It's hard for me to believe this is the first time Bela Fleck has appeared in my playlist. He's been a huge influence on my musical development, and I've always wished and hoped that someday I could be in a group that could make the kind of fearless and adventurous music that the Flecktones and his other projects make.
I stumbled upon this video while looking for another Flecktones tune I wanted to post, and decided to post this instead, because it's lovely. Big Country is one of Bela's best original tunes, and this setting with the traditional Irish instruments is really amazing.
Leaving today for the JunkFest Luau tomorrow, gonna be leading an early morning drum circle, wisp is going to lead a ukulele jam, then all the bands we play with and all our friends' bands are going to play. It's a gathering of the family, all the hoopiest froods in Georgia and Alabama are getting together for a one-day art party, and assuming it doesn't rain it's gonna be an awesome art party. And it was conceived and organized by this guy in the video here, Sean Rox.
Here's a song that Sean wrote years ago with a buddy in Atlanta, and we recorded and released this past winter.
The JunkFest Luau was pretty successful. We played a lot of music and had a good time. This is the band that closed the night. They did an awesome set, even though they had just gotten in from Tampa and the singer had lost his voice. I provided drums for the festival, and the drummer messed with my setup when he played on my kit, but he was so good I didn't worry about it.
I'd never heard these guys before, they play a lot on the same festivals as some of my jam band friends. They're out of Atlanta, and most of their stuff is pretty rhythmically heavy - I called it "progressive Latin" when describing it to a friend later. Here's a pretty song of theirs I found online.
This is a band I used to go see a lot back in Athens. Their shows at the 40-Watt Club had the friendliest mosh pits I've ever seen. Sure, everybody was running into each other at full speed and generally causing mayhem, but nobody was throwing elbows and if you got knocked down, people would help you up and give you a hug before pushing you back into the fray.
And their shows were LOUD - Amber plays a detuned guitar through a wall of some 40-odd daisy-chained amplifiers. It's insanity. And Ed plays the drums like he's fighting for his life. There is absolutely no reason a two-piece sludgecore band should sound so heavy and so awesome, but they just destroy it. And everything else for a few hundred feet around. And Amber and Ed are both really sweet people. If you go see them live, be sure to stick around and hang out with them after the show, they're really cool.
I love the Asylum Street Spankers. They're a great band. First heard 'em on NPR late one night. They're great at what they do.
But this song is the real treat here. This song, 'Shave 'Em Dry,' goes back to the 1920s. It was recorded in '35 by one of the mothers of the blues, Lucille Bogan. The original is an amazing listen. It's shocking even to modern ears. I chose the Spankers' version because the sound quality is better, and it's always nice to hear the audience reaction on a number like this.
Collective Cadenza is a kind of 'Improv Everywhere,' but with music. They do experiments every couple weeks and youtube them. They're up to 23 experiments now, and they're on fire. Not every one of them is a classic, but most of them are. They're one of my favorite youtube channels by far.
Here they are doing an experiment with bass. Ace of Base. With bass.
This is shiny and new. This video debuted about two hours ago.
I've introduced y'all to my friend Nelson, known as Nelly's Echo, in a different thread a few moons ago. He's a good guy, and fun to play music with. If you ever hear of him playing somewhere near you (especially you folks in college - he plays the college circuit, he'll be at your school at some point, look out for him), go pay him a visit and listen. It'll be worth your time, and he'll sing right to you.
Anyway, he's got a new album, and this is the title track. The video was shot in Baltimore, where he lives, with his band and their friends.
For a couple years early in college, I got really into Zydeco. It was my favorite genre of music. And here's some of the best: Clifton Chenier, King of the Bayou, at the height of his powers in the early '70s, with his excellent band, featuring his brother Cleveland Chenier on the frottoir, that big washboard you wear around your neck.
So I spent most of the last week fighting with my computer. The hard drive finally gave up the ghost after six years or so of hard work, and windows would no longer boot, which scared the hell out of me because I have all the raw files from the albums I've produced on there, including my own that is still in progress, and I had only backed up the project files and mixes, but not the original takes (space issues - we're talking many gigs of raw wav files).
But I was able to boot into Parted Magic with a liveUSB distro, and got the files rescued and stowed away on an external drive. So I dropped in a hard drive from a laptop that wisp's mom dropped in a bathtub a while back, found it to be undamaged, and it became the new disk for my old laptop. Resurrected! I don't have any Windows install discs, and the old HD is too damaged to clone, so I just went crazy and installed Ubuntu Studio. I have to learn all new software - except for Audacity, all the programs I mix music in won't run in Linux, even with WINE, so I've been reading the manuals for Ardour and JAMin and all the Linux equivalents. Lots to learn.
But I'm really excited that I was able to save my stuff and get this computer working again. And at first blush I really like Linux, it's weird but powerful and usable, and damn if it isn't faster on my machine than Windows ever was.
So, in celebration of not losing all my work on my recording project, here's one of the things I've been working on. It's in about the middle stage of production, still missing some pieces - gonna have a great guitarist I used to be in a band with come in and play some lead on it, and I've got re-recorded bass and drums that aren't in this mix, and an organ part. Also missing vocal harmonies and some lead vocal fixes and adjustments. But here's the track as it stands now, and I think it's a decent bit of groundwork.
I'll get back into the game with a thing I just discovered recently. How recently? Like, twenty minutes ago.
The Bombay Royale is an Australian band, playing some utterly wigged-out shit - surf/funk with a horn section and Hindi/Bengali lyrics, totally Tarantino-soundtrack-worthy stuff. They know exactly what they're on about - some of their catalog is covers of old songs from Bollywood movies.
Presenting Stanton Moore on the drums. He's been in my list already, as the drummer for Galactic. But here he is in full effect, attacking his kit like a funky kaiju. I love to see somebody who enjoys his work and is good at it, and Stanton's the best.
My favourite version of my favourite Frank Zappa piece. That's FZ himself up there on the conductor's podium, leading the Ensemble Modern, in a concert from the early '90s. The album of this concert is one of the great achievements of 20th century classical music. But listening to the album, you don't get to see the thrashing ballet dancers.
Been a while since I posted. I think I've unintentionally switched to "post only when I find something I really get excited about" mode. Which is alright, I guess.
Anyway, I got really excited about this. Somebody took the classic Dolly Parton tune "Jolene," and slowed it waaaaaaaaaaay down. The resulting track is awesome. The original is awesome too, if you've never heard it. But this manipulation really seems to add something; it does a nice thing to the groove. That's still Dolly singing, which is kind of hard to picture.
Recorded in 1928 for Okeh Records, during the same set of sessions that produced the legendary second group of Hot Fives recordings. These sessions produced an incredible bunch of takes, including the greatest recording ever made.
But this track is unique for the whole session. The rest of the Hot Fives took a break and let Louis and the piano player stretch out. The pianist for the group was Earl Hines, who was about to start a longstanding gig as the house bandleader at Al Capone's club, the Grand Terrace. Hines was one of the only musicians of his time capable of holding his own next to Louis Armstrong, and for the sessions they recorded one duet. It's an old rag tune called Weather Bird, and they completely take it apart.
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