1 AARON NEVILLE Bridge Over Troubled Water 4:59
2 ALLEN TOUSSAINT St. James Infirmary 3:51
3 GLEN & MARKETA Falling Slowly 4:50
4 BOBBY WOMACK Fire And Rain 4:30
5 BEACH BOYS God Only Knows (a cappella) 2:47
6 JAMES TAYLOR & CAROLE KING Something In The Way She Moves 4:38
7 WONDERMINTS Getting Better 2:49
8 BOBBY CHARLES Tennessee Blues 5:29
9 BOB DYLAN If Dogs Run Free 3:40
10 JACKIE DESHANNON The Weight 3:04
11 AMOS GARRETT River’s Invitation 3:46
12 DAVE LINDLEY Bye Bye Love 2:55
13 THREE DOG NIGHT Mama Told Me (Not To Come) 3:19
14 CAT POWER (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction 3:05
15 BRAD PAISLEY Let the Good Times Roll (feat. B.B. King) 5:28
16 NEW PORNOGRAPHERS Moves 3:52
17 JELLYFISH All I Want Is Everything 3:12
18 FEIST My Moon My Man 3:06
19 FLEET FOXES Meadowlark 3:11
20 THE WOOD BROTHERSThe Truth Is the Light 2:40

Earlier this summer we went to my wife’s high school reunion. I watched with interest as the DJ set up his rig. He didn’t bring any CD players. Instead he hooked an iPod and a computer to the sound system. His mix started out hit-or-miss but then he found a groove with typical baby boomer oldies, circa 1970. Since he seemed to be thirty-something, I was curious about his process of selection. I went up and asked him.

He told me, ‘As people suggest tunes I plug them into iTunes and then iTunes suggests other tunes and I cue them up.’ I thought to myself, ‘…kind of takes the matter of your own tastes out of the equation.’

I was reminded of the several occasions when I leveraged my own reputation as a music fanatic to gain access to the DJ spot. It’s enough to say, this didn’t work out very well. I have no feel for the hits, having turned off the radio in favor of my own mixology along time ago, say, around 1970!

However, another opportunity presented itself this summer. With more than a little trepidation, I assembled a 90 song playlist on my iPod and was ready to sin against the lowest common denominator. I took considerable care in putting together a long playlist of oldies and classic jazz and just a few oddball, albeit conservatively oddball picks.

It was not to be. My iPod didn’t issue a note when plugged into the Bose station. Fortunately, plan B was ready to go. A guy helping out had his iPhone, and his iPhone could access Pandora. Pandora, like the earlier party’s DJ leaning on iTunes, streams custom created “sets” which take a few user choices and formulates further choices from them. Automates the setlist. Cool, and it worked out well.

Here’s a Dub Collision mix taken from the long playlist, and, highlighting most of the oddball choices.

The new records by radio icons Sheryl Crow and Cyndy Lauper showcase, no doubt, the singers’ deep desire to make soul and blues music for their aging audiences. Because both established long ago their stylistic ranges, both records come across as experimental self-indulgence. Each also slides into the odd ‘career move’ track of many an aging musician whose recognizable niche has lapsed.

Crow, when she stays in the range of mildly gritty L.A. folk-rock and pop, has proved an enduring hit maker. Lauper, who burst on the scene as a quirky singer of MOR rock melded with dance-pop, has, over the last ten years, wed her–nowadays–creaky soprano to a chameleon-like ability to tune into what’s left of radio-friendly pop trends.

Here both make left turns onto the soul road. It provides an object lesson in the risk of self-indulgence. I don’t like to thrash music on the blog, but Crow’s record, 100 Miles From Memphis, is excruciatingly mild and denatured. She doesn’t have a stirring voice, yet the problem is the gulf between the expert backing and her seemingly complete lack of feel for the material. When I finished listening to it, I thought, ‘Well, strip the vocals and you have an excellent karaoke bed.’ Too bad, Sheryl chose to lie in it. Stick with Nora Jones, folks.

Cyndy Lauper, on Memphis Blues, compensates for her own unlikely appropriation of bluesy material, by simply wailing through the tunes, and doing so with help from Allen Toussaint, B.B.King and Anne Peebles. The result is a mediocre soul/blues record, but a pretty good blast of Lauper having a bunch of fun. Her greater emphasis on a kind of blues party atmosphere helps. Enjoyable; I hope Cyndi got it out of her system.

Still, I think, ‘poor Memphis.’ Now, where did I put that Betty LaVette CD?

Four Orang Hutan lost their habitat in the forest of Kalimantan (Indonesia) and decided to play in a band they named “Wayang Orang Hutan’ in order to sustain their lives in the cyber world. Campaigning for Education, Health, Justice and Ecology, they are heroes indeed, therefore if you want “to save the planet, then save the WOH

The band is virtual and from Bali. Wayang Orang Hutan, led by Igor Tamerlan.

Igor Tamerlan at soundfoundation

Abbey Lincoln passed away yesterday. Although it is always impossible for me to rank a favorite singer to be second-to-none, I can almost do this in Ms. Lincoln’s case. Her artistry as songwriter and singer was focused on moving the Great Black Music forward. At the same time, she is rightfully the most gripping and deepest of the heirs to Billie Holiday’s swinging deep-soul music.

Abbey has made a lot of superb records over her fifty+ year career. In a more wide-awake cultural circumstance she would be known by many many more as one of the great American singers. Start with You Gotta Pay the Band (1991, with Stan Getz,) and work in both directions.

I first heard Abbey Lincoln on Max Roach’s 1962 masterpiece, It’s Time. She caps the record with her song Lonesome Lover. I tracked down the few of her records one could acquire at the time, around 1978. I did happen upon scratchy copies of her classic record for Riverside, That’s Him, and her debut record. The trajectory of my tastes and enthusiasms in jazz singing begin with Lincoln and the singer she is related most to, Billie Holiday.

Beginning in 1980, she began to record more regularly, and, eventually I tracked down all of her records–because I wanted to hear every recorded note. She’s a cornerstone figure for me, and, when people speak of ‘spiritual jazz,’ she and Alice Coltrane are twin highest goddesses.

Sometime around 1984, me and some friends got in a car in the dead of a Vermont winter to make the trek to The Rising Sun in Montreal to pay hommage to, and hear, Ms. Lincoln. It was the kind of road trip where a half hour into it, trying to stay on Route 7, we all thought ‘we must be a bit crazy to be driving in this nasty weather.’ Then the weather turned ugly.

Making our way very carefully north, we got to the Rising Sun, made our way up the stairs and turned into the long rectangle of the club. Hardly anybody was there. This changed in a minor way, for another group had hit the bottom of the stairs. In any case, we turned toward the small stage and saw a set up for Abbey’s backup trio and a bunch of empty tables. We made our way to the front most table just a few minutes before the announced starting time for the concert. The party behind us grabbed a front table.

Then, Doudou Boicel, the renowned Montreal jazz maven and owner of the club, announced the main attraction. The trio, led by pianist Phillip Wright, played several songs. Then Wright introduced Abbey.

Unaffected by the miniscule turnout, she launched into a glorious opening set. Here’s the kicker: ten feet away, the singer not only beguiled, she also made laser-like eye contact with each of us. I have never before or since, listening to a singer, felt the direct physical connection Abbey created on this night, as she brought many moments of song in through the so-called window to the soul. Needless to say there was no problem hanging around for the slightly more populated second set. She sustained this direct connection throughout the evening. This evening’s experience remains for me one of the high points of being a fan of the human voice.

Lonesome Lover; w. Max Roach, 1962

I Should Care; unreleased, 1999

NPR’s Jazz Profiles section has a series of terrific interviews with Lincoln and her colleagues.

(see, if you wish, my recollections of my brief, but crucial, encounters with Harvey Pekar, while working at a record store in the mid-seventies.

BLUES FOR HARVEY PEKAR
1 Fats Navarro-Lady Bird 2:52
2 Bud Powell-Wait 3:05
3 Thelonious Monk-Introspection 3:12
4 Art Pepper-Surf Ride 4:42
5 Max Roach & Clifford Brown-Sandu 4:59
6 Thelonious Monk-Let’s Call This 5:07
7 Miles Davis-Tadd’s Delight 4:31
8 Art Pepper-Arthur’s Blues 15:22

Download iPod tagged 320kbs mix via Rapidshare: Blues for Harvey Pekar

Together, the sixth recording by The New Pornographers, provides a ton of delight on a bunch of levels. Although the 2010 competition all-of-a-sudden stiffened for pop pleasure listening time on my iPod, this winning record won out. I’ll sort it out at the end of the year. I’m sure Together will still be there.

AC, Neko and gang have put their fans on a bit of a roller coaster. Twin Cinemas, one of the decade’s great bursts of pop power was followed by Challengers, in which singer Neko Case and a lot of focus was, as it were, lost in the mix.

Yet it would be unfair to view the new record as a return to form. It is, yet it’s also the band’s most expansive and confident and playful outing so far. The np’s are, without any doubt, current pop’s best musical anthropologists. Their area of expertise is seventies/eighties radio pop, and, their updated sonic recombinations of Crowded House, Roxy Music, XTC, Squeeze, Bowie, Yes, Bangles, and much more, earns highest honors on this zero-dull moments record. (Tune-in-point: Move, the opener is about as close a cop of Todd Rundgren as one could imagine.) The band’s nostalgia trip here is squared with enough originality and distinction to set their sound apart from much of the backward-looking competition.

I think it’s their best so far.

Are you digging the drone of the vuvuzela as it sounds constantly during the FIFA World Cup in South Africa? I am. The long plastic horn sounds like whale songs do.

I’ve a 20+ year, and intimate relationship with the music of South Africa. (A bit of story,) but, the main thing recently is that the deep and beautiful musical culture at the bottom of Africa also is, going back (say) 25,000-100,000 years is at the bottom of music. The deep old sounds are the center of my investigation and tool-making concerned with what I’ve come to term, imaginal musicology. See Rhythm River for the skinny.

Think about the progression going back in time: modern to ancient to archaic to primitive to proto music. Proto music would be the music sounded in the settlements of earliest mankind, and in this period, not known as music per say. It’s struck me what a heavy concept it is to regard something fundamental as originating in an even more basic form and formulation stretched back to the necessary point where it was not known in any ‘second order’ terms. So, the sound world, the intentional sonic projection, the directed voice or rhythm, is not at such time–way back then!-known as music. It came before music; it is the song of before music.

Appropriate to this, my mix offered here starts with the music of the Khoi of the Kalahari, and then wanders with considerable intention through the diverse garden of South African music, and through a fairly thick slice of musical history too. There’s a streaming sampling of a Khoi woman singing to dance to.

1 Tribesmen – Kalahari 15 1:06
2 Durban High Stars – Lapha eSandlwana 02:43
3 Philip Nchipi Tabane – Lalavuka 2:36
4 Simphiwe Dana – Vukani (mix – modjadji) 5:06
5 The Dark City SDisters – Sihamba Kancane 2:15
6 Letta Mbulle – Noma Themba 3:19
7 Thekwane & the Sound Brothers – Sakubona 3:28
8 Reggie Msomi – Midnight Ska 2:25
9 Aaron Mbambo – Selishonile Ilanga 3:02
10 Eric Nomvete’s Big Five – Pondo Blues 4:13
11 Mahlathini & The Queens – Umkhovu 3:26
12 Hugh Masekela – Ha Lese Le Di Khanna 3:07
13 Amompondo – Salawena (Smith & Mighty dub remix) 5:49
14 Nganeziyamifisa No Khambalomvaleliso – Sini Lindile 3:15
15 West Nkosi – Inyoni Yami 2:17
16 Holy Spirits Vhoir – Baba Wethu Baxolele 3:10
17 Abdullah Ibrahim – Hamba Kahle 2:38
18 Robbie Jansen – Bokaap Kwela 03:58
19 Brenda Fassi – Ngiyakusaba 5:14
20 Zim Ngqawana – Anthem 9:14

download (tagged for iPod | mp3 320kbs | Rapidshare)

Khoi song.

Who else but Neil Young could pull off a solo tour where he both recasts his chestnuts and debuts brand new songs without a band, while mixing in arrangements on solo acoustic and electric guitars, harmonica, piano and pump organ.

What it sounds like is a guy who can make the weather change between songs.

After the Gold Rush-You Never Call-Cinnamon Girl (recorded late May 2010)

Let’s see? What can I remember of my friends back in the late sixties and early seventies, and their parents trying to go all Hait and Ashbury on us? No, I can’t think of being offered anything other than a martini. More often were instances where long hair and parental types peered at each other from opposite sides of the doors of perception. Those moments made for some funny encounters.

Yet, back then the counter culture was in fact right in the greatest generation’s face. This clip shows Mike Douglas working too hard–ha, ha!

And here The Byrds visiting Hugh Hefner on Playboy After Dark.

If you sense the large energy somehow captured in this photograph of Bettye Lavette, then imagine what its sonic equivalent sounds like. (biography) I saw her perform before a partially packed house at The Beachland Ballroom several years ago, and it was both the most soulful singing and most intense soul performance I’ve had the pleasure to be overwhelmed by.

She’s released a new record, one with an unlikely concept, Interpretations: The British Rock Songbook. Except it’s Bettye, and she could sing a phone book into fire and fury.

Here’s the trailer.

This record will be there at the end of the year.

Denise Sullivan’s article at Crawdaddy, Betty Lavette. When the Blues Catch Up to You, includes this capsule professional bio:

Once or twice in her promising career the soul songstress had the rug pulled out from under her cha-cha heels. The story of her long-waged war on going unheard started in 1962 when, at the age of 16, she was dropped from her label on the eve of a tour to promote “My Man—He’s a Lovin’ Man”, her Top 10 R&B hit. There was another less notorious incident, when “Let Me Down Easy” (a sweet and low slice of mid-’60s soul released by another record company) failed to take the world by storm as planned. But LaVette’s infamous blow came in ‘72, on a second bet with Atlantic, following the completion of her session in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, with the Memphis Horns. It was hoped that the masterful Child of the Seventies would be her overdue breakthrough, though the record was inexplicably locked in a vault for the next 28 years.

Between ‘62 and ‘02, LaVette recorded (she charted R&B a few more times) and performed, though she was often relegated to hotel bars and stages even less illustrious. “The same show you see now I was doing for $50 a night. That’s the way I was raised. That’s the way I work mine,” she says. And yet the stone survivor hasn’t lost her ability to laugh at what’s been framed as her tragic fate. “I figured that if I could live long enough to get over to everyone’s house and do a show on their porch, I could get to ‘em all,” she says. Meanwhile, offstage she fielded dumb-ass questions like, “Didn’t you used to be Bettye LaVette?”

And then, at the turn of the century, the winds of change started to blow for the artist who was once and always Bettye LaVette. First off, a French record label dug up the tapes of Child of the Seventies and released it as Souvenirs, setting the gears in motion for her now-famous comeback “from the crypt,” as she calls it. By 2004, a collection of newly recorded works, A Woman Like Me, had earned her a W.C. Handy Award for contemporary blues achievement. Her steady and recent ascendance is owed to the critical and commercial acceptance by rock audiences for two albums recorded and released in the last three years for hipster haven, Anti Records, starting with 2005’s I’ve Got My Own Hell to Raise (a collection of songs produced by Joe Henry and written by women, among them Aimee Mann, Sinead O’Connor, and Fiona Apple). But mostly it’s last year’s Scene of the Crime, for which she returned to Muscle Shoals to record 10 handpicked songs produced by herself, David Barbe, and Patterson Hood of Drive-By Truckers that brings it all back home for LaVette and kicks things up a notch.

Bettye sings her tale best of all.