Tuesday, May 31, 2005  

I need a marriage counselor. Not for my own, thankyouverymuch, but for my good friends Blogger and NetFirms, who no longer see eye to eye over FTP and other such issues that are necessary for a loving relationship between a crappy free web-publishing tool and a low-cost hosting service.

For the past two weeks I've fought the good fight, tried to ask NetFirms what's wrong, tried to get Blogger to open up and talk. No such luck.

Blogger won't FTP to NetFirms anymore; the only thing I get is a "broken pipe" error. I recommended some black-market Viagra and a jolt of Canadian Cialis (the U.S. stuff is watered-down, brah), but neither NetFirms nor Blogger will listen to me.

Alas, I've decided to drop my friends. At the moment I'm publishing this site via BlogSpot (with masking & forwarding---the downfall of any marriage), but over the next few weeks (years?) I'm going to try and make the transition to MovableType---if I can figure out how to install the damn thing.

Even though you're really hot, Perl, I already don't love you. You tempt me, you confuse me.

Posted by CP | Link |

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Thursday, May 26, 2005  

Only a few more days to download Pas/Cal's new song "Summer's Almost Here" for free from the band's Romantic Air Recording Company.

And you can still get gratis MP3s of "The Bronze Beached Boys," "What Happened to the Sands," "O Honey, We're Ridiculous (Demo)," and "The Glorious Ballad of the Ignored (Demo)" from Pas/Cal's site.

Last night I rendezvoused with Pas/Cal vocalist Casimer in the cosmopolitan city of Richmond, Va. You cannot beat the intellectual and creative atmosphere in the city's bistros and tabernacles. Plus, Lamb of God kicks ass.

Posted by CP | Link |

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Friday, May 13, 2005  

Culture
"Garvey" 12-Inch Extended Mix
Production Something: The 12-Inch Mixes
(Heartbeat, 1995)

Culture
"Two Sevens Clash"
Two Sevens Clash
(Shanachie, 1978)

A few weeks ago Kingston-based journo-photographer Michael Williams sent me the above photo of Culture's Joseph Hill getting an award. The timing was tite because I'd been meaning to write something about Culture for the longest time, and I had been listening to the group's Production Something album almost every day on the bus ride to work---helps to block out the kooks. Also, Culture was about to perform a couple of shows in the VA/MD/DC area and I planned on going to one of them.

Alas, I never blogged about Culture and I never made it to either concert because I've been in lockdown watching the NBA playoffs. Sometimes life slows down into nothingness and there's nothing you can do but follow the ennui straight to the couch.

But this weekend I'm gonna shake off the dust and get-get-get-get up & get-get-get-get down with a trip to NYC and then a brief stop in NJ on Sunday for the first area concert by trumpeter Dizzy Reece in more than a decade. If you've read this blog for some time, you know how I feel about Dizzy's music. The show's free and it starts at 2 p.m. It's at the library in Manalaplan, NJ, which is about an hour outside of Manhattan. Click here for directions and more info.

The amazing history of "Two Sevens Clash."

Buy Production Something and Two Sevens Clash from Ernie B's Reggae.

Posted by CP | Link |

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Wednesday, May 11, 2005  

Marcin Wasilewski
Slawomir Kurkiewicz
Michal Miskiewicz
"Hyperballad"
Trio
(ECM, 2005)

Bjork is quietly on her way to becoming the new Cole Porter for jazz musicians---and it's about friggin' time. (Throw Radiohead in there, too.) After all, there have been thousands of great songs written since, like, 1950, and it's about time skilled musicians apply their interpretive skills to this generation's finest tunesmiths.

MSM---as I will call them because I don't want to get a knot in my hands trying to type their names again---have been the backing band on trumpeter Tomasz Stanko's last two albums, Soul of Things and Suspended Night (both fantastic), and Trio marks their international debuts as leaders. (I understand that there are some Poland-only CDs; anybody got a line on them? Hollaback, girl.) EDIT: You can buy the group's Lullaby for Rosemary CD for $17 right here: PolishJazz.com

The threesome's version of "Hyperballad" (and the whole Trio album, for that matter) is in the tradition of the Tord Gustavsen and In the Country tunes I've posted: Twilight music for those who find whispering a little too loud.

Old jazz nerds---which means 90% of the music's audience these days---love to point out how young certain musicians are and how amazing it is that they can play such good music even though they are practically toddlers.

Eff them.

Who cares?

The MSM guys, all in their early 20s, are really talented now, and I imagine they'll still be great when they hit 40, 50 & 60. Whoop-de-damn-do.

You can download an MP3 of MSM's "Free-bop" from America's Jazz Magazine in NAFTA Territories, as well as some other good stuff by Tord Gustavsen, Sonny Rollins, Vijay Iyer, Henry Kaiser & Wadada Leo Smith and more.

Buy MSM's Trio here and the two Tomasz Stanko CDs they play on here and here.

Posted by CP | Link |

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Monday, May 02, 2005  

Konono No. 1
"Mungua-Mungua"
Zaire: Musiques Urbaines a Kinshasa
(Ocora, 1985; rec. 1978)

This is the first recorded work of Konono No. 1 to reach the West. It was provided to me by Peter over at Worldly Disorientation, who got it dubbed from a friend who owns a cassette of Zaire: Musiques Urbaines a Kinshasa on the French ethnographic label Ocora. The out-of-print comp features recordings of four bands from the region doing the matanga mumba-jumba, though none of them have the ramped-up intesity and heatwave distortion of Konono No. 1. (But it's tite how Orchestre Bambala uses an accordion as the lead instrument instead of the likembe.)

And, yeah, in 1978 Konono sounds exactly like they do now. Glad all of us finally got to catch up.

Because this jam is 29-minutes long, and I didn't want to edit it or blowout my bandwidth, I ripped it at a still fine 96 kbps. Konono is all about low-fi insanity anyway, and before you got all hi-fi fancy and started wearing pants in public, you used to listen to Siltbreeze 7-inches, right?

Some Konono-related links:
-Here's the Web site for Congotronics producer Vincent Kenis, who documented his extensive travels though the Kinshasa region.
-Crammed Discs now has a blog.

More Konono links on the Suburbs:
-Interview with Vincent Kenis.
-Links to reviews and places to purchase Konono's two CDs.
-A video and more videos.

Nugget: Producer John King and Medeski, Martin & Wood are down with Zaire: Musiques Urbaines a Kinshasa because they sample vocals from Orchestre Bana Luya for "Reflector" on last year's End of the World Party (Just in Case). Stream the entire track here.

Posted by CP | Link |

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