VARIOUS ARTISTS Orishas Across The Ocean 320 CBR mp3 CD rip & scans from Ryko RCD 10405 As winter progresses, long after its foliage has been shed, the tree loses most of the moisture in its trunk and must rely more than ever on the sap stored in its roots. In this spirit, Soundological would like to share with you a healthy helping of the musical equivalent of sap from said roots and the wellspring from which the branches of most musical traditions featured on this blog -- Blues, Jazz, Soul, Gospel, R&B, Funk, Rock & Roll, Hip Hop, etc. -- have extended themselves.
Long OOP, this CD fetches a high price (a new copy can go for upwards of $70) and is valuable not only for its pristine presentation of remastered material from the Library of Congress (that's why these recordings fall under the public domain) but for the reverent and revelatory booklet that provides enlightening reading regardless of the degree of familiarity one may have with the religious and cultural diaspora from Mother Africa. One might say this collection is essential for both its text and context, so if you were not fortunate enough to find it a decade ago it's highly recommended you take advantage now.
The 24 tracks featured on this compilation are aural snapshots of Haitian Vodoun, Cuban Santeria, Trinidadian Shango, and Brazilian Candomble religious ceremonies. They were originally recorded between the late '30s and the mid-'50s by such notable ethnologists as Laura Boulton, Melville Herskovits, and Lydia Cabrera. Culturally speaking, these recordings highlight African diasporic religions that originated with the Yoruba and Dahomean peoples and were brought to the New World with enslaved Africans. Retrieved from deep storage at the Library of Congress and digitally remastered by a team of audio experts, The Yoruba/Dahomean Collection: Orishas Across the Ocean is a powerful audio record that documents both the proud cultural legacy and sophisticated musical practices associated with Afro-Caribbean and Afro-Brazilian cultures.
Return to the roots for nourishment with SoundologicalHERE. (updated 2012-07-27)
JACK MARSHALL & SHELLY MANNE Sounds! 1966 256+ VBR LAME mp3 Vinyl rip & scans from Capitol ST-2610
The Girls of Sao Paulo
This is the final effort in the Sounds! series of duet albums Manne & Marshall did together during the early 60s. Manne was a drummer who always followed a different beat and was quite a bit more experimental than contemporaries like Buddy Rich and Louis Bellson. It was due to this bohemian bent that he proved the perfect percussionist for what amounts to sound-centred stereo test records that also provided an enjoyable listening experience.
The series was experimental to start with and was conceptualised as a showpiece for the flegdling Hi-Fi stereo sound consumers were still adopting at the start of the 60s and was envisioned as a way to demonstrate the frequency range and cutting-edge studio techniques of the era. In fact, after cruising some of the audiophile forums, it's surprising to see this particular LP in the series is still often slapped on to show off the strengths of a $erious $tereo $etup.
While Marshall has an exquisite tone and picks clean as a whistle throughout, Manne does his very best David Van Tieghem and pounds on whatever is at hand, whether shoe-boxes or sheet metal, giving the proceedings an avant-garde flavour belying the simple melodic strings Marshall effortlessly floats atop the percussion. Although a pleasurable listen in its own right, if you'd like to learn something about mic placement you need look no further than this long-play lesson in room, range and dynamics.
This one goes out to The Oracle for his excellent Portal of Groove blog, where you will also find the other releases in the series as well as a heapin' helpin' of hi-fi hi-jinx covering exotica, the-in-sound-from-way-out, space-age-bachelor-pad music and other auditory delights of the dollar bin variety.
Wild! Shelly Manne plays odd percussion behind Jack Marshall's jazzy guitar, and the two of them run through an odd bunch of tracks that will stretch the dynamic range of your stereo. More "hi fi" than jazz, but with a firm jazz base -- even though there's odd bits like shoeboxes, whistling, and handclaps. Cuts include "The Girls of Sao Paulo", "The Rain in Spain", and "Choros".
Jack Marshall - Guitar Shelly Manne - Percussion
1 Theme From "Lawrence Of Arabia" 2 Sweet Sue, Just You 3 All The Things You Are 4 Choros 5 Am I Blue? 6 The Rain In Spain 7 Spanish Dance No.5 8 S'posin' 9 Yesterdays 10 The Girls Of Sao Paulo 11 A Day In Brazil - Medley
Sound off with Manne, Marshall & SoundologicalHERE or HERE.
EDDIE CANO The Latin Magic Of Eddie Cano & His Orchestra 196? 256+ VBR LAME mp3 Vinyl rip & scans from Hurrah H-1053
Medley 4
Eddie Cano was a gifted LA-born Latino pianist from a musical family who played a considerable role in the creation and popularisation of Latin jazz. His early work with Tito Puente, Machito and Noro Morales in the late 40s led to stints with Les Baxter, Cal Tjader, Jack Costanzo and Buddy Collette then, thanks to his instrumental virtuosity and compositional skills as well as some strenuous support from Shorty Rogers, he was signed for a series of respected solo albums for RCA in the 50s. From there he would record for a considerable list of labels in the 60s, including United Artists, Pickwick, Reprise, Atco and Dunhill.
During the lion's share of that dynamic decade he headed up the resident band at the famous Hollywood hot-spot, P.J.'s, for numerous years and was a danceflloor darling of tinsel town jet set. It was there he recorded one of my favourite boogaloo bombs, Brought Back Live From P.J.'s, which would see its way to Soundological save for the fact the reissue is dirt cheap at Dusty's or on order from your local dealer. This was actually the second album he taped there; six years earlier he saw a hit with his interpretation of "A Taste of Honey" from Eddie Cano at P.J.'s.
Not nearly as exciting, this collection of cha cha medleys was recorded for Pickwick (who released it on at least three different sub-labels) at the outset of the 60s. Although Cano shows his chops and the horn section hits the mark throughout, it's the start of period of label restriction that saw Cano strait-jacketed by industry types out to exploit the latest Latin dance fads by covering and pop chart hits. Although proving to be a bankable payday, the piper called the tune and Cano was always clear that from the time he left RCA until he dumped Reprise for Dunhill, he had bupkiss by way of creative input on his albums beyond his actual playing. This would be rectified with Dunhill and later in the 70s with his participation in sessions on albums like Bobby Hutcherson'sMontara and his continuous live appearances until his passing in the late 80s
According to Cano himself*, he "wasn't into a complete jazz bag or a complete Latin thing" and Latin jazz was his "bag" and what he had "always done." Thankfully this release was prior to the worst of this restriction so Cano's obviously still having some fun with the gig at this point and displays a palpable emotional connection to the material. Although it's basically your run-of-the-mill cha cha record meant to be played at parties and consequently upbeat by nature of the beast, each of the four medleys has a subtly different overtone ranging from bittersweet to bawdy. Not nearly as strong as his earlier effort at RCA, it's still an enjoyable representative of its genre albeit better suited as a soundtrack for social gatherings than as a piece for solitary appreciation.
Eddie Cano - Piano
1 Canto Karabali; Lunita Nueva; Candice: Ombo; Salud, Dinero Y Amor; Piel Canela 2 Mama Inez; Negra Consentida En Vano Te Espero; Cuando Yo Bailo Asi; Tru-Cu-Tu; Amor Y Mas Amor; El Suenito; Batiri 3 Manhattan; Yo Te Lo Dije; Rico Rica; Amapola; Senor Juan Cha Cha #5, Pan Con Queso; Teresa 4 Take Your Time; Cha Cha Chando; El Limpiabotas; TV Cha Cha; Ella, Ella; Cuba Cha Cha; La Santiaguera; Acere
Feel the Latin magic with SoundologicalHERE or HERE.
DISCOGRAPHY
1956 Costanzo, Cano & Bongos! w/ Jack Costanzo @ Orgy In Rhythm
1956 Cole Porter & Me /1957 Duke Ellington & Me [reissued 2003 as Cole Porter, Duke Ellington & Me] @ AvaxHome
1958 Deep In A Drum [reissued 1993 & 2005] @ ELBROLLO
1965 The Sound of Music and The Sound Of Cano [reissued 2008]
1966 On Broadway w/ Nino Tempo [reissued 2008]
1967 Brought Back Live From P.J.'s [reissued 2006]
More info on Eddie can be found at Descarga.com and in the pages of *Barrio rhythm: Mexican American Music in Los Angeles by Steven Joseph Loza (snippets here).
MANU DIBANGO Manu Dibango 1971-1978 (aka Collection Blanche) 1979
256+ VBR LAME mp3 Vinyl rip & scans from Festival ALB 365
If you've already grabbed all the available releases from Dibango's discography post at Soundological, this collection still holds five exclusive treats for you: "Rencontre," "Soukouss," "Besoka On Salsa," "Biso" and "Idiba." None of them appear on any of the albums linked in that discog and since it is the single most-visited post at S.I., offering it here seemed a pretty simple way to make at least a few folks happy! Hopefully it also helps E-mile on his (relatively) new mix series, Africa Calling. If you like music from the mother continent, check out all four volumes!
Of most interest to Dibango fans are the rare tracks "Biso" and "Idiba" which have not made other compilations and are otherwise only available on the 1971 album Soma Loba or the Festival repressing of that LP from the same year, simply called Manu Dibango. As such, they pre-date the afrobeat direction and are more along the lines of the rhumba/souk sound popular in the region during the late 60s and early 70s.
Some of the other rarities not appearing on the discog post include "Rencontre" and "Soukouss," both from the Accord collection Soul Makossa released in 1985. The latter (along with "Besoka On Salsa") are otherwise only available on b-sides of singles or, appropriately enough, on the 2002 collection B-Sides, released by Dibango's own Soul Makossa records.
1 Soul Makossa 2 Kata Kata 3 Rencontre 4 Soukouss 5 Besoka On Salsa 6 Touba 7 Hibicus 8 Biso 9 Idiba 10 Wasa N'dolo 11 Nights In Zeralda 12 Oa Na Mba 13 Lakisane 14 Wild Man In The City
Soundological's Manu mission continues with part I HERE or HERE and part II HERE or HERE.
FUAD HASSAN ENSEMBLE Music of the Bedouin Bandit 1959
73.3 MB 256+ VBR LAME mp3 Vinyl rip & scans from RCA Victor LSP-1991
Here's another slice of RCA exotica with a lot of similarities to the Guy Warren album posted here on Soundological a couple months ago. For instance, both have excruciating exploitative covers with thinly disguised racist overtones (although at least the Guy Warren album had excellent liner notes) with no connection whatsoever to the artists, who were actually authentic masters of their particular ethnic folk genres which revolved around drums, rhythm and dance.
Since I don't read Arabic, there was very little info I could pick up on Fuad Hassan, who's much better known as Ahmed Fouad Hassan. He was Egyptian and, from what I can glean, was basically the Count Basie of North African belly dance, renowned as a composer and bandleader in the lucrative and fast-paced world of the nightclub scene in Cairo.
Most of the info I could find on him was derived from a handful of articles on his ex-wife, NaguaFouad, who almost sounds like the Josephine Baker of modern belly dance. Now this is where there is some unintended accuracy in the joke liner notes. You see, he actually was a kind of bandit in a way. Some people would call Mr. Hassan a cradle-robber since just a few scant years after this album was released, he married Nagua while she was still a teenager and he was 17 years her senior. It seems to have been some kind of mutually-satisfactory Svengali situation that lasted for six years and during that period she was catapulted into Middle Eastern stardom.
Sensationalism aside, this is actually a superb recording by one of Cairo's best bands and it easily showcases Hassan's considerable skills at both composition and arrangement with its assortment of originals as well as adaptations of familiar tunes and even an early stab at East-West fusion with "Jazz Araby." The rhythms and percussion are forefront throughout as befitting a dance record and if you're a fan of desert sounds you will not be disappointed.
1 Whirling Sands 2 Bolero Ala Drums 3 Dubki 4 Egyptian Caravan 5 Caravina 6 Eb Si Olanda 7 Dance of the Djiens 8 Cocktails 9 Hali Men 10 Chifti No. 2 11 Jazz Araby 12 Kashlama
Belly up to the bar with the Bedouin Bandit and SoundologicalHERE. (updated 2012-07-27)
If that's more belly dance beats than you were bargaining for, Soundological plundered those posts to provide our readers with an extra disc's worth of the Bedouin Bandit's beats that you can find HERE. (updated 2012-07-27)
The original Ghana Soundz. In fact, Guy Warren is pretty much checked as the start of afrojazz, bringing Yoruba rhythms and melodic sensibilities to NYC & Chicago in the 50s. He was so far ahead of the curve that they didn't know what to do with him back then (so of course the record company marketing men played up the sensationalist savage drummer angle) but his effect on the jazz idiom and popular music has been profound.
Guy Warren, also known as Kofi Ghanaba, was among the earliest African musicians to exert an influence on world music -- a bold achievement for a musician who was so far out in front of his own time and audience that his presence was barely perceived by most of his colleagues. Born in Accra, Ghana, in West Africa, in 1923, he was drawn to music from an early age, especially traditional Ghanian percussion -- in 1937, at age 14, he became a drumset player in the Accra Rhythmic Orchestra, which led him to his first visit to America, in 1939. By 1947, Warren was a drummer and singer with celebrated Ghanian musician E. T, Mensah and his Tempos Band. In 1948, he played with Kenny Graham's Afro-Cubists in England; he was back in Ghana the following year, but he knew where he was headed -- after a brief return to the Tempos Band, and an involvement in Ghanian politics, he headed to Nigeria and Liberia (as a radio disc jockey) and by 1953 he'd made his way to the United States.
In the mid-1950's, based in Chicago, Warren began leading a string of different combos of varying sizes, all directed to the fusion of West African music and American jazz. His music -- between 10 and 20 years ahead of his own time in his goals and results -- was unusual enough to attract little more than a cult following, but he did cut albums, including Africa Speaks America Answers and Theme For African Drums. Other musicians were quick to appreciate Warren's virtuosity and unique gifts, and he was soon traveling in a circle that included Charlie Parker, Thelonius Monk, and Max Roach. In 1962, he published an autobiography. That same year, he also saw one of his pieces become an international hit -- and a staple for easy listening radio -- when German bandleader Bert Kaempfert recorded "That Happy Feeling"; drawn from a Warren-authored Ghanian piece, the Kaempfert single and accompanying album helped put African flutes into the top 40 in America and elsewhere.
In 1965, Warren returned to Ghana, where, thanks to his decade in the United States, he was something of a celebrity -- he was also too advanced and too internationally oriented to earn much of a living as a performer, apart from the occasional concert in Accra. By the end of the decade, he'd changed his name to Kofi Ghanaba (i.e., "Son of Ghana"), accepting and even inviting the mantle of being a cultural institution. By rights, he should have been at least as renowned before the public as Ginger Baker -- an Englishman who got to a somewhat similar place in music by following jazz back to Africa -- but he never had the press or the association with an English power-trio to carry his name to the world's public.
He did participate in the Afro-American music "Soul To Soul" concerts in Ghana that spawned the movie of that name, but principally Warren has been a teacher since the early 1970's. In that role, his years in the United States, coupled with his decades in Ghanian music before and after, have made him a magnet for aspiring percussionists and a living legend among musicians on several continents. Alas, his 1950's and early 1960's remain out-of-print, though in recent years his later recordings have been re-released on CD, to the delight of drum enthusiasts and jazz (and African music) scholars everywhere.
Guy Warren - Percussion, Vocals James Hawthorne Bey - Percussion Robert Whitney - Percussion Phillip Hepburn - Percussion Lawrence Brown - Trombone James Styles - Bass on "The Talking Drum Looks Ahead" Earl Griffin - Vibes on "The Talking Drum Looks Ahead"
1 - Ballad For Giraffes 2 - Waltzing Drums 3 - Blood Brothers 4 - Love, The Mystery Of 5 - The Talking Drum Looks Ahead 6 - The Lady Marie Drum Suite 7 - My Story
Listening Notes has one of the only reviews online specifically for this album:
Featuring one of the most compelling exotica covers ever, this hard to find recording from 1958 is actually one of the best drum records RCA ever made. Kofi Ghanaba (born Guy Warren in 1923) is a West African musician who, at the time held court at The African Room on New York's Third Avenue. Melding traditional African themes with a jazz sensibility, Guy Warren is the originator of "Afro-Jazz". He also spent time in Chicago, and worked with jazz legends Charlie Parker and Thelonius Monk.
What Warren has created here is an exotic percussion album that features ancient instruments such as "The Talking Drum", conga drums, bongos, flute. The music is primarily rhythm driven, and some cuts feature vocals, shouting, and chanting. The hypnotic rhythm and dynamics of this special record are evident just by looking at the grooves. Each track is appears like a swirling spirograph of sound.
Lawrence Brown should need little introduction to fans of swing, starting out in the early 20's with Louis Armstrong and then spending 50 years as a member of Duke Ellington's Orchestra with the occasional side gig for cats like Johnny Hodges & Big Joe Turner along the way.
Earl Griffin is a bit of an enigma. In an extensive interviewAnthony Braxton mentions seeing him play with Cecil Taylor in the early 60s but the vibe playing on CT's Looking Ahead! released the same year as Themes For African Drums (and recorded in NYC around the same time) is credited to an "Earl Griffith" so I'm pretty sure it's the same person but less clear on which appellation is correct.
Couldn't find much on bassist Jimmy Styles unless he's reincarnated with the same name and plays in a metal band. Better luck with Phillip Hepburn, who is mentioned in Tom Lord's Jazz Discography with one credit - this LP. Robert Whitney fares even worse in history's roll call since he doesn't even get that much consideration. If anyone has any further info on either of these players, please let us know.
This album is extremely rare and popular with collectors of African music, Jazz, Exotica and those misguided souls who pay a premium for these types of covers with little regard for the music contained therein and can fetch sums upwards of $100 or more. Then again, it was just on auction over at eBay for $4.99 and closed without a single bid (there's one going for $30 at the moment) and Gemm's prices range from $8 - $180. I found it a few years back in superb condition for $3 at a local store called Jam Can, so it's still easy to find an affordable copy if you keep your peepers peeled. Otherwise you can grab it from Soundological's library HERE or HERE.
MANDINGO III 1974 256+ VBR LAME mp3 Vinyl rip & scans from EMI QL-6420
Lookin' around for the next post, I thought I'd finally rip a couple albums I hadn't played in a while. A few years ago when I last looked for digital versions of the Mandingo albums I picked up from delete bins waaay back in the 80s, I couldn't find nothin' nowhere. This time I found "Primeval Rhythm of Life" pretty easily. In fact, here it is courtesy of It's Coming Out Of Your Speaker...
So I spent a few hours ripping and cleaning up the third album, "A Story of Survival" from 1974. Unlike the Sun Ra rip I processed this one a bit to get rid of some table rumble and pink noise and realised the table I'm borrowing ain't so high end. But I did what I could and it's not too bad.
Of course, wouldn't you know it but I finally found a copy of this on Heino and Jerry right before posting. Looks like they got it from Mr Xtabay who has a good review but a dead link. I grabbed the tracks in the box and liked the transfer. Mine has a few more crackles but a bit less noise and some more bottom end. Since this LP fetches big bucks and even the '99 CD reissues are scarce, I thought another version floating around out there might not be so bad.
For more on this insane studio project featuring Nick Ingman, Brian Fahey, Mike Vickers, Alan Ainsworth, Roger Webband the Geoff Love Orchestra, peep the Vinyl Vulture's Mandingo bio and ENJOY the MADNESS!
Just tryin' to put back into the music blogosphere by fillin' in any blanks I can with out-of-print vinyl as well as the occasional mix, remix, re-edit, art or rant. But mostly vinyl. Mostly.
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