etnobofin

“Shotgun Golf was invented in the ominous summer of 2004 AD, right here at the Owl Farm in Woody Creek, Colo. The first game was played between me and Sheriff Bob Braudis, on the ancient Bomb & Shooting Range of the Woody Creek Rod & Gun Club. It was witnessed by many members and other invited guests, and filmed for historical purposes by Dr. Thompson on Super-Beta videotape.

Yes, I’m back from a long weekend in the Lucky Country, and I’ve got my photos developed. (Still a slave to analogue technology…) So to start with, here are some photos taken at the band’s demo recording at Hotel Vermont Studios (Tom’s garage) at the end of January.

OK people, here’s a silly mindless post. Gizoogle is a “gangsta” version of Google. You can load webpages into it and they come out like this:

Many hours of fun can be had by translating sites like BBC News and Project for the New American Century. (Pages may take a while to load).

Destiny Church: “God is say’n it is time ta be a thugz of tha Kingdom.”

A near-capacity crowd greeted DJ Krush‘s midnight set at Studio on K Road on Friday night. I went along with a friend of mine, not exactly sure what to expect, knowing the Tokyo-based DJ and producer more by reputation than by his music. Krush has been around since forever, (along with Massive Attack and EBTG he was a name to conjure with when I was still at school ten years ago). It seems that he’s remixed just about everybody. So I was curious and, I hope, open-minded enough to accept whatever Krush dished out.

Darkness and crushing basslines was what he served up, and very skilfully done, too. This was hip-hop, Jim, but not as we know it in New Zealand. Few vocal tracks, and nary a melody in sight. For about 2 hours, Krush surfed a dangerous wave that threatened to tip over the edge into drum and bass, but was pulled back from the brink at the last moment. It seemed to me that Mr Krush was playing his own little joke on the crowd, seeing how close he could push the jungle barrier without crashing through it. For most of the party people there, it was an exciting ride.

The set ended with Krush getting his photo taken by one of his crew (Japanese culture profers certain obligations), before returning to the decks for a short encore of breaks-oriented soul: providing the most melodic moments of the night.

Like Kid Koala a few weeks earlier, DJ Krush is an ace pilot of his three turntables and effects rack, and he reminded us kiwis that while we have many skilled DJs in this country, there is a yawning gap between the merely skilled and the truly great. What was most satisfying was that his set made great musical sense, from overwhelming passages of cut up breakbeats and scratching to a couple of abstract and ambient moments which flirted with sound-sculpture. DJ Krush-san, arigato gozaimasu!

Yay! I’ve found an online version of Kid Koala‘s Moon River mix. Thanks to the mind-bogglingly huge BBC website! For me, this routine was the highlight of Kid Koala’s show in Auckland in January. It really is a little jewel of perversity. I don’t know what I like better – 5 minutes of scratching without beats, or the concept of mashing up Henry Mancini.

Wayne Shorter’s 4/4 arrangement of Moon River for Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers (Buhaina’s Delight -Blue Note, 1962) is also a lot of fun.

It is little exaggeration to say that Jimmy Smith is jazz organ for the second half of the twentieth century. Geoff Alexander has written the best history of jazz organ, freely available online, and it accurately divides the evolution of this subgenre into pre-Smith and post-Smith. Indeed, any organist today who denies being influenced by Jimmy Smith is flat-out lying. It’s a bit like a trumpet player saying that they haven’t been influenced by Miles. From Lonnie Smith and Brother Jack McDuff through to John Medeski, all modern organ players have had to assimilate Smith’s innovations before moving onto new territories.

As organist Joey DeFrancesco put it well in a Reuters interview last year: “Anyone who plays the organ is a direct descendant of Jimmy Smith. It’s like Adam and Eve — you always remind someone of Jimmy Smith.“

Jimmy Smith’s mana was amplified over the years by a high calibre posse of collaborators, particularly in the late 50s and 1960s: Kenny Burrell, Oliver Nelson, Ike Quebec, Wes Montgomery, Lou Donaldson, Stanley Turrentine, Jackie McLean and Lee Morgan. His work lies at the grassroots of much soul and gospel influenced jazz and groove music. Smith’s considerable back catalogue will likely be sampled and reconstructed by producers and turntablists for decades to come, but there will never be another Jimmy Smith.