hoven droven: groove cd

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CD, groove, hoven droven, liner notes, music, nordic roots sampler, scandinavia

Long live the glorious island republic of Scandinavia. They make some awesome music there. What’s that you say? You can’t find it on a map? Then try this one.

I started to get a clue about what a Scandinavia is right about the time I first heard Hoven Droven’s tune SlentBjenn. Taking the energy of a rock band, adding fiddle and saxophone, and drawing on folk material, Hoven Droven lays down some seriously heavy grooves with beautiful melodies.

Below, you will see scans of their album Groove, which you can score on Amazon, and the first Nordic Roots sampler that features one of their tunes. If you want to get totally Scandinavian, Nordic Roots put out a second and third sampler of awesome bands from the region.

art blakey afro-drum ensemble: the african beat cd

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african beat, african music, afro-drum ensemble, art blakey, CD, drums, Jazz, liner notes, music, nat hentoff, percussion, yusef lateef

In 1962, Art Blakey recorded The African Beat not with his quintessentially swinging Jazz Messengers but a percussion ensemble. Yusef Lateef, who also recorded modern jazz albums using Asian and African ideas, joins the ensemble. The result is a sumptuously rhythmic album that often gets overlooked, perhaps due to its defiance of easy categorization.

Nat Hentoff’s liner notes give a brief but enlightening explanation of the music’s sources and the musicians’ cultural backgrounds. I recommend The African Beat for fans of jazz, percussion, “world” music, and African music. Fans of jazz/rock fusions and prog rock might also like this album, if they want to expand their listening into some other types of musical fusion.

Get a copy from Amazon.

proof CD

Tags

CD, music, self publishing, while my guitar gently annihilates

This will be fun. Amazon doesn’t have the pages for this and the other new album yet, but probably will this coming week.

motor dolls cd: burning memories

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All Fired Up, burning memories, CD, Detroit, Motor Dolls, music

 
After listening approximately a gazillion times to the Motor Dolls album we posted twelve days ago, we had to pick up this one, too. Burning Memories is the second and final solid slab of Detroit rock and roll from this trio, the stand-out cuts being “You Want It” and “Nailed to the Cross”. Several people have told us to include “Power” in that list, too, though the whole album is a veritable non-stop blaze of straight-up rock fury. You can find it on Amazon as Motor Dolls: Burning Memories, and it is usually selling for about half the price of Motor Dolls: All Fired Up.

One of the songs on this 1996 album, “Hangover”, appeared two years later on a compilation called Motor City’s Burnin’ 1: 1968-1998. That disc places the Motor Dolls right alongside legendary acts like the MC5 and The Stooges, and other hard-rocking southeast Michigan bands of the mid-90s like Big Chief. We think after hearing this album you will agree that placement was well-deserved.

jimi hendrix voodoo soup: cd booklet

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CD, jimi hendrix, liner notes, music, voodoo soup

 
This album is available on Amazon as Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Soup. Though you can currently find CD or even cassette versions, Amazon does not yet have it available as an MP3 download. Numerous Amazon customers have rated it four and five stars and written reams of praise. So let us simply say, we concur. It is truly awesome.

 

 
When Voodoo Soup came out in the mid 1990s, Hendrix fans had fewer posthumous releases of quality than we do now. This and Rykodisc’s stellar album of Radio One BBC recordings, later released in expanded form as the BBC Sessions two-CD set, were among the finest. Few if any of the recordings released since then can match these two recordings for sound quality, energetic performance, song selection, and production choices. Even songs released on The Cry of Love receive superior post-production on Voodoo Soup, and in our opinion sound more like what Hendrix would have aimed for in final mixes than most other “posthumously completed” compilations.

 

 
We scanned the CD booklet, including the complete 19-page essay on the context and production of the songs, for our archives, and share it with you now. As our CD copy had a cut out on the front cover, we did not scan the artwork by Moebius, but you can easily find that in any product listing for this album.

 

screaming trees change has come cd

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album, CD, Change has Come, EP, music, Screaming Trees, Sup Pop

Sub Pop put out a limited edition EP from the Screaming Trees – at gas stations, as one reviewer recalls, and perhaps through their subscription-based mail-order service of the late 1980s. The songs on Change has Come are five of the Trees’ best. But somehow they missed making it onto either of the Screaming Trees collections: Anthology the SST Years 1985-1989 and Ocean of Confusion 89-96. At the time of this writing, no one has seen fit to issue official mp3 downloads for them! The compact disk retains its status as a rarity.

For many years, no one wanted to sell their copy. But, the global Internet marketplace has expanded greatly since this album came out. In the last ten years, it has become regularly available in the $20 to $40 range: Screaming Trees Change Has Come EP.

Amazon claims a date of 1994 on this, but we remember listening to it many years before that. Perhaps a German release came out in 1989 on vinyl, with a CD pressing for the USA in 1991. Our best friend’s brother had a copy we never saw, but we heard our friend’s cassette copy dubbed from that unidentified source.

Do you think you have the definitive proof of the correct release date? We’d love to hear from you then! Comment, please! And now, archival photos & scans, including the original shrink wrap!

 

 

ry cooder and the moula banda rhythm aces

Tags

1987, blues, Catalyst, CD, concert, import, live disc, March 24, Moula Banda Rhythm Aces, Ry Cooder, Santa Cruz, Wrong Note

Ry Cooder & the Moula Banda Rhythm Aces; The Catalyst, Santa Cruz, CA; March 24, 1987.
Made in Japan. Copyright 2004.
Wrong Note.

Although fragments of video from this 1987 concert made it to YouTube recently, buyers in America still have a very hard time finding this CD. For example, if you look on Amazon’s U.S. site, you will not find it at all – no listing, not even an ‘out of stock’ or a blank picture. Just nothing.

 

 
Why? Our research suggests Ry Cooder blocked the release of this album in the States, refusing to even allow it to be sold, but we haven’t spoken with him to verify that. We got ours from overseas, from a seller in the UK with an eBay account.

 

 
The concert itself mostly sticks to rootsy, straight-ahead blues mixed with an all-male vocal chorus. Keys, horns, accordion, and of course Ry Cooder’s understated but soulful slide guitar spice up the mix. The a capella song Jesus Hits Like an Atom Bomb takes an unexpected lyrical turn before settling down into the slow burn of Down in Mississippi, an extended jam.

 

 
We sold ours back to the global eBay marketplace, but not before ripping some high quality mp3s and taking a few archival photos. It’s a good disc, if you can find it. Not a desert island top ten disc, but a solid blues performance somewhat hard to find here in the states.