Burning Dervish

Another great site from the author of Funky16Corners...where Funky16Corners is funk and soul-focused, Iron Leg is more in a rock vain, with some great posts covering garage, vintage pop, psych and more. Always informative and fun.

Dig.

Allmusic calls Higgs, "The greatest reggae artist you've never heard of"...But you have heard his influence:

"...when it comes to roots reggae, his fingerprints are on nearly every important recording and band that emerged from Jamaica in the 1960s and 70s...The most famous of his pupils was Bob Marley. It was under Higgs' tutelage that Marley's guitar playing greatly improved but, more significantly, it was Higgs that arranged the beautiful trio singing of Marley and fellow Wailers Peter Tosh and Bunny Livingstone (later Bunny Wailer). So integral was Higgs to the creation of this sound that when Bunny abruptly left the band in 1973 in the eve of their first major American tour, Higgs filled in brilliantly...After spending the early part of his career singing as part of a duo with Delroy Wilson, Higgs went solo after Wilson left Jamaica for America in the late 60s. But, it wasn't until 1976 that he released his first solo album, Life of Contradiction, a title that accurately summarized Higgs' career up to that point. The follow-up album, Unity is Power, was equally good, but as impossible to find. It wasn't until 1985 when Alligator records, a label best known for blues music, released Higgs' masterpiece, Triumph. Since that time he kept a low profile, issuing a record every now and then, his work revered by reggae fans around the world...Higgs died December 18, 1999."

So much soul...but not more than you can handle...

Higgs & Wilson: There's a Reward
from a rip of Coxsone 7" WC-8

Joe Higgs: There's a Reward (acoustic)
courtesy of podcastbattle.com

Change of Plan
from a rip of Coxsone 7" CS 017 11

Dinah
from a rip of Coxsone 7" CS DODD-80

More Slavery
from an unidentified Micron 7"

I Am The Song
from a rip of Studio One 7" CS DODD-81

They say these things happen in threes and I guess you can say we we lost three giants in pop culture and the arts this weekend: Dick Martin, Sydney Pollack and jazz organ great Jimmy McGriff...

I am not the first, last or most articulate blogger to right about McGriff's passing but man, so many icons of the 50s and 60s are going to start going in the next few years...the jazz world has been losing its greats since at least the 50s, with Bird's passing, but it's old age and its ravages that I think rattle people more than drug abuse, random tragedy or anything else. Jimi, Janis and Jim are one thing, but life after Dylan, Keef and Sir Paul?

All About Jazz has a great bio of McGriff, who died Saturday of complications from MS at the young age of 72. I posted about one of my favorite records, which features McGriff, back in November. Here are three tracks from that album:

Jimmy McGriff & Groove Holmes: The Preacher's Tune, Mozambique and The Boston Whaler
from Giants of the Organ in Concert: The Complete Concert

This week's McCoy post and last week's are both recaps along the way in my McCoy discography project...this post is a retrospective of the tracks I previously offered up from McCoy's initial run on Blue Note in the mid/late '60s...

The Blue Note records are where McCoy's voice as a composer really starts to emerge, specifically his style of explosive left-hand playing accompanied but lightning runs with his right. This crashing, virtuosic style, along with an Eastern/world influence, would define McCoy's sound for the next 5 - 10 releases on Milestone...follow the project for those...

The tracks:

Passion Dance, The Real McCoy
Man from Tanganyika, Tender Moments
Lee Plus Three, Tender Moments
May Street, Time for Tyner
Vision, Expansions via Mosaic Select: McCoy Tyner
Planet X, Cosmos via Mosaic Select: McCoy Tyner
Message from the Nile, Extensions
His Blessings, Extensions
Fulfillment, Asante via Mosaic Select: McCoy Tyner

Download Burning Dervish Vol 24: The McCoy Tyner Blue Note Years, 1967 - 70

Great blog, great music posted, great work they do...Home of the Groove is "...based on the premise that the true Home of the Groove, at least on the North American landmass, is New Orleans, Louisiana. We cannot afford to lose it. I feature selected rare, hard to find vintage New Orleans-related R&B and funk tracks with commentary. Some general knowledge of N.O. music is helpful here, but not required to get your groove on..."

You heard the man, get your groove on, head over to Home of the Groove now.

I'm going to crib a little from a biography about Eek-A-Mouse I found online...but I guess if I am citing it that's not the same as cribbing, so I would be clear if this were a senior thesis....anyway...

"Born: Ripton Joseph Hylton...November 19, 1957. Kingston, Jamaica, West Indies.... It is not only Eek-A-Mouse's 6 feet 6 inches height that make him one of Jamaica's most individual talents. He has created a style all his own, and gone on to become something of an international phenomenon quite apart from the rest of the world of reggae. Hylton's unusual name was originally that of a racehorse upon which he frequently lost money; when the horse finally won a race, he had, of course, refused to back it...his first two releases, came out under his real name in the mid-70s. Not only were they made while he was still in college, they were produced by his math teacher...In 1980, he started recording with Joe Gibbs after working briefly with the Papa Roots, Black Ark, Gemini, Jah Life, Black Scorpio and Virgo sound systems...He was the toast of Reggae Sunsplash in 1981, his bubbling lunacy providing a cathartic release to a festival otherwise in mourning for Bob Marley. "Biddy biddy beng" roiled out across the crowd, and the audience shouted it back as one, instantly cementing the syllables as the catchprase of the new decade...Mouse's diverse list of early musical influences reads like a Magic 8-Ball of the varied styles that would eventually color his inventive lyricism and instrumentation..."I loved Nat King Cole, Marty Robbins, Cab Calloway, Patsy Cline ... all different singers. Sam Cooke and The Beatles ... and stuff like that," said Mouse, rhapsodically. "And then I came up with my own original style."...That "original style" included elements of "sing-jaying," an early form of toasting (boastful catch phrases, singing and DJ work) mixed with funky vocal gymnastics and effects. Mouse's contribution to the genre was a percussive, nasally vocal style, and a talent for using his voice as a musical instrument that moved The Boston Globe to call him "the Al Jarreau of reggae."...Over the years, Mouse's core audience has also happily accepted his frequent lyrical switch-ups from half-baked humor ("The Mouse and The Man" is about a Disney World meeting of the minds with Mickey) and pointed social commentary ("Operation Eradication" is about the murder of his friend Errol Scorcher by politically-motivated Jamaican eradication squads)..."

I'm really digging some of his first jams, from the early '80s this week...

Eek-A-Mouse: Noah's Ark
Greensleeves 12" GRED 42A

Wa Do Dem
Greensleeves 12" GRED 58A

Wild Like Tiger
Greensleeves 12" GRED 107A

Operation Eradication
Greensleeves 12" GRED 107B

Anerexol
Greensleeves 12" GRED 129A

I have seen this 12" selling for mad, mad money online...It is the extended mix of Carlton Livingston's signature track, 100 Weight of Collie Weed, on Greensleeves.

I'd pay it, too. The good news is I don't need to and now you don't either...see below...this track is so damn trippy...I haven't been able to take it off rotation all week.

Livingston's main run was throughout the 80s but he's got a MySpace page and apparently continues to work...

Carlton Livingston: 100 Weight of Collie Weed (Extended Mix)
from a rip of Greensleeves 12" GRED 141

I have seen this bio used unattributed on a few different websites as well as in Barry's wikipedia entry, so here goes:

"Barry Brown was one of a number of singers to find success in the 1970's under producer Bunny Lee. One of the most successful artists of the early dancehall era, Brown worked with some of Jamaica's top producers of the time, including Linval Thompson, Winston 'Niney The Observer' Holness, Sugar Minott and Coxsone Dodd, as well as releasing self-produced material. After releasing eleven albums between 1979 and 1984, Brown's releases became more sporadic, although his work continued to feature prominently on sound systems such as those of Jah Shaka. In the 1990's, Brown's health deteriorated, suffering with asthma and substance abuse problems and he died in May 2004 at Sone Waves Recording Studio in Kingston, Jamaica, after falling and hitting his head."

I've got a dozen or so of Barry's tracks in my library, primarily from 12" rips (some on the Greensleeves label, some unknown...).

Dig:

Barry Brown - Give Another Israel A Try
from a rip of Greensleeves 12" GRED 068 A
Produced in 1980 by Henry 'Junjo' Lawes
Mixed at King Tubbys by Scientist
Backed by Roots Radics

From Creation
the notes in my rip say this is from a 12" but I have not been able to find any versions of this on 12"...there does seem to be a Jackpot 7" from 1978(?) with a b-side King Tubby/Aggrovators version as well as a posthumous 2006 7" on Striker Lee with a Sly & Robbie Version b-side...my sense is that this is from the Jackpot 7" given when I think this rip was made but who knows...do you?

Don't You Try
from what my library also says is a 12" rip but no label info...can't find any supporting documentation online, either...great track, though!

I've been doing "McCoy Mondays" as it were for almost a year now as I try to visit every record in his discography...Now that I am knee-deep into his long run of records on Milestone from the 70s, the current time seems as good as any to pause for a re-cap of some of the music posted already...

McCoy's first two labels as a soloist/band leader were Impulse! and Blue Note. From 1962 - 64 Impulse! put out six records under McCoy's name (a later retrospective of those releases was put out at Great Moments with Mccoy Tyner)...It was almost an exact two years, with the sessions and release dates spanning January '62 thru December '64...McCoy would revisit both labels later in his career, notably in the early 90s when MCA/Universal acquired and revived the Impulse! imprint...

These first records for the label only hint at the dynamo McCoy would become on his later recordings but they each represent a step towards him establishing his own voice outside of his work at the time with Coltrane. This mix contains the tracks from McCoy's '60s Impulse! output already posted here...

Download Burning Dervish Vol 23: The McCoy Tyner Impulse Recordings, 1962 - 64

By David Remnick in the May 19, 2008 issue of The New Yorker.

"Every weekday for the past twenty-seven years, a long-in-the-tooth history major named Phil Schaap has hosted a morning program on WKCR, Columbia University’s radio station, called “Bird Flight,” which places a degree of attention on the music of the bebop saxophonist Charlie Parker that is so obsessive, so ardent and detailed, that Schaap frequently sounds like a mad Talmudic scholar who has decided that the laws of humankind reside not in the ancient Babylonian tractates but in alternate takes of “Moose the Mooche” and “Swedish Schnapps.”

For Schaap, Bird not only lives; he is the singular genius of mid-century American music, a dynamo of virtuosity, improvisation, harmony, velocity, and feeling, and no aspect of his brief career is beneath consideration..."

Click here to read a truly great piece, not on Charlie Parker but on what it means to live with obsession...

But at least you should have a Bird-inspired soundtack:

Charlie Parker: Lover Man
from Verve Jazz Masters 15

Johnny Smith: Lover Man
from Walk, Don't Run!

Jimmy Smith: Lover Man
from The Sermon!

OK, maybe this one is not fair to promote since it is another blog I maintain but what the hell, I make the rules around here...

I actually started this new blog because I wanted to play around with some new features in blogger (the platform I use for my blogs), experiment with some search engine stuff and just have a site I could monkey around with. I wasn't sure I would keep it going but after two months and 100+ posts I guess we know how that is shaking out...

I usually create all of the posts for an entire week in one late-night session and then set them to publish on different days. Maybe a couple of times throughout the week, when there is something timely going on, will I create posts in real-time...

Please visit The Good Old Grateful Dead Blog...Thanks.

From Wikipedia:

"The Last Poets is a group of poets and musicians who arose from the late 1960s African American civil rights movement's black nationalist thread. Their name is taken from a poem by the South African revolutionary poet Keorapetse Kgositsile, who believed he was in the last era of poetry before guns would take over."

Here is a nice overview of the Poets as well as their influence on hip-hop culture...

I was turned onto the Poets 15 or so years ago via Bill Laswell, who has featured Poet Umar bin Hassan on several projects since the early '90s...I was even lucky enough to see them in the support slot on a bill with Laswell's Third Rail project (which itself featured Bernie Worrell, James Blood Ulmer, Amina Claudine Myers and Ziggy Modeleste...wow). I really love Umar's voice and he shines in so many different contexts, hopefully demonstrated for you below.

The Last Poets: Black People What Y'All Gon' Do
from This Is Madness

Tribute to Obabi
from Chastisement (without Umar)

Down to Now
from Black & Proud: The Soul of the Black Panther Era, Vol. 2 (featuring Chuck D)

Liu Sola: A Discourse On The Zither
from Blues in the East

Axiom Funk: Sacred To The Pain
from Funkcronomicon

Common featuring The Last Poets: The Corner
from Be

Download it here...

I assure you its a coincidence...two old-school Jamaican vocal group posts in two days...The Heptones don't shine as brightly for me as John Holt, the subject of yesterday's post, but there are some great jams to be dug out nonetheless...

In the rocksteady era and early-mid reggae period The Heptones were most closely aligned with Coxsone Dodd and Studio One. By the mid/late 70s they were securely in the Scratch camp. In between they worked with Joe Gibbs, Danny Holloway and others.

They didn't make the Rasta transition as well as John Holt did and by the late 70s were pretty outmoded though the carried on in different incarnations while ultimately reuniting the original members in the mid-90s.

Another wonderful bio at All Music Guide.

The Heptones: Dock of the Bay
from a Studio One 12" rip

I've Got a Feeling
from a Studio One 7" rip

Sea of Love
from a Studio One 7" rip

Streets of Gold
from a Tom Tom 12" rip

Earl Sixteen & The Heptones side A/King Tubby dub on side B (both in one MP3 here): Children Rise/Rising Dub
from a Trench Town 10" rip

The Heptones, Jah Buzz & Freddie McGregor: Equal Rights
from a Studio One 12" rip

John Holt originally came to fame as lead singer (though not the original lead singer) of The Paragons, whose biggest hit was “The Tide Is High”, which those of us born after, say, 1968 think of primarily as a Blondie song…

Holt shares the Gump-like attribute of the other singers who have continued to carve out careers in reggae from the sixties forward in that he was there for many, many stylistic changes and musical eras…ska, rocksteady, lovers rock, rockers, roots, dancehall, etc…Few have maintained the level of quality and integrity that Holt has, though…

To learn more, check out the awesome John Holt bio on All Music Guide.

The Paragons: When the Lights are Low
from On the Beach: the Best of the Paragons 66 - 82

My Satisfaction (Extended Mix)
from a Studio One 12" rip

Have You Ever Been In Love
from a Studio One 12" rip

John Holt: The Clock
from a Clock Tower Records 12" rip

For the Love of You
from Darker Than Blue: Soul from Jamdown (1973-1980)

I'm the One
from 200% Dynamite!

Police in Helicopter
from Police in Helicopter

Tonight
from Soul Music for Sale

From All Music Guide:

"An obvious classic, this piano solo record...features McCoy Tyner paying tribute to John Coltrane. Tyner not only plays three of Coltrane's songs ("Naima," "Promise," and "My Favorite Things") but two of his originals (a lengthy "The Discovery" and "Folks") which display how much the pianist had grown since leaving the saxophonist's group in late 1965. Few McCoy Tyner records are not easily recommended but this one even ranks above most."

And from Ground and Sky:

"McCoy Tyner and Keith Jarrett were among the forebears of the "not quite jazz/not quite anything else" style of solo piano recitals often played today by a number of younger artists (Brad Meldhau, for instance). Tyner stayed closer to his jazz roots than did Jarrett, however, and on his first solo piano album, Echoes of a Friend, Tyner looks back to his former bandmate John Coltrane for inspiration...Overall, I think that the music is excellent. Tyner's style is reminiscent of what he had been moving toward over the previous few years and which came to fruition on his most recent albums, Sahara and Song For My Lady. Without a band behind him, Tyner wisely eases back somewhat on the unwavering aggression that had imbued his playing for stretches on those albums. There is still plenty of muscle and power on Echoes of a Friend, yet his playing is also romantic and orchestral. His performances provide a very interesting perspective on the Coltrane material — the familliar melodies are often lost amid effusive virtuostic passages, yet despite the modernist treatment there is always a tenderness that breathes within Tyner's playing as well as a spirit that infuses it..."

Today I would like to post two representative tracks from this record:

My Favorite Things and The Discovery, from McCoy Tyner's Echoes of a Friend

Funky16Corners is a deep joint.

Cannot get enough of the mixes posted there under "Funky16Corners radio"...I especially like that the mixes get posted as the complete mix MP3 and the individual tracks. I don't do that here but I dig it there!

From their "About":

"...I have been writing about music in various forms (zines, newspapers, e-zines, blogs) since the mid-80's. The Funky16Corners blog started in November of 2004 to focus on funk and soul vinyl. Since mid-2006, in addition to individual MP3 tracks, I have been posting mixes under the title Funky16Corners radio..."

Nice clean template, lots of great jams.

Check out Funky16Corners

This som' bitch always gave me the creeps...between his ugly mug (guess which one he is here) and (usually) filthy lyrics, I've never known what to make of him...but catchy as hell, right?

Trash talk aside, he's a pretty amazing cat. Dig.

This is a great jam from his 1983 record Zungguzungguguzungguzeng...today's version is from the Greensleeves 12", GRED 119 (B-side, the A-side was Zungguzungguguzungguzeng)...Produced by Henry 'Junjo' Lawes...backed by Roots Radics...Recorded and mixed at Channel One...Engineer: Soldgie...riff is "three blind mice"...can't go wrong...

Yellowman - Who Can Make the Dance Ram - Greensleeves 12" GRED 119

I could not resist posting a link to an article whose summary reads,

"Ace Frehley shocks us with candid comments about his old bandmates (and that laugh is pretty scary, too)."

I wouldn't call the piece shocking, but its worth a read if you are inclined to give a shit...

Dub Boom is the B-side track to Fattie Boom Boom, Greensleeves 12" GRED 065 from 1981...Produced by Ranking Dread, mixed by Scientist at King Tubby's, backed by Sly & Robbie...dig that...

Side A was a big hit for Ranking...especially great if you appreciate songs about the dirty bits...let's go with the B-side dub today, though:

Dub Boom by Ranking Dread from Greensleeves 12" GRED 065

This site keeps my soul and funk need righteously fixed...from the "About" page:

"Ever since I was given my first radio with a cassette player attached, I’ve been fascinated with mixtapes. Then came the constant upgrades and subsequent troubleshooting so now some twenty five years later, here we are...my passion as you may have noticed by now is creating the perfect mixtape. I will spare no expense and leave no form of media unturned (vinyl, CD, mp3, etc.) to bring the finest assortment of sounds to feed your hungry souls..."

I've been downloading Vincent's mixes for a couple of months now and am never mad at what I hear...It's not just soul and funk, either, he's not afraid to throw in some hippy shit, hip hop, hard rock, etc.

Dig.

Today's the day for Volume 4 outta 4...From upsetter.net:

"...in contrast to Volume 1 , the 50 tracks on Volume 2 are much more upsetting and experimental. This was when Scratch first started to live up to his Upsetter nickname: weird intros, spooky instrumentals, more than one rhythm spliced together into a single song...The majority of the tracks are made up of Upsetters instrumentals...As with Volume One, strictly crucial."

Here are the previous posts and downloads:

Volume One
Volume Two
Volume Three

...and tracks to download from Volume Four.