Well, The New Orleans Saints just won the NFC South Division Championships, which means they’re on their way to Florida to play in the Superbowl on February 7th.  Now I’m not much of a sports fan, and until the last month or so it had to be explained to me that “Football” was the game with the egg-shaped ball and the helmets, not the one with the small ball and the stick.  But I do get caught up in the sociological symptoms and effects of major sports events, and this one is major.  The Saints have never come close to this before.  As my friend Ned Sublette just said:

“The importance of the Saints… is that they are the only thing everyone in New Orleans can agree on.  Nothing, but nothing, else.”

I’m spending a huge amount of time in New Orleans lately, and the city is going crazy over this.  If (when?) The Saints win the Superbowl, it will bring the city to its knees, in a good way.  They can sure use it.

As part of the citywide Saints fever, there has been an incredible explosion of locally created music supporting the team.  You can listen to a streaming radio playlist of much of this music at The Times Picayune site here.  My favorite of all of these songs so far is “Wit Da Saints” by a group of musicians from the Habitat For Humanity Musicians Village, who call themselves The Village Block Party.  You can hear the song on the tube here, or buy it at Amazon here.

Go Saints!

The Earl of Edgecombe has a new mixtape out. This one is all about New Orleans. Here’s the full tracklist:

1. Intro
2. The Death of Bounce - The Showboys vs. Wynton Marsalis
3. Blackbird Xtra Special - The Dirty Dozen Brass Band
4. Chocko Mo Marrero Clap - Danny Barker feat. MC Thick / Skip / Juvenile
5. Buck Jump Booker Time - Gregory D & DJ Mannie Fresh feat. James Booker
6. Sexual Healing (Hot Like an Oven Mix) - The Hot 8 Brass Band
7. Slow Motion Walk With Thee - Juvenile feat. Soulja Slim / Ray Nagin

You can also download this from here, where you will also find a nice flyer. The Earl loves feedback, so leave your comments below!

Over Christmas Davis Rogan was in NY, and we spent an afternoon in my studio playing some music. My friend Tony Jarvis joined us with his tenor sax and bass clarinet, and this track was one of the results. It’s been sitting on my drive 98% finished for months now, so this afternoon I decided to put the finishing touches on it and send it out into the world to fend for itself.

I’ve been interested in this song for many years. It’s one of the most covered tunes of all time, and it’s resilience and malleability never cease to amaze me. You can find an extensive collection of mp3s of many versions here, and a long discussion about the history of the song here.

Davis is a pianist and provocateur from New Orleans who was previously covered here, and who has a myspace here. Tony is a great musician, friend, and neighbor, who currently is playing in the house band at The Box, among other things.

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In other news, I’m currently music supervising David Simon’s new show for HBO, Treme, which is eating me alive — in a good way. But I have plans to start posting more here at The Ten Thousand Things soon. We shall see…

I wrote the score for a new documentary that’s premiering at The Tribeca Film Festival tonight. The film, called Pray The Devil Back to Hell, is about the Liberian Women’s peace movement. It’s directed by Gini Reticker and produced by Abby Disney.

This is the second documentary in the last year on an African subject that I have scored (the other was Shadow Work by Nigel Walker). One particular challenge is to create music which has an appropriate African sensibility but is not just ersatz African music, or African kitsch. I always encourage filmmakers to use actual African music if that’s what’s called for — and both of these films do have wonderful uses of authentic music from the places they are set.

Anyway, Pray The Devil Back to Hell needed a real film score to support the intense and moving story of a group of Liberian women who rise up and take on Charles Taylor, ultimately becoming a key factor in bringing a fragile peace to their country. We ended up with a dramatic and quite dark score that uses some African elements but is primarily bass, trumpet, strings and percussion, with some wonderful contributions from the great Beninese singer Angelique Kidjo. It was a great honor to work with Ms. Kidjo, and her extraordinary voice brings a transcendent, human, female element to the music which I could never have created without her.

The track I’m posting here is the song from the end credit sequence. I wrote the music first and gave an instrumental sketch to Angelique, and she wrote the lyrics (in Yoruba) and sang the vocal parts. I also was blessed with a beautiful solo from master Kora player Yacouba Sissouk (who happens to be the cousin of Toumani Diabate). I mixed the track, along with the rest of the score, in my studio.

All of the screenings of Pray The Devil Back to Hell at Tribeca are sold out, but you can get more info about screenings at the official site for the film. You can also see the trailer at that site, which features some other excerpts from the score. And the film has a Myspace here.

Over at the official HBO site for The Wire they’re running a feature about the music that has a fairly substantial interview with me, and a cool playlist I put together called “The B-Side of Baltimore”, showcasing eleven tracks that never made it into the show. There’s also some back-story to several tracks that were used over the last few seasons. The whole feature turned out pretty nicely, as far as these things go. One limitation was that I could only use tracks that they could link to in the iTunes store, but that didn’t cramp my style too much.

You can check it out here.

This just arrived in my inbox this morning, so I thought I’d share. I’m thinking that the tsunami of hope is not quite high enough yet that we will be hearing an official presidential campaign song from a Bmore rapper. But how about using it in some targeted ads? Just the fact that you might stop and consider the idea says something about the current climate, doncha think?

When Barack Obama is president, all radio stations, even NPR, will be required to play a certain minimum number of hours per week of hip-hop.

Mullyman has a Myspace here. Mully’s song The Life, The Hood, The Streetz is on both versions of The Wire soundtrack, which you can find here and here. The image of Barack Obama above comes from a limited edition print by Shepard Fairey, which is here. Barack Obama himself is here.

I’m Blake Leyh and I endorse Barack Obama for president.

Today, Wednesday January 30th, I will be a guest on the Leonard Lopate show on WNYC in New York, along with Clarke Peters (Freamon), Jamie Hector (Marlo), and Gbenga Akinnagbe (Chris). I’m guessing it will be a pretty lively discussion, and we will also play some music from the recently released soundtrack CDs. It’s live radio (we’ll try the hell not to curse), and the kick-off is at noon. If you can’t listen live, the show will be archived here.

In other radio news, I taped a nice spot for NPR’s World Cafe show last week in Philly, along with Darkroom Productions’ Juan Donovan. That one will air on Thursday, February 7th. In New York you can hear it on WFUV 90.7 at 10pm. In Baltimore, it’s on WTMD 89.7 at 2pm. World Cafe is syndicated on 200 NPR affiliates, and their shows are archived here.

I hope you can listen in.

**UPDATE** I guess the World Cafe spot has been re-scheduled, as there seemed to be a pledge drive happening on the XPN live feed when this was supposed to air. I’ll post here when I get the re-scheduled air date.

**UPDATE 2** Apparently it is airing today on the regular scheduled World Cafe broadcast on NPR affiliates, just not on XPN where I was listening.  Did anyone manage to catch this??

The journalists celebrating a good story in their local bar at the end of episode 51 of The Wire are listening to none other than Davis Rogan, the formidable pianist, composer, bandleader, DJ, raconteur, and provocateur from New Orleans.

I had the privilege of seeing his band play down there last year, and they tore up the venue, which happened to be a tent in a parking lot next to Ernie K-Doe’s Mother-in-Law Lounge. As the show progressed, the enthusiastic but admittedly small audience apologetically and politely departed to do some other important things, until I was the only one left, slowly sipping a Dixie and self-consciously bobbing my head in time to the music. Completely unperturbed, Davis and his band continued to complete their set, resulting in one of the live performance highlights of recent memory: my own private recital of I Quit, Davis’ rude masterpiece of anti-corporate R&B irreverence.

While you might initially be drawn to Davis’ music because of his hysterical stories and fierce attitude, you’ll end up sticking around for more because it turns out he’s a great pianist and songwriter with a real talent for dragging New Orleans musical heritage through the keyhole into the future.

The song we used in 51 was Do Me That Way, which like I Quit comes from Davis’ self-released album The Once and Future DJ. Other standout tracks are Hurricane and Godzilla v. MLK. The album was completed moments before Katrina hit, and the masters were actually lost because of the storm. Read that story here.

You can also read about Davis getting fired from WWOZ for playing hip-hop here. The artist has a Myspace here, where you can hear several more songs. You can buy The Once and Future DJ here.

I saw There Will Be Blood last night at the cast-and-crew screening at The Ziegfeld, and I’m calling out Jonny Greenwood for the best score of 2007. From the opening minutes until the bitter end some 160 minutes later, I was leaning forward in my seat, amazed and delighted that such audacious dissonance could be possible in a big budget American film - and a Western, no less. The music is what Ligeti might have composed for a John Ford epic, the unholy spawn of a union between Clint Eastwood and Krzysztof Penderecki. Not since Corigliano’s Altered States has a score so elevated what might have otherwise been an upper-middling genre flick. Don’t get me wrong — the film is very good on it’s own terms, and Daniel Day Lewis turns in another fine Oscar-contender. But the music is what feels utterly unique and bold, transforming a very familiar landscape into an alien world of great depth and beauty. Von Stroheim’s Greed could have played to this music.

So who is this Greenwood fellow, I wondered, turning to the internets? Well, well. He’s the guitarist of a rock band I’ve never listened to but who seem quite highly regarded, a band called Radiohead. You’ll have to excuse my ignorance of post-1983 rock music, but please clue me in… are Radiohead as good as this? I’ll have to go and P2P them some time. But first, let’s P2P some of this Greenwood fellow.

This track comes from a Radiohead bootleg found on Limewire, and is actually used in the film, although it was recorded separately a few years ago. Knowing the post-production process, I’m guessing this was probably used as temp music, and then they never came up with anything they liked as much, so they just licensed this track (and one other, Popcorn Superhet Receiver) to use in the film. In fact, the very first music cue in the film is a startling dopplering tone cluster that sounds lifted straight out of Popcorn Superhet Receiver. These two tracks are not on the soundtrack release which is undoubtably stuffed full of all the other excellent music and arrives on the venerable Nonesuch label next tuesday, December 18th.

So do check out the film. It opens December 26th and is definitely worth hearing on a big screen.

The album’s page at Nonesuch is here. The official site for the film is here. You can buy the CD here, among many other places. There’s an interview with Greenwood and director Paul Thomas Anderson here. And there’s a wonderful real-audio stream from the BBC of Popcorn Superhet Receiver here.

For the last five years, people have been asking me for a copy of The Fall, the piece which I wrote for the end-credits of The Wire. I’ve kept that track out of circulation so that it could be part of a Wire soundtrack record, and that is finally happening on January 8th.

The other thing people want is a longer version of The Fall, but that is not going to happen. Can’t do it. I tried, and it just doesn’t make sense. It’s the nature of the track for it to be under two minutes, and very specific, and to just be the thing that we have come to indelibly know as the music that plays at the end of The Wire. When I tried to make a longer version, somehow it just felt trite, like a sellout. Repeating the same material seemed monotonous, and adding new ideas seemed beside the point. So The Fall will stay the way it is.

But here’s a track from the forthcoming record that has the same band as The Fall, similar instrumentation, relevant mood, but is longer and pretty much a fully developed piece of music. I’m playing bass and electric piano, and my collaborator Andre Burke is playing violin, like on The Fall. Over the years, fans of The Fall have also asked for other tracks that were similar, but other than this, there aren’t really any to speak of. The music I do covers a very wide range, and just because you like The Fall, doesn’t necessarily mean you will like anything else of mine (much as I might wish otherwise!).

So here it is, 151 Canal, from my forthcoming “Ambient Electro-Tango Funk Dub” record, X-Ray Yankee Zulu Tango, which will be arriving in January along with everything else. I’m having a “soft release” on December 23rd, which would have been Andre’s 48th birthday, and the official street date is January 15th. Anyone who needs an advance copy of the CD for a review, blog post, podcast, or whatever, drop me an email…

X-Ray Yankee Zulu Tango has its own (currently minimal, soon to expand) site here, and there was an earlier track from the record posted here. My previous record with Andre, Shadow Economy, is available from Amazon, CD Baby, and the iTunes Music Store.