Stephen Scott and his Bowed Piano Ensemble create extraordinary musical works using the most prosaic and traditional of instruments: the piano. But the way they play the piano is anything but traditional, physically deconstructing the instrument and getting inside it with horse-hair bows, guitar picks, hammers, and an electromagnetic “piano bowing device” similar to the e-bow. The results are utterly unique, and sublime. This piece is the opener from Scott’s 1984 recording New Music For Bowed Piano on New Albion Records, which was re-released on CD in 1999.

You can find New Music For Bowed Piano here. Stephen Scott has a page here, which includes more music examples. There’s a good interview with the artist in which he discusses his techniques here.

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.

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.

Derek Jarman’s 1993 meditation on mortality features music by Simon Fisher-Turner and others, the voices of Jarman, Tilda Swinton, and a couple of other actors, deep landscapes of sound effects, and a bottomless field of blue. And that’s all. Completely unique, very powerful, and highly recommended.

You can find the CD of Blue here. The DVD isn’t available in the US, but you can find it at Amazon in Germany here. You can find the entire text here. You could also create a pretty accurate approximation of watching the film by dimming the lights, listening to the CD, and staring at a large blue card. Just make sure you have the right shade of blue.

Peter Gabriel has always been one of the more generous musical colonizers. Rather than just using authentic global musical culture as window dressing for his own white rock records, he has established a real dialogue with other musicians from around the world, and has directed not only attention but money and opportunities to those he has worked with. Here then is one of his earliest collages that combined indigenous South African music with his brand of intimate stadium rock. Shosholoza is perhaps most interesting when seen as a conceptual sketch for the planetary hit Biko, which has had many iterations including a great cover version from Manu Dibango. “Chocholoza” is the name of a traditional South African chant sung to give strength when facing hardship. It means “go forward.” The Gabriel version became popular in South Africa during the country’s victorious 1995 Rugby World Cup tournament.

This is very rare, only ever released on vinyl. I’m taking it from the 1980 12″ of I Don’t Remember, which I found in the recesses of the Urmson Vinyl Crate. You can find the definitive Gabriel version of Biko here, and the Manu Dibango version here.

Composer and multi-instrumentalist Richard Horowitz & Iranian-born vocalist Sussan Deihim have been collaborating since 1981. This track comes from their 1988 landmark first release Desert Equations. Today it might seem like old hat to combine the obliquely-blown ney with electronics in a combination of jazz, classical, and Moroccan trance music, but beleive you me, when Horowitz started doing it in the 1980s the hat was brand new. It was after hearing Desert Equations that Bernardo Bertolucci asked Horowitz to score The Sheltering Sky.

Richard Horowitz has a site with many more music examples here, and Desert Equations has a spot at the Crammed Disc site here. I’m taking this track from the original 1988 Belgian import CD, but fortunately you can find the 2003 re-release of this CD here.