In heavy rotation chez enrevanche

I've learned more about the blues in two weeks from you than twenty years of B.B. King.
- Curtis Salgado, 20 Years of B.B. King, from Clean Getaway.

Curtis knocked us out of our seats over Saturday morning coffee - thanks, WBGO.



The Triangle area of NC, unbelievably, has two FM jazz radio stations now - WSHA (Shaw University) and WNCU (N.C. Central University).

But I'm glad that the Internets will let us bring WBGO's Saturday morning blues, jazz and classic R&B programming with us.

Thought for the day

"You gotta hear this new box I got, it creates the most offensive noise..." - Robert Quine, speaking to Lester Bangs

I saw my old lover on the street last night

I haven't paid much attention to MetaFilter lately; at one time I spent a substantial amount of time and energy there.

Every now and then, though, I see an FPP that knocks me out of my socks.

Like this one: Delta Blues O.G.'s. Just click it.

From but one of the many links there - Hound Dog Taylor's "Wild About You Baby":

Freddie Hubbard, RIP

Jazz legend Freddie Hubbard died yesterday, at the untimely early age of 70.

Mr. Hubbard had a long and very prolific career, and the selection that follows--recorded in 1962, when Mr. Hubbard was in his early twenties--is by no means meant to denigrate his later work. But it really, really cooks.

This clip (an excerpt, unfortunately) is Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, playing the Bobby Timmons-penned classic Moanin', featuring Freddie Hubbard on trumpet; Art Blakey, drums; Wayne Shorter, tenor saxophone; Curtis Fuller, trombone; Cedar Walton, piano; and Reggie Workman, double bass.

Southern cooking

Meet Sir Shambling:

Due to Sir Shambling’s age, weight and general physical condition the emphasis here is on the slower side of things – not just by way of personal preference for those gritty ballads but also to act as a counter-weight to all the Northern soul and dance sites that exist. And while the great names of Southern soul will all feature here, so will a lot of lesser known artists. Again not just for the thrill of the obscure, but because so many rarer performances deserve to be valued and appreciated properly.

So the aim of the site is to attempt to bring this wonderful music to as wide an audience as possible. But while words and pictures can help this process the best method is obviously to listen to the tracks described here. So highlighted throughout the individual artist and article pages are soundclips of the best tracks concerned. These sound files are not digital copies of recorded works but considerably downgraded representations of the sounds, in lossy, gloriously low-fi MP3 format. The aim of these is to demonstrate the sounds, in order to promote the interest in this music and consequently promote the buying of original copies of the recordings, on vinyl or on CD. They are not meant to, and their low quality does not permit them to, serve as a replacement for the original recordings. Sadly as we all know there is a problem with sharing music via the Net. My own personal view is that the widest possible exposure to music is the best way to keep it alive, to promote interest in the artists themselves and to generate activity in the legitimate reissue business – and I could quote several examples of this taking place, so the soundclips are designed to do just that.

Like blond highlights in the hair of a third rate soccer player, scattered amongst the articles are discographies of sorts. Help with these would be most appreciated.

Welcome To Sir Shambling's Web Site!

Related:

• Artist Index @ Sir Shambling
• Article Index @ Sir Shambling

Freedom is a term of art with the specific contextual meaning of "nothing left to lose"

Over at Pencil Roving, Carrie has found a very amusing scholarly article about judges citing popular music lyrics in their opinions.

Rest in peace

“I was out to destroy the audience. I wanted to destroy 'em, just make the toughest dude in the crowd pat his foot. I'd find a groove to get 'em by watching feet, and once I got one guy moving, I'd start working on the dude sitting next to him.” - Bo Diddley

The sentimental mainstay of a million down-market karaoke bars

Jerome White Jr., born and raised in Pittsburgh, PA, is an unlikely enka star in Japan:

...[t]hanks to the records, videos and cassette tapes played by his Japanese-born grandmother... he got hooked on a melodramatic genre of Japanese folk balladry called enka. With no idea what the lyrics meant, he started singing it in fractured Japanese when he was 5.

As far as anybody in the music industry knows, Jero is the first African American to sing this shamelessly maudlin music for a living. Enka wallows in heartache. Accompanied by over-the-top orchestration, it is usually sung by an aging Japanese performer (male or female) in a kimono. Suicide is nearly always a viable option in its ballads of unrequited love, hopeless love, cheating love and relentless rain.

Enka became popular as a bathetic balm for the hard years that followed World War II. The Japanese sponged it up as they rebuilt their country into an industrial colossus. Enka was the sentimental mainstay of a million down-market karaoke bars. Until Jero burst upon the popular music scene here in February, it was also a musical genre that had lost much of its buzz. It had the unhip odor of Elvis ballads in his years of white jumpsuits and belly fat. Most of the people who sang enka were double or triple Jero's age, as were most of the people who listened to it.

A Far Cry From Home (Washington Post, 28 May 2008)

College towns won't be quite the same

This is sad:

You need a college, of course, but that's not the only ingredient in a good college town. You need quirky bookstores. Coffee shops - preferably not all chains. A diner. An artsy cinema. A dive bar.

There's one other thing you need, and it's getting harder to find: a local record store. The kind of place with poster-covered walls, tattoo-covered customers, and an indie-rock aficionado at the cash register, somebody in a retro T-shirt who helps you navigate the store's eclectic inventory.

A few years ago on just one block of Chapel Hill's Franklin Street, the main drag in what's been called America's ideal college town, four or five such places catered both to locals and University of North Carolina students.

But with the demise of Schoolkids Records, the last one is gone. Schoolkids had planned to gut it out through March, but couldn't even make through its final week and shut down Saturday. It's just the latest victim in an industry hit by rising college-town rents, big-box retailers, high CD prices, and - most importantly - a new generation of college students for whom music has become an entirely online, intangible hobby they often don't have to pay for.

In college towns across the USA, record stores bite the dust (News and Observer/Associated Press)

The quirky bookstores will be next to go. Similar dynamics are slowly squeezing the life out of independent booksellers, although they may hang on a little longer.

The genius of the independent music store/bookstore is that you have hardcore geeks curating the inventory of items for sale, and you find brilliant little gems in the rough that you likely never would have encountered otherwise.

The foundation of my record collection, and to some extent my musical taste, was formed by purchases made at Schoolkids in Chapel Hill and Raleigh and Poindexter Records in Durham.

I am as guilty as anyone of using Amazon for a lot of my "commodity" book and music purchases. I guess that blogs will, to some extent, fill the gap created by the demise of the independent store owners with eclectic tastes, but it definitely feels like the end of an era.

New York City retains a very few independent bookstores and collector-focused music stores, but I don't know how much longer they can hold on.

Church choirs and karaoke?

Last August Deke Sharon, founder of the Contemporary A Cappella Society, created a league for recovering singers, with some 25 groups across the country. “Five thousand collegiate a cappella singers graduate every spring,” he said. “What are their options? Church choirs and karaoke.”

Perfect Tone, In A Key That's Mostly Minor (New York Times, 22 March 2008)

I can neither confirm nor deny that I was once involved with collegiate a cappella singing.

This is your brain on jazz

It would come as no surprise to the late saxophonist and improvisational master John Coltrane, but when accomplished jazz musicians play free-form, their brain activity suggests a release of self-expression from conscious monitoring and self-censorship.

Such neural activity may lie at the heart of musical improvisation and perhaps other improvisational feats, propose auditory scientist Charles J. Limb of Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore and neurologist Allen R. Braun of the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders in Bethesda, Md.

"What we think is happening is that when you're telling your own musical story, you're shutting down neural impulses that might impede the flow of novel ideas," says Limb, himself a trained jazz saxophonist.

Riff Riders: Brain scans tune in to jazz improvisers (Science News, 8 March 2008)

Fascinating article. They had to design a foldable, nonmetallic keyboard that would fit into an MRI machine, and then they did live brainscans of musicians as they played improvisationally:

The part of the frontal brain that has been linked to planning and self-censorship saw a marked decline in activity. At the same time, activity spiked in a small frontal structure that has been linked to being able to tell a story about oneself.

In heavy rotation: eMusic

I love eMusic.

eMusic caters to music lovers of all types in the underserved 25-54 demographic. It does so by cultivating a vast catalogue from the world’s top independent labels that spans every conceivable musical genre, by offering unrivaled music discovery tools and by providing tracks in a high bit rate (192K VBR) MP3 format with no DRM. It all adds up to a pro-consumer experience that gives subscribers the ultimate in flexibility, and just as importantly, ample opportunities to discover new, exciting music.

For a flat fee, you can purchase a package of downloads every month (I pay $19.99 for 75 tracks every month, or 27 cents a download for those of you too lazy to do the math at home; cheaper and more expensive plans are available for those who want to download less, or more, respectively.) One of the best features of eMusic is a preference matching engine that tracks what you download and suggests music you might like, based on what other users who have downloaded similar stuff are listening to.

Unfortunately for me, eMusic doesn't have an affiliate model, because I've certainly convinced a lot of people to try it; fortunately for you, they have a "get 50 downloads free" trial plan that you can check out for yourself.

Some recent eMusic finds, currently getting heavy airplay on iTunes at home, at work, and in transit:

• Ze Records has reissued Was (Not Was)'s "Out Come The Freaks," a compilation of their work from the early 1980s complete with remixes and bonus tracks.
• I've become very familiar of late with the gypsy-punk stylings of Gogol Bordello and the semi-deranged world music of Manu Chao.
  
• The jazz section is just tremendous and features some wonderful live recordings. In recent weeks, I've download Bud Powell (At the Blue Note Cafe, 1961); Sarah Vaughn (Live at the 1971 Monterey Jazz Festival); Thelonious Monk (Live in Paris); and Louis Armstrong (at a much earlier Monterey Jazz Festival, in 1958.)
• There are some delightful oddities, too. Last year, Lou Reed released an ambient music album called "Hudson River Wind Meditations." I've never seen it any place but eMusic.
  

Malignant symphony

Berger has been working with cancer researchers and mathematicians on non-invasive ways to detect cancer. Instead of doing a biopsy, you can do things like medical [sic] resonance imaging, also known as MRIs. But the problem is that MRIs give you so much information, it's hard to know what to do with it. In a visual form, it's virtually impossible to separate the important data from the meaningless stuff.

So, Berger assigned different sounds to different data points. "Imagine there's an orchestra of one hundred players, and each of those points is mapped to one of those orchestra players," he says. Essentially, he's creating a symphony based on the information contained in the cells. And our ears can tell the difference between a benign symphony, which is a low, pulsing beat...

And then there's a tinnier, more bell-like, malignant symphony...

The Sound of Cancer, and Golf - Weekend America (American Public Media)

Did Scottish people invent gospel music?

The church elder’s reaction was one of utter disbelief. Shaking his head emphatically, he couldn’t take in what the distinguished professor from Yale University was telling him.

"No," insisted Jim McRae, an elder of the small congregation of Clearwater in Florida. "This way of worshipping comes from our slave past. It grew out of the slave experience, when we came from Africa."

But Willie Ruff, an Afro-American professor of music at Yale, was adamant - he had traced the origins of gospel music to Scotland.

The distinctive psalm singing had not been brought to America’s Deep South by African slaves but by Scottish émigrés who worked as their masters and overseers, according to his painstaking research.

[...]

The academic began researching at the Sterling Library at Yale, one of the world’s greatest collections of books and papers. He found records detailing how Highlanders had settled in North Carolina in the 1700s. "I found evidence of slaves in North Carolina who could speak only Gaelic. I also heard the story of how a group of Hebrideans, on landing at Cape Fear, heard a Gaelic voice in the dialect of their village. When they rounded the corner they saw a black man speaking the language and assumed they too would turn that colour because of the sun. When I made these connections, I thought: ‘That’s it, I’m going to the Hebrides."

Black music from Scotland? It could be the gospel truth (Scotland on Sunday/The Scotsman)

(hat tip to brautigan @ MetaFilter... be sure to read his post, which includes links MP3s of the referenced song styles and many good comments)

Most popular tracks

New music, currently in heavy rotation chez enrevanche:

• Dashboard Confessional, The Shade of Poison Trees
  
  Emo power-pop from singer-songwriter-guitarist Chris Carrabba.
  
  
• Gilles Peterson (compiler), Gilles Peterson Digs America Vol 2
  
  How meta: Chap, the best music curator of my acquaintance, turned me on to Gilles, a DJ and music curator par excellence. An eclectic collection of R&B, dance and funk.
  
  
• Konono No. 1, Live at Couleur Cafe
  
  Bash-you-over-the-head big-city African party music from Kinshasa's best 12-piece band. Should be played loud. If you've never heard an amplified thumb piano (ikembe), you don't know what you're missing; Congotronics, an earlier album, is the one to start with.
  

A history of progressive rock

Strawberry Bricks: a history of progressive rock from 1967-1979.

Hat tip: deVille

Get up offa that thang

Cobb and his readers have determined the one hundred funkiest songs of all time.

Well it's all here. The results are in. Our little corner of the world within earshot of this blog has spoken and we have finally compiled the 100 greatest funk songs of all time. Without further ado, here are the results.

Cobb: Let There Be Funk

Music Meme

A really fun iPod shuffle meme from Cobb:

INSTRUCTIONS:
1. Put your music player on shuffle.
2. Press forward for each question.
3. Use the song title as the answer to the question even if it doesn’t make sense. NO CHEATING!

How do you feel today?
So Real - Jeff Buckley

What’s your outlook on life?
Find my baby - Moby

What does your family think of you?
Piggies - The Beatles

What do your friends think of you?
A Night In Tunisia (Take 5, Master) - Charlie Parker

What do strangers think of you?
Relaxin' at Camarillo - Charlie Parker

[Note: Camarillo was a state mental hospital in California where Parker was committed involuntarily for a period of time. - bc]

What do your exes think of you?
Lady Cab Driver - Prince

How’s your love life?
Ain't That Love - Ray Charles

How will your love life be in the future?
Living In The Future - John Prine

Will you get married?
Games Without Frontiers - Peter Gabriel

Are you good at school?
Jungleland - Bruce Springsteen

Will you be successful?
The Nearness of You - Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong

What song should they play on your birthday?
Groovin' High - Dizzy Gillespie

What song should they play at your graduation?
Think of Me - Buck Owens

The Soundtrack of your life?
Illumination - Thievery Corporation

You and your best friends are?
Lead a Normal Life - Peter Gabriel

Happy times:
The Hymn (Take A Master) - Charlie Parker

Sad times:
Goin' Away Blues - Big Joe Turner

Every day:
My Favorite Things - John Coltrane

For tomorrow:
Long, Long, Long - The Beatles

For you:
Jesse James - Bruce Springsteen

What does next year have in store for me?
Carvin' The Bird - Charlie Parker

What do I say when life gets too hard?
Crayon Sun - Latin Playboys

What song will I dance to at my wedding?
Back at the Chicken Shack - Jimmy Smith

What do you want as your career?
One Last - Sufjan Stevens

Your favorite saying?
You're The Top - Louis Armstrong

How will I die?
Joogie Boogie - Dizzy Gillespie

"Pearls before breakfast"

What happens when you put a world-class violinist, playing a Stradivarius, at a Metro stop during morning rush hour?

As it turns out, not all that much.

This little detail, though, is very telling:

There was no ethnic or demographic pattern to distinguish the people who stayed to watch Bell, or the ones who gave money, from that vast majority who hurried on past, unheeding. Whites, blacks and Asians, young and old, men and women, were represented in all three groups. But the behavior of one demographic remained absolutely consistent. Every single time a child walked past, he or she tried to stop and watch. And every single time, a parent scooted the kid away.

Pearls Before Breakfast - Washington Post, April 8, 2007

I can relate to the D.C. commuters who "didn't see" violinist Joshua Bell as he busked in L'Enfant Plaza Station. The *place* where art is happening isn't irrelevant, and very little can penetrate through the fog of my morning commute on the New York City subway.

Getting from point A to point B at rush hour is kind of a cross between meditation and a martial arts exercise, and in fact, it would likely take a threat to my safety to snap me out of my morning routine:

• Up early, feed the animals, make coffee, walk the dogs, answer e-mails, shower, shave and dress, kiss my wife on the way out the door.
  
• Be on the subway platform by 8:15
• Skim the headlines in AM New York or Metro (hey, I'm a Times reader, but those little free tabloids are cannily designed to be perfect for commuters)
• Take the express train to Chambers Street, switch to the local and get off at South Ferry
  
• Stop for a takeout breakfast on the way in to the office.
  

I start perceiving things around me again as I settle in at my desk, greet my co-workers and start thinking about what I'm going to do that day.

Kickin' out the jams

In heavy rotation chez enrevanche, on CD player, iTunes, iPod and just generally in the hippocampus...

Ladies and gentleman, live from the Grande Ballroom in Detroit, Michigan, on Halloween Eve in the year of our Lord 1968, it's the MC5.

Ur-metal, and especially ur-punk.

1968, people.

More recent CDs getting frequent airplay at our place:

• The Little Willies, "The Little Willies" (2006) - Texas swing by-way-of-New-York-City side-project band for a number of musicians, the most famous of whom is Norah Jones. They tend to focus, in their recordings and live performances, on reverent, virtuosic covers of country standards (from Rose and Acuff to Kris Kristofferson and Townes Van Zandt.... and, of course, Willie Nelson) but they occasionally record original music, too.


• Rickie Lee Jones, "The Sermon on Exposition Boulevard" (2006) - Music inspired by Lee Cantelon's "The Words" project, a modern-language rendering of the words of Christ. (See also: The Words Online.)


• Guy Clark, "Workbench Songs" (2006) - More polished diamonds from the best singer-songwriter working today in any genre. Thoughtful, engrossing, you couldn't and wouldn't change a word he sings or a lick he plays.