Happy Halloween! from The Prince of Darkness

I was talking today to my buddy JT in Texas... a more sage soul there ne'er was. We touched on subjects ranging from consciousness recalibration (from 4th to 5th density) to Arthur Garfunkel informing my stunned parents in a record room of a department store in 1973 that their son clearly loves music, so that must mean they are great parents (he was right, they were!). 

Anyway I told him (JT, not Artie!) today's post was gonna be dedicated to him, so here it is. It's coming up on the 1st of November here, so I have pulled out this facemelter of a DVD containing a Miles Davis electric set, recorded for WDR-TV in (then West) Germany exactly 40 years ago on 11/1/1973. This is a recent digital rebroadcast from German TV, so the picture & sound quality are extra clean and pristine, just like it oughta be. Just be aware that although the tag at the beginning says 1972, this is indeed from 1973:

 Miles Davis Septet
Berliner Jazztage
Philharmonie
Berlin, Germany
11.1.1973

01 Turnaroundphrase [Moja/Nne]
02 Tune In 5
03 Ife
04 Unknown title
05 Tune In 5

Total time: 46:22

Miles Davis - trumpet & keyboards
Dave Liebman - tenor & soprano saxophones and flute
Pete Cosey - guitar & percussion
Reggie Lucas - guitar
Michael Henderson - bass
Al Foster - drums
James 'Mtume' Foreman - percussion

PAL DVD of a digital satellite rebroadcast
1.79 GB PAL/October 2013 archive link

You can burn this to a playable region-free DVD, or you can watch it on your computer device of choice via the stellar VLC Media Player, available as freeware on an Internet near you. Just don't get spooked by the primal, corrosive funk on display as Miles steers his ensemble through some vintage "electric period" shenanigans... watch out especially for guitar legend Pete Cosey tearing holes through the studio ceiling with what he's churning out.  Enjoy and Happy Halloween :D           --Joshy Boo

18 and I like it

i'm eighteen and i like it...

It's my friend Brandon's 18th birthday... you bet that only happens once. So in honor of this momentous occasion I have constructed this compilation -- with a very punning title -- which is a totally unique representation of the music of the legendary troubadour Donovan (aka Donovan Leitch). All stellar cover versions of his songs... in fact there's 18 of 'em!

Brandin' Donovan

18 songs of Donovan Leitch

01 Butthole Surfers - The Hurdy Gurdy Man

02 Kate Bush - Lord Of The Reedy River

03 King Crimson - Get Thy Bearings

04 Deep Purple -  Lalena

05 Bridget St. John - The Pebble And The Man (Happiness Runs)

06 Jefferson Airplane - Fat Angel

 07 Marianne Faithfull - In The Night Time (Hampstead Incident)

08 The Animals - Hey Gyp

09 Richie Havens - Wear Your Love Like Heaven

10 Hüsker Dü - Sunshine Superman

11 Herbie Mann - Mellow Yellow

12 Blues Project - Catch The Wind

 13 Allman Bros. Band - Mountain Jam

14 Mary Hopkin - Voyage Of The Moon

15 Julie Felix - To Try For the Sun

16 Lobo - Universal Soldier

17 Joan Baez - Colours

18 Richard Thompson - Season Of The Witch

Total time: 1:18:08
460 MB FLAC/October 2013 archive link

I was gonna send it just to him, but he is the type of guy that would the be the very first to share his gifts, so I am posting it for everyone to enjoy.   So please do so  :D         --Josh

Linger on...

3.2.1942-10.27.2013

"linger on"

This is a sad day. Also a day for celebration of the life of Lou, for it isn't too many people about whom you could credibly say that they altered the course of and expanded -- irrevocably so -- their chosen idiom.

Of the songwriters of our lifetimes, there are none more influential, not even (dare I say) Bob Dylan. Brian Eno once said that only a few hundred people bought that first Velvet Underground record, but all of them started a band. You have to understand what the music universe was before that record and after it... it was a totally different place, with entirely different possibilities acceptable for subject matter in the world of song, after that one dropped in 1967 like a big ol' banana-shaped shoe of otherness. 

So many of the ideas and methods of character study we take for granted in modern songwriting were pioneered and essentially invented by Lou. Before him, no one dared write about drag queens, hard drugs... and certainly not drag queens on hard drugs. His was a living chronicle, from the inside, of the marginal, marvelous characters in and at the edge of the artistic demimonde of New York City before the Times (up and downtown) became so Square. Before the hookers and weirdos were replaced by the Hard Rock and Walgreen's. For me, an essential truth is that Lou is one of those people who makes me proud to be gay, having written some of the best songs that will ever be written about what it feels like to be at the crossroads of gender without much more than words, a guitar and a human heart for an atlas.

What do you think I'd see

if I could walk away from me?

There isn't much more to say... like Frank Zappa said, writing about music is like dancing about architecture. The only thing of which I'm certain on this sad day is that we are so, so lucky as human beings to be alive and to have been alive during the advent of musicians and songsmithing artists such as Lou Reed, to bear witness to the redefining of the craft at their hands and by their totally unique insight and artistry almost without parallel or peer.

it's such a perfect day

glad I could spend it with you

It's hard to choose one thing -- one show or song that encapsulates everything about him... Lou went through many changes over many personae in a half-century career of rewriting the playbook, so I'm not gonna try. But please accept this tremendous (and complete) unreleased concert of the Lou Reed band, recorded from an FM broadcast from the Werchter Festival in Belgium on July 8, 1984 and featuring legendary guitarist, the late Robert Quine. It's an excellent representation of Lou's early-'80s trilogy which includes The Blue Mask, Legendary Hearts and New Sensations.

Lou Reed 

Werchter Festival

Werchter, Belgium

7.8.1984

CD1

01 Sweet Jane 

02 Waiting For The Man 

03 High In The City 

04 Down At The Arcade  

05 Legendary Love 

06 Fly Into The Sun 

07 Turn Out The Light 

08 My Red Joystick 

09 Average Guy

10 Walk On The Wild Side 

11 Satellite Of Love

CD2

01 New Sensations 

02 Sunday Morning 

03 Underneath The Bottle 

04 Betrayed

05 Doin' The Things That We Want To/Waves of Fear 

06 I Love You Suzanne  

07 White Light/White Heat 

08 Some Kinda Love 

09 Rock 'n' Roll 

10 Kill Your Sons

Total time: 1:32:48

Lou Reed – vocals, guitar

Robert Quine – lead guitar

Fernando Saunders – bass

Fred Maher – drums

Peter Wood – keyboards

off-air FM master tape of the complete broadcast

610 MB FLAC/October 2013 archive link

Lou got kind of a bad reputation for mistreating people (especially critics) during his life; you need only listen to the (completely hilarious) raps between songs on the Take No Prisoners live LP from 1978 to get just how direct he could be in his assessments. But they can say whatever they want about Lou and it matters not... let 'em talk, because while he lived he reinvented & recalibrated one of the central art forms on this planet and they didn't. 

Thank you so much Lewis Allan Reed. I won't forget you, and I suspect I'm not the only one. 
--Josh

 

speaking of gratitude, it makes me feel so honored that our lifetimes overlap with musicians and composers and maestros like WAYNE SHORTER, who wrote this... one of the most covered songs in the history of the music we call jazz -- my friend Rico said it best when he once said to me, in a moment of Hemingway-grade sophisticated simplicity, "Wayne tunes are great."

speaking of jazz, it jazzes me to no end that this -- the first recorded instance of Footprints -- was recorded in the city in which I was born (NYC), on the day I was born, 10/25/1966...

in the opinions of lot of people I respect, it is one of the definitive compositions of jazz and one of the most memorable, eloquent themes in the history of all music (not just jazz and not an exaggeration)

so thank you Miles, thank you Wayne, and happy birthday to Footprints, still steppin after 47 years

I'm Just a Bill: nowbodhi's blissness

Hi... it's me Nobody. I'm 47 today, having been born this day in 1966. A hundred-legged dancing deity I met used the power of centiscorpion suggestion on me and (without speaking, mostly) put it in my mind that I shouldn't be so quick to shy away from the path that's true for me. To remind myself not to withhold what I know is the good stuff and the things folks -- despite how fucked up I might get in three dimensions trying to hitchhike my ass to the fourth -- can only get from me. So after years of avoiding it, I've made this page to avail the world -- or at least its wide web -- of the many terabytes of unreleased and out-of-print (the not-coming-back variety) music I've accumulated in lo these many lifetimes. Call it an Escher-Zen boomerang-in-reverse: on your big day, don't just grab the gifts you're getting but give the gifts you've got. Repay the debts, real and imagined... even the ones as yet unincurred. A down payment on the upbeat, and you're invited.

So let's begin at the beginning, yes? I extracted this from the TV station master tape and it did indeed take place on the very day I happened to hit these strained and strobe-streaked streets... a Tuesday entitled October 25, 1966 for those of you having linear time with your Friday caramel cappuccino. If you'd enjoy a knotty-but-nice, brief-but-big set of piano-jazzy goodness, commanded at center stage by some towering ivory, here comes the Bill Evans Trio, playing live on Danish TV while I was somewhere else on planet Earth getting this "begin breathing when I smack you on the ass" thing mastered.

Bill Evans Trio 
Studie 1 (TV)
Copenhagen, Denmark 
10.25.1966

01 Very Early 
02 Who Can I Turn To 
03 If You Could See Me Now 
04 Autumn Leaves 
05 Five 
06 Five (master take) 

total time: 24:28

Bill Evans - piano 
Eddie Gomez - bass 
Alex Riel - drums 

extracted lossless audio from an FLV file of the original TV master tapes
90 MB FLAC/October 2013 archive link

FLAC is the format of the files, lossless and all that good stuff... Thank you for hearing and listening and watching this space for more of the same, never the same way once. Because birthdays are like that when you're working backwards, remembering it all in reverse ;)       --J.