Kelefa Sanneh tips us to a new soundtrack which is born of corporate wheeler-dealering but ends up as a rather satisfying cutting-edge dance/hip-hop/crooner mashup. Kelefa is never wrong about anything - check his edifying feature about New Orleans hiphop from this Sunday’s NYT if you need more proof of his unassailable investigative prowess. Unfortunately, the NYT does not allow their reviews to be linked to musical examples, leaving us bloggers to fill in the gaps.

My favorite track from Take The Lead is this number which combines 1950’s vocal cool diva June Christy’s version of the Gershwin standard with updates from NY battle rapper Jae Milz, hip-hop gods Eric B & Rakim, and R&B wannabe Mashonda. These sorts of things shouldn’t work, but this one does.

You can find out more about the film Take The Lead here (if you must), and you can buy the soundtrack CD here.

This is the opening track from Tunisian oud master Anouar Brahem’s new record Le voyage de Sahar, just now out on ECM. It sits on my shelf next to the prized Astor Piazzola, Alberto Iglesias, and Dino Saluzzi records. I am captivated by Brahem’s oud; Jean-Louis Matinier’s accordian is sublime and surprising; Francois Couturier’s piano playing is best when it keeps a light touch and stays out of the way - occasionally the tinkly arpeggios remind one of the dreaded New Age beast which hovers in the background of so many otherwise-excellent ECM releases. But like the finest of that crop, this is exquisitely produced and when at it’s best creates a unique, mesmerizing, contemplative space to get lost in.

You can buy Le voyage de Sahar here. The artist has a web site here.

The new version of My Life in The Bush of Ghosts is officially released in the U.S. today on Nonesuch records, so here is one more track related to that project before we move on to other business.

This is an early unofficial version of “The Jezebel Spirit” which uses the voice of the American Pentecostal evangelist Kathryn Kuhlman. It was legal issues surrounding the use of the Kuhlman recording which delayed the initial release of My Life in The Bush of Ghosts. The record was recorded in 1979/1980 but was released in 1981 after the Talking Heads record Remain in Light. The final version of this song featured a different (male) vocal, credited to an “Unidentified exorcist, New York, September 1980″. In a Trouser Press review from the time of the release, Eno discussed the clearance difficulties and Remain in Light (full article here):

“There was a legal reason that actually disguised an artistic reason,” Eno says of the delay. The former was an objection from the estate of the late evangelist and faith healer Kathryn Kuhlman to the use of her voice on one of the album tracks.

“The whole thing was ready,” Eno continues. “We knew that if we tried to release it there would be an injunction stopping its sale, so we just had to rework that track. This came up after we’d done Remain in Light, and doing that record gave us quite a lot of new ideas about how we could approach ours as wel. The two records really helped each other along: the Talking Heads record was influenced by early My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, and then, having done Talking Heads, we learned a few things about how we could do our own record better. This Kathryn Kuhlman episode was really the perfect cause to take the record apart and do some things again.”

More info about the bootleg release that this version comes from can be found here - apparently this is still available for purchase in some places, but I couldn’t find any. The official new release of My Life in The Bush of Ghosts can be bought here, and the new site for the release is here.

Here’s a very contemporary example of the legacy and influence of My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts — a “song” existing in a pop idiom (hip-hop) that eschews all live performance of musical instruments in favor of a strategy which relies exclusively on re-combining pre-existing recorded excerpts into a new unique musical event. It even uses “found” vocals, which would not seem out of place as another element in America is Waiting, the opening track from Ghosts.

J Dilla (aka Jay Dee) came out of the Detroit underground and went on to become a major producer, working with De La Soul, Busta Rhymes, A Tribe Called Quest, Common, Macy Gray and others. This track comes from Dilla’s latest album Donuts, which was assembled in his hospital bed while fighting lupus, using a laptop and a stack of LPs. The album was released on his 32nd birthday three days before his death in February.

Donuts is an interesting example in another currently raging musical debate: The Death of The Album. Critics have suggested that the digitization of music and ready availability of per-song purchases are killing longer-form musical products that have traditionally been seen as the ultimate artistic expression in popular music, but here is a prime example of current work which suggests that this is not the case. Donuts resists excerpting (and thus blogging) because its strength is as a 43-minute journey across a series of short interludes. Each track flows into the next seamlessly without a break, and the last track flows perfectly into the first when the album is played on repeat. The whole is much larger than the sum of its parts. Get the CD and experience it for yourself.

You can buy Donuts here. The artist has a web page here.

Music nerds of a certain persuasion have spent countless hours debating the minutia of Brian Eno’s historical precedents and innovations. Did Eno steal the “double Revox endless tape loop” technique from Steve Reich, or did he arrive at it independently for Discreet Music? Who cares?

This captivating track from Holger Czukay’s 1979 record Movies pre-dates My Life In The Bush of Ghosts by a year or two and employs some of the same techniques, appropriating Persian vocals snagged from shortwave broadcasts and combining them with Czukay’s own brand of hi-life, featuring guitar work reminiscent of another tech monster, Mr. Les Paul.

Czukay studied under Stockhausen in the 1960s and was a member of the German braniac band Can, and was certainly a pioneer in the mixing of “world” music sources with Western style Pop and Art Rock. His 1968 record Canaxis combined many shortwave “samples” of international music sources with his own electronic music sensibility and grooves. Czukay went on to work as a bassist, composer, and producer with The Eurythmics, Eno, Phew, David Sylvian and Jah Wobble, among many others.

Movies is out of print, but you might find a copy here. On The Way to The Peak of Normal is another excellent Holger Czukay record, which is available here. The artist has a useful web site here, which has news of a new record, 21st Century, arriving soon along with much of his back catalog re-mastered and re-released.