4 posts tagged “soul”
Starting with the premise that it's not healthy to live in the past all the time, I scan the zip blogs once in a while to get a taste of what's new, to hear if anyone is making good music today. Answer: for the most part, no. Same as always. But it's the ones that cut through the noise, that shine through the murk of mediocrity like a halogen laser, that reward the hunt. "Little Bit of Feel Good" from German soulster Jamie Lidell is one of those, and it's jazzed me up enough to further derail my whole trumpet theme. Oh well, it has trumpets in it too. And hey, I just found a tool that lets me embed a MySpace player right here on the blog, so here is Jamie Lidell's:
Wouldn't it be awesome to see a Jamie Lidell and Dap Kings double bill?
(Here is the MySpace Music Player Embed Tool.)
Walking around listening to Speedometer in my earphones months ago, I really wished I could see them live, or at least see a band playing their type of music. I must not have been playing close enough attention to the local music scene, because there is a band here in Ithaca, the Rozatones, who venture into Speedometer territory. They opened for Freekbass at the Haunt on Thursday night; if the show had ended after the Rozatones I would already have gotten my money's worth. The Rozatones are a seven-piece band of Ithaca College students, led by singer/guitarist Revi Roza. I had high hopes for the set given that the lineup includes a two-man horn section, a keyboardist, and an extra percussionist, and my hopes were fulfilled. They played a mix of rock, funk, soul, and blues that reminds me of great bands of the 70s (Rufus and Chaka Khan come to mind), the band was tight, the soloing was adept, and the keyboard had all the classic funk sounds in it--Rhodes, Hammond, Clavinet, Moog--what more could you want? And they were all so into it! It was an impressive set from a band who are all half my age! Arrgh! My preference is for the faster numbers, when everybody really gets down and lets rip, but the slower songs move along quite well too and give Revi room to showcase her powerful voice. Here's one of the latter:
You can hear more Rozatones songs on their MySpace page, and there is an article about them from November 2006 here.
I scored some cool records at a record show today, I'll have some prime cuts coming up from them in the next week or so. Tonight, there's Afrobeat right here in River City! Finally! I'm heading out to Castaways to catch The Afromotive.
About a year ago I finally got back around to making music, something I hadn't done for about 10-12 years. And this time I went a step further than I ever had, which was to compose all the tracks (in Noteworthy as MIDI) and arrange them in a real "studio" application, ACID Pro. I soon grew frustrated with the limitations of scoring drums in MIDI, so I tried out some drum apps and settled on Hotstepper for its flexibility, ease of arrangment, controls, and ability to accept any .wav file as a "drum." Even with the increased facility that Hotstepper gave me, my drum tracks still lacked a certain something. So I started reading about drumming techniques, and above all, listening to real live drummers. Pierre Moerlen of Gong was the first drummer to catch my ear; most recently I've been admiring Alphonse Mouzon's work on Eugene McDaniels's 1971 album Headless Heroes of the Apocalypse: not just the beats, but the fills, trills, embellishments, accents, and whatever else you call all the things he does with the drums so that no two measures are quite the same. Here's the leadoff track, "The Lord is Back":
Apart from Mouzon's drumming, the album contrasts a message of Christian love with some bitter anger against racism, warmongering, and societal inequties; in other words, problems that are still with us, for pity's sake. In that respect Horsemen is timeless. Deeper insights than mine are available at Uppity Music and Stylus Magazine.
As is always the case, my mission to "see how it's done" took on a life of its own, and I found myself listening to more and more music, collecting and cataloguing (figuratively) and not getting back to my original project. But I am embracing the fact that collecting and cataloguing is my project; I've always done it, it brings me joy, why fight it? But a side effect of getting so attuned to drummers is that now it's hard for me to listen to any music built around drum loops. They sound so sterile and lifeless. Too bad for me, most of electronica is built around drum loops. A genre I used to enjoy has become less fun than it was, with one notable exception. Tom Jenkinson, a.k.a. Squarepusher, creates amazing drum tracks (using nothing more than Roland drum machines, I understand). He must use some looping, but he manages to do something different in most measures (well, not in all his songs, but a lot of them). And if one measure of an artist's success is his employment of techniques that are specific to the medium, Jenkinson succeeds by including bits in his drum tracks that are impossible for a human drummer to play. It could be too many drums at once, or incredibly fast snare rolls, or different reverb patterns on the drums that make them sound like they're being played in different rooms, but at the same time. His drum programming skills are right up front on "Squarepusher Theme" from 1996:
Jenkinson is also a wicked bassist, as you can see on the front page of the official Squarepusher website. Take that, Ivan the slap-bass-hating bear!
One of the more interesting genre revivals to spring up in England over the last decade or so is "deep funk," which seeks to recreate the sound of American local and regional funk bands of the 70s. At the forefront of the style is Speedometer, driven by the close-miked hot snare drum of Professor Chris Starmer. A three-piece horn section, guitar, bass, organ, extra percussionist, and occasional vocals by the Speedettes fill out their sound for good-time danceability. While many deep funk bands concentrate on loping, laid-back grooves a la the Meters, Speedometer often revs up the tempo, as their name implies. I like it fast! Here's "Wait Up," from their 2003 album This Is Speedometer (Vol. 1):
I detect a little "Jungle Boogie" in there. Speedometer also show off their moves on YouTube, performing "No Man Worries:"
And "You Know You Can:"
