Gavin B.

Song of the Day


The preciously talented Petra Hayden

I Can See For Miles- Petra Haden Petra Haden's father is jazz bassist Charlie Hayden who played in the classic edition of the Ornette Coleman Quartet, the avant garde jazz group that was the launching pad for the free jazz movement. Charlie Hayden began showing his musical talent at age two according to his family and was singing with his parent's country and western act by age three. Like her father, Petra was a child prodigy.

As a child Petra found out she could do a vocal rendition of any song upon one hearing... and not only that, she could also use her voice to do near perfect imitations of all of the musical instruments in the song. She began studying the violin when she was eight years old, and by her teens she was on her way to becoming a virtuoso. She also mastered the trumpet, mandolin, and various keyboard instruments, making her a true multi-instrumentalist.

It was Petra's voice with it's extraordinary range that most people noticed. In early 2005, Bar/None Records released Haden's The Who Sell Out, a recording that she worked on intermittently for three years. The album reinterpreted the classic Who album in its entirety, using Haden's a cappella voice as the sole instrument. It's a cult classic. Hayden's voice was overdubbed on as many as 11 different tracks to provide all the vocals and instrumental tracks on the songs.

In order to perform the complex a capella arrangements in a live setting, Ms. Haden wrote a musical score of her idosyncratic vocal parts and assembled a ten woman a capella choir and she sang and directed the choir at performances. I Can See For Milesis a live performance by Petra and her a capella choir called the Sellouts.



More On Haden Family Talent Glut

The Haden family musical franchise has a bigger glut of talented siblings than the Wainwright family. Neither family sells as many records as the Jonas Brothers but the jury's still out on whether the Jonas Brothers have any musical talent.

In 2008 Charlie Haden recorded Rambling Boy an well received album of Americana folkways classics with three of his daughters and his son.

As a result of performing on Rambling Boy, Petra and her talented sisters Rachel and Tanya formed a rootsy Americana group called the Hayden Triplets. Below is the Haden Triplets performance of the Carter Family classic Single Girl, Married Girl.



For those of you unfamilar with Charlie Haden's work with the Ornette Coleman Quartet, I've posted a video a 1987 perfomance of the Ornette Coleman Quartet in Europe.

Members are of the Ornette Coleman Quartet are Coleman on alto sax, the late Don Cherry on pocket trumpet, Charlie Haden on upright double bass and Ed Blackwell on drums. Like Haden, Don Cherry sired musically talented siblings and was the father of R&B/Pop artists Neneh Cherry and Eagle Eye Cherry.

Be forewarned that the Ornette Coleman's music doesn't adhere to a fixed harmonic structure and the entire band improvises at will without observing any rules about fixed metres, musical keys, tempos, instrumental roles, harmonics, stuctures of rythym. Free jazz abandons the idea of musical composition altogether. The timbre of Coleman's alto sax draws heavily from traditional blues. The title of the piece is 4 Tet.

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There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff.
Townes Van Zandt

Flower Child

I just want to say thank you, THANK YOU for putting that Eddy Davis' New Orleans Jazz band video in your thread. I had never listened to any of their music and now I'm just in love with it. Those banjos add so much flavor and interest and the guys who play them are just the cutest things. After the trumpet player does his little wangy notes, I love how the little fat guy matches it on his banjo. And Eddy Davis' voice is just wonderful. Thanks again for opening up my eyes to these guys. They are my new favorite.

Gavin B.

Song of the Day


Rory Block at recent performance


Terraplane Blues- Rory Block Terraplane Blues is an old Robert Johnson blues song from the Thirties. A Terraplane is the model of an automobile manufactured by the Hudson Motor Company between 1932 and 1939. Johnson's poetic use of the Terraplane is loaded with sexual innuendo.

The singer Rory Block is the finest interpreter of Robert Johnson's music which is no small feat considering that Johnson was a black male musician and Rory is a white female musician.

Rory Block was the daughter of Allan Block sometime folk musician who owned and operated the Block Sandal Shop on McDougal Street in Greenwich Village in the Sixties and Seventies. The shop became a hangout for folk musicians like Dave Van Ronk ( aka the Mayor of McDougal St.), Harlem street singer and master of the ragtime blues guitar Rev. Gary Davis, David Bromberg, Stephan Grossman and boatload of other aspiring musicians.

The main attraction (for the males) at the Block Sandal Shop was Allan's teenage daughter who red hot looking in addition to being a blues prodigy. Allan Block was a bit of a stage father and had been teaching Rory to play the blues since the cradle. I've seen her play several times and she is a better singer and guitar player than most of the old pros in Greenwich Village that schooled her to play the blues. She practically channels Robert Johnson on Terraplane Blues.

Rory's first artistic muse was an elderly travelling companion of Robert Johnson's, Son House.

Rory Block was 15 years old when she met Son House. Two improbable people. A young teenaged Greenwich Village guitar prodigy and an older black man, 62, who had recorded nine of the most powerful blues pieces ever for the Paramount label in 1930. Rory said Son was a close friend of Willie Brown's and was thunderstruck at Rory's performance. Son couldn't quite wrap his mind around the idea of this sweet looking adolescent girl playing gritty Mississippi delta blues.

Terraplane Blues was Robert Johnson's most challenging song to play on guitar because of the abrupt changes in tempo and the masterful right techniques required to play the song correctly. This video is shot nice and close, so you can see Rory's incredible right hand guitar technique where she strums, picks and pounds the guitar using all five fingers. She even slaps at the strings using the entire palm of her right hand.

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There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff.
Townes Van Zandt

Gavin B.

Glad you like Fast Eddy's music. I'm totally in love with his music too. The song performed by Eddy's Band, St. James Infirmary, is one of the oldest songs in the American folkways. .
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As it so happens, Flower Child's comments provides the opportunity for a seamless segue into my Song of the Day feature which offers four versions of the jazz/blues classic St. James Infirmary.

Song of the Day


Above is a picture of the original sheet music of St. James Infirmary. The composer is listed as "Joe Primrose" which was an alias for a music publishing executive who made a false claim of writting the song to collect sheet music royalties on a public domain song.

St. James Infirmary- Four Different Versions

I first heard a version of St. James Infirmary when I was collecting and doing field recordings of blues and jazz musicians for the Smithsonian folkways collection way back in the Seventies. It was sung by a New Orleans street singer and blues musician named Snooks Eaglin

I thought it was about the coolest song I've ever heard and later on I learned that just about about every jazz and blues performer in New Orleans did some sort of version of the song. Nobody knew who wrote the song. The earliest sheet music credits the song to "Joe Primrose" a long time psuedonym for Irving Mills who ran the largest music publishing house in New York from 1919 until 1965. Irving Mills was not the writer of the song.

The song's origin goes back to the 19th Century and both Blind Willie McTell and Big Bill Broonzy said they first heard versions of St. James Infirmary when they were children in the 1890s. So it's likely that the royalty minded Mr. Mills was engaged in the sleazy act of registering a copyright on a public domain song for his own self enrichment. Keep in mind this was in the era that predated the rise of recorded music and the primary source of royalties were sheet music sales not record sales. Many American families had pianos in their homes and played the popular music of the day on piano, instead of listening to it on a record player. The mass marketing of RCA Victrola record player changed all that, but that's another topic.

St. James Infirmary was first popularized by Louis Armstrong in 1928 and the song has long been linked to the Cresent City jazz and blues tradition.

I've collected over 100 versions of the song by jazz, blues, R&B, folk and rock and roll musicians. My 100 different collected versions is just the tip of the iceberg because there must be 10,000 different versions of the song floating around in cyberspace and private record collections. I even have a version of St. James Infirmary by an Hawiian ukulele player. Some versions of the song are titled Gambler's Blues.

St. James Infirmary is about the saddest song I've ever heard. The songs haunting lyrics have an unadorned authenticity of an everyday conversation.

It's basically a blues song, but the use of minor chords makes it sound more like a funeral dirge. The song opens with a man coming viewing the dead body of his wife (or maybe girlfriend) laid out on a slab in the St. James Infirmary. Most versions have lyrics typical of the Louis Armstrong version:

St. James Infirmary ( Version #1 New Orleans Jazz Ensemble Style) - The Old School Band The two guest artists artists on this 1983 live rendition are what makes this video so special. The first guest is the female vocalist Lillian Boutté. During her musical studies at New Orleans' Xavier University, she sang in the gospel choir, before being discovered by Allen Toussaint, who used her as a background singer when producing the likes of James Booker, Patti Labelle, the Neville Brothers, the Pointer Sisters and Dr. John.

The second guest artist is legendary trumpter Doc Cheatham who was a longtime associate of King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Ma Rainey and Cheatham was the lead trumpeter for the Cab Calloway Band an all black jaza orchestra that rivalled the Count Basie and Duke Ellington band for recruiting the most talented black jazz musicians. Cheatham is the guy who emerges from the shadows in dark glasses to take the first solo in the video:



St. James Infirmary ( Version #2 Swedish Blues Style) - Jers, Lindbom & Zetterlund. It's hard to belive that this trio of young musicians is from Sweden because they have the American blues idiom nailed with this harmonica, mandolin, and doublebass instrumental version of the song. All three musicians play with passion, conviction and soul. Filip Jers' use of vibrato on his harmoica playing is quite skillfully rendered.



St James Infirmary (Version #3 Folk Blues Style) - Snooks Eaglin This is that first version of the song by New Orleans street singer Snooks Eaglin and it began my long oddessy to unravel the origins of the song. For all my research on the origins of the song, St. James Infirmary's origins remain as elusive and ambiguous as ever. The true writer of the song has acheived his own kind of immortality by becoming so notably anonymous.



St. James Infirmary (Version #4 New Orleans Piano Style) - Doug Duffey. Doug is an old NOLA homeboy of mine and he plays piano in the ornate style of old school New Orleans blues piano masters. This 1991 live performance by Doug is my currently my favorite version because St. James Infirmary is the kind song that lends itself perfectly to a 3 am rendition in a smokey Bourbon St. after-hours joint, sung a lone piano player with an oversized taxi driver's hat bobbling on the top of his head.

__________________
There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff.
Townes Van Zandt

Gavin B.

Song of the Day


The Melodians in recent concert appearance.

Sweet Sensation - the Melodians Summer time is ska music time in my home by the banks of the Big Muddy River. I've skanked away many a balmy summer evening to the sounds of of this beautiful 1967 ska classic from the Melodians. Summertime photographs on the video storyboard are, as always, free of charge to gaze in awe at.



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The Artist formerly known as Santogold



A few months back Santogold legally changed her stage name from Santogold to Santigold as a result of a threatened copyright lawsuit by Santo Gold a infomercial jewelry merchandiser. Her real name is Santi Gold.

Santigold's musical oeuvere defies classification in the nomenclature of contemporary musical genres. Some critics attempted to place her music in the hip-hop ghetto even before she released her first album. Others called her an MIA knock-off because she toured with MIA prior in 2007 prior the release of her album.

I don't hear much about Santogold on the MB forum. Her debut album last year has become this year's remix album in the underground club scene. I'm particulary fond of M.I.A. producer Switch's recent remix of Shove It from her debut album.

Shove It (Switch remix)- Santogold



Most folks don't know that Santigold was school at the Germantown School a Quaker run preparatory school in Philadelphia whose students have one of the highest rates of successful applications to Ivy League colleges in the nation. Santigold went to college at the posh and academically challenging Weselyan University in Middletown Connecticuit. Her father was a Philadelphia lawyer who ended up getting involved in a sordid municipal corruption indictment. Still Santigold's priveleged middle class background and academic accomplishment don't exactly fit profile of a Brooklyn hip-hop homegirl.

Her network of musical associates comes from a grab bag of varied genres. She has plans to record with both David Byrne and the Beastie Boys and has already recorded with M.I.A., the Strokes Julian Casablanca, and Jay-Z and has toured in Europe with MIA, Architecture in Helsinki and Bjork.

Santigold has said she is inspired by 1980s pop music. She has also stated her liking for New Wave and added that My Superman is based on a Siouxsie & the Banshees' song, "Red Light". The singer also cites Blondie, Grace Jones, Devo whom she describes as her "ultimate favorite band" [Devo the ultimate band? I confess being blindsided by that remark. Don't get me wrong... I love Devo, but it never occured to me that Devo would be anybody's "ultimate band].

Santigold gets testy with critics and music vendors who hang the hip hop, rap or R&B label on her music simply because she is a black artist Santigold says:

__________________
There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff.
Townes Van Zandt

Piss Me Off

I bigged it up a fair amount as did adidasss, it's a brilliant pop album which draws on a ton of influences as well. I think i ended up overplaying it in the end though but i'm seeing her live in a few weeks which should be gnarly. Top song choice!

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Gavin B.

Song of the Day


Son House: The archetypal old blues man

Death Letter Blues- Son House Son House was one of the last of the old school Mississippi delta blues singers. Son's music had a big influence on both Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters who both came from that rural area near Clarksdale Mississippi where Son House frequently performed at picnics, juke joints and roadhouses.

When I first heard his version of this old blues classic I was thunderstruck by the intensity of his voice and guitar playing. Son House was the closest friend of Charley Patton the first American blues musician to record his music for a record label. Patton is acknowledged to be the father the blues music idiom. Patton and House spent their entire lives in the same delta region of Mississippi that was the home of the Mississippi blues.

All Music Guide descibes the relationship between Patton and House as almost comically dysfunctional:
I never met Son House or heard him play live but by all accounts even in his twilight years, he wasn't a pleasant person to hang out with. Dave Van Ronk once told me that Son scared the bejesus out of the more genteel elements of urban white folk music crowd at patron's reception for Son at the Newport Folk Festival . Son House was an old school hard drinking bluesman who was as quick tempered and mean as a rattlesnake. Son wasn't an affable and urbane elder statesman of blues like B.B. King. Son was suspicious and hostile toward the white patrons of the musical arts who treated him like he was an exotic musical curiosity or a minstrel show performer. He didn't like being patronized and I've seen that same vitriolic attitude in many the delta blues players I met. There's a good reason for that.

You have to understand that talented blues musicians like Charley Patton, Furry Lewis and Son House were made a lot of promises by white folks early in their musical careers and none of those promises were delivered. In Son's world, undue flattery from a white person was perceived as an attempt to exploit his hard earned reputation as a musician. When Son recorded his lengendary sessions for Paramount Records he was promised fame and fortune by Paramount but he was paid $5 for each song he recorded, and he returned to anonminity in Clarksdale Misssissippi and never heard from Paramont again.

Those first generation of blues players didn't reap the financial rewards and universal public acclaim as the next generation of blues players like B.B. and Albert King, Howling Wolf and Muddy Waters. Yet without Son House or Robert Johnson there would have never been a next generation of blues players.

Son spent his prime years working as anonymous sanitation worker (garbage collector) for the city of Rochester New York. He was retired and in his sixties
when Al "Blind Owl" Wilson a musicologist showed up on his door step to rediscover him. It was the end of year long oddessy of a couple of blues researchers to locate him.

Wilson and guitar virtuoso/blues researcher John Fahey came across a couple of Son's old 78 rpm on a field trip to Mississippi in 1963. Prior to that neither man knew of Son House's exsistence much less his connection the famed Charley Patton, whom coincidentally was the subject of Fahey's master's thesis in music history at University of California Berkeley. Wilson and Fahey spent several months doing a search for him in Mississippi. Just when they believed he had long since died, they got a tip from a distant relative that Son was alive and well and living in Rochester New York, a city was that was about as many miles due north of the Mississippi delta region as one could travel without without being in Canada

Son hadn't played music in so long, the 22 year old white blues researcher, Blind Owl Wilson had the rather strange assignment of reteaching Son House how to play the guitar like Son House. Blind Owl was a talented blues guitarist in his own right and went on to form the popular blues boogie band, Canned Heat, with blues music collector Bob "The Bear" Hite.

Despite of all his career setbacks and well being well into his sixties, Son delivers the goods on this rarely seen video rendition of Death Letter Blues recorded sometime in the 1960s after Blind Owl rediscovered him in 1964. Son House once said, "Al Wilson didn't redisover me... how can you rediscover somebody who never got discovered by nobody in the first place?" Bow to the wisdom of your elders, children.



Errors of Fact on Video: The voiceover intro says Son House lived well into the Sixties, Son actually died in 1988 at age 86. The voiceover also says that Son recorded 3 or 4 songs for Paramont but in reality Son recorded 15 songs (19 if you count the session outtakes). This guy has done a tremendous service by posting this rare tape of Son House on YouTube. Unfortunately the 45,200 people who have viewed it will gotten some unintentional misinformation about the essential facts of Son's life.

__________________
There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff.
Townes Van Zandt

Gavin B.

Song of the Day


Neneh Cherry: She's a germ free adolescent.

Germ Free Adolescents- Neneh Cherry

When Neneh Cherry was 16 years she moved from her parent's home in Stockholm to London and became immersed in the local London punk scene. Early on Neneh brief stint with one of the ground breaking bands punk rock, the Slits but she rarely stayed in a group longer than a few months. In addition to the Slits, Neneh sang for the Cherries, the Nails, Rip Rig + Panic and Float Up before reinventing herself in 1986 as a hip-hop artist.

This is a 1997 performance by Neneh Cherry performing the X-Ray Spex punk anthem is at a party for a film premier at the Cannes Festival. Neneh's rendition is notable because she sings the song with as much conviction as Poly Styrene the original X-Ray Spex vocalist, and does so in a $15,000 haute couture dress lent to her by French fashion design icon Jean Paul Gaultier for the event. Punk had come a long way from ripped t-shirts, saftey pins and leather jackets by 1997.

Nenah has been recording on and off with Massive Attack and is the featured singer in her husband Cameron McVey's electronica group Cirkus. Cameron was the first manger of Massive Attack and had a lot to do with the production of their debut album Blue Lines in 1991.

__________________
There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff.
Townes Van Zandt

Gavin B.

Song of the Day


Ever the outlaw, Iggy defies the Super Wal-Mart's No Shirt-No Service rule


Nice To Be Dead - Iggy Pop Iggy's new album Preliminaries is one of the more subued musical offerings from rock and roll's resident wild man. Nice To Be Dead is an exception. As the title of the song implies "Nice to Be Dead is a gleeful celebration of being dead and buried six feet underground sung to a backdrop of distorted guitar noise from Hal Cragin who produced the album and co-wrote many of the songs with Iggy. At age 62 Mr. Pop proves to his grandchildren that he's still a force to be reckoned with.

__________________
There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff.
Townes Van Zandt

Engine

Holy shit, man! You just described the coolest job that has ever existed.
I don't even know where to start -- you have posted so much interesting stuff in this thread. I guess I'll go back to The Bad Plus - that's funny about audience reaction to their Nirvana covers. I remember hearing an interview (on NPR, by the way) back when their first album was just released - they said the pianist had never heard Smells Like Teen Spirit and in fact, had never heard of Nirvana. In the interview they said the ages of the band and I figured that the guy was in his late teens when Nevermind was huge. But he had only listened to/studied classical music until he joined the Bad Plus.

Anyway, thanks for everything.