My friend and collaborator Andre Burke passed away this year on June 30th. Andre has played violin on my most important and personal music since 1993. My last solo record, Shadow Economy, released in 2000, featured Andre on six of the eight tracks. We have been working intermittently since then on a collection of new music which will finally be released this year on December 23rd, which would have been Andre’s 48th birthday. The new record is called X-Ray Yankee Zulu Tango, and this is the opening track, Milonga Del Zero.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Andre’s violin playing the last few months. Thinking about how I, as a composer, could give Andre a few scrawls on a piece of staff paper, and he would give me back music. Music infused with emotion, with attitude, with life. Composing is often regarded as somehow “above” mere musicianship, a higher form of artistic expression. But with Andre, his violin could always transform a simple, even trite, idea into a rich and seductive landscape. Consider the two-note phrase that opens “Total Harmonic Distortion”, our collaboration from the previous record (which you can hear here): nothing but a simple whole-step up. Two notes played one after the other. Could anything be simpler from a compositional point-of-view? And yet, listen to Andre play those two notes, and it has all the life and emotion one needs from music.

Another two-note example: the minor third played in the end theme from “The Wire” (the track called “The Fall”, which you can hear an excerpt from here). Those two notes, played that way, give you the necessary humanity in the midst of a track which is otherwise mostly machines. I think it’s the violin which makes this track exceptional, and it’s probably the most popular piece of music I’ve ever written.

So there will be no more now. Andre is gone, and I’m left with only the music. A dozen years of violining now has a beginning, a middle, and an end. A finite body of work.

Thank you Andre, I miss you.

*****

Andre has a web site with selected examples of his writing and filmmaking here. You can see some of Andre’s films here. Our previous record together, Shadow Economy, is available from Amazon, CD Baby, and the iTunes Music Store.

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.

Nortec Collective’s new CD Tijuana Sessions, Vol. 3 arrived on my podium slathered in hype thicker than, uh, burned pipian sauce? But whaddya know, there are some mighty fine tunes here, including this slab of fractured dub which is now in rotation here at the Ten Thousand Things rodeo dome.

You can buy Tijuana Sessions, Vol. 3 for a measly $10.99 here. Nortec Collective have a lot going on at their Spanglish web site here, including more mp3s to download.

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.

A couple of months back James put The Complete Works of Amon Tobin on my kitchen counter, a stack of some seven CDs, and said “You’ll like this.” It seemed a bit like homework at the time, but I’m starting to listen and don’t you know James was right. This track is the opener to the 2003 CD Verbal Remixes and Collaborations. This is more downbeat than much of Tobin’s stuff, but shows the same lush, thoughtful production and attention to detail.

Tobin is originally from Brazil, spent the last two decades in the UK electronica scene, and has most recently garnered international acclaim for his score to the mega-hit video game Splinter Cell 3. You can find the widly popular soundtrack CD Chaos Theory: Splinter Cell 3 here. You can download a legit free sample mp3 from that soundtrack here. You can find Verbal Remixes and Collaborations here. And the artist has a web site here.

Here’s some classic post-punk smart funk dub, recorded live on the late, great John Peel’s show on October 12th, 1981. The Slits were so far ahead of their time they were burned by red shift on re-entry. If they had released their infectious version of I Heard it Through the Grapevine as a single, the history of pop music could have taken a different fork in the road.

They played live on John Peel’s show three times from 1977 - 1981 and the best of all three sessions is here, so this ten-song disc also works as a history of the band’s musical development, from 15-year-olds who didn’t know how to tune their instruments (but still turned in a mean set), to global village funk shamanesses with big drums. I saw The Slits open for The Clash in 1977, and it was a complete mess, but great fun anyway. Now days my 20-month-old daughter grooves to this song, which is among here favorites, along with singer Ari Up’s later project The New Age Steppers.

Ari Up has a deep site, including audio links, here. You can buy The Slits’ Peel Sessions CD here.

Much of The Necks music is resistant to blogging, by the simple fact that most individual tracks are over an hour long. Three Australian guys on piano, bass, and drums, play a very simple groove with minute variations, adding and subtracting elements in a style more like dub or techno than jazz. The end result is uniquely hypnotic. Cage’s musing on repetition applies well here:

“If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.” –John Cage.

This track captures the typical mood of The Necks, but time compressed into a few minutes. It’s head-spinning in its development and speed compared to most Necks tracks. It comes from the soundtrack to a 1998 Australian film also called The Boys.

Most of The Necks’ CDs are available from their own site out of Australia, and quite a few are available in the US via Amazon among others.

If you only buy one record this century, it should probably be Maarifa Street. This is an exceptional project. One of our era’s most original composers, at the top of his game, has independently released his first solo work in five years, and the music is as good as anything he’s ever done. Maarifa Street arrives in the US today, on Hassell’s brand new self-owned NYEN label.

This music hangs in the perfect balance between: improvised/composed ~ sacred/profane ~ Europe/Africa ~ America/Islam ~ ancient/modern ~ slow/fast ~ empty/full ~ accessible/refined ~ night/day ~ dirty/clean. Maarifa Street sounds like the Jon Hassell record I have been listening to in my mind’s ear for the last 25 years, now finally incarnated. You get it instantly, but it feels like you could keep listening for the rest of your life and learn something new each time.

There’s a great Web site accompanying the release, crammed full of background information, with exclusive remixes and special editions coming soon. NPR had a ten-minute interview with Hassell on Sunday, and you can hear the archive here. The NPR page also includes three entire tracks from the record as streaming audio - well worth a visit. You can buy the new CD here, among other places.

One of Hassell’s teachers, the great Kirana style vocalist Pandit Pran Nath, has said:

“It is necessary to remain one hundred years with the guru, then practice for one hundred years, and then you can sing for one hundred years.”

Maarifa Street feels like the magnificent beginning of the next hundred years after that; may Jon Hassell have a good 4th century.

I stumbled across this planetary hit recently after not having heard it for a few decades, and I thought something was wrong with the file. All that slap echo… the left and right channels are out of sync… the vocal sounds like it’s on a different continent from the guitar. It sounds like one of Lee Perry’s out-takes or something. Upon further investigation I realized that there was nothing wrong with the file. That’s just what it sounds like. And it sounded like that in 1973 when it was released. Weird.

You can buy the full-length album of Rock On here.