Live Tomorrow in Athens (See You There Motherf@#!ers!)

Clifford Brown & Max Roach - Study in Brown (Jazz, 1955)

"With my quartet, holding time for each other would lock us in. My charge with the group is to add color and be dynamic in my accompaniment, not just to keep time for the players. They keep time. I can go outside of the time!"

Clifford Brown was born October 30, 1930 in Wilmington, Delaware. As a young high school student Brown began playing trumpet and within a very short time was active in college and other youth bands. By his late teens he had attracted the favourable attention of leading jazzmen, including fellow trumpeters Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis and Fats Navarro. At the end of the 40s he was studying music at Maryland University and in 1952, following recovery from a serious road accident, he made his first records with Chris Powell and Tadd Dameron. In the autumn of 1953 he was a member of the big band Lionel Hampton took to Europe. Liberally filled with precocious talent, this band attracted considerable attention during its tour. Contrary to contractual stipulations, many of the young musicians moonlighted on various recordings and Brown in particular was singled out for such sessions. Back in the USA, Brown was fired along with most of the rest of the band when Hampton learned of the records they had made. Brown then joined Art Blakey and in mid-1954 teamed up with Max Roach to form the Clifford Brown-Max Roach Quintet. It was actually Dizzy Gillespie who recommended Clifford Brown to Roach. The quintet was quickly recognized as one of the outstanding groups in contemporary jazz and Brown as a major trumpeter and composer. On June 26th, 1956, while driving between engagements during a nationwide tour, Brown and another quintet member, pianist Richie Powell, were killed in a road accident leaving the other members in despair.
Max Roach was devastated but he kept the quintet together with Kenny Dorham and Sonny Rollins as the lead horns. For the remainder of the '50s, he would continue to use major talents like Booker Little, George Coleman and Hank Mobley in his small groups, dropping the piano entirely now and then.
Anyway, this album's a must. An essential recording that defined the hard bop of the '50s, it will give you plenty of chance to marvel at his fleet improvisations and sharp tone, which remarkably never lost its fullness at any speed. A total jazz masterpiece!


Let's Go Get It!

40 Winks - Sound Puzzle (Ambient/Hip-Hop/Downtempo, 2007)

"When you’re digging for records to sample from, you’ll come by a lot of dope stuff. It can go from jazz, soul, blues to psychedelic rock..."

40 Winks is an instrumental hip hop group made up of two producers - Padmo' and Weedy - from Belgium. Very much induling the Merck soft-spot for all things hip-hop, their second LP really boils it beats to perfection - dispensing with the IDM leanings of Machine Drum et al and going straight for the heavy-weight gold. Sounding not unlike something which would ignite the Ninja Tune cabal in frenzied delight, the eight tracks here all thunder along with sprightly glee that flirts with the credible end of lounge music - evoking smoky European bars and crackling home movies. Fans of DJ Cam, Nightmares On Wax, DJ Krush etc will be very pleased!


Let's Go Get It!

Pete Rock - The Surviving Elements (Hip-Hop, 2005)

"DJ Premier' s one of the only producers from my era that’s still doin’ something...he's very street at times, but I like to be versatile and be street and be a little R&B, a little melodic, mix a little pop with a little reggae - a little bit of everything. But where my heart lies is in the underground, and I think Primo’s does as well!"

Pete Rock's skewed renderings of long forgotten jazz noodles and 70s soul have left an indelible mark on hip-hop production. On his fifth LP, once again Pete Rock comes up tromps with a varied selection of beats to suit all moods. Unlike "Petestrumentals", this time around there are no vocal tracks, thus enabling the songs to shine and drawing the listener into the sonic dreamscapes he masters by fusing velvety strings, funky warbled basslines and a wealth of soul and jazz samples. BBE states that "these are beats that were intended for the “Soul Survivor II” album. However, BBE felt this selection of instrumentals were strong enough to hold their own on an instrumental album." A surely enjoyable laid-back hip-hop album with the trademark Pete Rock style.


Let's Go Get It!

Ozomatli - Ozomatli (Hip-Hop/Funk, 1998)

"In other groups, it’s often one or two guys who call all the shots and everyone else just follows. In our situation, we try to give everybody’s point of view consideration. It’s a family thing, we’ve been a band for 14 years..."

In their fourteen years together as a band, celebrated Los Angeles culture-mashers Ozomatli have gone from being hometown heroes to being named U.S. State Department Cultural Ambassadors. Originally formed to play at an area labor protest over a decade ago, Ozomatli spent some of their early days participating in everything from earthquake prep "hip hop ghetto plays" at inner-city L.A. elementary schools to community activist events, protests, and city fundraisers.
At its core, the group is a dance band, blending funk, hip-hop, Latin rhythms, jazz, salsa, reggae, Tejano, and worldbeat into its sound. It's a busy, heady mix and occasionally there's simply too much going on in the mix for it to be easy to digest. Nevertheless, it's easy to admire a group that challenges the listeners, and Ozomatli certainly do that with their eponymous debut album. Not only is the music dense and exciting, but the lyrics are politically charged and daring, adding substance to the infectious music.


Let's Go Get It!

Live Radio Today! (Saturday October 31)

Cheers everyone, today's the second day most-def radio is on air! You can tune in everytime by clicking the picture on your right. If this doesn't work, click on one of the links below:


http://mostdef.listen2myradio.com
http://mostdef.listen2mymusic.com
http://mostdef.radiostream321.com
http://mostdef.listen2myshow.com
http://mostdef.youstream.fm
http://mostdef.radio12345.com
http://mostdef.radiostream123.com


My first podcast is on for tonight. For requests, tracklists etc you can contact me via the listen2myradio chat function, or on the comment board on this blog. Enjoy the tunes!

Syd Barrett - The Madcap Laughs (Psychedelic Pop/Rock, 1971)

"I don't think I'm easy to talk about. I've got a very irregular head. And I'm not anything that you think I am anyway."

Having left Pink Floyd in 1968 after a daily LSD habit had taken its toll, Syd Barrett's first solo album finally appeared two years later with ex-Floyd sidekicks David Gilmour and Richard Wright riding shotgun with him in the studio. The Madcap Laughs is a brilliant but brittle album, with every strum of the electric guitar seeming to take its toll on Barrett's increasingly frayed nerve strings. The final album is a somewhat daunting listen, but quite phenomenal if you can get your mind into Syd's world, where things like rhythm are rather amorphous. "No Good Trying," "No Man's Land," "Octopus," and "Late Night" are strange but amazing masterpieces of psychedelic rock. On the first two especially, the backing musicians sound like they're furiously trying to keep up with Syd and the music is always on the verge of flying apart at the seams in a wonderful and interesting sort of way. "Terrapin," "Dark Globe," and "Golden Hair" are the more acoustic classics. All in all, the circumstances under which the LP was made have to be understood in order to take a fairly look into it. Yes, it is uneven, but still, it's an amazing debut and a modest gem.

Let's Go Get It!

DJ Cam - Soulshine (Abstract/Trip-Hop, 2003)

"I love hip-hop like Madonna loves dick! "

Parisian hip-hop devotee Laurent Daumail is one of a few but growing number of French artists updating hip-hop for the chill-out crowd, drawing on the beats'n'samples groundwork of producers such as Rakim, DJ Premier, and Prince Paul and combining it with broad, impressionistic strokes of dub, jazz, and soundtrack-y ambience. Like countrymen the Mighty Bop and la Funk Mob, DJ Cam is stylistically closest to Mo'Wax artists such as DJ Shadow and DJ Krush: minimalist, downbeat instrumental hip-hop built from obscure samples and stomp-box turntable accompaniment, bent and twisted into new, artfully arranged compositions.
This album features China, Inlove, Guru from Gangstarr, Donnie , Anggun, and the funk legend Cameo. Differing radically from his former work , “ Soulshine” only contained unplugged tracks , and as little sampling as possible. The track “Summer In Paris“ featuring Anggun is a worldwide hit while “Love Junkee” featuring Cameo is remixed by the great J Dilla.


Let's Go Get It!

Kruder & Dorfmeister - The K&D Sessions (Electronic/Chill Out, 1998)

"This album is the "Hotel California" of our times - everyone has it at home!"

The trip-hop production duo of Peter Kruder and Richard Dorfmeister has gained more fame for its stellar remixes and DJ sets than as producers of its own work. The K&D Sessions is a double CD compilation of the best of those mixes - 140 minutes of music that takes in artists as far apart as Roni Size, Depeche Mode, Bomb The Bass and Bones Thugs ‘N Harmony. K&D revel in mixing all sorts of music, whether it’s trip-hop, jazz, jungle, drum & bass or whatever other genre you care to name. Almost too good to be true, this is a true musical masterpiece!


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Frank Zappa - We're Only in It For the Money (Psychedelic Rock/Experimental, 1968)

"You see the origins of hippies is quite a different evolution from the LA freak movement, of which I was a part and there was just a difference in the concept of it. I was never a hippie. I never bought the flower power ethic."

Frank Zappa was one of the most accomplished composers of the rock era, a satirist whose reserves of scorn seemed bottomless and whose wicked sense of humor and absurdity have delighted his numerous fans, even when his lyrics crossed over the broadest bounds of taste. He became interested in music early and pursued his studies in school, up through a six-month stint at Chaffey College in Alta Loma, CA. He scored a couple of low-budget films and used the money to buy a low-budget recording studio. In 1964, he joined a local band called the Soul Giants, which, over the course of the next two years, evolved into the infamous "Mothers of Invension".
"We're Only in It For the Money" is Zappa's third album along with the Mothers- a satirical masterpiece that simultaneously skewered the hippies and the straights as prisoners of the same narrow-minded, superficial phoniness. The album essentially devotes its first half to satire, and its second half to presenting alternatives. Despite some specific references, the first-half suite is still wickedly funny, since its targets remain immediately recognizable. The second half shows where his sympathies lie, with character sketches of Zappa's real-life freak acquaintances, a carefree utopia in "Take Your Clothes Off When You Dance," and the strident, unironic protest "Mother People." Regardless of how dark the subject matter, there's a pervasively surreal, whimsical flavor to the music, sort of like Sgt.Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band as a creepy nightmare. Some of the instruments and most of the vocals have been manipulated to produce odd textures and cartoonish voices - most songs are abbreviated, segue into others through edited snippets of music and dialogue, or are broken into fragments by more snippets, consistently interrupting the album's continuity. Compositionally, though, the music reveals itself as exceptionally strong, and Zappa's politics and satirical instinct have rarely been so focused and relevant, making "We're Only in It For the Money" quite probably his greatest achievement.



Let's Go Get It!