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Lord Echo: Thinking Of You (feat. Lisa Tomlins)
From Melodies (Economy, 2010)
(Editor’s note: David Terrace wrote me a few weeks back to see if I had heard anything about this NZ artist named “Lord Echo” and his incredible cover of Sister Sledge’s “Thinking of You.” I hadn’t but was absolutely taken with the song and I asked David to shed some more light on him for the site. –OW) A couple of weeks ago a friend handed me a disc that had been given to him by a friend from the South Island of New [...]
Continue reading LORD ECHO: FUNK FROM THE ANTIPODES
It took me about a week but I finally finished all ~700 pages of Dan Charnas’ The Big Payback. Some (extensive) thoughts…
First up, I’m not exaggerating when I say I think this isn’t just the most important book on hip-hop that’s come out in years; it’s one of the most important books on pop music, period. After all, hip-hop has been the most powerful musical force – in the world – of the late 30 years and The Big Payback enriches our understanding of the music and its global impact through the vastness [...]
Continue reading THE BIG PAYBACK: REVISITED
Dan Charnas: The Big Payback
Just from word of mouth, I knew this book, at the very least, was going to be pretty good. Charnas has been making the book tour rounds, including a great interview on Fresh Air the other week and listening to him run down a few stories I knew about but didn’t have all the details for made me run out to a local bookstore and buy it. That’s right, I wasn’t even patient enough to order it online and save 33% (and I’m usually cheap!)
And so I started reading it [...]
Continue reading THE BIG PAYBACK: JUST IN TIME FOR THE HOLIDAYS
When I originally wrote about “La Murga De Panama” back in 2006, I naively wrote “I find it rather funny that such a rousing Latin dance anthem would have originally appeared on a Christmas album.”
Well, maybe I should have bothered to research the song itself since, if you understand “La Murga” in connection with Carnival, it makes total sense to put it on a holiday album (provided, Carnival is after Xmas but it’s most certainly a massive holiday/festival season during the winter, throughout South America). Murga seems largely associated with Uruguay or Argentina but given the [...]
Continue reading ‘TIS THE SEASON FOR LA MURGA
Mayer Hawthorne, covering one of the few holiday songs I can remotely stomach*. I think this every year I hear Guaraldi’s classic but has there ever been a sadder, more melancholy, yet sublimely lovely Christmas song than this? It is so perfectly Schultzian in that weird mix of angst and hope that sprung eternal from the Peanuts creator. I thought Mayer did a great job here and pays real homage to the emotional truth of the original.
Mayer Hawthorne – Christmas Time Is Here by Mayer Hawthorne
You can DL it from here.
*This [...]
Continue reading MAYER MEETS GUARALDI
I originally mentioned “Morning” a little over three years ago in one of my “Who flipped it better?” posts but I erroneously wrote it about as if it were Tjader’s original. It’s actually a Clare Fischer tune but given that I had discovered Tjader’s music first – and I was too lazy to look at publishing credits – I assumed Fischer had covered Tjader vs. the other way around.
Either way, it’s an absolutely marvelous bit of laid-back Latin jazz goodness and holds up from version to version. Here’s both Fischer’s original plus a re-recording he [...]
Continue reading “MORNING” GLORY
I “discovered” “Viva Tirado” back around 1990, when Kid Frost sampled/interpolated parts of it for “La Raza” but I didn’t realize the greater genealogy of the song until later in the decade when one of my academic mentors, Josh Kun, put me up on how Frost was flipping an El Chicano song that, in turn, was based on a Gerald Wilson original.
The connection planted a tenacious seed in my head and for the dozen years after that, I slowly began to flesh out the story behind what I call the song’s “multiple iterations” and specifically, [...]
Continue reading THE STORY BEHIND “VIVA TIRADO”
The first jazz record I ever bought was sometime around 1990/1, a 7″ version of King Pleasure singing James Moody/Eddie Jefferson’s “Moody’s Mood For Love.” This song still sound magical to me, 20 years later. Thanks James. RIP.
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