Today (or maybe it was yesterday) in exciting musical news, the Alan Lomax archives are being digitized. Music, film, photos and manuscripts will be available online. And that is pretty amazing. There have been CD releases of some of the material. Maybe even a lot of the material. I'm not sure -- it's not like I'm a Lomax scholar or anything. But I know I've played stuff from CDs that said they were Alan Lomax recordings and I even reviewed a couple of Caribbean collections. Anyway, well looking forward to being able to check more of it out. Coming online later this month, according to that link.
Driving home the other night, listening to the radio and they cut to a commercial break. I was about to switch to another station when I hear "this is Mal Sharpe for U.S. Cellular." My first thought was that I recognized the voice. Then I realized what he'd said and realized that, yes, it was Mal Sharpe of Coyle and Sharpe. I was gonna say fame but I'm not sure if they count as famous. But they should be famous. Early 60s street interview prank humorist. I'm cracking myself just thinking about their stuff. Oh look, here's a transcript of Airport Fishing Rod. Brilliancy! So anyway I had no idea that Mal Sharpe was still alive. Sorry to see he's doing radio spots but on the other hand, glad he's getting work. Also, the spot was formatted as a street interview even though I can't imagine anyone much listening to the ad would actually get why. I guess someone at the ad agency is a fan.
"Be the second clerical personality to try this. Please."

And today's headline of the day is "London Olympics travel plan: be patient, drink beer."
Meanwhile, it was Sarah's birthday over the weekend. Festivities included dinner and drinks with a small party of favorites at Geer Street, home-made Chinese-style spareribs, Daisy Cakes lemon cake, and "the Rat Pack is Back" at the Carolina. Fun times galore. This was actually the fourth time we've seen a Rat Pack tribute show. What can I say? We're music geeks. Here's Sarah's review of a 2009 performance we saw in Raleigh. I think the Carolina was a better space for the show. The audience was closer to the stage and that gave "Joey Bishop" (there was no program for the show but I'm pretty sure he was played by Sandy Hackett) a chance to interact with the audience a lot more than in Raleigh. The band, while smaller, was cooking. This time out, the best performer was "Frank" (altho he took a while to click for me cos he looked nothing like Sinatra but he really had the voice and, especially, the phrasing nailed). Once again, they take pains to set up the show as in the spirit of the early 60s and then include later material like "My Way" and "New York, New York." Which, once again, is only gonna bother geeks like me. The one thing I didn't like this time was this out-of-left-field musical number where "Frank" is in silhouette at the piano and a woman comes out and belts out some song I've never heard before. People seemed to like it, unless they were just applauding because a song just ended and that's when you're supposed to applaud. I thought it was like someone auditioning for "American Idol" singing a third-rate Andrew Lloyd Weber knockoff. Protip: if you're doing a Rat Pack tribute show, five minutes spent w/ no members of the Rat Pack performing is 5 minutes wasted. On the other hand, they did "In the Wee Small Hours" which I've never seen at one of these shows. And they did "Sam's Song," which I haven't seen since the very first show like this we saw, back in 2001 at the now-closed Sahara.
Finally, here's an important message from Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy:

Following up on my last post about that Cure show (from back in the early Pleistocene), here's thesetlist. Before looking at that, I'd have been able to tell you a few songs that I remember them doing that night. Looking at it now, a bunch more come back to mind. But there's still a couple that I look at and have no memory of at all. Oh well, I'm sure those brain cells are being used for something more important, like where I put my keys last night when I got home.
Sunday seems like a good day for some random linkage so please enjoy these LIFE Magazine photos of Des Moines teenagers in 1947. And this spiffy shot of Godzilla.

Have spent the evening avoiding most of my usual blog-reading since I really feel like I need a break from the clown maglev. The stupid, it burns. So I've been whiling away the last few hours (aka, wasting) surfing concert videos on youtube. I'm doing one of those "song challenge" meme things on fbook and I'm on the day where I'm supposed to pick a song from the best concert I ever saw. Of course, I can't pick one "best concert." Hell, I try to do a top 10 list of music and end up with 3 CDs. I'm up to 4 so far but there's about a half-dozen other great shows I'll probably include. Assuming I can find decent live footage on youtube. A couple of (theoretically) interesting things have come up while messing around with this.
For one, I've found three clips so far from shows that I was at. Big Black at CBGB in 1986, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan in Central Park in 1993, and Hot Club of Cowtown at Casbah here in Durham last year. I'm actually surprised I haven't found more footage of recent shows. Phones keep getting smaller and the picture quality they can capture keeps getting better and better. I guess I understand why performers and venue issue no recording policies and statements but I kinda wonder why they bother. I went looking to see if there was any footage from this Cure show I saw back in 1984 at the Beacon. There wasn't but there are 20+ pages of videos from Cure shows at the Beacon in November 2011.
So that's another thing I learned -- that the Cure did a (not quite a) farewell tour last year which included three nights at the Beacon in NYC, playing their first three albums in their entirety. Wow. If you'd told me back when I was waiting on line to buy Cure tix in '84 that they'd be playing the same theater 27 years later, I'm sure I wouldn't have believed it. In a way, I'm kinda glad I never heard anything about those shows. Cos they were over Thanksgiving weekend so it is actually imaginable that we could've gotten up there for one of them. On the other hand, tix were anywhere from 60$ to 100$.
And thinking about that Cure show and "best concerts" in general got me to wondering about how many of what I think of as "best" shows were also the first time I'd seen the band. I used to think that was always true, that the first time was always the best. But I've modified that over time. Some bands just get better. Either the material is better or the players or they just do better in a different space (maybe bigger, maybe smaller). The first Cure show I saw was amazing and new and it knocked me on my ass but if I had to pick the best Cure show I saw it'd probably be Radio City. Maybe MSG but the sound there wasn't nearly as good as at the Music Hall. For me, the 80s versions of the Cure got better as they got into bigger and bigger halls. Unlike, say, Psychedelic Furs who were never better than the first time I saw them (in DC on the Forever Now tour). As they got bigger, they got slicker and lost most of their edge and sense of danger. Some bands are just better in an intimate setting. Like Hot Club of Cowtown. Altho I can't decide whether the house concert we saw them do back about 10 years ago was better than their gig at Casbah. The house concert was amazing but I do think they picked up energy from the crowd and especially the dancers at Casbah.
Well, I'm not sure what my point was anymore. So, goodnight.

While I was pulling together the XDU wrrld music tops yesterday, I noticed that fully half of the top 20 is music that was recorded in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Nothing wrong with that. I loved some of those albums. And a lot of it is stuff that's never been released in the US until now. But it's still kinda odd that 40 year old music is so dominant on the charts. It's as if college radio in the mid-70s was spending significant time spinning works by Django Reinhardt or George Formby. Which I'm pretty sure it wasn't. I didn't really discover college radio until late in my high school years (and, obviously, one or two stations do not represent the entirety of the college radio spectrum) but there I don't remember hearing anything much older than Bonzo Dog Band.
Not sure what it all means, exactly. I'm sure it tells us something about the modern condition, the world we live in and life in general but I'm damned if I can figure it out just now.

XDU wrrld music top 10 (year ending 31 dec 11)

Psych Funk Sa-Re-Ga! :: various
Cannibal Courtship :: Dengue Fever
¡Chicas! Spanish Female Singers, 1962-1974 :: various
Thai? Dai! The Heavier Side of the Luk Thung Underground :: various
Those Shocking, Shaking Days: Indonesian Hard, Psychedelic, Progressive Rock and Funk 1970-1978 :: various
Ponchototal :: Poncho
Googoosh :: Googoosh
Africa for Africa :: Femi Kuti
El Rego :: El Rego
Not So Commercial :: los Amigos Invisibles

video feature: Googoosh

(note: 11-20 are listed below the cut)

Hope y'all had a yule that was cool and will have a new year's eve that's just the right amount of festive. A fine time was had by all here. There was some coughing and sneezing but nothing we couldn't work around. Meats were roasted, cookies were baked, eggs were nogged, lights were lit. And etc.
Since another one of the things one does in this post-Xmas week is make lists and reflect back, here is today's Mondo Mundo playlist, which was a look at some of my fave world music from the last year.
While there were many good things about 2011, I can't say it was my bestest year ever or that I'm sorry to see it go. Here's hoping 2012 will be filled with high levels of wonderfulness for us all. Either that or the Mayan apocalypse...

My two days of long-ass days that involved getting home from work around 9pm are over. I know, I shouldn't complain. That's a regular thing for lotsa folks. But the disrupted schedule has knocked me off calendar a bit and I'm having a hard time focusing on the fact that we're looming up on Christmas.
One thing I've learned listening to the holiday music channel on cable is that, much as I love me some Spike Jones (and have ever since I first heard Spike Jones is Murdering the Classics back in middle school), there are few surer signs of wretched horrbileness than Spike Jones' name attached to an Xmas tune. My guess is that he was trying to cash in on the success of "... Two Front Teeth" but, oh my, the horror... the horror... About the only thing that will get me jumping for the mute button faster is the opening chords of "Jingle Bell Rock."
So, here's some holiday music that doesn't suck -- this year's edition of Santastic. dj BC has pulled together another solid set. Some of this year's, I'd say, rank up there among the best mashups I've ever heard. (not that I'm any kind of authority on the mashup scene or have heard that many)

Been thinking some more about the idea (raised by that xkcd comic I blogged about the other day) of the death-grip of boomers on Xmas music. Which I can't really disagree with. Listen to holiday radio and it's either trad. carols or songs from Tin Pan Alley or Brill Bldg. era. But if the hegemonic refusal of boomers to leave the stage is what's responsible for the fact that the most-played Christmas songs were written in the 1950s (or earlier), then why is the same not true for movies? While it's true that It's A Wonderful Life, White Christmas, and Miracle on 34th Street still get played often and are widely considered to be classic movies (or at least classic holiday movies), there are also newer movies that have developed into holiday standards -- Christmas Vacation, A Nightmare Before Christmas, and of course A Christmas Story. Seems clear that there is room for new movies to become Xmas classics in a way that doesn't seem possible for new songs. Delusional boomer "end of history" thinking must not be the only thing going on. I think maybe what that all tells us is that there's still a general movie audience (maybe not as broad-based or universal as before but still basically there) while there really isn't one for music. Post rock, the audience has splintered and re-splintered. There are now hundreds of micro-audiences and there really isn't an over-arching pop sensibility that connects them. So there's no one trying to write the new pop music Xmas standard because there's no reason to believe it would find an audience, would ever be able to break thru genre boundaries. And since there's money to be made just rehashing the already agreed upon classics, there is incentive to do that and not risk trying something new.

or not...

I'm just really not ready to go all in with holiday-themed linkage yet. I'm saving that up to start sometime next week. I did break down and plug in the lights on the front porch. They're inside the screened porch so it's not like I have to take them down and put them back up or anything. Just a matter of plugging the x-cord back in and hey ho it's holiday lights. Once again, I must say that I regret that the common Xmas light choice 'round these parts is white lights. Feh on that! Probably it's cos of where/when I grew up but for me Xmas lights should be multi-colored. Oh well.
Spent most of the evening working on the radio show I'm doing this Sunday. In a bit of a change from the usual run of play, I'm hosting XDU's jazz show and doing a tribute to the great pianist McCoy Tyner (Sunday is his 73rd birthday). Did some reading online and got copies of some of his early recordings that the station doesn't have, including sides with Freddie Hubbard and the Jazztet. Haven't decided if I'll go strictly chronological or jump around between the early stuff, the years with Coltrane and the later solo stuff. There's also a lot of work he did with other musicians in the late 60s right after he left Coltrane and I haven't decided if I'll have time for that. But I will try to make time for this, from 1974.