Month: January 2009

JUJU BEES

the plane across the pond showed a movie with Queen Latifah presiding over a matriarchal black beekeeper society (Alicia Keyes wearing a ‘natural’ wig, that successful singing show contestant, etc) and a young white girl escaping from her abusive father. Who made her kneel on rice (symbolic rice?) while he drank beer (symbolic beer?) as punishment for playing in the dirt after bedtime. At this point I assumed the movie was German.

The young white girl has a troubled past which inserts itself into the present via flashbacks. The black women have their laughter, their honey, and the power of music. The editing was clumsy. This is what I understood as I glanced at the screen from time to time with no audio. Also, racism – in a movie theater!

now I’m looking for electricity in the airport.

This song — I’ve heard it sampled but can’t remember where. Maybe you can.

[audio:Synchro Series Synchro System .mp3]

King Sunny Ad̩ РSyncro Series Syncro System

(from, among other places, Rough Guide to Africa & Middle East)

BASS CON/FUSION, RAI NOW

PARIS? PARIS. PARIS!

next thursday, ‘Teuf Soot’! CIAfrica will be coming up from Abidjan (Ivory Coast) to perform alongside Maga Bo feat. MC B Negao from Brazil and yrs truly on the ones & twos, in one of Europe’s finest Afro-Arab metropoles.

paris party

jeudi 29 jan. Le Cafe des Sports, 94 rue de Ménilmontant 75020 Paris. 20h-1. 6 € en prévente – 8 € sur place. Facebook page.

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Fader blogs some rai!

& here’s an excellent gnawa-crossover tune from a Wary’s well- and playfully-produced Gnawa Dance album. Which is more rai than gnawa. “Sallama” contains acoustic instruments and (at times) full vocal auto-tune, yessir.

[audio:Wary – Sallama.mp3]

Wary – Sallama

plus, his photoshop skillz are formidable:

wary

waricover

PITCH IMPERFECT & THE GEKO JONES SHOW

the flip side of auto-tune’s robo-correction is bad/out-of-tune singing, as timeless at auto-tune is new. (I find both performance styles quite compelling, to be honest.) Cumbia Sonidera is filled with folks who just can’t hit those notes – and sing anyway! How can you not appreciate that?

I posted a version of this song a few months ago, by Grupo Ginnsu. This is the Kumbia Sonicos’ pitch-imperfect rendition (debe ser guapo dice R!):

[audio:Cumbia de los Patos.mp3]

Kumbia Sonicos – Cumbia de los Patos

one of my favorite cumbia sonidera subgenres is the injured lover jam. You hurt my heart, she sings (in-tune).

[audio:Tu Heriste Mi Corazon.mp3]

Majeza – Tu Herista Mi Corazon

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geko jones

on today’s radio show – “Latin/Caribbean music expert & DJ Geko Jones will be joining Rupture. The Colombian-Puerto Rican digger will share with us some of his latest finds from the cutting edge of tropical soundsystem and street music culture, from Mexican tribal guarachero to freshly made ragga-bass mutations and Afro-Colombian soul gems. A deep live mix from Geko Jones — ¡¡No te lo pierdas!!”

if yr in NYC, catch Mr Geko Jones (Que Cojones) live @ APT tomorrow – FREE – holding it down w/ Uproot Andy:

CELLO, BOOMBOX, HARMONICA, VOICE

Obama praise song – clearly the most compelling transmedia genre of past months.

Greg transcribes Elizabeth Alexander’s inauguration poem “Praise Song for the Day“

excerpt:

All about us is noise.
All about us is noise and bramble,
thorn and din,
each one of our ancestors on our tongues.

Someone is stitching up a hem, darning a hole in a uniform, patching a tire, repairing the things in need of repair.
Someone is trying to make music somewhere with a pair of wooden spoons
on an oil drum.
With cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

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& Heatwave rounds up Caribbean-leaning Obama praise songs.

CAKE & ICING

my friend from CIA Africa who lives in Côte d’Ivoire and will be performing in Paris on the 28th and 29th of this month emails:

“OK OK BLACK PRESIDENT no no BLACK FAMILY IN WHITE HOUSE ,
IN ABIDJAN THE NAME OF THE NEW PREsiDENT OF THE WORLD
IS BARACKA FOUSSINI BRAMA , lol ,in MALI BAMAKO BAMA …
in all Africa people remix the name with ethnic name reference…”

today we’re gonna have our cake, and we’re gonna eat our cake.

obama-cake

TURN THE OTHER CHEEK REVOLUTION

With all due respect to the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz– in this sludgy powerful reggae riddim with a Malcolm X sample I hear a call for structural violence… Because that’s what’s happening to the music (and the words in it): the Roots Radics dub version kicks out this time-worn riddim’s walls to let in psychic/studio space.

“Turn the other cheek revolution” – the DJ cut brings in a hint of ambiguity, leans (slightly) towards the post-Mecca El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz worldview. Malcolm’s full sentence was, of course: “There’s no such thing as a turn-the-other-cheek revolution.”

Structural violence as freeing up discursive space. This can happen in many ways, like when you usher unseen narratives into visibility (Toni Morrison’s early work as an editor bringing black women’s writing to a mainstream readership in the 1970’s is an awesome example); communicating across a hostile silence which didn’t serve y/our purpose, or – dubwise – inserting a silence which does.

(& i love 7″s for their combination of brevity and effort – after 3 minutes, you need to get up and stop the record. This mp3 loses that.)

[audio:RootsRadics_CussCussRiddim.mp3]

Roots Radics – Cuss Cuss riddim

rootsradics

CHARLES HOLGATE AND THE PUBLICITY GAME

EDIT: I just had a long, slightly surreal phone conversation with Charles Holgate, the original topic of this post. Charles requested that I take down this blog entry & associated comments and wait until the end of the month, by which time my core concerns should have been resolved. I’m happy to oblige and hope everything works out.

Thanks and sincere apologies to the commentors – should this discussion re-open, your comments will be intact. I feel awkward truncating an open discussion, I never delete comments on here; in the years of Mudd Up! this is the only time a post has been put on pause.

MARCHE MARCHE MARCHE

hp haiti cherie 27366

Haitian ‘meringue’! Hispanola is a small island. This is a small tune which keeps expanding, rootsy acoustic meringue in kreyole. There’s a drum & voice Legba tribute song on this CD (Haiti Cherie) but I prefer those, like this one, which sweeten the equation with light plucked guitars.

[audio:Mizisyen.mp3]

Ti Band L’Avenir – Mizisyen

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Other side of the island… now via Manhattan island, Blogworkorange. A short story blog by Juan Dicent, en Español. Via Caro, who knows, and notes that “some of the better Dominican writing is actually happening on the web these days” in this link-filled post.

J.R. MATASANOS Y SUS MANOS CARTERISTAS

my hour-long cumbia mix for Rob Da Bank’s BBC Radio 1 show went out a couple hours ago and will be streamable for a week. PERFECT THING TO HEAT US UP, mixed in freezing New York. Modesty aside, you’ll be hard pressed to find a hotter hour of free cumbia heat floating around…

andres

Go here then click on ‘Listen to Rob Da Bank & Friends show’ and forward til an hour in.
Or try this direct link to the BBC player. Incidentally, the first tune I play after the intro chat w/ Rob is Pesadilla’s version of La Pava Congona…

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Too much sound? Susan Sontag on The Aesthetics of Silence. via Audio Poverty’s blog , AP being a conference-event happening in Berlin Feb 6-8. I will play music one day and chat with Kodwo Eshun (More Brilliant Than the Neologismachine) & Brian (Awesome Tapes from You Know Where) the next.

also: “According to a new study by Will Page, chief economist of the MCPS-PRS Alliance, who is also the guy behind the economic modelling for Radiohead’s In Rainbows album, more than 10 million of the 13 million music tracks available on the internet failed to find a single buyer last year.”