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…

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.

David Byrne is performing for four nights in a row at Carnegie Hall, beginning tonight with a rare performance of his musical collaboration with Robert Wilson, The Knee Plays.

I was lucky enough to attend one of the first performances of The Knee Plays in Los Angeles in 1985, which had members of The Dirty Dozen Brass Band playing horns, but for some strange reason had a David Byrne lookalike reading the text, which was somewhat disconcerting but not entirely out of line with Mr. Byrne’s recurring themes of alienation, simulation, and transformation. It was a memorable show. In The Future is a favorite track from that project, never released on CD and very hard to come by these days. I’m taking it from the Urmson Vinyl Crate and digitizing it here for you.

More info about the original record is here, and info about this week’s shows is here.

Always at least a day late, but almost never even close to a dollar short, The Earl of Edgecombe has finally dropped his Summer Mix 2006, just in time for your Labor Day pig roast. It includes the following artists, tripping gracefully around, over, and under each other simultaneously:

Augustus Pablo / Dem Franchize Boyz / Thelonius Monk / Jay-Z / Max Romeo & The Upsetters / Lee Perry / Indeep / Young Leek / Eric B & Rakim / Marrs / Talking Heads / Manu Dibango / Leslie Winer / Future Sound of London / John Cage

Previous posts with The Earl, all of which still contain active links:

Jamie Foxx V. Eno & Byrne: My Unpredictable Life
Summer Mix 2006: Clash Up and Burn
Gwen Stefani vs. Miles Davis: Summatime Girl

The Earl is somewhat vaporous and cannot be linked to anywhere, but you can get the new mix by clicking on the “Hear This Now” button below.

This new release from Harkit Records out of the UK appears to be the most definitive and complete release yet of Komeda’s brilliant score for Polanski’s 1968 film Rosemary’s Baby. It *appears* to be, but it’s hard to be definitive, because like so much else surrounding Polanski, and particulary this film, the specific details are always somehow shrouded in mystery.

The liner notes to this version contain many compelling factoids such as:

Directed by Roman Polanski, whose pregnant wife, he actress Sharon Tate, was murdered in 1969 by Charles Manson and his followers, who titled their death spree “Helter Skelter” after the song by The Beatles, whose leader, John Lennon, would one day live (and in 1980 be murdered) in the Manhattan apartment building called The Dakota — where Rosemary’s Baby had been filmed.

and

To keep the rituals and chants as realistic as possible, director Roman Polanski had Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan and composer of “The Satanic Bibles,” serve as an assistant in the ritual scenes. In return for his help, LaVey was allowed to play Satan in the “impregnating sequence.”

That’s all well and good, but couldn’t the liner notes tell us something about the difference between the two tracks both called “Main Title” which seem to be alternate versions?? Which one is the actual Main Title?? I’m posting track 1 from the CD. There have been several releases of this soundtrack over the years, and no amount of Googling can sort out the details — accusations abound of re-records, mislabeled tracks, shoddy remastering, bootlegs, etc etc. Suffice to say that this release contains a lot of astounding music, which sounds like it was taken straight from the mag masters of the film. There is also a “jazz” version of the main theme recorded live in a Warsaw club in 1989 which starts out as a breathtaking avant garde vocal interpretation but then devolves into kitsch jazz after the 80 second mark, and two takes of Komeda improvising around the theme at the piano, apparently while writing it. These improvisations are remarkable in their spontaneity and rawness - not a view of the composing process one usually gets on a soundtrack CD. It actually seems unlikely to me that Komeda would have agreed to their release if he were still alive.

Krzysztof Komeda was the Polish Jazz master who scored 65 films, including ten for Roman Polanski, the first being Polanski’s 1958 student short Two Men and A Wardrobe. He died from head injuries sustained in a mysterious accident shortly after completing the score to Rosemary’s Baby. (Anybody know that story? The details on that are also mysteriously impregnable to Google searches).

You can buy this version of the Rosemary’s Baby soundtrack here, or from the label in the UK here. Harkit has also just released another excellent Komeda/Polanski score, The Fearless Vampire Killers, which you can find here and here. Komeda has an official (posthumous) web site here.

Kelefa Sanneh tips us to a new soundtrack which is born of corporate wheeler-dealering but ends up as a rather satisfying cutting-edge dance/hip-hop/crooner mashup. Kelefa is never wrong about anything - check his edifying feature about New Orleans hiphop from this Sunday’s NYT if you need more proof of his unassailable investigative prowess. Unfortunately, the NYT does not allow their reviews to be linked to musical examples, leaving us bloggers to fill in the gaps.

My favorite track from Take The Lead is this number which combines 1950’s vocal cool diva June Christy’s version of the Gershwin standard with updates from NY battle rapper Jae Milz, hip-hop gods Eric B & Rakim, and R&B wannabe Mashonda. These sorts of things shouldn’t work, but this one does.

You can find out more about the film Take The Lead here (if you must), and you can buy the soundtrack CD here.

In general, we don’t encourage holiday-themed music here at The Ten Thousand Things, but we are capitulating in a moment of weakness to bring you this beloved classic. Bob Dorough is a true original, and has been lending his singular voice and talents to all manner of projects since the 1950s. This track was recorded with Miles and Gil Evans during the Quiet Nights sessions in 1962.

Bob Dorough has a site here, where you can find his most recent self-released album Bob Dorough - The Houston Branch, among many other things. There’s also an illustrated book (!) Bob wrote about the recording of Blue Xmas. The song is included on the excellent Miles Davis/Gil Evans boxed set Complete Columbia Studio Recordings, which you can find here.

In 1992 Gershwin historian Artis Wodehouse transferred twelve of Gershwin’s piano roll performances from 1916 - 1927 into a Yamaha Disklavier, creating brand-new pristine digital recordings of those performances. The resulting CD, Gershwin Plays Gershwin, is a fascinating historical document as well as a toe-tapping romp, with a somewhat ethereal, outside-of-time quality. It contains several previously unknown compositions, like this track Novelette in Fourths, as well as a 14-minute rendition of Rhapsody in Blue and a piano roll masterwork from Gershwin’s editor Frank Milne which arranges An American in Paris for two pianos over almost 17 minutes.

Gershwin was something of a piano roll virtuoso, creating sophisticated arrangements, complete with over-dubbing, for the medium which was extremely popular in the 1920s. In the CD liner notes there is a quote in which he recalls one of his first musical memories from the age of six:

‘I stood outside a penny arcade listening to an automatic piano leaping through Rubinstein’s Melody in F. The peculiar jumps in the music held me rooted. To this very day I can’t hear the tune without picturing myself outside the arcade on 125th Street, standing there barefoot and in overalls, drinking it all in avidly.’

In fact, it turns out that Gershwin actually learned to play the piano at the age of ten by studying piano rolls, which he would slow down and mimic. While some composers initially dismissed piano rolls as a mechanical gimmick, Gershwin had always embraced the medium, and went on to create 130 carefully crafted rolls, using the finest technology of the era.

Nonesuch re-released the CD along with a second volume featuring not only Gershwin’s own compositions, but his piano roll interpretations of several other composer’s popular works of the time. You can find Gershwin Plays Gershwin: The Piano Rolls here. There’s a Volume 2 here. Artis Wodehouse has a site here, which includes several detailed articles describing the process she used to bring Gershwin’s rolls into the digital era.

Ennio Morricone must be not just one of the most prolific composers of the modern age, but one of the most prolific artists, period. Maestro has written over 500 film scores and released hundreds of CDs. Each year dozens of new Morricone compilations hit the shelves, most of them lazily curated based more on licensing agreements than any guiding aesthetic principle. But now… here is something of a different order: On November 29th Ipecac will release Crime And Dissonance, a stunning double-disc set compiled by Morricone-freak Alan Bishop. The collection focusses on Morricone’s out/avant-garde/experimental work, and some of it is pretty out… heartbeats, metal screeches, orgasmic breathing, metal screeches, and impossible time signatures abound. But it’s not all screechy free jazz, either… there are plenty of quiet, moody, textural sets. The sequencing is outstanding, sound quality is superb, and the liner notes are by John Zorn.

It’s hard to pick a single track to excerpt here, but I’m going with 1970, from the Dario Argento horror movie Il Gatto A Nove Code (The Cat of Nine Tails), which starred Karl Malden as a blind man searching for a killer.

This is in no way a definitive Morricone collection ~ it’s not trying to be, and as Alan Bishop says “a definitive collection of his work would have to be at least 50 hours of material” ~ but it is a truly magnificent collection of some of the composer’s lesser known and more fascinating work. Absolutely essential listening.

More detailed info about the release at the label here, and a very interesting interview with curator Alan Bishop here. You can buy Crime And Dissonance here.