Musical Ramblings

Vote for your favourite theme for the Rambling Podcast

As you can see on the left hand sidebar, I just added a poll for you to give your advice on the content of the next Rambling Podcast. When I'm ready to work on it, I'll simply look at which theme got the most votes, and pick that one.

If there are themes you'd like to see/hear besides those, don't hesitate to post them here as comments so that I can include them in further polls.

More Rock: Thorazine Shuffle

This is one of my favourite Gov't Mule tunes, if not the favourite. Woody had a way of playing those bass lines that was unique, and it hasn't sounded quite the same since he passed away. So here's a taste of what it sounded like: fat, mean and rocking.

Too much jazz: let's rock the place!

I realise that I've been talking, reviewing and posting videos of mostly jazz these last few months. That just won't do ! So, while we wait for his new album to be released, let's just rock to Jason Ricci's My Head is a Bad Neighbourhood !

Stanton Moore - III

When it comes to instrumental albums, I don't often feel tempted by what drummers produce. Not that I have specific bad experiences with drummers' albums or anything, just that it doesn't strike me as an instrument that I want to hear put forward. I did, however, purchase Stanton Moore's III, based partly on a review in MOJO and partly on Moore's pedigree with Galactic and Garage à Trois.

III is a fairly sparse affair with a core band comprised of Stanton Moore on drums, organiste Robert Walter on B3 and guitarist Will Bernard. They are joined on several tracks by the horns of Skerik (saxophones, also of Garage à Trois) and Mark Mullins (trombone). III's repertoire navigates in the waters (no pun intended) of New Orleans traditional and modern music, between funk, jazz, gospel and blues in other words. Some of the pieces are hard to pin into one of these categories, especially the trio efforts which all sound bluesy even when they're funky. The tunes are composed by all three of the collaborators with Robert Walter taking a good share of the lot.

What struck me first about this album is the sound. There's a particular quality to the overall sound, especially - again - the trio pieces. Moore's drumming is quite forward in the mix, louder than you'd expect, but it also sounds increadibly rich in texture, something I found quite unusual and interesting. Walter's organ is greasy and mean, quite distorted and heavier than, say, Jimmy Smith's although the grease is similar. His rhythmic role is impeccable, laying down the soft bass lines that B3 is known for in great synch with Moore's drumming. Bernard's guitar playing, often on slide, is quite mean as well, but sparsely played and all the more efficient for it.

The funkier pieces, especially the ones with the horns, are quite pleasant and get your feet tapping, but they sometimes grow a little repetitive. Big uns get the ball rolling and Chilcock do the trick though, and the latter especially allows Skerik to display his wild sounding tenor playing. I guess though, that these are the kinds of tracks that work best live.

The last three pieces however are stunning and each deserve a mention. Water from an Ancient Wall is an Abdullah Ibrahim original given the New Orleans treatment. You can feel the South African roots, but there's a slice of gospel and a slice of blues in there that are quite moving. Very powerful tune.

Moore and his two acolytes then launch into a superb rendition of Led Zeppelin's When the Levee Breaks. I think jazz covers - especially of pop and rock tunes - work well when they manage to strip the tune to its essential components and rebuild around it, or not as the case may be. This tune is the bare bones of When the Levee Breaks, it's dark, creepy, heavy and powerful and it's impossible, listening to it, not to think of when the New Orleans levee broke, of Katrina and of what New Orleans is now. It's sad, gutwrenching and achingly beautiful at the same time. It's probably one of the most impressive covers I've heard, ever.

But the album doesn't end on that depressing note. It ends on a quietly uplifiting version of the spiritual I Shall Not be Moved, which suggests Moore's determination to continue promoting the music of the city he loves and, more generally, suggests the will of New Orleans to rebuild and retrieve its cultural history that was devastated by the hurricane and the inanity of the local and federal governments.

Ultimately, III is a powerful record even if some tunes, like in every record, are not quite as good as the rest. It's a very accessible record though, as far as instumental exercices go, and despite this it manages a depth of feeling that's quite rare in modern music. It should please both blues, funk and jazz fans and is worth hearing if only for these last three tunes I mentioned.

The best of Howard Levy (IMO)

Howard Levy's many projects all feature great stuff, but probably the formation that I find the most interesting in which he plays a central role is Trio Globo. Trio Globo only ever released two records, the self titled Trio Globo and the wonderful Carnival of Souls. The band is composed of top class musicians in their respective instruments, namely Eugene Friesen on cello, Glen Velez on percussions, and Howard Levy on piano and harmonica (sometimes at the same time, as you'll see below). The quality that makes Trio Globo's music expeptional in my opinion is that it's audibly a collaborative effort. I find that when Howard is his own man he tends to lose restraint and his stuff becomes more technical and less musical. Here, he is forced, in a way, into the collaboration and sounds more musical. Furthermore, there's a harmony of sounds between the harmonica and the cello that I find very powerful. Finally, while this music is by no means easy listening, it's not hard to access either.

The clip below is a "compilation" of excerpts which, while frustrating because none of the pieces are complete, gives a good overview of the styles and sounds of Trio Globo.

Rory Block - The Lady and Mr. Johnson

I've never been a fan of copycat playing, especially in blues and jazz. These are musical styles, I feel, in which the artist needs to express himself in his own way, not in the way of another artist he or she admires. And yet I've always been fascinated by Rory Block, despite the fact that everything in her playing screams Robert Johnson, even when she's playing her own compositions.

I don't quite know what it is that struck when I saw the couple of live performances she gives on the DVD Hellhounds on My Trail - The Afterlife of Robert Johnson but I felt something authentic despite the fact that she was playing, practically note for note, Robert Johnson songs. Sometime in July I stumbled upon The Lady and Mr. Johnson and I thought I'd give it a try.

This is Rory Block's hommage record, with only RJ covers, twelve tracks and all the best known among them: Me and the Devil, Crossroad blues, Hellhound on my Trail, Terraplane Blues, Come on in my Kitchen, etc. Rory plays solo with the exception of a choir of sorts over the first few seconds of the first track. Guitar, singing, just like the old Robert Johnson recordings.

It's a surprisingly good record. Despite the fact that she's covering a material that's been covered again and again, despite the fact that her interpretations are extremely close to the originals (with the exception of the feminisation of the lyrics), Block really is on fire interpreting this material. In a day and age when many artists lack the power to make their own compositions come alive, that's rare enough to be appreciated.

The record is not without its flaws, the main one being, in my opinion, the guitar sound. I suspect the choice of having a sound that's not too acoustic is deliberate, a way of dissociating the covers from the originals in a way, but the strange semi-amplified sound that Rory uses is just a little too weird for my tastes. I can't even pinpoint exactly where the flaw is.

Still, I'm pretty happy with this purchase. After listening to it half a dozen times over the holidays, I slapped my good old Robert Johnson anthology in the CD player last week-end, and I realised that listening to Block's intepretations has made me hear the RJ originals in a whole different way. They are undoubtedly superior to the covers, but Rory Block's interpretations highlight aspects of Johnson's playing or singing that I wasn't consciously aware of.

Overall, a good buy, if not comparable to the source material.

In a bass-y mood

I'm a little loathe to put this up, it's just about the best double bass playing out there, and following the bass themed rambling podcast, I'm on a deep end kick right now.

However, it's totally illegally on Youtube and I'm a little more weary about this because it's not from some TV show, it's actually part of the DVD that comes with Renaud Garcia-Fons' latest release. So I'll extract a virtual promise: if you like what you see and hear, please buy it !

The album is called Arcoluz, it's a CD and DVD package and it's a marvel, there's no other word. It features Garcia-Fons in a small band context with guitarist Kiko Ruiz and percutionnist Negrito Trasante. The repertoire on that live album is quite varied, but the relative sparseness of the instrumentation allows Garcia-Fons' lyricism to shine through perhaps better than it does on his previous albums. Listen to that bow playing in the second part it's just... beautiful...

Adam Gussow releases a raw bootleg recording of Nat Riddles

Those who have read Adam Gussow's excellent biography Mr Satan's Apprentice probably know of Nat Riddles. Others probably don't. Adam thinks it's a shame, and from what he let me hear of Nat's playing, he's probably right.

In order to bring this wonderful unknown a little more in the limelight, Adam unearthed old tapes he recorded in 1989 on the streets of NYC, featuring Nat Riddles (vocals, harmonica) and Charlie Hilbert (guitar). Adam digitised them and has now released them for sale on Tradebit. The "album", entitled El Cafe Street Live!, features 24 tracks of deep street blues, the quality is rough but listenable, but it's not easy listening you'll be purchasing, it's a piece of blues history.

Nat Riddles died of Leukemia in 1991, and his recorded legacy is out of print and unlikely to ever be re-released. Here's some of what Adam says about Nat's playing:

The [uncanny] power [of Nat's playing] traces not just to his thoroughgoing mastery of the tradition, especially the styles of John Lee Williamson and Rice Miller (Sonny Boy 1 and 2), Big Walter Horton, Little Walter Jacobs, and Kim Wilson, but to his distillation of those styles in a way that seems to reinvent the core values of the blues harmonica idiom. Revivalists, and there are many of them, recycle familiar moves. They play it safe. Nat never does. Instead he seizes the heart of the tradition and wrestles it into what he needs it to be in order to do the street-level work he has in mind. He reconfigures the tradition in line with his own personality: playful, lustful, gregarious, gallant, relaxed, and intense. He s got that New Yawk squawk. In your face, but never threatening, never gangsta.

August 2007 Podcast: The Upright Bass Show

The August Rambling Podcast is The Upright Bass Show. The setlist is:

1. Oscar Peterson Trio -Nigerian Marketplace (01:35-07:40)
2. Les Chats Variés - Intro (07:40-12:20)
3. Sunnyland Slim - Tin Pan Alley (13:45-17:25)
4. Charles Mingus - Monk, Funk or Vice-Versa (17:45-24:35)
5. Renaud Garcia-Fons - Goodjinns (26:00-33:20)
6. The Wood Brothers - Luckiest Man (33:20-37:40)
7. The Mojo Band - Parch Farm Blues (38:50-42:15)
8. Olivier Ker-Ourio - Sur les quais de Lorient (42:15-49:55)
9. Joe Powers - El Choclo (49:55-52:20)
10. G. Love and Special Sauce - Blues Music (53:35-59:20)
11. Ray Brown - Bag's Groove (59:20-01:03:35)
12. The John Butler Trio - Better Than (01:04:45-01:08:11)

For more info on this podcast in general, check out the generic Rambling Podcast post.

Wood Brothers: New Album in the Works

My love of the Wood Brothers is well known. Here's an excerpt from their mailing list:

Chris and Oliver are hard at work on their second album for Blue Note Records. The brothers and their producer, John Medeski, recorded at Applehead Studios in Saugerties, NY during the end of May and early June. The currently untitled album features some exciting exciting special guests. No release date has been set but we'll keep you posted. In the meantime, you can hear some of their new songs at upcoming live performances.

Woohoo !