Burning Dervish

Poking around online I saw that a lot of folks either hate Dub Syndicate passionately or even if they do like them, dismiss this record...not being a purist I am free to cherry-pick and there is enough on this record to like to make it worth a listen...a purchase? I don't know...but certainly a listen...from AMG:

"Dub Syndicate played at San Francisco's Maritime Hall in early 2000 as part of an ongoing series of reggae concerts at that venue by top international artists...The Maritime Hall set features tunes drawn from Dub Syndicate albums recorded close to the performance, notably Echomania, Ital Breakfast, and Stoned Immaculate...It's also significant that the live mix at Maritime Hall was realized by Boots Rolf Hughston, rather than Adrian Sherwood...Hughston does a fine job at the board, but that special touch of Sherwood magic -- the feeling of control being gracefully held in the face of encroaching chaos -- is missing...The two highlights of this program, not surprisingly, are the two tracks that sample vocal parts by the late Prince Far I: "Wadada (Means Love)" and, especially, "Glory to God."..."

Download the absolutely sublime Glory to God by Dub Syndicate from Live at the Maritime Hall

Expanding on last week's theme, today's addition to my blog roll is another cover blog: Cover Freak - Songs that don't sound like you remember.

The latest post over there gathers up some interesting cover of Clash tracks...

Dig Cover Freak

This record just sounds like the 70s...

Info from All Music Guide:

"A West Coast psychedelic band in the heavy Iron Butterfly tradition, Kingdom combined hard guitar riffing, dramatic organ sounds, prog rock soloing, and gruff vocals from the group's frontman, organist and guitarist Jim Potkey. The group, which also included guitarist John Toyne, bassist Ed Nelson and drummer Gary Varga, was playing the California circuit as Parish when they were discovered by DJ Dr. Demento (Barry Hansen), who was then working as a director of product development at the Fantasy-associated Specialty Records. The band signed with Specialty and changed their name to Kingdom. Their self-titled debut appeared in 1970. Going out of print soon after its release, the album became a rare find for prog rock and acid rock collectors until 2001, when the Akarma label reissued it on 180-gram vinyl. Akarma issued a CD version of the debut in early 2006."

Two tracks for download here.

This is my first favorite hip-hop CD of the year, not that I am anywhere near an authority or totally up to speed...Here's a little summary from undergroundhiphop.com:

"Los Angeles based Kenny Segal has been making beats for some of the West Coast's most beloved rappers (Haiku D’Etat, Abtract Rude, Juice and more). Now he's releasing his first full-length album on Project Blowed / Decon, combining his love for the kitchen with his talent for beat making. Kenny serves up 16 dishes of home style cooking on his solo debut. Featuring Abstract Rude, Aceyalone, Busdriver, NoCaNdo, P.E.A.C.E. and Micah 9, Ken Can Cook brings the listener on a journey through dusty loops, jazzy keys and lush strings."

Dig four tracks from Ken Can Cook by Kenny Segal

From reggae-reviews.com:

"Horace Andy has remained a popular reggae singer for decades -- traveling through rock steady/early reggae, lovers rock, and dancehall -- due to his likeable helium-filled vocals and catchy songwriting skills. In the Light is generally considered one of his best albums, and anytime you can get a dub of an album thrown in, it's a good thing...Accentuated percussion and bass, crashing cymbals, and echoing horns propel these dubs into your psyche..."

Discography details from Roots-archives.com:

"Engineer: Major Little & Dennis Thompson & Sylvan Morris
Mixing Engineer: Prince Jammy

Producer: Horace Andy & Everton Da Silva

Backing Vocals: Wayne Jarrett & Janice
Drums: Horsemouth Wallace & Jah Malla
Bass: Michael Taylor & Leroy Sibbles
Lead Guitar: Andy Bassford
Rhythm Guitar: Horace Andy & Privy Dread
Keyboards: Touter Harvey & Augustus Pablo & Bobby Kalphat
Horns: Dirty Harry & Tommy McCook & Vin Gordon & Charles Bashford
Percussions: Clayton Downie & Horace Andy & Sylvan Morris & Everton Da Silva & Skully"

From me: I love this song!

Horace Andy - Fever Dub from In the Light/In the Light Dub

Man, I been outta commission all week...longest blogging dry spell in some time...traveling a bunch for work - Nashville and Miami this week, so please forgive me...

I'm picking a low-impact way to get back in the swing of things...a highlight of another cool blog I found over the last month or so: Copy, Right?, which describes itself as, "An MP3 blog dedicated to cover songs, good and bad."

"Cover blogs" as a genre is a totally new thing to me...there are tons of sites that do this stuff...mostly all fun.

Visit Copy, Right?

Another blog I recently started following: A Closet of Curiosities...this site is a collaborative effort from three writers, each of whom also keep other blogs. Closet carries a lot of posts covering modern composers and electronic music (amongst other stuff).

I like this blog because it exposes me to music I don't normally encounter through my own looking and listening. I especially like the fact that I don't love everything they post, I enjoy the challenging aspect of the music they feature.

Dig A Closet of Curiosities.

Here we have it - part one of the who knows how many parts or when I'll get around to them History of Metal project I've had going on the past several weeks...

I nominated the songs from a variety of metal subgenres and you voted...here is what you came up with for the final mix:

01 Sweet Wine by Cream
02 I'm Eighteen by Alice Cooper
03 Into the Void by Black Sabbath
04 Cities on Flame with Rock and Roll by Blue Oyster Cult
05 Victim of Changes by Judas Priest
06 Blitzkrieg Bop by The Ramones
07 Neat, Neat, Neat by The Damned
08 Ace of Spades by Motorhead
09 The Zoo by The Scorpions
10 Run to the Hills by Iron Maiden

Great work!

Download Burning Dervish Vol 19: The History of Metal pt 1

This is an interesting record. I fully expected it to be a lot more "out" but there is a surprising amount of delicate, romantic playing throughout. One track, though, encompasses all sides of this avant tenor, and I am including that track here...

The other musicians on this date, recorded by the BBC at Ronnie Scott's in 1996, are Cameron Brown on bass, Rita Marcotulli on piano, and Matt Wilson on drums.

I-Pimp from Dewey Redman In London

I need help finding a track from the record Permanent Damage by the GTOs. To quote Wikipedia:

"The GTOs were a "groupie group" that consisted of Miss Pamela (Pamela Des Barres), Miss Sparky (Linda Sue Parker), Miss Lucy, Miss Christine (Christine Frka), Miss Sandra (Sandra Leano), Miss Mercy and Miss Cynderella. The group hailed from the area around Los Angeles in the late 1960s, with most of the girls being denizens of the Sunset Strip scene...Originally known as "The Laurel Canyon Ballet Company", they changed their name to The GTOs on the advice of Frank Zappa, their financial supporter and producer. "GTOs" was an acronym for the full band name "Girls Together Outrageously"...Their only album, Permanent Damage (Straight Records), was produced in 1969 by Frank Zappa and Lowell George...."

The track I need is "Do Me In Once And I'll Be Sad, Do Me In Twice And I'll Know Better (Circular Circulation)". Can you help? If so, would you upload the track to me here?

Man, there is some great music coming out of France right now...The songs offered up today are from a sampler that was included for free with the UK-based music industry trade magazine MUSICWEEK called, aptly enough, French Talent 08 (sounds mildly pornographic to me...).

Lots of good "experimental" pop with psych overtones...little dash of Middle Eastern sounds, even a jazz cover of Britney Spears' Toxic!

I picked a few of my favorites from the sampler (and am including links to a web or MySpace page for each artist so you can learn more).

Download a subset of French Talent 08 here, featuring:

Driving This Road Until Death Sets You Free by Zombie-Zombie
Ikalane Walegh by Toumast
The (Over) Song by Nelson
Laisse Aboyer Les Chiens by Benjamin Biolay
Toxic by Yaron Hermann

I just set up an account on imeem a few minutes ago...not entirely sure the best way to get started on the site...if you have a profile would you please consider adding mine as a friend so I can start digging into the features?

Here is my imeem profile.

Would also love to hear about your experiences over there.

Thanks!

Here is a blog that I have been downloading a bunch of stuff from lately.

Lots of out of print and rare psychedelia from around the world. The author himself is based in Sweden.

Most posts consist of a full record, shots of the album art and an essay.

ChrisGoesRock, welcome to my blogroll!

I can't abide this! ANOTHER TIE! So here's our track list after the most recent voting:

01 Sweet Wine by Cream
02 Into the Void by Black Sabbath
03 Cities on Flame with Rock and Roll by Blue Oyster Cult
04 I'm Eighteen by Alice Cooper
05 Blitzkrieg Bop by The Ramones
06 Neat, Neat, Neat by The Damned
07 Victim of Changes by Judas Priest
08 The Zoo by The Scorpions

This week's nominees are from one of the most famous and popular branches of metal, the New Wave of British Heavy Metal...this is the metal a lot of us children of the 70s and 80s grew up with...dig.

There are so many bands to pick from, so to make the voting that much tougher, I pick only two:

The Ace of Spades by Motorhead
Run to the Hills by Iron Maiden

Download the two tracks from each nominee and cast your vote in the upper left hand corner of burningdervish.com now!

Another selection from the score I mentioned yesterday...this record is due out next week.

The two big news items around this album are that (1) it is Del's first solo record in eight years and (2) he made pretty much the whole record available for free on his MySpace page...so I don't feel so bad sharing a little here...

I saw a couple of negative advance reviews online but I dig this record. Del's flow is as unique as ever and if the production isn't as jaw-dropping as his Deltron 3030 tracks, I am still psyched enough to listen to some great lyrical flow backed by instrumentation more interesting than the majority of what passes for rap these days...I say "dig it".

Download three choice tracks from Del tha Funky Homosapien's Eleventh Hour

Well I certainly didn't find this record first but I am glad I finally did stumble across it. Actually, a friend of mine sent it over with a bunch of other stuff last week - what a score.

I have a hard time keeping up on my underground hip-hop. I used to work with a guy who was good about feeding me stuff but he moved on...

Oh No is the younger brother of Madlib (and son of Otis Jackson, Sr., and nephew of Jon Faddis) and has really come into his own as a producer. This record is right up my alley, mixing beats with just tremendously tasteful Asian and Middle Eastern samples.

No single track of the close to 30 clocks in at even close to the two-minute mark but no matter, the whole is so much greater than the sum of its parts...

Dig four of those parts: Download Oh No's Heavy, Exp out the Ox, Action and Oxcity Sickness from Dr. No's Oxperiment

This record bowls me over every time I listen to it. The line-up is a dream: McCoy Tyner, piano; Alice Coltrane, harp; Wayne Shorter, tenor sax, soprano sax; Gary Bartz, alto sax; Ron Carter, acoustic bass; Elvin Jones, drums. The melodies are so left of center but still so listenable...

Four tracks, about 40 minutes of music. I'll serve up about half, focusing on the track with Alice Coltrane. Why? Let me quote a review I found on a site called "Ground and Sky":

""Message from the Nile"...by itself would make this a more than worthy purchase. On the one hand, its structure, like all of the remaining songs on this album excepting "His Blessings," is in the traditional jazz format: a simple and catchy main melodic line (Tyner was always great at coming up with these) forming the 'ground level' of the composition, from which the band take off and exchange a round of solos. On the other, the gentle mood concocted gives "Message from the Nile" a very non-Western, arcane touch. Heightened by the rippling of Alice Coltrane's harp, this track would have fit in quite well on one of her solo albums (e.g., Journey in Satchidananda). Tyner's solos are usually stunning displays of piano virtuosity, but I find the solo here to be particularly outstanding in its fluidity and free-spiritedness. One second he is stubbornly pecking at the main melody, contorting its rhythm or transposing it to an adjacent key, and the next minute he is flinging the notes up the upper registers of the piano and back down again in a blur of insanely rapid arpeggios...the closing piece "His Blessings" sounds the album out blissfully. It is an obvious tribute to John Coltrane, who died less than three years earlier at the time of the recording. Magma fans might note its kinship with the homage track "Coltrane Sundia" from the album Kohntarkosz. Again augmented by Coltrane's harp and the bowing of Carter's bass, this track effortlessly recreates the majesty of the Coltrane Quartet's signature wave effect: an ocean of sustained, rippling notes and chords swept along by the orchestral rumble of Jones' percussion. A work of tranquil beauty, this last track is one more reason to pick up this great disc."

Good enough for me. Enjoy.

Download
Message from the Nile and His Blessings from Extensions by McCoy Tyner

I had an opportunity to meet one of my musical heroes last Monday through my job...That's always a dicey proposition, you never know how it's going to go...this time it was a real blast, a treat, a highlight...

Anyway, this guy is known as a pretty heavy music geek, so I made him a mix CD of some obscure R&B tracks...he was psyched.

The track list:

1. Knockin' At The Wrong Door by The Rollers
   
2. Too Far Gone (Alt. Take) by The Four Mints
   
3. I'll Take Her by Eddie Floyd
   
4. She's A Burgler by Howard Tate
   
5. Just Enough To Hurt Me by Astors
   
6. After Laughter by Wendy Rine
   
7. Rain, Rain, Go Away by Bob Azzam & His Orchestra
   
8. When The Lights Are Low by The Paragons
   
9. Don't Be Surprised by Lynn Williams
   
10. See And Don't See by Marie Queenie Lyons
    
11. Let My People Go by Darondo
    
12. Inspiration Information by Shuggie Otis
    
13. If I Had My Way by Boscoe
    
14. Hold Me Baby by Albert Washington
    
15. Beautiful Things by Eddie Fisher

Download Burning Dervish Vol 18: R&B Lost & Found

From the website:

"On Saturday, April 19, 2008, hundreds of independently owned music stores across the country will celebrate “Record Store Day.” On this day, all of these stores will simultaneously link and act as one with the purpose of celebrating the culture and unique place that they occupy both in their local communities and nationally."