Twittering Machines

A while back I used to link to records I’d talk about typically on either eBay or Amazon. Then I read an interview with bookstore owner Miles Bellamy of Spoonbill & Sugartown in Brooklyn where he says: “It’s amazing that people still buy books from us at all.” Bellamy was referring to the impossibility of competing based on price with sites like Amazon. I don’t know about you but I do not want local bookstores to go away just as i don’t want local record stores to go away. So as a lead-in to this list, I encourage everyone to BUY LOCAL.

That said, not everyone has a great local book or record store and not every great local place can get every title you might be interested in buying. Also, all of these online sites are excellent resources for discovering new music and some also have their own label many of which offer their offerings in very limited releases so you pretty much have to buy direct or miss out. Also, my feeling is if I learn a lot from a site I buy something from them to support their efforts and I’ve purchased something from all of these so on with the list.

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Ali Akbar Khân
Ragas of India

Released in 1971, this is a 3 record set of Ali Akbar Khan on sarod and Mahapurush Misra on tabla accompanied by tamboura. To say that Ali Akbar Khan was a master musician is to understate the state of things – his families musical roots can be traced back to the 16th C, his father and uncle were also musicians and he gave his first public performance at the age of 13. You probably know Ali Akbar Khan from his performance with Ravi Shankar at George Harrison’s Concert for Bangladesh where they lifted spirits up and brought the house down (and that was while they were just tuning up).

This set, from the Connoisseur Society, includes a lovely 12 x 12 booklet with essays by Nat Hentoff, An Introduction to Indian Music by James Lyons, biographical notes on both Khan and Misra, a full-page description of the instruments, Notes on Indian Raga, and Notes on the Contents of the Album by Ali Akbar Khan.

“It is almost as if, to be somewhat fanciful, you have become an instrument – or your emotions have – and for that space of time, your primary function is to complete this musical experience.” ~ Nat Hentoff

“The music of India is exciting.

It can be languorous, beguiling, even intoxicating; at the same time it can be intellectually the most edifying and esthetically the most satisfying of all musics. But first and last it is the literally suspenseful excitement of it that compels the listener.” ~ James Lyons

This set includes predawn, morning, late morning, evening and late evening ragas. Raga around the clock (apologies) for soul-stirring sounds that are at once foreign and familiar and leave you, the listener, in a better place.

“Our sages developed music from time immemorial for the mind to take shelter in that pure being which stands apart from the body and the mind as one’s true self. Real music is not for wealth, not for honors or even for joys of the mind . . . but as a path for realization and salvation. This is what I truly feel.” ~ Ali Akbar Khan

Kenneth Goldsmith, UbuWeb founder, started it. In his “Epiphanies” article in the May 2011 The Wire magazine Goldsmith talks about how Napster changed his music-buying ways. “Epiphany No. 4: As a result [of file sharing], just like you, I  stopped buying music.”

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Adolph Wölfli
The Heavenly Ladder / Analysis of the Musical Cryptograms
by Baudoin De Jaer

Belgian composer Baudoin De Jaer has unraveled and deciphered the twisted musical markings of Adolph Wölfli (1864-1930) and he performs 32-songs-worth on violin (Wölfli used to perform them on paper trumpet). I wonder how De Jaer did it – have you ever seen one of the thousands of pages Wölfli created while interned at Waldau hospital in Switzerland?

A challenge to say the least. Comes with a 52 page book which I look forward to reading when I order my very own copy since the story behind this music helps fill out the notes.

You can hear snippets of every song here and read about another interpretation of Wölfli’s musical work on LP here.

I was fortunate to have seen a show of Wölfli’s work at the American Folk Art Museum in 2003 and the multiple floors of wall covering artwork left me completely exhausted.

25 years ago give or take, a group of us decided to meet up in Paris for the holidays. I arrived on Christmas Eve the others arrived a few days earlier. The plan was to meet at M’s hotel room the following morning to exchange gifts and spend the day touring the city of lights.

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Sub Rosa recently re-designed their website and there’s an accompanying intro page which struck me as highly relevant and well-put. Here’s an expert:

Our whole catalog is available for download as a convenience, but we encourage you not to abandon objects altogether – they can be powerful magic spells and transition tools between the world and ourselves. Just because an industry chief wants to sell you their digital audio prosthesis doesn’t mean you should settle for that and only that. Music is not only an abstraction, it is tied to our affect, and it is not only a sonic mat that isolates us – pure noise should take shape within our silence.

There are too many pictures, too much music, we all know that. But it is good to pause on an LP or an anthology, a piece of music we know so well it is a part of our story, or a track we know nothing about, and to listen, really listen, and to tell ourselves that this is something good to do. In some unknown situations, music can lead to unpredictable, unfathomable (and, certainly, unshareable) things.

Listening to records – an intimate or collective experience taking us back so far (our very first years) and carrying on so much within ourselves that we feel more alive through it. That is the purpose of the whole adventure.

John Pareles shares in his piece titled The Cloud That Ate Your Music in this Sunday’s Times, “Ever since music began migrating online in the 1990s I have longed to make my record collection evaporate – simply to have available the one song I need at any moment, without having to store the rest.”

Really?

But Pareles admits he has special needs - “In three decades as a music critic, I have amassed more vinyl, CDs and digital files than I know what to do with. Periodic weeding can’t keep up with the 20 to 30 discs that arrive in the daily mailbag; the overfull floor-to-ceiling shelves are already strained under thousands of CDs and LPs. Any affection I had for physical packaging, no matter how elegant or unique, has long since vanished; it’s a reference library, not an art collection.”

Really?

I think Mr. Pareles has made a strong case for some hazard pay. If your record collection is not a collection of art, rather fodder for critical morass, I feel for you brother. But what has this rather unique and off-putting perspective have to do with the rest of us poor saps who have to actually buy our music?

“The ritual of placing an LP on a turntable and cranking up a hi-fi home stereo disappeared-when? Perhaps with the cassette and Walkman, the ancestor of the portable MP3 player. Now even the thought of having a separate music player is a little quaint.”

Really?

I guess we’re just on very different pages. Mr. Pareles does raise important points relating to Internet-based music including sound quality and the applications you choose to access your evaporated music files with and how all of this technology tends to make songs “trivial” and also how musicians can pretty much be assured they’ll never make the same kind of money from e-music as they did from physical discs. The upside? Convenience and accessibility – more people can hear more music they might have otherwise missed and you don’t have to do anything besides sit there and click your mouse or let your service provider of choice and their handy algorithms do your selecting for you. Sounds like a lose lose kinda deal to me.

“But I have to stay optimistic that it won’t be another decade before all my discs really can disappear into the cloud. And then, having solved the space problem, I can turn to something even more intractable: the time to listen to it all.”

While I enjoy collecting LPs and looking through my stacks to find something I’d like to listen to all the way through (which is quaint, I know), I’ve yet to get excited about the idea of having access to more songs than I’d ever be able to listen to presented through the filter of software which has conveniently cut them from their album-context and pasted them into my-mix so I don’t have to be troubled with a musical message beyond one easy to digest snippet or heaven forbid be forced to listen to something foreign.

I’m still of the opinion that the best way to discover new music is through other people and if you want to sit back in a stream of music there’s this quaint and free human-powered app called independent radio that has more songs than you’ll ever have the time to listen to. Call me old-fashioned but the day I retire my records to a virtual self-storage facility is the day I’ve lost touch with something vital.

Oren Ambarchi & Jim O’Rourke
Indeed

First-time collaboration in duo-form recorded & mixed at Steamroom, Tokyo, January 2011. Two side-long tracks that feel mind-alteringly feathery light and heavy – “it sounds like the music that two guys who have honed their skills through years of composition, pop songwriting and rigorous improvisation make when they’re having fun in the studio.” ~ Francis Plagne

K. Frimpong & His Cubano Fiestas
The Blue Album

Originally released in 1976, K. Frimpong & His Cubano Fiestas self titled (The Blue Album) record gets a reissue from the original master tapes courtesy of Secret Stash and Continental Records. A monster-cooker of world funk soul from Ghana.

Catherine Ringer
Ring n’Roll

Twisty twisted French pop from Catherine Ringer (one/half of Les Rita Mitsouko with husband Fred Chichin who passed away in 2007).

When I think of Ava Gardner, I can’t help but think of the 1964 film The Night of the Iguana, which was based on the play by Tennessee Williams and adapted for the screen and directed by John Huston. Starring Richard Burton as the Episcopal minister Reverend Dr. T. Lawrence Shannon who ‘left’ his church following a nervous breakdown and an inappropriate relationship with a “very young” Sunday school teacher, he’s now a bus/tour guide in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.

Burton jostles a mostly aged group of all-female Baptist school teachers through the sweltering heat and dust while temptation builds with each passing mile. Charlotte Goodall, embodied by the ever tempting then 17-year-old Sue Lyon (who had just a year earlier done some serious damage to James Mason in Kubrick’s brilliant film-version of Nabakov’s Lolita), is after more than Burton’s soul and when her ‘butch’ aunt fires him in an attempt to save her niece’s purity (for herself?), the good Reverend hijacks the bus with the good ladies in it and heads down the coast to Mismaloya where Ava Gardner and her pair of maraca-shaking cabana boys add another twisted angle of temptation and possible redemption.

There once was woman from Nanatucket (Deborah Kerr) and her very aged poet grandfather also await the troupe at Gardner’s jungle resort. Did I mention the good Reverend is also battling the bottle? Queue Tom Waits’ “Temptation” and hang on for the ride of your life. And to add some real-world spice Burton’s off-screen love, Elizabeth Taylor, went along for the ride.

You see that smile on Richard Burton’s face? You would be too…

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Frank Sinatra
In The Wee Small Hours

His seventh studio record, his first LP, 1955, originally released as a pair of 10″ discs or one LP filled with beautifully written songs – Duke Ellington, Rogers & Hart, Hoagy Carmichael!, Cole Porter!! and more -, expertly arranged by Nelson Riddle and performed by The Voice with more control, cool and mood than a bucketful of method actors on methadone.

From the liner notes:

“Frank’s rare in-person presence pervaded each of the six sessions held to record this album. Standing in front of the mike with his hands nearly always jammed into his pockets, his shoulders hunched a little forward, he sang.

And as he sang, he created the loneliest early-morning mood in the world.”

As “Andy” pointed out, this is Tom Waits’ # 1 “most cherished album of all time“. The story goes Sinatra recorded this record, what’s called the first concept album, after his breakup with Ava Gardner which explains his mood indigo. I feel his pain…

John McLaughlin
Extrapolation

Recorded at Advision Studios in London on January 18, 1969, Extrapolation was John McLaughlin’s first release as leader and also features John Surman (baritone and soprano sax), Brian Odges (bass), and Tony Oxley (drums). Sitting among McLaughlin’s fiercely controlled playing on Miles’ In A Silent Way (1969), Bitches Brew (1970) and Tony Williams’ Lifetime Emergency! (1969), Extrapolation lights a fuse with the first note and it doesn’t go out until the very last fades into silence. This is mood music – the entire LP holds my attention and keeps me in the same place throughout, never once breaking the spell.

I read somewhere, a very long time ago, that McLaughlin plays it so ‘straight’, sans effects, on Extrapolation in part to silence his critics who claimed he relied too heavily on effects as affectation. I also know people who don’t care for this record feeling that McLaughlin’s playing is nothing more than a race to fit as many notes into a given moment as possible. To each his or her own but to the latter listener I’d suggest that they are hearing a race because its something they value and this focus has effectively limited their ability to hear between and around the notes. To hear the larger story and fall into its mood.

And even though this isn’t billed as a quartet in name, it is one in spirit and the supporting cast do much more than support. John Surman takes on the roll of McLaughlin’s alter ego weaving intricate patterns in time, Brian Odges double bass adds melodic undercurrents, and Tony Oxley keeps the whole thing cooking. I’ve owned and listened to this record since the late ’70s and I’ve never once tired of the tales it has to tell or the places it places you in.

Do it!

Vincent van Gogh
Portrait of Dr. Gachet (1890)

Some people ascribe psychological reasons to other people’s ability to perceive an audible difference between audio cables. The standard argument goes – there’s no scientific basis to explain how an audio cable can affect sound unless a) it incorporates something beyond wire to intentionally alter the sound, b) it is poorly made or c) it is broke. Therefore the only reason people hear a difference between properly functioning audio cables is due to the fact that they believe they will hear a difference. Either someone has suggested they will hear a difference or their belief system informs their perception. Either way the most vehement critics of audio cables cry not only foul but also fraud.

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Another lazy post but I didn’t want this one to get brushed under the rug.

From the website:

“Three albums by Randy Burns were originally released on the ESP-Disk label during the late sixties. The first of which called Of Love and War came out in 1966 and was somewhat your typical mid-sixties solo folk debut album, straight out of the Greenwich Village scene. It contained a few self-composed tunes but mostly ‘borrowed’ songs from fellow folksters. Accompanied only by his acoustic guitar and occasional 12-string backing, Randy laid down a set that inspired his own writing. The third album called Songs For an Uncertain Lady was released in 1970 and already leaned much more towards Randy’s rock style in the early 70’s, when he moved on to the Mercury label. However still folky, as a whole it was much more straightforward and outgoing than the music described yet.

Now, in retrospective categorized as acid- or lonerfolk, ever an effort of a self-composed album in the folkrock genre of the time is Evening of the Magician, from 1968. Randy has a clear and warm, very distinctive voice, especially beautiful when backed up by himself on two songs. In regards to the ‘acidfolk’ point of view his poetic lyrics may be considered slightly psychedelic. However his words unsophisticated are often used and placed oddly, therefore making the meaning of the song not instantly obvious. From a ‘lonerfolk’ perspective, the music is quite introvert due to a woolly home recording sound. Now backed up by a small band, Randy’s music really is folkrock in the very essence of the term, or even how it should be. He’d constructed compositions that are and can only be carried out on (acoustic) guitar, the core melodies being within the suggestive chords, underlined by electric solo guitar and bass, and occasional drums, organ, piano, and flute. The album only consists of the most gentle and musically interesting songs.

It has been a challenge to provide the best of sound quality for the vinyl reissue. The original vinyl was of poor quality, the original tapes were worse. Furthermore, the recordings appeared to have been panned dominantly to one channel making it sound completely out of balance. But, with the latest technology the album could be fully restored to the way it should sound. The audiophile will find a centered stereo image and smooth continuity of tonal beauty.

Randy recently picked up the guitar and started writing again. Apart from his often ESP-Disk related cult status, he is a very much respected member of the US folk community. Now, his current followers are introduced to probably his most essential of music history, as collectors are offered a true gem in the best quality ever.”

Looks like another great reissue from Enabling Works.  Remember they have already delivered two very fine Loren Connors reissues.  I’m sure we will all enjoy the “centered stereo image and smooth continuity of tonal beauty.”

Due September of this year.  A sample here.  You can also hear Connors sound bites for those not familiar.  However, this is very unlikely with ML at the helm!

Rev. Charlie Jackson
You Got To Move: Live Recordings, Vol. 1

It just keeps getting better. Adam Lore at 50 Miles of Elbow Room has announced their inaugural LP release and it’s bound to be a winner. Here’s Adam:

Rev. Charlie Jackson was a distinctly powerful guitar evangelist who devoted his life to singing and preaching the gospel, particularly throughout Louisiana and Mississippi. Beginning sometime around the early 1970s, he often documented the church services at which he participated with a portable cassette recorder. Over the years, he accumulated an extensive archive of recordings that were mostly made by himself, Frances Jackson, or Laura Davis Jackson, with a local professional occasionally hired to record a noteworthy service.

…these tapes contain a wealth of outstanding performances. They also provide a valuable opportunity to take a broad survey of Rev. Jackson’s music over roughly a 30-year period and obtain a much more detailed and vivid picture of the vibrant gospel community in which he traveled, something that was only hinted at by his commercial recordings. Listening to these performances, one can hear why Rev. Jackson was so in-demand: no matter the situation or the size of the congregation, he sounds fully engaged, with a sense of sacred duty.

I happen to own and love a 45 of one of the Reverend’s live performances, Wrapped Up In Jesus/Lord Your So Good, which I got from Adam/50 MIles…and consider it an Indispensable Record. I played this very 45 at a Monkeyhaus and Herb Reichert commented, “Now that’s real music”. My bet is this first LP on 50 Miles of Elbow Room is too. Sign me up!

- First pressing of 500 copies on high quality RTI-pressed vinyl
- Beautiful old school “tip -on” Stoughton sleeves
- Insert with extensive biographical notes
- Vol. 1 in a series of at least 3
- All material previously unreleased, drawn from 100+ hours of tapes
- 50 Miles of Elbow Room will be the sole distributor of this record; stores are encouraged to get in touch for direct dealing