I've set up a smart playlist on itunes to collect together all those tracks/albums that I have yet to play once. At the moment I've only gone back six months but still over 100 tracks. You know what it is like, you're playing an album in the car on the ipod, get home and then go to itunes on the computer and play somethng different or vice versa and two or three tracks remain unplayed! In a few cases it is virtually the whole album.
bedroom eyes may be one of my favorite songs of the year. it's certainly one of the most immediate and catchiest songs of the year (maybe because it grabs hold of my 80s nostalgia impulses and my current intrigue with 50s noir-pop).
Talbot - Tundra EP - this is a really, really, really good Estonian doom metal thing. NYOP at Bandcamp, free at Free Metal Albums. Check it out if you like metal. Does anyone here like metal?
An ambient project consisting of two CDs of tracks by various artists that are all exactly the same length, the idea being that you play more than one of them simultaneously, thus creating 121 possible new tracks.
Hey, you jazz people, please do me a favor. Tell what other tracks to look for that sound like the first song on this free sampler, because I am really liking it. Slinky bass, great vocal, smart lyrics.
Sounds a great track GP (and sampler) Sadly I can't download, even though it is free. The 30 seconds I heard reminded me of Jacqui Dankworth - but I do not profess to be a jazz person at all, just interested in jazz. I'm sure Jonah or Kargatron will come up with something else...
This album is one that the Guardian are reviewing as part of a series on their writer's favourite albums. Normally I'd put the website here for the review, but I'm quoting it in more detail' as this is such a good album and deserves wider recognition for its historical importance
It could feel lame to start any paean to a favourite record with a claim for its significance; it makes it sound dry, academic, removed from the emotions it engages. And yet the story of Pirate's Choice bears re-telling, and what I've taken from it over the years is bound up in its multiple histories. This was an album recorded in 1982, but only released in the UK seven years later, when it helped kickstart a new-found fascination among certain western listeners with "world music". The band by that point had split up: their music deemed increasingly passé in Senegal itself, where once they'd be seen as harbingers of a new sound and style. But there's more than simply that: this seems to me to be a tale that reaches back much further in time, and crisscrosses the oceans more than twice over.
I was a surprise when I learnt that Orchestra Baobab did in fact owe their existence to a club, only one less dissolute than that in my imaginings (the sort of place whose patrons might include Paolo Conte and Tom Waits on a busman's holiday). In fact, Dakar's celebrated Star Band were ploughing their trade at the Miami Club in 1970 when a rival establishment, the Baobab Club, opened and the owners lured half the group to form their own house band. That much is archetypal.
The interior of the club was designed to resemble the hollow of a baobab tree emblem of the savannah and cabinet ministers and senior civil servants were its principal patrons. "The dress code was strict: a suit and tie or full traditional robes," Balla Sidibe once told the writer Mark Hudson. "Only the very top people could get in." It seems fantastical to me that any government apparatchik should have once danced to bands like Orchestra Baobab, but then Dakar clearly isn't Manchester come party conference season.
The pace on Pirate's Choice picks up after Utru Horas with the sensuous, lilting Coumba, which is set to a rumba rhythm. But the next two tracks, Ledi Ndieme M'bodj and the driving Werente Serigne, feel grittier, partly because both are Wolof songs. And it was, in fact, the earthier elements that Orchestra Baobab introduced to their sound that made the group stand out on the local scene, with a line-up that featured at different times Wolof, Malinke, Toucouleur, Nigerian and Moroccan musicians. Barthelemy Attisso originated from Togo. Issa Cissoko and the drummer Mountage Koite came from Mandinka griot families, from Mali and eastern Senegal respectively. Rudy Gomis and Balla Sidibe were from the southern, forested region of the Casamance. The final song on Pirate's Choice, the lovely Soldadi, is apparently based on a folk tune from there. So each member of this cast brought with them their own influences and while I can't pretend to know much about any of these traditions, Pirate's Choice is the gateway.
I do know of one irony in this story, though: Baobab were Dakar's star attraction throughout the 70s, but the kids in the medina increasingly preferred a rawer, funkier sound and in the year that Pirate's Choice was recorded, 1982, a new group emerged from the remnants of the Star Band to take their crown. This was the Etoile de Dakar, led by a young Youssou N'Dour. Five years later, Orchestra Baobab split.
Even this isn't the end: the Pirate's Choice recordings were first released on cassette in Senegal, and then subsequently as a hard-to-find vinyl album in France. It was in a flea market in Paris that World Circuit Records' Nick Gold tracked down his copy, and in 1989 he put it out on CD. Support came from DJs including Charlie Gillett and Andy Kershaw, both hugely influential in the new market for world music. And in 2001, Orchestra Baobab reunited, making a record produced by Nick Gold and Youssou N'Dour, which also featured the Buena Vista Social Club's Ibrahim Ferrer. A world tour included an appearance on the David Letterman Show.
I love the stories that music can tell, and this album can be the start of several journeys. But first: just listen.
New from Colin Stetson on emusic. Two tracks each just over 10 minutes long - Brighternow and I will be OK, as it cost me 84 pence, but I suspect a bit more in the States. On album pricing v track pricing we all win some and lose some!
Comments
Boomkat exclusive live album by Deaf Center.
Personnel: Erik Friedlander, cello; Doug Wamble, guitar; Trevor Dunn, bass; Mike Sarin, drums.
bedroom eyes may be one of my favorite songs of the year. it's certainly one of the most immediate and catchiest songs of the year (maybe because it grabs hold of my 80s nostalgia impulses and my current intrigue with 50s noir-pop).
Colin Stetson: Saxophones, Clarinet
Eric Perney: Bass
Andrew Kitchen: Drums
I'm not ashamed to admit that cheesy though this album is, I love it.
Craig
U2 - Boy
Just started:
Craig
An ambient project consisting of two CDs of tracks by various artists that are all exactly the same length, the idea being that you play more than one of them simultaneously, thus creating 121 possible new tracks.
Started with Naked, moved backwards to this gem. Via Spotify, not cassette.
Take me to the River indeed.....
Craig
No music, all baseball this afternoon!
Hey, you jazz people, please do me a favor. Tell what other tracks to look for that sound like the first song on this free sampler, because I am really liking it. Slinky bass, great vocal, smart lyrics.
and, coincidentally, i just loaded that eno/byrne disc onto my ipod. always loved that album.
This live set shows off Bert Jansch, IMO, at his best. His version of Anji is superb here.
This album is one that the Guardian are reviewing as part of a series on their writer's favourite albums. Normally I'd put the website here for the review, but I'm quoting it in more detail' as this is such a good album and deserves wider recognition for its historical importance
Full review at http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2011/oct/05/pirates-choice-orchestra-baobab?intcmp=ILCMUSTXT9388
New from Colin Stetson on emusic. Two tracks each just over 10 minutes long - Brighternow and I will be OK, as it cost me 84 pence, but I suspect a bit more in the States. On album pricing v track pricing we all win some and lose some!