I heard a lot of amazing music last week at Jazzfest in New Orleans (I wish I could post something from Elder Edward Babb & the Madison Bumble Bees, but alas they have no recordings), but one of the most fun shows was 007 at The Saturn Bar on Sunday night. 007 begin with the highly improbable premise that four middle-aged white guys can play authentic Jamaican rocksteady, and through a slavish devotion to detail and a laser-beam focus on the soul of the music, they hit the ball out of the park. Massive chops and great voices don’t hurt their cause either.

The Tide is High was written by John Holt and originally recorded by his band The Paragons in 1967. It is one of the definitive core rocksteady works, which in 1980 became a planetary hit for Blondie. 007’s CD Studied Rudeness is chock-full of danceable tunes, all covers, drawn mostly from the canon but also including some rocksteady versions of other songs - Summer Breeze works surprisingly well here, and I had to resort to Google to determine that Bank Robber was in fact written by Mick Jones in the ’80s, not Toots Hibbert in the ’60s. You can pick up a copy of Studied Rudeness at the band’s site here, where you can also here more of their tunes. They also have a myspace page here. 007 are best appreciated live, and they are playing in New Orleans all the time.

Today finds us with a triple-pronged post about The Beatles. Yes, those The Beatles. One of the very first records I owned and loved, in 1971 at the age of eight, was a scratched vinyl LP of A Hard Days Night, which for some reason came to me inside the cardboard sleeve of With The Beatles. I played that thing to death, and later moved on to most of the band’s other catalogue. But after the age of 14 when I discovered The Clash, and John Cage shortly thereafter, I never voluntarily listened to The Beatles again. As an adult I have mostly felt about The Beatles the same way I feel about Beethoven; geniuses who revolutionized music, but all due respect, I’d most often rather listen to Bach.

Eighteen months ago I started working as the sound designer on Julie Taymor’s new film Across The Universe, and I was surprised to realize that not only do I know the lyrics to almost every Beatles song by heart, but the music is stunning. This may seem like a vapid or disingenuous statement, but I mean it sincerely. At this point in history, The Beatles music has become an archetypal cultural touchstone to Western Civilization that functions in the same way folk music has operated for earlier cultures.

Across The Universe is a musical featuring 35 re-imagined Beatles songs. It tells the story of a young man from Liverpool named Jude who comes to America looking for his father and becomes embroiled in the counter-culture of the 1960’s in New York. The film features new versions of the songs, sung live by the actors, with a few celebrity cameos from the likes of Bono (I Am The Walrus) and Joe Cocker (Come Together). The film is 95% finished, and I think it’s great - one of the most enjoyable working experiences of my career, and the most elaborate sound design I have created since The Abyss in 1989. The film is scheduled for a release in September 2007, and you can see the (corny but effective) trailer here.

Since I’ve been spending so much ear-time on The Beatles, I keep stumbling across Beatles-related items and cover-versions, and today’s mp3 post is one of my favorites. Laibach are a group of Slovenian conceptual-industrialist crypto-nationalist parodist nutjobs who archly responded to charges of fascism by saying “We are fascists as much as Hitler was a painter.” Their 1988 re-working of Let It Be is a radical demonstration of the durability of The Beatles music; the songs maintain their integrity and essential function even when torn to pieces musically, politically, sonically, and artistically. If you like this track as much as me, be warned that it is not typical of the Uber-metal thrashing screaming stuff which beautifully comprises most of the rest of the album. You can buy this version of Let It Be here. Laibach have an official site here, and their Wikipedia entry here is efficiently enlightening. Thanks to my colleague Igor Nikolic for suggesting this record to me.

The final prong for today is the extraordinary book Recording The Beatles by Kevin Ryan and Brian Kehew. If you are interested in the historical development of the recording studio, or you love gear, or you are a technically-inclined fan of popular music, this is a bible. Exhaustively, obsessively, insanely, the authors have documented the minutiae of everything related to how The Beatles records were created. We get floor plans and architect’s blueprints for the studios at Abbey Road, detailed photos of knobs, nostalgic recollections from the tiniest of minor technicians, diagrams of who sat where, lists of percussion instruments used on specific tracks, on and on and on. And the whole thing comes in a beautiful collectors-edition package big enough to prop open the heaviest asylum door. Could these guys PLEASE make another book like this about Lee Perry??? Mind-boggling and highly recommended. You can see excerpts and buy it here.

The Earl of Edgecombe has been up to his old tricks, here mashing one of the previously unavailable tracks from the 25th Anniversary Edition of My Life In The Bush of Ghosts (the track called Pitch to Voltage) with the planetary hit from Jamie Foxx, Unpredictable, with predictable results.

More info about My Life In The Bush of Ghosts here. You can buy the Jamie Foxx record here. The Earl of Edgecombe’s previous mixes are available here and here.

Word arrives today that the Golden Bear Awards last night at the Berlin Film Festival featured several numbers performed by… Nina Hagen?! That’s not unlike the Academy Awards featuring special musical guest Diamanda Galas. As if.

This track comes from Hagen’s first American release, 1982’s Nunsexmonkrock, which holds up surprisingly well. The song features samples of Cosma Shiva herself, who is Hagen’s daughter born in 1981. The music technology may sound quaintly dated, but there’s no shelf-life on Hagen’s extraordinary voice and blasphemous sensibility. That’s not a sample from Earth Wind & Fire’s Boogie Nights, just an appropriated riff; someone who has the time, please make a mashup of Boogie Nights and Cosma Shiva. Thanks.

You can find Nunsexmonkrock paired with four tracks from 1979’s Nina Hagen Band here. The Nina Hagen Electronic Shrine is here. You can see Nina Hagen interviewed on David Letterman’s show in 1985 here, which includes a clip from a live show in Brazil.

Sublime Frequencies, the label responsible for releasing rare gems of Burmese garage rock and Southeast Asian insect electronica, recently unleashed Choubi Choubi, a collection of rare Iraqi folk and pop music produced during the last two decades of Saddam Hussein’s rule.

This track from Souad Abdullah closes the CD, and is apparently a prime example of the Iraqi style of “choubi”, described in the liner notes as having signature “rapid fire machine-gun rhythms fluttering atop the main tempo.”

It sure would be interesting to hear some stuff coming out of Iraq right now, but failing that, this CD is a great jumping off point for getting to know Iraqi popular music. And the track is burning hot. More info at Sublime Frequencies here. You can buy Choubi Choubi here.

It’s snowing something fierce in NYC today, which must mean it’s time to stay locked up at home and listen to reggae.

This track which combines Ms. Keys 2003 song with the rhythm from Beres Hammond’s Come Down Father feels right on for today. Turns out there’s practically a cottage industry in making reggae re-mixes from this acapella — if you have a look on the internets there are all kinds of dodgy versions of this, with “DJs” mumbling into karaoke mics over the intro. But this is the one you want. There’s even a rumor that this might get an official release.

You can find a 7″ vinyl copy 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.

You can’t turn on the radio right now without hearing the snowman and the illegal alien from New Jersey trifling on the feather-light but infectious original version of this track. But if you’re going to have it stuck in your head, might as well have *this* version up in there. The hilariously over-the-top gunfire sounds take the central concept to its logical conclusion, and Vybz Kartel spits with the confidence of an M16. There are also fine contributions from Sizzla & Shabba Ranks.

Kartel might just be 2005’s Hardest Working Man In Show Business, and his new CD J.M.T. is about to drop any day. When it does you’ll find it here. More about Kartel at his label Greensleeves here. To hear more from Akon or Young Jeezy, just go outside and walk around.

The late 20th century is littered with examples of brave souls who came together for a while, made some great music, and then returned to the margins like rusting hulks on the side of the M4 — or perhaps they ended up working at Tesco’s, dreaming of the days when they made glorious noise and we all listened. Pigbag might fall into this category, although strictly speaking some of their members did go on to carve a slightly larger niche in musical history. Anybody out there know where bassist Simon Underwood ended up?

From 1980 to 1983 Pigbag did their thing, and this track was their highest moment of visibility, actually reaching the top 5 of the UK charts when it was released for a second time in 1983. But never mind all that, just turn up your little computer speakers out there until your sub-woofer rattles the copy holder, and give this a listen.

I got this from the 7″ vinyl in Mark Harrington’s pile. Unfortunately there is very little Pigabg to link to, notwithstanding the valiant work at fansite pigbag.com.

October 13th is officially the first annual John Peel Day, and I’m marking the occasion with a track from The Stranglers, one of many bands I first heard on Peel’s show. The Stranglers were unlikely candidates for a punk band. They could play their instruments. Some of their songs had way more than three chords. They seemed old. And the bass player, Jean Jacques Burnel (what an amazing, distinctive bass sound), was rumored to be French. But they had an energetic, stripped-down sound, and an angry pose, and the John Peel seal of approval, so we liked them.

I first acquired their version of the Burt Bacharach/Hal David classic Walk On By as a bonus disc accompanying their third album, Black and White. It was a weird, ugly, marbled grey vinyl. It has everything that’s good about the band, with none of their “old hairy misogynist” thing. The crunchy bass, swirling organ sounds, angry vocals and tangential shards of guitar are all there.

The cheap compilation Peaches: The Very Best of the Stranglers is a pretty good bet here, or if you’re feeling fanatical and flush you could go for the massive Old Testament box set here. The Stranglers have an official site here.