with Stewart, but that may be because this album lacks Copeland's imitable stamp: deep percussive fury and untethered openness. This album is more synthetic and focuses on Lema as a vocalist (which is good), but not enough to his keyboard skills or filling out the rest of the sound. It falls a little too far into the pandering to a fizzled out middle ground of accessibility at times, but is stronger than a lot of similar efforts from that period. It does make curious as to what else he has released, since his honeyed voice and solid melodies are worth investigating further.

The Woo of Celluloid

So I am an avowed adherent to funk in so many of its joyous and disparate forms, all of which have been practiced by musical powerhouse Bernie Worrell. Bernie is in a rare class; a true prodigy with staggering chops who sees no categorical bounds to where he can play. As a keyboardist, he composed his own piano concerto by the age of eight, and has perfect pitch. He is just as adept at ripping and tearing through Ravel as he is pushing crushing loads of funk with Parliament-Funkadelic. While he has continued to get steady work as a studio player and sideman (most notably with the Talking Heads, Keith Richards, BlackJack Johnson, and various Bill Laswell and Les Claypool projects), he has essentially been ignored as a solo artist and suffered the indignity of having all of his seminal works earning him no royalties due to shady business practices.

Well, someone decided his rather colorful personality and even moe colorful history in music would make for a good movie, as it became so. Phil DiFiore has made Stranger: Bernie Worrell On Earth, a documentary that has already earned a few accolades and is due for wider exposure, if the trailer is any indication. Featuring performance and narrative footage as well as a panoply of interviews with various artists that work or have worked with Bernie.* The film looks to be an enlightening and fun watch. Go take a peek at the trailer at least. Better yet, go see a Bernie show and buy a few dozen album he appears on.

* Includes footage Bill Laswell, Les Claypool, Mos Def, Will Calhoun, Doug Wimbish, Dr. Know, George CLinton, Bootsy Collins, Prince Paul, Warren Haynes, David Byrne, Tina Weymouth, & Chris Frantz.

Yahoo! does something worthy of its saying its name...or has it?

Well Yahoo! has launched a beta version of its audio search, which pretty much does what its name says. It is surprisingly good at finding some obscure stuff, as I went looking for things like Wendy & Lisa, various historical political speeches (i.e. Churchill, Roosevelt, Eisenhower), and podcasts. All in all, it has promise, although as mentioned in this Slashdot thread about it, it would be nice to incorporate lyric searches into it as well (even though you can do this just fine in a standard search on Google anyway, it would be nice to have the two joined somehow on an audio search). Even better would be something that cross references something like the AMG where I could do an audio search for say, Tony Levin, and have the results not just bring me his solo work, but any results for bands he has belonged to or done session work for (i.e. King Crimson, Peter Gabriel, Paul Simon, Seal, Rachel Z, et al) and provide them in some kind of stratified fashion.

Grubby beats from John Kuan

Out on Orange Grove Records, is a new track from John Kuan called Flatside that has a wonderful, grubbiness to it. A foul mix of Detroit asceticism and aspects of a noiser Carl Craig. He also has a zipped for download copy of his PostRav EP. Get moving.

Rykodisc

So when I first encountered Rykodisc it was with the Bill Frisell/Vernon reid duet album, Smash and Scatteration a perturbing and sometimes arresting collection of various guitars, guitar synths, drums machines and the occasional banjo riff. Then of course came the attention they garnered for the first cd releases of Zappa material and of the RCA era albums from David Bowie. I just found they have an online history that actually is some good reading about a label that has done well financially and kept its artists happy.

BTW Arthur, I own a copy of that Sreaming Tribesmen album.

This Weeks Releases

So this week is a little weak on releases I have to say on the new release front, but there is at least one really good set of re-issues:

1. Amen releases a live album called Gun of a Preacher Man. Having seen these guys open for Killing Joke in 2004, I was sorely disappointed. They are a truly sad sight on stage,and worse on the ears.

2. Faith Hill's new one is out, replete with Tim McGraw duet (oh, the shock). Buy this if you want music to bore yourself catatonic. Otherwise go find a good Bocephus album (any will do).

3. Bill Bruford started not one but two boutique labels to release his new material and reissue his older material dating back to his 70s fusion days. The results so far have been positive. With the first new album being last years impeccable Random Acts of Happiness as a starter, he also has been issuing new remastered and bonus-tracked goodies from his Bruford and early Earthworks catalog, as well as his collaborations with pianists Michael Bortslap and Patrick Moraz. This week sees a continuation of the reissues with The Bruford Tapes and All Heaven Broke Loose.

The former is of a live NYC radio broadcast in 1979 that shows the quartet blasting through many of that groups best instrumental workouts: Hell's Bells (no relation to the AC/DC song of the same name), Sample and Hold, Fainting in Coils and both parts of The Sahara of Snow are all there. This is a very muscular, quirky but grounded band with a lot of explosive power. The latter is the last studio outing by the electric version of Earthworks. Featuring Bruford's use of what Bruford called chordal drums (using electronic drums to trigger and play unconventional sounds for both rhythmic and melodic parts), and the peerless frontline of Django Bates on Peck Horn and keys and Iain Ballamy on saxes and reeds, and rounded out by bassist Tim Harries, this unit made some of the most adventurous electro-acoustic jazz of the 80s and early 90s. It was not art-rock made jazzy or jazz confined to arty pretense, but unique and innovative in its own way. If you are a Bruford completist, you need to pick these up for the extra tracks and improved sound, but if you want a sample of how good Earthworks Mark I was, pick up the live album Stamping Ground.