Zombie Headphones

It's Gonna Take a Miracle

2008-02-28T17:59:00.000-08:00

If all Sunday strips were this opaque, I might actually read the funny pages. Also I really like Mandrake the Magician, almost as much as Merlin the Magician (whose Wikipedia article, not coincidentally, I wrote).

Oh, apropos of that:

"Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolor disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life?"

For a couple weeks, there's been this rocksteady tune been itching at my brain something furious and I couldn't remember what the fuck it was. It drove me crazy. Seriously, one day I came home from work at 7 and the only thing I did for the rest of the night was try to find out what the hell it was. I went to bed frustrated. Then today, when I wanted to share this Ken Boothe song I've been digging, there it was! Duh, that's right! "Moving Away"! It was also a Ken Boothe song! (I'd thought it was called "Losing You") So I uploaded that too, and a Uniques song that's also one of my favorites right now.

Ken Boothe - Moving Away
Ken Boothe - It's Gonna Take a Miracle
The Uniques - My Conversation

2007-08-23T11:35:00.000-07:00

So it wound up that I am more or less DJ'ing my Aunt Dot's memorial party thing. The editorial decisions are awkward, probably because it's tough to judge the tenor of the thing before it happens. I should probably be prepared with several playlists. One of the few dictates I've gotten was that it should probably be kinda Sinatra-heavy, which, hey, is no problem for me. It's what I'd want.

I guess this post isn't about anything really. I'm just awake and listening to music, and I just felt like posting some songs I really like but have discarded as unsuitable for one reason or another. Mostly because they're depressing. But I like depressing songs. Or maybe because they're too solipsistic, being more about me than anything else.

Frank Sinatra - The Night We Called it a Day

Frank Sinatra - I'll Be Around

Frank Sinatra - Someone to Watch Over Me

Frank Sinatra - Stormy Weather

Frank Sinatra - When I Take My Sugar to Tea

Ray Charles - Cry

Ray Charles - I Wake Up Crying

Billy Eckstine - Bewildered

Billie Holiday - Easy Living

Louis Armstrong & Ella Fitzgerald - Dream a Little Dream of Me

Blossom Dearie - Like Someone in Love

Blossom Dearie - Someone to Watch Over Me

Doris Day - Close Your Eyes

all files zipped together

2007-08-18T11:30:00.000-07:00

Somehow, despite actually being the son of a preacher man, I've never been able to parley this fact into any action. Maybe I didn't try hard enough, or perhaps being the spawn of Christian schizophrenia isn't as sexy as it used to be. By the time I was dating, my dad's pulpit days were more or less post hoc, ergo propter hoc anyway.

Anyway, it's a waste of my time to post the Dusty Springfield version of this song because everyone has it, right? Right.

Bobbie Gentry - Son of a Preacher Man

The Gaylettes - Son of a Preacher Man

Eddie Jefferson - Son of a Preacher Man

Mavis Staples - Son of a Preacher Man

Siouxsie & the Banshees - Bring Me the Head of the Preacher Man

I'm especially fond of the Gaylettes version, although I must admit I've got quite a reggae fixation these days.

2007-07-12T09:30:00.000-07:00

Walking home, I was just thinking how lucky I was to have not gotten rained on despite the flash-flood that occurred while I was on the train, when I got hit with this tidal wave, and consequently soaked to the bitter bone, by two seventeen year old dicks in an Acura, who actually stopped and backed up to taunt me. In the seven or eight seconds I had available to me to retaliate I could only summon a dripping, fangless, "Fuck you, cocksucker," when only seconds later it occurred to me that the optimum response would have been to smash a bottle of beer or the jar of spaghetti sauce I'd just bought for dinner on the side of their car. Or something similarly brake-inducing. I'm no Evander Holyfield, but they were both tiny children and I'm confident that any grievous bodily harm resulting from a physical confrontation would not have been my own. I've never been particularly attached to the idea of a fair fight, so two weedy high-schoolers would be just my speed. Alas! my reaction time was too slow, and they sped off, likely to menace other harmless but potentially psychopathic pedestrians, leaving me grumbling like a Scooby Doo villain.

On the other hand, the melody of this song has been making me happy all day, when I should be exhausted and miserable (considering I only slept for about 75 minutes last night):

Linda Scott - I've Told Every Little Star

So the Neville Brothers were in Prospect Park today

2007-06-14T23:59:00.000-07:00

The Neville Brothers - Tell it Like it is (the white dude is Gregg Allman, I think)

The Neville Brothers kicked fucking ass. And even though the crowd kinda sucked, it was still a killer show.

The set was heavy on crowd-pleasing covers, which is cool. They hit their stride around the second song Aaron sang (which were too few), a soul-stirring take on the Sam Cooke classic "A Change is Gonna Come" (the first couple songs were Meters stuff like "Fire on the Bayou"). Then there was Stephen Stills' "Love the One You're With", Bill Withers' "Use Me", Rod Stewart's "Drift Away", Marvin Gaye's "What's Goin' On?", and two or three Professor Longhair tunes and NOLA classics like "Big Chief" (I guess most recognizable as a Lily Allen sample these days). And of course the Neville/Linda Ronstadt (minus the Ronstadt) chestnut "I Don't Know Much" (which I've never really cared for) and a truly sublime, show-closing "Amazing Grace".

As I expected the instrumental stuff and the stuff Art Neville sang was very, very good, and the stuff Aaron sang was so incredible it would pull your heart out and show it to you like a Mortal Kombat fatality. (Who was that anyway, Johnny Cage?) And even though it was a completely irrational hope, I clung to the idea that they might do a bizarrely unseasonal "Please Come Home for Christmas", but no.

The crowd was a mixed bag. A lot of folks were just there for a picnic, with the free music an added bonus. So a lot of people around me were just hanging out chatting, or playing with their yuppiespawn, or being disgusting hippies with hummus smeared in their beards and massaging the fat backs of their gross, busted girlfriends. After a while I wanted to start picking up children by their ankles and bashing their brains out on the nearest tree, but I moved a little further up the hill where more people were actually interested in watching the show and that was better.

Rev. Cleophus Robinson & The Loving Sisters - Won't We Have a Time

2007-06-11T10:46:00.000-07:00

Am I still awake?

2007-06-02T10:47:00.000-07:00

All four files zipped up

Alfed Lewis - Friday Moan Blues

The Monarchs - Friday Night

The Specials - Friday Night, Saturday Morning

Them featuring Van Morrison - Friday's Child

2007-05-31T10:48:00.000-07:00

Hey folks! Remember me? Sorry I haven't been posting. Not that I've been busy, I'm the most indolent cat I know, I've just been acquiring music far faster than I can process it. I've been struggling to find time to listen and tag and sort everything with which I've been filling my hard drive. And the iTunes playlists for future mixtapes I've been compiling for everyone I know have spiraled out of control.

So, with all this, I haven't had much calm space to sit down to think of things to share. And I'm still kind of dazed by this month's haul, so yeah, no real revelations today either. Just some songs I've been digging, going by ABCs. Which I guess is enough. For now.

Also, I'm trying out MediaFire for file sharing. Let me know if it sucks.

Letters A-M in one zip file

Alton Ellis - I Can't Stand It
Lately I've been going to the apartment of my friend Chris--who has more CDs than most New York record stores--and filling up a duffel with as many CDs as my back and shoulder can bear. One of the areas I attacked first was his old reggae stuff, and I wound up with fifty discs of Trojan Records goodness. This is one of my favorites.

Benny Spellman - If You Love Her
Can't think of anything to say, other than this is great and you're dumb if you don't like it.

Carmel - Rockin' On Suicide
So I just discovered these cats. They're sort of soul/jazz/lounge...I could keep adding slashes and genres but it probably isn't going to make any more sense until you listen to this, which has kind of a British big-band sound with a dash of early 80s punk attitude and a hot chick (i.e. Carmel) singing.

David Ruffin - Put a Little Love in Your Heart
A couple weeks back, was asking me one of his typical Mordicai questions, "You're making a shitty action movie and you have to pick a song to soundtrack that meet-cute scene where the camera slo-mo pans along the body of the super hot, super slutty romantic lead, probably sweaty and mostly unclothed...what song do you pick?" And I blurted out the first thing that came to mind, this song, which is probably the worst idea that's ever come out of my mouth (or not; I've had some doozies). But I love this song so much it seems to me the answer for most questions. It's one of those "instant happiness" tunes.

The Equals - Baby Come Back
Okay, so, Eddie Grant? The guy who sang the hilarious/awful/awesome "Electric Avenue"? Before he was that dude, he was the lead singer for the Equals, a Brit/Carib 60s mod rock quartet that only made a few songs, but the ones they did were catchy as hell. This song pings around in my head a lot.

Freddie McKay - So Long, Farewell
More Trojan reggae.

George Jones - Three's a Crowd
There are certain kinds of music that I'm really into, but that don't often find a way onto the mix CDs I make for one reason or another. Avant-garde jazz (too inaccessible), historical pre-war blues (too esoteric), death metal (hahahhaah, you listen to death metal?), &c. &c. Country is like that, only I don't really have a good reason for it. But I sure love this George Jones track. Hell, George Jones, period.

The Honeys - The One You Can't Have
This should be the title of my biography, should someone decide such a sallow pamphlet is even worth the keystrokes. Both for reasons of factual accuracy and because I can never get an earful of sixties girl groups. My appetite for the stuff is bottomless.

Iggy Pop - The Passenger (live)
Have you all heard that that kid who played Frodo in Lord of the Rings is going to play Iggy Pop in the new Iggy biopic?

Joe Tex - Be Cool (Willie is Dancing with a Sissy)
So you probably all know Joe Tex from Reservoir Dogs; he's the guy who sang "I Gotcha!", the song that's on when they're kicking the crap out of the cop. (I think; I haven't seen it since before Tarantino was a superstar.) He made some really funky soul albums in the sixties, but like a lot of dudes fell prey to the lure of disco in the 1970s, and this song comes from one of his more disco-ized records. Joe has just figured out that the girl his pal is dancing with is maybe probably a guy ("ain't no girl got an adam's apple like that!"), but he warns his other friends to KEEP QUIET. Why? Because some of those sissies pack razors. Don't spook the sissies man, they're like grizzly bears. Back away slowly and quietly!

Keith Richards - Please Please Me
This is just a drunken Keith Richards and an acoustic guitar doing a short Beatles cover. It's kind of like when you were a drunk teenager and passing a guitar around and playing songs with your friends and screwing up most of the song, except even plastered out of his skull Keith Richards is still 10,000 times more brilliant than any guy who ever came to your house to drink.

Lyle Ritz - Lulu's Back in Town
I'm usually pretty opposed to kitsch. Quirky ukelele jazz from the 1950s? Oh man, even on Bizarro world that can't be any good. But I picked up this Lyle Ritz record (How About Uke?) and I totally could not stop playing it. It has a loping, almost goofy sweetness that somehow falls short of being plastic and puerile (like lounge music) and is just disarming instead. It also sounds really familiar, and I suspect it (or something very much like it) has been used in a comedy I've seen recently (Arrested Development?)

Mahmoud Ahmed - Bemen sebeb letlash
This is from the Ethiopiques series of Ethiopian music compilations from the sixties and seventies, some of the discs of which are even too esoteric for me. But this stuff here is just right. Mahmoud Ahmed is supposedly the James Brown of Ethiopia. Which is really only true if you think James Brown makes crazy hypnotic snake-charmer groove music with a bunch of zombies. And most old Ethiopian music is like this too. What the fuck is in the water over there? Oh yeah, terrifying intestinal parasites.

2007-04-13T10:50:00.000-07:00

And today's official song, ladies and gentlemen, is:

Earl Gaines - It's Love (24 Hours a Day)

2007-03-28T10:51:00.000-07:00

I'm generally pretty content with my singleness. Dating is a drag, and inventing reasons to meet new people oozes desperation, and I've got a dog, so, you know. Normally I'm pretty okay with it. You know what makes me feel lonely, though? Grapefruit. Right now the grapefruits I'm getting from my fruit stand are, without hyperbole, some of the best, sweetest fruit I've ever had in my life, and I've been buying them in bushels. I usually have a couple a day. But it's the first one that gets me. Rolling out of bed and into the kitchen to halve a grapefruit for breakfast? It's such a two-person thing. I can certainly eat both halves, happily, that's not the point. When sectioning a grapefruit, you feel like you should be sectioning one half for yourself, one for someone else, bringing it back to bed before they get up. Bringing someone sweet grapefruit in bed is nice. I dunno. Maybe it's just that spring is in the air.

And of course soul music vibrates just the right heartstrings when you're feeling like Mr. Pitiful. Here's some soul tunes I've been digging heavily these past few weeks. The Aaron Neville tune especially.

Aaron Neville - Wrong Number (I am Sorry, Goodbye)

Bill Withers - Hope She'll Be Happier (live)

Eddie Holman - Four Walls

Irma Thomas - Gone (live)

Jimmy Holiday - The Turning Point

April Young - Steady Boyfriend

Actually, "Steady Boyfriend" just put me in a pretty terrific mood. Thanks, music!

2007-03-03T10:52:00.000-08:00

Spent most of today doing my weekly (almost daily at this point) trawl through the good music blogs. Nothing much caught my ear until I heard this song:

Amy Winehouse - Rehab

Which, okay wow. Am I the last person to hear about this chick?

I generally can't be bothered to give a flying fuck about what's going on in soul/R&B, since almost all of it is garbage after, oh, 1980 or so. (Man, whatever happened to black music?) But this song hit me just the right way (and not just because of my St. Jerome's bender last night), so it figures its by a 23 year old white Jewish Brit.

She's like what if Macy Gray was actually good. And she also wins points with me for being a hot mess in the British tabloids, doing things like heckling Bono ("Shut up! I don't give a fuck!") at awards ceremonies.

Okay, she does over-embellish the melody sometimes, but pretty much everyone oversings like that nowadays, so I can let it slide. To her credit, she shows a little more restraint than her contemporaries.

Amy Winehouse "Rehab" live at the Brit Awards

more YouTube links from some acoustic rehearsals or radio station performance or something:
Rehab (I particularly like this version)
You Know I'm No Good
Love is a Losing Game

2007-02-22T10:53:00.000-08:00

I stayed up late last night making mix CDs for people, but when I woke up this morning I remembered that our UPS is out at work so I can't send anything for a few days. Decided to post some songs in the mean time. In the remotest hour of the night, my sleepy brain was just randomly picking a bunch of songs I'm really into, but now in the cold blue light of day I'm looking at my song selection and I seem to have chosen tunes in a peculiar spirit of romantic pessimism. Yeah, what. They're all awesome, so get on that.

The Gems - I Can't Help Myself

Linda Scott - I've Told Every Little Star

Percy Sledge - You Really Got a Hold on Me

The Honeys - The One You Can't Have

Chet Baker - I Fall in Love too Easily

2007-02-12T10:53:00.000-08:00

Nothing much going on tonight. Get home from the gym, ate dinner, log on to the internet, and no one's really updated their livejournals tonight. Get with it, folks, I'm bored!

Anyway, here's a song I'm obsessed with:

Yusef Lateef - Sister Mamie

From Yusef Lateef's Live at Pep's album. I know almost no one on my friends list likes jazz, but, you know, get over it. The droning bass and drum vamp that starts the song just hypnotizes my brain with its sinister power, and then Lateef comes in with a...what the hell is that? An oboe? A stritch? And he's like an atomic eel. Killer.

I just sit here and click play over and over again. Addictive stuff. Evil, addictive stuff.

2007-02-11T10:54:00.000-08:00

I'm preparing a new chronological post, but until then I'm updating with my current obsession, Del Shannon.

Shannon was an early 60s pop singer/songwriter, generally discarded as a mere sub-Beatles teen idol. But his songs generally have a weird, distressed undercurrent of abandonment and loneliness ("Misery") that floats them far above the usual teen-idol fare. Or with songs like "Hats Off to Larry", which is about Del cheering for the guy who broke his ex-girlfriend's heart--and, awesomely enough, Del wants his ex to know that even though her new man has thoroughly broken her, he (i.e. Del) still wants her back. Lesson: don't ever leave me.

He had a few big hits in the mid-60s ("Runaway"), but his tendency towards lyrical heartbreak eventually became full-blown clinical depression and he was ultimately a drunk and a suicide. He's also one of the few male singers to make falsetto sound cool. Check him out.

Del Shannon - Misery

Del Shannon - Hats Off to Larry

Del Shannon - Little Town Flirt

Del Shannon - Do You Want to Dance

Del Shannon - Stranger in Town

Del Shannon - Break Up

2006-12-28T10:54:00.000-08:00

1927

The Jazz Singer opens in October, basically killing silent films forever.

First transatlantic telephone call: NYC to London.

Charles Lindbergh makes the first nonstop solo flight across the Atlantic.

First armored car robbery occurs a few miles outside Pittsburgh.

Saudi Arabia becomes independent of the UK.

NYC: Holland Tunnel opens, linking Manhattan and New Jersey via Atlantis.

born: Eartha Kitt, Sidney Poitier, Steve Ditko (co-creator of Spider-Man)

died: Lizzie Borden

It's everyone's favorite doomed alcoholic cornettist, Bix Beiderbecke, with 20 Songs from 1927

Trumbology
Clarinet Marmalade
Singin' the Blues
Ostrich Walk
Riverboat Shuffle
I'm Comin' Virginia
Way Down Yonder in New Orleans
For No Reason at All
Three Blind Mice
Blue River
There's a Cradle in Caroline
In a Mist
Wringin' and Twistin'
Humpty Dumpty
Krazy Kat
The Baltimore
There Ain't No Land like Dixieland to Me
There's a Cradle in Caroline
Just an Hour of Love
I'm Wonderin' Who

Some 1927 Jazz and Blues (if nothing else, you need the Memphis Jug Band songs)

Edna Winston - Way After One and My Daddy Ain't Come Home Yet
Evelyn Preer - If You Can't Hold the Man You Love
Fletcher Henderson - Livery Stable Blues
Furry Lewis - Good Lookin' Girl Blues
Gertrude Saunders - You Can't Have It, Unless I Give It To You
The Memphis Jug Band - Cocaine Habit Blues
The Memphis Jug Band - Insane Crazy Blues

Anton Webern - Symphony #21

2006-12-14T10:55:00.000-08:00

Stupid weather! Everyone keeps telling me how un-Christmasy it feels because of how gamn hot it is, which is mostly true. But seriously cold fronts, Christmas is like ten minutes from now. If I don't start feeling the season soon, it'll be over already. Where's the Weather Wizard when you really need him?

First Christmas post of the year!

Carla Thomas - Gee Whiz, It's Christmas
Run D.M.C. - Christmas in Hollis
Clarence Carter - Back Door Santa (from which "Christmas in Hollis" derives its distinctive sample)
The Youngsters - Christmas in Jail

1926

2006-09-17T08:14:00.000-07:00

1926

Premiere of "Sam 'n' Henry", a radio program in which the two white performers portrayed two black characters. Most shows revolved around trying to score some pocket dough during the Depression. It was the first major radio appearance of actors Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, who later created a similar but much more popular radio show: Amos 'n' Andy.

Ireland initiates its Committee on Evil Literature, mostly to censor advertisements and crime reporting in newspapers.

Martial law in England declared after workers stage a general strike.

Successful military coups in Poland and Portugal (which actually has two separate coups). Poland gets a president (then a PM), Portugal a dictator.

born: Hugh Hefner, Chuck Berry, Don Rickles, Fidel Castro, John Coltrane

died: Harry Houdini, Rilke

Louis Armstrong - 16 songs from 1926
1. Lonesome Blues
2. Sweet Little Papa
3. Jazz Lips
4. Skid-Dat-De-Dat
5. Big Butter and Egg Man
6. Sunset Cafe Stomp
7. You Made Me Love You
8. Irish Black Bottom
9. Willie the Weeper
10. Wild Man Blues
11. Alligator Crawl
12. Potato Head Blues
13. Melancholy
14. Weary Blues
15. Twelfth Street Rag
16. Keyhole Blues

Bo Weavil Jackson - You Can't Keep No Brown

1925

2006-09-16T11:31:00.000-07:00

1925

Mussolini announces dictatorship over Italy.

High-water mark of this century's crazy backward-Christian mania: Scopes Monkey Trial!

The Sphinx dug out of the mountain of dirt and sand that had buried it for centuries.

NYC surpasses London as the largest city in the world.

Scotch tape invented.

born: Yukio Mishima, Jack Lemmon, Flannery O'Connor, Sammy Davis Jr., Malcolm X, Barbara Bush

died: H. Rider Haggard

Trixie Smith - You Gotta Beat Me to Keep Me

1924

2006-09-14T09:28:00.000-07:00

1924

Genius/morons/wannabe Nietzschean supermen Leopold & Loeb kill a 14-year-old kid for fun, to commit the 'perfect crime.' They are both caught and sentenced to prison. Loeb is seen here confessing to Leopold that he hopes Brit director Alfred Hitchcock makes a movie about it all one day.

Lenin dies. Stalin begins purging rivals.

Hitler begins work on Mein Kampf.

J. Edgar Hoover becomes head of FBI.

NYC: First Thanksgiving day parade held.

Chinese mobster Gee Jon becomes the first man in the country to be executed by lethal gas. As it turns out, the original idea behind gas execution was that prisoners would have a vent in their cells and the cyanide would be pumped in as they slept. When this proved impractical, a dedicated gas chamber was constructed in Carson City, Nevada. They tested it on bedbugs first, then kittens and a stray dog. It worked fine on Gee Jon too.

born: Lee Marvin, Don Knotts, Jimmy Carter, Ed Wood, Rod Serling

died: Kafka

Emery Glen - Fifth Street Blues

Fletcher Henderson - Zip with three songs: Teapot Dome Blues / Copenhagen / Shanghai Blues

1922

2006-09-13T08:10:00.000-07:00

1922

The Irish Free State comes into existence.

First successful insulin treatment of diabetes.

James Joyce's Ulysses first published.

20-ton meteorite lands in Blackstone, Virginia

Benito Mussolini becomes the youngest Premier in the history of Italy.

Ottoman Empire finally abolished.

Vegemite invented.

born: Stan Lee, Charles Mingus, Kingsley Amis, Christopher Lee, Judy Garland, Veronica Lake

died: Ernest Shackleton

William Walton - Façade

[semi-related bonus] Here's James Bernard's 1997 score for 1922's Nosferatu:

Overture: Omens of Nosferatu

1920

2006-09-12T16:27:00.000-07:00

1920

'Human Fly' George Polley scales the outside of NYC's Woolworth Building (pictured above) to the 30th floor, without any equipment or support.

PROHIBITION!

French president Paul Deschanel falls out of a train and is later found wandering along the railroad track, wearing pajamas.

First Negro-League baseball game is held in the U.S.

Joan of Arc canonized as saint.

Adolf Hitler makes first public political speech.

First terrorist bombing of Wall Street: a horse drawn buggy filled with several hundred pounds of dynamite explodes in front of J.P. Morgan bank at 23 Wall Street. Death toll: 39 people, 1 horse.

born: Isaac Asimov, DeForest Kelley, James Doohan, Ray Bradbury, Ray Harryhausen, Frank Herbert

died: Max Weber

Mamie Smith & Her Jazz Hounds - Crazy Blues

1918

2006-09-11T16:45:00.000-07:00

1918

Spanish flu pandemic.

Russia changes its national capital from Petrograd to Moscow.

Magician William Robinson (fakee-Chinee stage name Chung Ling Soo) dies while performing his "catching a bullet" trick. Actually, he does catch it, but with his lung.

Having lost Finland last year, all hell breaks loose for Russia: Latvia, Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia all declare their independence from the empire.

Habsburg empire ceases to exist.

born: Theodore Sturgeon, Mickey Spillane, Spike Milligan, William Holden, Richard Feynman, Jack Elam

died: Claude Debussy

Bela Bartok - The Miraculous Mandarin

1917

2006-09-10T16:46:00.000-07:00

1917

J.R.R. Tolkien puts pen to paper and starts writing his first embryonic works about Middle Earth.

Zimmerman Telegram discovered. U.S. public thinks it's faked. A couple weeks later when everyone figures out it's for real, war is declared on Germany.

Puerto Ricans granted U.S. citizenship.

Pulitzer prize awarded for the first time. None of the books are still in print.

Balfour Declaration: Britain declares its support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

Finland declares its independence from Russia.

First jazz recording (posted below).

born: Ernest Borgnine, Anthony Burgess, Ella Fitzgerald, JFK, Dean Martin, Lash La Rue

died: Auguste Rodin

The Original Dixieland Jass Band - Livery Stable Blues

Erik Satie - Suite au Prelude du Rideau Rouge

Arnold Schoenberg - Verklaerte Nacht

1916

2006-09-09T12:58:00.000-07:00

Battle of Verdun

1916

First successful blood transfusion. (Man, WWI's been going on two years already and they just now figure this out?)

Charles Hatfield, a professional magic rainmaker makes rain, floods San Francisco.

First U.S. air combat mission flown.

New Jersey Shore shark attacks of 1916.

Planned Parenthood founded.

born: Jackie Gleason, Glenn Ford, Kirk Douglas

died: Rasputin (finally)

Gustav Holst - The Planets

Charles Ives - Symphony #4

Don Richardson - Selected Columbia Recordings 1916

1915

2006-09-08T12:59:00.000-07:00

1915

D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation premieres.

U.S. House of Representatives rejects proposal to give women the vote.

Typhoid Mary isolated.

First stop sign in the United States: Detroit, MI.

The cities of Great Yarmouth and King's Lynn in England are bombed by German zeppelins.

Armenian Genocide! Unless you're Turkish, in which case you believe this is a year absolutely nothing of consequence happened.

Theory of Pangea proposed.

Astronomers decide Pluto is a planet.

born: Muddy Waters, Billie Holliday, Orson Welles, Ingrid Bergman, Bob Kane, Frank Sinatra

died: William Willett, inventor of daylight savings time

Claude Debussy - Sonata pour flute

1913

2006-09-04T12:29:00.000-07:00

1913

King George I of Greece assassinated by Grecian anarchist.

NYC: Grand Central Station opens.

16th Amendment makes federal income tax compulsory.

Woodrow Wilson creates the The Federal Reserve.

born: Richard Nixon, Alfred Bester, Tyrone Power, Peter Cushing, Gerald Ford, Robertson Davies, Jesse Owens, Frances Farmer, Burt Lancaster, Hedy Lamarr, Albert Camus

died: Tokugawa Yoshinobu, last shogun of Japan

William McEwan - Will the Circle Be Unbroken?

Anton Webern - Five Orchestral Pieces, op. 10

De Parade

2006-09-04T12:28:00.000-07:00

I'd wanted to go to the West Indian Parade today, but instead I'm stuck at home, filling out mountains of NYPD paperwork and trying to rest up for the orgy of textbook sales that's going to be my life for the next two weeks. Today my life is so lame.

Lord Melody - Carnival Proclamation

We Interrupt Your Regularly Scheduled Broadcast...

2006-08-15T13:43:00.000-07:00

Okay, taking a break from musty historical review, here are some hip-hop body-poppers for your listening pleasure.

I've spun these songs so much in the last few days, I'm sure my dog and my neighbors are thoroughly sick of them, but damn...talk about catchy. The Notorious B.I.G. hook in the Busta song has been looping in my brain almost continuously for the last 36 hours. Both songs are produced by Clipse, or Clinton Sparks, or the Re-Up Crew or whatever the fuck they're called. I haven't really cared enough to parse which identity is responsible for what, but I know they're more or less the same people. It doesn't really matter. Just download and enjoy.

Busta Rhymes with Rah Digga and Spliff Star - Untouchable

Clipse - One Thing

1910

2006-08-14T16:56:00.000-07:00

1910

Jack Johnson knocks the crap out of whiteboy favorite Jim Jeffries. Race riots ensue.

Japan annexes Korea.

The Vatican introduces a compulsory oath against modernism, to be taken by all priests upon ordination.

Mexican Revolution!

born: Akira Kurosawa, Jean Genet

died: Tolstoy, Mark Twain

Charles Ives - Piano Sonata #2, Concord, Mass. 1840-1860

Claude Debussy - Préludes, 2é livre

1909

2006-08-12T11:57:00.000-07:00

1909

NYC: Manhattan Bridge opens.

Ernest Shakleton finds magnetic South Pole.

Teddy Roosevelt's presidential term ends. He immediately leaves for African safari.

U.S. Navy builds base in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

born: James Mason, Errol Flynn, Malcolm Lowry

died: Geronimo

Anton Webern - Sechs stuecke fuer grosses Orchester, op. 6

Rachmaninov - Concerto for Piano & Orchestra #3 in D minor, op. 30

1908

2006-08-09T11:49:00.000-07:00

1908

THE TUNGUSKA EVENT!
(the above photograph is not actually the Tunguska impact, but Castle Bravo, a 1954 United States nuclear bomb test of comparable magnitude)

Mother's Day observed for the first time in the U.S.

First major commercial discovery of oil in the Middle East.

Winston Churchill ordained as a Druid. (not kidding)

Henry Ford first produces his "Model T"

Chicago Cubs win their last World Series ever.

Harry Bensley begins his trip around the world, wearing an iron mask and wheeling an empty baby carriage.

Some kind of "feminist" allows chicks to compete in the Olympic Games for the first time.

born: Jimmy Stewart, Tex Avery, Rex Harrison, Louis L'Amour, Buddy Ebsen, Bette Davis,

died: Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov

Charles Ives - Three Places in New England
I. The "St. Gaudens" in Boston Common (Col. Shaw and his Colored Regiment)
II. Putnam's Camp, Redding, Connecticut
III. 'The Housatonic at Stockbridge
(written 1908; never actually performed until 1930)

Anton Webern - Passacaglia

Len Spencer - Arkansas Traveler

1907

2006-08-08T12:32:00.000-07:00

May 26, 1907 – June 11, 1979

1907

Oklahoma! (The state, not the play)

First and, to this date, only train robbery in Sweden.

Bubonic Plague outbreak in San Francisco.

Hoover vacuum cleaner invented.

born: Caesar Romero, W.H. Auden, Zarah Leander, Katherine Hepburn, John Wayne, Barbara Stanwyck.

died: Edvard Grieg, Huysmans

Béla Bartók - Suite #2 for small orchestra, op. 4, sz. 34

Claude Debussy - Préludes, 1é livre

1906

2006-08-07T10:11:00.000-07:00

1906

San Francisco earthquake!

Otherwise, pretty boring year, except for Teddy Roosevelt: 1) he dedicates the United States' first national monument: Devil's Tower, 2) he receives the Nobel Peace Prize for his intervention in the Russo-Japanese War, and 3) he becomes the first sitting U.S. President to take a diplomatic trip outside the United States (to Cuba).

born: Robert E. Howard, Lon Chaney Jr., Bugsy Siegel, Samuel Beckett, Kurt Godel, Billy Wilder, Dmitri Shostakovich, Luchino Visconti, Otto Preminger

died: Henryk Ibsen

Charles Ives - Central Park in the Dark (my favorite Charles Ives piece; even if you've been taking a pass on most of the classical/modern composer stuff I've been posting, you shouldn't miss out on this one.)

Claude Debussy - Iberia

1905

2006-08-04T12:47:00.000-07:00

1905
(thanks to Einstein, it is our most recent Annus mirabilis)

Debut of Mata Hari

Ex-Governor of Idaho, Frank Steunenberg assassinated by labor union.

Brooklyn Public Library system bans Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer.

born: Tex Ritter, Ayn Rand, Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo, Howard Hughes

died: Jules Verne

Béla Bartók - Suite #1 for full orchestra, op. 3, sz. 3

John Taylor - Medley of Old-Time Reels

1904

2006-08-03T15:05:00.000-07:00

Great Baltimore Fire of 1904 destroys more than 1500 buildings. Death toll: 1

1904

Atrocity-happy Japanese people return to the scene of previous massacres to start the Russo-Japanese War for shits and giggles.

Oh yeah, Belgian atrocities in the Congo. Big year for atrocity.

NYC: Longacre Square renamed Times Square, on behalf of the New York Times. It is used for the first time as a now-traditional mecca on New Year's Eve.

First underground subway in NYC opens (IRT line).

Fire on the steamship General Slocum in the East River kills 1000, mostly children. My great-grandfather receives citation from the mayor for diving in and pulling drowning kids out of the water. Until 9/11, it is the worst disaster in NYC history.

Peter Pan premieres on the stage in London.

born: Cary Grant, Glenn Miller, Robert Oppenheimer, Fats Waller, Count Basie, Jacques Tourneur

died: Anton Chekov

Alessandro Moreschi - Oremus Pro Pontifice / Crucifixus (Get it right here, folks! The only existing sound recording of a real live castrato! Ever wonder what they actually sounded like? As it turns out, they--or Moreschi, at least--sounded a lot like a member of Monty Python impersonating a woman.)

Anton Webern - Im Sommerwind

Arnold Schoenberg - Pelleas und Melisande, op. 5

Claude Debussy - Masques (tres vif et fantasque)

I've Grown Accustomed to My Bourbon

2006-08-01T12:08:00.000-07:00

(All the songs in one 57mb ZIP folder, and a few more that I forgot to upload as single files, like John Coltrane and Paul Quinichette's "Vodka". I can't remember what the rest were)

Peppermint Harris - I Got Loaded

Possibly my favorite song about being drunk, this was the one big hit of Harris' career when it came out in 1951, and led to him cutting a slew of other, highly similar booze songs, none of which were a tenth as good as this. Harris was a protege of Lightnin' Hopkins in his (Harris') early years, and legendarily cut some early singles in an ad hoc studio in a Texas whorehouse. Not this song though.

Louis Jordan - What's the Use of Getting Sober (When You're Gonna Get Drunk Again)

This was Jordan's first #1 hit, going all the way to the top of the Harlem Hit Parade in 1942. Have I mentioned yet how much I like Louis Jordan? Not surprising, he's almost un-unlikeable. In a catalogue jam-packed with catchy and charismatic songs, this one stands out as one of the catchiest and most charming.

Maddox Brothers & Rose - Hangover Blues

It might be evident, or it might not, that I started making this post the day after my birthday party on Friday. Coming to work that next morning? Wow, that really, really sucked.

Miles Davis - Straight, No Chaser

I gave someone "Straight, No Chaser" as a clue in Charades once and people acted like it was a crazy, obscure saying. I guess nobody orders a 'chaser' in bars any more. But the saying's still around, isn't it?

Neil Diamond - Red Red Wine

It's high time I started posting some Neil Diamond. What? Fuck you, Neil Diamond can be pretty awesome.

Nick Cave - Rye Whiskey

Blah blah. I'm getting a little tired of Nick Cave. He's one of those singers whose schtick is so potent and so monotonously unyielding that he's easy to tire of. I burn out on him on a fairly regular basis, but then I go back and listen to Live Seeds and my enthusiasm for him is rejuvenated for at least a few more weeks.

Otis Redding - Champagne and Wine

One of the less-popular and less frequently replayed Otis Redding songs, but that gives it the virtue of freshness. Not that there's anything dated or unfresh about Otis, but if I tried to calculate the number of times I've heard "These Arms of Mine", I'd probably need to use scientific notation to save space.

The Lushes - Drunken Guitar

One of the awesomer tracks from the Las Vegas Grind comilations of 60s garage and novelty-garage songs. You can download all six compilations in their entirety here: Vols. 1 & 2 - Vols. 3 & 4 - Vols. 5 & 6

Zarah Leander - Det Började Med Ett Glas Champagne

Hey, ever wonder what kind of record collection Hitler had? I mean, aside from being a huge Wagner fanboy. I can tell you one thing: lots and lots of Zarah Leander records. The Swedish actress and chanteuse became the #1 film star of the Third Reich by default when Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo fled Europe for the sun and democracy of Los Angeles. Check out this post on the WFMU blog if you feel you need to download a whole album's worth of Leander songs. I did. Pretty neat stuff.

Also, one thing I discovered when making this post is that doing a google image search for "DRUNK" is really not going to take you good places. The first hit was from some place called hotdrunkmoms.com

1902

2006-08-01T12:04:00.000-07:00

1902

Second Boer War.

First movie theatre in the U.S. opens in Los Angeles.

Mount Pelée erupts in Martinique, annihilating almost all of the 36,000 residents of the town of Saint-Pierre.

Antikythera Mechanism discovered.

Teddy Roosevelt becomes first American president to ride in a car.

born: John Steinbeck, Max Ophüls, Meyer Lansky, Khomeini

died: Emile Zola

Joseph Natus - The Fatal Rose of Red

Yeah, just one file today. (How many songs from 1902 do YOU have?) On the plus side, this is the first appearance, in my chronological program, of actual pop music. Really, really old pop music, but still.

1900

2006-07-31T12:07:00.000-07:00

1900

First zeppelin takes to the skies in Germany.

President McKinley places Alaska under military law. We rule the wastes with an iron fist!

Ada Williams, a London "baby farmer", hanged in Newgate Prison.

Boxer Rebellion!

Cuntrag and professional killjoy Carrie Nation demolishes 25 saloons in Kansas.

King Umberto of Italy assassinated (on my birthday!) by an Italian-American anarchist terrorist.

born: Luis Buñuel, Spencer Tracy, Aaron Copland

died: Oscar Wilde, Nietszche

Claude Debussy - Les Chansons de Bilitis

Rachmaninov - Concerto for Piano & Orchestra #2 in C minor, op. 18

The Bloop

2006-07-11T10:57:00.000-07:00

Thanks to my pal Mordicai and the glories of our parallel addiction to Wikipedia, I now have a new mystery to ponder: the Bloop. In 1997, the Equatorial Pacific Ocean Autonomous Hydrophone Array, which "uses U.S. Navy equipment originally designed to detect Soviet submarines", detected the repeated presence of an ultra-low-frequency sound matching the profile of a living creature, but indicating a creature that would have been much, much larger than a blue whale.

"To date there has been no explanation as to what produced the sound."

The Bloop, sped up 16x. (WAV file, 161kb)

Frankly, it's not really much to listen to. Not as good as the numbers stations, at least. Just one of those fascinating internet things I like to have pop up on my iPod shuffle now and then.

also:

Bloopwatch.com!

1898

2006-07-08T13:39:00.000-07:00

1898

U.S. declares war on Spain on April 25. Later, they retcon this date to April 20. Teddy Roosevelt begins 299-day streak of kicking ass.

U.S. annexes Hawaii.

First automobile fatality.

Empress Elizabeth of Austria-Hungary assassinated by Italian anarchist.

Neon discovered.

born: Preston Sturges, Sergei Eisenstein, Bertolt Brecht, George Gershwin, C.S. Lewis.

died: Lewis Carroll.

Charles Ives - Symphony #1

Next stop, 20th century! (I ain't got nothin' for 1899.)

1897

2006-07-06T11:08:00.000-07:00

1897

The Great Consolidation! The City of Brooklyn becomes part of New York City. Obsolete buildings like the one above--the City of Brooklyn's Fire Department Headquarters--are repurposed. (That is now retail space.)

The murder trial of Elva Zona Heaster becomes (probably) the only criminal case in United States history to use testimony from a ghost to secure a conviction.

British Punitive Expedition burns the City of Benin to the ground.

Arctic Balloon Expedition! Everyone dies.

The Boston subway, the USA's first underground metro, opens.

First use of the word "computer" to mean an electronic calculation device.

born: William Faulkner, Douglas Sirk, Sidney Bechet, Frank Capra, Moe Howard.

died: Johannes Brahms

Claude Debussy - Trois Nocturnes

Live and Direct Part II

2006-07-05T11:09:00.000-07:00

David Murray with the Gwo-Ka Masters

More live goodness. I don't have as much info about these tracks as I did for the ones from Vol. 1. A lot of them I just accumulated the way one does when you spend most of your day on the internet.

Fordmadoxfraud's Live and (Mostly) Bootleg Mixtape, Vol. 2

TRACKLIST
1. Buddy Holly - Love is Strange
demo version
2. Iggy Pop - The Passenger
3. Frank Sinatra & Ella Fitzgerald - The Lady is a Tramp
live on Sinatra: A Man and His Music tv special, 1967
4. Sam & Dave - Soothe Me
live 1967
5. PJ Harvey - The Dancer
live 4/23/05
6. Jimi Hendrix - Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart Club Band
7. David Murray & the Gwo-Ka Masters - Gete
live in Switzerland, 8/20/03. This song kicks ass. Thanks to my pal Pangborn for ripping it for me.
8. Shane MacGowan & Christy Moore - Spancill Hill
and this I have to thank my pal Rich for. This is one of my favorite live Shaney songs.
9. Johnny Cash - Unchained
live at Irving Plaza, NYC, 7/9/96
10. John Zorn's Masada with Susie Ibarra and Bill Frisell - unknown song
live at the Knitting Factory, NYC, 4/10/96
11. Killing Joke - Sun Goes Down
12. Radiohead - Wonderwall
not serious
13. Desmond Dekker - 007 (Shanty Town) w/ versions
14. The Beach Boys - God Only Knows
rehearsal tape, 1967
15. Fear - New York's Alright (If You Like Saxophones)
live on Saturday Night Live, Halloween, 1981
16. Bob Dylan - Sloppy Drunk
B.B. King cover, live at the Royal Festival Hall, London, 1964

1896

2006-07-03T10:47:00.000-07:00

1896

Wilhelm Röntgen discovers x-rays.

Battle of Adowa! Ethiopia kicks the crap out of Italy once and for all.

born: Howard Hawks, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Andre Breton, George Burns.

died: Harriet Beacher Stowe, Anton Bruckner.

Antonín Dvořák - The Water Goblin, op. 107

1894

2006-07-01T09:55:00.000-07:00

1894

Royal Greenwich Observatory almost destroyed by French anarchist with a bomb.

Big year for France: Dahomey colonized. Unrelatedly, Sadi Carnot, president of France, is assassinated by an Italian anarchist. South France battered by meteor shower.

Alfred Dreyfus arrested for spying. The Dreyfus Affair begins.

Grace Kimmins establishes the hilariously named Guild of the Poor Brave Things, for disabled boys.

born: Dashiell Hammett, Nikita Khrushchev, Jack Benny, Normal Rockwell, Bessie Smith, Céline, Joseph Roth, e e cummings.

died: Robert Louis Stevenson, Adolphe Sax (inventor of the saxophone).

Claude Debussy - Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune

1893

2006-06-30T08:45:00.000-07:00

1893

World's Fair: The Columbia Exposition

The Panic of 1893. Stock exchange crash.

New Zealand first country in world to grant women's suffrage.

First exclusively African-American high school opens in U.S. Its name? Colored High (not kidding)

SCOTUS declares tomatoes 'a vegetable.'

born: Hermann Göring, Jimmy Durante, Big Bill Broonzy, Lillian Gish.

Antonín Dvořák - Symphony #9, op. 95, "From the New World"

And go here for the Columbia University Orchestra's recording of Dvořák's 8th and 9th symphonies, and also Beethoven's 7th, Brahms' 1st, &c., &c. Lots of good stuff.

1892

2006-06-29T12:42:00.000-07:00

1892

Lizzie Borden chops her family up with an axe.

Ellis Island begins accepting immigrants to the U.S.

Wyoming: Johnson County War

born: J.R.R. Tolkien, Ernst Lubitsch, Gregory La Cava, Mary Pickford, Johnny Dodds, William Powell.

died: Walt Whitman.

Johannes Brahms - Intermezzi

Live and Direct, Part I

2006-06-28T14:48:00.000-07:00

blah blah. blah blah blah blah. blah. blah blah blah. blah blah.

Not much to say today, except: good music below. Git some.

Fordmadoxfraud's Live & (Mostly) Bootleg Mixtape Vol. 1

TRACKLIST
1. Nick Cave - From Her to Eternity
I've always loved this song and this version of it in particular. This is what gave me the idea for this (and the following) mix.
2. Irma Thomas - Gone
Live at the Showboat, New Orleans, 12/26/77
3. The Sex Pistols - God Save the Queen
Live at the Great Southeast Music Hall, Atlanta, GA, 1/5/78
4. Doug E. Fresh & Biz Markie - Let Me Clear My Throat
unknown provenance
5. The Pogues - The Auld Triangle
Brendan Behan song; live at BBC
6. Bruce Springsteen - The Fever
Live at Houston's KLOL-FM, 3/9/74
7. Miles Davis - 'Round Midnight
Live at the Berlin Philharmonic, 11/4/67
8. Prince - Head
Live in Detroit, 1982
9. The Misfits with Joey Ramone - 1969
Stooges cover; October 1998
10. Public Enemy - By the Time I Get to Arizona
Live in Winterthur, Switzerland, 4/9/92
11. The Meters - Hey Pocky Way
Live at the Showboat Lounge, Metairie, LA, 1/22/77
12. Otis Redding - Land of 1000 Dances
unknown European television broadcast, 1967
13. Giles - Live at the Bronze
Oops. I forgot I included this. I guess I'd been drinking a little when I made this mix. This is the song that Giles sings in the dream in Restless, the last episode of season 4 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
14. My Bloody Valentine - Only Shallow
live on the MTV Loom Tour, Vancouver, CA, 7/4/92. This bootleg would be perfect if only the vocals would be a little further up in the mix. I wish I had more MBV records. I wish more MBV records existed.
15. Van Morrison & Bob Dylan - Crazy Love
unknown provenance
16. Henry Threadgill - Gateway
live in the Bronx, 3/3/84

BONUS: for those of you with a taste for free jazz: The Art Ensemble of Chicago - Live in Hamburg, 1977

Boy, What'll You Do Then?

2006-06-27T11:17:00.000-07:00

Here's a rare gem I picked up the other day from Borracho Muchacho. I try not to post stuff I've recently acquired from other blogs, but this song is so great my impulse control is totally shot.

Denise and Company was an all-girl garage-rock band, led by Denise Kaufman, aka Mary Microgram of the Merry Pranksters, Ken Kesey's army of hippies. From what I can tell, they were only together for a short while in 1965. But in that time managed to record at least one totally rocking song, this raw, snotty, sexy slice of garage heaven.

She went on to form the SF band Ace of Cups, a band with a lame, new-age Tarot thing going. Thereafter she became that most frightful of zoological oddities, the aging hippie. Whatever magic she had in 1965 is clearly gone now.

Denise and Company - Boy, What'll You Do Then?

I'm pretty sure the photo above is not actually Denise, but who cares, really.

Spies or UFOs? You Decide.

2006-06-26T12:43:00.000-07:00

One day, Dinosaur Comics reminded us that Numbers Stations exist, and and I realized we needed some. So I sought out The Conet Project, a free source of mp3 recordings of shortwave numbers station transmissions, downloaded about a hundred or so, ripped 'em to CD, and now here we are, listening to them all and cackling with nerdish delight.

If you don't know what numbers stations are, or want a more detailed history than the Wikipedia article gives you, you might want to check out this NPR article, or, to get the gist:

Numbers stations are shortwave radio stations of uncertain origin. They generally broadcast people reading streams of numbers, words, or letters (sometimes using a phonetic alphabet). The voices that can be heard on these stations are often mysterious: mechanically generated; spoken in a wide variety of languages; usually female, but sometimes male or those of children.

Evidence supports popular assumptions that the broadcasts are channels of communication used to send messages to spies. This has not been publicly acknowledged by any government that may operate a numbers station, but in one case, numbers station espionage has been publicly prosecuted by a foreign court.

This track here is a good introduction to what it's all about. Another favorite we have is one titled 'High Pitch Polytone', but which we here like to refer to as Oh My God This is Fucking Awesome. Another one I really like is something I call Frantic Computer Beeping Followed by Vaguely Desperate-Sounding Woman.

The Conet Project
Disc 1
Disc 2
Disc 3
Disc 4

It's Witchcraft

2006-06-26T12:15:00.000-07:00

Hoo boy. I spent all weekend combing my mp3 library and inching closer to finishing the myriad mixtapes I've started for my livejournal pals, and making up new mixtapes to post here in my journal, as an occasional alternative to posts with multiple downloads of single songs. As a consequence, I have a LOT of stuff to post this week. Let's get started.

Fordmadoxfraud's Magic Mixtape Vol. 1 (~91mb)

TRACKLIST
1. The Sonics - The Witch
2. Louis Prima & Keely Smith - That Old Black Magic
3. Eric Dolphy - It's Magic
4. Django Reinhardt - Magic Strings
5. Frank Sinatra - Witchcraft
6. Charles Sheffield - It's Your Voodoo Working
One of my favorite Excello blues songs.
7. Gustav Holst - Uranus, the Magician
8. Exuma - Exuma, the Obeah Man
From one of my favorite artists no one's ever heard of. When you start talking about scary magic musicans, Exuma's near the top of the list.
9. Mohammed El-Bakkar - Bisat El Reeh (Magic Carpet)
10. Sonny Sharrock - Princess and the Magician
11. Van Morrison - Magic Time
12. Art Blakey - The Witch Doctor
13. Ella Fitzgerald - Bewitched
14. Jumpin' Joe Williams & the Red Saunders Orchestra - Voodoo Blues
15. Goblin - Witch
From the Suspira soundtrack.
16. Ladytron - High Rise
from The Witching Hour
17. The Rattles - The Witch
18. Jean Shepard - Under Your Spell Again
Turns out there wasn't much country music in my collection with a sorcerous vibe.
19. Akim - Voodoo Drums
20. Wayne Shorter - Witch Hunt
21. Screamin' Jay Hawkins - I Put a Spell on You
Okay, obvious, I know. I thought about picking a different version; the one by Diamanda Galas, e.g. But this really is the best one.
22. Louis Armstrong - You've Got Me Voodoo'd
23. Albert Ayler - The Wizard
Hell, I could've filled up two mixtapes easily with just the Albert Ayler material that's about magic, wizards, spirits and witches, but I had to narrow it down. Ditto for Sun Ra, but I've decided I'm going to have a separate mix tape for space, devils and demons.

A few people have already told me that this is a dumb idea, as I'm far from the only person in the world who doesn't have broadband. But I think it's time I tried out mixtapes as an effort to give folks more bang for their downloading trouble. (We're all about more bang here at Zombiemusic Labs Inc.)

Enjoy!

1890

2006-06-22T13:02:00.000-07:00

1890

At Auburn Prison, New York, William Kemmler is the first man to be executed by the electric chair, for the hatchet-murder of his commonlaw wife. It doesn't go well. The first shock, lasting seventeen seconds, fails to kill him, and the generator needs quite some time to recharge for a second attempt, during which time Kemmler can be heard pitifully moaning. The second attempt, lasting sixty seconds, works, but reduces Kemmler to a smouldering charcoal briquet. A reporter on the scene said it was "an awful spectacle, far worse than hanging".

Idaho! Wyoming!

Massacre at Wounded Knee.

born: H.P. Lovecraft!, Adolphe Menjou, Ho Chi Minh, Stan Laurel, Agatha Christie, Jelly Roll Morton, Groucho Marx

died: John Jacob Astor III, Vincent Van Gogh

Johannes Brahms - String Quintet #2 in G minor, op. 111

1888

2006-06-21T13:00:00.000-07:00

1888

Jack the Ripper!! The five 'canonical' victims: Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly, murdered. Also Martha Tabram; possible early victim.

Washington Monument opens to the public.

National Geographic Society founded.

Borneo becomes British protectorate.

born: F.W. Murnau, Irving Berlin, Raymond Chandler, Maurice Chevalier, T.S. Eliot, Joe Kennedy, Eugene O'Neill, Knute Rockne, All American

died: Matthew Arnold

Claude Debussy - Deux Arabesques

Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov - Scheherazade, op. 35
I. The Sea and Sinbad's Ship
II. The Kalendar Prince
III. The Young Prince and The Young Princess
IV. Festival At Baghdad. The Sea. The Ship Breaks against a Cliff Surmounted by a Bronze Horseman.

***and here's another recording of Scheherazade by the Peabody Symphony Orchestra (as well as MP3s of tons of other classical works the PSO has recorded)***

1887

2006-06-19T14:46:00.000-07:00

1887

First production of Glenfiddich.

Ethiopia mops the floor with the Italians.

Largest snowflakes ever fall on Fort Keogh, Montana. They are 15 inches (38cm) wide and 8 inches (20cm) thick.

First observation of Groundhog Day.

Earmuffs patented.

Esperanto invented.

Electromagnetism discovered by Heinrich Hertz.

born: Fatty Arbuckle, Marc Chagall, Erwin Schrödinger, Marcus Garvey, Le Corbusier.

died: Doc Holliday.

Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov - Capriccio Espagnol, op. 34

Fun With Peanut Butter

2006-06-19T12:22:00.000-07:00

Here's something I copped from Beware of the Blog last year: video of Iggy & the Stooges live in Cincinatti in 1970. They do "TV Eye" and "1970" and Iggy gets up to hijinks with everyone's favorite sandwich spread. The news announcers narrating the concert are pretty hilarious too.

Iggy & the Stooges - Live in Cincinatti, 1970

1886

2006-06-15T11:53:00.000-07:00

1886

John Stith Pemberton invents Coca-Cola.

Britain, ever-busy, annexes Burma.

born: Al Jolson, Junichiro Tanizaki, Hermann Broch, Ty Cobb, Kid Ory

died: Emily Dickinson, Franz Liszt.

Antonín Dvořák - Slavonic Dances, op. 72

Billy Preston Meets Outa-Space

2006-06-14T12:15:00.000-07:00

Billy Preston
September 2, 1946 – June 6, 2006

Oy, has it really taken me eight days to get around to this?

Billy Preston had been in a coma for more than a year, and last week he finally died from "complications of malignant hypertension".

For a better obit than I can give here, you should go visit Billy's own website. And if you don't know much about him, you should check his bio on Wikipedia, which'll give you a rundown of the necessary details: piano prodigy as a child, got his big break as a pre-teen playing organ for Mahalia Jackson, collaborated with the Rollings Stones, Little Richard, Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, Aretha Franklin, one of only two Beatles sideman to ever get a record-cover credit ("Get Back" was originally released under the name "The Beatles with Billy Preston"), John Lennon and Paul McCartney argued over whether he should be admitted to the band as an official "fifth Beatle" (Lennon was for it, McCartney against), &c., &c.

Billy Preston - Let the Music Play (produced by George Harrison, and also my favorite Billy Preston song. It turns up on a lot of mix CDs I make.)

Billy Preston - Can't She Tell

Billy Preston - John Henry

Billy Preston - Nothing from Nothing

Mahalia Jackson - Then the Answer Came (live) - (I KNOW somewhere I have a 1958 Mahalia live track with a 12-year-old Billy on organ, but I can't find it right now. I'm going to keep looking. As a consolation, here's a young Billy, age 17, also live with Mahalia.)

For more farewells to Billy (and more Billy MP3s, if you dug these), you should check out the recent Billy posts at Monkeyfunk (who beat me to the title I wanted to use for this post, 'It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)'), and The "B" Side, which posts Billy's "He Brought Me Out", Soul Sides ("Little Girl"), Home of the Groove ("Sho Nuff"), Melomaniac (a bunch), Badminton Stamps ("Outa-Space"), Cable and Tweed (a bunch more), et al.

1883

2006-06-14T11:40:00.000-07:00

1883

Krakatoa!!!

NYC: The Brooklyn Bridge opens to traffic on February 24. Six days later, a rumor that the bridge is about to collapse causes a stampede that kills twelve people.

Two great entertainment firsts: The first vaudeville theatre opens in Boston, MA. The first rodeo is held in Pecos, TX.

Death and species extinction of the last quagga.

born: Sax Rohmer, Kafka, Mussolini (on my birthday!), Anton Webern (another composer who'll be popping up here a lot), Douglas Fairbanks, Lon Chaney, Sr.(!)

died: Karl Marx, Ivan Turgenev.

(p.s. - the picture above is NOT Karl Marx)

Johannes Brahms - Symphony #3 in F major, op. 90

Edvard Grieg - Sonata for Cello & Piano in A minor, op. 36

1882

2006-06-13T11:41:00.000-07:00

1882

P.T. Barnum buys Jumbo the Elephant.

Jesse James shot and killed for five grand.

Egypt becomes British protectorate.

Nikola Tesla invents alternating current generator/motor.

born: Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Sigrid Undset, Stravinsky, Samuel Goldwyn, FDR, A.A. Milne.

died: Charles Darwin.

Johannes Brahms - String Quartet #1 in F major, op. 88 "Spring"

1881

2006-06-12T09:59:00.000-07:00

corpses of Tom McLaury, Frank McLaury and Billy Clanton

1881

Gunfight at the O.K. Corral!

Kansas becomes first U.S. state to prohibit ALL alcoholic beverages. (boooo)

Alexander II of Russia assassinated by grenade-throwing anti-Tsarists.

Tunisia becomes French protectorate.

born: P.G. Wodehouse (huzzah!), Pablo Picasso, Bela Bartok (who will shortly be appearing very frequently here), Billy the Kid.

died: Dostoyevsky, Modest Mussorgsky (crap, have I forgetten to post any Mussorgsky? and now he's dead)

Johannes Brahms - Piano Concerto #2 in B flat major, op. 83

1880

2006-06-08T09:58:00.000-07:00

Emperor Norton I

1880

First town in the world gets electric streetlights: Wabash, Indiana.

Ned Kelly hanged.

Born: Tom Mix, Mack Sennett, W.C. Fields, George Herriman, Douglas McArthur, Robert Musil,

Died: George Eliot, and our dear emperor, Joshua Norton.

Antonín Dvořák - Six Mazurkas, op. 56

1879

2006-06-07T09:56:00.000-07:00

1879

Anglo-Zulu War!

NYC: On the former site of 'P.T. Barnum's Monster Classical and Geological Hippodrome', the first Madison Square Garden opens.

Saccharine discovered.

Doc Holiday kills for the first time.

Thomas Edison demonstrates incandescent lighting to the public for the first time, in Menlo Park, NJ.

Born: E.M. Forster, Albert Einstein, Victor Sjöström, Will Rogers, Wallace Stevens.

Died: no one very interesting.

Bedrich Smetana - My Country

1878

2006-06-06T14:27:00.000-07:00

1878

Phonograph patented by Thomas Edison.

Born: Carl Sandburg, Jack Johnson, Lionel Barrymore, Alfred Döblin, Upton Sinclair, STALIN!

Died: Boss Tweed.

Johannes Brahms - Capriccto for Piano in B minor, op. 76 no. 2

Some Albums You Might Just Need to Download

2006-06-03T14:32:00.000-07:00

One thing I like to do when cruising blogs that post full albums is to make lists of Rapidshare URLs so I can go back and download what I want in my own time, without having to wade through months of archives to find a particular post. That is what I did today. I usually make them private or highly filtered posts, because I don't like sharing my sources. It kind of kills the mystique of the guy with the bogglingly large music collection. But I'm going to share this month's list because...well, no good reason.

Tonight is going to be dedicated to me organizing and ID3-tagging my new music downloads, and making mixtapes for my sisters, so I guess I just feel like sharing.

A lot of these files are from Lellebelle and the Rato Records Blog, which are terrific and everyone should really check them out, and Soundsational is occasionally pretty good (though more on the kitsch side).

In case anyone's interested in checking out a broader selection of what's available, you might want to occasionally skim through Realm of X, Ride Your Pony, Down in the Groove, Endless Mike 101, Lysergia (mostly 1960s psychedelia, folk and acid rock), Pinocchio's Easy Listening and Instrumental Corner, Xtabay, Snow Day, Sounds of Champaign (and the archives at the old Sounds of Champaign site might be of interst), Space Debris, Mexicovers, Tam Tam Melodie, Oops Whoops, Quimby and Lounge Tracks.

Generally, these blogs post a lot of strange and not-very-good records. Stuff you'd only need one or two records of, like space-age bachelor pad hipness, hawaiian tiki lounge music, whitebread bossa-nova craze records, obscure Gallic ingenue-pop, extremely square 'swinging' jazz played by white dudes who look like high school math teachers, &c., &c. Then again, maybe you're the kind of person who needs hundreds of Brazilian bossa-nova records. Who knows.

I haven't yet downloaded all the following albums myself (this is, after all, my to-do list), so I can't attest to the quality of each record. Caveat downloader! But they're all things I'm confident are at least a little awesome.

1874

2006-06-03T11:10:00.000-07:00

1874

New York City annexes the Bronx.

Levi Strauss and Jacob Davis receive a US patent for blue jeans with copper rivets. (I'm stretching, I know! Bit of a boring year, this.)

Born: Somerset Maugham, Winston Churchill, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Shackleton, Harry Houdini, G.K. Chesterton, Charles Fort, Arnold Schoenberg, Gustav Holst, Charles Ives (big year for composers!)

died: no one I'm particularly interested in

Anton Bruckner - Symphony #4 in E flat, "Romantic"

Camille Saint-Saëns - Danse Macabre, op. 40

Zig, zig, zig, Death in a cadence,
Striking with his heel a tomb,
Death at midnight plays a dance-tune,
Zig, zig, zig, on his violin.
The winter wind blows and the night is dark;
Moans are heard in the linden trees.
Through the gloom, white skeletons pass,
Running and leaping in their shrouds.
Zig, zig, zig, each one is frisking,
The bones of the dancers are heard to crack—
But hist! of a sudden they quit the round,
They push forward, they fly; the cock has crowed.

Wanderin' Blues

2006-05-21T11:55:00.000-07:00

My pal Pangborn just came back from St. Petersburg, Aaron is bursting with crazy tales of Morocco, cousin Conor is walkabout in the Land of Oz, and here I am, stuck at work, updating my livejournal. Feh. Oh well, at least I have a reasonable excuse to haul out my old photos of the Cliffs of Moher again.

I'm going to Boston in a week for my little sister's birthday, but I could use a real vacation.

Charlie Parker - A Night in Tunisia (take 5)

Dion - The Wanderer

Dean Martin - On a Slow Boat to China (live at the Sands, 1964)

Willie Nelson - The City of New Orleans

X - Los Angeles

Flatt & Scruggs - Little Girl in Tennessee

Noah Howard - New York Subway

That last post was just a test.

2006-05-19T10:48:00.000-07:00

Inaugural post! I've already got a music blog on Livejournal, but since pretty much all of the good music blogs I read are on Blogspot and not Livejournal, I figured it was high time I moved over here myself. I'm going to maintain the old mp3 livejournal, and use this as a secondary platform. I'd move all my old posts over here, but I haven't figured out how to backdate stuff yet...or if it's even possible.

I guess I've got to get busy thinking of some new posts now.

1873

2006-05-19T10:32:00.000-07:00

1873

Central Park in NYC completed.

Barbed wire invented.

Both Coors and Heinekin breweries founded.

Born: Ford Madox Ford, Willa Cather, W.C. Handy.

Died: Sheridan Le Fanu, John Stuart Mill.

Johannes Brahms - Variations on a Theme by Haydn

1867

2006-05-17T11:03:00.000-07:00

1867

Nebraska!

Missionary Thomas Baker killed and eaten in Viti Levu, Fiji

Baudelaire drops dead in a maison de santé in Paris; he is not eaten.

Born: Frank Lloyd Wright, Marie Curie, Luigi Pirandello (I saw his house once; it was a dump).

Bedrich Smetana - Dalibor
I. Slyšels to, príteli, tam v nebes kuru? (Oh, Didst Thou Hear It, Friend, In Heaven's Regions?)
II. Tot tretí noc (It's The Third Night)

In the Mood for Hating: A Field Guide to Blogosphere Hype

2006-05-16T15:39:00.000-07:00

Hey, are you totally fucking sick of hearing about Gnarls Barkley yet? I sure am.

If you read music blogs at all, you know it's been impossible to avoid hearing about this band (or 'band'), weeks and months before any actual record of theirs came out. Most of the initial hype centered around DJ Dangermouse doing a 'soul' record, which made me think, okay, hype aside that might be all right. His "Gray Album" was good, and "Dangerdoom" was okay. I never really had an opinion on Cee-lo, the singer, other than to think that his old band, Goodie Mob, always kinda blew--but I realize I'm prejudiced because I think that all rap from the South inherently sucks grits.

Then their big single, "Crazy", got major press in the UK for going #1 just on internet downloads, and apparently now there's some peculiarly English mass-hysteria for this band? (An alternate title for this post was: The UK Has Gone Fucking Insane.)

Unfortunately, now that I've actually heard the record, I can safely say it's as soulful as a ziplock baggie full of dog farts. Really the most startling thing about it is that it's so hideously bland, so preternaturally underwhelming. It's not even like I hate this record. How can you? There's nothing there to hate. But that doesn't stop eight million bloggers from posting about it like it's the second coming.

CubikMusik and Clever Titles Are So Last Summer are just two of the unnumbered legions of blogs (just this week alone!) who posted GB's Top-of-the-Pops smash "Crazy" (or here). CubikMusik describes this slab of punishing mediocrity as a "classic". CTASLS calls it the "craziest psychadelic soul jam that Prince couldn't even come up with". Both are smoking crack rock.

The Laws Have Changed posted GB's cover of that Violent Femmes song, "Gone Daddy Gone". And even if not too many other blogs have posted it, they all seem to agree it's doubleplus awesome that GB picked that song. Hello! It's a boring cover of a song that really isn't any good in the first place!

Silence is a Rhythm Too posted this track, "The Last Time", and at least admits that the hype on this group is totally absurd. In case you're wondering, this song blows too.

Bushwick is Beautiful (which has an interesting title, but that's about it) calls Gnarls Barkley "the Outkast of 2006", which pretty much sums up why I was sick of them before I ever heard a single song. He does, to be fair, post "Smiley Faces", the sole song on the album that is even remotely catchy.

1866

2006-05-16T00:35:00.000-07:00

1866

First robbery by Jesse James.

Calaveras skull hoax!

Born: Wassily Kandinsky, H.G. Wells, Butch Cassidy.

Root beer invented.

Edvard Grieg - Intermezzo for cello & piano in A minor, EG 115

Songs occupying my mind like the Nazis occupied Poland

2006-05-15T14:26:00.000-07:00

The Bermudas - Chu Sen Ling

This is an obscure girl-group gem I copped from the always interesting Crud Crud over at blogspot. On first spin, I thought this song was okay, a little annoying maybe, not to mention the fake-Asian cadences and Engrish grammar and the ahh-so, Number-One-Son-ness of it all (though I am inclined to wink indulgently at that sort of thing in pop music).

But the more I hear it, the sweeter it gets. Elemental stuff: girl loves boy, girl loses boy, girl cries. And it's catchy as fuck. Even if you don't dig it that much at first, I think it's the textbook definition of a song that will grow on you. As Crud Crud points out, the credit is mostly due the writer, Rickie Page, one of the secret movers and shakers of the 1960s music scene in Los Angeles. Download and enjoy.

Lucky Millinder & His Orchestra - Silent George (vocal by Myra Johnson)

No real story behind this one. I've just got Lucius Venable (aka "Lucky") Millinder on the brain since posted a song (not this one) this morning. This one's from a comp of 'raunchy' R&B, and I guess this is reasonably raunchy, okay. I assign this song a raunch level of...six!

Wanda Jackson - Funnel of Love

You want raunch? Listen to this motherfucking song. It's not the words; there's nothing raunchy about the lyrics at all. It's in Jackson's delivery, a raw rockabilly snarl of undiluted sex and, as she pulls back, romantic sweetness and confusion. I've been obsessing over this one for near two weeks now, and I still can't stop listening to it.

Dizzee Rascal - Give U More

Now that Americans have gotten the heads-up about Lady Sovereign in a big way, I am no longer cool for knowing about her before 99% of the universe did. So I need to get my grime fix from somewhere else, and this is it. Dizzee Rascal singles started hitting the U.S. a couple years ago, but they were ignored by, well, everyone (too bad you weren't tiny and cute and white, Diz!)

For a minute, people thought he would be big over here. And then he wasn't. And then people gave up and kinda forgot about him. So I guess that means he's ripe for hip re-discovery, right? Geez, electronic media really accelerates the life cycle of pop music by a factor of 100, doesn't it? From hype to has-been to superhip post-failure discovery in like 24 months? That's crazy.

1865

2006-05-15T13:27:00.000-07:00

1865
Lincoln inaugurated for second term. Then assassinated. (In that order.)

American Civil War ends. William Faulkner begins work on first novel, although he will not be born for 32 years.

Slavery abolished by the 13th Amendment. American racists bitch about it for six days, then form the Ku Klux Klan. (On Christmas Eve. Merry Christmas!)

First train robbery in the United States.

William Butler Years born June 13. Rudyard Kipling born December 30.

Grieg - Piano Sonata in E minor, Op. 7

1860

2006-05-13T11:28:00.000-07:00

Whaaat? I know you must be thinking. What happened to 1855 through 1859? Nothing happened to them, I just thought I had some files from those years on my PC at home, and I don't. I knew the year-by-year might be a little spotty until 1920 or so. (If anyone has any files from the missing years, I'd love to have them!)

1860
Johannes Brahms - String Sextet #1 in B flat Major, op. 18

In other news, the venerable and awesome Jazz Pour Tous over at blogspot seems to have been taken down, which is a shame since it was the best jazz blog in the world. But since they were posting full downloads of very expensive box sets almost every other day, you knew the record industry was going to catch up with them one day or another.

The majority of the Rapidshare URLs that the Jazz Pour Tous users had uploaded albums to also seem to have been terminated by Rapidshare because "complaints were received." Luckily because I'm anal retentive about stuff like this, I kept a log of all the URLs posted on Jazz Pour Tous, and I'm going through them now to see what's still live. I'll put up a (probably very short) list in a friends-only post later today, in case anyone's interested.

1854

2006-05-10T11:29:00.000-07:00

Not much goin' on in 1854 either. Crimean war, the beginning of the ascendancy of Tammany Hall in NYC, Dickens starts writing my favorite Dickens novel, Hard Times. Also, Uncle Sam dies. Oh well, better luck next year.

1854
Franz Liszt - Faust Symphonie

1853

2006-05-08T11:29:00.000-07:00

If I can remember to do this often enough, this will hopefully be the first in a (more or less) daily review of music, year by year, up to the present. It ought to allow me to update more often, since I won't really have the pesky requirement of trying to think of some vaguely interesting text for each post. The year-by-year thing is its own justification; I just need to wiki each year to come up with some interesting minutiae about each 365-day period, and the posts should make themselves, right? But I looked up 1853, the year I am arbitrarily starting with, and nothing really interesting happened that year, except potato chips were invented.

Johannes Brahms - Piano Sonata #3 in F minor, op. 5

Spring is in the Air

2006-05-03T11:30:00.000-07:00

[note: I wrote this yesterday, when it was actually fucking NICE out, but lj was actin' a damn fool and wouldn't let me post it]

It's finally gotten warm enough for me to stop using the bus, so I've been walking to work all week. I love that switchover, from the gray wretchedness of public transit in winter to the glory of the first sunny days of spring. Granted, three and a half miles along Flatbush Avenue during rush hour is not the most picturesque stroll, but the spring air and blue skies make up for every time you get blasted by diesel exhaust or have to wipe off the Pavlovian drooling brought on from being downwind of eight hundred chicken shacks.

Spring also, of course, tends to inspire in me a woozy romantic beatitude that makes me want to sit on a porch swing somewhere with a bottle of beer and a girl with glasses. The door is hereby opened to summer, and to the Botanic Garden and Bronx Zoo and Flushing Meadow and Coney Island! I want to eat something out of Tupperware in Prospect Park.

The other thing that walking two hours a day will do for you is allow you to really plow through all the warm and springtimey songs on your iPod, which is what I've been doing.

Big Bill Broonzy - The Glory of Love

Bobby "Blue" Bland - That's the Way Love Is

Grant Green - I Want to Hold Your Hand

The David Murray Octet - Sweet Lovely

Duke Ellington - The Girl in My Dreams Tries to Look Like You

The Blenders - Don't Fuck Around With Love

I'd also wanted to upload Dollar Brand's "Soweto", because it's always seemed a wonderfully sunny, springy song, but it's a huge file so I ran out of time. Maybe tomorrow. Instead, I figured this would be a good capstone for today's post:

Joan Jett - Crimson and Clover

Ring-a-ding-ding!

2006-04-27T11:31:00.001-07:00

This is a quartet of songs that I uploaded a few days ago when I was out of my mind with sleep deprivation, and now, looking back, I'm still not sure how the fourth came to be included in this mix. Which, given the fact that my brain was barely working, seems appropriate under the circumstances.

Frank Sinatra - The Coffee Song (They've Got an Awful Lot of Coffee in Brazil

Sarah Vaughan - Black Coffee

While I was finishing that freelance project and 's birthday present (an endless nightmare of longhand transcription) I drank so many pots of black coffee in succession I eventually lost track of how many I'd had, and I lost all conception of what an appetite for food might have once been. Big thanks to my sister Christine for the coffee maker!

Carl Stalling - Marching Pink Elephants

Eight or nine years ago, when I was deep in the abyss of the film department, editing my one and only 16mm student film, alone, in the middle of the night, I had my first hallucination brought on by not sleeping and drinking way, way too much coffee. It was purely auditory (I've never seen things that weren't there merely from not sleeping for an extended period), but for a good two hours while I was cutting and splicing (pre-AVID) I could hear a choir of angelic voices serenading me in a language no man had ever comprehended. They helped me stay focused despite being a complete wreck at that point, and I finally finished the project just in time for the screening. Also, despite being a complete wreck, the hallucinations also brought on an extreme and very pleasurable giddiness that felt just like this song.

Eric B. & Rakim - I Ain't No Joke

What? Okay, I love this song, and really, I ain't no joke, but still, what? Maybe when I'm really tired I start regressing to my adolescence.

Sometimes it Snows in April

2006-04-05T11:31:00.000-07:00

Spring, spring, wherefore art thou? What a weird weather day in NYC. At the crack of dawn it was raining, then hailing, then snowing. Now the sun is out and it's a beautiful day. Weird apocalypse weather. Plague of frogs anyone?

Maybe I'll edit and add some text later. At the moment, I'm busy. So just music and pictures for now.

**DOWNLOAD** Johannes Brahms - Allegro energetico - Presto (from String Quintet #1 in F Major, op. 88, "Spring")

**DOWNLOAD** The Carter Family - When the Springtime Comes Again

**DOWNLOAD** Sun Ra - Springtime in Chicago

**DOWNLOAD** Prince - Sometimes It Snows in April

**DOWNLOAD** Art Tatum - Stormy Weather

**DOWNLOAD** Bobby Bare & Skeeter Davis - We'll Sing in the Sunshine

Lots and lots of old, old recordings

2006-03-23T11:15:00.000-08:00

In case any of you missed, as I did, the NYT article on the University of California's Cylinder Digitization and Preservation Project, I'm giving you all a heads up, trying to spread the word. Apparently the U. of C. has managed to accumulate an audio library consisting of about 6000 wax cylinder recordings made between 1890 and about 1924 or so. And they just put all of it online. Pretty fascinating stuff!

You can, and should, go browse their collection. All the songs are available as free downloads as both compressed MP3 files and, if you prefer that sort of thing, as gargantuan WAV files.

Also, big gratitude to for giving me a heads-up on this one.

If You've Got Leavin' On Your Mind

2006-03-22T15:20:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I just start making playlists for no discernable reason, until a hazy theme begins to emerge. With this one, most of the songs had to do with a dissatisfaction about one's relationship. I'm not actually in a relationship right now, so I don't know where that came from, but the songs are still good.

The Orchids - Mr. Scrooge

Christ! How could I not have posted the Orchids already! They're so good. And yes, that is really them. In 1963, three fifteen year old girls from Coventry won a talent contest in the local Orchid Ballroom, and one thing led to another and pretty soon they're cutting singles for Decca. They had a microscopic career, only recording a handful of singles in England, but pretty much every one of them is gold. They sound a little like the Crystals, and a lot like a twentysomething girl group of black chicks, instead of some mousy Brit girls barely old enough to date.

Richard Hell & the Voidoids - Betrayal Takes Two

I can't say that I'm a huge huge Richard Hell fan, but I do seem to wind up listening to him an awful lot. Mostly it's because he wrote a handful of songs that I really, really like, e.g. "Blank Generation," and, of course, this broken Bowery take on infidelity.

Buddy Ebsen - Your Cheating Heart

Halfway through uploading this song, I realized I was actually uploading Buddy Ebsen's cover version, not Hank Williams's. I thought it was funnier and more interesting that way, so I let it finish. You all probably own the Hank Williams version anyway, right?

Prince - New Position

My affection for Prince waxes and wanes, and it's currently at a lower ebb than usual, but this song's still pretty awesome.

Peetie Wheatstraw - No Good Woman (Fighting Blues)

"Peetie Wheatstraw" is, in old negro folklore, the evil half of a good/evil set of twins, the "High Sheriff of Hell" vs the "Lord God Stingerroy." You know that old meme of a southern black blues player at a crossroads selling his soul to Satan for musical skill and success? That's mostly due to this guy here (born William Bunch, although he took the name Wheatstraw at a young age), as he actually claimed that he had sold his soul to Satan for just such a bargain.

Deep in the night of his 39th birthday, he decided to drive to the liquor store to get some more booze. At a crossroads, he tried to beat an oncoming train across the tracks. He didn't make it.

Patsy Cline - Leavin' On Your Mind

My friend's boyfriend broke up with her the other day. By text message. Classy, right? I did break up with a girl once over the phone, I admit, but that was a long time ago, and it was kind of an accident.

Tell me about your terrible break-up!

Guess the Theme of This One, Folks

2006-03-21T16:43:00.000-08:00

**DOWNLOAD** Bobby "Blue" Bland & B.B. King - Three O'Clock Blues

**DOWNLOAD** Frank Sinatra - I Couldn't Sleep a Wink Last Night

**DOWNLOAD** The Go-Go's - You Can't Walk in Your Sleep (If You Can't Sleep)

**DOWNLOAD** The Kinks - Just Can't Go to Sleep

His Excellency, Sir Sidney Poitier

2006-03-07T16:35:00.000-08:00

Today's heaped serving of whaaaaa? comes from this recent post of the very strange but occasionally awesome Bent Records Blog. It's an entire record of Sidney Poitier reading Plato over a cool hipster jazz band! Not kidding here! Who wouldn't want that? I don't have much info on it, other than that it was originally put out on Warner... in the late 1960s (?)

Also, once, Mordicai, Kromelizard, Dantelong, Tough Lad and yours truly wrote a whole novel together in which Sidney Poitier was a major character. So we're all kinds of fascinated by him now.

Sidney Poitier - Poitier Meets Plato

btw, the files are zipped in the WinRAR format (which all the kids seem to be using nowadays), so if you don't have it already, you should go download WinRAR.

Moondog!

2006-03-07T14:51:00.000-08:00

Like Daredevil, Moondog (b. Louis Hardin, Kansas, 1916) lost his eyesight in an explosion when he was 16. Unlike Daredevil, he did not get super powers, martial arts skills and a string of psychopathic girlfriends. He did learn to read music in braille and become a self-taught composer, however. In 1944 he moved to New York, picked up some jazzy accents and attitudes, hung out with Charlie Parker, Benny Goodman and Toscanini, and also started performing his weird and wonderful music on the streets of Manhattan, in the getup pictured above. The costume worn by the 'Viking of Sixth Avenue' was an attempt to distance himself from Christianity. He moved to Germany in the 1970s and lived there until his death in 1999.

The list of Moondog's admirers is long and crosses borders of genre and era, and includes Lester Young, Igor Stravinsky, Artur Rodzinski, Janis Joplin, Frank Zappa, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and Elvis Costello, who (as far as I know) is the only one of Moondog's admirers who has ever played alongside him.

The first track I've got uploaded here, "Lament 1," is a little like Sun Ra meets Frank Zappa. The other two a little more like Harry Partch recording a Sun Ra tribute album to be played by marching band. All three are terrific, wild, but startlingly accessible stuff; "Lament" in particular (which is one of the few Moondog tracks that feature musicians other than an overdubbed Moondog) I have not been able to stop listening to since I first downloaded it from...someone else's blog. I can't remember who now (sorry, I read a lot of blogs). But whatever, listen. This is some of the most seductively brilliant new music (new to me, I mean) I've come across in a long time.

[Zombie Mom reminded me that it was Some Velvet Blog that originally posted these tracks. Thanks ZM!]

Moondog - Lament 1 "Bird's Lament"

Moondog - Symphony 1 "Timberwolf"

Moondog - Rabbit Hop

Getting It On

2006-03-03T14:18:00.000-08:00

Patience & Prudence - Tonight You Belong to Me

First up has to be one of the biggest Lolita singles of all time, Patience & Prudence's ethereal, innocently sexy "Tonight You Belong to Me." At the time of recording, they were age 9 and 12, respectively.

Patience and Prudence McIntyre were the daughters of Mark McIntyre, who had played piano for Frank Sinatra during his last few years at Columbia Records. McIntyre recorded his two daughters doing a version of the song while he was cutting it as a demo for some cabaret singer or other. McIntyre played their version for a musician friend of his, who played it for a musician friend of his, and one thing led to another and the song was actually released as a single on Liberty Records, hitting #4 on the charts in 1956. The two girls actually recorded a few good singles after that (and had a "reunion" on some Dick Clark show in the 1970s), but they mostly disappeared from the charts into one-hit-wonderland.

Wynonie Harris - Keep on Churnin'

Note to self: remember to remind everyone that Wynonie Harris was fucking AWESOME. If you've never had the pleasure of hearing his extraordinary hollering or sample his glorious tales of boozing and whoring, your life is fundamentally incomplete. Prurience aside, he made some of the catchiest and most raucous 1950s R&B you're ever going to hear. There will be a post exclusively devoted to Wynonie some time in the future.

And this song? Well, no need to reprint the lyrics when you can just listen, but they have to do with... churning butter... 'until the butter comes,' and how frothy one's paddle can get during such activities.

Butterbeans & Susie - Elevator Papa, Switchboard Mama

Butterbeans and Susie was the performing name on the black vaudeville circuit of husband and wife team Joe and Susie Edwards. They were mostly a comedy act (Butterbeans being the incompetent, inadequate husband, and Susie the capable but sexually frustrated wife), but they cut a bunch of blues sides like this one for Okeh from the late 20s to early 50s, most of them of a similarly comic/raunchy nature. Suffice to say, this song's all about elevators papas looking to help you 'go down' and switchboard mamas who need their dials twiddled.

The Dominoes - Sixty Minute Man

This is from a great compilation that everyone should own called Risque Rhythm: Nasty 50s R&B. All the songs are primo slices of good rockin' & rollin' 50s raunch.

The Dominoes actually started out as a gospel group in the 1940s, and for a little over a decade met with great success, while also enduring numerous lineup changes and a shift to secular R&B. At the point this song was cut...I'm not really sure who's singing the lead here. Clyde McPhatter (who went on to form the Drifters, pre Ben E. King) and Jackie Wilson (who's, you know, JACKIE WILSON) both sung with the Dominoes for a few years. But I don't think this is McPhatter singing, and it's definitely not Wilson. I don't have the liner notes handy, either. Anybody know?

[edit: I have been informed that this is Bill Brown singing]

Bo Carter - My Pencil Won't Write No More

And here we have the most incorrigible of pre-war blues double-entendreists, Bo Carter, author of such classic sides as "Don't Mash My Digger so Deep," "Pin in Your Cushion," "Banana in Your Fruit Basket," "Ram Rod Daddy," "Pussy Cat Blues," and this here melancholy meditation on the sad event of, you know, one's pencil being all out of lead. Not that I would know anything about that.

All Quiet on the Weston Front

2006-02-23T14:57:00.000-08:00

Randy Weston - African Cookbook

Randy Weston - Congolese Children

You know that CD you have because you borrowed it from someone six or seven years ago and then stopped hanging out with them so much? This is one of those CDs. (If you're reading this, you know who you are. E-mail me and we'll hang out and I'll give you your Randy Weston back.)

Brooklyn-born Randy Weston was an occasional student of Thelonious Monk's, which shows in their (very) slightly similar style. And like a lot of black folks--especially black artists--in the 60s, Weston developed a great hunger to develop a rootsier identity and heritage for America's diasporic Africans, and started introducing overtly African and Caribbean colors into his playing. In the early part of the decade, he traveled to Africa for the first time, making two extended trips to Nigeria; shortly after returning from the second, he recorded this wonderful but obscure album. Well, obscure at the time. In 1964, he somehow could interest no serious record company in it, and it was only released by the tiny Bakton label (whoever they are, I've never heard of them). It didn't see wider release until eight years later, when it was reissued by Atlantic.

It's hard to say why no one wanted to put it out at the time of its creation. It's not like jazz with an African flavor was a bizarre animal by that point, and it's not 'difficult' music (in the sense that some people argue Albert Ayler is 'difficult'). In fact, these songs are played with humor and intensity, and are all hugely accessible (the short, joyous "Congolese Children" in particular). So...fluke of fate? Who knows.

Randy Weston - piano
Ray Copeland - trumpet
Booker Ervin - tenor sax
Vishnu Wood - bass
Lenny McBrowne - drums
Big Black - vocals on "Congolese Children"

Music that will perhaps surprise some friends to hear I dig a lot. Or not, if you know me well.

2006-02-21T14:59:00.000-08:00

I don't like to call anything in my life a 'guilty pleasure.' If I enjoy something, it is, self-evidently, awesome. I don't see much percentage in being abashed about the things I enjoy. There are, however, some songs that I don't expect to like, songs that surprise me. Droney, disco-esque girly electroclash? That sounds like my definition of pure hell on Earth, I admit, and yet... I like Peaches a whole lot. These are songs that make me glad I still have the capacity to surprise myself.

Yummy Bingham feat. Jadakiss - Come Get It

It took me a few weeks to get around to listening to this track, which I jacked from Adoru. But I was hooked fucking instantly, and now I simply cannot stop listening to it. It's kinda like what if Destiny's Child was actually awesome, and didn't make me throw up in my mouth a little bit every time I hear their music.

I'd never heard of Yummy Bingham, and no hip-hop head I know has either. Apparently, she's mostly a songwriter/ghostwriter type, and has written stuff for Amerie and Mary J. Blige (again, barf). And every day I become just a little more accepting of Jadakiss on the mic. The real credit for this track is probably due to producer Just Blaze, who can be a little uneven. But he's totally on top of his game with this one.

This Yummy might have been up-and-coming for a second there, but as it looks like her website hasn't been updated in almost half a year, maybe she's simply receded into the murk of pop music never-never land. Who knows? Check it out though.

Kelis - Milkshake

The only radio I listen to is the BBC in the morning, so sometimes--okay, always--I am woefully behind the times in terms of pop music, but I still caught this one on the first bounce. I was introduced to it while eating lunch in the Haitian joint over on Glenwood Road. I hadn't heard anything that sounded quite like it before, so at first I thought it was an islands thing. I asked some Haitian employees of mine about this new Haitian sensation who sang that song about milkshakes, and they all looked at me like I'd gone bonkers. I eventually managed to tease out of them that the song was by someone named Kelis, and she was in fact from Harlem. Also, she's really hot and married to Olu Dara's kid Nas?

Anyway. I get the feeling that the pop landscape has been utterly saturated by this song in the last two years. Or maybe not; being blissfully ignorant of radio and MTV, I get to burn out on songs at my own pace. If it is indeed the case, however, that everyone's thoroughly sick of it by now, here's two other versions of the song:

Kelis feat. Lala and Rah Digga - Milkshake (basically the same song, with overdubbed raps)
Kelis feat. Pharrell & Pusha-T - Milkshake (Clipse remix) (a pretty broad--but catchy--reconstruction of the song, at times unrecognizable compared to the original)

Peaches - Lovertits

I think I first heard this on someone else's blog, I can't even remember who any more. It doesn't matter. What matters is that Peaches makes slutty electronic dance music that doesn't suck like a small but extremely massive astronomical object. Her kind of weird future-throwback disco-punk reminded me of Blondie at first, with less brains and charm but more punch and stylish nymphomania. It's pretty chilly stuff--sympathies with the Stones' "Emotional Rescue" have also been invoked, not unjustly--but some days that really hits the spot, you know?

Pink - Trouble

Pink is really not the kind of thing I normally find myself listening to (evidence in this post to the contrary), and I find her not a little creepy looking. But of all those types of diva-ish young chick singers, I find her the most interesting, largely because of how different her voice is from the willowy, charmless, yodeling norm. Hers is a big voice, a forceful voice, a fat girl's voice...coming from a tiny girl's body, and this track tweaks her sound just right. It doesn't hurt that this song and the album it's from are mostly co-written and co-performed by Tim Armstrong, the guitarist, singer and punk-auteur from Operation Ivy and Rancid. And actually it almost sounds more like Pink guesting on a Rancid track than the other way around. The rest of the album is pretty crappy, but I'm still pretty attached to this song.

The Great Drunk (Driving) Post of 2006

2006-02-16T15:04:00.000-08:00

I really like this song. It is, however, unforgiveably unseasonable by now (despite the blustering NYC snowstorms), and posting Christmas music in the middle of February will only encourage friends and strangers to send strange exploding packages to my home. So, let's get this clear: this is not a post about Christmas music. It's a post about a whale! No, I mean it's a post about drinking and driving songs.

The Youngsters--also known as the Preludes, and then as the Tempters--were a minor R&B group on the west coast in the late 50s. They had a fairly big local hit with their first recording as the Youngsters ("Shattered Dreams") in 1956, and then later in the year they recorded this terrific slice of Christmas anti-cheer as the b-side to their genuine R&B hit "Dreamy Eyes," which was subsequently covered by numerous b-list R&B acts. Like a lot of similar groups, they dissolved not long afterwards, however, due to their little label folding; most members fled to other, similar west coast bands like the Shields.

You don't hear this song on the radio too often. Or, well, ever. Maybe because humorous songs about drinking and driving during the holidays just rub folks the wrong way? Whatever, it's a wonderful song.

The Youngsters - Christmas in Jail

1983 was a year when British Oi! music still had legs as something other than a vehicle for white supremacist doggerel. Sadly, that wouldn't hold out much longer (or not so sadly; it's a pretty limited genre), but this album still has a few gems on it, most notably this cute little paean to the titular activity. The only lyrics I can ever remember from this song are "Knocking em back, have another one, drinking and driving is so much fun." That may be all the lyrics in the song, who knows. The anthemic qualities of Oi! were a bit of a double-edged sword.

The Business - Drinking and Driving

The Maddox Brothers & Rose wrote some of the most raucous, fun, energetic country music you are likely to ever hear. This song's a little uncharacteristically melancholy, though. Actually, now that I've uploaded and I'm thinking about it, I don't think there's any reference to booze at all. It's just a song about careless drivers running over little kids on the street. They're not drunk, they're just assholes I guess.

The Maddox Brothers & Rose - Careless Driver

It was the whiskey punching my commonlaw wife in the face (not me)!

Jerry Lee Lewis - It Was the Whiskey Talkin' (Not Me)

Hey, it's everybody's favorite screaming black guy! Is there still anyone who hasn't heard and learned to love Screamin' Jay Hawkins? God, I hope not. If so, perhaps this post will remedy that shameful state of affairs.

Screamin' Jay Hawkins - Baptize Me in Wine

The picture says it all. (It better; I'm running out of time here, I gotta go home and start cooking dinner!)

Merle Haggard - Wine Takes Me Away

Yeah, whoo, is that he time? Jesus. Anyway as a parting gift I decided to use the photograph of Gram Parsons that most makes him look like a retarded child. Enjoy!

Also please someone get plastered and call me so I can enjoy the vicarious drunk.

Gram Parsons - Tonight the Bottle Let Me Down

A Buncha Short Fixes

2006-02-10T15:07:00.000-08:00

So things are starting to slow down at work here, but it's still intermittently busy. And I can't really eat up the store's bandwidth uploading songs on this slow connection, so here I have for you some very good but very short tracks I was able to upload in the brief moments this morning when we had no customers. Slainte.

I've also decided to switch from Yousendit.com to Rapidshare for hosting, as pretty much a permanent thing from now on. This means fractionally more hassle in terms of downloading--you've got to wait about 30 seconds to download each file--but the files will stay up theoretically forever, so long as they don't go 30 consecutive days without a download. Yousendit expires the links after 7 days or 25 downloads, whichever comes first. I've been downloading from Rapidshare a lot lately, and I like it a lot better.

Sun Ra - A Foggy Day
A lot of the early Sun Ra singles are okay kind of R&B, nothing very special, but I've always had a huge soft spot for this one. Really, if Sun Ra's doing standards, it's hard to think of a song more SUN RA than "A Foggy Day". Even putting aside the canny mysteriousness of London fog... The British Museum gets a name-check? And the Age of Miracles? Geez, Sun Ra could've written that song.

Elvis Costello - A Drunken Man's Praise of Sobriety
It's true. With my new "I'm broke" emergency measures, I've had to stop buying booze, which is kind of a large expense for me. Now I'm down to the liquors I don't really like very much, vodka and I think maybe a little gin and one bottle of wine I'll probably drink tonight. Next week will probably be all singing, all dancing, all sober at the FMF homestead. Sadly. While sober I did get rather a lot of translating work done last night, though...

Matthew Shipp - Maze Hint
Pianist of the superb David S. Ware quartet. Some of his solo stuff is really iffy or actually even kind of lame, but this record's pretty okay, and I like this song a lot.

Redman - Beet Drop
Redman's brief, catchy riff on "The New Style" from the first Beastie Boys record (I think...I don't remember that record very well, even though it was my favorite album when I was 11 years old).

Bela Bartók - Arabian Song

Bob Dylan - London Calling
This one is courtesy of that rockin' apostle of Robert Bork known as Right Wing Bob. It's really just a single verse and chorus of the Clash tune, done as an intro to his show of 11/21/05 (I think). But kinda fun nevertheless.

Rah Digga - Harriet Thugman
A lot of chick rappers are really, really lame... basically supermodelly pop stars who can't rap. Rah Digga? Daaaaaaaamn. Harder than 95% of the guys rapping out there. Great voice, great rhymes, great production. Also kinda hot too; all in all, a lethal combination.

Mahalia Jackson - Keep Your Hand on the Plow (live)
Mahalia! Jesus, speaking of big, beautiful voices filled with soul and soulful authority. Mahalia will stop your sinning and send you to heaven. So listen to her. Listen!

Two of My Favorite Characters in the Whole Universe

2006-02-07T15:10:00.000-08:00

Sun Ra and The Blues Project
Batman and Robin (1966)

Funny, since we were just all talking about this at work the other day, but WFMU's Beware of the Blog has just posted downloads of all twelve songs from the Sun Ra Batman record. Cool!

Oh, wait... Sun Ra Batman record, you ask? Why, yes. Here's the story:

In 1966, a toy company in Newark, New Jersey released a children's record called Batman and Robin to cash in on the popular Adam West TV series of the same name. The music on the LP was credited to "The Sensational Guitars of Dan and Dale," but in fact the band was one of the greatest uncredited session combos of all time, including the core of Sun Ra's Arkestra and Al Kooper's Blues Project. To keep the music licensing fees to a minimum, all the tracks were based on public domain items like Chopin's Polonaise Op. 53, the horn theme from Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony and the love theme from Romeo and Juliet, and generic rock riffs. It's all instrumental, with the exception of Robin's Theme.

It's not by any stretch of the imagination a classic Sun Ra record, or even in the top half of his discography, but it's manna for Sun Ra junkies like myself.

1. Batman's Theme
(you'll actually have to go to Beware of the Blog for the rest)

Joan Armatrading

2006-01-21T15:13:00.000-08:00

Nothing really much to say about this one. Posted because 1) it's a good song, 2) my pal Sara Zarr likes Joan Armatrading, and 3) mentioned she'd never heard it before. So there you have it folks.

If you've never heard Armatrading... I read some guy on the internet the other day saying she was the original source for later black female singers like Tracy Chapman... kinda soul, but really not. I don't know that I completely agree with that (since I loathe Tracy Chapman), and I hear other things, much stronger influences--Ann Peebles, for example--in such latter-day singers. But whatever. I'm not really going to quibble. Like I said, it's a good song.

Joan Armatrading - Baby I (1978)

R.I.P. Wilson Pickett

2006-01-21T15:11:00.000-08:00

3/18/41 - 1/19/06

Allmusic.com's bio of Wilson Pickett begins "Of the major 60's soul stars, Wilson Pickett was one of the roughest and sweatiest." Which is pretty accurate, I suppose, but also kinda gross. I wouldn't ordinarily consider 'sweatiness' any kind of defining musical attribute, but there is a whole class of 60s soulsters for whom it fits just right. Wilson Pickett, with his frenzied, energetic, raw R&B grooves is certainly one of them. It is a happy and apt coincidence that he shared a birthday with Rudolph Diesel, the undoubtedly sweaty German scientist who invented the combustion engine.

Prolonged eulogizing on my part would be a little silly and redundant, when I can just link you to one in the New York Times. I don't really have much biographical information to add to that. It's not like I ever went furniture shopping with the guy (although I'm sure that would have been awesome and soulful). I admit that I was unaware of the ODB-like life he led in the last two decades of his life, until I read this obit in the Miami Herald:

In '91, he was arrested for allegedly yelling death threats while driving a car over the mayor's front lawn in Englewood, N.J., and less than a year later was charged with assaulting his girlfriend. In 1993, he was convicted of drunk driving and sentenced to a year in jail and five years' probation after hitting an 86-year-old man with his car. In 1987, he was given two years' probation and fined $1,000 for carrying a loaded shotgun in his car.

So that's something. Pretty funny stuff. But if you don't know him already, please listen:

Wilson Pickett - In the Midnight Hour

Wilson Pickett - Land of 1000 Dances

Wilson Pickett - Mustang Sally

Wilson Pickett - I'm in Love

Wilson Pickett - Hey Jude

Wilson Pickett - Everybody Needs Somebody to Love

Our Man Hamiett

2006-01-18T15:15:00.000-08:00

Hamiet Bluiett
Im/Possible to Keep
(live at Axis, NYC, 1977)

I want to sit down and write a good long thing about Hamiet Bluiett because I think he's terrific and because I love this record (it's in my top 20). But I'm feeling lame and overworked so no, sorry, not today. If you've never heard of him (which is more than likely), in his younger days he played with one of Mingus's last good bands and he's also one of the four corners of the super World Saxophone Quartet. He plays baritone and gets a huge, deep tone out of the horn, but also somehow manages to occasionally play higher than an alto it seems. He gets tagged 'avant garde' a lot, but that's because lots of jazz fans are stupidly conservative. Mostly he's just a very bluesy player who takes the traditions to their logical extension. It's not very weird at all. This song is also one of the best arguments for really, really long-form jazz. It's forty minutes long and sounds continuously fresh and inventive the whole way through. Enjoy.

Hamiet Bluiett - Oasis / The Well (40:57)

Hamiet Bluett - baritone saxophone
Fred Hopkins - bass
Famoudou Don Moye - drums & percussion

(Don Pullen also plays piano & organ on the record, but not on this track)

Tricks with the internet

2006-01-15T15:22:00.000-08:00

The internet is great. I'm doing my usual Sunday trawl through various other people's music blogs, and I came across this one guy's site that consists entirely of various archival movies and numerous home recordings of the sounds of all different kinds of air raid sirens.

Also, in (un)related news, there's this blog I check in on once a week or so called Sucka Pants, which occasionally has interesting music but mostly has kinda repulsive and kinda fascinating photographs of the scummier (and therefore actually interesting) side of hipster Williamsburg nightlife, the kinds of parties that nobody you know actually goes to, Marxist BBQs, amateur lesbian Jell-o wrestling benefits for squatters' rights, that sort of thing. Also she's really hot.

Anyway, just a few days ago, on one of her hip 'to do' events lists, she posted a thing about a Professor Murder show, and I was like, Professor Murder? I know those dudes. They're guys I used to work with--or just Andy & Tony, rather--and occasionally grab a beer with, and unlike most folks I've fallen out of contact with I actually still think they were pretty cool cats. Whatever happened to you, O Andy & Tony?

Queen Kitty

2006-01-15T15:18:00.000-08:00

Kind of weirdly blue today; weirdly blue all weekend. Yesterday I was kind of troubled and grumpy because I hadn't eaten anything in what started to approach 24 hours, then I was troubled and grumpy because when I finally did eat, it was crappy Chinese food. This morning I was morose over my chewy (in the industrial, vulcanized sense) bagel. And now I guess I just have to accept that maybe it has nothing to do with food, I'm just grumpy and blue all on my own. Boo hoo, right? Anyway, I had Kitty Wells on my mind all night and all morning, specifically 'Mommy for a Day,' for absolutely no good reason at all that I can divine.

Kitty Wells - My Mother

Kitty Wells - It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels

Kitty Wells - I Gave My Wedding Dress Away

Kitty Wells with Webb Pierce - Can You Find it In Your Heart?

Kitty Wells - Mommy for a Day

A Fistful of Alice Coltrane

2006-01-04T15:23:00.000-08:00

Alice Coltrane - Lovely Sky Boat

Alice Coltrane - Ohnedaruth

Alice Coltrane with Pharoah Sanders- Shiva-Loka

Alice Coltrane - Blue Nile

Alice Coltrane - Sita Ram

The Big (Un)Review of 2005 Post

2006-01-03T15:24:00.000-08:00

So if you've got an mp3 livejournal, the to-do thing seems to be to top off the start of the new year with your review of the old, pronouncing with a wizened, compendious, utterly useless and Greil-Marcus-like authority the hits and misses of the year. Some people here have (understandably) ridiculed the idea that I should do so, since, as pal Pravda has pointed out, I more or less live in a pop-culture cave, and know absolutely nothing about those albums that would conceivably turn up on any critic's "Best of 2005" list. But I probably think those records suck anyway. Instead, here's a summary of my 2005 in music:

BEST CAREER ANTHOLOGY
Townes Van Zandt - If I Needed You

To be honest, this was also the only anthology that popped up when I sorted my iTunes by year, which is because I'm an obsessive archivist, and when I get a compilation I always enter the year as the year of the material's original release (or original recording, where available). Somehow I neglected to do that for this record, the soundtrack to the documentary about Van Zandt that's currently doing the art-house circuit. (The track is originally from Van Zandt's 1977 Live at the Old Quarter, Houston, Texas.) But don't assume that that means I'm less than enthusiastic about this record, because I really do think it's awesome. Van Zandt's simple, direct, forthright country folkiness is too affecting to ignore, if you have any kind of heart beating in your chest.

BEST RECORD I NEVER WOULD HAVE GUESSED IS ACTUALLY FROM 2005
Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings - How Do You Let a Good Man Down?

I'd come across Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings before, and assumed they were a 70s soul-funk outfit I'd never heard of, which isn't unusual, since it sometimes seems like everyone who even accidentally touched a James Brown record put together a funky band at some point in the 1970s. But even still, their stuff was so good I was surprised I'd never heard of them until recently. So I did a little Googling, and was astonished to find out that not only wasn't Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings a classic funk band from my glory days as an embryo, their record had actually just come out a few months ago. Whoa.

Basically: it's just Sharon Jones, an ex-prison-guard with a serious soul voice, playing with the 'house band' (whatever that means these days) of Daptone records. No electronic studio chicanery; no piteous urban yodeling up and down the scale without actually landing on a recognizable note. It's great. It's like finding a box of brilliant but forgotten 45s in your attic. To be fair, the serious downfall of this music is that it's almost completely indistinguishable from music that was being made 36 years ago. But hell, that was some good music. It's certainly a better soul record than anything that's been released in the last decade (at least), that's for sure.

BEST ABSTRACT JAZZ LEAST LIKELY TO BE LISTENED TO BY ANYONE ON MY FRIENDS LIST
Nels Cline / Wally Shoup / Chris Corsano - Lake of Fire Memories

S'funny, this was one of the very very few jazz records on my 2005 iTunes playlist. I guess I just didn't pick up much new jazz last year. Also, sadly, I haven't been going to very many shows, where I used to buy a lot of records, so that could be it too. Anyway, this slice of sanity here is a short little bit of ear-cleaning, brain-freezing, soul-exalting jazz astonishment, the way Charles Gayle used to play it, before he went totally retarded and started dressing up like a clown and doing mime onstage.

BEST REALLY GOOD RECORD FROM A GUY WHO HASN'T HAD A REALLY GOOD RECORD IN A REALLY LONG TIME
Elvis Costello & Emmylou Harris - The Scarlet Tide

I haven't liked an Elvis Costello album this much in forever. Really. I scanned back in his discography and the last album of his I was this unequivocal about was Imperial Bedroom, which was in 1982 for god's sake. Trying to do a country record seems to have rejuvenated him in a way that trying to do an opera record did not (surprise). This is a better album than When I Was Cruel or North, and a more consistent one than Painted From Memory. This here duet with Emmylou Harris might be my favorite, as it seems to take its cues from the harmonizing, bluegrassy country of Harris's own Roses in the Snow, an album I have a deep affection for.

BEST RECORD BY A GUY WHO PRETTY CONSISTENTLY PUTS OUT REALLY GOOD RECORDS BUT WHO HAS A REALLY WEIRD CHRIST/MARTYR COMPLEX
Van Morrison - They Sold Me Out

BEST REMIXED TRACK FROM 2004
Madvillain - Money Folder (Four Tet Remix)

This is from a vinyl remix EP taken from last year's Madvillainy album. Madvillainy was pretty good, but the Four Tet remixes are complete genius. Indie hip-hop, but in a good way: catchy but weird, quirky but not precious, and completely lacking the dourness that usually characterizes "serious" hip hop. (Madvillain is the collaboration moniker of wunderkinder Madlib and MF Doom, and Four Tet is the producer/DJ alias of Kieran Hebden when he's not playing guitar for Brit postpunks Fridge, a band I have never heard).

BEST RECORD BY SOMEONE WHOSE CAREER SHOULD REALLY BE OVER BY NOW BUT SOMEHOW EVERY ONCE IN A WHILE STILL MAKES REALLY GOOD MUSIC
[TIE]
Bettye LaVette - Down to Zero
Ann Peebles - Tonight I'll Be Staying Here With You

Bettye LaVette's dramatic reading of Joan Armatrading's (whatever happened to her?) "Down to Zero" comes from her collaboration with Joe Henry, the guy who produced Solomon Burke's "comeback" record in 2002. The Ann Peebles song is from a compilation of new recordings by old New Orleans soul performers that I first saw being hawked after Hurricane Katrina in, of all places, a Starbucks. I couldn't imagine such a thing would be worth even a second of my time, but lo and behold it's actually pretty sweet.

BEST SONG ABOUT A HUMANITARIAN DISASTER
The Legendary K.O. - George Bush Doesn't Like Black People

Speaking of Katrina, worth mentioning is The Legendary K.O.'s (an alias of Houston's K-Otix) riff on Kanye West's live-tv declaration about our beloved leader. It's less a polemic against Bush specifically, more a blanket expression of black anger in the wake of the hurricane, and as such is a really good example of something you don't see much of these days: a protest song. It certainly stands head and shoulders above Mos Def's whiny, venereal-sounding "Katrina Clap."

BEST...OH, I DON'T KNOW...BEST FUN GIRLY SINGLE?
The Pipettes - Dirty Mind

Only slightly anachronistic compared to some of the stuff on this list, The Pipettes is a Brit trio that plays fun and poppy rock with, according to them, a sixties girl-group flavor, although to my ear they more vibe eightes girl-groups a la the Go-Go's, and their harmonizing vocals are at times more reminiscent of the Dance Hall Crashers, but whatever. I liked the Go-Go's and DHC. They're also kinda hot, and always wear matching outfits, which should really be required for girl bands.

BEST PUNK ROCK THAT SOUNDS LIKE IT WAS WRITTEN IN 1979
The Rakes - Retreat

2005: the year of the throwback. I don't listen to that much rock music these days (not stuff that's coming out now at least), since basically rock and roll today is all about trying to sound exactly like bands most listeners are too young to have known the first time around. And that's the good stuff that's coming out these days. Having said that, these guys here are pretty decent. They sound like they could have opened for the Buzzcocks on the Singles Going Steady tour. I'd always thought they were Aussies, but Allmusic says they're from London. Go figure.

BEST RAP RECORD BY A DEAD GUY
Ol' Dirty Bastard with Ghostface Killah - Back in the Air

The newest entry in what is fast becoming the largest subcategory of hip hop: records from beyond the grave. Pretty soon, only the dead will be able to put out any music at all. Kanye West will be removing his internal organs and embalming himself just to get people to take him seriously again. Zombie hip hop in 2006, that's what I'm seeing.

BEST OBVIOUSLY GHOSTWRITTEN RAP SONG
Lil' Kim - Lighters Up

A fairly bright spot on an otherwise miserable record, "Lighters Up" has a pretty swell beat and pretty decent vocals from Lil' Kim who, given the remainder of the album and the remainder of her career, almost certainly had her material written by some unknown hip hop ringer. Also, I think this record cover is hilarious because it makes me think of the time Vice Magazine's fashion section said she looked like the Lion King.

BEST CHRISTMAS ALBUM
Brian Wilson - Hark the Herald Angels Sing

Brian Wilson's Pet Sounds is widely considered one of the greatest pop records of the 20th century in hip cirles, and widely considered an overrated jerk-fest in even hipper ones. Whatever. I used to think I was tired of Pet Sounds, but then I got over myself. But that's kind of a one-shot deal, you know? Mostly I don't expect good things to ever come out of Brian Wilson again, because he's so cripplingly loony. Witness my surprise when this Christmas album turned out to be not only endurable, but actually really good. The new compositions on the album aren't so hot, but his interpretation of carols like this one, "We Wish You a Merry Christmas" and "It Came Upon a Midnight Clear" wound up being some of my most-played Christmas songs during the holiday.

BEST ALBUM FROM 2004 THAT UNTIL FIVE MINUTES AGO I THOUGHT WAS RELEASED IN 2005
Nellie McKay - Ding Dong

It was late 2004, so it almost counts. I was surprised by how much I liked this album. I had assumed it was going to be exactly the same kind of disposable crap I always see clogging the record store shelves in NYC, but after giving it a spin...it's not bad at all. Not really great, either, but definitely interesting. It's not very coherent, and a little overambitious, but it's got a thing going on that works sometimes. Thing is, McKay's like a lot of smartypants young girls you wind up working with in bookstores. I feel like when I first started at this company, half my co-workers were Nellie McKay, stomping around in their ridiculously cute red jackets and handing out flyers for their little cabaret shows in Chelsea.

ARTIST I MOST WISH WOULD DEFECT TO AMERICA
Lady Sovereign - Cheeky (remix)

Move to America, SOV. I'll sponsor your visa, even! American radio needs you!

The Big Cosmic Horror in the Nighttime Post

2006-01-02T15:31:00.000-08:00

I'm still pretty out of sorts from going into my traditional sulky coma of isolation on New Year's Eve, and feeling pretty all-around rancorous. Too grumpy, in fact, to think of a theme even for today's mp3 post. Perhaps one will emerge as I let my mind wander and my eye guide me through iTunes.

Arnold Schoenberg - Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night), op. 4 [zipped; 27.6 megs]

Arthur Alexander - Detroit City
You know, I can already see where this is heading. This is clearly going to be my 2005 post-backlog clearing house. I've been meaning to post Transfigured Night and at least some Arthur Alexander, but never got around to it. Arthur Alexander, if you don't know, is quite an R&B nonpareil. Lots of folks re-recorded his songs (e.g. the Beatles & the Rolling Stones), but his unique, betrayed, fatalistic songwriting style really sounds best when sung in his own voice. This tune, of course, was not written by him... Not sure who really, and I'm too lazy to look it up right now. I want to say Bobby Bare, but I'm pretty sure that's wrong.

Blossom Dearie - I Want to Be Bad

Cab Calloway - Smokin' Reefers
This and the track above are from a pair of undeservedly obscure compilations highlighting sorta-but-not-quite-famous American songwriters. Desylva, Brown & Henderson in the case of the former, Arthur Schwartz in the latter. The Blossom Dearie song makes me want to get drunk and start pinching strange women on the ass, and the Calloway tune is just a hoot.

Bobby "Blue" Bland - I Pity the Fool
I've been feeling really bluesy lately. It's mostly what I've been listening to, actually. And I really should've done a big Bobby Blue post long before this. There will be one in the future.

The Chairmen of the Board - So Glad You're Mine
I don't even really know who these cats are. They're kinda 70s disco (most of their other songs I've heard are crap), but also kinda soulful. This song's got a really catchy chorus, though, and I found myself singing it under my breath (but somewhat loudly) on the bus the other day. I wasn't even listening to it at the time, it just lodged itself in my brain somehow.

Clarence "Frogman" Henry - Ain't Got No Home
I put this on a mix CD for Kromelizard, but it's still poking around my subconscious. Maybe it's the whole 'lonely boy' thing. Then again, maybe it's the 'I can sing like a girl' thing, who knows. (I really can't, but that never stopped me from trying to rip out a Betty Everett tune in the shower.) You've gotta admire the chutzpah of a guy who basically stops singing his song to tell you he can also sing like a girl and like a frog, if you want. And then proceeds to do just that. I myself have never tried to sing like a frog. It sounds uncomfortable.

Diamanda Galas - Baby's Insane
A song that somehow always makes me feel nostalgic for the craziest excesses of the women I've dated. It's also a good song to put on mix cds of crazy girls you're trying to woo. Normally, Diamanda Galas scratches at the outer limits of what I find enjoyable in music, and she's really not a good blues singer, but this record that she did with Led Zeppelin bassist Jon Paul Jones is actually pretty groovy.

Dorothy Masuka - My Parents
Super-catchy fifties (sixties?) dance/R&B/jazz from South Africa. At least that's what the cover on the compilation claims. It doesn't quite sound like Afrikaans to me, but then it's definitely not English either. Basically sounds like a lost Louis Jordan song, with this young South African chick doing somewhat sing-songy vocals (her voice makes me think she's the girl in the playground all the boys want to make out with, and one day she will, she will).

The Impressions - It's All Right
On my mind because of an Okayplayer message board thread Dantelong was showing me, exhaustively admiring Curtis Mayfield's solo output while mostly acting like the Impressions never really existed. Frankly, I prefer the stuff he did with the Impressions.

Jackie Chan & Ani DiFranco - Unforgettable
Yes, they're duetting on the Nat King Cole chestnut. I mean, really. What the fuck.