Musical Ramblings

Win JJ Milteau's Harmonicas - Week One !

As I mentioned last month, JJ Milteau recently released a 2-CD set called Harmonicas which presents 40 tracks, mostly instrumentals that have been out of print for a decade or more. You can't exactly call this a "best of" since what you get is 11 out of 17 tracks from Bastille Blues, all 11 tracks from Explorer, 11 out of 15 tracks from Routes, 2 instrumentals from Merci d'Être Venus, 2 live tracks from Blues Live and 3 live tracks from the never distributed Pacific Blues.

This slew of great music includes all of the amazing tracks that made Milteau famous in and outside of France, not just amongst harmonica players but amongst lovers of African-American and world  music. Marcelle & Marcel, Rue du Rendez-Vous, Down at Utopia, Boogie Mix, Rue Doisneau, Bordighera, Lonely Crowd, Big Walter, Tin Biscuit Boy, and many many more are all in there.

And here's the great thing: you can win a copy of this CD thanks to JJ Milteau, the Dixiefrog and Harmonia Mundi labels and Musical Ramblings. I have 9 copies to give away (they sent 10 but I had to open one for this review!), and I will give one away each week. I will pay for P&P, wherever you are in the world. What do you have to do to win it? Very easy, here it is in 4 steps:

1. If you do not have a twitter account, open one on www.twitter.com, it's free.

2. Once you have a twitter account, you need to start following me, ie. @fiberguy.

3. Once you've subscribed to @fiberguy, you need to tweet the following:

Win JJ Milteau's 2-CD 40-track career spanning compilation. Please RT. Info: http://bit.ly/4zk20v #harmonica #blues #soul #milteau

And that's it. Simple isn't it ? At the end of the week I will collate all the tweet handles of the participants, paste all of that in Excel and randomly select a winner.

Just two important note:

• tweeting this message more than once will not get you several chances to win.
• you need to tweet the text exactly with no variations whatsoever.

And there you are! Of course, feel free to spread the word far and wide (blogs, fora, etc.) but remember that the contest is twitter based.

Harmonica: an instrument of the people

There's a great feature on Flickr called Expos. Using expos you can put together a collection of other peoples' photos. I started looking around for harmonica photos, and amongst the many photos of concerts and pro harp players, I found many photos of buskers, children, old and young, all playing the harmonica. This reminded me of one of the reasons I fell in love with this instrument, it's simplicity.

So I decided to gather an expo that I called Harmonica: an instrument of the people. I hope you'll enjoy it.

Free Dirty Dozen Brass Band Track!

On the occasion of the re-release of their first ever album My Feet Can't Fail Me Now, the Dirty Dozen Brass Band is offering the title track as an mp3 for free on their website. Check it out, it's a great introduction to the legendary New Orleans brass band!

Milteau Carreer Spanning Compilation

The following video released by JJM himself on Youtube suggests there's a carreer spanning double CD compilation out soon. The track listing includes a whole lot of really old or obscure tracks that you would have virtually no hope of finding anywhere else (from Blues Harp, Explorer, Bastille Blues, Routes and Pacific Blue as far as I can tell) so this is indeed excellent news if you're into JJM or interesting in discovering the breadth of his music. 

The track listing is: Blue Hop, Miss. Boogie, Réunion, Yaoussa, Rue Doisneau, Rue Du Rendez-Vous, Marcelle & Marcel, The Sailor & The Maid, Jurong Bird Park, Big Walter, Fun Home !, Bordighera, Lucas & Margot, Magnolias, Lonely Crowd, Boogie Mix, Taxco, Au Bellevue 1, Le Wolf, Blues Harp , Saga, Ode To Billy Joe, Freddie, Insouciance, I Can't Hold Out, Helena Ark, Taj Mahal, Sweet 70's, Ars en Ré, Routes, Cajun Shuffle, Elegant Luther, Tin Biscuit Boy, Randy & Ry, Chicken, Manhasset Blues, Tennessee Fried Chicken, Down At Utopia, B.B. Kong, Soweto, Soft Rain

Prog Rock Defined

A friend sent me along this link which had me laughing my head off. Still can't shake it. Obviously it's funnier if you have some prog rock culture, but a lot of it is universally understandable. Let me just reproduce this picture which still has me in stitches:

A bit of cross blog advertising

Today I have just opened a new blog. Just as my first blog (this one) was about my passion for music in general and harmonica in particular (or is it the other way 'round) and my second one about my (professionally related) passion about fiber to the home and its implications, my third blog is about a new interest of mine which has recently bloomed into a full-fledged passion: photography.

Photography is something that I enjoy doing, but when you're pleased with the results you really want to show it to other people. So this is what that new blog is about and since I'm just a beginner, I entitled it Apprenti Photographe (Photographer Apprentice.) Unsurprisingly, you will see a lot of photos there of musicians, but other things also. I hope you enjoy it and I intend to try and post one photo a day. Oh, and it's bilingual, so don't be fooled by the French title!

Musical Ramblings: Now on Twitter

About three months ago I joined twitter to see what it was, with mostly a professional aim in mind. Turns out I've been tweeting about music just as much as I have about telecoms (my day job) so I thought I'd give you the opportunity, if you're interested, of following my thrilling twitter posting. It's very easy, just go to http://www.twitter.com/Fiberguy and click on Follow. If you're not already on twitter, you will have to open an account first, of course.

I'm planning extensive twitter coverage of Harmonica sur Cher 2009. Maybe by then I'll have sorted how to send twitpics with a blackberry. Until then, I've put my twitter feed up here on the right hand side so even non twitterites might follow. Don't blame if I don't just talk about music, though!

HADOPI BLACK-OUT

Amélie de Paris!!!

The super talented artist who has been doing the banners for the last 5 rambling podcasts finally has her own website up.

If you want to check the work that she did for Musical Ramblings in full high-def glory, it's here.

Amélie is not just a super graphic artist, she also does decoration work and her website features a lot of photos of the kind of work she does. The things that impress me the most are what we call "tromple l'oeil" in French; I'm not sure what the english word is but essentially it's a decoration painting so realistic that the eye is tricked into believing it's real.

Anyway, please check her site out and - should you have any intricate decoration needs - contact her and contract her!!!

More Shelf Space Needed: CDs for sale

I need to get rid of some CDs, heartwrenching as it is. I've just put 20 up on ebay, all starting at 5 EUR, P&P included for France. There's a lot of jazz and rock, some harmonica, and generally all good music. Some of these are hard to find...