Ring in the New Year with Alex Pangman's final Swing Set

Alex Pangman signs off in swingin' fashion with her final Swing Set for jazzcast.ca which johnny-come-latelys can find here.  

One For The Weekend: Phil & Dave Alvin

Here are Phil and Dave Alvin performing "World's In A Bad Condition" off their Lost Time (Yep Roc) album from 2015. 

That time Neil Young collaborated with DEVO in 1978

This unhinged rip through "Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)" was done at San Francisco's Different Fur Studios in 1978. 

Happy Birthday Patti Smith!

Celebrating Patti Smith's 75th birthday with "People Have the Power" backed by Lenny Kaye and Choir! Choir! Choir! 

Michot's Melody Makers are joined by frogs and crickets on Tiny Island

Michot's Melody Makers conjured a sweet version of Canray Fontenot's "Les Plats Sont Tous Mis Sur La Table" on Tiny Island. 

Here's the scoop...

TINY ISLAND was recorded and filmed by firelight on the night of March 6 on – yes, a tiny island -- in a small pond on Michot's home in Prairie Des Femmes, Louisiana. Played entirely live, the performance was put together for a tour stop on Ned Sublette and Ariana Hall's NOLA Reconnect, a virtual visit to Louisiana with attendees from all over America and Europe. Featuring a deep sonic collaboration with the tiny island’s frog and insect population, the set captures a more intimate and acoustic performance than the higher-decibel, psychedelic shows the Melody Makers are known for.

Their joint repertoire of Cajun and Haitian, Créole and Kréyol songs -- both original and traditional -- coalesced in 2016 when Leyla joined String Noise for a special set at Louis's residency at The Stone in NYC in 2016 (released in 2020 on Nouveau Electric as Le String Noise under the L.E.S. Douze collection). Leyla first joined Michot's Melody Makers at New Orleans’s Music Box Village for a socially distanced show in November of 2020, and the outfit continued working together on outdoor shows at the Broadside Theater throughout the months of canceled touring.

Tiny Island is now available as a digital audio EP on on Louis Michot’s own Nouveau Electric Records. The package was executive-produced by Ned Sublette, produced by Louis Michot, recorded by Kirkland Middleton, and mixed by Mark Bingham. 

Get a copy Michot's Melody Makers' new Tiny Island album directly from Nouveau Electric Records right here. Listen to "Les Plats Sont Tous Mis Sur La Table, " "Blues de Neg Francis" and "Two-Step de Ste. Marie" below.

 

Happy Birthday Marianne Faithfull

Celebrating Marianne Faithfull's 75th birthday with a couple of interviews surrounding her latest album She Walks In Beauty.

She Walks In Beauty

With She Walks in Beauty Marianne Faithfull, with composer and multi-instrumentalist Warren Ellis, releases one of the most distinctive and singular albums of her long, extraordinary life and career. It was recorded just before and during the first Covid-19 lockdown – during which the singer herself became infected and almost died of the disease – with musical friends and family including not only composer Warren Ellis but Nick Cave, Brian Eno, cellist Vincent Ségal and producer-engineer Head. She Walks in Beauty fulfils Faithfull’s long-held ambition to record an album of poetry with music.

Delving deep into her past, it’s a record that draws on her passion for the English Romantic poets, a passion she fostered in her A Level studies with one Mrs Simpson at St Joseph’s Convent School in Reading, before leaving for London at the age of 16. From there she entered the world of ‘As Tears Go By’, of Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones, Top of the Pops and the left-hand path of pop and stage stardom. Sixties iconography and outrage followed, as did her subsequent battles with addiction before her 1979 return to powerful female and artistic autonomy with Broken English, an album which featured her setting to music Heathcote Williams’ poem of eviscerating rage, ‘Why D’Ya Do It?’

On subsequent albums, such as 1995’s A Secret Life, she set the poems of her friend Frank McGuinness to music, while 1998’s Seven Deadly Sins drew on Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht. She toured a show of Shakespeare’s sonnets with cellist Vincent Ségal in 2008-2009, and earlier in 2020 took part in a relay reading of Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. But it is only now that a project she had nursed through the decades has come to fruition.

Instrumental in making She Walks in Beauty a reality is her longtime friend and manager Francois Ravard. “It was Francois who put it together and made it happen,” she says. “And it was him who persuaded Warren to commit, which was really difficult because Warren’s doing so many things.”

“Marianne had a wonderful idea for this poetry record, and she wanted to do it straight away,” recalls Ravard. “I loved the idea immediately, and I called Head and asked him to go to Marianne to record her readings.” Then he approached Warren to see if he could score them in the same way he scores his films. “It took time for him to realise what he could do, but afterwards he said that he’d had one of the best times in his life working on it.”

Warren Ellis with Marianne Faithfull

It was recorded in part at her London home just before and after lockdown, with PJ Harvey’s producer Head, who then sent the voice recordings to Ellis, who set about composing the music in his Paris studio. “I didn’t think of them as songs,” he says. “I wasn’t locked into melodies or chords. I could take incredible liberties. It wasn’t about creating something that had to follow the text or outline it – it was free in that respect. The important thing was that it didn’t get in the way.”

He describes the music of She Walks in Beauty as a kind of musique concrete, incorporating street sounds with a range of acoustic and electronic instrumentation and manipulation. “My preferred way of making music is to leave a lot of it to chance, to let accidents happen,” he says. “I’ve been moving away from structures in things. This music is me attempting to push forward. I think it’s as good as anything I’ve ever done,” he adds, “in terms of the spirit of it and the process I went through to make it.”

Working in isolation through lockdown in his Paris studio, Ellis’s immersion in the readings took over his life for a while. “It’s really meditative to hear this stuff over and over,” he says. “For a couple of months it was all I listened to.” Eventually he shared the music he had composed to counterpoint the poems with an enthusiastic Nick Cave, who went on to play piano on many of the tracks (“He downloaded it as he listened to it while talking to me on the phone and he was like, ‘wow, this is incredible, this is amazing!’”). Brian Eno created compelling sound textures on the likes of ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ and ‘The Bridge of Sighs’, while Vincent Ségal added cello parts to Shelley’s liminal, otherworldly ‘To The Moon’, and Byron’s late night lament ‘So We’ll Go No More A-Roving’, among others.

Drawing deep on the poetry of Shelley, Keats, Byron, Wordsworth, Tennyson and Thomas Hood, Faithfull’s vocal performances set to Ellis’s subtle collages of sound draw out the heart, the quick, the vibrant living matter in all these great poems, making them fresh, renewing them with the complex, lived-in timbres of her voice, and set to a subtle palette of ambient musical settings. It’s both a radical departure and a return to her original inspirations as an artist and performer.

The greatest poetry is best heard, and Faithfull’s accounts of some of the greatest lyric poetry in our language – Keats’ ‘Ode To A Nightingale’ and ‘To Autumn’ – are spine-tingling in their deep understanding of the poetry’s powerful currents of meaning and identification. On ‘Nightingale’, her voice opens up like an epic landscape, while in Shelley’s miniature masterpiece, ‘To The Moon’, she sounds otherworldly, as if calling down from another medium, and the atonal, otherworldly sound textures provided by Eno on ‘Bridge of Sighs’ and ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ become a compelling foil for Faithfull’s haunting interpretations of these rich, dark poems.

“They’ve been with Marianne her whole life,” says Ellis. “She believes in these texts. That world, she inhabits it, embodies it, and that really comes through. She really means it. It’s no blind reading. And what’s great about hearing them is that she totally takes you with her. It’s inclusive. She’s inviting you into this world with her. She does that with a song too. I’ve seen her do things in the studio, deliver a vocal where there’s not one dry eye in the room. And then she’d go, ‘Was that alright?’. She’s got one of those voices. There’s just something about the way she can deliver that is incredibly affecting.”

“Eventually I always end up where I was meant to be,” says Faithfull. “I’ve noticed that. It may take a long time, but I get there. I never forget these things. After all these years, I’ve drawn the strands back and they still mean something and they resonate more, actually, because I now have life experience. Life and near-death experience. Many times! Not just once.”

It’s perhaps no coincidence that her previous album, 2018’s highly acclaimed Negative Capability, took its title from a central tenet of Keats’ poetics. “And what that is, is to live in doubt, to not be absolutely sure of yourself. But this time,” she adds, “I wasn’t in doubt – I’ve been thinking about it for so long, this album, it’s been in my head for so long, I think I really knew exactly what I wanted. I just picked the poems I really loved, and I can’t help but say I think I was very lucky. We got it.”

She Walks in Beauty is scheduled for release on April 30th 2021, with artwork created for the album by British artist and lifelong friend, Colin Self, and with the full texts of the poems, and commentary, included in the liner notes. While Faithfull continues to recover from the after-effects of Covid-19, and the world around us continues to struggle with the impact of the worldwide pandemic, these are poems and performances to steady and lift the spirit.

Get a copy of Marianne Faithfull's new album She Walks In Beauty right here. Check the interview clips and BBC documentary from 1999 below.  

 

LINKS

Billboard Marianne Faithfull turns 75 – celebrate with her 10 best songs (according to Joe Lynch)

Goodbye to NYC's historic East River Park Amphitheater!

Along with Sonny Rollins gigs in 1962, East River Park Amphitheatre was the site of the climactic hip hop concert in Wild Style.

LINKS

Gothamist City Demolition of East River Park Amphitheater Underway

Faces In The Crowd vs. Edgar A. Guest

"Clouds of Doubt" cut by Jack Mikovic's group Faces In The Crowd was clearly inspired by Edgar A. Guest's poem "Don't Quit"

Happy Birthday Alex Chilton!

Remembering Alex Chilton on his birthday with the trailer for the documentary "Why Should I Care?" and a couple of clips. 

Watch the Henri Texier Trio at La Maison de la Culture d'Amiens

Bassist Henri Texier is joined by saxophonist Sébastien Texier and drummer Gautier Garrigue for this concert from March 17th.

Henri Texier's most recent release is the quintet outing Chance released by Label Bleu in 2020.  

Watch the video for "Lost Cool" by HolyFuck feat. Lucia Tacchetti

Check out Tim Krug's video for "Lost Cool" by Toronto's own HolyFuck followed by the clip for "Airport Dreams"

David Hood's guided tour of Muscle Shoals Sound Studios

Legendary session bassist David Hood points out photographic evidence of recording with Pops Staples at 3614 N Jackson Hwy. 

R.I.P. bluegrass great J.D. Crowe, 1937-2021

Sadly, Kentucky-born banjo legend J.D. Crowe has passed away. He'll be greatly missed. 

Happy Birthday Doug Hammond!

Celebrating Doug's birthday with a reading, a classic 1975 album, a whumper with Nina Simone from '76 and a documentary. 

Tubby Hayes vs. Mose Allison

Tubby Hayes' Jazz Couriers covered Mose Allison's "In Salah" for Carlton back in 1958, a year after Mose released it. 

Another Foggy Christmas with Lester T. Raww's Graveside Quartet

Seems like "Another Foggy Christmas" by Lonesome Lester T. Raww couldn't be more appropriate this year. Have a listen. 

Happy Holidays from Many Lands courtesy of The Mastersounds

Monk and Buddy Montgomery put together this jazzy swing through Christmas tunes from around the world in 1959. 

Merry Christmas from Charlie Parker, Max Roach & Kenny Dorham

Here's a swinging live version of "White Christmas" by Charlie Parker and crew recorded at New York's Royal Roost in 1948. 

Season's Greetings from Scott McCaughey & The Minus 5

Here's a spirited yuletide ripper from Scott McCaughey off the Minus 5's Dear December album from 2017. 

You can still get the Minus 5's Dear December album from Yep Roc or your fave streaming platform right here.  

Joni Mitchell shares Christmas-y animated clip for "River"

Check out the official video for Joni Mitchell's "River" off her classic album Blue from 1971. 

Watch Girl Trouble's Holiday Special

Girl Trouble recently got together at Stu Michael's pad to spread a little Christmas cheer for the holiday season. 

Merry Christmas children from Bette Davis

Lots of fabulous presents for Bette Davis but she has another gift in store for her kids on Christmas.  

Remembering Jimmy Silva this Christmas

Check out "Christmas Is Holy" by Jimmy Silva's Goat 5. Jimmy passed away on December 23, 1994 at age 42. 

Why not spend Christmas with Johnny Dowd

Johnny Dowd's limited-run Xmas EP comes hand decorated by the man himself. Grab a copy from his site right here. 

Listen to Johnny Dowd's insights on The Power Of The Dog on Joshua & Phoebe's Yell About Movies! podcast right here. 

Celebrate Christmas Leutonian-style with The Schmenge Brothers

Yosh Schmenge (John Candy) and brother Stan (Eugene Levy) offer a glimpse of how they celebrate Christmas. 

That time Dr. John joined Leon Redbone for "Frosty The Snowman"

Here's Dr. John and Leon Redbone reprising "Frosty The Snowman" for Leon's Christmas Island album from 1988.  

Jad Fair is Baking Cookies for Santa

 Jad Fair's delightful Christmas tune was recorded for the Joyful Noise label's annual holiday special.    

Here's the scoop...

We’re suckers for a good tradition over at Joyful Noise Reccords, one of them being our annual “holiday special” with holiday-themed covers by members of the JNR roster – including Oneida, Paul Leary, Kramer, The Ophelias, WHY?, jess joy, CJ Boyd and of course, Jad Fair – available as a digital download right here. 

Check out Jad Fair's performance of "Baking Cookies For Santa" followed by the entire Joyful Noise 2021 Holiday Special. 

Joyful Noise 2021 Holiday Special

1. WHY? - Auld Lang Syne 

2. jess joy - OkCupid Xmas 

3. Paul Leary - We Wish You a Merry Christmas 

4. Kidbug - Just Like Xmas 

5. Sound of Ceres - Walking in the Air 

6. Jad Fair - Baking Cookies for Santa 

7. C.J. Boyd - Winter Wanderer 

8. Tall Tall Trees - Free Jazz Drummer Boy 

9. The Ophelias - Silver & Gold 

10. No Joy - Theme from Gremlins 

11. Kramer - Winterlong 

12. Oneida - In The Court of the Christmas King

100% of net proceeds will benefit Coalition for the Homeless. 

 

Happy Birthday Jean-Michel Basquiat

Remembering Jean-Michel Basquiat on his birthday with the posthumously released Gray album "Shades Of..." and remixes. 

B-Side Wins Again: The Swan Silvertones

With Christmas on the way, here's Claude Jeter and the Swan Silvertones singing "Great Day In December" on Vee Jay from 1956.  

Rough Guide to Texas Blues traces development of the Lone Star sound

Guitar slingers like Blind Lemon Jefferson, Black Ace, T-Bone Walker and Smokey Hogg are the focus of this savvy selection.

Here's the scoop...

Texas is without doubt one of the quintessential musical melting pots of the US, and whilst Mississippi receives most of the credit for creating the blues, Texas is where many of the earliest blues pioneers lived and played. Although equally poignant and direct as the Delta style, the Texas blues was fundamentally less raw and rudimentary with guitarists typically incorporating more sophisticated and varied guitar accompaniments from verse to verse.

Dubbed the ‘Father of the Texas Blues’, Blind Lemon Jefferson is to the Texas blues what Charley Patton and Robert Johnson are to its Delta variant. Laying down a whopping one hundred or so sides in just three short years between 1926 and 1929 he established himself as one of the very first successful blues recording artists before his premature death at the age of just 36. Like many songsters of his time, Jefferson was renowned for his versatility and wide-ranging repertoire from rags and spirituals to blues and other popular songs of the day. His towering musical influence had a huge impact on all who crossed his path including Leadbelly, who pays his respects in the featured ‘My Friend Blind Lemon’ and Aaron Thibeaux Walker (T-Bone Walker), a family friend to whom Jefferson is thought to have passed on his guitar knowledge in exchange for Walker’s services as a guide. Another oft-romanticized story is that Jefferson once plied his busking trade on the opposite side of the street to another Texan guitar legend Blind Willie Johnson, a fire-and-brimstone Christian believer to the core who played sacred songs so mean that his legacy has gone down in blues history.

Coley Jones and the Dallas String Band

Dallas was an important hub for the Texas blues scene during the 1920s and amongst its most popular acts was the Dallas String Band. The band’s repertoire was drawn largely from minstrel, vaudeville, and ragtime traditions, and was primarily made up of vaudevillian songster Coley Jones on mandolin, bassist Marco Washington, and guitarist Sam Harris, with a few transient members joining in occasionally including even Blind Lemon Jefferson who was said to have sat in from time-to-time. Their wonderful rendition of ‘Dallas Rag’ has endured as one of the band’s most loved tunes and is popular to this day amongst guitar pickers. The band’s leader, Coley Jones, was a prominent figure in the Afro-American music scene of Dallas, whose solo release ‘The Elder's He's My Man’, is one of several great church parodies in the pre-blues canon.

Andrew "Smokey" Hogg

Remarkably Henry Thomas’ projected birthdate of 1874 predates that of Blind Lemon Jefferson by two decades and gives us an idea of what rural black music sounded like before the turn of the twentieth century. He was 53 years old during his first recording session in 1927 by which point much of his music was already a representation of a bygone era. His songs have duly been re-interpreted and much covered by artists including Bob Dylan, The Lovin’ Spoonful, and the Grateful Dead who covered the classic opener ‘Don’t Ease Me In’ for their debut single in 1966. Check out the original version by Henry Thomas below. 

The powerful vocals of both Texas Alexander and Bessie Tucker provide another important insight into the pre-blues tradition as they belt out their lyrics in the style of the old southern field hands in their respective ‘Bell Cow Blues’ and ‘Got Cut All To Pieces’, thus helping to preserve the musical traditions of work songs and field hollers. Equally distinctive was the slide guitar artistry of blues pioneers who performed in and around the Texas region such as Black Ace, Oscar Woods and Ramblin’ Thomas whose playing represents another key aspect of the Texas blues.

Invariably, many of these featured musicians were connected in some way, and the blues diva Victoria Spivey was another who had performed with Blind Lemon Jefferson. Undoubtedly one of the most influential blues women of her era, she wrote songs, sang them with heartfelt passion and accompanied herself on piano, an instrument whose importance and contribution shouldn’t be overlooked in blues history from the region. In fact, no other southern state produced as many local pianists as Texas, including Texas Bill Day and the more well-known Whistlin’ Alex Moore whose ‘West Texas Woman’ concludes this collection of tracks rooted in the traditions of "The Lone Star State.”

The Rough Guide to Texas Blues is out January 28th but you can pre-order a copy right here. 

Merry Christmas from Clyde Lasley and Cadillac Baby!

Chicago impressario Narvel "Cadillac Baby" Eatmon was behind Clyde Lasley's 1967 yuletide gem "Santa Came Home Drunk"

Jaymz Bee presents A Very Untraditional Christmas

Jaymz Bee and pals knocked out a nutty Christmas benefit album with proceeds supporting musicians in need. 

Get a copy of Jaymz Bee presents A Very Untraditional Christmas right here. Listen to Jef Farquharson's "Christmas Iz" (vocally enhanced by Mary Margaret O'Hara) and Gita Baltensperger's version of "Santa Baby" following the album credits below. 

Charles Hackbarth created the album's colourful sleeve artwork. 

 

A VERY UNTRADITIONAL CHRISTMAS

​

1 - It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas 3:28 (Willson Meredith) Frank-Music Corp.

JEF FARQUHARSON  

 

2 - Santa Baby 3:15 (Joan Javits / Philip Springer / Tony Springer) Tamir Music/BMG

GITA BALTENSPERGER 

 

3 - I’ll Be Home For Christmas 3:36 (Kim Gannon / Buck Ram / Walter Kent) Carlin America Inc.

CHARLENE JALONDE  

 

4 - Silver Bells (4:38) (Jay Livingston / Ray Eans) Sony/ATV/Harmony  

HEINO  

 

5 - Winter Wonderland 2:53 (Felix Bernard, Richard B. Smith)

PD THE THREE QUINTS (Dallas, Hunter and Logan Quint) 

 

6 - Sleigh Ride 3:37 (Anderson Leroy, Parish Mitchell) Mills Music Inc. 

INGRID VON BIFFENFEFFEN  

 

7 - The Christmas Song 5:10 (Mel Torme / Bob Wells) Morris-Edwin-H-Co.

KING SALTY  

 

8 - Let It Snow 2:41 (Sammy Cahn, Jule Styne) Cahn Music Co. Quaytor Prod. LLC

ERINA CHORINA  

 

9 - Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas 2:39 (Hugh Martin, Ralph Blane)  EMI Feist Catalog Inc.

BUEHLER TOBOGGANHEAD  

 

10 - White Christmas 3:02 (Irving Berlin) Irving Berlin Music Company 

ROGER © with DAISY BAMWOOD 

 

11 - It’s The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year 3:27 (Eddie Bola, George Wyle) Barnaby-Music Corp.

FRED SPEK 

 

12 - There’s No Place Like Home for the Holidays 3:20 (Al Stillman, Robert Allen) Charlie Deitcher Prod./KItty Anne Music Co.

FRIENDLY RICH & MARY MARGARET O’HARA  

​

BONUS TRACK (not available on vinyl) 

13 - Christmas Iz (Rusty McCarthy & Jef Farquharson) 4:12 

JEF FARQUHARSON 

Produced by Rusty McCarthy 

Jef Farquharson-lead vocals, background vocals

Rusty McCarthy-guitar, bass, background vocals

Matt Horner-keyboards

Mike Sloski-drums

Geoff Bennett-percussion

John Johnson-tenor sax

Mary Margaret O’Hara-sweet warbling

​

ARTWORK by CHARLES HACKBARTH

​

Recorded, Edited, Mixed and Mastered by Mariana Hutten

Additional Recording: Vezi Tayyeb & Ben Pelchat

Produced by Jaymz Bee

 

Starring:

Bulldog Ujjak Zene - Piano 

Great Bob Scott - Drums

Bartholomew Wankman - Bass

Ariana Chopstikz - keyboards, bv’s 

Hans Grober - lap steel, accordion, trumpet, slide trumpet, bells

Marcus O’Hara - balloon sounds 

Chauncey McBarnacle - flute

Dirk Fiddler - violin

 

Happy Birthday Betty Wright

Remembering Miami soul great Betty Wright with a couple of stellar performances including 'Paralyzed' from 1966.

Watch Cat Power's video for her version of "I'll Be Seeing You"

Cat Power's wistful reading of "I'll Be Seeing You" is off her forthcoming Covers album out January 14th.

Here's the scoop...

Cat Power, the singer/songwriter/producer Chan Marshall, previews her forthcoming album Covers (Domino) with a fresh interpretation of Billie Holiday's "I'll Be Seeing You" accompanied by a music video. Directed by Greg Hunt, the clip nods to Lady Day as Marshall sings behind a classic 1940’s-style Shure microphone in a cabaret hall evoking the jazz legend’s beautifully restrained vocals.  

“I’ll Be Seeing You” was inspired by recent losses surrounding Marshall’s inner circle of life—including Sun collaborator Philippe Zdar, who tragically passed in 2019.

 

“When people who you love have been taken from you, there’s always a song that holds their memory in your mind,” Marshall ruminates while talking about the importance that the cover itself holds in her heart. “It’s a conversation with those on the other side, and it’s really important for me to reach out to people that way.”

You can pre-order Cat Power's Covers album right here. Watch the video for "I'll Be Seeing You" followed by Billie Holiday's 1944 version for Commodore backed by Eddie Heywood's Orchestra below. 

 

B-Side Wins Again: Earl Hines Orchestra w/ Billy Eckstine & Budd Johnson

Billy Eckstine turned the Earl Hines B-side "Jelly, Jelly" into a hit but Budd Johnson's crazy closing clarinet solo took the cake.  

Truckin' Around The Christmas Tree with Alex Pangman

Here's Alex Pangman's video for "Truckin' Around The Christmas Tree" off her delightful Christmas Gift album with her Alleycats.  

Alex Pangman reprises yuletide classics from Kay Starr, Mae Questel and others on Christmas Gift available via Bandcamp here.  

Happy Birthday Audrey Totter

Remembering film noir femme fatale Audrey Totter with a rare interview and a few trailers and clips from her movies.