jazzy diggin by Noray, featured on the very cool, downtempo album 1974-2010 A Tribute (In Memory of Nujabes), released on www.onryourecords.fr. A very good example of mixing with style, including elements of groove and jazz.
I would have love to share another fantastic tune called colors by Ash Day, featured on the same vinyl but last I looked, it is not available on Youtube (and no, for the life of me I won’t go looking for it on Dailymotion). So you have to go to your local vinyl store and catch the good vibes.
A few days ago, I’ve received a wonderful record from The Numero Group, one of my favorite labels. It’s called Light: On The South Side and it features a 2 LP gatefold vinyl and a 132 page hard back book.
The 2 LPs are a compilation of 17 tracks of the kind of funky Chicago blues that was played in Chicago’s South Side clubs in 1975-77 and the hard back book features some incredible pictures taken by Michael L. Abramson, a white guy in that massively black neighborhood. The pictures show the crowd, not the artists, that haunted those joints back in the day. There were some incredible cats and ladies in those places. The music is captured in a ‘raw’ fashion. You could hear a hiss now and then, some background noise and other details that makes you travel back in time without living the comfort of your sofa.
While most of the selection is very good, a few tracks stand out such as Andrew Brown’s You Made Me Suffer:
Such is the power of music and pictures. Together they can create the necessary conditions to make history real and restitute a long-gone atmosphere.
Christian Scott is one of the best Jazz artists I know of. His latest release, Yesterday You Said Tomorrow, is simply a masterpiece. I’ve seen him play live at the New Morning in Paris twice (last year and a few days ago). Totally awesome! As of this writing, I’ve listened to his latest album 36 times since adding it to my iTunes library on Feb 7th, 2010…
It has been 16 years. 16 years that Gil Scott-Heron, the legend who influenced a whole generation of hip-hop artists with his rather unique voice and proto-rap style, hasn’t released a new album. And then I’m New Here hits the streets. And it hits them pretty hard.
It’s not only the streets that it hits this hard but my ears too. I just dig the voice, the composition and the poetry! Actually, some of the tracks such as Me And The Devil, New York Is Killing Me or I’ll Take Care of You make me speechless before this 59 years old man’s art.
I got my copy of the album from eMusic.com. Some people criticize the short length of this very fine album, as if it was a scale against which quality can be measured. Unless they are led to believe that more is better, something that mind-tricking marketing has been pushing us to believe in order to rip us off yet another amount of bucks.
Either way, you can’t listen to Gill Scott-Heron and stay neutral. Either you’d love it or you’d hate it. But let your ears be the judges, wouldn’t you?
