etnobofin

Ever get the feeling that the torch has well and truly passed to the next generation? When we were starting one million dollars back in 2001, Iva Lamkum was still at high school.

But today, Iva is fully-fledged solo artist from who seems to be following in the lineage of New Zealand contemporaries Ladi6 and Hollie Smith. Certainly her deep-throated soul-jazz style recalls somewhat both Hollie and Ladi.

Her 2008 single Kung Fu Grip plays on Iva’s Asian heritage (born in NZ, Iva is half-Chinese, half-Samoan), and is the centrepiece of a début EP that mines consistently popular characteristics of the New Zealand scene – live old-school beats, jazz, and an organic r+b/soul aesthetic.

Auckland producer/musician Andrew Spraggon featured Iva on Turn Around, a grack from the new Sola Rosa album Get it Together. If you want to know what the insides of an Auckland DJ’s record bag sound like, take a listen over on Bandcamp:

(A sidebar note: the trombone lick on Turn Around is played by Haydn Godfrey, an erstwhile one million dollars conspirator and one of a very few young professional trombonists in the NZ. He’s currently in Chicago studying with players from the Chicago Symphony.)

It seems that recent thoughts have been tape-recordings going around on a loop. For the past few weeks, my Twitter feed has pretty much been variations on two messages:

@etnobofin “Holy crap my French sucks. Gee it’s really hard getting back into the language again.”
@etnobofin “Wow, I’m living in France again. I’m going off to do [insert apparently- typically-French-activity here] just because I bloody can.”

So yeah, apologies for that. But while we’re repeating ourselves, lets say again that Lewis Taylor is a genius and why do so few people know of his music? His fan page on Facebook has just 153 members. Lilly Allen has freaking 1,000, and she’s not even any good. (Of course it could be that most Lewis Taylor fans have too much good sense and taste to be signed up to Facebook.)

Lewis Taylor fandom is marked by gushing, verbose enthusiasm and simmering rage that nobody else “gets” Taylor’s music. Ernest Hardy’s article on Taylor from LA Weekly in March 2007 is a good example. Here’s his typically ebullient description of the song Leader of the Band.

“[Taylor's music] turns you into art, freeing your imagination to fly. “The Leader of the Band” … is an air-swept melody, full of breezy harmonies with drawn-out oohs and ahhs and sideways bah-bah-bahs. It’s on an unapologetic ’60s tip. It trips the trigger between sound and memory, allowing one’s private reserve of mental imagery to tumble forth, rather than some choreographed music-video shit. For me, it conjures that smiling, sated morning-after feeling of watching an underwear-clad lover eat a bowl of cereal, morning sunlight fracturing through a naked window.”

Well, yes, exactly.

Also in Lewis Taylor news, Markleslie99 has made a nice new video for Everybody Here Wants You – a mashup using copyright-free Betty Boop cartoons, which is a really nice idea. Unfortunately embedding has been disabled on the vid, so you have to follow this link.

So there. I’ve repeated myself again about Lewis Taylor’s genius, so now I’m off to eat couscous, because I’m in France and I can.

(Or: Towards a Recontextualisation of Art based on a Sliding Scale of Badly Drawn Monsters)

Donny Hathaway – Love, Love, Love
From Extensions of a Man [Buy] [iTunes]

The morning after a fun Friday night out in London, dodging raindrops between pubs and engaging in some good conversations with people I don’t see enough of, the iPod alarm clock woke me with a randomly selected tune, which just happened to be Donny Hathaway’s Love,Love,Love. Normally waking up is not particularly fun, especially on Saturdays, but this was one of those moments when the tune completely fitted with the good memories of the previous evening.

Which got me thinking – was the appreciation of that particular moment and that particular song enhanced by knowledge of Donny Hathaway’s career and his tragically short life?

Does enjoyment of art increase with familiarity? Or can our engagement with art be inhibited by too much knowledge about the context of its creation? And how does our knowledge interact with the specificity of the moment in which the art is consumed/observed/heard?

A music geek or an academic might argue that one’s enjoyment and appreciation of any given musical performance is enhanced by extensive study or obsessive fandom. When this relationship is expressed in a graph, the Appreciation Curve rises proportionally as one’s knowledge (Ka) of an artist/artform/genre increases, and as a function of specificity of the moment in which the music is heard (Sc).

Fig. 1

For example – in Figure 1, the anonymous elevator music heard on the way to work would lie near the bottom left side of the Appreciation Curve, whereas for a jazz fan, hearing Coltrane’s A Love Supreme at the funeral of a close friend or family member might rank very high to the right hand side on the curve.

However, this neat Unified Theory falls down rapidly when tested against real world experience. For example, Maurice Ravel‘s String Quartet in F Major can hit you between the ears with the same force of beauty, whether you’re hearing Ravel for the first time or for the 1,000th. And speaking personally, my irrational love of Senorita by Justin Timberlake is completely out of proportion to any instinct for good taste or indeed my knowledge of Mr Timberlake’s career, which is rather limited.

So knowledge and context interact in far more intricate ways than we might expect. Therefore the graph must be modified somewhat to illustrate a rather more complex reality, as in Figure 2:

Fig. 2

The implications of this revised model of music appreciation, which we might call the “Ball of String Theory” are quite startling, and are twofold:

1. Sometimes you really should stay in bed on Saturday mornings

2. Clever theories will come back and bite you on the arse, as demonstrated in Figure 3:

Fig. 3

Hopefully Isaac Hayes, who died yesterday, will be remembered for more than just the Theme from Shaft, Chef’s voice in South Park and providing the original style template for “pimped-out”.

Even before he was a solo artist, he wrote songs and arrangements for the Stax stable, including some guy called Otis Redding. His career as a songwriter, singer, pianist, arranger includes some of the most kick-ass re-imaginings of pop songs ever (try his 18+ minute version of Jimmy Webb’s By the Time I Get to Phoenix on 1969′s Hot Buttered Soul). Anyone who doesn’t appreciate how massive was the Isaac Hayes phenomenon in the early 1970s should watch Wattstax, a highly entertaining doco in which Hayes is the headline act of the 1973 Stax artists concert in Watts. A moment in pop culture history indeed.

But back to Shaft. Everybody seems to forget that the film itself is rubbish – the best thing about it is the soundtrack. The video shows Hayes and his band rehearsing and writing the music in 1971 with director Gordon Parks, including an early cut of the immortal Theme .

Requiesce in pace, brother. Daaaaaamn right.

James Brown, 1933-2006

Graham Reid’s review of his March 2004 gig at St James (haha) Theatre, Auckland, New Zealand.

One of those road-trip moments… the view of Mont Blanc over Lake Geneva

Lewis Taylor – Bittersweet

From Lewis Taylor: Island CID 8049 [Buy]

Lewis Taylor – The Way You Done Me

From Lewis II: Island CID 8098 [Buy]

It’s been a while between posts, mainly because the dayjob has become a bit of a nightjob and an awayfromhomejob for the past few weeks. Moving to a new job in the UK, and the chance to travel around Europe again has been (mostly) a great decision, although pretty exhausting at times! Here’s some recovery music.

So the sun was just about gone from the sky, and we were driving back up the A39 across the vast rolling expanse of the Champagne region (the dreary countryside doesn’t quite match the reputation of the eponymous drink).

All the way from Geneva, we’d been listening to just about everything you could imagine – R.E.M.’s Automatic for the People (still one of the perfect pop albums ever), a compilation of 1930s black gospel, Eminem, James Brown’s Living in America. And the GPS tells us our overnight hotel in Reims is still an hour away.

I whack on Lewis Taylor, and the Citroën’s stereo selects Bittersweet as the first track… the hints of trip-hop are only an overture to a sprawling masterwork that touches every soul reference point you can shake a stick at: Stevie Wonder, Prince, Earth Wind and Fire, Marvin Gaye. The smile is back on our faces for the day’s final stretch of road.

Thanks to IanB at RetroBabe! for introducing me to Lewis Taylor, an English soul genius who really deserves a lot more recognition than he currently gets. And good luck with your new blogging project Ian – looking forward to seeing what form it takes

* For Bonus Music Points: track the time signature changes all the way through The Way You Done Me – it’s definitely 7/8 in the chorus but I haven’t quite nutted out the verses yet.

On the N5 through the Jura, eastern France: hints that autumn is here…