News from the darkest corners...

Well, it’s been out for a little while already, but we thought you’d enjoy hearing about this title:

Discographisme Récréatif [Homemade Record Sleeves] is both a documentary and archival work begun in 1996. It’s composed of different iconographic montages made from record sleeves and CD jackets. The distinctive feature: these covers, be they 45s, 33s, or CDs, mostly found at flea markets, have all been redone or modified by anonymous individuals using the original covers as a guideline and as a source of inspiration. The first book issued in 2004 compiled around 100 examples of found altered or homemade record sleeves. The second one contains around 200 sleeves.

The first volume of this book was already an absolute winner and this new volume goes much further, with twice the number of images and larger pages. This book highlights a trove of found creative efforts with many handmade album covers that exceed the design qualities of the originals. A true celebration of the kind of visual playfulness that makes the distinction between official works of art and other creative endeavors so unimportant.

Written by Patrice Caillet
Publisher: Saint-Denis, France: Editions Bricolage, 2009
Pages: 240
ISBN: 9782914697361

The book can be ordered from Amazon France.

In the spring of 1971 the Rolling Stones reluctantly departed the UK to take up residence in France. Keith Richards settled at a villa called Nellcôte in Villefranche-sur-Mer and this became the venue for the recording of much of the band’s masterpiece “Exile On Main Street”.

The new dvd “Stones In Exile” (coming out june 22nd) tells the story in the band’s own words and through extensive archive footage of their time away from England and the creation of this extraordinary double album, which many regard as the Rolling Stones’ finest achievement.

Extensive additional footage including interviews with all the band members, footage from “Cocksucker Blues” and Mick Jagger and Charlie Watts returning to Olympic Studios and Jagger’s country house Stargroves where a lot of the early work on the album was done.

Wath the trailer for “Stones In Exile” here.

Cesaria Evora, the world’s most famous singer from Africa’s Cape Verde, had open heart surgery last night (Monday, May 10, 2010) in a Paris hospital. The surgery was in response to a coronary problem that occurred this past weekend. She was admitted to the hospital Monday morning and the surgery, which started at 8:00 p.m., concluded early this morning at 2:00 a.m. The operating surgeon reported that things went as well as possible. Cesaria was then admitted into intensive care where she awoke around 11.00 this morning. Cesaria is suspending all activities until the end of the year. As a result, June 2010 concerts in Washington, DC, New York City, Boston, Toronto, and Montreal have been cancelled.

This week’s surgery follows an amazing return by Cesaria following a stroke in April 2008. Summer 2010 was meant to mark a return to North American stages. Three months after the stroke, she was ready to start rehearsing and working on her new album, Nha Sentimento (Lusafrica). “She hates rehearsing,” said producer and manager José da Silva in an interview earlier this month. “But she had a strong will to return to singing. The stroke made it harder for her to remember the words of new songs. She worked harder on this album than any other we have made,” says da Silva, who is staying at Cesaria’s side in the hospital. Music critics noticed that Cesaria’s voice had changed on the new album, yet she retained the essence of who she is. “I think the stroke scared her and she is now open to doing more things,” da Silva said before this week’s heart surgery.

Nha Sentimento explores the Middle Eastern and Arab influences of Cape Verdean music and culture, territory rarely explored before. The album features collaborator and admirer Fathy Salama, a former conductor of the Cairo Orchestra known for his work with Youssou N’Dour, and who arranged three mornas on Cesaria’s new album. Nha Sentimento will be re-released shortly featuring a bonus track of “Moda Bo,” Cesaria’s duet with Cape Verde’s up-and-coming singer and starlet, Lura, considered by some to be Cesaria’s heir apparent. The duet’s live debut was to take place during the June North American tour, for which Lura was set to be the opening act.

Meanwhile, the world waits and hopes for a speedy and full recovery of Cape Verde’s leading heroine of song, Cesaria Evora.

The Frank Zappa Family Trust have made four Frank Zappa releases available as downloads.

The albums “Buffalo”, “Everthing Is Healing Nicely”, “Imaginary Diseases” and “FZ:OZ” can now be purchased in mp3 format (256kbps) or FLAC directly from Zappa.com. As far as we know these releases will not be made available on any other download stores.

Lena Horne, the ground-breaking singer, actress and civil rights activist who, in 1942, became the first African-American performer to be put under contract by a major studio, died on Sunday, May 9, at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York. She was 92. According to the New York Times, Horne’s death was announced by her son-in-law, Kevin Buckley.

Though her movie career spanned nearly six decades and included a smattering of well-regarded films, like Stormy Weather (1943), Ziegfeld Follies (1946), and Meet Me in Las Vegas (1956), Horne was best known for her singing. Her music highpoints include collaborations with Tony Bennett, Grammy-winning recordings of her Vegas nightclub act (1981′s The Lady and Her Music, Live on Broadway, and 1995′s An Evening With Lena Horne), and her Tony-nominated performance in the Broadway musical, Calypso.

Horne grew up in an upper-middle-class African American enclave of Brooklyn, raised primarily by her grandparents after age 3, when both her parents left the family. By the time she was 16, Horne had scored a regular singing gig at Manhattan’s Cotton Club. Her knack for dramatic flourish and romantic renditions of jazz standards led to appearances on TV variety shows including The Ed Sullivan Show and The Dean Martin Show, as well as a role in the big-screen musical, The Duke Is Tops (1938). Though she never found the substantial, satisfying work she sought on film, Horne did make an impact, later in life, on TV in recurring roles on The Muppet Show and The Cosby Show.

Throughout her career, Horne was equally dedicated to her advocacy for civil rights. She was an early pioneer in the movement for equality, fighting for desegregation alongside such legends of the movement as Paul Robeson and Medgar Evers. She also fought with first lady Eleanor Roosevelt to pass anti-lynching laws. The combination of Horne’s disarming talent and fierce individuality created a powerful force in breaking down racial barriers in Hollywood and beyond.

(Source: EW.com)

Masterful exotica group Waitiki 7 is releasing their new album New Sounds of Exotica on June 7th. With a luscious mix of tropical landscapes, Latin percussion, and popular jazz (oh, and did we mention the bird calls?), Waitiki 7 revisits some old tiki classics and adds their own stamp on exotica. To give you a taste of they’re all about, check out the group performing Martin Denny’s “Firecracker” on YouTube.

Take one part diverse players with intense focus and killer chops, and one part neglected mid-century multi-ethnic hybrid music with origins on America’s harmonious island paradise. Add a dash of Technicolor tropical dreamscape, a twist of wild birdcalls, and stir soulfully.

Waitiki 7 serves up this polychrome cocktail, taking a new serious spin on exotica, the musical genre that leaped from Hawai‛i’s fashionable bars and clubs to mainstream living rooms in post-War America. Keeping true to exotica’s deep roots and intense demands on musicians, with New Sounds of Exotica the group brings heady passion, acoustic musicianship, and a love of old-school mixology to an art form just begging to be revisited and savored.

Waitiki 7 embraces the pulse and ambiance of exotica, while adding their own stamp thanks to the diverse jazz, classical, and folk backgrounds the seven members bring to the group, including the jazz drums of multi-instrumentalist Abe Lagrimas, Jr; the thoughtful and vigorous Latin and jazz piano of Zaccai Curtis; the ever cool vibes of classically trained Jim Benoit.Improvisation and more expansive, expressive solos, something rarely heard in carefully scored classic exotica, play a major role in shaping the band’s sound, as do unexpected instruments from violin (classical virtuoso Helen Liu) to woodwinds of all shapes and sizes (Berklee instructor and Latin jazz master Tim Mayer).

Adding a new dimension to the rhythm sections of the past, lush melodies come to the fore on Waitiki 7’s tour of exotica standards like the beautiful “Bali Ha‛i” of South Pacific fame. Or on the mysterious yet once wildly popular “Similau,” penned by one of dozens of exotica ghostwriters hired to copy Denny and Lyman’s signature sound – without the prohibitive licensing costs.

Read our review of Waitiki 7’s previous album here.

It is with sadness that we announce the cancellation of the entire April/May 2010 North American tour for King Sunny Adé and his African Beats.

On March 26th 2010 a tragic car accident took the lives of two members of the African Beats, talking drummer Gabriel Ayanniyi and percussionist Omo Olope, who were en-route to a video shoot for a forthcoming recording. When the US Embassy refused to grant visas to replacement members in a timely manner, there was confusion about the possible courses of action. At the same time, it became clear that the artist and the band had neither recovered from the impact of the tragedy, nor were they able to find consensus on how to move forward with normal touring.

As a result, the North American April/May 2010 tour has been canceled until such a time as King Sunny Adé and his group have sufficiently regrouped and are ready to face the rigors of an International tour again.

Composers James M. Brody and Franz T. Kamin were both killed in a car crash in Roseville, Minnesota, on Sunday, April 11, 2010. Brody was driving when his car left the road, jumped a curb, and hit a tree. Kamin, Brody’s friend and one-time composition teacher, was in the passenger seat.

New Mexico-based James Brody was an important figure in the development of electronic music in the Midwest. While still a student at Indiana University, where he studied with Iannis Xenakis in addition to Kamin, he served as a teaching assistant in IU’s electronic studio during its first years. He also wrote the liner notes for the original Nonesuch LP, Iannis Xenakis: Electroacoustic Music. He composed numerous works that were presented at the annual International Computer Music Conference, Sonic Circuits, and SEAMUS. In addition, he also composed many works for acoustic instruments, including Traces for solo woodwinds and brass, piano, harp, percussion and strings, which was commissioned and performed by the Harrisburg Symphony in 1994. Brody was a co-founder of CAPASA in San Antonio and the Baltimore Composers Forum.

Milwaukee-born composer and pianist Franz Kamin studied composition at the University of Oklahoma with Spencer Norton and at Indiana University with Roque Cordero. At IU, he was also a piano student with Alfonso Montecino. In the late 1960s, working with James Brody, Kamin organized the weekly FIASCO meetings in Bloomington, Indiana. These meetings attracted composers, poets, artists, and other creative persons and became a focal point for experimental projects. After some time, even the university world accepted the creative presence of FIASCO, and faculty persons exhibited and performed under its independent aegis. One of Kamin’s works which he felt was the culmination of this period is The Concert of Doors, a synaesthetic work in which a number of doors, each of vastly differing design, some found, some constructed, ranging from comical to mysterious, were set on a path through a woods to be traversed by the audience-participants. In the 1970s, Kamin lived in New York, where he worked with legendary avant-garde cellist Charlotte Moorman. He later moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, where for the past 20 years he had presented a series of Birthday concerts.

(Source: Newmusicbox.org)

Famed rock ‘n’ roll raconteur Malcom McLaren, best known as the manager of the Sex Pistols, died Thursday April 8 in New York City at the age of 64.

McLaren’s spokesman told the U.K.’s Independent that McLaren had been battling cancer “for some time, but recently had been in full health, which then rapidly deteriorated.”

McLaren was born into a working class family in London’s Stoke Newington section. After attending art college, he and designer Vivienne Westwood opened a Kings Road clothing store in 1971 called Let It Rock, later renamed Too Fast To Live, Too Young To Die. Having traveled to New York in 1972, McLaren began making stage clothes for the New York Dolls and subsequently managed the group.

In 1975, McLaren renamed the London store yet again — as SEX, which sold S&M-styled gear and put him at the center of Britain’s rock underground.

It was at SEX that McLaren met a green-haired Johnny “Rotten” Lydon, sporting an “I hate Pink Floyd” T-shirt and recruited him to front a group he was managing called the Strand, which he rechristnned the Sex Pistols. The group helped launch Britain’s punk scene with its 1977 hit “God Save the Queen,” and McLaren proved himself an able pitchman with a number of publicity stunts, including staging a boat trip down the Thames for the Pistols to play the song outside the House of Parliament. The ship was raided and McLaren was arrested, turning the prank into national headlines.

McLaren’s penchant for promotion was chronicled in films “The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle” and “The Filth and the Fury,” and the members of Sex Pistols sued McLaren to win back rights to their music as well as unpaid royalties during the ’80s.

After the Pistols split in 1978, McLaren put together the group Bow Wow Wow and became an artist himself, exploring hip-hop, dance and electronic music on hits such as “Buffalo Gals,” “Double Dutch” and “Madame Butterfly.” He also worked with Yanni on an adaptation of “The Flower Duet” from Leo Delibes’ opera “Lakme” for the latter’s “Aria” and also for a popular British Airways ad campaign.

In recent years, McLaren co-produced the documentary “Fast Food Nation” and competed in the British reality TV series “The Baron” and “Big Brother: Celebrity Hijack.” In 2008, he created a sound painting series called “Shadow” that was premiered on MTV’s HD screen in Times Square.

The Zappa Family Trust have announced a new archival Frank Zappa release: Greasy Love Songs, an expanded edition of the Cruising With Ruben & The Jets album from 1968.

The original album is fashioned as a simultaneous parody of and tribute to the doo-wop music Zappa grew up with and worked on. The album has been described as a collision of high and low art, with Stravinsky-style chord changes and unusual tempos applied to purposely trite and banal teenage pop love songs.

The new cd features the original vinyl mix – previously unreleased on cd – plus bonus material. The exact track listing is unknown at this time, but the album should ship on or around april 23rd.

You can pre-order the album here.

Soul Jazz Records are to release a new double CD/four-LP compilation called “Elektronische Musik: Experimental German Rock & Electronic Music 1972-1983″ in april.

Featuring the likes of Can, Harmonia, Tangerine Dream, Faust, Neu!, Cluster, Amon Düül II and Popol Vuh, this looks like it’s going to be a great introduction for anyone curious about the scene.

From the Soul Jazz website: “The objectives of German experimental rock and electronic music in the 1970s were to create a new music ‘free’ from the past. A music that gave seed out of the cultural ‘nothingness’ that young Germans felt as a consequence of Germany’s role in the Second World War. A generation who grew up stifled by the recent history of Nazi atrocities, the guilt of their parents’ generation and their disillusionment at the reintegration of old Nazis into mainstream society.

From the opening of the first collective/cooperative in 1967, Commune 1, in Berlin, to the formation of the Baader-Meinhof terrorist group and the bombings, kidnappings and killings of the Revolutionary Armed Forces (RAF), young Germans sought out new values and a lifestyle outside of ‘the system’.

These cooperative and communal experiences led to a number of new radical German bands including Amon Düül, Faust and Can.”

The two-disc or quadruple vinyl collection, available in early April, will feature 24 tracks.

Jerry Adler, a harmonica virtuoso whose pure, open sound can be heard on the soundtracks to “Shane,” “High Noon,” “Mary Poppins” and other films, but who labored in the shadow of his more famous harmonica-playing older brother, Larry, died on March 13 in Ellenton, Fla. He was 91 and lived in Sarasota.

Adler got off to a flying start in the music business after winning a talent contest at a local theater at 13. It was the same contest, sponsored by The Baltimore Evening Sun, that Larry had won five years earlier, in 1927, and Jerry performed the same piece, Beethoven’s Minuet in G.

First prize was the chance to perform with the theater’s headliner, Red Skelton, for a week. A few years later, looking for work in Manhattan, Jerry talked his way into an audition with Paul Whiteman and soon began appearing with his orchestra at the Palace.

Unlike Larry, who devoted himself to classical music, Jerry stuck with popular tunes. He was highly sought after as a soloist in films from the 1940s through the 1960s.

When stars needed to pick up the instrument for a film role, he showed them how to fake it with conviction, secure in the knowledge that he would be recording the notes offstage. He tutored Jimmy Stewart in “Pot o’ Gold” (1941) and Van Johnson in “The Romance of Rosy Ridge” (1947). In the 1953 Kirk Douglas film “The Juggler,” he appeared on screen taking a solo in a campfire scene.

Beginning in the 1950s, Adler found steady work performing on cruise ships, which provided a good living for decades.

His autobiography, “Living From Hand to Mouth,” was published in 2005.

The Sun Ra Arkestra under the direction of Marshall Allen will launch their 2010 World Tour, which includes three European tours and a Canadian tour, with a performance on Sunday, March 21, 2010 at Sullivan Hall, 214 Sullivan St., New York, NY themed “Springtime again”. There will be no better way to shake off the intense winter this year than with the enlightenment that the Arkestra can arouse.

The last two Arkestra appearances at Sullivan Hall were at or very close to a sell out, so it is recommended to make your plans in advance for this show. Tickets are $15, Show 8:00 p.m., Doors 7:00 p.m. For further information, please visit:

http://www.cegmusic.com/sullivan_hall/index.htm

For more information on the Sun Ra Arkestra under the direction of Marshall Allen, please visit www.thesunraarkestra.com

Singer and guitarist Alex Chilton, known for his influential work with bands the Box Tops and Big Star, died Wednesday. He was 59.

Chilton died at a hospital in New Orleans after experiencing what appeared to be heart problems, said his long time friend John Fry.

As the teenage singer for the pop-soul outfit the Box Tops, Chilton topped the charts with the band’s song “The Letter” in 1967. Their other hits were “Soul Deep” and “Cry Like a Baby.”

His work with Big Star had less mainstream success but made him a cult hero to other musicians, as evidenced by the title of the 1987 Replacements song, “Alex Chilton.” Big Star’s three 1970s LPs all earned spots on Rolling Stone magazine’s list of 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.

Chilton said in a 1987 interview with The Associated Press that didn’t mind flying under the radar.

Chilton had been scheduled to perform with Big Star on Saturday at the SXSW music festival in Austin, Texas.

Here’s a clip of Big Star performing “Thirteen”, live in San Francisco in 2007.

Welcome to the Lagos Disco Inferno, the first compilation of rare, Nigerian Disco to be released outside of Africa. Compiled by Frank Gossner of Voodoofunk.com, this record contains 12 tracks that represent the sound of Lagos in the late 1970s.

Dean Disi (Music Journalist and formerly Director of Lagos based label TYC Records) wrote the liner notes for this album:

“It was the era of sheer ecstasy. The music not only represents the vibrancy of youthful expressionism of the time but is also deeply rooted in African rhythm though not traditional in phraseology…
This collection of songs marks the development of Nigerian urban pop culture… There was diametric difference in the music of the discos and the music play by the groups. Disco music as played by the DJs was essentially western. The fans could connect with this easily. It was hip, urban and stimulating. The young Nigerian groups were hooked on it and tried to play it but with a distinctive African stamp of their own.”

Some of the artists on this record were stars of their times while others remained in obscurity.

And here is what makes Nigerian Disco so special: Lagos by the 1970s was a huge metropolitan city. Due to the oil boom, there was money to be made with music and nightlife and big international record labels like EMI, Decca and Philips had set up their recording studios that for a big part got equipped with vintage hardware handed down from their European franchises. So as the sound of the late 70s and early 80s in Europe and in the US got more and more modern and from todays point of view just plain shitty, overloaded with ugly sounding Roland keyboards, the sound of Lagos was dominated by powerful horn sections, heavy drums and percussion instruments. There’s plenty of early Moog synthesizers but no synth-generated strings or fake horns.

EMI’s house producer Emmanuel Odenusi had worked with Fela for many years, defining the sound of Afrobeat. Kayode Salami who produced another couple of tracks on this album also was responsible for the incredible sound of the famous debut LP by Psych-Rock group Ofege.

Lagos, a uniquely vibrant, gritty, energetic and sometimes quite dangerous tropical metropolis has always been much more than just a city. A state of mind where third world poverty met the oil boom, where African traditions clashed with Western decadence.

Make no mistake, this stuff will have you dance in a feverish rush in no time.

Lagos Disco Inferno will be out on cd and vinyl mid-february.