Hector Zazou fabricates imaginary cultures, creating musical authenticity out of whole cloth. His 1986 record Reivax Au Bongo is the soundtrack to a photo novel set in the mythical African kingdom of Bongo, which must have been a former French colony. Combining three Zairean singers, a fifteen-piece classical ensemble, an operatic mezzo-soprano, sound effects, African percussion, and electronics, Zazou creates a lush and thoroughly convincing idealized universe. It’s a preposterous conceptual experiment that seems completely naturalistic, beautiful, and carries great emotional weight.

You can buy Reivax Au Bongo here. Crammed disc, the excellent Belgian parent label, has made this record available to the digital consolidators, so you can also find it at the likes of emusic and the iTunes store.

Sally Potter’s new film Yes has a beautiful version of this piece in the final scenes, played by Potter herself in collaboration with guitarist Fred Frith. That version will be on the CD soundtrack of the film, which will be released along with the film on June 21st, 2005. Seeing as we don’t yet have the Potter/Frith version, we’re spinning the original from Tom Waits.

Yes is a post-September-11th love story between East and West, jam packed with challenging ideas, gorgeous film making, and some excellent music from the likes of Philip Glass, Gustavo Santaolalla, and Kronos Quartet. Although the film at times threatens to collapse under the weight of its formal challenges (the entire screenplay is written in rhyming verse), it ends up being a sensual, moving, provocative, experience. I saw the film last night at the Tribeca Film Festival, and it’s playing again on Saturday.

The Tom Waits version of the piece here comes from his exquisite 2002 CD Alice, written in collaboration with his wife Kathleen Brennan.

You can pre-order the soundtrack to Yes here. You can buy Alice here. The site for Yes is here, and includes information about and excerpts from the soundtrack.

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.

Go ahead and roll your own version of music history if you like, but just don’t leave out ol’ Varèse. Two of the 20th Century’s grand masterpieces, Ionisation and Poème électronique, come from the mind of this French-born American composer who was once characterized by Henry Miller as The Stratospheric Colossus of Sound, and by Nicolas Slonimsky as “a huge French peasant”.

Ionisation is written entirely for percussion and two sirens. It was composed in 1931, and reflects Varèse’s interest in scientific ideas as musical organizing principles. In a uniquely mid-century dialogue between the American arts and sciences, supposedly a recording of Ionisation was played regularly by the scientists at Oak Ridge in 1940 who were working on the atom bomb.

In this 1977 recording Pierre Boulez conducts the New York Philharmonic on a CD which also includes stellar recordings of several of Varèse’s other works, including Amériques and Arcana. You can find it here. There is a fascinating audio archive about Ionisation here, which includes a long interview with Nicolas Slonimsky, the wunderkind who conducted the world premiere of Ionisation in New York City in 1933, among other things.

In the liner notes for the CD release of Altered States, Ken Russell writes of first discovering John Corigliano at a concert in Los Angeles in 1979:

“Reading from my program that he was a contemporary composer I braced myself for thirty minutes of plinks and plunks that pass for music these days. I was in for a surprise, a shock, a revelation.

Not since Bartok’s Miraculous Mandarin have I been so excited in the concert hall… I knew I was looking at a composer of the stature of Ives and Copeland. If only he could compose the music for Altered States instead of some commercial Hollywood hack we directors are usually saddled with, I thought wistfully. But that’s just a dream.

I should have known better — Hollywood is the place where dreams come true.”

Corigliano’s incredible 1980 score was nominated for an Oscar, but lost to Fame. Corigliano has only written two other film scores; Revolution (1985) and The Red Violin (1998), for which he finally did win an Academy Award. Altered States is out of print, but you can find a used copy here. He has many excellent recordings of his other work available, including his Symphony No. 1. The Red Violin Score is also available.

I was planning on posting something else, but then Bang! Kate Bush came out of nowhere like another kanga on the bonnet of the van. Could Kate Bush be the missing link between Nona Hendryx and Meredith Monk? Perhaps not, but consider the idea while giving this song a listen.

This track comes from the 1982 album of the same name. Kate Bush was among the very first people using the Fairlight CMI sampler (she actually first used it in 1980 on her previous album, Never for Ever), and you can hear her putting it through it’s paces on this track, including liberal doses of the renowned ORCH5 orchestra stab.

You can buy The Dreaming here. There are many rare Kate Bush mp3s here. Kate Bush has no official site, but there is a critical mass of material on her here.

I saw Meredith Monk sing with her ensemble at the Look and Listen festival here in New York last Thursday. She had her pigtails on and was as cute as ever, and knocked my socks off with her stunning performance. I find her gibberish vocals to always have a slightly absurd quality, even as they are emotionally moving, which is very welcome in the context of avant garde music, which can sometimes be dragged down with weightiness.

My all-time favorite piece of Monk’s is Gotham Lullaby, from her 1980 record Dolmen Music, which you can buy here.

The Verve Remixed series has been a mixed bag, as these types of things usually are. On the one hand, it always seems like a transparent attempt to raid back catalogs and get the kids paying for music their grandparents already bought. On the other hand, what’s wrong with that? In the end, of course, it’s just a matter of taste… If you like the results, it’s all good.

Volume 3 of the series just came out a couple of weeks ago, and it contains this toe-tapping version of the flogged Cole Porter tune. Blossom Dearie recorded her take in 1958, in a version which probably sounded quite modern and forward-thinking when it was first released, but by now sounds like archeology to fans of The Brazilian Girls, who are the current darlings of the Brooklyn club scene. When the twain meet it ends up being a reasonable example of how the ancient and modern can sometimes co-exist peacefully with good results.

Verve also take the nice step of releasing an “Unmixed” version of the series as well, which can be seen either as another cynical attempt to wring even more money from their back catalog, or as a culturally sensitive nod to the original music.

You can buy Verve Remixed Volume 3 here. The Unmixed version is here. The Web site for the series is here. The Brazilian Girls have a site here.

This is the opening track from my favorite Nona Hendryx record, the 1983 disc called simply Nona, produced by Bill Laswell. After leaving Pati LaBelles’s Blue Belles, Hendryx was a busy session musician and when it came time to do her own records, a stellar cast returned her favors and assembled an allstar smartfunk band including Nile Rodgers, Sly Dunbar, Bernie Worrel, Afrika Bambaataa, and Laurie Anderson. I could go on.

I saw her play a couple of times in the 80’s, once as part of Talking Heads big band on the Remain In Light tour, and then as a solo act in Los Angeles promoting her 1984 record The Art of Defense. She’s a stunning performer, with a commanding presence and an all-powerful voice.

Unfortunately all of Nona Hendryx’ catalog is now out of print, but you can support her by visiting the store at her official site, where there are links to some of her side projects which are available. The artist’s site is here.

Here’s Nat King Cole from 1949, singing Alec Wilder’s song arranged by Pete Rugolo. Cole is at the top of his form here, but this song isn’t the best of anything. It’s just the right song for today.

Gee, I’d like to go fishin’!

It’s taken from the very good Lush Life record, which you can buy here.