wnyc.org / 93.9fm / am 820


New Sounds

Wednesday, December 15, 2004
  • Schaefer & Fast n' Bulbous
    Fast n' Bulbous w/host John Schaefer (WNYC/Irene Trudel)

    Oh Captain, My Captain

    On this edition of New Sounds, experience Fast ’N’ Bulbous: The Captain Beefheart Project. Sax player/composer Phillip Johnston arranges and conducts the music of one of rock’s most eccentric figures, Don Van Vliet, aka Captain Beefheart, featuring guitarist (and ex-Beefheart sideman) Gary Lucas. Both Johston and Lucas join John Schaefer in the studio, along with a band made up of seasoned improvisers from both the worlds of avant-garde jazz and rock, including . Together, they take on the adventure of rhythmic interplay that is Van Vliet’s music, with the horn section taking the place of the vocals. Incidentally, Van Vliet stopped the business of making music and “chucked it all for a painting career in 1982.”

PROGRAM #2355, Fast ‘N” Bulbous: The Captain Beefheart Project live (First aired 12/15/04)

ARTIST(S)

RECORDING

CUT(S)

SOURCE

Captain Beefheart & The Magic Band

Trout Mask Replica

Pachuco Cadaver, excerpt [1:30]

Reprise #2027**

Fast ‘N’ Bulbous: The Captain Beefheart Project

Live

Pachuco Cadaver [5:00]
Kandy Korn [5:00]
Suction Prints [5:00]
Veteran’s Day Poppy [6:30]

All available on the band’s 2005 CD, "Pork Chop Blue Around the Rind,” Cuneiform #205** www.cuneiformrecords.com *

Captain Beefheart & The Magic Band

Trout Mask Replica

Ella Guru [5:00]
Old Fart At Play [2:00]

See above.

Zoot Horn Rollo

We saw a bozo under the sea

Detective Charlo [5:00]

Zoot Horn Rollo #ZHR 2001 www.zoothornrollo.com

*, ** Find the recordings you've heard - go to the New Sounds Recordings Information page

Leave a Comment

Please stay on topic, be civil, and be brief.
Email addresses are never displayed, but they are required to confirm your comments. Names are displayed with all comments. WNYC reserves the right to edit any comments posted on this site. Please read the WNYC.org Comment Guidelines before posting.

Your comment


* required
The information entered into this form will not be used to send unsolicited email and will not be sold to a third party.
 

Twitchy Renaissance-Infused Minimalism

New Sounds

From the New Sounds Live concerts at Merkin Hall, Nico Muhly presents a series of new electroacoustic ensemble works, combining “twitchy Minimalism” and Renaissance polyphony. Hear brand-new works from "Mothertongue," along with other works, recorded live.

In Robert Moran's Kitchen

New Sounds

From October 30, 1989, the infamous "cooking show" with composer/raconteur Robert Moran. Recorded while cooking an Indian dinner in John Schaefer's kitchen, for reasons still not entirely clear. Along the way, we hear an "acoustic" version of Cage's 0:00 - for amplification of chopping vegetables and blender. And don't miss the teary conversation as onions are chopped. View the the recipes.

Michael Hedges and Michael Manring

New Sounds

The incredibly gifted and astonishingly original guitarist Michael Hedges left the planet much too soon in 1997. Avant-folk and ever-entertaining, Hedges made brilliant music with alternate tunings, harmonics and was known for striking the guitar’s body and strings with his fingers, palms and knuckles. His close friend and sometime collaborator, electric bass virtuoso Michael Manring, was a genre-bender, before music writers ever discovered that hyphenated term. He started out in the New Age bins, but moved all over with various projects, including the very first New Age-death-metal-jazz-funk-fusion record, among other things, with his “hyperbass”, (a fretless instrument which makes re-tuning mid-piece a little easier). On this October 10, 1987 edition of New Sounds, the two artists visited and played at the WNYC performance studios.

Caravan Variations

New Sounds

Like camels slogging through the sand, the exotic strains of “Caravan,” by Duke Ellington and his sometime trombonist Juan Tizol (with rarely heard lyrics by Irving Mills), have been played loose, fast, swinging, and/or slow by just about everyone. For this New Sounds program, it’s another of the occasional series of programs of Theme and Variations, where the premise is simple: take a single piece of music and explore what a number of musicians have done with it, through arrangements, deconstructions, and revisions of the original theme. This time around, it’s Duke Ellington’s “Caravan.” Listen to arrangements by Romania’s Fanfare Ciocarlia, Hungary’s Kalman Balogh & The Gipsy Cimbalom Band, the California Guitar Trio, the ska group Hepcat, banjoman Bela Fleck, Lebanese composer Rabih Abou-Khalil, and trumpeter/composer Jon Hassell, among others.