Fats Domino – February 26, 1928 – October 24, 2017

One of the true pioneers of R&R. Fats was New Orleans, lived there, and was symbolic of the emergence of Southern R&B. Remember seeing him perform after Katrina, as he lived in the same house in NOLA. He was heartbroken. He was an institution in the City, and I hope they give him a real NOLA Homecoming!

Fats Domino, Architect Of Rock And Roll, Dead At 89

Fats in 1967

Fats Domino, one of the architects of rock ‘n’ roll, died yesterday at 89 years old at his daughter’s suburban New Orleans home. Haydee Ellis, a family friend, confirmed the news to NPR. Mark Bone, chief investigator for the Jefferson Parish Coroner’s office, tells NPR Domino died of natural causes.

In the 1940s, Antoine Domino, Jr. was working at a mattress factory in New Orleans and playing piano at night. Both his waistline and his fanbase were expanding. That’s when a bandleader began calling him “Fats.” From there, it was a cakewalk to his first million-selling record — “The Fat Man.” It was Domino’s first release for Imperial Records, which signed him right off the bandstand.

Producer, songwriter, arranger and bandleader Dave Bartholomew was there. He described the scene in a 1981 interview now housed at the Hogan Jazz Archive at Tulane University. “Fats was rocking the joint,” Bartholomew said. “And he was sweating and playing, he’d put his whole heart and soul in what he was going, and the people was crazy about him — so that was it. We made our first record, ‘The Fat Man,’ and we never turned around.”

Between 1950 and 1963, Fats Domino hit the R&B charts a reported 59 times, and the pop charts a rollicking 63 times. He outsold Little Richard, Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly — combined. Only Elvis Presley moved more records during that stretch, but Presley cited Domino as the early master.

So how did a black man with a fourth-grade education in the Jim-Crow South, the child of Haitian Creole plantation workers and the grandson of a slave, sell more than 65 million records?

Domino could “wah-wah-waaaaah” and “woo-hooo!” like nobody else in the whole wide world — and he made piano triplets ubiquitous in rock ‘n’ roll. “Blueberry Hill,” for example, was not Domino’s own song — it was first published in 1940 and had already been recorded by the likes Glenn Miller, Gene Autry and Louis Armstrong — but Domino’s version in 1956, complete with those right-hand triplets, was unforgettable.

Jon Cleary is a piano player who has devoted most of his life to the New Orleans sound. “The triplets thing,” he says, “that was one of the building blocks of New Orleans R&B. And that’s really the famous Fats Domino groove. Everybody knows that.”

And then there was Dave Bartholomew. He and engineer Cosimo Matassa perfected a rhythm-heavy sound in Matassa’s studio that was the envy of rock ‘n’ roll. “Blueberry Hill” may have been Domino’s biggest hit, but Bartholomew wrote Domino’s favorite: “Blue Monday.”

“Blue Monday” had other levels of meaning in Domino’s career. In the 1950s, the birth of rock ‘n’ roll was hard labor. Social critics called the music vulgar. Jim Crow laws segregated Domino’s audiences, sometimes with only a rope. And the combination of racial tension and teenage hormones at concerts proved violent: bottle throwing, tear gas, stabbings and arrests.

Fats Domino’s biographer, Rick Coleman, says that there was a real disjunction between that era and the work that Domino was producing. “It was not an easy time period, even though the music was beautiful and joyful,” he observes. “It was a hard birth.”

By 1960, Domino’s audience was overwhelmingly white. In South Carolina, the Ku Klux Klan gave his band directions — by the light of a burning cross. The late saxophone player Herbert Hardesty was driving the Domino bus on that occasion.

“So I had to make it tight,” Hardesty recounted. “In about five minutes, I came to Ku Klux Klan. They said, ‘Well, where’s Fats Domino?’ I said, ‘He’s not here.’ They said, ‘What are you guys doing?’ I said, ‘I’m lost, I’m trying to get back to the highway.’ And they were very nice — the Ku Klux Klan treated us very nice!”

The British Invasion sent nearly every American performer tumbling down the charts. And yet longtime confidante Haydee Ellis says that Domino wouldn’t change a note. “He said, ‘When I play,” she explains, “‘I want the people to hear exactly what they’re used to hearing on the record.’ And eventually, that was one of the things that made him reluctant to play, let’s say. He was afraid that he would, you know, mess up a word or whatever.”

Domino toured for many years, but eventually settled into life at his compound in the Lower Ninth Ward, cooking loads of hog’s headcheese for his many friends. Then came Hurricane Katrina — and everybody thought Fats was dead.

“When Katrina came,” Ellis gasps, “Oh, Lord! Fats would say he wanted to leave, but he said, ‘What kind of man would I be if I left my family? They don’t want to leave.'”

The family survived. Domino lived out the post-Katrina years in a suburb of New Orleans with one of his eight children. But his house still stands on Caffin Avenue, in the Lower Ninth Ward, and has been restored in recent years. It’s a reminder of the greatness that the neighborhood once produced, of the golden age of New Orleans music — and of what a fat man can do.

 

Eminem Freestyle Chumph Takedown

Eminen evicerates the Chumphshit at the BET Awards…

 

And You Thought Michael Jackson Had Moves

His real name was James Isaac Moore but he adopted the stage name Slim Harpo. Just a shade behind Lightnin’ Slim in local popularity, Harpo played both guitar and neck-rack harmonica in a more down-home approximation of Jimmy Reed, with a few discernible, and distinctive, differences. Harpo‘s music was certainly more laid-back than Reed‘s, if such a notion was possible. But the rhythm was insistent and, overall, Harpo was more adaptable than Reed or most other bluesmen. His material not only made the national charts, but also proved to be quite adaptable for white artists on both sides of the Atlantic, Moore never really dedicated his life full-time to music, he owned and operated a successful trucking business in the 60’s, even while several of his songs took off and made the charts. His style was called the electric swamp blues and included elements of Delta Blues, swamp rock, and Country and Western.

Elmore James was born Elmore Brooks in Richland, Holmes County, Mississippi, the illegitimate son of 15-year-old Leola Brooks, a field hand. His father was probably Joe Willie “Frost” James, who moved in with Leola, and Elmore took his surname. He began making music at the age of 12, using a simple one-string instrument (diddley bow, or jitterbug) strung on a shack wall. As a teen he performed at dances under the names Cleanhead and Joe Willie James.During World War II, James joined the United States Navy, was promoted to coxswain and took part in the invasion of Guam. Upon his discharge, he returned to central Mississippi and settled in the town of Canton with his adopted brother Robert Holston. Working in Holston’s electrical shop, he devised his unique electric sound, using parts from the shop and an unusual placement of two DeArmond pickups

He is known as the King of the Slide Guitar.

And last but not least – Sonny Boy Williamson -He first recorded with Elmore James on “Dust My Broom“. Some of his popular songs include “Don’t Start Me Talkin’“, “Help Me“, “Checkin’ Up on My Baby“, and “Bring It On Home“. He toured Europe with the American Folk Blues Festival and recorded with English rock musicians, including the Yardbirds, the Animals, and Jimmy Page. “Help Me” became a blues standard.

 

 

I’ll Play the Blues For You

Just because it’s Thursday – The Blues in different generations

Ain’t no Love in the Heart of the City –

Little Milton – Make Me Cry

Albert Collins – If Trouble Was Money-

Otis Rush –

Non-electric blues – Lightnin Hopkins for the early 60’s –

From the early 50’s – Son House –

And Mississippi John Hurt – “Cocaine Blues”

And lastly at the edge of R&B – Howling Wolf

 

Vinyl Records are Back – Sony to Make Vinyl Records in Japan

Digital music sucks. Lets face it, your Apple/Microsoft digital music is pretty bad if played on anything other than your phone or iPod equivalent. If you listen to anything that is not synthesized music, you are missing a healthy percentage of what is there. Don’t believe me? Listen to a digitally downloaded version of a Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, or Thelonious Monk compared to a Vinyl version on any decent system. Gosh! Half the music got lost in the translation.

Vinyl is the fastest growing segment (and only growing segment) of the Music distribution industry Which is why the Millennial Generation is making a fast track to buy up Turntables, old amplifiers (especially vacuum tube) and speakers capable of producing. Look at the prices of what used to be relegated to the Yard Sale table! Even modest quality turntables made by the venerable BSR are selling into the hundreds of dollars. Vacuum Tubes? Yeah, those 1930’s generation technology devices long ago replaced by the transistor in the 60’s are making a comeback because of the sound they are capable of producing. The price of a modest tube amp versus its original outperforms Uber stock. We won’t even discuss high end.

Maybe I’m an old timer – but I enjoyed record stores…except for the usual teen staff who thought somehow that playing music at ear shattering volume would somehow induce you to enjoy it.

There is a business lesson here. Not everything new is good, or an improvement. I see this in the technology markets. The rush to adopt the newest shiny technological bauble often overlooks the key rationale of why the previous technology did what it did. Technology alone doesn’t solve problems – what it does is just fail faster because of the same human problems the previous iteration did. The Internet of today is obviously a vast improvement over the technologies which came before it. However it brings with it a number of issues, such as poor security which the old networks didn’t have much of an issue with. Lot of focus on making it faster, or more far reaching – not much thinking on how do we construct a system which by its design solves the major issues. Lot of thinking inside the very small box.

Gosh…I’m going to need a “new” tube amp to replace the one I sold 10 years ago. Lucky for me I kept the old Turntable!

If you enjoy Jazz Music from the 50’s through the 70’s this is very important. Th Japanese bought up all the original Analog tapes they could of Jazz Musicians, to feed their local market of Jazz aficionados. This could well mean some of that may be available in the original Vinyl format again.

Sony Will Start Making Vinyl Records Again In Japan, After Nearly 30-Year Hiatus

Sony Music is preparing to make its own vinyl records again in Japan, in another sign that albums are back from the brink of being obsolete. The company says it’s installing record-cutting equipment and enlisting the help of older engineers who know how to reproduce the best sound.

Vinyl sales have seen a resurgence since around 2008. And while records are still a small part of the market, the fact that in 2016 “a format nearly a century old generated 3.6 percent of total global revenues is remarkable,” as NPR’s Andrew Flanagan has reported.

Years of double-digit growth in record sales have left vinyl press plants in the U.S., Japan, and elsewhere struggling to meet demand. Sony’s plan reportedly includes the possibility that it will press records on contract.

As the creator of the Walkman and a co-developer of the CD format, Sony helped to end the era of vinyl albums. And while sales of digital music have been hit in recent years by the popularity of streaming audio on Spotify, Pandora and other outlets, Japan’s Nikkei newspaper quotes Sony Music Japan’s CEO Michinori Mizuno saying that when it comes to vinyl, “A lot of young people buy songs that they hear and love on streaming services.”

Fans of vinyl cite the rich sound it provides; they also say album art and liner notes gives them a more tangible sense of connection to the music they love.

Here’s what a 28-year-old record store customer told NPR about the format’s appeal, back in 2014:

“The way I consumed music has been so instant and so immediate, especially with Spotify and online streaming services,” Veronica Martinez said. “I kind of just want to go back to the way I used to listen to it as a kid.”

Sony has already installed record-cutting equipment at a Tokyo studio; it will start pressing records again in the spring of 2018 — nearly three decades after it made its last in-house vinyl back in 1989.

“Cutting is a delicate process, with the quality of sound affected by the depth and angle of the grooves,” Nikkei reports, “and Sony is scrambling to bring in old record engineers to pass on their knowledge.”

With the move, Sony will make records that could be played on the new turntable it sent to market last year — although we’ll note that the player includes an audio converter and a USB outlet for converting songs into digital files.

At the end of 2016, sales of vinyl records outpaced digital music sales for the first time in the U.K., as The Guardian reported.

 

Just for the Joy of It – Thelonious Monk Live in ’66

Enjoy!

 

Chuck Berry Early Rock and Roll Great

Rock and Roll legend Chuck Berry passed yesterday at the age of 90. His music shaped Rock and Roll for decades.

“There’s only one true king of rock ‘n’ roll,” said Stevie Wonder. “His name is Chuck Berry.”

The Chicago bluesman, who has died aged 90, basically invented rock.

Sure, there were other contributors: Bill Haley’s northern band rock ‘n’roll; Pat Boone and his New Orleans dance blues; and Berry’s label mate at Chess Records, Bo Diddley.

But no-one else shaped the instrumental voice and lyrical attitude of rock like Chuck. His recordings were lean, modern and thrilling. In the words of pop critic Bob Stanley, “they sounded like the tail fins on Cadillacs”.

He was the first to admit he drew inspiration from days of old. “There is really nothing new under the sun,” he said in the mid-1980s tribute film Hail, Hail Rock ‘n’ Roll – citing the likes of T-Bone Walker and Charlie Christian as his forebears.

Even the famous “Chuck Berry guitar riff“, which opened hits like Maybellene and Johnny B. Goode, was lifted – by his own admission – from a Louis Jordan record.

What he did with those influences, though, was something else. He gave country the bite of the blues, writing defiant odes to cars and girls at a time when rock lyrics were all Tutti Frutti and A-wop-bop-a-loo-bop.

As Brian Wilson said, he wrote “all of the great songs and came up with all the rock and roll beats”.

“He laid down the law,” added Eric Clapton.

 

The biggest knock on Chuck Berry is he typically performed with pickup bands. As such, the quality of his live performances varied wildly – often not to the good. In this video, he does his classic “Nadine”, backed up by Kieth Richards of the Rolling Stones.

 

Lastly, and interview with Johnny Carson in 1987…

 

 

 

Music – Booker T. (Formerly of the MGs, and his Hammond 17

I remember as a kid when Hammond Organs were the staple of a number of local bands. There was nothing at the time that generated to deep base notes. Two of the most famous Hammond playing musicians were Booker T. Jones and Jimmy Smith. When the band got hot, and the Hammond started heating up, was about as good as it got back in the day. The Hammond pre-dated transistor technology, and used Vacuum Tubes, mechanical coils, and an oil trough which made a sound far more complex than today’s digital synthesizers.

Takes me back…

 

And not to leave him out, Jimmy Smith in 1964 –

 

Al Jarreau…

One of the truly greats passed yesterday… Had seen him in concert at least half a dozen times through the years. His voice had a range and versatility beyond anyone else in the Jazz and Fusion arena.

My personal favorite song by Al Jarreau –

 

The Heart of Motown in the 60’s

Probably the most prolific and successful song writing team in history was Holland-Dozier-Holland.

MOTOWN’S TRUE VISIONARIES

The brothers Brian and Eddie Holland and their friend Lamont Dozier created the Motown Sound, and an unusual sort of love song.

Motown was headquartered in Detroit, and so the Motown metaphors are industrial: the record label was a machine, a factory, an assembly line fitting songs together, part by part. But the heart of the company was human, and much of the art it produced can be traced to the exertions of two brothers, Brian and Eddie Holland, and their friend Lamont Dozier. With all due respect to Smokey Robinson, the Motown Sound as we know it was created by Holland-Dozier-Holland. “Heat Wave,” “Baby Love,” “How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved by You),” and all the others: looking over a list of their best songs is like reading a snatch of pages from the American Songbook.

In the eighth or ninth grade, when I decided to be the kind of person who “knew about music,” I listened to those songs over and over—and developed a reputation for singing them, too loudly, in student lounges and on playing fields and in hallways between classes. I filled my Discman with greatest-hits compilations and my notebook with hand-drawn charts, trying to glean what I could from these songwriters, whose names I didn’t yet know. Sometimes, I learned, you start a major-key piece with a blaringly gloomy minor chord, as in “Stop! In the Name of Love.” Part of love’s allure is its capacity—its threat, its guarantee—to someday let you down. Maybe I picked up more about love than I did about songcraft.

Between 1963 and 1967, almost fifty of H-D-H’s singles topped the pop or R. & B. chart, and occasionally both. In their hits, they found a way to express, through the subtleties of song structure, a strange vision of love. All three of them were church boys, and that vision has a faintly religious cast—a union of two lovers, one praising and pleading with the same fervent breath, the other mysteriously mute. H-D-H always wrote and arranged the music first, and even without lyrics their compositions speak of romance that is wrenching and helpless, though not always sexual. There’s certainly little foreplay to be found: the chorus often leads an H-D-H song, a bit of anti-magic that reveals the big trick at the outset but somehow manages to build on that foundation a structure for suspense. This is another thing I learned: to “show your cards,” in art or in life, isn’t always an act of total honesty.

My parents met in a church choir, and I was always enthralled with the voice. But through these songs I came to see how a good band, artfully choreographed, could surround a singer like a circle of friends, working to assure her success before she ever entered the scene. The arrangements are intricate but restrained—low, husky horns; strict drums; a daydreaming underlay of Hammond organ—leaving a surprising amount of space between instrumental layers. There’s enough for the melody and its accompanying harmony parts, and also for a curious interplay between grandeur (often pushed, chromatically, toward joy by James Jamerson, the bassist for the Funk Brothers, Motown’s legendary backing band) and a sweet sadness, framed cursively by strings or a chorus of flutes.

Then came the words. Eddie Holland used to go around asking women for the secrets of their relationships—inner thoughts, hidden hopes, deepest fears. “I always thought that females were the most interesting subjects,” he once said. This goes some way toward explaining why, although H-D-H wrote for almost every classic male Motown act, their most riveting work came with the Supremes, and through the odd instrument that is Diana Ross’s voice. That voice: it had little range or depth, none of the outright power of Martha Reeves’s or the athletic movement of Marvin Gaye’s, but there was something literary—a quiet clarity and a way of delivering phrases that made them sound half-remembered, as if they’d been plucked right out of a dream. Eddie’s lyrics had the same partly precise, partly mystified quality: “Where did our love go?” he had Diana ask, and the question made you turn your head and join the effort to locate that lost jewel.

The resulting mood—an unlikely alloy of experience and naïveté, innocence and fatigue—is what drew me to Motown. Even today, as I try to fit the parts of my own work together—paragraph after unwilling paragraph; always failing to make of myself a machine—I am in some way striving to describe the kind of love that Holland-Dozier-Holland conveyed, the kind that lavishes its object with overwhelming light, then swings and bops away, impossible to keep for long.

Several of my favorites –

The reverb on this one is set too tight , but…

 

Skipland Redefined – Radio Garden Lets You Listen to Radio Around the World

Those of you old enough to remember AM Radio, will remember when just after nightfall you could get literally hundreds of channels from nearly halfway across the country at night. This was before radio became homogenized and MTV-ized into the same pablum top 40 or so format in every city. So listening to radio from NYC or Philadelphia was totally different from that in Charlotte or Atlanta. As a kid I would sit with my transistor radio and listen to the big hits and latest music from what were then to me far away locations. The ability to do this had to do with AM Radio’s physical property that the radio waves bounced off the Troposphere at night, and based on weather conditions could land hundreds, and in some cases a thousand or more miles away. Sometimes the connection would last for hours – sometimes only a few minutes. We called it “Skipland” because the signals would move around based on weather, and it was unpredictable where they would land. As such you might get a perfect signal at your home, but lose it in a trip to a friends house a few miles away.

A new ap lets you do just that now, only it covers just about the whole world.

The Map That Lets You Listen to the Radio Everywhere

Radio Garden is a meditation on connectedness and what broadcast technology does to local culture.

…Radio Garden, which launched today, is a similar concept—a way to know humanity through its sounds, through its music. It’s an interactive map that lets you tune into any one of thousands of radio stations all over the world in real time. Exploring the site is both immersive and a bit disorienting—it offers the sense of lurking near Earth as an outsider. In an instant, you can click to any dot on the map and hear what’s playing on the radio there, from Miami to Lahore to Berlin to Sulaymaniyah and beyond.

The project, created for the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision by the interactive design firms Studio Puckey and Moniker, was built using an open-source WebGL globe that draws from thousands of radio stations—terrestrial and online-only streams—overlaid with Bing satellite imagery.

The result is the best kind of internet rabbit hole: Engrossing, perspective shifting, provocative, and delightful.

The Golden Record is now more than 12 billion miles away from Earth, somewhere in interstellar space. Here on Earth, Radio Garden allows you to travel not just through space, but through time—or at least time zones. So when it’s 5:08 a.m. in Nome, Alaska, and the local radio station is playing “Mercy Came Running,”—a song by the Christian trio Phillips, Craig and Dean—it’s also 5:08 p.m. in Moscow, where Haddaway’s 1993 hit “What Is Love” is on the radio.

At the same time—as in literally at the same time—you might find Bruno Mars’s “Grenade” playing in Rome, where it’s 3:08 p.m., and Billy Idol’s “Dancing With Myself” playing in Honolulu, where it’s 4:08 a.m, and The Talking Heads’s “Wild Wild Life” playing in Buenos Aires , where it’s 11:08 a.m. (That’s in addition to all the songs in languages other than English playing everywhere from Ghana to Egypt to Mexico.)

Looking at (and listening to) the planet this way can leave you feeling paradoxically detached while still connected—like an omniscient observer finding familiar sounds in unfamiliar places. For one thing, radio as a medium often has a similar sound. That’s not just because American pop music in particular is a global export, but because of similarities in how radio is produced around the world. Local stations, wherever they are, often broadcast a mix of music, ads, traffic, and weather reports—and deep-voiced announcers adopt a similar tone across cultures. The aesthetic of the Radio Garden site—which uses satellite imagery rather than maps with political borders—helps further promote this feeling of connectedness. That was deliberate: Jonathan Puckey, who runs the interactive design firm Studio Puckey, told me that he and his colleagues wanted to leave people with the sense that “radio knows no borders.” (Besides, he points out, click around enough and you’ll find you can “tune into an Ethiopian spoken station in the middle of Kansas and an American station in the middle of South Korea.”)…

 

Queen Be Rocks CMA With Dixie Chicks

Beyonce teamed up with the Dixie Chicks to blow away the Country Music Awards last night, with one of her songs which quite literally falls into the “Country” category. I missed it…I confess, I was watching my adopted team, the Chicago Cubs win the World Series.

Admittedly, minority Country genre musicians are still rather sparse on the ground – but that has more to do with interest anymore than major obstacles due to race.

Of course there was the inevitable pushback by that section of the population of racist cretins – but having Beyonce perform her own country song, certainly opens up the minds of a lot of folks who automatically discard the genre as limited.

Smart move CMA!

And as usual, a great performance by Beyonce and the Dixie Chicks.

 

 

 

Black Joe Lewis – Blues/Rock

Something to listen to – again just a bit off center. Just discovered this group. Black Joe Lewis and the Honeybears, who actually have been around about 10 years. Interesting fusion of blues, rock, and a little funk with a big band reminiscent of Tower of Power. Lewis is originally from Austin, Texas.

 

Put Your Old Records On …Corrine Bailey Rae Re-emergence

Not to everyone’s tastes, but British Pop singer Corrine Bailey Rae is back with a new album. Her first in 6 years, since The Sea, dealing with the untimely death of her husband, Saxophonist Jason Rae.

 

 

The Best Jazz Pianist You Have Never Heard Of – Cyrus Chestnut

Cyrus Chestnut was born in Baltimore, and lives in the Washington-Baltimore area. I have seen him play 4 or 5 times, with my appreciation of what he is doing rising each and every time. I would call his style “austere”, with clean beautifully struck notes.First time I listened to Cyrus was in the late 80’s at the Treaty of Paris Restaurant in Annapolis Maryland. My group of 6 was in another room – We asked for and got a table in the room with the trio. That was a delight!

He is one of the most requested pianists among recording musicians, including  Freddy Cole,Bette Midler, Jon Hendricks, Freddie Hubbard, Jimmy Scott, Chick Corea, Isaac Hayes, Kevin Mahogany, Dizzy Gillespie, and opera diva Kathleen Battle. If you have heard Anita Baker, chances are you heard Cyrus.