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New Sounds

Saturday, September 06, 2008
  • Kind of Afroblues

    For this New Sounds, listen to the blues that kind of wander someplace else. Hear the droning, bluesy grooves of guitarist Brad Barr, of The Slip, on "Bouba's Bounce," drawing inspiration from the late Sandy Bull's psychedelic folk. Also, there's a nod to the blues from Mali, with Bill Frisell's "Boubacar," from the Intercontinentals record. Plus, there’s Arabic-flavored blues, as Taj Mahal adapts the Mississippi Delta blues tune "Catfish Blues" ("I wish I was a catfish swimming in the deep blue sea, I'd have all you good looking women swimming after me … "), with references to the Malian cities of Timbuktu and Bamako as well as the capital city of Zanzibar. And as always, much more.

PROGRAM #2587, “Afroblues” (First aired on Tues. 9-26-06)

ARTIST(S)

RECORDING

CUT(S)

SOURCE

Various Artists: Taj Mahal & The Culture Musical Club of Zanzibar

Blues Around the World

Catfish Blues [6:30]

Putumayo #253 ** www.putamayo.com *

Dama & D’Gary

The Long Way Home

Searching for Work [6:30]

Shanachie #64052 Out of print, but try Amazon.com or other auction sites

Various Artists: Dama Mahaleo

A World Out of Time: Henry Kaiser & David Lindley In Madagascar

Kobaka [7:00]

Shanachie #64041 www.shanachie.com

Boubacar Traore

Kar Kar

Kavana [6:00]

Sterns Africa #1037 www.sternsmusic.com

Various Artists: Brad Barr

Imaginational Anthem, Vol. 1

Bouba’s Bounce [6:00]

Tompkins Square
www.tompkinssquare.com OR download thru iTunes or Emusic.com

Boubacar Traore

Kar Kar

Adieu Pierrette [5:00]

See above.

Bill Frisell

The Intercontinentals

Boubacar [6:00]

Nonesuch #79661 **
www.nonesuch.com

Ali Farka Toure

The Source

Mahini Me [5:00]

Hannibal #1375**
www.rykodisc.com*

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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.