6 posts tagged “instrumental”

UK funk trio the Baker Brothers (Dan Baker, Rich Baker, and non-brother Chris Pedley) are generally a little too close to smooth jazz/disco for me (too much hi-hat, not enough snare), but "Aargh, Aargh-Aargh" would fit right in on my virtual mixtape of Badass Instrumentals:

03 The Baker Brothers - Aargh, Aargh-Aargh

The Baker Brothers

That mixtape was created on Mixwit, which has since shut down.  I could reconstruct it with the code available at mixwidget.org, but that would involve getting a real web host and doing real web scripting (which may actually be a worthwhile endeavor... hmmm...).

The Baker Brothers' latest album is Avid Sounds, a collection of covers of 70s funk and soul classics performed with assorted guest vocalists.  I especially like their version of "Fly Like An Eagle"; I thought the Neville Brothers had realized that song's fullest funky potential, but I think the Baker Brothers have surpassed them:

04-baker_brothers-fly_like_an_eagle_feat_matt_mcnaughton

Baker Brothers

In 2005 we took a family vacation to Moab, Utah.  We brought along a bunch of CDs to play in our rented minivan, but The Sleepy Strange by Japancakes fit the surrounding desert landscape so well that we kept it on repeat and never took it out of the player... not even when we returned the minivan.  No problem, I just burned another CD, and maybe someone else discovered the languid beauty of this steel-guitar-centric instrumental band from Athens, Georgia.  It looks like Lala will let me embed the whole album for your listening pleasure:

The Sleepy Strange

Japancakes

I was listening to Mumbles' Transformations/Illuminations (2007) thinking it might be the Mumbles that the original Drowning Pool morphed into, but no, this Mumbles is Matthew Fowler of the musical Fowler family.  His first recordings were backing tracks for MC Aceyalone, but now his backing tracks stand more or less on their own as "instrumental hip-hop," or as it used to be called, acid jazz.  "Lakysha Boda" with flautist Rebecca Kleinmann is the track that really grabbed me:

13 Lakysha Bodha

Mumbles

I heard from an old friend out of the blue who suggested I look up Edgar Winter on YouTube.  Now why didn't I think of that long ago?  Considering how much I like badass instrumentals, it's taken me an awfully long time to post one of the badassest of all:

(Oh, wait, I did post it already, last November.  Whew!)  We need more guys playing keyboards that hang in front of them like a guitar!  This calls for a re-post of Gary Wright:

Did Edgar Winter and Gary Wright ever play together?  I'd love to see that!

No new content this time, but I have put the most badass instrumentals from the blog onto a single Mixwit mixtape:

Having a party?  This is all the music you need!  28 tracks of pure instrumental badassery!  If I ever have a party, I just might play it.

Wouldn't you know, as soon as I slag off indie rock in public, I find some that I absolutely love.  When Money Mark's album Push the Button came out in 1998, I read the product description to learn that he had played keyboards for the Beastie Boys (good) and that the album consisted of equal parts funky instrumentals (good) and indie-rock songs (bad).  That was back in the days when you had to actually buy a whole CD to check it out, and there was no way I was going to buy a CD that could only be half good at best, so no Money Mark music ever entered my ear canals.  But thanks to file-sharing I can hear it all now, and Mark's indie-rock songs are... really good!  Wow!  I like "Tomorrow Will Be Like Today" so much that I listened to it five times in one day:

04 Tomorrow Will Be Like Today

Money Mark

That has kind of a Squeeze vibe, don't you think, a little like "Pulling Mussels (from the Shell)"?

But as great as his indie-rock songs are, his instrumentals are even better because they're totally badass, like "Information Contraband" from Change Is Coming:

02 Information Contraband

Money Mark

I am a bona fide Money Mark fan now, I'm going to go friend him on MySpace.