Madeleine Peyroux in concert. (I thought I'd add a picture (as I didn't use up my full word allowance) just to liven up the text...feel free to delete if you don't like innovation! )

Madeleine Peyroux - Careless Love - Universal 9823583

The second album from this French-Canadian former street performer is a treat. The pitch of her voice and her phrasing has more than an echo of Billie Holliday - which is more than fine by me. She gives a jazz-blues twist to things like Dylan's "You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go", Cohen's "Dance Me To The End of Love" and Hank Williams' "Weary Blues" - the three best tracks to my ear. Unlike the rash of women singers re-interpreting the standards (Diana Krall, Stacey Kent, Clare Teal, Jane Monheit etc) she has original material and re-interprets some contemporary material in an intriguing way. Mellow, but with an edge.

Wyclef Jean - Welcome to Haiti Creole 101 - Koch KOC-CD-5783

George Benson said that he had the power to make either jazz albums that sold 50,000 or soul albums that sold a million; that while he’d prefer to make jazz albums, he couldn’t do it to Warner Bros. Well, Wyclef has got the result that Benson probably would have got from WB – BMG refused to issue this album, so he’s released it on Koch’s San Pasé label. As Public Enemy said, “if you don’t own the master, the Master owns you”.

BMG rejected it because it’s a celebration of the 200th anniversary of Haiti’s independence and only a couple of tracks are in English – mostly it’s in French or Creole. Although Wyclef sounds very comfortable in this context, it only managed to get to number 66 on the R&B album chart, which shows how important the promotion power of the major companies is - and how resistant the American public is to anything truculently un-American. There are no plans to release this in Britain; Cardiff shops don’t even have it on their computers as imports, but you can get it from CDX Radyr, Amazon or 101CD - AM

Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds - Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus - Anti B0002SROSQ

I’ve had to battle with Nick Cave’s work in the past, notable Murder Ballads; I loved the music but felt depressed and shocked by the lyrics, so much so that I abandoned the album after two hearings. Recently, I’ve come to enjoy The Boatman’s Call and No More Shall We Part. They’re by no means a barrel of laughs, of course, but he’s moderated his bleak vision and the music is as strong as ever.

These two albums, issued together, are even better. The Dark One lets himself go a bit, gets carried along by melodies, and sounds as though he’s having fun. Nature Boy is almost poppy. However, it’s not all fun. Fable of The Brown Ape is as grim as you might expect and there’s a reference elsewhere to the Butcher Bird of his native Australia which suggests he hasn’t entirely forgotten about the blood and guts of life. Overall, though, an uplifting listen.

Hank Crawford - A Funky Thing To Do – Collectables 6597

Joel Dorn, who produced this album, doesn’t like it. It’s not as good as the three best of Hank’s sixties albums, but well up to the other seven, and a lot better than Hank’s later seventies albums. And very interesting.

It’s Pee Wee Ellis’ first recording after leaving the James Brown band; the former straw boss of the James Brown band together with the former straw boss of the Ray Charles band. The title track, composed by Pee Wee, is a fabulous groove; the basis of Salt & Pepa’s sarcastic Step (not many raps in 6/8). The most interesting track is Hank’s version of Bird’s Parker’s Mood. The original was the B side of Parker’s only R&B chart entry and the only recording in which Parker used the stone blues style that was the greatest influence on the young Hank Crawford, backing Memphis bluesmen with Ike Turner’s band. So this is precisely where Hank is coming from - AM

Hot in Dakar 4

Viviane is, I think THE rave in Senegal at present. Her songs were on radios throughout the African quarter all the time. She is Viviane N'dour, Youssou's sister-in-law, having married Ndiaga N'dour, Youssou's sound engineer. She was previously Viviane Chudid and, under that name, spent some time in Youssou's backing vocal group. Marriage appears to have meant promotion. She looks fabulous and can really deliver a song. Her band can play almost any type of music. Much of Viviane's work is Hip Hop and neo-soul. But there are also traditional numbers, including, on her latest,Tere Nelaw, a beautiful song in praise of Leopold Senghor, Senegal's first President, who had died a short time before. There is also the extremely enthusiastic Yii Gainde", another football song, and much the most exciting; you really want to yell along with the crowd. All of Viviane's K7s are probably available on CD - AM

Allan recommends cdmail as a source.

Earl Okin - Musical Genius and Sex Symbol -- Sony5152852

Something different: unless you have frequented the Kings Head Comedy Club in London you may not have encountered Earl Okin. He's in the British tradition of comedy musicians, but out of the top drawer for originality and musicality. This album is worth it simply for his "interpretations" of "I'm just a teenage dirtbag" as a lush bossa nova, a swing version of Blur and an easy listening rendition of Coldplay's Yellow. I'm not sure if they are revivals or covers, but they are very funny...

Bjork - Medulla - One Little Indian TPLP358CD

This is wonderful. It has choirs, voices as musical instruments, double basses like growling, hungry bears, and, above all, Bjork’s own ice-clear voice. There’s nothing here that would make a pop or rock song in the normal sense, just sound-scapes and rhythms mostly constructed without any musical instruments at all. One or two tracks have something approaching a melody, which is welcome, but they are all dramatic and arresting.

What’s it all about? Hard to say. Certainly some of the tracks are about relationships but many are sung in what I take to be Icelandic so I can't tell. The lyrics are printed on the sleeve notes but they’re illegible so perhaps they don’t matter. And the tracks are only identified by numbers so there‘s no help there. Being in almost complete ignorance about what Bjork’s banging on about has in no way spoilt my enjoyment.

Pucho and The Latin Soul Brothers - The Hideout - Milestone MCD9340

In contrast to Funk Fantastique, this has a really nice sleeve note: full of reminiscences from Pucho about meeting his recently deceased wife at The Hideout, a Harlem club where the band used to play in the early sixties, which was the hangout for the King of the Numbers in Harlem, Spanish Raymond. (You’d have thought he could have found a better moniker than that; even my father was called Ike the Lombard and he was English).

Oh yes, the music. The music’s great, too. Pucho is now leading a much larger band than ever before, with four trumpets, two trombones, one doubling on violin, the great Ed Pazant on alto sax and the usual complement of very rhythm. Lewis Hahn’s violin solos put me in mind of Africando and I found Hahn has played on the last two Africando records, as well as the last two of Pucho - AM

Misc. - Crunch time - Sender send042cd

According to People That Know, this is an example of tech-house. I think I'd be inclined to call it 'a surly mob of square-waves fighting in a sack' and dismiss it as just more of that technological music that they churn out by the lorryload in big factories along the Ruhr valley. However, one of the SIDStations is unexpectedly possessed by the spirit of Grand Funk Railroad and it all goes horribly right. There are echoes of fine old New York electro-funk and Man-Machine era Kraftwerk nailed to huge basslines that rumble along in the style of tanks the size of small villages while happy 'blork' noises that were last seen on old Joey Beltram records burble cheerfully in the background. The overall impression is that of a crowd of small robots gleefully jumping up and down on a pile of rusty corrugated iron.

Hot in Dakar 3

Assane Ndiaye spent many years singing backup to
Thione Seck. He has a voice which someone in Banjul
described to me, with perfect accuracy, as "divine".
If you think Thione has a good voice, Assane kills him
stone dead. His latest albums were Bagnal, a studio
album, and Takussanou Ndakarou, another TV concert
double K7. Assane sings in a slightly more traditional
manner than Thione, and his subject matter is more
religious than political. There is at least one CD out
in France, of his second album, Yone Wi, which is
very good indeed, and has a couple of bonus tracks
from the live album on it - AM

Allan recommends cdmail as a source.

John Lennon - Acoustic - Parlophone 8744282

I have very mixed feelings about this album. It's great to hear Lennon again singing some of his best and most acerbic material accompanied just by acoustic guitar. But it's a motley collection put together presumably to match the popularity of the "unplugged" format. The sound quality varies hugely and some were clearly never intended for release. However, "Working Class Hero", "Watching the Wheels" and even the live version of "Imagine" are worth it. "Woman is the nigger of the world" took a little explaining to the kids when it came on in the car, but their political sensibilities are developing fast.

K D Lang -- Hymns of the 49th Parallel - Nonesuch NNS798472

I've never been a fan of K D's before but bought this album, a tribute to all things Canadian, because I love good cover versions.(I also like Canada). Covers are a divisive issue. Bad ones are awful and the perpetrators should be shot for lack of taste and judgement. But good ones reveal new depths to familiar songs and allow you to rediscover what was great about them. Here, K D Lang reinterprets Canadian songwriters like Neil Young, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell and Jane Siberry. It works spectacularly well, only once or twice descending into the mush which has made me reject KDL in the past. This album forces me to acknowledge that she does have a great voice as well.

P J Harvey - Uh Huh Her - ILPB 143/986 639-6 (LP)

This made me think “so that’s where music is going.” Like many of her albums, there’s enough that’s familiar in the music to get your bearings but then you realise there’s something subtle going on with P J’s voice, the arrangements, the sound and you’re wandering down a completely unfamiliar path. And a good thing too, I say.

There are shades of the relatively mellow predecessor Stories...., like the single from the album, Shame, but there’s also some six-cylinder ranting and a couple of gentle tracks to end. The rough stuff really stood out on the first few plays but now it all seems to fit together. Apparently, she listened to lot of Russian folk music before the recording, on which she plays just about everything herself. Where next?

Charles Earland - Funk Fantastique - Prestige PRCD11030

This CD really pisses me off. First, I have, of course, no complaints about the music, which is some of the most sensational Earland ever recorded. However, second, it has the most awful sleeve note I’ve ever read. It’s not simply that it’s written in an excitingly pseudo-hip style; it’s also that the writer doesn’t know very much about Charles Earland’s music.

Third, this is a compilation of bits of three different sessions. The first chunk is from the session that produced Soul Story. So it’s obvious that LP isn’t going to appear on CD. The second chunk was recorded as part of the Intensity LP, with Lee Morgan. This could have been issued when Intensity, together with the two tracks from Charles III that came from the Intensity session, came out on CD a couple of years ago. And finally, the CD contains other tracks from Charles III; so that LP has now come out on CD, albeit spread between two CDs. Bah! - AM

Lambchop - Awcmon/Noyoucmon - Merge B00019G428

Two albums here, the result of a spell spent honing his song writing skills by band leader Kurt Wagner. His singing voice is in the same league as Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen and the first album has many of the musings about life over a languid piano backing that he produced for Is A Woman. On the second, the songs are more developed musically and less laid-back.

On both albums, though, are some really cheesy instrumental tracks, which I suppose provide light relief but what serious musician bothers about light relief when he’s got something to say? Perhaps we should be grateful. Take out the instrumentals and you’d be left with one good album, albeit something of a “grower” as Lambchop never hits you between the eyes. Definitely haunting and not in a good way.

Hot in Dakar 2

Alioune Mbaye Nder has been around for a bit. He
started off singing lead with Lemzo Diamono in the
early 1990s, then formed his own band. He is
definitely the male singer of choice for young ladies
now. His work is almost wholly political, though he
did record a love song a few years ago. His latest
albums were Lu Tax, a studio effort and very good
indeed, if not as dynamic as Super Thiof, his
previous album, and a double K7 set, Takussaan a
Dakar, a great live album - AM.

Allan recommends cdmail as a source.

Al Casey - Buck Jumpin' - OJCCD675

I bought this LP in 1969. It was cracked right through when I bought it; held together by the label. But it was very rare. Over the years it has become less and less playable, and I’ve played it less and less. This is totally unnecessary, since it’s been on CD since 1991. So I just bought it.

There are two Al Caseys. The other one is a Rock & Roll guitarist. The REAL Al Casey played guitar with Fats Waller from 1934 to 1943, then with a wide variety of people from Armstrong to Sarah Vaughan. By 1958, he was in King Curtis’ band. He recorded until 1994! This album, made in 1960, is by the King Curtis band, without King Curtis, but with Rudy Powell, another Waller alumnus, on alto and clarinet. Herman Foster is on piano. Much of the material is Waller-oriented and swings as well as one would expect of these musicians with their background in swing and R&B. The highlight of the album is Casey’s Blues, which is one of the greatest preaching blues I’ve ever heard by a jazz group. Casey takes a gut-bucket solo, followed by Powell, who preaches the dead up from the grave, and Foster who takes one of his normal explosive solos - AM

Rival Blogs

Yes, we do have competition out there you know. One of my favourites is this one from a guy called Simon Waldman who calls himself "50 quid bloke" - apparently CD shops are now kept in business by middle aged men who are happy to spend £50 a visit on a clutch of CDs. Anyway, I like his take on things. Try this: http://www.50quid.org/2004/11/czars_filling_t.html

Or you can try this site which is dedicated to the much missed and lamented John Peel. The bands featured here and their record companies have donated these songs, featured by John in his radio shows, for playing for free on the web (tho not as it says for download).... we can still enjoy his eclecticism...

http://www.radio.plus.com/

Hot in Dakar 1 - Music From Senegal

Fatou Laobe is a new singer. She sings traditional
music and has one of the most leather-throated voices
I've ever heard. She would fit right into a 1940s
Gospel quartet. This makes her completely different
from Wolof singers, whose voices are flat (ie hardly
any vibrato or melisma). Fatou is Puular. She has made
three albums, the second of which, Hommage a Tidiane
Anne, is very traditional praise singing with
traditional instrumentation. The other two, Fatou
Laobe and Labat, have an electric band which goes
like mad and both albums are total dynamite
throughout - AM

Allan recommends cdmail as a source. More from Senegal shortly.