Here’s my newest episode of Getting Warmer for NTS Radio. Funk, synth pop, and lots of vocal harmonies. If you like it, you can download an mp3 version here. Enjoy!
Tracklist:
1. Deniece Williams – Free
2. Shinichi Tanabe – Hell’s Gate Island Theme
3. Marju Kuut & Uku Kuut – I Don’t Have To Cry Anymore
4. Koo Dé Tah – Over To You
5. Dee C. Lee – Hey What’d Ya Say?
6. Jennifer Vyban – Miracles
7. Mami Koyama – Love Song
8. Love, Peace & Trance – Hasu Kriya (Single Version)
9. Brenda Ray – Another Dream
10. Velly Joonas – Käes On Aeg
11. Astrud Gilberto – Dindi
12. Syoko – Sunset
13. Minako Yoshida – Gogo No Koibito
I was deeply saddened to hear of the passing of legendary jazz trumpeter (and occasional zither player) Kelan Phil Cohran at the age of 90 on Wednesday. While his accomplishments are too significant to fully do them justice, he played trumpet with Sun Ra and His Arkestra, co-founded the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), was a respected educator (one of his students was a young Maurice White), opened the Afro-Arts Theater in Chicago, and invented the Frankiphone (aka space harp), an electric mbira. He also recorded extensively with The Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, a group composed of eight of his sons. Cohran was still regularly performing live until quite recently.
Though African Skies was recorded a later stage in his career (by which point he had already been given the honorific Kelan, meaning holy scripture, by Muslim scholars during a trip to China), it’s considered by many to be a cosmic jazz masterpiece and one of his finest works. His first record since his 1969 Malcolm X memorial, this was recorded live at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago as a glowing tribute to Sun Ra, Cohran’s mentor and friend who had recently passed away. African Skies is mostly acoustic and fairly minimal, but for all its sparsity, it’s hypnotic, deftly expressive, and all the more powerful for doing less. Trumpet, harp, frankiphone, congas, violin uke, guitar, flute, bowed string bass, clarinet, trombone, and vocal riffings by Aquilla Sadalla that, whenever I’ve put this on in social settings, have invariably prompted at least one person to ask what we’re listening to. If the back cover is any indication, this performance looked just as incredible as it sounded.
Though I’ve always considered myself a jazz idiot, this record has been an ideal gateway drug into the worlds of cosmic and spiritual jazz, and I can’t think of a better tribute to Cohran’s legacy than giving this some airtime this weekend. Out of respect for his family I’ll be taking down the download link in the next few days, so if you want it, get it now. Thank you for everything, Kelan Phil Cohran!
Listen to my newest mix for NTS Radio below. Moody slow-burners, futuristic textures, and a few anachronisms. If you like it, you can download an mp3 version here. Enjoy!
Tracklist:
1. Владимир Леви & Ким Брейтбург – Не Уходи, Дарящий (thanks David!)
2. Susumu Yokota – King Dragonfly
3. Roberto Musci & Giovanni Venosta – Water Music
4. Ichiko Hashimoto – La, La Maladie Du Sommeil
5. Penguin Café Orchestra – Numbers 1-4
6. John Martyn – Please Fall In Love With Me
7. Yumi Murata – Face To Face
8. Unknown Artists (Burundi) – Akazehe Par Deux Jeunes Filles
9. Ryuichi Sakamoto – Put Your Hands Up (Opening) (TBS News 23 1997)
My newest mix for NTS Radio is a two hour tribute to Joanna Brouk, who passed away this month at 68. Considered one of the early founders of New Age, Brouk never referred to herself as a composer, but rather insisted that she was a vessel for the music that flowed through her. Her work sat somewhere in between new age, drone, minimalism, and classically inclined ambient, with a curiosity and a roughness reminiscent of pioneering early electronic music. You can buy her excellent compilation released last year by Numero Group here. There’s also a great interview with her here in which she talks about her early processes and her work in sound healing.
She often said that it was the space between the notes in which interesting things start to happen, and that music has to slow down in order to get there. I put this mix together of things that, to me, are similarly interested in space and silence. Some of these songs were written by her contemporaries; others are just things that I hope she might have liked. If you like it, you can download an mp3 version here. Goodnight, Joanna, and safe journey.
Tracklist:
1. Joanna Brouk – Healing Music (excerpt)
2. Francesco Messina – Prati Bagnati Del Monte Alalogo (excerpt)
3. Kudsi Erguner & Xavier Bellenger – Apu-Caylioch / Le Seigneur Des Étoiles
4. Kevin Braheny – Lullaby for the Hearts of Space (excerpt)
5. John Clark – The Abhà Kingdom (excerpt)
6. Masahiro Sugaya – 水-(1)
7. Craig Kupka – Clouds II (excerpt)
8. Iasos – The Winds of Olympus
9. Daniel – Quartz Crystal Bells (Side A) (excerpt)
Pristine crystal overtones. Most of this moves at glacial speeds, with a few stretches of more active composition. While singing bowls go back hundreds of years, crystal singing bowls (made from silica quartz) weren’t manufactured until the mid-80s when they were used to grow silicon computer chips. They weren’t marketed as healing instruments until the early 90s, meaning Quartz Crystal Bells is one of the pioneering recordings of crystal singing bowls. Recorded live on a set of twelve bowls between 8″ and 18″ in diameter, with Daniel Lauter as well as Donna Soszynski and Kim Atkinson on the bowls, and recorded by Bernard Xolotl (reminder to post some Bernard Xolotl).
This is a decent quality tape rip with some room tone, but if you like it I’d highly recommend buying a re-mastered version directly from Daniel, which is divided up into five tracks rather than two sides.
Another gem from the ECM catalogue. Brooklyn-born jazz horn player John Clark hasn’t made many records as a bandleader, but has been hugely prolific and has recorded and performed with Miles Davis, Jaco Pastorius, Chick Corea, Frank Sinatra, Aretha Franklin, and Leonard Bernstein, among many others. He’s still a faculty member at Manhattan School of Music.
Faces is disarmingly beautiful in ways that I don’t typically expect to hear from a jazz record (though I’m admittedly a jazz idiot). The cover image feels very apt: in addition to much of this being a very quiet record, it also has a ghostly quality, suggesting faint impressions from a carbon copy done too lightly. That vaporous, trailing-behind sensation is echoed in the generous reverb on both the horn and the electric cello, suggesting watercolors or streaks of neon in street puddles. Despite all these murky descriptors, there’s joy to be found all over it: “Silver Rain, Pt. III” is a nod to steel-drum tropical sunshine, and closer “You Did It, You Did It!” is almost baroque in its exuberance. There are some really nice notes about Faces on ECM Reviews, which, incidentally, is an excellent resource if you’re as daunted as I am by the ECM catalogue. Thank you Gil and Matthew for bringing me here!
My newest mix for NTS Radio is meant for springtime walking around. (Mom, I think you might like this one.) I’ll be posting an mp3 download version in a week from now. I know it’s been a little quiet around here–I’ve been tied up with another project, but am looking forward to sharing more music next week. If you like this, you can download an mp3 version here. Thanks for listening!
Honored to contribute a mix to Blowing Up The Workshop, which is a very useful archive of mixtapes including many from my own musical and curatorial heroes. I was thinking about escapism, cinematic déjà vu, anime soundtracks, hyper-optimistic fantasy about the experience of tourism, courtyards, commercials, and ruins as I put this together. If you like it, you can download it here. Thanks for listening!
I made a two hour guest mix of long-form instrumentals for Lyon/Paris based online radio station LYL Radio. The Oddlogs is their series of guest sets with different music bloggers from around the world, and their lineup has been excellent thus far so I’m honored to be in such good company. I wanted to take advantage of the long time slot to use lengthier, more meditative tracks that are less synth-heavy and more acoustic-centric, with (almost) no vocals. There’s also a lot of excellent natural reverb and room tone in here. In the spirit of the music, I recorded my talkback segments in my bathroom for added reverb, and made my best attempt at ASMR-esque speaking. For what it’s worth, I think it makes a solid snow soundtrack. If you like the mix, there’s an mp3 version without my speaking in it which you can download here. Enjoy!
Tracklist:
1. Joanna Brouk – Winter Chimes
2. Raul Lovisoni – Amon Ra
3. Daniel Lentz – Lascaux
4. Daniel Schmidt & the Berkeley Gamelan – Faint Impressions
5. Daniel Kobialka – Orbital Mystery
6. David Casper -Tantra-La
7. Ernest Hood – From The Bluff (Excerpt)
8. Roberto Mazza – Artigli Arguti
9. Vincenzo Zitello – Nembo Verso Nord
10. Pandit Ram Narayan – Rāga Kirvani
11. Seigén Ono – Suimen-Jo Niwa
12. Joel Andrews – The Violet Flame, Part 2 (Excerpt)
Another Don Cherry collision with terrific results. Originally recorded in Paris in 1978, this only had a 1000-copy run in France and, despite being considered one of Cherry’s strongest works by die-hard fans, was mostly forgotten until its reissue in 2009. A fairly early and very successful piece of Indo-jazz fusion–while Cherry had a propensity towards cultural dabbling, he avoided many of the pitfalls of “world music” aesthetic through his commitment to musicianship, collaboration, and sensitivity. Also, he sings a bit!
Ustad Ahmed Latif Khan was a tabla virtuoso, avid composer, and member of the Delhi Gharana. He also had perfect pitch and used it to great advantage, tuning his daya (right drum of the tabla) to the same pitch as his baya (left drum of the tabla)–typically the baya is between a fifth and an octave below the daya, but Khan’s tuning allowed for an unusually deep, full tone of the bass notes. He stood out both for this tonal precision and because of his taste for irregular and extremely syncopated rhythms. From the liner notes:
“Sangam” means “meeting place” in Sanskrit. Don obviously knew exactly what he wanted to do, and Latif immediately understood, his fingers fizzing across the tablas at frightening speed, his perfect pitch making him the obvious person to tune the disparate instruments in Don’s armoury to those in the studio, which included a grand piano, a B3 Hammond organ and chromatic timpani.
It was Don who suggested that Latif overdub new tabla parts to enrich and add complexity to the first takes. We could reasonably have expected to spend the night doing this because this was the first time the percussionist had done this. It took him all of five minutes to get used to listening to the first tracks over the headphones before playing them without the slightest mistake. When we got to the timpani, which he was playing for the first time, his keen sense of pitch and tone once again did miracles. During one take, just for the fun of it Latif started to play a fairly slow, disconnected duple time, moving on to three and then four… all the way up to 19 by which time his fingers were whizzing invisibly across the skins, leaving us in awe and him looking as if he didn’t know what the fuss was all about. All this just made Don even keener to impress his musical companion for a day… and so he did, with great ease and a complicity created by their shared love of music.
Of course, the subtleties of this album call for greater analysis, for example the meeting between the Malian doussou n’gouni and Indian tablas, the Hammond organ taking over from the tampura, 5 1/4 time as if it were the easiest thing in the world, the reinvented Indonesian gamelan… and the lyricism of the (pocket!) cornet.
