Unreleased 70s jazz recordings from Montreal's Quintonal due in February!

Jazzaggression's 2LP collection of Quintonal's 1975/76 basement sessions is out February 5th.

Nick & Allyson's New Year's Eve Mellow Holiday Fantastico Fun-boree @ The Common, tonight

Join Nick Flanagan & Allyson Baker for a chill soiree with pals at 1071 College this evening from 7pm on.

Zacht Automaat w/ U.S. Girls @ Double Double Land, tonight

Expect the unexpected from Carl Didur and company at Double Double Land this evening. 

Happy Birthday Alex Chilton

Remembering Alex on his day with his version of Norman Blake's Alcholiday.

Ian Blurton's Happy Endings @ The Rivoli tonight!

[Ian Blurton + Huron] x Grand Funk Railroad = Happy Endings

Merry Christmas from Lou & Laurie

Every Day Is Christmas with the Chamber Strings

Yes, even Paul Weller loves the Chamber Strings and so will you after hearing the track below.

Happy Birthday Jean-Michel Basquiat

Remembering the late great Jean-Michel Basquiat with a couple of his recordings with Gray. 

Whaddya mean you don't know Pietro Ciancaglini

Check out "Balarm" from Pietro Ciancaglini's 2009 Mingus salute Reincarnation Of A Lovebird. 

Red Fang w/Opeth @ Kool Haus, Sunday

Red Fang's show is sadly sold out but you can still enjoy Adam Avilla's animated clip for Crows In Swine. 

Happy Birthday Ed Kuepper!

Leather Uppers reactivate for Bovine blow-out tonight!

Leather Uppers will be on stage at 10:30pm. Grab a copy of OK, Don't Say Hi.

Before They Were Famous: Run DMC

Joseph Simmons and Darryl McDaniels made their screen debut as asylum orderlies in The Fuzztones' Ward 81 clip.

Choir! Choir! Choir! @ Monarch Tavern, tonight

Check out Choir! Choir! Choir!'s lovely rendition of Nick Drake's Pink Moon. 

Watch the new Persian Rugs video for Underemployed

The track "Underemployed" is off the cassette This Is OK For Now by Toronto's Persian Rugs available here.

Whaddya mean you don't know Doc & Les 6 Jets

The track "Makin' Love" is off Doc & Les 6 Jets' Vol. 1 EP on the French Metropole Records label.

Dan Penn performs Dark End of the Street on Letterman

Legendary soul singer/songwriter Dan Penn's latest recording I Need A Holiday is available right here.

Happy Birthday Tom Verlaine

Foggy Hogtown Boys' CD Release Party @ Hugh's Room, tonight

Toronto's own Foggy Hogtown Boys launch their Animals, Insects and People album at Hugh's this evening. 

Happy Birthday Bob Dorough!

Check out Bob's great but largely overlooked version of Runaway Child, Running Wild.

Happy Birthday Gary Floyd!

Celebrating Gary Floyd's birthday with two stellar vocal performances you may have missed.

LINKS
Please Bee Nice: A Gary Floyd Memoir
The Dicks 1980-1986
Rank and Revue An Interview with Gary Floyd

Lil Debbie @ The Dance Cave, Wednesday

Check out Lil Debbie's chat with B-Real and recent performance at The Crocodile in Seattle. 

Mayer Hawthorne & Jake One put on Tuxedo DJ set at Tattoo Friday

Mayer Hawthorne & Jake One will get down with DJ Serious, Big Jacks & Son of S.O.U.L. at Tattoo.

The Tuxedo pairing of superslick R&B crooner Mayer Hawthorne (Aquarius) with celebrated beat scientist Jake One (Taurus) belongs to the esteemed one-word funk family lineage which includes such legendary groups as Chic, Shalamar, Zapp, Radiance, Xtasy and Lemuria.

For Mayer and Jake, the collaboration began with an exchange of mixtapes back in 2006. The fruits of a long-standing kinship were three Tuxedo tracks that mysteriously showed up on Internet doorsteps nearly two years ago. In between personal projects, these three tracks became a full album’s worth of Tuxedo. The album was mixed by original disco don dada John Morales at his home studio in South Plainfield, New Jersey. “I flew out there,” Mayer says. “His wife made me spaghetti and everything.”

Tuxedo's 12-track self-titled album is set for release on March 3 via Stones Throw Records, the same label that issued Mayer's A Strange Arrangement debut back in 2009. No doubt Mayer and Jake will squeeze a few Tuxedo joints besides Do It (check it out below) into their DJ set at Tattoo on Friday night which should double quite nicely as an 80s boogie birthday bash for Toronto's own Arcee.

RIP Brian Goble aka "Wimpy Roy" of the Subhumans

Sadly, Brian Goble passed away on Sunday. Longtime pal Joey Keithley of D.O.A. remembers Brian below.

BRIAN GOBLE, 1957-2014

Brian Goble aka Wimpy aka Sunny Boy aka Sunny Boy Roy has left us and this world is much poorer because of that. Brian, just 28 days short of his 58th birthday died of a heart attack on Sunday December 7th, 2014. I am writing this because of the loss and heartache I feel out of losing a lifelong friend, but also to remember what a vital and amazing person Wimpy was. The toughest part is the thinking about the children he has left behind, his son Dylan, his daughter Sarah and his step son Cole, who Brian helped raise. My most heartfelt condolences to them and to Brian’s older brother Roger.

I first met Brian in 1963 walking home from Lochdale Elementary School in Burnaby, BC. Around the same time I also met Gerry Hannah (Gerry Useless) who lived very near Brian, they were six years old and I was seven and we all lived on Burnaby Mountain. About four years later the three of us befriended Ken Montgomery (Dimwit), whose family had moved to the Lochdale area. From elementary to high school our friendship grew, through our collective love of music and social/political consciousness till we became the best of friends and inseparable. It occurred to me later on in life that we truly were “The Four Amigoes”.

The four of us started our first high school band called Misty Grey and we were terrible, but we were learning. In 1975 when we were around 18 and 19 years old we left Vancouver in an attempt to “get back to the land”. We were kind of junior hippies in a sense in the small BC towns of Lumby and Cherryville, that was a lot of fun but ultimately that fizzled out. We moved back in Vancouver and started a cover rock band called Stone Crazy, Brian on bass, Gerry on vocals, Dimwit on drums and Brad Kent and I on guitar. We got our first booking in Merritt BC and promptly got fired and our collective asses kicked out of town before “the locals cut you guys in two with their chainsaws”.

Well that unfortunate booking led us to abandon that predictable approach to rock n’ roll and to take on the new ground breaking style of punk rock, which we did with an unparalleled zeal. We started Vancouver’s second punk band in the summer of 1977, we called it The Skulls. Brian was becoming a stalwart on bass, Dimwit was well on his way to becoming one of Canada’s greatest drummers ever and Simon Werner was an ace on guitar. That left just me, by default I became Joey Shithead, “That maniac on vocals”.

We were soon dubbed “Vancouver’s most hated band by Tom Harrison of the Georgia Straight. We played around Vancouver for awhile, then in October 1977 we all moved to Toronto to join the “scene” there. Gerry Hannah, looking for adventure, moved to Toronto with us and this is how the legend of “Wimpy” was born. Gerry was writing songs but had no band, so we had Gerry play bass, Wimpy sang, Simon played guitar and I drummed, we called this obnoxious outfit Wimpy and the Bloated Cows. Thus Brian finally had a great punk rock nickname and also the tradition of “fuck bands” was born, where people traded instruments and made up instant bands.

At the start of 1978 Wimpy and Simon moved to the U.K. with a plan to have The Skulls invade London! Good plan but Dimwit and I screwed up the plan by moving back to Vancouver, Wimpy was broke and freezing in London, so he soon followed. When he got back, Wimpy started the early Subhumans along with Dimwit and Brad Kent. (this was about the same time I started D.O.A.). That line up soon merged with The Stiffs, solidifying the Subhumans classic line up of Wimpy on vocals, Gerry Useless on bass, Mike Graham on guitar and Dimwit on drums. Notably left out of the arrangement were good pals Zippy Pinhead, Sid Sick and Brad Kunt. But one of Canada’s greatest bands were on their way.

Featuring the great songwriting of Wimpy, Gerry and Mike, the powerhouse  drumming of Dimwit, the Subhumans were led by Brian Wimpy Roy Goble,  the most original  front man as you could find this side of Iggy Pop. It’s not totally clear but I do believe that Wimpy invented “crowd surfing” when Mike would start playing lead Wimpy would jump into the crowd, then one night the crowd caught him and held him up, I had never seen anything like it. Brian was a powerhouse vocalist, our old soundman Hutch believed he had a special power to fire out vocals louder than any human ever had! The Subhumans put out two sterling albums as well as a number of singles and a four song EP, before they broke up in 1982. They later reunited (with Jon card replacing Dimwit) and released two albums.

So in March 1982 Brian joined D.O.A. along with Dimwit (RIP). They replaced Chuck Biscuits (Dimwit’s little brother) and Randy Rampage as our rhythm section. Exceptional they were and the two of them, along with Dave Gregg (RIP), myself and producer Thom Wilson recorded in Los Angeles for five days and cut D.O.A.’s 3rd album “War on 45”  (some call it an 8 song EP) in any case I would rate that album in D.O.A.’s top four. On that record you hear just how innovative that Brian was on the bass.

Brian was a huge part of D.O.A. from 1982 -1996, we went through personnel changes that included great musicians like Jon Card, Chris Prohom, Ken Jensen (RIP), Ford Pier, Brien O’Brien, John Wright amongst others. I recorded seven albums with Brian: War on 45, Let’s Wreck The Party, True North Strong and Free, Murder, 13 Flavors of Doom, Loggerheads and The Black Spot and a number of other releases. After well over a thousand shows around the world, Brian quit D.O.A. after 14 years, making him the second longest serving member of D.O.A.

There are some things I’ll never forget, when were both about 11 or 12 Brian introduced me to hockey, we played on the street in our rubber boots with golf balls, boy did that hurt when he would take a slapshot at my net and I got it right on the ankle.  Brian and I also played minor hockey together in Burnaby and he later became a devastating hard hitter playing right wing for the D.O.A. Murder Squad. There was the time in Germany when Italian army deserters tried to steal his passport and he ran out of the bar with only one shoe, yelling “Hans Peter help me! Hans Peter help me!”. Or on an early tour in Europe when him and I had never seen a mini bar in a hotel bar before, so on my advice we drank the bar dry and in the morning we had to make a run for it from the hotel staff when they wanted the dough! Or the time he was two fisting bottles of wine at a gig in Slovenia and the ride back to the hotel ended up with a Technicolor yawn on the side of the van! There was also the sense of self preservation when Brian, Dave, Dimwit and I barely escaped  L.A.P.D billyclubs at a couple of different police vs. punks riots in Los Angeles. This is indelible stuff that I shared with Brian, that is now part of my very soul and being.

Brian was a humanist, a great father, an incredible singer and bass player, he believed in free speech, was always against war and he would speak up against bullshit. He was also one of my best friends and I’ll miss him forever.

 Long live the spirit of Wimpy!!! Rest in Peace

Joe Shithead Keithley 

Deep 70s Israeli folk-jazz album rescued from obscurity by Fortuna Records

The Jazz Workshop LP is available from Fortuna Records. Tel Aviv launch party at Port Said on Friday.

Happy Birthday Tom Waits!

Here are Tom's appearances at the 1981 Montreal Jazz Festival and on Fernwood 2 Night in '75.

One For The Weekend: Classie Ballou

Here's Classie Ballou's Crazy Mambo recorded by Jay Miller, the first single issued on the Nasco label. 

Verckys' 70s Congolese funk & psych gets deluxe reissue treatment from Analog Africa

Congo's turbulent and exhilarating '70s: Nightclubs and dance floors were packed to the brim in the capital, Kinshasa. Exuberant crowds, still giddy from independence a decade prior, grooved to the sounds of the country`s classics. In fact the whole continent was submerged into the Congolese Rumba craze. Encouraged by the fantastic productions of the Ngoma label, vibrant radio waves had been spreading the Congo sound from Leopoldville all over the continent, becoming the countries' No.1 export. The unexpected success nurtured an incredible wealth of talented musicians. One of them was Verckys, who, at age 18, became a member of the country´s most dominant and influential band: Franco´s OK Jazz.

This "relationship" however was short-lived as Verckys, aka Georges Mateta Kiamuangana, now a versatile and potent multi instrumentalist, had plans of his own - the formation of Orchestre Vévé in 1968, with the aim of reinventing and modernising the Congolese sound. Blending the ever influential prowess of James Brown with Congolese Merengue, Rumba and Soukous, Verckys stripped away the conventional approach that O.K. Jazz had pioneered, allowing his saxophone-laced melodies to dominate.

Around 1970 a new important area began with the foundation of the label "les Editions Vévé" on which Verckys would release his own productions. A studio was built and Verckys started recording young urban artists, with guitar-driven Cavacha sounds; Les Freres Soki, Bella Bella, Orchestre Kiam and many more shot to stardom overnight, making Verckys a very wealthy man.

But that wasn't enough for an ambitious man with a vision. He built a sprawling entertainment complex called Vévé Centre, and dispatched a team to learn the intricacies of record pressing to set up the first pressing plant in the country. This was followed by the construction of the Congo's most modern recording studio in Kinshasa, in which he recorded the legendary Tabu Lay Rochereau.

Orchestre Vévé's popularity poured across borders and in 1974 the band travelled to Kenya for a 2 month tour. "Bassala Hot", "Cheka Sana" and "Talali Talala" were some of the tracks recorded in Nairobi for the Kenyan market, songs which are now available to the ears of the world for the very first time.

Compiled over the course of many years, Analog Africa offers a rare glimpse of the Congo's grooviest era with  with this 11-track Verckys et l´Orchestre Vévé CD and double LP release accompanied by in-depth liner notes and vintage photographs. Note: the digital version on bandcamp  comes with 3 exclusive bonus tracks.

Jamaican guitar great Ernest Ranglin returns to Toronto December 14

Ernest Ranglin joins the Jay Douglas All Stars for the Sunday Jam at Seven44 on Dec 14 at 4 pm. 

RIP Bobby Keys, 1943-2014

Legendary Stones saxophonist Bobby Keys died this morning at his home in Franklin, TN. He was 70.  

Massey-Harris @ The Local tonight!

Check out the Massey-Harris treatment of Scott B's tune Waiting in the Wings.