While Franti may sometimes stray into holier-than-thou territory, God bless him for keeping it real, and let’s just remember that someone has to be out there barefoot with a guitar lecturing us about right and wrong. At his most successful, Franti merges a deeply felt political consciousness with great musical poignancy, or, as in this case, great shake-your-booty grooves.

This is from Franti’s 2001 release Stay Human, which also includes the terrific track Oh My God, among others. We used both songs in Season 1 of HBO’s The Wire; I imagined that Avon Barksdale had a copy of Stay Human floating around in his SUV. After having used Oh My God in an early episode, a discussion of political content in songs emerged on one of the HBO bulletin boards in which someone said “yeah, but HBO would never DARE use Rock The Nation in a show,” apparently feeling that the lyrics were just too politically scathing.

Bomb Bomb
Rock the Nation
Take over television and radio station
Bomb Bomb
The truth shall come
Give the corporation some complication

Fuck the Constitution
Are we part of the solution or part of the polution?

Well, we had already used that song and those lyrics in an episode which was completed but hadn’t aired yet. Turns out you CAN say shit like that on TV, and no-one cares. And, of course, absolutely nothing changes as a result.

Anyway, you can find Stay Human here. Michael Franti has a web site here.

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.

In February this year I was lucky to attend the Sherpa Association New Year Losar celebration here in New York, which was a fantastic evening of great food, dancing, celebrating and wildy varied music. There were groups of young girls in traditional dress dancing with Sherpa men in cowboy hats. There were Sherpa rappers with gold chains and backwards baseball caps. There were emotional crooners practically swallowing their radio mics. I had to stumble home around 1 am leaving my hosts who were just getting going and usually dance until dawn on such occasions. This track comes from a CDR given to me by a Nepali friend after I asked her for some music like what we had heard at the New Year event. I don’t know the name of the artist, or the song, or what it’s about.

You can find the United Sherpa Association here. They are also hosting an entire album of mp3s from Mingma Sherpa here, and a selection of more great songs here, including Ma Sherpa Ko Chhoro by Nhyu Bajracharya which features sound FX of an avalanche and yaks in the intro. And don’t miss the first Nepali hip-hop record recorded in the U.S., Nurbu Sherpa Representin’ K.T.M.C., available as a free download here.

Nothing like some Monday morning harmolodics to get the week off to a good start. This is from James Blood Ulmer’s rare and out-of-print 1981 record Free Lancing, and comes to us via the renowned Urmson Vinyl Crate.

If you’re in the mood for more James Blood Ulmer, you could try his most recent release Birthright, which is available here, or his 1996 Tales of Captain Black which is here. There’s more info about the artist, including tour dates, at his label here.

When The Hounds of Hell are on your tail or The Dogs of Summer are nipping at your heels, throw them this bone for best results.

In 1982 George Clinton emerged from the wreckage of the crashed Funkadelic mothership with his first solo album, Computer Games, which included this song. Atomic Dog sounded quite different than most American pop music at that time, with its backwards drums, nonsense chants, grunts, chipmunk vocals, and mechanical synth hooks, but the single nevertheless took the number one spot on the R&B charts for four weeks.

This is the deliciously satiating extended Atomic Mix version, not the shorter version released as a single and appearing on Computer Games (which is out of print). You can find this long version on the Rhino compilation Phat Trax 3 here, or you can get the good compilation The Best of George Clinton for a measly $6.98 here, which includes the original short version.

Miles Davis was one of the towering figures of 20th Century music — but you’d never know it from this record. In his prolific outpouring over several decades, he created many musical masterpieces — but this isn’t one of them.

L’Ascenseur Pour L’Echafaud, recorded quickly in 1957 as a score to Louis Malle’s first film, is instead a casually improvised collection of mood pieces which perfectly accompany the film they were made for, and removed from that context work as an extremely evocative and accessible set of miniature tone poems. It’s as if working in a supporting role freed Miles to just play instead of think, and stretching a few motifs out over an hour allows him to experiment with details of tone and phrasing in a different way. The rumored affair with the film’s star Jeanne Moreau couldn’t have hurt his inspiration, either.

You can buy L’Ascenseur Pour L’Echafaud here. Verve records has a page about the record here.

The full title being Electronic Sonata for Souls Loved By Nature. This is an excerpt from the live version on the CD George Russell & The Living Time Orchestra: The 80th Birthday Concert, which you can actually buy today at CD Baby, even though it’s not officially being released until September.

The artist has a web site here. You can also purchase his world-changing book The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization here.

This opportunity to get your Lydian Chromatics on has been made possible by Urmson, who may enlighten us further in the comments below…

Another advance leak from the mythical Earl of Edgecombe Summer Mix, which will be dropping here or somewhere nearby in it’s entirety before September. Hopefully.

In addition to Gwen and Miles, there are a few fragments of Angelique Kidjo’s Summertime, and a major contribution from several thousand Dead Sea Crickets which I recorded in the West Bank in 1985. The sounds of summer…

If you’re in a bibliographical mood you can find Gwen Stefani’s Love. Angel. Music. Baby. here, and the Miles comes from Porgy & Bess which is here. Angelique Kijdo’s version of Summertime is here. And the Dead Sea Crickets are 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.

The violence that I grew up with in London in the 70s seemed horrific at the time, but seems a bit quaint now. Dying on the platform of the Baker St tube in a hail of Doc Martens has a nostalgia to it that cell-phone-triggered briefcase bombs lack. Even the pub bombs seem relatively civilized now, with their two minute advance warning calls. But I suppose the least nostalgic way to die is from a cruise missile landing on you. A Hellfire Drone would at least have some futuristic glamor to it. Ancient proverb say “May we all have poignant deaths”.

I saw The Jam a few times, but the best gig was in Paris in 1978. I had just dyed my hair fluorescent orange with black stripes, and I felt a special sense of entitlement, being English, sure that the French kids around me couldn’t possibly understand what The Jam were on about. To them it was just fashion, I was sure. How could a French kid decipher

They smelled of Pubs
And Wormwood Scrubs
And too many right-wing meetings

And I suppose in that moment of feeling separate and special lies the beginning of a Nationalist, separationist sentiment, the end of which is actually fundamentalism and xenophobia. That’s the funny thing about culture, I guess. Things which make us feel special and clever and closer to the members of one group necessarily push us further away from the others. Oh well.

Anyway… I’m sending this one out to my mates in the UK.

You can get the awesome Jam box set Direction Reaction Creation here.