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.

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.

Lee Scratch Perry turns 70 today, March 20th. This track, sung in appropriated Hindi by an un-credited vocalist, comes from the 1978 masterpiece Return of The Super Ape, which Perry recorded with The Upsetters as a sequel to the original Super Ape.

A great background article about Perry from Sasha Frere Jones can be found here. The Dub Discussion Board has some interesting background on the lyrics to Bird in Hand here. Apparently Scratch borrowed the Hindi words from a song which he heard in a 1950 film called Babul directed by Raj Kapoor.

Lee Perry has a site here. You can buy Return of The Super Ape for a measly $8.98 here.

Happy birthday Scratch.

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.

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.

Trinidadian calypso master Slinger Francisco, better known as Mighty Sparrow or The Birdie, turned seventy this year but shows no signs of slowing down. He just played the Apollo Theater here in Harlem and is in the middle of an East Coast tour right now. The Supreme Serenader has had an extraordinary career spanning almost fifty years and has also been a tireless crusader against injustice everywhere.

I’m taking this from the 1982 WOMAD Music And Rhythm double album. You can find this song on the 2001 CD Frenzy, which is available from the artist’s web site here. The site also has a complete discography and much more information about this remarkable man.

Finally. Just when we might have given up hope of ever hearing it, The Earl has dropped his Summer Mix 2005. It seems to include the following artists, all at the same time:

Dr Alimantado / David Byrne / Zion y Lennox / The Clash / Ini Kamoze / Mashonda / Damien Marley / Leslie Winer / Erika Badu / Faye Wong / Jay-Z / Brian Eno / Massive Attack / Wong Kar Wai / Mad Professor / 50 Cent / Angelique Kijdo / Gwen Stefani / Miles Davis / Usher / M.I.A. / Robert Fripp

We featured a couple of excerpts from this mix recently, but this is the first time the whole thing has shown up anywhere. The last section which combines The Clash’s Magnificent Seven with Usher’s Burn and some M.I.A. is particularly spinworthy. This is only available right here for the time being, although it will probably show up on some torrents soon. Enjoy.

Just a quick post from the road, availing myself of JetBlue’s free wifi…

I don’t know of too many reggae tunes sung in Hebrew, Arabic, and English, calling for peace, but it seems like we could probably use a few more. In the meantime there’s this one from Cote d’Ivoirian wizard Alpha Blondy. Although i’ve never seen him play live, he apparently puts on a great show when he’s not too stoned to climb on to the stage.

Alpha Blondy has a new (old) album out in the US right now, Elohim, which you can find here. Jerusalem is on The Best of Alpha Blondy, which is available here.

Whenever Birmingham comes up I first think of my old friend Hugh Nankivell, and then I think of Steel Pulse. So when Birmingham came up the other day I had to dig out this classic old track.

I saw Steel Pulse play at the historic Anti-Nazi League rally in April 1978, and what a show that was. The high point of the day was the band doing their song Ku Klux Klan, and that was after The Clash and X-Ray Spex had already played. Steel Pulse apparently went on to have success in the US during the 1980s with more dance-oriented music, but this was hard-driving political protest music loved by punks and rastas alike, and it was good.

You can find Handsworth Revolution here, or the very good Ultimate Collection here.

Right then… this was the last in the recent series of aging white punk teabag reminiscences. Tomorrow we will return to our regular programming.

Apache Indian is the guy who grew up in Birmingham, England, surrounded by both Jamaican and East Indian influences and combined the two to become the most successful artist mining the rich vein between Raggamuffin and Bhangra known as Bhangramuffin. After doing a lot of toasting in U.K. dancehalls, Apache Indian released two very succesful albums, 1993’s No Reservations and 1995’s Make Way For The Indian.

This new version of The Israelites (released on July 4th in the U.K.) is the first single from the forthcoming album Time For Change, which drops on July 18th. You can see the video for this song, which features a spry Desmond Dekker, here.

Apache Indian has a site here. The new album doesn’t seem to have a US release scheduled yet, but you can get a copy of the great compilation The Best of Apache Indian here, which includes his planetary hit Boom-Shack-A-Lack and an inspired cover of Willie Williams’ Armagideon Time.