Burl Veneer’s Music Blog

Breaking news: New NOMO!

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 17:49:17 -0700

I must interrupt the skronk thread to announce this breaking news, or broken news, as the case may be; it may be old news but it's news to me. Blog favorite Nomo has a new album, Ghost Rock, coming out on June 17th, but they're streaming three songs in advance on RCRD LBL:

Ghost Rock was produced by Warn Defever, a.k.a. His Name Is Alive, and it seems that Nomo leader Elliot Bergman is as much a studio geek as he is, so this should be a great album. If the rest of the tracks are as good as these three, then it will be.

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Brand new Radio 4

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 11:06:54 -0700

Speaking of Radio 4, as I just was, they released a new song today on the RCRD LBL netlabel. Which means it's free! Free to download, free to listen to, and free to embed as long as you use RCRD LBL's ad-supported widget:

They're jumping on the Afrobeat bandwagon too: note the kalimba in the "cover art" (in quotes because there's no physical product to cover) and the guitar figure that plays throughout the song. At the same time they've smoothed the edges of their sound; this doesn't seem like a good direction for them, but they're promising more through RCRD LBL, so I'll keep my hopes up for something a little more raucous. For comparison, here are some older Radio 4 songs that are sitting around on the web, starting with the title track from their last album:

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Vampire Weekend, best new band? Really?

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 20:10:47 -0700

Aren't they pretty boring? So they incorporate some African pop sounds into their music; so do a lot of better bands. The Budos Band, for instance, who have a brand-new video:

The Budos Band: Origin of Man

And they're on Daptone Records, so you know they've got to be good. However, they're not new. Yeasayer is, though; they sound like the Polyphonic Spree playing Afrobeat. Since there are only four band members, that big sound must be the result of overdubbing and choir effects, but it sounds great, positively lush at times.

Afrobeat is creeping into the mainstream, and that's a good thing, because it means I can hear more of it.

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NOMO video

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 21:14:21 -0800

Widgets, widgets, everywhere, I've just got to try them all out. I just got word on MySpace that Don Was has produced a video for NoMo, the coed Afrobeat band from Ann Arbor, Michigan (previously covered here). What sets them apart from other Afrobeat bands (other than being gender-integrated)? The electric mbiri! See Elliot Bergman play it here on "Nu Tones":

Don Was has had a long and interesting (and hit-or-miss) career, maybe I'll get around to cherry-picking some of his music for the blog.

Demand NoMo in your city!

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Afrobeat and Frankenstein

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 07:55:38 -0800

I caught Asheville, North Carolina Afrobeat band the Afromotive at Castaways last night; with four full-time percussionists they put out some really rich beats. It was a real luxury to take a ten-minute drive to see a ten-piece Afrobeat band for, again, just five bucks. Here's some music from the Afromotive--there are actually three whole songs available, click the "songs" button to access the other two:

The Afromotive

I am always amazed at the musicianship in Afrobeat bands, but I suppose that the genre attracts serious players with serious chops, and above all a great sense of fun. At my first Afrobeat show (Nomo in Boston, back in July) I hit upon the idea of an Afrobeat version of Edgar Winter's "Frankenstein." Nobody's done that yet, as far as I know, but yesterday I found the next best thing: a marching band version! At the record show in Ithaca I got an album by the Stanford University Band, there's no date on it but I'll date it at 1979, probably recorded during fall 1978 football games (as the newest song on it is "Who Are You," a hit during fall of 1978). I love marching bands, they dispense with any sense of subtlety at all in favor of pounding rhythms and blaring brass. At my first office at the University of Maryland, the marching band would practice right across the street. It gave a real sense of importance to whatever I was doing!

Stanford University Band - Frankenstein

Stanford University Band

Too bad they didn't bring it back to the main theme after the bridge, but you can't have everything. Edgar Winter's original version follows for comparison purposes. If I am feeling mischievous one day, I may dig out his 1984 remake and post it on the blog. If I am feeling evil, I will post the rap version.

Edgar Winter Group - Frankenstein

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Funk'n'Waffles

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 20:24:20 -0700

Afrobeat is getting closer to Ithaca... Last night my daughter came along with me on the 54-mile trip to Syracuse to see the Chicago Afrobeat Project at Funk'n'Waffles. What a cool place! It's a former coffeeshop in a basement under a bar. It was started by two guys who like funk music and made a name for themselves serving waffles at parties as students at Syracuse University. So now they have a business serving up funk, and waffles. And they've got the good funk: crates of records from 1970 plus or minus five years (the kind of stuff I've been getting into recently thanks to the 4 Brothers Beats blog), which they keep spinning on a turntable while the clientele chows down. Here's what it looks like inside:

Funk'n'Waffles slideshow

We had a Belgian waffle with maple syrup, and it was fantastic. The opening band was an apparently popular local reggae band. I will only say that I was not a reggae fan before the set, during the set, or after the set. But I am an Afrobeat fan, and the Chicago Afrobeat Project delivered two sets of it. They had just seven members (which I understand from this interview is the touring portion of their full 11-member group) but that's enough for a full Afrobeat sound when there's a baritone sax in the mix. They also have the best keyboardist, Kevin Ford, that I've heard in an Afrobeat band. His solos on organ and electric piano are acrobatic without straying out of the "action music" framework of Afrobeat and becoming a fusionesque wankfest. The band is on tour promoting their new album, A Move to Silent Unrest; both of their albums are available in mp3 format from eMusic. Here is "Crunch" from their self-titled first album (2005):

04 Crunch

Chicago Afrobeat Project

The Chicago Afrobeat Project is also in "active" status on the Internet Archive, though there's only one show there so far. Somebody post more, please!

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Jammin'?!

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 14:38:08 -0700

I thought that I would rather go through another divorce than ever go see a jam band, but it turns out that if the band has some ethnic percussion going on then I'm down with the jamming. In my efforts to find more live music to go see (of a style I actually like, i.e. not roots rock, not country, not folk, not bluegrass) I happened upon Jambase on Monday and learned that Toubab Krewe would be playing in Ithaca on Tuesday. I'd never heard of them, but the band bio said they play Malian/rock fusion, and that seemed to fit into the whole Afrobeat kick I'm on, so I went out to Castaways last night to check out the show. It was great! Lots of varied rhythms, extra percussion, kora (which I think should be called "harptar" in English), great ensemble playing, some real rockin' out, and not too much of that happy-sounding "high life" music that I usually find annoying. Without any horns they're not quite as satisfying as "real" Afrobeat, but it was a fine performance nonetheless. I don't have any Toubab Krewe audio files, but there are scads of clips of them on YouTube, of which this one seems the best:

Toubab Krewe at the Bandersnatch

I had so much fun I almost forgot I was twice as old as the rest of the audience, until some guy called me "Sir" when he wanted to get by me. Punk!

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Nomo, or Boston and Back

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 18:44:09 -0700

One of my discoveries on emusic since joining last November is Ann Arbor-based "post-Afro-beat" band Nomo. Their latest offering is the Better Than That EP on Dutch label Kindred Spirits; when it showed up on emusic I downloaded it immediately. Then I checked their website, and lo and behold, they're touring! Unfortunately the closest they were coming to Ithaca was Toronto, Boston, NYC, or Pittsburgh. So I decided to drive to Boston, visit my brother and his family, and go to the show with my brother, something we haven't done together since seeing Bootsy and the P-Funk All-Stars at Kilimanjaro in Washington about...16 years ago?! Was it worth a six-hour drive? (And another one back to Ithaca?*) You bet! It was as if all my favorite elements of all musical genres were all rolled up into a single band. Leader Elliot Bergman plays saxophone, synths (one set to electric piano and the other to what I'll call "Funky Worm Moog"), and kalimba (which I haven't seen anyone play since seeing Steve Tibbetts and Marc Anderson at the old Birchmere in 1991), there's a drummer and a percussionist, a bassist, a guitarist/percussionist, and a four-piece horn section with two trumpets, an alto sax, and a whomping baritone sax. Elliot even had his younger sister along to play some kind of cymbal-stick. The concert was a rollicking good time with plenty of funky beats, fat horn jams, tribal chants, and wild soloing from all the band members. The baritone sax was especially impressive, with lightning-fast runs in the upper register punctuated with huge bass blasts. And the horn players all played conch shells in one song! Wow! I'm going to have to see them on every tour. They played a cover of Sun Ra's "Rocket #9;" as they are not averse to covers, I would love to hear them take on Edgar Winter's "Frankenstein." Here's "Better Than That:"

NOMO--Better Than That

NoMo

The opening act, local eleven-piece Afrobeat band The Superpowers, were no slouches, delivering a tight and energetic set which would have been worth the ten-dollar cover charge by itself. And they had something Nomo didn't: two trombonists, who traded licks in a fantastic double solo in one of the songs.

* I didn't actually do all the driving; many thanks to my lovely wife Eva for making the whole thing possible by coming along and helping out with the driving, and to Basil (age 3) for being such a good boy on our trip!

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