tUnE-YarDs

Nicholas Jaar

Favorite video of the year. Liz Green youtube channel

Excellent record from last year, O Devotion | Last.fm | BBC review & preview

Perpetuum Jazzile (Slovenia) on youtube | youtube search | home page

If you had asked, me say about five years ago, whether or not the hippie folk rock of my youth would ever burst through into a completely contemporary iteration, I would have cynically reminded you music culturistas have sustained their reaction against so-called hippie music for twenty-five years.

This reaction has been going on so long that we can nowadays find it remarkable (for example) that Wilco or The Jayhawks, folk rock exponents in the second wave, have managed to ply their trade on the margins of guilded respectability for over 20 years. Face it: only with guilded respectability is the listener relieved of being accused of favoring (at least) mildly uncool, bourgeois, regressive musical artistry.

Then, amazingly, the reaction dissipated without issuing even an audible gasp. Alternately, and more likely, I haven’t been paying anywhere near enough attention. Yes, I was rather struck by the debut of The Fleet Foxes.

Upshot is I get it–it’s the new golden age. I’m now tracking its antecedents beyond the lucky accidents, (such as Or, The Whale, Last Town Chorus,) I’ve gathered up over the years.

Dawes, Nothing Is Wrong. Laurel Canyon soft rock, it is said, is on the up and up. This is funny branding from the perspective of those long in the tooth. Wait, has Silver Lake fallen to the side?

However, the Dawes’ second record is quite entertaining, and, the lead video here is at once straight-forward and deliciously laced with odd visual references.

Compare this with the movie Laurel Canyon from 2002, a flick itself a very long way from somebody deciding whether or not Graham Nash is the ticket.

Ry Cooder is pissed off. I’ve been tracking his music for over forty years, and this is the most pissed off he’s been so far. He wraps an interview with Lynell George about his excellent new record Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down this way,

“These times call for a very different kind of protest song. ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone?’ We’re way down the road from that.”

In a new review of the album, Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down “is in the tradition of the great titles of Woody Guthrie and Haywire Harry McClintlock.” Reviewer Cory Doctorow describes the album’s songs as “a combination of Mexican-style corridos, stomping blues, shitkicking C&W tracks, and other forms of great American music, tackling such themes as financial corruption, immigration, the plight of migrant workers, the double sorrow of dying for a war based on a lie, and other outrages of the modern age.”

Ry’s site at Nonesuch is great.

One of the great jazz groups of all time, Keith Jarrett’s American Quartet. Jarrett has a two disc solo set due this month, Rio, on ECM.

h/t Free Form Jazz

Soundtrack heaven underneath, and, a terrific animated feature, Chico y Rita.