Peter Lang - American Stock: A Guitar Collection

Peter Lang is an American Primitive Guitarist in the true sense of the word. His technique is rooted in open-tuned, pre-blues guitar styles dating back to revolutionary times. His music looks forward, however, and combines the deep, mysterious, memory-inducing melodies and dark chords of John Fahey with the agility and precision of Leo Kottke. He draws these influences together with strains of classical guitar, Joseph Spence, ragtime, country blues, and timeless American folk melodies. You can hear all these influences, along with the white-collar folk-blues of Koerner, Ray & Glover, but Lang's style is unique and instantly recognizable.

He recorded an LP for Takoma in 1973, and was featured on their "Fahey, Lang, Kottke" release. Then he made some albums for Flying Fish and Waterhouse records, which began to augment the classic, stark, solo guitar sound with other instruments and vocals. These albums are somewhat uneven; Lang's singing is a warm and muddy baritone not unlike Kottke. The presence of other instruments sometimes enhances the guitar, and sometimes sounds totally dated.

American Stock: A Guitar Collection was released in 1986, and recorded on several dates from 1976 to 1986. On it, he revisits many of the songs and styles that he premiered on other albums, but with a new understanding and maturity. It stands out as a return to the classic instrumental sound. The few tracks augmented by other instruments are integrated more successfully. The interplay between National Steel guitar and screaming electric violin on "Halloween Blues" is amazingly spooky, and his solo cover of Joseph Spence's version of "There Will Be a Happy Meeting in Heaven Tonight" is classic.

After releasing this album, Peter Lang went into semi-retirement, and didn't release another album until 2001's Dharma Blues.

Peter Lang - American Stock: A Guitar Collection
Year: 1986
Label: Aspen
get it here.
from vinyl | mp3 >192kbps vbr | no cover | 79mb

This album is out of print, but you can get most of his others from his website/itunes.

for guitar tunings and discography, check out stropes.com

Albert Ayler - Love Cry

"He carried the gift, the voice, a reflection of God." -Don Cherry

And if you like jug band music, why not try out this avant-garde jazz? Seriously. It has the same freewheeling spirit, the same abundant joy and chaos. I chanced upon Albert Ayler when I found the 9-CD box set "Holy Ghost" by Revenant. I listened and I was totally blown away. Here was this music that was totally challenging and avant-garde, yet totally beautiful and spiritual. His music sounds like a marching band that has travelled to the future, become enlightened, and then forgotten all about it as they stumble back into the 60s, all screaming ecstasy in different tongues. Sometimes these tongues are harmonious, sometimes dissonant. Sometimes in time with each other, sometimes unhinged and flying in different directions. But always free, soulful, and beautiful. Not pretty. Beautiful. There's a difference.

Of all the musical geniuses who died in the prime of their life, Albert Ayler is perhaps the most like Icarus. With one subtle difference: Ayler made it to the sun.

"By 1958, Albert Ayler and his horn had made some rounds: from boy prodigy to teenage member of Little Walter's Blues Band, from "Little Bird" of Cleveland to featured US Army Band soloist. Then he resolutely set out to forget everything he'd ever learned about how to properly play the sax so that he could really PLAY it -- unhinged, free from strictures of pitch and form, drawing on spirituals, folksong, marches, and other big whopping chunks of collective musical memory -- to channel symphonies to God out his horn.

Seeking nothing short of Truth in music, Albert Ayler became THE catalytic force in defining the sound of the tenor in Free Jazz, and was a heavy influence on John Coltrane's later work." -Revenant

"A genius of the tenor saxophone." -Cecil Taylor

Biography by Scott Yanow
One of the giants of free jazz, Albert Ayler was also one of the most controversial. His huge tone and wide vibrato were difficult to ignore, and his 1966 group sounded like a runaway New Orleans brass band from 1910.

Unlike John Coltrane or Eric Dolphy, Albert Ayler was not a virtuoso who had come up through the bebop ranks. His first musical jobs were in R&B bands, including one led by Little Walter, although oddly enough he was nicknamed "Little Bird" in his early days because of a similarity in sound on alto to Charlie Parker. During his period in the army (1958-1961), he played in a service band and switched to tenor. Unable to find work in the U.S. after his discharge due to his uncompromising style, Ayler spent time in Sweden and Denmark during 1962-1963, making his first recordings (which reveal a tone with roots in Sonny Rollins) and working a bit with Cecil Taylor. Ayler's prime period was during 1964-1967. In 1964, he toured Europe with a quartet that included Don Cherry and was generally quite free and emotional. The following year he had a new band with his brother Donald Ayler on trumpet and Charles Tyler on baritone, and the emphasis in his music began to change. Folk melodies (which had been utilized a bit with Cherry) had a more dominant role, as did collective improvisation, and yet, despite the use of spaced-out marches, Irish jigs, and brass band fanfares, tonally Ayler remained quite free. His ESP recordings from this era and his first couple of Impulse records find Ayler at his peak and were influential; John Coltrane's post-1964 playing was definitely affected by Ayler's innovations.

"Man, what kind of reed you using?" -John Coltrane

However, during his last couple of years, Albert Ayler's career seemed to become a bit aimless and his final Impulse sessions, although experimental (with the use of vocals, rock guitar, and R&B-ish tunes), were at best mixed successes. A 1970 live concert that was documented features him back in top form, but in November 1970, Ayler was found drowned in New York's East River under mysterious circumstances.

"The dynamite sound of our time!" -Amiri Baraka

Review by Al Campbell:

From the time he was signed to Impulse in 1966, it was assumed that Albert Ayler's releases on that label would be motivated by an attempt at commercialism. While the music was toned down from his earlier ESP recordings, by no means did Ayler ever make commercial records. Much in the same way John Coltrane's later-period Impulse releases weren't commercial, Ayler simply took advantage of a larger record company's distribution, trying to expose the music to more people. Ayler's uncompromising musical freedom mixed with his catchy combination of nursery rhythms and brass band marches remained prominent on Love Cry. The interplay between the Ayler brothers also remained fiery as younger sibling Donald is heard playing trumpet for the last time on a recording with his brother. Donald was fired from the band (at the suggestion of Impulse) and, unfortunately, was committed to a mental institution for a short stay after these sessions were made. The rhythm section of Alan Silva on bass and Milford Graves on drums continually instigates and propels this music into furious militaristic march territory. Unhappily, the four tracks in which Call Cobbs is featured on harpsichord tend to drag the music down; it's unfortunate his gospel-inspired piano or organ playing couldn't have been utilized instead. The CD reissue contains alternate takes of "Zion Hill" and "Universal Indians."

Albert Ayler - Love Cry
Year: 1967
Label: Impulse
catch that band!
mp3 192kbps | w/ cover | 74mb

for westwardwall

ayler.org - bio, disco, music, stories, etc etc

and
Revenant Records: Albert Ayler - Holy Ghost: Rare & Unissued Recordings (1962-70)

"If people don't like it now, they will." -Albert Ayler

Clifford Hayes & The Dixieland Jug Blowers

The Dixieland Jug Blowers were the finest of the city jug bands.

~Sam Charters

More of the Same, only different.

Biography by Craig Harris:
The Louisville, Kentucky-based Dixieland Jug Blowers were one of the first jug bands to record. Led by violinist Clifford Hayes and jug player Earl McDonald, the Chicago-based group, which featured clarinetist Johnny Dodds, left a legacy of twenty-three tracks, including "Boodle Am Shake", "Memphis Shake" and "Skit, Skat, Doodle-Do", recorded between December 1926 and June 1927. Recording as the Louisville Jug Band, they cut such tunes as "She's In The Graveyard Now".

South Carolina-born McDonald moved to Louisville, at the age of two, in 1885. He formed the Louisville Jug Band while still in high school. The product of a musical family, Glasgow, Kentucky-born Hayes moved to Jeffersonville, Indiana in his teens. He joined McDonald's band in 1913.

Although McDonald and Hayes formally separated, over financial conflicts, by 1919, they continued to hire each other to play on recordings and live performances.

Clifford Hayes & The Dixieland Jug Blowers
Year: 1927-28 (rec); 1976 (comp); 1991 (reissue)
Label: Yazoo
boodle-am-boo. (re-post 11-08)
mp3 192kbps | w/ cover | 50mb

Jugs, Washboards, & Kazoos

Some of the very fines of the early jug band sides. This music is carefree and highly buoyant. It is hipster music from the days of the first hipsters. Really it was much closer to the dixieland jazz of New Orleans (King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, etc) than it was to folk music or country blues, despite the rather do-it-yourself instrumentation of kitchen implements turned music-makers. Why the jugs, you may ask? Well they were cheeper than tubas, and in plentiful supply due to the amount of bootlegging that was going on. Likewise, a washtub was cheaper than a double bass, and a washboard was a great alternative to a sack full of drums (actually, come to think of it, there are no washtubs in these recordings). Kazoos were the obvious response to the trumpet, and harmonicas were already becoming a readily accepted and viable musical instrument. Though these instruments would become novelty items in decades to come, here they shine as brightly as the guitars, pianos, fiddles, banjos, clarinets, and saxophones which they accompany. And their particular tones are exploited perfectly, sounding wonderfully unlike anything before or since (check the sweet interplay between fiddle and jug on the Dixieland Jug Blowers sides). Couple this with an irresistibly insistent rhythmic groove that gets you hopping up and down whether you like it or not, and you have the makings of some seriously good-time music. Reefer has done some great things for the musical evolution of this century, let me tell you.

This disc shines for its spectacular selection. There's plenty of surface noise, so be warned, but the levels are fully present, having been ripped from vinyl on some professional recording equipment, so the music is really there and it sounds great (you soon won't even notice the clicks and pops, or the fact that you've been bouncing and stamping unconsciously for 40 minutes). There's some great ironic vocal deliveries (What Makes My Baby Cry), and even a mock-sermon on bootleggin' and short skirts (House Rent Rag) that parodies the sanctified jug bands. The standout tracks on this album are by the Dixieland Jug Blowers and Tiny Parham and his Musicians, all of which approach jazz and are both extremely contagious, fun-wise.

VA - Jugs, Washboards, & Kazoos
Dixieland Jug Blowers, Five Harmaniacs, Memphis Jug Band, Tiny Parham, Washboard Rhythm Kings
Year: 1967 (comp)
Label: RCA Victor
jugs!
from old, scratchy vinyl | mp3 ~180kbps vbr | w/o covers | 60mb

out of print, though you can get the Complete Recorded Works of these guys from Document Records.

see also many jug band posts at Broke Down Engine, Merlin in Rags, and El Diablo Tun Tun. Do a search.

The Microphones - Little Bird Flies Into a Big Black Cloud

Well, now, I do a lot of badmouthing of sensitive singer-songwriter types, partly because they are inexplicably popular right now, and partly because by and large they are mediocre musicians and rather whiny, self-centered egoists. Yes, there is a certain undeniable charm to Nick Drake, Elliott Smith, Iron & Wine, and those folk. Yes, there are certain songwriters who are good enough writers and restless enough spirits to never become a walking cliché (Bob Dylan until 1975, Tom Waits, Joni Mitchell, Tori Amos). But by and large, it's mostly precocious pop music disguised in a slightly more literate, reflective shell.

But I am not a one-sided coin, and there are a few singer-songwriters and indie musicians who, despite being sloppy musicians and quavering singers, I really love. Phil Elvrum, AKA The Microphones, AKA Mount Eerie is one of those restless spirits who never lets questions of pitch and tempo get in the way of his music, and never lets music get in the way of his divinely inspired but remarkably down-to-earth lyrics. Like e.e.cummings, his humility and lo-fi aesthetic allow Phil to craft little gems of natural mysticism without ever getting pretentious.

His music is filled with the dissonant chords, heaping waves of sound, and odd phrasing that you'd associate with the avant-garde, and yet is very accessible, nay, universal, in its persistent glowing wonder. Like medieval devotional music as conceived by a wandering nomad of the post-consumer desert, filtered through the lens of a very gentle child of the punk age. This album in particular is like a cross between a church service delivered by William Blake and a children's story as conceived by Cecil Taylor. Or vice-versa. Or something.

With a highly idiosyncratic set of personal recurring symbols to populate his songs, many of which become characters in their own right (fog, the moon, the sun, buoys, trees, blood, ships, the mountain), he is guaranteed not to tread the cliché-ed territory of that most overtrodden of symbols, the rose. He is to this date, the only artist in any medium who has communicated the way I feel when I'm in love: totally excited by the magic of it, totally devoid of conventional romance, and with an underlying current of profound sadness. Phil Elvrum is one of the few people I have met who is unafraid to show how afraid he is, when he is afraid that is. He is, above all else, honest, and his integrity is so naked and compelling that I can't help but let fall my own desperately concocted costumes of chic, my machinations of machismo. It is his vulnerability, coupled with vision, idiosyncrasy and persistence, which make me finally lay down my mountain, bare my fragile hardened heart heart, let flow my precious blood, and say "enter."

Cause why shouldn't I live as God in a glowing canyon?
My life could be a fruit bowl with my hand in.
Stuck with arrows, tarred and feathered,
In a tigers jaw, loving living raw,
I get my truce through open stares and steady open palms.

The Microphones - Little Bird Flies Into a Big Black Cloud
Year: 2002
Label: St. Ives
bloody songs and sunny beams.
mp3 256kbps | w/o cover | 70mb

All the tracks are untitled, though you can find the lyrics and some of the song names at the Mount Eerie Preservation Society. Or, if you simply must have names for all your songs, this tracklist has been suggested, though plenty of the titles are just the most notable verse from the song.
This album was released in a vinyl edition of 400 copies, each with a different hand-painted cover. They were well-gone by the time I heard it, so don't expect to find one. But you can get several of his albums from P.W. Elverum and Sun (including a free downloadable album of another OOP vinyl, Seven New Songs of Mt. Eerie)!.
K. Records hosts a number of similar musicians and has several Microphones albums as well, with a deluxe edition of The Glow, Pt.2 just released, as I write this, right now.


And here's a good review by Tiny Mix-Tapes:

In a world dependent on synthetic pills and dot-coms, it's nice to know Phil Elvrum (aka The Microphones) is out there. He is like a breath of fresh air in the middle of Boston Chinatown, a pitchfork hidden in an array of electronic tuners. He faultlessly transforms the basic rock elements into extensions of his creative impulses. With an impulse here and an impulse there, the creative juices ebb & flow as often as he sings about the moon, the fog, the wind, the water, and the mountain tops-- which is a lot.

On Little Bird Flies into a Big Black Cloud (the sonic version of a book he wrote last year of the same title) never have these impulses been so lucid. Throughout its ethereal compositions, you'll hear new songs, old songs, and pretty much everything in between. Cram previously released albums like Song Islands, The Glow pt. 2, It Was Hot, We Stayed in the Water, and Don't Wake Me Up into a pencil sharpener, sprinkle the shavings on a nearby lake, and you're getting closer to being a complete idiot that just ruined some great albums. But don't fret, with this record by your side, you'll never want or have reason to leave your house again, if only to repurchase the albums you ruined.

The beauty of the record lies in its simplicity. Recorded with a Neumann U67 microphone (set on cardioid) and a Sony Cassette Recorder, Little Bird reflects Elvrum at his most sincere, and perhaps, his most vulnerable. It's incredibly intimate; you can't help but feel as if you are staring over the shoulder of a man writing the rough draft of a magnificent novel. Every piano chord, every organ hit is like Elvrum himself poking you in the stomach with his fingers. By the end of the record, you'll feel as if his whole hand is stuck inside the gooey goodness of your voluptuous belly.

Relinquishing the acoustic guitar and stereo experimentalism for strictly piano and organ, Elvrum bequeaths a relentless batch of songs that transcend simple pop conventions. He recorded 40min of music with 40min of time; there's no layered tracks, no patches, no re-recorded parts. Replete with wavering time rhythms and fluctuating notes, the record has a relaxed, apathetic disposition. It makes you feel comfortable and invites you to listen to its entire natural splendor. Despite the "low" fidelity, these songs are far from mere demos or blueprints or live versions; they are the sound of a process, a performance; the sound of a song in its most naked state.

Generalizing the two sides of the record, the first is more "song" based, as most of the tracks have a distinct beginning and end. Traces of past melodies from previous albums ("I Want Wind to Blow," "The Glow pt. 2," "I'll Not Contain You") haunt throughout, as Elvrum alternates between organ and piano. The tracks on side two prove harder to discern from one another. With the exception of the first two tracks (which are fucking amazing, mind you), the rest are built around a somber chord progression. One moment he'll be singing above slow organ notes ("There's No Invincible Disguise that Lasts All Day"), the next he'll be singing a capalla ("Phil Elvrum's Will"). Though, despite the familiar melodies, all 18 tracks are simply titled by its track number enclosed in brackets.

If anything, Little Bird is essentially a stripped-down Microphones album. And if you are familiar with the Microphones, then you know you don't have to strip down much to get to its core. As the trend with many great albums of late, Little Bird is limited to only 400, all of them on vinyl, each of them hand-painted and letter pressed. Every cover will be essentially different, which is refreshing considering that nearly every other album cover is pressed on a mass scale. (Mine features two floating heads on the back of a Simon Joyner EP turned inside-out.) Once the 400 are gone, they are not coming back. So, if you act quickly and do a little sifting on the web, you too can have one of the most genuine albums released this millennium.

Larry McNeely - Rhapsody for Banjo

Another fine Flying Fish album of bluegrass-meets-jazz. Larry McNeely was a lifetime session player and backup man to schlocky musicians (Glen Campbell, Roy Acuff, et all), this album shows he really had some ideas in addition to his sparkling chops. His banjo picking is very chromatic and exploratory, delving into jazz and eastern european musics while maintaining the piledriving rhythmic force of Earl Scruggs. One of the tracks (Space Circus) actually sounds decently close to the Peter Lang end of the Takoma spectrum of fingerpicking guitar.

AMG Review by Eugene Chadbourne:
That this guy is one of the flashiest and technically adept banjo pickers around would be a fact many bluegrass fans would be happy to wager a set of fingerpicks or two over. Many tracks on this album are simply killer, and the presence of mandolinist Jethro Burns will definitely be of interest to listeners who would like to hear more of his fine, serious picking outside the wacky confines of the famous Homer and Jethro unit. The originals by McNeely, highlighting fast-moving developments with a particularly aggressive sense of time, would predict the later work of artists such as Bela Fleck, and younger fans of this latter artist should definitely check out the playing of artists such as McNeely who have received a whole lot less hype in their lifetime. However it is something of a shame that McNeely also chose to play guitar in a hot jazz or swing style, his work vastly in the debt of jazz picker supreme Django Reinhardt, to whom he dedicates a tune. When it comes to these tracks the music is just much less original and exciting, unless the listener is a bluegrass fanatic who has never heard any other styles of music before, in which case it might be difficult to predict what the reaction might be. Nashville session king Roy Husky is solid on bass, no doubt smoking a cigar the whole time.


Larry McNeely - Rhapsody for Banjo
Year: 1979
Label: Flying Fish
bedazzled. [re-post 12-08]
not my rip (vinyl) | mp3 128kbps | no cover (and none can be found on the interweb) | 31mb

Tracks:
1 Black Room
2 Slipped Disc
3 To Django
4 Red Haired Boy
5 Honeysuckle Rose
6 Edson Breakaway
7 Blue Jazz
8 Bonjo Nova
9 Spell Zubenelgenubi
10 Limehouse Blues
11 Sinstone
12 Rhapsody for Banjo #1

also see Norman Blake/Vassar Clements/Tut Taylor/Jethro Burns/Dave Holland/et all for more great bluegrass jazz from Flying Fish.

Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks

Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks were the unofficial successors to Jim Kweskin & The Jug Band. They were smart, weird, catchy, fun, and highly musical. And they sounded entirely unlike the Kweskin band, or anyone else for that matter. In an era dominated by snot-encrusted, bellybutton-gazing, semi-literate, mirror-fixated, testosterone-deprived, over-medicated, self-appointed prophets of a particularly lifeless strain of homogenized, lyrically depraved, self-indulgent faux-poetic songcraft (John Denver, Leonard Cohen, James Taylor, and that ilk), Dan Hicks stood out from the crowd. And remember, we are not even mentioning the ocean of mediocrity that was 70s rock (a few exceptions notwithstanding). If the '70s singer-songwriter scene had a single saving grace, musically, it was Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks (Tom Waits running a close second).

Hicks was supported in his eccentric folk-jazz efforts by a stellar group of musicians including John L. Girton (lead guitar), Sid Page (electric violin), and the Lickettes, who offered off-kilter backup vocals and percussive asides. While, with the exception of the fiddler, virtuosity is never a focal point, the group has a fully-developed sound that is totally integrated and unified.

But it was really his songwriting that made the band. His lyrics were some of the sharpest-tongued, dryest-witted, and subtly hilarious bits of irreverence ever committed to rhyme. And he set these lyric gems to quirky, quiet, quagmiric tunes that traded on a bagful of jazz chords and an irresistibly propulsive rhythm. This music gets under your skin, and the lyrics are set loose upon your unsuspecting brain. It's one hell of a good time. In his delightfully demented music, Glenn Miller-style vocal harmonies mesh with cowboy songs, Hot Club swing meets the laid-back groove of an opium-drenched Hawaiian harem. Add a cast of bizarre characters to populate his narrative songs, a East-European classical bolero flair, and ironic choreographed dance steps, and you have the makings of a beloved freak show, fully deserving of the cult following they garnered. And, of course, like Kweskin, Hicks broke up the band at the height of its popularity because he "just got tired of being a bandleader."


There was no one who sounded at all like Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks, and remarkably, 35 years later, there still isn't. We are again in an age of introspective sensitive singer-songwriters. Our current age prides itself on its eclecticity, with the new wave of freak-folk becoming dubiously popular. But the king of hipster-sheik will always be Dan Hicks (though Tom Waits, Leon Redbone, and Captain Beefheart hold their own beside him).

Luckily for us, he has emerged from the cloudy waters of obscurity, re-assembled the Hot Licks, and is recording and touring again. Show us the way, Dan.

Recorded live at the Troubadour in Los Angeles, "Where's The Money?" was originally released on Blue Thumb Records. It is now available on CD from MCA Records. The innovative LP cover has a fold-over flap at the top, and the album cover opens to reveal the song lyrics.

"Where's The Money?" introduced us to the best-known Hot Licks lineup, including Lickettes Maryann Price and Naomi Ruth Eisenberg. The album also features some classic Dan stage-patter ("You probably think it's easy being up here. Singing and everything, and playing. It's not. It's not easy. Thank you.").

Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks - Where's The Money?
Year: 1971
Label: Blue Thumb (reissue by MCA)
where is it?
mp3 160kbps | w/ cover | 45mb

& here's a radio ad for Where's the Money, as performed by Hicks&Co

This studio album was originally released on Blue Thumb Records, and is now available on CD from MCA Records. The original LP cover is designed to resemble a matchbook, and indeed, "Striking It Rich" matchbooks were distributed by Blue Thumb as promotional goodies. The album sleeve showcases Dan's talents in prose and graphic art, including an entry coupon for the "Dan Hix Lookalike Contest".

One of Dan's most-covered tunes, "Walkin' One And Only", appears on this album. The most familiar versions of "I Scare Myself" and "Canned Music", arguably Dan's best-known songs, are also here.

Maryann and Naomi each take a solo turn, with (respectively) "I'm An Old Cowhand" and "Presently In The Past". John Girton wrote the instrumentals "Flight Of The Fly", "Philly Rag", and "Fujiyama". Jaime Leopold's "Skippy's Farewell" features a memorable "Meet The Band" rap.

Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks - Striking it Rich
Year: 1972
Label: Blue Thumb (reissued by MCA)
strike it.
mp3 192kbps | w/ cover | 58mb
this zip has two versions of track 1: one cd rip with a minute missing from it, and one vinyl rip of the whole song. sorry. if you want the whole album in a better bitrate (but vinyl), get it at Pecks Spet Rips or buy the damn thing.

oh, and if you like him, you'd better go check out his incredibly hip website and get some of his new albums. I posted these because I have a funny feeling MCA isn't giving him squat for royalties, and the exposure should serve him well. But really, his new recordings are just as good, and his singing is better.

from that website you can also see a video clip of Jukie's Ball and read a fantastic article from Oxford American Magazine

The Irate Pirate on the Cover of Time

Well thanks for all your kind words everybody. And thanks to whoever paid off the editor of Time for me! It looks like I'm finally getting the recognition I deserve...

Mrs. Etta Baker, Family and Friends - Instrumental Music of the Southern Appalachians

Etta Baker started playing guitar when she was three, and played for an hour a day until she died. So she was really good. Like Libba Cotten, Etta's style was a syncopated fingerpicking style rooted in the 19th Century. Called the "Piedmont" style, it owes as much to ragtime, Appalachian, and songster traditions as it does to the blues (which itself grew out of these traditions). Her music had a gentle, rollicking, and joyful flavor not unlike that of Mississippi John Hurt. Besides being a fantastic guitar and banjo player who influenced John Fahey, Taj Mahal, Doc Watson, Bob Dylan, and countless others, she was a warm and gracious person.

Here is the story of this album:
On a summer day in 1956, Mr. Boone Reid of Morganton, NC took his family to nearby Cone Mansion. The brilliant folksinger Paul Clayton happened to be walking the grounds with his guitar. Mrs. Etta Baker remembers, "My daddy asked Paul to let me play One-Dime Blues. He was over the next day with his tape-recorder."

Clayton issued these pieces on an album that became among the most influential recordings of the folk era, Instrumental Music from the Southern Appalachians on Tradition Records. Etta's renditions of One-Dime Blues and Railroad Bill became standards at the height of the folk music revival in New England. Taj Mahal a student at UMASS in the early 60s first heard this LP in a college dorm: "I was immediately taken by her version of Railroad Bill. She is the greatest influence in my guitar playing." Etta had numerous offers to perform but did not go because, "My husband could play piano real well, we could have made it, but he did not want to leave home."

Paul Clayton had a cabin outside of Charlottesville, VA, and he would bring his musician friends down from the New York folk scene to visit Etta. Paul, a friend to Bob Dylan brought Bob and Susie Rotolo to visit Etta in 1962 to celebrate Bob's 21st birthday. Bob soon after rewrote Clayton's song Whose Going to Buy You Ribbons, When I'm Gone into Don't Think Twice, It's Alright, in which you can clearly hear Etta's guitar influence.

Etta's early recordings have always been available. The Bakers never granted permission for them to be released. Etta reflects, "Back then we just did not know what to do about it."
-- Music Maker Relief Foundation

Hobart Smith is also on this album playing some amazing fiddle and banjo. I'll probably do a post on him later, but let me just say that he fully conveys the ancient-ness of the tunes he plays. They do not sound old; rather, they sound eternal. Mrs. Edd Presnell captures some of the same effect on the mountain dulcimer, though without the same virtuosity.

There are also some lackluster performances here, delivered by Mr. Richard Chase on harmonica and Mr. Boone Reid (Etta's father) on banjo. Well, that's 'family and friends' for ya.


Mrs. Etta Baker, Family and Friends - Instrumental Music of the Southern Appalachians
Year: 1956 (reissue 2006)
Label: Tradition
the happy blues.
mp3 >192kbps vbr | w/ cover | 49mb

for greg

also check out Etta Baker - One Dime Blues over at Broke Down Engine. It's actually a much better album, as she got better and better with age.

and if you like Etta Baker, please support the Music Maker Releif Foundation, which started recording and supporting Etta Baker in the 90s and does so for many other unknown but very deserving artists. Really, it's one of the most deserving labels ever, having been founded for the sole purpose of supporting the artists, rather than profiting from them.

Astor Piazzola - Tango: Zero Hour

It's not hyperbole to say that Astor Piazzolla is the single most important figure in the history of tango, a towering giant whose shadow looms large over everything that preceded and followed him. Piazzolla's place in Argentina's greatest cultural export is roughly equivalent to that of Duke Ellington in jazz -- the genius composer who took an earthy, sensual, even disreputable folk music and elevated it into a sophisticated form of high art. But even more than Ellington, Piazzolla was also a virtuosic performer with a near-unparalleled mastery of his chosen instrument, the bandoneon, a large button accordion noted for its unwieldy size and difficult fingering system. In Piazzolla's hands, tango was no longer strictly a dance music; his compositions borrowed from jazz and classical forms, creating a whole new harmonic and rhythmic vocabulary made for the concert hall more than the ballroom (which was dubbed "nuevo tango"). Some of his devices could be downright experimental -- he wasn't afraid of dissonance or abrupt shifts in tempo and meter, and he often composed segmented pieces with hugely contrasting moods that interrupted the normal flow and demanded the audience's concentration. The complexity and ambition of Piazzolla's oeuvre brought him enormous international acclaim, particularly in Europe and Latin America, but it also earned him the lasting enmity of many tango purists, who attacked him mercilessly for his supposed abandonment of tradition (and even helped drive him out of the country for several years). But Piazzolla always stuck to his guns, and remained tango's foremost emissary to the world at large up until his death in 1992. -- Steve Huey, AMG

The music of Astor Piazzolla epitomized our situation in the modern world with his fusion of folkloric beauty and contemporary tension. He forged a new music that challenged the traditionalist and left the adventurous craving more. He took the music of the great tango masters like Garde, ripped it away from the velvet-walled concert hall and the soft-cushion drawing room, and slapped it down on the pavement of Buenos Aires. Reviled by the critics, shunned even by the conservative government, his music spoke to the next generation, and popular and jazz musicians and listeners all over the world eventually fell under the spell of his "nuevo tango." In recent years, Piazzolla has taken the new tango back to the concert halls, composing and performing works for chamber ensembles like Kronos Quartet, larger groups like The Orchestra of St. Luke's, even an opera company. These works brought his once radical music back into the mainstream.

But it is his work with the quintet that will be best remembered. The striking violence he could achieve in a pas de deux with violinist Paz, the beauty of his bandoneon playing off of Ziegler's piano, the fierce power of guitar strings and his reeds bouncing off a long, bowed bass line; these are the moments that made Astor Piazzolla a catalyst for new music, a creator rather than a player. To see this band play was a priceless wonder, a joy that too few took part in over the last few decades. My one and only time in a concert with Piazzolla turned my head around, made me look at all art with a different eye, and music with a more readily challenged ear.

It is a typical irony that it was in the last few years of his life that some of his bestrecordings, some of his darkest tangos, were finally re-issued in the U.S. Live In Vienna (Messidor/Rounder), Love Tanguida (Milan), and even his 1989 chamber piece Five Tango Sensations (Elektra) are all the tribute one could pay to a lifetime of musical confrontation and artistic boldness. - Cliff Furnald, Rootsworld

"This is absolutely the greatest record I've made in my entire life. We gave our souls to this record." -Astor Piazzola

The liner notes:

Strip to your underwear if you're not in black tie. Get obscene if you want, but never casual. You feel an urge? Touch its pain, wrap yourself around it. Don't put on airs. What you seem must be what you are, and what you are is a mess, honey, but that's okay, as long as you wear it inside. Look sharp! Don't slouch. See anyone slouching here? Stay poised, taut, on guard. Listen to your nerves. It's zero hour. Anxiety encroaches, wave after wave, with every squeeze of the bandoneon. Already twisted by the contraposto of uprightness and savagery, this new tango turns the screw even tighter with its jazz dissonances and truncated phrasings. No relief. No quarter. At zero hour only passion can save you. Time is flowing backward and forward into the vortex. From the rooms come a warm air and a choked melody of syncopated gasps. Something throbs. A vein under your skin. It's inside you now, this bordello virus, this pleasure that tastes so much of anger and grief. When you find pools of pure, sweet light, bathe in their waters, balm for your lacerations. For the whiplash scars the bandoneon is leaving on your soul. If this were the old milonga of the slums, or those popular songs about painted faces and purloined love, you could let distance sketch a smile on your lips. Cheap irony. You won't get away that easy. This music is for you. It always had you in mind, your habits, your twitches, the tiny blood vessels bursting inside you when you hide what you feel. So walk in the parlor, bring your friend or come alone. Come hear the master as he unravels the wind inside the box, as he presses the growling tiger that threatens to embrace him and shapes the beast into a purring kitten. And tiger again. And kitten. It's all a game. You're going to play it too, you're going to dance with the tiger. Don't worry, your life is in danger. Remember your instructions. Listen up. And suffer, motherfucker, this is the tango.

- Enrique Fernandez -

Astor Piazzola & the New Tango Quintet- Tango: Zero Hour
Year: 1986/1992
Label: Pangea
scary.
mp3 >192kbps vbr | w/ cover? | 66mb

he's dead now but there's many living musicians playing his music who you could support. Gidon Kremer, Kronos Quartet, et all.

Check out this interview with Piazzola (English & Español). Among other things, it is revealed that Nadia Boulanger (piano-playing sister to Thereminist Clara Rockmore -- see archives) is the one who got him to start fusing tango and classical music.

And here's the biography: Astor Piazzola: Chronology of a Revolution