Gavin B.

I'm a big fan of Black Box Recorder. The other co-members of BBR are John Moore former drummer and guitarist for the Jesus and Mary Chain and Sarah Nixey former member of Balloon. Black Box Recorder you posted reminds me of Serge Gainbourg's music from the 60s.

Jackhammer's BBR post segues nicely into my artist profile of Dean & Britta Yankee duo who that has a lot of the same musical attitudes as Black Box Recorder.

Dean & Britta: A 21st Perpective of Gainsbourgh's Europop

Dean & Britta are devotees to the music of Serge Gainbourgh, Leonard Cohen, the Velvet Underground, Lee Hazelwood and the Europop and Baroque pop of the late 60s era. Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips were originally members of Luna a quintessintial New York band that many hailed a heir apparent to the Velvet Underground.

Comparisons to VU were ineviable because Dean's singing voice has a world weary quality and a conversational cadence that evokes Lou Reed's laconic vocals and Britta's voice sounds a bit like Nico during her Chelsea Girl heyday. Britta's physical appearance bears a resembalance the youthful Nico's chilly ethereal Nordic beauty during those pre-VU days before heroin use withered away her exterior beauty.

Like Nico, Britta was an actress and model early on. Britta was best known for her substantial part in the film Satisfaction a movie about an aspiring rock and roll girl group. Britta co-starred with Liam Neeson, Julia Roberts and Justine Bateman. Britta often played a girl group musician or a singer in her television and movie roles because she had a great voice and could sing her own parts. Britta also played guitar and bass with the facility of a professional musician which was a plus for getting musical roles. Britta was on the road to becoming a notable actress but music was her first love and after she joined Luna, her acting career was put on hold.

Luna really wasn't a clone of VU and Reed himself was a both fan and friend of the band. The magnanimous Reed credited Luna with expanding the musical territory that VU mapped in an earlier era. Luna was markedly different from Velvet Undergroud because Wareham and second guitarist Sean Eden had the skills and techincal ability to improvise on meandering psychedelic guitar jams at live shows, in the manner of Television's dual guitarists, Richard Lloyd and Tom Verlaine. Luna's repetoire of songs were markedly uptempo from the standard VU or Television bill of fare. Britta and Dean married shortly after she joined Luna as bassist. Luna disbanded after a venerable 13 year run in 2004.

Since 2003, Dean and Britta have released three albums as a duet and toured extensively. Night Nuse, the song I've embedded below, reminds me of the sultry ballads that Serge Gainsbourg once sang with his muse, his collaborator and his future wife, Jane Birkin in the late 60s.

Gavin B.

The Gotan Project Adds a Tango Flavor to the Outernational Music Scene


Gotan Project brings the romance of the tango and the high fashion sense of the old school Cordoba ballroom gigalo to electronica movement.

Philippe Cohen Solal and Christoph H. Mueller worked together in the Boys from Brazil and Stereo Action Unlimited as early as 1996 on the Parisian deejay scene. The two self described "top Argentinian musicians living in Paris" became interested in remixing their native tango music in a dub style toward the end of the 90s and were joined by a third member Eduardo Makaroff another French/Latino deejay to form the nucleus of the Gotan Project. Gotan's dub tango revolution has become the primary force behind the newfound interest in Argentine music in the underground club scene in Europe.

In 2000 Gotan created a buzz in the UK with a string of 12" singles on their own French based Ya Basta label and earned the devotion of such electronica tastemakers as Jazzanova, Gilles Peterson, Mr. Scruff, and Thievery Corporation. Gotan toured the UK and was signed to the influential XL label. Gotan left XL after one album and returned to releasing music on their own homegrown Ya Basta label.

As the past decade progressed, the music of Gotan's neo-tango music became another cultural element within the outernational realm of the electronica movement, along with other worldbeat genres like samba, salsa, reggae, bossa nova, rumba, and the many and varied musical genres of the Sub-Saharan African region like juju and the township jazz of South Africa.

The Gotan Project's remixed versions of classic tango are just beginning to reach the ears of music fans outside of Gotan's musical axis of France, Spain and the Uk. Tango 3.0, their 3rd album will be released in a little less than four weeks. I tried every trick in the book to get an advance preview song from Tango 3.0 but Gotan and Yo Basta are keeping this release under tight wraps until it's official April 19th release date. The best I could come up with is this sexy little 30 second teaser:




To make up for the bevity of that video I've also including Gotan's version of the sublimely sensual tango classic Epoca:

Gavin B.

Gare Du Nord: Downtempo Meets Cool Jazz


Gare du Nord music is so good, I forgave them for being Eurotrash fashion victims

A band's public image is never the sum total of their music. If image was everything, I would have taken a pass listening to the music of Gare du Nord, a band whose members dress in black and remind me of the Eurotrash posuers who travel in entourages to discothèques in Ibiza and Cannes and guzzle down Dom Pérignon right from the bottle. My own dislike of the Eurotrash style tells you more about my own class bias and very little about the music of Gare du Nord. Public image is never the sum total of any band's attibutes and I was pleasantly surprised by the depth of Gare du Nord's musical sophistication. You miss out lot of good music when you let your own carefully conditioned biases about style and genre overule your inquisitive impulse to explore music and art with an open mind.

A Short History of Gare du Nord

Gare du Nord named themselves after the Gare du Nord train station in the heart of Paris. The Gare du Nord station is busiest Metro station in Paris (180 million riders a year!). The jazz cafes and cellars in the Montmarte distict served by Gare Du Nord became the musical home of American expatriate jazz musicians like Dexter Gordon and Chet Baker after American interest in waned in the early 60s.


The imposing neo-classical facade of the Gare du Nord entrance has served as a backdrop for many films including the critically acclaimed film Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain (aka Amelie) which made actress Audrey Tautou an international film star. A photobooth in the Gare du Nord is used as a plot device in Amelie

Cool jazz was a big influence on Gare du Nord's Dutch/Belegian founders who are Doc (Ferdy Lancee) and Inca (Barend Fransen). Shortly thereafter Doc and Inca made Gare du Nord a trio by enlisting the sensuous Italian singer Dorona Alberti who sings in a sultry voice this is reminiscent of the jazz cabaret chanteuse performance style.

Gare du Nord developed an enthusiastic cult following among the jazz savvy Parisian club circuit. In 2002, Gare du Nord's music created a buzz on the outernational scene with the release of their album Kind of Cool in 2002. The abum title, Kind of Cool was Gare du Nord's statement on the influence of Miles Davis. Kind of Cool was clever combination of the titles of Miles' first and last cool jazz albums; Birth of the Cool (1949) and Kind of Blue (1959). The music of other Parisian deejays like Dimitri from Paris and DJ Cam is inundated with with samples from the cool jazz era.

Gare du Nord samples and remixes many standards from the cool era of jazz, but the band also composes original music that is more within the realm of trip hop music. The cool jazz influence is prevasive in all of Gare du Norde's music.


Miles Davis usually had a scowl on his face and frequently played with his back to the audience. His highly impressionistic and minimalist approach was widely imitated and his influence over the first generation of French acid jazz, ambient and trip hop artists is ubiquitous.

A Short History of Cool Jazz

The hard bop of the Charlie "Bird" Parker evolved into cool jazz at the end of World War II as the next generation of players began to assert themselves. Many musicians from the bee-bop school followed the cool jazz trend which spanned roughly ten years between 1949 & 1959. Cool jazz emerged as the dominant musical trend of the 50s and was exemplified by musical titans like Stan Getz, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Herbie Mann, Chet Baker, Dave Brubeck, Gerry Mulligan, Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell. Especially Miles who was at the leading edge of every new development of jazz music for 50 years. This link to Hard Bop & Cool Jazz will provide you with excellent thumbnail profiles of the central musicians involved in the cool jazz movement.

A handful of cool jazz artists most notably Stan Getz, Zoot Sims, Charlie Byrd and Herbie Mann broke ranks with cool jazz and began musical experiments that fused the Brazilian samba and bossa nova with the cool jazz approach. Getz and Byrd were lionized for their groundbreaking collaborations with Brazilian artists like Joao and Astrud Gilberto and Antonio Carlos Jobim. Another Brazilian musician Sergio Mendes formed Brazil '66 and enjoyed unprecedented mainstream success with his trademark brand of Brazilian jazz/American pop fusion.

Gare du Nord's signature song, Kind of Cool samples long passages of Miles Davis' trumpet as a musical foundation. Kind of Cool boldly accentuates Miles' dark and mysterious quality by drenching the samples of trumpet playing with high doses of reverb echoes. The phat bass and drum mix, the improvised lead vocal, the liquid splash of a synthesizer, and the overdubbed "cool down" chorus are nice counterpoints to Miles Davis' otherworldly but highly precise minimalist approach to playing. Kind of Cool is a remarkable song because it reinvents Miles Davis in a bold new context without undermining the integrity of the original artist's vision. Miles' last studio album, Aura (1989) was an impressionistic journey into minimalism and bore a close resembalance to a lot of the current acid jazz, trip hop and ambient music.

Gavin B.

Sarah Tavares' Sensual Afropop Is A Breath of Fresh Air




Sara Tavares was born in Lisbon Portugal but is a second generation Cape Verdian Island native. Sara is a well known musician and performer in Portugal, West Africa and Cape Verde where she emerged in the early 90s at age 16, but her music wasn't available in international release until 2001. The inclusion of remixes of her songs in a couple of recent trip hop remix anthologies have resulted in more public interest in her career.

At age 32 Sara Tavares is no longer the work in progress she was in the 90s. Her alluring sensuality, earthy stage personnae and her charismatic performances have all the earmarks of a future international music star of great significance.

Her last two albums have received a great deal of play by deejays on Lisbon, Barcelona, Paris and Ibiza club scene. She's made four near perfect albums over the past 9 years. Her most recent album Xinti (2009) has been hailed as her best effort yet and it was on my own most notable albums of 2009 list.

Balance is from Ms. Tavares' 2006 album of the same name:



Ponto de Luz is from a recent live performance in Hamburg Germany:



Xinti is the title song from her 2009 album:

Gavin B.

Italian B-Movie Soundtrack Composers of the 60s & 70s


Ennio Morricone & Piero Ulmilani were the leading composers of European B-movie soundtracks in the 60s & 70s.

As esoteric as this musical genre is, there is a mother-lode of great music that can be found on B-movie sountracks written by (mostly) Italian composers during the independent European film boom of the 60s & 70s. I feel in love with these soundtracks as a result of my long standing interest in European indie films of that era. I started by searching out the sountracks to the hundreds of B-movie soundtracks composed by Ennio Morricone during that era. You can come across a few in compact disk format but the vast majority of the soundtracks are old vinyl long players that never made it to compact disc.

The good new is that the MP3 format has created an Internet audience for B-movie soundtracks. Most of the music is public domain in the United States and the MorriconeRocks You Tube channel has 400+ vintage soundtracks to listen to or download for absolutely free.

For those unaquinted with the genre the European B-Movie genre includes the spanish surf of 'spaghetti westerns'; the kinky demonic masses of horror films; the bent psychedelia of counterculture hippie exploitation films; the brassy big band themes and outernational global msic of spy movies, the avant-garde delirium of thriller and mysteriy films; the sultry lounge jazz of adult sexploitation films; the driving rhythms of adventure and intrigue films; and the ethereal beauty of haunting operatic scores to romantic love stories.

Morricone has logged over 500 soundtrack credits from 1960 to 2010. That's roughly 10 soundtracks per year. At his peak Morricone wrote and recorded 25-30 soundtracks a year and at age 81 Morricone is still composing and producing soundtracks at the rate of 3 to 5 a year.

My current music collection has about 300 vinyl issues of B-movie soundtracks from that era. Many of these musical gems can be found at flea markets, garage sales, and in the unsorted bins of 50 cent lps of second hand record stores. It helps if you live somewhere in Europe but even in the United States I can find second hand shops located in the most urban areas of the United States that have old soundtracks from European movies. New York and Chicago are especially fertile hunting grounds for collectors. From my perspective, most of the joy is in the ritualized of chasing down these rare soundtracks.

A lot of the classic European B-movie music sound like a kitschy pastiche of pop music musical trends from the United States during that era. But there's more in the music than meets the eye. The Italian school of film composers use American jazz and pop as a musical framework but their classical training allows them to subevert the music and produce an inventive film score that soars with artistic imagination and vision. I'd love to see Thievery Corporation do a remix album of some of the great European B-movie soundtracks from the 60s & 70s.

Ennio Morricone The first song was the master of the B-movie soundtrack. This song; ExocticoErotiko from a 1964 Italian sexploitation film called E la Donna Creo L'uomo. ExocticoErotiko predates Morricone's involvement with the film scores of Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns that made an international star of Clint Eastwood. ExocticoErotiko sparse minimalism borrows from cool jazz and the loose interplay between the muted trumpet and flute are straight out of a improvised jam session. Morricone adds some agressive Martin Denny style percussion to give the music a Bohemian beat generation sound.



Piero Umilani was arguably is creative and productive as Morricone and this song Luna Di Miele comes from a 1971 French sexploitation farce entitled Ce Monde Si Mereilleus et si Degueulasse. Umiliani combines a Brazilian samba with the seductive male/female vocals that Serge Gainsbrough used to great effect with in his vocal duets with sex kittens like Bridget Bardot and Jane Birkin.



Alessandro Alessandroni wasn't quite as prolific as Morricone or Ulmilani but the wicked cool jazz of Tema di Londra makes Alessandroni's score to the 1968 Italian spy/caper film Colpo Maestro Al Servizio di sua Mastra by all time favorite soundtrack from the Italian school.



Cover Art

There's another aspect of the B-movie music of the Italian school that obsesses many collectors of the B-movie genre. There's a cult of collectors who collect the out of issue B-movie soundtracks exclusively for artistic value of the lp cover. Those collectors lovingly frame the album covers and (with a certain amount of irony) display covers as valued objects of kitsch art. Hard core collectors will pay $200 or $300 for a mint condition cover of a rare B-movie album cover. I don't... it's more fun to stumble across a rare B-movie album at a garage sale and pay only 10 cents for it. And I don't frame the covers because prolonged exposure to sunlight does serious damage to the album cover.

NumberNineDream

This comes in the greatest time. I've been in a 60s & 70s Italian film binge for a month now, and their music was truly magnificent. I should find some time to dig deep into this review, very rich as usual.

__________________

Gavin B.

As I said in the post check out the Morricoe Rocks channel on YouTube. Roberto has posted over 500 selections from old Italian B-movie soundtracks. He's such a fanatic about Italian film score composers he even scares me.

Gavin B.

Charlotte Gainsbourg & Beck Collaboration, IRM is a Pop Masterpiece


Like her talented mother, Jane Birkin, the equally seductive Mdme. Gainsbourg has launched multiple careers as a singer, actress & fashion model

Portrait of a Young Woman as an Actress

Charlotte Gainsbourg is the daughter of French pop provocateur Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin, British born actress, singer and model. Until about five years ago Charlotte was mostly notable for her impressive acting resume of roles in mostly French film productions. As an actress, Gainsbourg gained a higher profile among American audiences in her role as Claire, the muse of the Dylaneque hero in the Todd Haynes' film I'm Not There. The Hayes film was a highly unortodox biopic of Bob Dylan's life in which six different actors were cast to portray Dylan during various stages of his life. Charlotte Gainsbourg is still largely unknown to American audiences because she has primarily appeared in French language films and English language indie films. Her extraordinary talents as an actress have been acclaimed in Europe where she most recently won both the Cannes (French) & Bodil (Danish) Best Actress award for her spellbinding performance in the 2009 film Antichrist.

I first saw Charlotte Gainsbourg as a 16 year old leading lady in Francois Truffaut's final film, The Little Thief in which she played a sexually promiscuous and emotionally world weary high school girl who sought out older men to deliver her from her dreary existence in an underclass family in provincial France. It was as complex and challenging role as any adolescent actress could play and her performance in the 1987 film was a revelation. I was unaware that Charlotte was the daughter of Gainsbourg and Birkin until a few years later and her performance as an actress stood on it's own merits from my perspective. Gainsbourgh receive her first nomination for Best Actress at the influential Cannes Film Festival for her role in the Little Thief.


Gainsbourg Cover, French Vogue December 2007

Until recently Charlotte was primarily known outside of Europe as a high fashion cover model and the "face" of advertising campaigns by such fashion houses as Dior and Balenciaga. Even as she approaches the age of 40 Charlotte Gainsbourgh continues to be one of the most in demand anchor models for high fashion advertising campaigns. Gainsbourgh's lucrative career as a fashion muse that has underwritten her career as a talented but modestly paid actress in French language and independent film productions.

All of this will certainly change in the wake of the January 2010 American release of IRM Charlotte Gainsbourg's breakthough pop album produced by Beck the resident alien icon of American pop music.


Gainsbourg & Beck strike a pose during 2009 IRM recording sessions

IRM: Portrait of a Woman as a Vocal Stylist

Charlotte Gainsbourgh's debut as a recording artist began at age 13 with Charlotte Forever an album of songs that her father Serge had written for her. It was a lackluster album and for the next 20 years Gainsbourgh stayed out of the recording studio and limited her singing career to infrequent live performances, mostly at concerts staged to honor the music of her internationally acclaimed father.

I must confess that I wasn't very impressed by Charoltte's 2006 debut album as an adult, 5:55 which was produced by Air's Jean-Benoît Dunckel and Nicolas Godin. Dunckel and Godin both worship the music of Charlotte's father Serge Gainsbourg and 5:55 sounds like an Gainsbourg/Birkin album from the early Seventies. Like her mother, Charlotte sings in a breathy voice at near-whisper decibel level. On the album Mdme. Gainsbourgh's expressive vocals are drowned beneath the mix of Air's multi-track instrumental arrangements. Gainsbourg's vocal tracks seem to be added afterthought to compliment Air's lushly textured orchestra arrangments.

The reason why the Beck produced IRM is a musical triumph for Gainsbourg is Beck's own unorthodox and highly intuitive sense of arranging and producing music. Air's misstep was to produce Charlotte using her father's trademark French pop style complete with lavishly baroque orchestral arrangements.

Beck uses the opposite approach. Using the minimalist techinques of ambient music, Beck puts Gainsbourg's voice front and center to allow the full appreciation the haunting qualities of her delicate voice. Gainsbourg's seductive and often precocious manner of singing can have a disturbing effect in the same manner of Alison Shaw's (of Cranes) atomospheric vocals can be unsettling.

La Collectionneuse (The Collector) is an example of how IRM Gainsbourg and Beck create weave their dark and sinister spell over the listener. La Collectionneuse suggests that the obsessive female collector of "things" is a collector of the human species.

English Language Lyrics
La Collectionneuse

I collect many things
And keep them all close to me
To the ceiling from the floor
I'm tripping on them constantly

Pixelated faces play
On the blown out TV screen
Footage from a camera,
These days I'm fast-forwarding

I see a pattern start to form
Over time it's surfacing
Like a face I recognize
It never says anything

I add up all these moments
In a long narrow ledger
Decimals of pain
Integers of pleasure

The sum of all these parts
I don't know how to measure
They keep on adding up
They just keep on adding up

The collector, la collectioneuse



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More Beckstuff

Beck's Web Only Record Club

Besides producing the Gainsbourg album, Beck spent the last half of 2009 launching an intriguing internet only record club. The website Record Club is a collaborative effort between Beck and numerous artists of his choosing, in which they record and recreate an album in its entirety. For his first foray, Beck tackled the Velvet Underground's The Velvet Underground & Nico with Icelandic singer Thorunn Magnusdottir. Since then Wilco participated in Beck's record club, with a cover of Skip Spence's (Moby Grape) 1969 album, Oar and Beck with the help of Devendra Banhart produced a cover album of Songs of Leonard Cohen. The newest work in progress in a cover album of INXS' 1986 pop classic Kick.

My only wish is that Beck would consider a commerical release of the Record Club music in compact disk or MP3. Most of the music on his Record Club project transcends the tribute album genre because of Beck's talents as an arranger, a producer and a musical collaborator. There is a cornicopia of unreleased musical gems on Beck's Record Club website.

James

^Thanks for that I will be working hard to acquire this as I am a huge Beck fanboy and the video you linked was fantastic. Nice writeup.

Gavin B.

Music from Beck's Record Club




In response to the interest in Beck's latest cover albums project, I've posted a selection from each of the fully completed cover albums at Beck's Record Club his web only project in which Beck collobarates with other musicians to do song by song covers of their favorite record albums.

Most of Beck's Record Club music is available for free download at YouTube but you have to download each album one song at a time a convert the flash files into an MP3 format to play on your digital jukebox or on your portable music device:

From Velvet Underground & Nico- Beck and Icelandic singer Thorunn do a gorgeous version of All Tommorrow's Parties:



From Skip Spence's 1968 visionary low-fi masterwork Oar, Beck and Wilco team up for Little Hands



From L. Cohen's debut album Songs of Leonard Cohen, Devendra Banhart joins Beck and company for a rousing version of So Long Marianne: