Stéphane Vilar enlisted French model/actress Zouzou to sing on Calcium's psych recordings in 1969 which were only just released.
Here's the scoop...
Percussionist Stéphane Vilar played with pianist Jef Gilson and recorded on his 1964 album Oeil Vision. Musician Graeme Allwright introduced Vilar to Marc'O, then director of the theater school of the American Center Boulevard Raspail. The director, looking for musicians to play rock n' roll in his project Les Idols, hired Vilar along with jazz pianist Patrick Greussay, saxophonist Didier Malherbe (Gong, Clearlight), and guitarist Didier Léon who features on the Barney Wilen's 1972 album Moshi (FFL 015LP). Stéphane then recruited jazz bassist Jacques Zins through Jérôme Savary.
Les Idols is where the musicians who baptized The Rollsticks played. It was performed in 1966 and was later adapted for a feature film in 1968, where the same participants were joined by Valérie Lagrange. Stéphane Vilar then decided, together with his brother the painter Christophe, to create his own band which included some of the Rollsticks: Jacques Zins, Patrick Greussay, Didier Léon, drummer Alain Sirguy, and singer Danièle Ciarlet known as Zouzou.
Model and muse of the Parisian night scene, Zouzou acted in Eric Rohmer's acclaimed film Love In The Afternoon (1972). Considered to be the French Marianne Faithfull, she released two 45 EPs orchestrated by Jacques Dutronc. She represents the image of the liberated woman in France in the sixties. The group took the name of Jardin, and soon changed it to Calcium. Thanks to financial support from Sylvina Boissonnas, the group bought instruments and practiced and refined the compositions for a year before recording. Two recording sessions were held at the Davout studios in 1969. Christophe was replaced by guitarist Denys Lable who later recorded on Jean Claude Vannier's L'enfant Assassin Des Mouches (FKR 001X-LP).
After the recordings, Michel Taittinger, the heir of the namesake Champagne and television producer, obtained a contract with Pathé for the band. A single was put on the market without any promotion, resulting in poor sales. It's now considered to be one of the rarest singles of French psychedelic rock. Due to the disinterest of the record company, which only wanted put Zouzou's character forward to create a new Janis Joplin, the masters for the album were abandoned on a shelf for forty-eight years.
Monster Mélodies present the never before released album by Calcium. A legendary French psychedelic rock album, recorded in 1969, of which only two tracks were released at the time. Get a copy of the Calcium album via Force Exposure right here. Listen to a few tracks below.
Adventurous Japanese post-rock crew Buffalo Daughter make a rare Toronto appearance at The Garrison tonight at 8 pm.
Here's the scoop...
Tokyo's Buffalo Daughter – who'll be joined by babybaby_explores and Ingredient at The Garrison (1197 Dundas West) tonight at 8 pm, get tickets here – is a three member group consisting of Sugar Yoshinaga, Yumiko Ohno and Moog Yamamoto, often augmented by a drummer and other guests. Their sound is heavily influenced by German prog and techno pop, but also includes dub and post-rock influences. Given their mix 'n' match style, and that they emerged in the mid-90s, they are often considered as part of the Shibuya-kei movement (Pizzicato Five, Cornelius, Fantastic Plastic Machine, Towa Tei, Yukari Fresh, et al).
Before putting together Buffalo Daughter, Yoshinaga and Ohno played together in a band called Havanna Exotica. Buffalo Daughter’s 1994 debut EP Shaggy Head Dressers was released on the Cardinal label, a spin-off of the popular indie magazine Beikoku Ongaku.
When the American group Luscious Jackson were touring in Japan they met Buffalo Daughter, and favorably impressed with their music, passed samples along to the their label honchos at the Beastie Boys own Grand Royal Records. As a result Buffalo Daughter signed with Grand Royal in 1996, and released Captain Vapour Athletes internationally.
The band spent much of 1996 in the States, first playing a few East Coast dates in March, then doing an extended tour with Butter 08 in September, and returning again for dates in November with Luscious Jackson. Their impressive live shows had a lot to do with breaking the band internationally. In 1997 Grand Royal followed with a remix EP with reworkings of Buffalo Daughter tracks by Alec Empire, Money Mark and U.N.K.L.E. Also in 1997 Buffalo Daughter joined Grand Royal labelmates Ben Lee, BIS and Luscious Jackson for events in London and Paris.
In 1998, the band returned with the studio album “New Rock”, and toured the U.S. and Europe with Money Mark. They also performed at the Tibetan Freedom Festival in Washington DC in June 1998 along with the Beastie Boys, Radiohead, REM, Sonic Youth and Herbie Hancock. They returned again to the States in July and August to tour with Boys Against Girls. When Grand Royal suddenly shut down label operations in 2001, the band linked up with LA-based Emperor Norton, where they released “I”. Also in 2001 Buffalo Daughter played Japan’s top electronic music event Electraglide, on a bill with Aphex Twin and Plaid.
In 2003, Buffalo Daughter released “Psychic” on V2 Records which led to a U.S. tour with Blonde Redhead followed by the album “Euphorica” in 2006. The versatile group has worked with a wide range of artists including the French ambient pop group Air, members of Japanese techno-pop pioneers The Plastics, Ami Suzuki, Mari Natsuki, Takako Minaka, Cornelius, Naoko Yamano of Shonen Knife and Cibo Matto. Sugar also sometimes plays with her side project Metalchicks.
In July 2010 Buffalo Daughter released “The Weapons of Math Destruction” on their own Buffalo Ranch label, their first release in four years. They again collaborated with drummer Atsushi Matsushita (of Zazen Boys), who joined Buffalo Daughter for Fuji Rock 2010 and a national tour that November.
In 2013, Buffalo Daughter released their 20th anniversary best-of compilation “ReDiscoVer. Best, Re-recordings and Remixes of Buffallo Daughter” which brought together some timeless classics with new recordings, covers, remixes and concert material.
In 2014, the double album “Konjac-tion”was released worldwide (via U/M/A/A in Japan and Modulor in France/EU). The album features various guests such as Kahimi Karie, Shintaro Sakamoto (ex. Yura Yura Teikoku) and remixes by Cibo Matto, Sean Lennon, Varo, Yoshinori Sunahara, etc.
While keeping themselves busy on the road, Buffalo Daughter also enjoys collaborating with visual artists, most recently involving illustrator Ed Tsuwaki’s exhibition at Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo in January 2016. Tsuwaki’s live-painting featured the band’s improvisational performance with avant-garde cellist Hiromichi Sakamoto. It was their second museum performance after a collaboratioin with British artist Peter McDonald for his 2012 exhibition at 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa.
Buffalo Daughter’s most recent album, We Are The Times – their first collection of new material in seven years – was issued on September 17th, 2021.
Watch two Buffalo Daughter performances below.
Tickets for Buffalo Daughter's upcoming North American tour dates are available here.
For her follow-up to Joy's Reflection is Sorrow, Sharron Kraus wrote the songs from KIN in response to the global pandemic.
Here's the scoop...
Over the years Sharron Kraus’ musical career has pulled her in many directions and seen her collaborate with artists, poets, writers and researchers, creating soundtracks, podcasts, musical accompaniments and responses. She is an intuitive improviser, a compelling performer and a weaver of musical spells.
The spine supporting this body of work is songwriting, though, and it is to this most natural combination of words and music that she always returns. If prose writing is a tool for analysis and working out what we think, because of the emotional dimension music introduces, songwriting is a tool for working out how we feel.
KIN, her newest album for Cardinal Fuzz, is a collection of songs written during and partly in response to the pandemic and the relative isolation it plunged us into. Kraus dives into deep explorations of themes of kinship with other humans as well as the natural world, and of what happens when those kinship bonds are severed or abused. Sonically the album is on a continuum with her previous solo album, Joy’s Reflection is Sorrow, with its layered synths and recorders, and sits somewhere in the space between Jane Weaver’s electronica and the psych/folk of bands like The Left Outsides and Modern Studies.
Get a copy of Sharron Kraus' KIN album via Bandcamp right here. Listen to a few songs below.
The late Nigerian drumming dynamo Tony Allen – longtime Fela Kuti sideman – has an unreleased Jazz Is Dead session on the way.
Here's the scoop from Jazz Is Dead...
The genius that is Tony Allen departed this mortal world in April of 2020, but not without leaving an unmatched legacy that crossed oceans and borders, bridging cultures and forging a sound that changed music. As the drummer for Fela Kuti’s revolutionary Africa 70, Allen’s polyrhythmic drumming defined Afrobeat, combining American Jazz and Nigerian Highlife to animate one of the most iconic performers of all time. Over the course of Allen’s tenure with the group, and later as a solo artist, he would continue to relentlessly innovate, incorporating new sounds and working with scores of contemporaries. His contributions as an artist and cultural ambassador left an indelible impact on every genre of popular music, from Techno to Jazz to Rock and Hip-Hop. Tony Allen’s music stands as an ongoing testament to the interconnected musical relationships and dialogues across the African diaspora, and their lasting influence on how we listen.
Aside from traditional Yoruba Juju music, Tony Allen was enamoured with Jazz, particularly the recordings of Art Blakey, Max Roach, and Elvin Jones, musicians who had begun to experiment with West African rhythms and musical concepts. At the time, Nigeria’s immensely popular Igbo Highlife music was incorporating influences from Jazz formulating what became known as Afro-Jazz, connecting the American genre back to its roots. These early cross-cultural dialogues pushed Allen to develop a drumming style that fused Highlife and Jazz. In the mid-1960s, Allen met Fela Kuti, and the two formed the group Koola Lobitos, which would later grow to become the legendary Africa 70 band. Nigerian audiences did not immediately take to this new sound, but following a trip to the United States, Kuti was exposed to James Brown and the Black Panthers. Allen began to incorporate the sounds of Black American Funk and Soul. By the 1970s, the group morphed their influences into Afrobeat, the sound of post-colonial Africa, making music that was concerned with economic and political liberation and Pan-Africanism.
The nearly 30 records which Allen appeared on with Africa 70 contain some of the most innovative drumming of all time. Throughout his time with Fela Kuti and Africa 70, Tony Allen introduced the world not only to Afrobeat, but to an entirely new way of conceptualizing rhythm.
In his post-Fela career, Allen moved to Paris and continued to be a vanguard. He experimented with Dub, Electro, and Hip-Hop. He was a willing mentor, collaborating with several generations of musicians inspired by his vernacular. French pop artists, such as Sebastien Tellier, Air, and Charlotte Gainsbourg, called upon Allen to help shape some of their most well-known work, such as Tellier’s “La Ritournelle” and Gainbourg’s “5:55”. His collaborations with Damon Albarn of Blur and Gorillaz formed the bands The Good, the Bad, and the Queen and Rocket Juice and the Moon, where rock stars like Paul Simenon and Flea were eager to enter conversation with a musician Brian Eno once called “perhaps the greatest drummer who has ever lived”.
On some of his last recordings, Allen returned to his love of Jazz, while reminding listeners of the ongoing influence and legacy of the diaspora. Recording with Blue Note, he released a tribute to his hero Art Blakey, along with an album of original material and collaborating with the South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela. In 2018, Allen and Techno pioneer Jeff Mills released an EP that fused Afrobeat, Jazz, and Techno. On 2021’s aptly titled posthumous recording “There Is No End”, Allen worked with Hip-Hop artists such as Danny Brown and UK Grime star Skepta. Allen remained a constant innovator, absorbing sounds that had derived from West African music and conversing with new generations, passing on the ideals of Pan-Africanism. For Jazz Is Dead producer Adrian Younge, it is no small honor to share new music recorded with the drummer revolutionary Tony Allen.
"Don't Believe the Dancers" is the first single from the forthcoming Tony Allen JID018. Have a listen below.
The Children of the Forest double album feat. Milford Graves, Arthur Doyle and Hugh Glover in March, 1976 is out now via BEA.
Here's the scoop...
Black Editions Archive is ecstatic to announce the newest release in the Milford Graves Archival series, the double LP, Children of the Forest, featuring previously unreleased 1976 sessions with Hugh Glover and Arthur Doyle that re-write the book on Milford Graves' ensemble music of the 1970s. Graves recorded these sessions himself in his legendary Queens basement laboratory and workshop in the weeks immediately leading up to the March 1976 session that, with the same unit, produced what many consider his most iconic album, Bäbi, recorded at WBAI-FM Free Music Store.
Following the death of Albert Ayler in 1970 and up until his storied trip to FESTAC 1977 in Lagos, Nigeria, Graves gigged fairly often as a band leader in the New York Loft scene and traveled twice to Europe (1973, 1974) with duos, trios and quartets comprised of fellow New York City based musicians —almost always with Hugh Glover, and variously including Arthur Williams, Joe Rigby, Frank Lowe, and Arthur Doyle. The three sessions that comprise Children of the Forest date from near the end of this intensive period of grassroots activity by Graves during a peak era of musical & cultural ferment in jazz & Black American Music.
The earliest recordings feature the duo of Graves (drums & percussion) and Glover (tenor saxophone) from January 24th, and Graves solo (drums & percussion) from February 2. In an interview commissioned for this release and conducted by Jake Meginsky, Glover discusses the mastery of form and execution in Graves’s playing and approach: "It has always been a mystery to me how Cuban drummers in Bata were able to modulate the rhythm and the meter. Well, it takes more than one player to do it Cuban style. Prof (Graves) shows you can do it as one player. The reason he’s able to do it is because he has an encyclopedic knowledge of the rhythms of the Caribbean, rhythms of Africa, plus rhythms of jazz. He can move around without losing the feel.”
The centerpiece of this set is the March 11 session featuring Graves, Doyle on tenor saxophone and fife, and Glover on a rather unusual pair of instruments that would not appear on the Bäbi recording just one week later —klaxon, and the Haitian one-note trumpet the vaccine. Glover: "The klaxon… it's important to keep that tribal possession-state feel... because it’s not a Hollywood gallop. It’s very much about the energy, this gallop. Prof (Graves) talks about that, talking about the low, the galloping as in the Divine Horsemen of Haiti.”
Doyle’s visceral and unrestrained tenor playing on the March 11 session is further evidence as to why his work, especially during this period, has attained mythic status among aficionados of free jazz and even noise music. Graves would later discuss Doyle in Conversations (William Parker, 2011 Rogue Art Books): "There was another horn player I know that really got into it from the gut and he had a certain kind of intellectualism when we performed… that was Arthur Doyle. (laughs) Arthur Doyle would just go into it. I mean really just go into it… something happened there that was beyond the immediate intellectual control of the people who was doing it. It was about just doing it and don’t worry about all these people putting you down. The most important thing was what was coming out of your instrument and how it was effecting people.” Listening to these recordings, that spirit is unmistakable.
The original 1/4 inch reel, labeled “Pygmy" by Graves, including 15 minutes of audio from an unknown documentary on the Mbuti People of the Congo Basin, are among the few tapes we’ve so far encountered from Graves' private archive that seem clearly intended in his conception & sequencing to be an album. For this reason, these recordings are now presented exactly as assembled by Graves, for soonest possible release. – Peter Kolovos & Michael Ehlers
Get a copy of Milford Graves, Arhur Doyle, Hugh Glover's Children of the Forest via Bandcamp right here.
"Bananas" is off the forthcoming Bonnie 'Prince' Billy album Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You out August 11 via Drag City.
Here's the scoop from Drag City HQ...
Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You is a tale as old as time. It’s an album. Its songs and music are by and for people together. For listening together. Before it gets too late. Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy stands at the nexus of all the kinds of music he can summon, with friends, with family and community. All roads roll though him. There can be no holding back. A million billion moments are on the line. He’s gonna tell us about a world...
Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You is due August 11th via Drag City Records. Bonnie 'Prince' Billy plays Montreal's Theatre Rialto w/ Beyries as part of Pop Montreal on October 1st. No Toronto date has been announced.
Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You – Bonnie 'Prince' Billy
Like It or Not 5:08
Behold! Be Held! 3:25
Bananas 2:43
Blood of the Wine 4:24
Sing Them Down Together 2:14
Kentucky is Water 4:06
Willow, Pine and Oak 3:44
Trees of Hell 4:00
Rise and Rule (She Was Born in Honolulu) 6:05
Queens of Sorrow 3:06
Crazy Blue Bells 4:28
Good Morning, Popocatépetl 2:34
Drag City's "Keeping Hard & Marvelous Bundle" comes with a bonus cassette of material grown from the same garden plot as Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You, paired with your format of choice: LP, CD or CS. Pre-order a copy right here. Check out Ethan Osman's animated clip for "Bananas" below.
Sadly, British novelist and essayist Martin Amis has died from cancer on Friday at the age of 73. He'll be missed.
Salman Rushdie: “He used to say that what he wanted to do was leave behind a shelf of books—to be able to say, “From here to here, it’s me.” His voice is silent now. His friends will miss him terribly. But we have the shelf.”
