etnobofin

This is about as good as it gets – Keith Jarrett (pn), Charlie Haden (b) and Paul Motian (d) live in Hamburg in 1972. It’s an object lesson in how musicians should interact: an economy of ideas with no raised voices. Texture in tranquility.

Well, it’s New Zealand Music Month again. A good excuse to dig up this old classic from 1984: Poi E by the Patea Maori Club.

It’s probably the first pop song I remember: kids in the school playground would run around singing and shouting “Taku poi porotiti, taku poi e!“. We didn’t know what the lyrics meant, but it sure made a change from playing Ewoks and Stormtroopers.

Poi E sounds like no other pop song before or since. Everything about the song and the video is awesome – fusing poi dance with breakdance, mixing kapa haka with MPC beats, and providing a 16mm picture into New Zealand at a transitional time in its history. Magic.

A short post is often a good post. Here’s some rather extraordinary footage of Charles Mingus playing with his daughter and being interviewed in the 1960s. The next day he was evicted by the police from his apartment:

The film is Thomas Reichmann’s Mingus: Charlie Mingus 1968.

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.

…just a perfect YouTube moment (hat tip to Benjaminbrum)

One day, (probably quite soon), Tom Milsom will be seriously famous.  Multi-tentacled talent such as his will not remain undiscovered (or unsigned) for long.

This 19 year-old “from south London” writes songs, plays ukelele, drums and Casiotone AND he makes films, draws cartoons and runs one of the most popular YouTube channels in the world.  His Internet Love Song (singalong chorus, everybody now: “BRB, OMG, LOL. ROFLMAO“) has already been a hit on the web – and would make a great case study for Dubber’s New Music Strategies.

Here’s a song about a dead cat, and yes, Tom did the animation and played and wrote all the music:

Tom’s début album, Awkward Ballads for the Easily Pleased is 100% geeky and self-knowing.   Songs like Watching Paint Dry (about, er, home decoration) are infused with enough late-teen weltschmerz to hint that there’s more depth to Milsom’s music than first meets the ear. The disc glories in painstakingly-wrought rhymes and the sort of internal lyrical logic that only comes from writing and recording alone in your  bedroom. Really quite special.

It’s very possible that I am, indeed, easily pleased.  At the moment I haven’t quite decided whether Tom Milson is the Spike Milligan for the Millenial Kids, or the Ivor Cutler for the New Century. Either/or/neither, he’s one to watch.

Buy Tom’s album as mp3s on emusic, or the CD via his website. You can even follow Tom on Twitter.

Earlier last year we talked about Oxford hip hop crew GTA. We quite liked their unashamed Thames Valley accents and Stax-sampling beats. The good news is that their début album The Way is now available everywhere.

Here’s the video for their new single Breakthrough:

As you might expect from an album recorded in Oxford, there aren’t too many stories of ghetto life to be heard here. MCs Chima Anya and Ineff are mostly interested in addressing their experience as young men growing up, finding their way in life (Chima is a junior doctor, Ineff is an accountant), running round town and chasing women.

And GTA are keen to point out, The Way is about life, it’s not about the town they’re from. Even if Ineff claims that “We’re the biggest thing outta Kidlington man” there’s little name-checking of suburbs or housing estates. As Ineff continues, there’s no point in giving shout-outs to a town that’s already world famous:

There’s a list of places that are simply blazin’
But I’m not gonna list the places
If you wanna know ask Tourist Information

The attitude is 100% positive, they both seem to know they’re lucky to be making beats and rhymes. And best of all it sounds like the guys had a lot of fun recording the album.

The Way can be picked up as an mp3 download Amazon or iTunes, or you can buy a CD for 10 squids via their Myspace page.

Freddie Hubbard, 1938 – 2008

Rochester, NY – 1976 (Image: Tom Marcello)

Freddie Hubbard – Keep Your Soul Together (Excerpt)
From Keep Your Soul Together: CTI [Buy]

There was a time when I didn’t know who Freddie Hubbard was.

I was just starting to learn about jazz. A friend’s father (himself a well-known pianist and jazz broadcaster around town) thrust two dusty cassettes into my hand, which I duly took home and thrashed to death in my bedroom.

One tape was a copy of Miles’ Someday My Prince Will Come. The other was Herbie Hancock’s Empyrean Isles. The Herbie tape had a hastily scribbled playlist and personnel listing: Herbie… Ron … Tony… Freddie. Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, Tony Williams, I’d heard of. But this Freddie guy… playing the … cornet?

Pretty soon Freddie Hubbard was a familiar sound in my house. His solos from that album – on One Finger Snap, Oliliquy Valley – were melodies I could sing in the shower. At that time, all trumpet players sounded fresh and exciting to me. Lee Morgan, Wynton Marsalis, Clifford Brown were all early additions to a small trove of cassettes that filled the family home with sound on evenings and weekends and annoyed my sister in her room down the hallway.  Freddie, with his loud-high hard bop style, probably annoyed her more than most.

At university we formed little jazz bands that played cafés around town. Somehow we managed to persuade the owners that we were actually good, and sometimes the owners even paid us.  By that time, we had discovered Freddie’s early 1970s recordings for CTI, and Red Clay inevitably ended up on our setlist.   We played it EVERY gig. Along with Chameleon, Wayne Shorter’s Footprints and a couple of Cole Porter ballads.

And then one January day, one of the band was killed in an accident. He was the youngest of us. Hell, the oldest of us was only 23.  We put together a band that played at his funeral.  Stevie arrived there before us, and we did our soundcheck next to his coffin. We played four songs before the start of the service. One of them was Red Clay.

Now Freddie Hubbard’s gone too, to join the ever-expanding jam session in the sky.  Through his most powerful recorded work (from, say, 1961 to 1975) many of his phrases have spun themselves into the DNA of all young jazz trumpet players today.  I never got to see him play live, but more than most trumpeters, it felt like I knew him a little bit through his records and the way they influenced me and my bandmates.   So, thanks, Freddie.  We’ll remember you.

Eartha Kitt (1927 – 2008)

Take 2 teaspoons of Billie Holiday, a pinch of Edith Piaf, half a cat, a small dose of Judy Garland (or Liza Monelli to taste), and mix together with the essence of Marlena Dietrich, Josephine Baker and some dynamite.

Smoulder on stage for 81 years, serve in a slinky cocktail dress, sharpen her claws, light the fuse and stand well clear… you have created…. Eartha Kitt.

Choristers at Canterbury Cathedral, December 2008 (Photo: chrisjohnbeckett)

I’ve finally managed to finish Alan Mould’s The English Chorister. Mould’s book is likely the definitive history of boy choristers in England – a history that stretches to the first child oblates who sang the daily office alongside Benedictine monks in the monastery founded by Saint Augustine in Canterbury in the year 597.

Coursework reading meant that this book sat next to my bed all term, half-finished, until this week. But it was well worth perservering with, providing some insight into a musical tradition that formed a very important part of my early musical education.

The continuation of choristership over 14 centuries is unique to England – nowhere else in Europe today can claim a similar long-standing tradition.  But what becomes apparent in Mould’s history is the precarity of the choristers position for many centuries. Despite the demands of singing two services every day, choristers were often badly housed and fed, and until the 20th Century, little provision was made for their education.

Choristers also suffered through political and religious turmoil, including Viking raids on monasteries in the 7th century, or the open hostility of Tudor religious reformers. During the English Reformation, all trappings of Roman Catholic practice  were under threat in the newly protestant Church of England.  Choral worship probably only survived because Elizabeth I (a music fan) personally demanded that choirs not be disestablished – and today choristers still sing  the daily Canticles laid down in Thomas Cranmer’s 1552 Book of Common Prayer.

Today, it is estimated that at any given time, there are around 900 boys and girls in the UK involved in formal choristership – in cathedrals, Oxbridge colleges or the Royal Chapels.  Beyond the UK, a number of “English-style” choral foundations exist, notably at Saint Thomas Church in New York, Saint Andrews in Sydney and Christchurch Cathedral in New Zealand.

The one Anglican choir that undoubtedly receives more “airtime” each year than any other is the choir of King’s College, Cambridge.  On Christmas Eve, millions of people in the UK and around the world tune in for the live broadcast of the service of lessons and carols held in the college’s magnificent chapel.  A televised version is also recorded.  Here’s the choir a few years ago, singing Kenneth Leighton‘s arrangement of the Coventry Carol.