Terrace Martin is making some of my favorite beats right now.
Over the past few years, he's produced a number of strong LP tracks for Snoop Dogg ("Been Around the World"), 213 ("Joysticc"!) and others but much of his music has only come out through leaks or mixtapes. He's also been playing the background, working with and learning from legends like Quincy Jones, DJ Quik and Teddy Riley.
He plays a bunch of instruments (saxophone, keyboards, drums, etc.) and his stuff is really musical-- not fussy, just melodic and well-crafted. I think he takes a lot inspiration from 80s-era producers like Prince, Jam & Lewis, etc. in terms of synth sounds and general aesthetic, but he uses different kinds of chords. It sounds old, but it also sounds fresh. I wish he were getting a fraction of the hype Dam-Funk gets.
The Snoop Dogg song is taken from Terrace Martin's Gangsta Grillz mixtape, Locke High. The Locke High mixtape is also available unmixed and without drops here.
While the unmixed version is a lot more useful for DJing, I got a huge smile from one moment on the other version, when DJ Drama shouts out Reggie Andrews.
Reggie Andrews is an L.A. pianist who was a music instructor at Locke High for almost 40 years, from its opening in 1969 until shortly after its recent takeover as a charter school (the latter was subject of a good recent New Yorker article).
Andrews mentored some tremendous talent there, from Terrace Martin and members of the Pharcyde to school-band prodigies like Patrice Rushen and Ndugu Chancler, cutting a couple of obscure and extremely collectible records with Locke school bands in the process. In his spare time, Andrews also produced a number of commercially successful records, including several for Patrice Rushen and the Dazz Band's huge hit, "Let It Whip".
Back in April, my homeboy Jonny from Good Records NYC posted a pre-Locke High album by Andrews over at his blog. The album, Mystic Beauty, is gorgeous, with great compositions and gentle Latin vibe throughout. I recommend heading over there to snatch it pronto (plus other amazing treats, like the Brief Encounter LP). I believe Jonny has an online shop coming to the site soon, but in the meantime if you pass through the Lower East Side, I highly recommend a stop at his storefront on E. 5th between 2nd & 3rd.
EDIT: About a month after the initial Terrace Martin post I was ripping some vinyl and came across this:
Saxophonist Billy Harper is maybe my favorite living jazz player.
I first discovered his music thanks to Ubiquity's Andrew Jervis, who tipped me to Harper's Black Saint back in the early 90s. Hearing that album for the first time, I was overwhelmed. It's incredibly powerful music, forceful in its beauty, kind of like Coltrane's "Alabama" stretched to album length.
Over the years I grabbed any Harper LP I could find and I have yet to hear a bad one. Because it was the first I heard, Black Saint is probably my favorite, but In Europe, Love on the Sudan or Trying to Make Heaven My Home are all equally good places to start (and available in digital form for under $3). He's also really worth seeing live.
The track I've posted is from one of his albums that's not in print, Jon & Billy. The album was cut in Japan with Jon Faddis, a trumpeter who happens to be Madlib's uncle and to have gone to high school in the Bay Area; one of his high school jazz band albums is pretty nasty. "Two 'D's" is a beautiful tune and Cecil Bridgewater's kalimba adds a nice flavor.
P.S.: I had been thinking about doing something from on Harper, but a post over at Michael Barnes's excellent new blog, Melting Pot, pushed me over the edge. Michael is an old friend who DJed at KALX for a number of years before finding greener pastures in LA (a teaching job at CSU in Long Beach, a show on at KCRW, etc.). His taste is as eclectic as it is excellent-- bookmark him!
P.P.S.: In his Billy Harper write-up, Michael mentions the Spiritual Jazz comp, which doesn't seem to be getting much light but is really excellent. Typical of Jazzman comps, it features a ton of tremendously obscure music, much of it great; Stones Throw's US edition adds an amazing track by the P.E. Hewitt Jazz Ensemble, a band led by a Bay Area high schooler.
In my last post I happened to mention legendary jazz composer and theorist George Russell. He died about 4 days later of complications from Alzheimer's. He was 86.
His music generally didn't tend towards grooviness, so I think this flies below the radar:
George Russell Sextet: "Event I" (Soul Note, 1980)
It's edited from the 1980 version of Electronic Sonata for Souls Loved by Nature, which, like a lot of great stuff on Soul Note, is available dirt cheap in electronic form.
I've managed to mostly ease the situation with liberal doses of the Milton Nascimento original, but I also ended up dusting off a few other pseudo-Brazilian favorites.
"Rico Suave" appeared on Dilla's 2002 Welcome 2 Detroit album. It's basically him and Karriem Riggins goofing on some Sergio Mendes-ness.
A few years ago I heard my homie Tim Diesel play "Rico Suave Bossa Nova" at a gig, which led me to whip up this unfancy little re-edit-- I gave it a mixable intro and extended it from 90 seconds to about five minutes.
George Russell: "Brazilian Bus" (Records by Pete, 19??)
This is not the George Russell who led groups featuring Bill Evans and John Coltrane, etc., won a MacArthur genius grant and whose music theories provided the underpinning for modal jazz. It's a George Russell without a wikipedia entry or a website who, from what I can infer from the blurbs on the back of his Easy Listening LP, was a guitarist who mainly made his way in music promotion. Also, according to the notes, he's "a musician's musician, a man's man, a ladies' man, a marvelous human being."
The music on Easy Listening was arranged by Jimmie Haskell; I love what he does with the strings here. The same recordings were later issued on Dobre under the title Guitar With Orchestra.
I've been obsessed with this song since first hearing it on the Trojan Rocksteady Box a few years ago.
Partly it's because it's a great, great song but also I couldn't quite put my finger on where he'd cribbed it from-- I recognized bits of Billy Stewart's "I Do Love You" (or is it "Sitting in the Park"? they're too similar) but it took me about two years to figure out that the intro was from the Alan Brandt/Bob Haymes tune "That's All", which is one of the prettiest standards I know.
Ian Carr was super-underrated, at least in the U.S.
The British trumpeter and composer led two great bands, the Don Rendell/Ian Carr Quintet and Nucleus. With the former, he cut some beautiful and haunting music; the latter band added a backbeat and sometimes upped the tempo but usually retained some of the quintet's brooding lyricism-- I wasn't that surprised to read in obits that Carr had lifelong problems with depression.
It's always been a little surprising to me that he wasn't more popular; his music seemed to me like it could appeal to a lot of audiences that didn't pick up on him. That is, if you like early 70s Miles Davis, Can, Endtroducing-era DJ Shadow, CTI-era Freddie Hubbard, the more droning Black Sabbath material, Marc Moulin's Placebo or anything moody and funky, his music is probably for you.
Just about everything he released is in print on a series of UK twofer reissues. I've heard almost everything he did and I've never heard a bad record from him. On the straight ahead jazz end, Shades of Blue/Dusk Fire is great; for the jazz-rock stuff, maybe start with Solar Plexus/Belladonna or Labyrinth/Roots. This is from the latter:
Organist Lyman Woodard passed away last week. He was a major presence on the Detroit jazz scene for decades, holding down numerous residencies and schooling a lot of younger players.
I first discovered his music via his sublime Saturday Night Special LP, which is one of my favorite jazz LPs. It's a subtle record-- intimate, lo-fi, lightly funky, kind of wistful-- but one that I don't tire of. The songs, all by Woodard or members of his band, are brooding, gorgeous, groovy and a little eerie-- often all at once-- and the arrangements are perfect.
The original album is pretty rare-- it was released on John Sinclair's Strata Records, which didn't have much in the way of distribution. In December I ripped the whole LP and was bugging off the fact that in the reissue glut of the past decade, Saturday Night Special had somehow slipped through the cracks. However before I got around to posting any of the songs here, I learned that Wax Poetics has a reissue in the works with new liner notes and the original, even more gangster cover. It's currently available only in digital form but they're also taking pre-orders on limited edition double vinyl.
Because a legit reissue is available, I've held off on posting anything from Saturday Night Special, but here is an earlier version of a song that appears on that LP:
Lyman Woodard was briefly a member of the 8th Day and on their second album they recorded this song. There's something a little sinister in the bassline but the song has such a groovy pulse that I still reach for it every time I'm DJing on a balmy night.
Bonus random fact I learned while preparing this post that kinda blew me away: the saxophonist on Saturday Night Special is also the singer of this mid-90s house classic.
Elysian Spring was a Massachusetts quintet, although this track features only four of them: two guitars, vibes and bass. The tune reminds me of "The Look of Love" and the performance has a beautiful intimacy.
Warmth was a loosely knit group of jazz musicians led by pianist/vibraphonist Don McCaslin, the middle hairy guy in the photo above. Beginning in 1972, the group regularly performed at a sidewalk cafe outside the Cooper House in Santa Cruz. They continued until the 1989 quake destroyed the building.
The group recorded at least 5 albums. This song is from their second one. McCaslin adapted the song from a poem by Joseph Stroud, another Santa Cruz guy; it's sung by Harry Woodward. I don't normally flip for jazz guitar solos but Larry Scala kills this.
Michel Sardaby's a Martinique-born pianist who has been based in Paris since the 1950s. This is from his Gail LP, which was (I think) his second. The album was booted in the early 90s and "Welcome New Warmth" has been comped a few times.
While ripping these it occurred to me that either might fit comfortably alongside Fusion Batches, an excellent mellow jazz mix that my homie Morse Code put together a few years ago. I ran into him on a plane recently and he told me had a sequel wrapped up and ready to go plus plans to reissue the first one. I'm waiting....
As the weather gets fall-ish I tend to want to cuddle up with psych and jazz records.
These two songs kind of straddle the boundary between the two. Both were cut in the late 1960s by L.A.-based jazz groups who cut pop-influenced one-offs.
The Advancement was a group headed by Gabor Szabo's rhythm section, bassist Lou Kabok and drummer Hal Gordon. Kabok, like Szabo, was a refugee from Hungary and based this track on a Hungarian folk song. Their record is solid and really slept-on.
The Aquarians were a studio group led by Russo-Belgian pianist Vladimir Vassilieff and featuring established jazz players like Bobby Hutcherson and Joe Pass as well as Lynn Blessing, who coincidentally plays vibes on the Advancement record also. (Oh, and the Bill Plummer record, too! I guess he was kind of the Forrest Gump of the jazzy pseudo-psych world.) The Aqurians record is more or less a latin jazz LP with some flower-pop touches.
I love this song for the vocal and, in particular, the way the naive, dippy lyric ("we can do better/there won't be wars/that kill good people/there won't be walls/between the people/there won't be laws/for certain people/there won't be hate/among the people") gets echoed or maybe undercut by the mindless and strangely affectless responses that follow each line, "uh yeah yeah yeah" and "oh yeah".
The song was recently collected on Sounds of She, which was put together by the folks behind the cool Soft Sounds for Gentle People sunshine-pop comps. In the liner notes, they speculate that the vocalists on this one, credited simply as the Gemini Twins, were probably Alyce and Rhae Andrece, twins who cut weird, late-60s jazz-pop records for Verve and for Limelight with the group Sound of Feeling. I had been thinking that, too.
Oh, and-- here's a song from the second Sound of Feeling LP:
It combines wordless vocals and moog with stuff that ought to suck, like a 7/4 time signature and microtonal improvisation, but instead of being a leaden, pretentious mess, it's actually kind of strange and awesome.
Neal Hefti passed away Saturday. Before he achieved his most lasting fame as a TV and film composer, he was prominent as an arranger with Count Basie's big band and he wrote a number of great jazz standards.
Growing up, I heard various versions of this one all the time:
My mom used to listen to KJAZ religiously and in particular to a weekly segment (Sundays, 10:00 a.m.?) where they'd play a different version of "Li'l Darling". I doubt they ever played this one, but there are dozens of others. (BTW, it's killing me that I can't think of a good version of Hefti's "Girl Talk"-- I know I have a cool one lying around somewhere.)
Of course, Hefti is best-remembered these days as the writer of the themes to the "Odd Couple" and this, here bastardized by unidentified members of Sun Ra's Arkestra and the Blues Project:
The Sensational Guitars of Dan & Dale: "Batman Theme" (Tifton, 1966)
This one has always reminded me of the Batman theme:
The Mitch Mitchell who made this is not the Jimi Hendrix Experience drummer, but instead an Ohio guy featured on this fine compilation and this l'il mix. Gene King also collaborated on Mitchell's "Never Walk Out on You" and, to hear the record tell it, was a real cool cat.
Finally, this one reminds me of the scatting on the Mitch Mitchell record, and has been stuck in my head on and off for months:
Segun Bucknor & His Revolution: "La La La" (Polydor, 197?/Strut, 2001)
The compilation it's drawn from, Nigeria 70, was released well ahead of the current glut of Afrobeat compilations but remains one of the best. The recent sequel is pretty great, too, and is still in print.
Too many R.I.P. posts lately. I think I may have to change the name of the blog to "I hear dead people". Or maybe "but I digress", to account for all the "reminds me of this" side-trips.
Earl Palmer passed away late last week at the age of 84. Although he wasn't a household name, I guarantee you've heard his playing-- for decades he was one of the most widely-recorded musicians on the L.A. studio scene, recording with everyone from Frank Sinatra to Neil Young.
Although he plays on dozens if not hundreds of records I own, I never really fixed on his name until I heard his playing on David Axelrod's Songs of Innocence album. Palmer was, along the great bassist Carol Kaye, the core of Axelrod's rhythm section in the era of Axelrod's great productions for Capitol Records. Axelrod's music is really hard to pin down genre-wise; it flirts with jazz, rock and orchestral music, but never settles into any one groove for long. Palmer did a phenomenal job of tying them all together, as this song illustrates:
The song is all over the place, with themes and dynamics shifting almost constantly, but Palmer stays in such a deep pocket throughout that all the changes make sense. On the strength of playing like this, he's maybe my favorite drummer ever.
Modest digression: I can't really let the opportunity slip to mention that Palmer was from New Orleans, which has produced more great drummers than anywhere (Ziggy Modeliste, Idris Muhammad, Smokey Johnson, James Black, Clayton Fillyau, Baby Dodds, etc. etc.).
A jazz vibraphone player gets sent to the studio to make an album of pop covers saddled with sitar and strings and draws a Beatles cover. Beatles covers are inherently really hard to pull off because (duh) the band were so fucking great. This works, though.
Being an instrumental, McCoy is freed from having to sing Lennon at his most self-indulgent and precious ("sitting on a cornflake"? "elementary penguin singing Hare Krishna"?) and can focus on the deliciously off-kilter melody.
The other day I had an intense Peter Sellers jones and watched The Pink Panther for the first time in 20+ years. I had forgotten all about the dance scene, so I flipped when it came to this part:
Within the context of the film, the scene makes no sense—Claudia Cardinale’s ambiguously ethnic (but really kinda Indian) princess character spontaneously rocks a ski chalet with a latin-esque dance number (in Italian, no less) and then the action resumes with no comment—but Mancini’s “Meglio Stasera” is a great song.
This version is pretty good, too:
Les McCann: “It Had Better Be Tonight (Meglio Stasera)” (Pacific Jazz, 1964)
My homie Kenan a/k/a Kool Kear hollered to tell me about a radio show he and his partner Kray just started on East Village Radio (available as a podcast here and on iTunes). They also have a new blog, chanceswithwolves.
One of Kenan's first blog posts was on the film 80 Blocks From Tiffany's, a 1979 documentary about Bronx street gangs which I'd been jonesing to see ever since Jeff Chang described it to me a few years ago. (I've also been pestering Kenan to mail me a copy for like 2 years... yo, Kenan!) It turns out the film is up on youtube, although its hour running time is broken into into 8 pieces. Here's the first:
I'm fascinated by the early history of hip hop, including the crossover between gangs and rap crews, so this film has been kind of a holy grail for me. It's set in the borough that birthed hip hop just at the moment before rap music entered the national consciousness. While it's far from the film's focus, there's a moment in the closing block party scene that touches on hip hop in a cool way, when a woman starts chanting a bunch of generic park jam emcee patter. The film doesn't establish the context very well and it sometimes seems unbelievable, but there are some great random monologues (not to mention shit-talking!).
The music in the film is good, too, but none of it is identified in the credits. During a couple scenes, this plays:
Chico Hamilton: "Conquistadores (The Conquerors)" (Impulse, 1965)
The guitar parts are by Gabor Szabo, who is one of my favorite musicians but who I seldom remember to play or listen to.
Last night I caught a freebie and went to see the drummer Billy Cobham. His chops are ridiculous and he had the great Kenny Barron on piano, but there was a lil too much Randy Brecker-with-awful-effects on top of a few too many Cobham compositions with crazy time signatures. So I didn't enjoy the show much, except for when he played this:
Billy Cobham: "Heather" (Atlantic, 1974)
If you're from the Bay, you'll recognize it as the sample to Souls of Mischief's "93 Til Infinity", which long ago became an Oakland anthem. The rightness of hearing him play the song live in Oakland made me happy and got me wondering-- does he bust out "Red Baron" when he plays Compton? "Crosswinds" in Brooklyn? "Almustafa the Beloved" in the Bronx? I hope so.
