Javelin – ‘Intervales Theme’

And you should also keep your ears peeled for Lefto & Simbad present Worldwide Family Vol 1. A Brownswood label mix by two of the B-wood family. Official release date was January 3. Teaser to follow:

Lefto & Simbad present Worldwide Family Vol 1 – Lefto Teaser

Soul Sedation is monumentally proud to bring you the new Katalyst single: ‘Day Into Night’ 
ft. Stephanie McKay. It’s from the producer’s third, full-length album which is due out early 2011. The following is an amazing fusion of blues, soul, and hip hop.

Katalyst – ‘Day Into Night ft Stephanie McKay’

The insanely hot Israeli funk outfit The Apples have enticed eminent trombonist Fred Wesley out of his comfy chair to record a track with them. The single ‘In The Air’, will be followed up by a full album on Freestyle Records. Soul Sedation is hoping for an Australian tour to follow.

The Apples – ‘In The Air ft Fred Wesley’

For anyone getting into the sounds of digital/neuve cumbia and the ZZK record label out of Argentina, Soul Sedation can recommend looking up Melbourne’s Cumbia Cosmonauts. They’re Australia’s first cumbia sound system, and you can find some early releases, as well as a podcast, on Melbourne independent label Scattermusic.

Radiokijada – Agua e’Nieve (Cumbia Cosmonauts Austoft 7000 Remix)

Reviewed by Louis Kaplan

In dispensing with the pretext of a continuous narrative and dividing his biopic on Josh Dolgin into eighteen parts to create a fragmented and kaleidoscopic portrait of this multi-faceted Montreal musician, Garry Beitel’s The Socalled Movie has made a symbolic statement that registers in a Jewish key.  For the structure of the film signals in Jewish numerological terms (where Chai/Life = 18) that it is the superabundance of life itself with all of its gusto and exuberance that this project seeks to capture in documenting the on- and off-stage antics of its restless musical subject.  Tracking Dolgin at home and on tour, the film illustrates how he has blended the genres of klezmer, hip hop, and funk into a potent and often rambunctious mix.

What allows for these surprising musical encounters is the technique of sampling so deftly deployed by Dolgin on his Akai MPC1000.  Socalled’s samples not only produce unusual musical connections; they also make these cultural artifacts come to life again.  Very early in the film, we see the mixologist demonstrating to Beitel how he has managed to sample a looped phrase from a Yiddish singer from Vilna in the 1930’s in tandem with a funky riff from the 1970’s.  He adjusts their speeds to meet in the key of F minor and he lays down a danceable beat as a backdrop.   Josh relishes this “eureka” moment of surreal juxtaposition—“And they go together.  It’s absurd!”  To rephrase Lautréamont, this is like the chance meeting of a Hassidic niggun and a hip hop rap on the dissecting table.  But what is left unspoken in the film is that Dolgin’s final arrangement of the song draws heavily on the traditional Yiddish folk tune Klingen Gleker (“Bells Are Chiming”) composed by Yisroel Glatshteyn who later died in the Warsaw ghetto.  This is just one example of Socalled’s rejuvenation of the Yiddish musical past in order to make it speak in today’s popular idiom.  Dolgin also shows Beitel the scratchy record of the vaudeville legend Aaron Lebedev that started it all for him and that produced his first sample.  Responding to Lebedev’s breaks from the contemporary perspective of hip hop, Socalled found his musical calling and niche.

The Socalled Movie makes a point of introducing us to the wide circle of artists and influences that have shaped Dolgin’s quirky vision and that, in some cases, have extended his range well beyond the pale of Jewish musical settlement.  For instance, we meet the former James Brown trombonist Fred Wesley, who functions as Socalled’s godfather of funk.  Wesley’s collaboration with Socalled is covered in the section aptly titled “My Hero” as well as in the concert footage of their side project Abraham, Inc. at the legendary Apollo Theatre in New York.   Wesley also is featured in the “Fred Fantasy” segment that is one of the two dream-like clips where Dolgin tries his own hand at directing and that temporarily hijack the film from the documentary mode.  Then there is Dolgin’s role in resurrecting the career of ninety-four year old lounge lizard Irving Fields of Bagels and Bongos fame.  Clearly, the boundary-breaking Dolgin draws inspiration from Fields’ earlier mash-ups.  In the “Irving” segment, Fields shows off the silly YouTube ditty that Dolgin encouraged him to compose in order to reach the online generation.

Interestingly, the filmmaker’s original intention was to record the “Klezmer Cruise” where Dolgin led a merry band of musical collaborators and Yiddish enthusiasts down Ukraine’s Dneiper River in a journey celebrating this lost Eastern European folk culture.  Some of this footage is included in the section “My Grandfather’s River” as well as in Socalled’s second filmic interlude, “Ukranian Fantasy.”   These segments feature another important collaborator and mentor for Socalled—the virtuoso klezmer clarinetist David Krakauer.   Because the film focuses only on the last few years, it does not represent fully the formative role played by Krakauer in the development of Dolgin’s career: including Socalled’s participation in the group Klezmer Madness and their early collaboration (along with Sophie Solomon and Michael Alpert) on the innovative Hip Hop Khasene (2003) that deconstructed and reinvented the Jewish wedding ritual.

The film’s finale features Socalled’s anthem “These are the Good Old Days,” pieced together through snippets taken from a variety of rousing performances around the world.  Twisting time, this song’s message catapults nostalgia into the present and affirms the moment “because it’s only gonna get worse.”  The happy apocalyptics of Dolgin’s lyrics here are typical of his mordant and ironic Jewish wit.  If there is a certain amount of nostalgia for the lost culture of the shtetls of Eastern Europe or the vaudeville of the Yiddish theaters in New York, it is undercut by such reverse logic and comic reasoning.  It reminds us that Dolgin’s zany and performative shtick belongs to the venerable tradition of Yiddish humor and popular variety entertainment.  Beitel captures this important component of Socalled’s persona throughout the film whether looking (and laughing) at his cracked caricatures, his on-stage banter and cutting up, or his satirical lyrics.  The Socalled Movie also engages Dolgin’s queer sexuality in the “Just Another Old Master” segment, where he talks frankly about growing up in the closet with little access to erotica.  This experience leads him to organize a campy evening of “Socalled’s Porno Pop” at the Cinema L’Amour in Montreal in homage to another one of his offbeat heroes, the pornographic filmmaker Toby Ross.

In assuming the stage name and persona of Socalled, Josh Dolgin has forged a dubious identity that questions authenticity and that revels in a certain queering of the codes.  One highpoint of Beitel’s documentary is when he draws Dolgin out regarding the central and profound irony by which he lives and plays—the “love-hate” relationship that drives this reanimating project in Yiddishkeit.  “I don’t care about God, I don’t believe in the Bible.  I hate religion, it makes me angry, but I realize that [Judaism] created this culture that I love.”  In other words, we are indebted to a cultural Jew and iconoclastic atheist for producing some of the most creative alternative Jewish music today—and it is probably on account of this very reason.

Louis Kaplan is Professor and Chair of the Department of Visual Studies at the University of Toronto Mississauga as well as a member of both the Graduate Department of Art and the Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto.

James Brown has been on my mind more than ever this year and so many nights I’ve fallen asleep with those horn parts not so much swirling as stabbing and jabbing in my head. Burnt Sugar has been working on the music of James Brown all year; we performed it at the Serralves Festival in Porto, Portugal in June, at The Apollo Theater Salon Series in October and just last week at Le Poisson Rouge in NYC. There’s more to come and I’ve come to realize that attempting to learn and approximate let alone perfect all those horn parts could be a lifetime pursuit. Having said that, talking about those parts and the players who gave them to us will probably become a recurring theme on this blog. Everyone knows The JBs, Fred Wesley, Maceo Parker & Peewee Ellis, but I have come to love the sound of St. Clair Pinckney’s horns on many of the tunes too. Anyway, as we approach the anniversary of James Brown’s death with which he masterfully eclipsed and forever transformed the meaning of the December 25th holiday I leave you with this consummately groovy film clip of his Soulful Christmas featuring those seemingly simple but indispensable horn lines.

I was looking for some more songs to add to the group’s repertoire and came across this guy’s blog who managed to transcribe Fred Wesley’s solo from “Doing It To Death.” I’ve been trying to figure out how to play some of Fred’s solos for years. Seeing one written out, I now understand why I haven’t been successful. Fred plays some cool, funky syncopation and blows some full, smooth notes. He makes it sound easy, if not effortless. But Fred is probably more awesome than you and certainly way more awesome than me. Most of the notes he’s playing are at and above the usual playable range of the majority of tenor trombonists out there. I never could find the right notes because I couldn’t imagine that anybody could possible play notes in that range with any sort of speed without them sounding like the cries of a dying walrus.

On a different note, I’m glad to be back in Denver for a variety of reasons, but driving home tonight I was reminded of another one. There are lots of places around the city where you can get a view out across some section or another and see for miles. I particularly like the views at night, which are even better at this time of year since the leaves have fallen off the trees and people have put up holiday lights. As with many things that look good to the human eye, it’s pretty tricky to produce a photo that has the same effect. Here’s a photo of Denver from space at night though. That little rectangle of lights in the bottom left is DIA, which means the mountains are on the right side of the picture and north is at the bottom.

He was “the Hardest Working Man in Show Business,” “the Godfather of Soul”– James Brown.  Immensely popular with audiences from the mid-Fifties (when “Please, Please, Please,” above, was a hit), he was a tremendous influence on popular music, with admirers who included jazz greats like Miles Davis, and emulators like Sly and the Family Stone, Booker T & the MGs and “soul shouters” like King Curtis, Edwin Starr, and David Ruffin (of The Temptations).  He was a famously-tough task master as a band leader; but it served his musicians well, as their education at his hands laid the foundation for several successful solo careers (e.g., Bobby Byrd, Lyn Collins, Vicki Anderson, Hank Ballard, Bootsy Collins, and Carlos Alomar).  And he was the ur-source of Funk (e.g., admirer George Clinton cast Brown alumni Fred Wesley and Bootsy Collins centrally in the seminal Parliament-Funkadelic).

But Brown made what was arguably his most influential contribution with his feet: he was, as anyone who saw him perform can attest, an astonishing dancer.  As a child, he’d earned pocket money buck dancing to entertain troops headed to Europe at the outset of WWII.  Over the years he made that traditional form uniquely his own– inspiring performers like Michael Jackson and Prince, who modeled their moves on his, and prefiguring the current vogue of dance-centric pop performances.

James Brown died on Christmas Day, 2006.  But happily, he left behind a guide to the moves that made him famous.  The holiday party season, with its fraught occasions to dance, looms; but there’s no reason to fear, Dear Readers– just watch and learn.  Michael Jackson did…

As we trip the light fantastic, we might recall that it was on this date in 1946 (when James Brown was 13 years old) that Walt Disney released Song of the South, a feature film based on the Uncle Remus stories of Joel Chandler Harris, in which live actors frame animated enactments of the adventures of Br’er Rabbit– like the story of “The Tar Baby.”  The film won the Best Song Oscar for “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah”; but, while the film was re-released theatrically in 1972, 1981, and 1986, and has been released to home video in Europe and Asia, it has never been released to home video in the U.S.– perhaps because Disney executives feel that it might be construed as racist.

James Baskett, who played Uncle Remus, was the first black actor hired by Disney to play a live role.  He was unable to attend the film’s premiere in Atlanta, the event hotels there would not have him. (source)

He’s still working and teaching … “Set sail with Fred  on Jam Cruise 9, Jan. 4-9, 2011” CLICK HERE to find out more!

Fred Wesley, photograph by Reese Moore

CJO presents POPS! Charleston Music Hall, 37 John Street, 7 pm. Buy tickets here!

Maceo, Fred Wesley and Pee Wee Ellis perform Marvin Gaye’s classic and perhaps the best booty call song, “Let’s Get It On.”

I’ve also came across a dope comp called “Good God! – Heavy Funk Covers Of James Brown From All Over The World 1968 to 1974″ that’s pretty fresh. It’s a handful of Mr. Dynamite covers that’ll I’ll be posting in the near future.

James Brown – “Sportin’ Life”

http://www.divshare.com/flash/playlist?myId=12069459-d3d

GE-Gabby_w-Tom_&_G_on_HaasYEAH_7-17-10.m4a (20531 KB)

Download now or listen on posterous

GE- Gabby Khalil Shaheed Benefit7-17-10.m4a (3088 KB)

Download now or listen on posterous

GE- Gabby w-DocMarcus KangenWater7-17-10.m4a (12983 KB)

Fred Wesley and The JB’s were affiliates of this guy named James Brown. Blow Your Head is a weird but funky track that has been sampled by a myriad of hip hop artists including Digable Planets, Public Enemy, Rye Rye and Bel Biv DeVoe. Enjoy.

Sam Sparro is killer, check out some of the older post for more of his own tracks, this one is a little different but nonetheless ‘firya” check it out and give it a couple listens will defs grow on you.

Saint Motel – Dear Dictator (Sam Sparro Remix)

Change of pace … but this is a real slow burner for the ages man, holy lifting! Probably has been sampled by some hip hop noteworthy but i dont know … if you do send the track my way. This track seems real fitting for some hung over gloomy weekend morn when all you want to do is lay in bed and listen to music. anyways here it is.

Bob Azzam & His Orchestra – Rain, Rain, Go Away

Another slow burner .. but with a little more funk to it. Fred Wesley had been the trombonist for King James Brown. Know all those funky brass licks, well this is cat. Have a listen cause any true head will be down with this track. Wesley does something with that bone, it isnt always technically difficult but the smoothness and tone this legend gets out of hunk of metal is unreal.

Fred Wesley and the Horny Horns – Four Play

Change of pace again … i am a little excited to be posting again so my brain is just jumping, plus i have had a couple cups of coffee. Anyways check out the Neus remix of Breakbots Iron Zombie. Killer. Those of you who read this blog probs know i have a bit of a hard on for breakbot and well i am not going to deny it. The kid drops some suuuurious burners so why wouldnt I. Anyways check out this remix pretty dope.

Breakbot – Iron Zombie (Neus Remix)

Well, there a four killer tracks to make my unexciting and severally unanticipated return, but her she is and i hope it gets your weekend, or whats left of it, off to a great start. Cheers.

p.s. there will not be gaps like this is my operation again.

The Hip-Hop world lost one of its most valued MCs yesterday: Keith Elam, better known as Guru. We were all alerted to his poor health earlier this year when he was admitted to hospital following a cardiac arrest, sending him into a coma. Apparently he had been living with cancer for the past year, and although he seemed to be recovering well after waking from his coma in early March, he died in hospital on Monday, aged 48.

With a career spanning over two decades and numerous projects, Guru has left an extensive musical legacy behind him. Formed in 1987, Gang Starr was arguably his most influential project. After putting out three singles on Wild Pitch records in ’87 and ’88, Guru enlisted the help of the now legendary producer DJ Premier. With Guru delivering his trademark monotone battle raps and Premier laying down some of Hip-Hop’s most iconic beats, Gang Starr went on to produce a string of hit albums that became timeless classics. The duo’s influence was so profound, that some of its music single-handedly made the old records that it sampled into classics.

Gang Starr’s first major hit, ‘Manifest’ (1989) took a loop from Charlie Parker and Miles Davis’s ‘A Night in Tunisia’ and coupled it with a James Brown groove, creating an instant classic which is still dropped on many a dancefloor today. Their reputation was further cemented with the release of ‘Step in the Arena’ in 1992, their second full-length album, containing the hit ‘Just to Get a Rep’, with Guru’s conscious flows matching a loop taken from French electronic music experimentalist Jean-Jacques Perrey’s ‘E.V.A.’, turning the latter into a crate digger essential. Other highlights from the album are ‘Check the Technique’, which samples Marlena Shaw‘s ‘California Soul‘, and title track ‘Step in the Arena’, with trumpet flourishes from rock group Ballin’ Jack’s ‘Never Let ‘Em Say’ and an iconic scratch from Premier using Thunder and Lightning’s ‘Bumpin’ Bus Stop’, laid over a thumping Fred Wesley break.

In 1993, Guru took time away from Gang Starr to focus on the first of a series of albums entitled ‘Jazzmatazz’, a project that united his love of Hip-Hop and Jazz. Guru not only brought in established MCs to feature on the project but also enlisted a number of legendary jazz artists to provide instrumentation, including Roy Ayers, Lonnie Liston Smith and Donald Byrd. The album was one of the first to combine classic sampled beats (by artists such as James Brown, Love Unlimited Orchestra and Melvin Bliss) with live instrumentation provided by renowned old school artists, putting the two production approaches on equal ground and showing how powerful this combination can be. The album was a notable commercial success, especially in Europe where Acid Jazz was in full swing.

1994 saw the release of Gang Starr’s ‘Hard to Earn’, containing the anthemic ‘Mass Appeal’, with an inspired loop lifted from jazz guitarist Vic Juris’s ‘Horizon Drive’, whilst a different atmosphere is created on ‘Code of the Streets’ thanks to a soulful Monk Higgins loop. The second instalment in the Jazzmatazz series arrived in ’95, including ‘Feel the Music’, a track built around a loop from Martine Girault’s Acid Jazz single ‘Revival’, released in ’92 on FFFR. It wasn’t until 1998 that the next Gang Starr album arrived, entitled ‘Moment of Truth’. Guru released a third Jazzmatazz album in 2000, and Gang Starr released its final album, ‘The Ownerz’, in 2003.

Interestingly, Guru even dabbled in dance music, appearing on Dutch Trance DJ/producer Ferry Corsten‘s 2003 single ‘Junk’, a re-working of Corsten’s own track ‘Punk’. Guru followed on to release a solo album titled ‘Version 7.0: The Street Scriptures’ in 2005, a fourth Jazzmatazz instalment in 2007, and his last solo album, ‘Guru 8.0: Lost and Found’, in 2009.

His loss is particularly painful given that he died at the young age of 48, and carried on making and releasing music until shortly before his death. May he rest in peace.

Please feel free to pay your tributes and highlight your favorite Guru moments in the comments section below or on Guru’s artist page on WhoSampled.com.

David Krakauer, Socalled and Fred Wesley are Abraham Inc.

Klezmer king David Krakauer, the tirelessly inventive clarinetist who leads Klezmer Madness!, trombonist Fred Wesley (whose credits include stints with James Brown, George Clinton’s Parliament/Funkadelic and the Count Basie Orchestra) and frequent Krakauer collaborator Socalled (a DJ whose real name is Josh Dolgin), are coming together at Manhattan’s (Le) Poisson Rouge tomorrow night to celebrate the release of Tweet Tweet, their debut CD as Abraham Inc.

If you’re one of those people who still thinks that the clarinet isn’t cool, and that klezmer is the music of your grandparents— something you’ve worked hard to escape — think again. Krakauer has been at the forefront of a modern movement to make klezmer cool, and he succeeds more every day.

Watch the video below, then check out this show, or get the CD, and you’ll be convinced. Sure, they’re three kinda goofy guys, but when they start grooving, they skillfully weave together elements of klezmer, funk and hip hop to create a really fresh sound.

Abraham Inc. with Girls in Trouble. 7 pm tomorrow (Thursday, Feb. 25) at (Le) Poisson Rouge, 158 Bleecker Street, Manhattan. $25 in advance. Tickets available here.

The Dozens: Top Twelve Trombone Tracks

I penned the reviews for them in the fall, and it’s finally up for all to see!

In case you’re too lazy to click the link, my twelve (actually 13 since I got two in one track) terrific trombonists are (in chronological order by recording):

1- Jimmy Harrison: Fidgety Feet

2- Trummy Young: Margie

3- Joe “Tricky Sam” Nanton: It Don’t Mean A Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)

4- Edward “Kid” Ory: Muskrat Ramble

5- Weldon Leo “Jack” Teagarden: Stars Fell On Alabama

6- J.J. Johnson & Kai Winding: A Night In Tunisia

7- Al Grey: Makin’ Whoopee

8- Frank Rosolino: I Love You

9- Albert Mangelsdorff: Ant Stepped On An Elephant’s Toe

10- Carl Fontana: I Thought About You

11- Fred Wesley: Pass the Peas

12- Conrad Herwig: Hieroglyphica

Click the artists’ names for biographical information, click the song titles for either a link to stream at lala (for most) or a link to the jazz.com review.

Sadly, many amazing jazz trombone recordings were left off of my list.  But I thought it gave a good representation of the variety of amazing trombone styles that have sprouted from the jazz tradition.  I’m especially proud of myself for getting one recording in from each decade, starting in 1920 and going all the way into the 2000s.