320 kbps | 180 MB | LINKS
The new album was captured during a special show at the famed Nashville venue on February 27th of last year where Emmanuel was joined on stage by Steve Wariner and John Knowles (who are the only other two living CPGs, a.k.a. Certified Guitar Players, a moniker bestowed on four guitarist that he admired by music icon Chet Atkins.
Tracklist:
1. Tall Fiddler (2:44)
2. The Mystery (4:29)
3. Windy & Warm (2:33)
4. Deep River Blues – Doc’s Guitar – Blue Smoke – Cannonball Rag (6:28)
5. Saturday Night Shuffle – Nine Pound Hammer (6:29)
6. Angelina (3:27)
7. Blood Brother (5:27)
8. Beatles Medley – Classical Gas (7:40)
9. Sails (5:37)
10. San Antonio Stroll [Feat. John Knowles & Steve Wariner] (3:54)
11. Guitar Boogie (9:26)
12. Somewhere Over The Rainbow (6:34)
13. I Still Can’t Say Goodbye (3:42)
14. Workin Man Blues [Feat. Steve Wariner] (3:57)
15. Eva Waits (4:41)
320 kbps | 261 MB | LINKS
On 13th October 1979, Leonard Cohen began his most extensive tour to date in support of his sixth studio album, Recent Songs , with a concert in Gothenburg, Sweden. Entitled ‘The Smokey Life Tour’, this 48-concert European leg of what would eventually become a world tour (ultimately encompassing too Australia, the USA, and in November 1980, Israel) progressed through Sweden, Norway, Denmark, France, Holland, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, England and Ireland. Cohen surrounded himself with a coterie of superb musicians. As a nucleus, he co-opted the Austin, Texas-based jazz band, Passenger (Steve Meador on drums, Roscoe Beck on bass, Mitch Watkins on guitar, Bill Ginn on keyboards and Paul Ostermayer on sax and flute). Further extending the core group’s capabilities were violinist Raffi Hakopian and John Bilezikjian on the oud – an 11-string pear-shaped instrument, visually similar to a mandolin – all of whom had also contributed to ‘Recent Songs’. Completing the ensemble, Leonard’s brace of backing singers on the jaunt were long-time friend and colleague Jennifer Warnes (who later released her own Cohen tribute album, ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’ in 1987) and another Cohen collaborator and future song-writing partner, Sharon Robinson. This concert, from Bonn’s prestigious 2,000 capacity Beethovenhalle, was recorded towards the end of the European extravaganza on 3rd December, and, as is evident, the cast were performing superbly by this juncture. ‘Recent Songs’ was, and remained, a personal favourite of Leonard s: “I think I like ‘Recent Songs’ the best. The producer was Henry Levy – I was studying with Roshi at the time in Los Angeles and it was appropriate that I worked with a Los Angeles producer. He had that great quality that Bob Johnston (Bob Dylan’s producer) had: a lot of faith in the singer and he just let it happen. He introduced me to the group Passenger. I’d always wanted to combine those Middle Eastern or Eastern European sounds with the rhythmic possibilities of a jazz or rock’n’roll rhythm section,” he later stated.
Tracklist:
1. Bird On The Wire (Live From The Beethovenhalle, Bonn, Germany 1979) (5:37)
2. Hey, That’s No Way To Say Goodbye (Live From The Beethovenhalle, Bonn, Germany 1979) (4:19)
3. Who By Fire (Live From The Beethovenhalle, Bonn, Germany 1979) (7:18)
4. Passing Through (Live From The Beethovenhalle, Bonn, Germany 1979) (5:14)
5. The Window (Live From The Beethovenhalle, Bonn, Germany 1979) (5:34)
6. Lover Lover Lover (Live From The Beethovenhalle, Bonn, Germany 1979) (8:20)
7. So Long, Marianne (Live From The Beethovenhalle, Bonn, Germany 1979) (6:30)
8. The Stranger Song (Live From The Beethovenhalle, Bonn, Germany 1979) (6:17)
9. Chelsea Hotel #2 (Live From The Beethovenhalle, Bonn, Germany 1979) (4:23)
10. A Singer Must Die (Live From The Beethovenhalle, Bonn, Germany 1979) (2:42)
1. The Partisan (Live From The Beethovenhalle, Bonn, Germany 1979) (3:23)
2. Famous Blue Raincoat (Live From The Beethovenhalle, Bonn, Germany 1979) (5:29)
3. There Is A War (Live From The Beethovenhalle, Bonn, Germany 1979) (4:44)
4. The Gypsy’s Wife (Live From The Beethovenhalle, Bonn, Germany 1979) (5:42)
5. The Guests (Live From The Beethovenhalle, Bonn, Germany 1979) (5:35)
6. Suzanne (Live From The Beethovenhalle, Bonn, Germany 1979) (6:33)
7. Memories (Live From The Beethovenhalle, Bonn, Germany 1979) (5:38)
8. One Of Us Cannot Be Wrong (Live From The Beethovenhalle, Bonn, Germany 1979) (4:48)
9. Tonight Will Be Fine (Live From The Beethovenhalle, Bonn, Germany 1979) (6:34)
10. I Tried To Leave You (Live From The Beethovenhalle, Bonn, Germany 1979) (7:31)
320 kbps | 104 MB | LINKS
One of the best vocalist working today, John Németh has received a multitude of nominations for Blues Blast and Blues Music Awards, with four consecutive BMA nominations for the B.B King Entertainer Of The Year Award. His live shows highlight his dynamic stage presence, super-tight band, and a wealth of original songs that range from down-home blues to fervent ballads.
His latest release offers eleven originals in a variety of styles, ranging from the tender love song, “My Sweet Love,” to a taut appeal to rise up and dance on “Get Offa Dat Butt”. Breaking out his harmonica, the singer punctuates the title track with potent wails while beseeching a woman to take a walk on the wild side. “You Really Do Want That Woman” builds on one of Németh’s best known songs, “Do You Really Do Want That Woman”. He acknowledges the effort and sacrifices necessary to maintain a relationship over a horn-driven arrangement complete with a loopy guitar line.
“S.T.O.N.E.D” is not a celebration of getting high – instead, Németh lifts up a passionate plea for open minds, truth and righting the wrongs of the world. “I’m Funkin’ Out” doesn’t offer much lyrically but Marc Franklin on trumpet & flugelhorn plus Art Edmaiston on tenor & baritone sax command the listener’s attention, adding a dose of spice to the brooding track. Németh pours out his troubles on “Kool-Aid Pickle,” trapped by a conniving woman with no end in sight.
Several tracks could have been part of Németh’s previous project, the award-winning Memphis Grease. “Rainy Day,” complete with strings, finds him lamenting the error of his ways that left him broken and alone. The track is brimming with the classic Hi Records sound, especially with Charles Hodges from the Hi Rhythm section on the Hammond organ. The band creates a similar groove on the dark tale of love gone bad, “Gave Up On You”. Németh tries to exorcise his pain, reflected in blasts from the horns while Hodges adds an additional layer of tension with well-placed organ swells.
Saving the best for last, Németh showcases the full range of his vocal skills on “Long Black Cadillac”. As they do throughout the disc, the rhythm section of Matthew Wilson on bass and Danny Banks lay down a rock-solid foundation and guitarist Johnny Rhoades stokes the fire with shimmering fills. It is a fitting ending for a disc that provides plenty of highlights while proving that John Németh continues to be one of the top-tier performers for soul & blues music. You certainly can’t go wrong with this one!
320 kbps | 154 MB | LINKS
The ‘Hoochie Man’ is back with all original material including the new smash Two Cats! ‘My woman got two cats, one in the front, the other in the back!’ From the searing ‘Where Did You Take Your Clothes Off Last Night’ to the tender ‘Til I Kissed You’, from the comedic ‘Facebook Woman’ to the political ‘Comb Over Blues’ Linsey weaves his colorful stories throughout this album of blues, soul, R&B and funk. It’s great fun and serious music at the same time. ‘Cause the blues don’t mess around and neither does Linsey.
320 kbps | 102 MB | LINKS
The Nashville Celts lineup features founder Ric Blair on vocals, guitars, bodhran, and piano, Laura McGhee from Dundee, Scotland on vocals and fiddle plus an ensemble of world class musicians playing uilleann pipes, Irish whistles, banjo, mandolin, bass, drums and always crowd pleasing Irish step dancers.
The music of The Nashville Celts is uniquely original. When asked about their musicial style Blair says, “I’m proud of my Irish/Scottish roots, but I am equally proud of my American music roots. So, our music has become a product of blending the two.” Blair credits the group’s popularity to their melding of modern American hit songs and sounds with organic Celtic instruments as well as the success of their PBS-TV specials.
320 kbps | 359 MB | LINKS
40 brings together the best songs from Foreigner’s nine studio albums, including all 16 of its Top 30 hits: “Feels Like The First Time,” “Cold As Ice,” “Waiting For A Girl Like You” and more. The collection features “Too Late” from the group’s 2008 retrospective No End In Sight and “The Flame Still Burns,” the title track from a vinyl EP released just last year, making its debut on CD in this collection. All prior recordings have been remastered and the album features two new tracks recorded especially for this release, “Give My Life For Love” and a new version of “I Don’t Want To Live Without You.”
The first disc covers Foreigner’s first five albums: Foreigner (1977), Double Vision (1978), Head Games (1979), 4 (1981) and Agent Provocateur (1984). The 21 tracks include some the group’s biggest hits (“Urgent” and “Feels Like The First Time”) as well as deeper cuts like “Luanne” and “Women.” The second disc features songs from Inside Information (1987), Unusual Heat (1991), Mr. Moonlight (1994) and Can’t Slow Down (2009), and features “Rain,” “When It Comes to Love” and “Heart Turns To Stone.”
320 kbps | 127 MB | LINKS
Tracks:
01 Volver
02 ¡Encore Encore! (feat. Chiara Mastroianni)
03 Le nuage
04 Mala Siempre
05 Happy Hour (feat. Catherine Deneuve)
06 La mémoire
07 Roma (amoR) (feat. Illya Kuryaki And The Valderramas)
08 Hypertranquille
09 Ça vole bas (feat. Sofia Wilhelmi)
10 Arrivederci
11 Pardonnez-moi (feat. Miss Bolivia)
12 Sur la comète
13 L’alcool, l’absence
14 Avec le temps
15 Hollywood Palermo (feat. Ambrosia)
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320 kbps | 108 MB | LINKS
Hugo Race and Michelangelo Russo are no strangers to either Hooker or the blues. Hailed as a supreme influence on the music of their band Hugo Race & The True Spirit, here the duo create a full sensory immersion in John Lee Hooker’s World Today with devastating singularity of purpose.
Recorded in a single, continuous day and night session at the Berlin studio of Boris Wilsdorf (Einsturzende Neubauten), this is an epic album of sonic sorcery suspended in time and place, looking back through twenty-first century eyes at John Lee Hooker’s delta blues legacy in a swirling mix of analogue grit and deep trance pulses.
The selection of tracks tells a story in itself; from the runaway twelve-year old boy of the desolate classics ‘Hobo Blues’ and ‘Country Boy’ to the worldly-wise elder Hooker of ‘The World Today’ (originally from Hooker ‘n Heat) and The Motor City’s Burning (a cover of Hooker’s cover of the MC5 classic), the album traces the arc of a life from pre-modernity to the Now on the 100th anniversary of Hooker’s birth.
Race and Russo’s reimagining of Hooker is simultaneously blues, electronica, avant-garde and ambient, a homage to one of the greats of rock and roll prehistory, delivered with a sting and a twist more relevant than ever to The World Today.
Tracks recorded by Palmer Keen and Joseph Lamont, mixed and mastered by Joseph Lamont.
Location: Palanggay, East Sumba
Sound: Jungga as played by Ata Ratu
Note: This is the fourth episode in the series called Sumba Strings. To get a more in-depth look into the jungga music played by Ata Ratu, check out the first part here.
She stares right at you from the album cover, her gaze cool and hard. The woman sits in front of a corrugated wall of bamboo, her collared red blouse popping against the warm painted blue. In her hands is a fantastical instrument, a jungga shaped like a tiny electric guitar, stylish fins and all. The jungga is a mess of red, white, and blue, and its covered in writing. In a red that matches her blouse is written her name: Ata Ratu.
The album is Smithsonian Folkways’ Music of Indonesia, Vol. 20: Indonesian Guitars, an album which I’ve returned to religiously over the years, both to listen and as a resource. I’ve tracked down and recorded for myself nearly every guitar style on the album, from the gitar tunggal of South Sumatra to the sayang sayang of West Sulawesi. I’ve even recorded the same artists twenty years on, such as Band Teleu Nekaf, the bidu string band of West Timor. Haingu himself, the star of Sumba Strings, Pt. 3, is featured on track four.
Philip Yampolsky, the American ethnomusicologist who recorded the whole brilliant Music of Indonesia series and should probably get a whole page devoted to him on this site, was clearly enamored with Ataratu’s performance. “She sang for thirteen minutes straight,” he writes in the liner notes, “and if we had room on the CD, we would have published the whole thing.” Yampolsky mentions that her name, along with Haingu, was brought up again and again in East Sumba as a musician worth recording. Even now, twenty years on, she clearly has something of a legendary status.
Everywhere in East Sumba, I’d tell folks that we were planning on meeting and recording Ata Ratu, and they’d respond with a knowing style. Oh, Ata Ratu, they’d say, she’s famous. Some would have amateur recordings of hers on their phones. As we neared her village, asking directions to the village chief’s house, we dropped her name and got the same response.
Ata Ratu lives in the driest, harshest landscape I’d ever seen in Indonesia. This corner of Sumba is quite literally savannah, dry grass stretching across flat, arid earth for miles and miles. After tracking down the head of her village in search of permission and a place to stay, we were escorted across the plains on motorbike, a small gang of bikes (my buds Logan and Jo following close behind me) bumping our way along dirt paths, the sun beating down on our arms. At one point my bike slipped in a puddle of sticky mud and I fell into the earth, the motorbike crushing my legs, thinking “Where did that water come from?” Jo pulled up behind me on his bike and laughed at my misfortune, taking photos as I struggled to my feet. We were all thinking it, I think: we are very literally off the beaten path.
Ata Ratu’s hut was down an even narrower dirt path, a stilted wooden hut surrounded by rare trees. Dogs barked from under the porch as we sat on the edge, shaking hands with the woman herself. The twenty years past clearly showed on her face, but she was still beautiful, her drawn lips sandwiched by parenthetical creases on either side. She doesn’t really speak Indonesian, our new guides told us, only Kambera. I spoke to her in Indonesian, hoping the neighbor would my long, heartfelt message: I’m a huge fan; I’ve come from across the country to meet you, and I’d love to hear you sing. I’ve been listening to your song for years. The sentiment must not have been translated very well, if at all: she responded with a suspicious frown, looking down at her hands. There was an awkward silence as we waited for her to respond, and for the response to be translated back into Indonesian.
She’ll sing, we were told, but only one song, and she wants a million rupiah (around 75 dollars.) I rarely talk on this site about the money I pay musicians, as its an awkward topic, a taste of capitalism in the free and beautiful flow of music which I try to cultivate. But its almost always there except for very special circumstances, a slip of cash from hand to hand, “cigarette money” we call it. Let’s just say that what Ata Ratu was requesting for one song was far more than is usually asked or suggested (a million rupiah being more than a month’s wage in some parts of Indonesia) for an entire concert of material.
It was an awkard moment: here was a strong woman, a woman who clearly did not want to be undervalued. She saw some foreigners pull up in a flurry of motorbikes and giant backpacks, and made a judgment. Little did she know or care that we were not from some fancy institution, no grant-backed budget behind us: just three dudes who’d flown to Sumba on a shoestring hoping, with the generosity of the locals, to hear amazing things.
I’m not going to talk more about money, as it still embarasses me, but I’ll tell you that we came to an agreement on that porch: Ata Ratu would play us three songs. Her house was crawling with barking dogs and chirping chicks, so we agreed to meet in the field in front of her house, away from the animals and in the light of the sun.
The sun was blinding and fierce, so we set up in the shade of some trees, a neighbor’s hut behind us. Pigs lazily paced the fields in the background, chickens following close behind. Curious locals saw us setting up in the shade and came to watch, keeping a distance. A dry wind blew, the fuzzy dead cat of a microphone’s wind screen fluttering dangerously.
Ata Ratu prepared herself with a serious air, a seemingly well-practiced routine. She tuned the four strings of her jungga with a patient determination, the instrument’s austere, unpainted body a world apart from the whimsical instrument I’d seen on the album cover. She used a shard of plastic as a pick, but soon found it too flimsy. She bound across the grass and grabbed a plastic jerry can from beneath the hut, taking a knife to it to whittle a new pick, a tattoo of a mahang spirit on her forearm moving as her lean muscle flexed. I was, frankly, intimidated.
With a stern nod of the head, Ata Ratu signaled that she was ready. Her new plastic pick came down on the brake cable strings with that now-familiar deliberate intensity, and her voice soon joined the dry, oddly metered picking. It was a stunning voice, somehow even stronger than the thirty-something Ata Ratu on Yampolsky’s recording. It was firm and full, something that shouldn’t have surprised us but somehow still did.
Our three song allotment soon up, we sat on the grass as I tried to get to know this incredible musician better. She'd been playing since she was sixteen in the late seventies, she said. Self-taught. Her husband made her jungga himself, and Ata Ratu was but just one of his three wives. People came from all around to play, and she travelled across the east side of the island to play at harvest ceremonies.
I took out my notebook and a neighbor helped Ata Ratu and I transcribed part of what she’d sung. “Mi kalanguruwa ha kammu rongu a ai…Baku hali aya ka ha, nduma luri a mu nu ha ei una ni angu.” Using the lawiti verse form in her native Kambera tongue, Ata Ratu had improvised a message for us, incomprensible on first listen: “Listen, I’ll be sad when we part. I hum this song for you, sir, who will soon leave.”
Who knows if she meant it: Ata Ratu remained as stonefaced as ever, and I knew that, as is tradition, she had probably picked these lines from her stock of verses to fit the ocassion. Like any devoted fanboy, I wanted nothing more than for Ata Ratu to warm to me, to see that my intentions were good, that my only aim is to share her music with the world. Maybe, though, a fitting stock phrase would be enough.
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Epilogue
Months later, I was invited by the Europalia International Arts Festival in Belgium to curate a night of music to join their massive Indonesia-themed, quarter-year-long event. The organizers were interested in talent outside of the Javasphere, as Java and its famous neighbor Bali were already plenty well-represented. My thoughts immediately went to Ata Ratu and her incredible voice. What if she were to play at this festival in Belgium, getting the chance to share her music outside of her remote province for the first time?
It was a gamble, but it’s happening: later this year, Ata Ratu (along with two other musical acts to be announced later) will be playing at Europalia, her voice reaching a whole new audience of soon-to-be fans. It’s a huge opportunity, for her and for me, and I can’t wait. I’ll update this post with the exact information for the shows when I get it!
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