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.

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.

 

Ali Farka Toure: Liner Notes from The River

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african music, ali farka toure, liner notes, music, the river

Listening to vocal music in languages you don’t speak means you lose the narrative, but it can draw your focus to the purely musical aspects of a piece. We enjoy the hypnotic minor-key drones and plaintive singing of The River, but if you download the album you miss out on some deeper meanings. Fortunately, Ali Farka Toure kindly provided us with stories, culture, and context in his liner notes.

We snagged these scans of The River before selling it on Amazon. Yes, you can click and zoom to read the small print.