Don't call me whitey...

Damn, nearly a week since my last post.

Tom Breihan did a piece on Paul Wall on his Status Ain't Hood blog on Friday, in which he disses the white rapper for not concidering race to be an issue. Which it IS, of course. Especially if you're not white. You don't have to look further than to the recent events in New Orleans and its media coverage to figure that out. I don't see the point in his "history of white rap"-list though, unless it's more tounge in cheek than I take it to be.

The record releases seem to be picking up, with Blackalicious and Amy Rigby among the ones I have been looking forward to thew most. Had a couple of spins of the 'licious cd already, and Gift of Gab seems just about as sharp as ever.

Unbelievably, Pitchfork gave the new Wolf Parade cd a 9.2 rating. Eirik is unimpressed, though. I have to side with him.

Have I ever told how amazing Air's 80 Degrees Below 82 is? Check my jazz list.

Beef and chicks

Pitchfork critic, Riff Raff blogger and all-time funny man Nick Sylvester has been checking out a live gig by two of Norway's biggest hopes for world domination, the lovable Annie and Røyksopp. A good read.

Steinar gave me some stick yesterday regarding some ratings on my jazz page and the high entry by Spoon's Gimme Fiction on my 2005 list. No harm in that, it's a large part of the reason why I post these lists in the first place. Discussions are healthy. They keeps culture alive. I wish more of you would do the same. Discuss and post comments that is.

As regards the Spoon record, I think it has a good share of cracking tunes; "The Two Sides of Monsieur Valentine", "I Turn My Camera On", "Sister Jack", and "I Summon You" to name my favorites. I doubt if it will hold the number three spot in the end, though, but I rate it highly. It's certainly better than Robert C. reckons it is.

My year by year-page was set up during spare hours in the summer, and was probably a result of hubriss on my part. At present, I have plenty of tasks at hand, so I have not been able to post any lists. I hope to have some soon, though, but don't hold your breath.

Children and geniuses

A combination of fatigue, lack of money, and bad timing led me to miss two gigs this week. Martha Wainwright played this Monday, and Eirik was left unimpressed. Yesterday, a crew from Stones Throw Records, including one time (or current, who knows) Lootpack MC Wildchild rocked their mikes and spun their records, but alas, they suffered the same fate as Martha and were unlucky not to have me in their audience.

Rhino Records released two (at least) large box sets this week. Children Of Nuggets: Original Artyfacts From The Second Psychedelic Era 1976-1995 compiles bands inspired by the first wave of psych/garage bands. There are some cracking tunes here, like The Lyres' "Help You Ann", The Hoodoo Guru's "I Want You Back", and contributions from good acts such as That Petrol Emotion, The La's and The Nerves. Unfortunately, the Nerves song included is not their original of "Hanging on the Telephone". As with many of the Rhino collections, it is equal parts fun and frustration. Many of the best acts and songs included I already have on better discs, either original albums or superior compilations. Some of them are currently unavailable, though, so this will surely bring them out to a larger audience. The lesser acts are hardly worth owning, much less hearing, but that's part of the beauty of Rhino's box sets I guess.

They also released a Ray Charles box set, Pure Genius: The Complete Atlantic Recordings (1952-1959), which looks amazing, but is probably overkill. Great artist that he was, you'll probably get by with a couple of his albums, such as the lovely Modern Sonds in Country and Western Music, plus a singles collection. I could be proven wrong, as I am yet to listen through the behemoth.

Help Her, She Wants to Know Girls

Idling Wildly was kind enough to leave me a comment the other day. Now help her find the words to this song, 'cause she seems like a nice gal!

Note: This post has been updated due to me not having my facts straight.

Let us elaborate: Re: CMJ vs. by: Larm

Ok, so I may have jumped the gun a bit in comparing the CMJ fest and by: Larm. College radio and its CMJ offshoot was always about bringing new music out to a wider audience. None of the acts playing this years marathon can be considered major acts, and in that respect they fit the bill. Point is, though, most of them are known to the people through other sources than college radio. Again, I point to Kelefa Sanneh's article. (To keep up with impressions from the marathon, see Nick Sylvester's Riff Raff and Tom Breihan. Have a look at their archives for previous posts).

by: Larm, on the other hand, was and is a place for Norwegian music journos to discover Norway's next big thing. The act that would conquer the world (yeah, right). My point was that in recent years, more and more established acts have played the festival, and stolen the limelight from all the newcomers that are trying to find a bigger audience and hopefully get some media coverage. I'll wait for the next by: Larm before I slag them off even more.

CMJ Music Marathon 2005

This week saw the start of CMJ's Music Marathon 2005, one of the best music "festivals" on either side of the Atlantic. The line-up includes excellent and interesting bands some of which probably, and regretfully, won't appear in Norway. Main treats: The Hold Steady, The New Pornographers (whose latest album has grown a bit since my initial impression), The Arcade Fire, Blackalicious, much heralded African duo Amadou & Mariam, Atmosphere, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, !!! (I refuse to write "chk chk chk". Shit! I just did), and countless others. For that reason, in addition to the fact that New York is my home at heart, a couple of friends and me had initially decided to fly over, but decided not to in the end. It would have meant no Christmas presents this year.

Kelefa Sanneh, who I had some beef with earlier this year but who actually is a very good critic with a broad musical taste, wrote a good piece in the New York Times about the marathon. It's hard to disagree with his views. CMJ started as a coming-together of college radio station people, who at that time (some 25 years ago) were hugely important in bringing new and alternative (being an alternative to corporate radio profile that is) music out to the masses, or at least the student masses. In these days of blogging, pod-casting, and efficient on-line zines, their importance in presenting new artists is not that significant. As Sanneh explains, this years line-up reflects that. Most artists playing are in some way or another known to the audience. Heck, it was the reason why I intended to go.

I think the problem is similar to Norway's own by: Larm. What started as a showcase for up-and-coming Norwegian bands, they have become increasingly reliant upon established acts in recent years. In addition, it's a sickening lurve-fest for music industry people to kiss each others behinds.

In other news, I got the first taste of DangerDoom yesterday. The first impression is that it's not as eery as Viktor Vaughan and Madvillain, and it sounds more humorous than those two. Not that any of them lacked humor, but Danger Mouse's beats are somewhat lighter and helps bring MF's humor more to the fore. Promising.

Martha Wainwright comes to town next week.

Let me watch!

Unless you didn't get the news from other sources, the genius that is MF Doom (a.k.a Viktor Vaughan a.k.a... ahh f**k it, too many to mention) and top hip-hop producer Danger Mouse have collaborated and are to release Dangerdoom later this month. I can't wait to hear it (although I've been told there are downloads available on various websites). MF Doom, in addition to having been one half of the fantastic KMD whose Black Bastards is one of hip-hop's lost gems, have been responsible for what is in my opinion two of the best hip-hop records of the past few years in Vaudeville Villain from 2003, and the Madvillain collaboration with Madlib from last year. Danger Mouse was, as you may know, behind the infamous Jay-Z/Beatles mash-up The Grey Album. He certainly has talent, and MF is probably the best MC he has worked with. I can't wait. More when I get it.

Update: Although the collab is called Dangerdoom, the album will be titled The Mouse and the Mask. The release is set for October 11.

Drive-By Truckers, Friday Sept. 9. 2005

Living in Norway, we're not spoiled with great gigs. So when one of the best live bands around decides to play here for the fourth (and fifth, and sixth) time within six months, you can't help but pinch yourself and hope you're not dreaming. The Drive-By Truckers' story telling is as American as you get, complete with hope and search for glory, inventing yourself as you go, while remembering those left behind. Not as forceful and great as the previous time (back in April), but still lovable, and they appeared to be as pleased to be back as we were pleased to see them. A tribute to New Orleans in the form of Newman's "Louisiana 1927", with most of the crowd singing along, topped the set.

Musical comfort

As a result of the catastrophe in and around area of New Orleans, I have been listening to music inspired by or made in New Orleans. Not that it lessens the tragedy in any way, certainly not not for the victims; it was more a subconscious thing. It started with Randy Newman's "Louisiana 1927" off his Good Old Boys record. The song remembers the flood in Louisiana of that year. In turn, I listened to Louis Armstrong, "King" Oliver, and "Jelly Roll" Morton, before, in keeping with my constant revising of my jazz library, I picked up Duke Ellington's own New Orleans tribute from 1970, New Orleans Suite, and found it very enjoyable. I have always preferred his flaming youth, as well as some of his longer 50's records, but although it lacks the guts and glory of earlier Ellington, New Orleans Suite is as elegant as any of his better known albums, and a fine tribute to a city so rich in musical history.

Don't Cha?

I just started liking cheatin' songs
And what's bothering me
Is I don't know if it's the cheatin' I like
Or just the melody

(inspired by "She Just started Liking Cheatin' Songs" by the fabolous John Anderson).

Two Diamonds?

Yes, so two of this year's most anticipated releases have arrived. Firstly, Kanye's Late Registration, a record that has received so much acclaim already that adding a view seems superfluous. But, I'm not entirely excited. Yes, it flows almost as gracefully as College Dropout, his love and compassion is still put to the fore and he is still the most humane rapper out there, including the indie-hoppers, which helps when you've got goons such as The Game doing cameos. He has valuable input on topics of Sierra Leone, the best track on the album, and the dangers of crack to the black community and the community at large. Because he is smarter than your average Joe, his recent comments about Bush Jr.'s seemingly neglect of African-Americans in the wake of the disaster in New Orleans are genuine words of concern, as well as that of an enraged citizen, more than misinformed ravings from the world of bling bling. The music, though, sometimes lack the smarts of his words. Most samplings are used as complete backing tracks, which brings African-American music tradition into the present, but the samplings seem too obvious. Move on up, indeed, but a bit of forward motion is also welcome. It's still a great album.

The New Pornographers' Twin Cinema is a bigger disappointment. It starts with a bang, but falls flat too early. No letters from occupants, nor slow descents into alcoholism, and none of the tracks are as catchy as the ones on Mass Romantic. Twin Cinema is more coherent and slightly better than Electric Version, but I fear the air has been let out of the balloon some time ago.

Corndogs

In anticipation of the DVD version of the new Minutemen documentary We Jam Econo: The Story of the Minutemen I googled and came across this brilliant site which has video and audio downloads of plenty of unseen and unheard Minutemen materlial. Since the only other visuals I have of this great band is from the Best of Flipside Video, vol. 2, and since i do not have a VHS player to play it, the vidoe clips on the corndogs site was like a revelation. Although the quality of the visuals are a bit dodgy, I had a ton of fun anyway. But I'm still waiting for that DVD.

No money? No problem.

So lack of money made me miss a host of possibly good gigs during the past week. Atomic celebrated their release of the live anthology The Bikini Tapes with a gig at Blå in Oslo.

This was also the week of Oslo Jazz Festival. As usual, there weren't many interesting gigs, but I did look forward to Peter Brötzmann's Chicago Tentet, which also played at Blå. But, alas, I had no money. Reports said it was a good gig, although I failed in my efforts to find a link of the review i read. I'm not a big follower of the European improvisational scene that Brötzmann is regarded to be a part of, and I often have problems getting through his classic Machine Gun, but I just as often find it enjoyable. Still, I'd gladly pay to see him live.

One of the few other interesting artists at Oslo Jazz was Lee Konitz, whose Motion from 1961 ,with Elvin Jones on drums and the lesser known Sonny Dallas on bass, I love. In connection with his visit, my old nemesis Ole Martin Ihle wrote a pretty good article on cool jazz versus bebop and hard bop in the Norwegian daily Klassekampen (I have no link to the actual article. Try the site's search engine). He points to the apolitical and detached style of cooljazz, as opposed to the engaged and political, or at least social, implications of be bop and hard bop. His reasoning is good, as is his writing, but I can't help to argue that to label Lee Konitz as merely a cool jazz player, is to overlook large parts of his oeuvre.

So there you go. Three concerts in a weeks time, and I attended none of 'em. Damn those delayed student loans.

Beep beep (/mi mi/)?

Mr. Matos reckons Crazy Frog's "Axel F" is ace. He is SO wrong. You'd think it could've been catchy/annoying like, say, "The Ketchup Song". No freaking way. He's got quite a few other good points, though.

Not so Extraordinary?

The New York Times reports that Fiona Apple has rerecorded the songs on the internet leaked album Extraordiary Machine (or Fuck Sony as it was also called). As you may know, the initial album was shelved by Sony (for six years now), which spurred fans to leak the album online. I dowloaded a version myself, and thought it was pretty good. She's still bitter (clenched teeth-image) but funnier, and the music is a bit quirkier than her previous two albums. I have my doubts about the rerecording, though. Time will show, but hopefully not six more years.

The party's over...

Oya is over for this year, which basically makes it feel like the summer is over, too.

Friday 08. 12. 2005:

Went over to see The Thing at the start of Friday, and they played a very good set. They bashed through barely recognizable cover versions of garage rock "hits" by mixing the riffage of that genre with the elasticity of free jazz and keeping the energy of both. Ingebrigt Haaker Flaten on double bass was particularly impressive, stretching and hammering his strings and creating grooves behind Gusatffson's hollering. I don't get the Ayler comparisons at all. Ayler had a knack for simple melodies to set off his wailing; Gusatffson is more of a power player akin to David S. Ware. Riffs more than melodies. But he can wail, too. Nilssen-Love was strangely subdued at the start of the set. Perhaps it was the sun. Thurston Moore was not only in the audience, but decided to join them for a jam. As fun as it was to see him on stage, he drained some of the intensity away from the group. His guitar was a bit too loud, and with him on board, the guys seemed less interested in throwing in a riff or two to shake things up.

Then I had to f**k off to work.

I came back just in time for Sonic Youth who were scheduled on stage at 21.30. Their set comprised largely of song from Sonic Nurse, which were performed exquisitely, and just a hatful of classics; "Bull in the Heather", "Catholic Block" and the closing "Expressway to Yr Skull". Mats Gustaffson added some horn on the closer, but "Catholic Block" made me punch the air. Some may have lamented the lack of "hits", but for me, omitting them made it feel more like a proper concert. Good on them. I still have a few problems with Jim O'Rourke, though.

Apparently, Saul Williams' set was pretty good.

Went home and slept.

Saturday started with more work for me, which made me miss even more music. No big deal, though, as I most likely would have sat around drinking beer and slagging off the artists anyway. Arrived around Animal Alpha's set. They are truly horrible. An energetic female singer does not make an average nu-metal band better, especially since nu-metal is pretty awful to begin with.

Nick Sylvester reckons Datarock had a good gig. I didn't get to see them.

Sons & Daughters were this year's post-punk alibi. Better than your average, if only because they remind me of the Au-Pairs, a band which none of the other post-punkers have copied yet.

Franz Ferdinand's set was slightly enjoyable. They started off with my favorite song of theirs, "Michael", and slowly went downhill from there. Their good-natured aura takes them a long way, but the new songs were very anonymous (were there any?).

Robert Post is this year's Julian Berntzen, complete with terrible English and naive song writing skills. Norwegian critics love that shit.

Roots Manuva's set was far better. I was getting drunk by that time and started to dance almost immediately. I seem to remember wanting the bass to be heavier and the vocals to be louder, but still fun.

The Subs, from China!, ended this years Oya (at least at the festival site). Rock'n'roll like only East-Asians know how to play. Part novelty and part fun.

Beers and the mandatory nachspiel ("after party" for you non-Norwegians/Germans) with my chums from Trondheim meant I only got up just in time to watch Arsenal get a win, and that there were no funds left for me to go and see the mighty Atomic at Blå on Monday.

Øya 2005

So, this years Oya festival, the most rockist festival of the lot, has just started rolling. Small club gigs on Wednesday set the thing off, with my chums in Accidents Never Happen being the sole band I bothered to go and see, while Eirik is raving about The Cocktail Slippers. I obviously missed out on something.

Yesterday (Thursday) was the opening day at the festival site. With rain and a gawdawful line-up setting the mood. I was charmed by the young girls in Mary Me Young; their bubble gum-punk is not original, but it is good humored, and I can't say "no" to a song proclaiming the love for chocolate. The bar was raised considerably when the old dudes in Dinosaur Jr. entereded the stage, and rescued the day from oblivion. Their energy was contagiousus and I was left feeling sixteen again, and I wished I had a joint, ...or something. Needless to say, it was a better reunion than the Pixies one, and they also reaffirmed my love for (power-) trios.

Speaking of trios, I'm off to see the amazing Thing, the Nilssen-Love/Haaker Flaten/Gustafsson combo. Expecting powerful stuff, and possibly Thurston Moore as a member of the audience.

RE: Intonation

I realize that my previous post might have seemed like a defense of Pitchforkmedia's indieism (did I just coin that). If you read the Zelious piece, what I intended was to oppose Sanneh's views in his NY Times article, much the same as Carl Z did. Since we agree, I couldn't be bothered to write a long piece myself, especially since Carl did it so well himself.

In other news, Rhino's 90's box arrived this week. It's a confusing mess, collecting hits that charted on Billboard plus tracks I guess the guys at Rhino considered important. It leans heavily on alternative artists, which is fine by me, but since such nineties phenomena as dance and electronic music are barely represented, the box is not what it says on the cover. They've done a terrible job of representing rap music too. MC Hammer, Wrex-n-Effect and House of Pain may fit the bill as hits, but are they hardly good representatives of this prolific time for rap music. De La Soul is, but what about Public Enemy. Ok, they were at their peak in the late eighties, but did good music well into the nineties. Pharcyde, Outkast, Dr. Dre and the whole g-funk era? Nowhere to be seen. If Rhino had trimmed the box down to a couple of CD's, they could have had an excellent overview of alternative and indie music from the era when Nirvana and alternative entered the charts. As a guide to nineties pop culture, though, they are way off the mark.

Intonation

Thought I'd write something about this myself, but Eirik wrote a good piece, and Carl wrote an even better one.

"Jazz" in Molde, 2005

Reporting from the back of a boat at the harbor of Molde, a city which its inhabitants a more proud of than they have any reason to be.

I came down to see Anthony Braxton, one of few truly interesting jazz names in this years program. Braxton played on the 20th of July. He fronted a sextet I daresay comprised of his students, they were at least 20-30 years his juniors. Braxton on saxes: piccolo, soprano and alto. Bass, violin, percussion, trumpet and tube completes the sextet. They played one piece on the night, entirely composed, but they seemed to play around with the sections as though the piece had not been composed from A to Z. I found it very engaging and was particularly impressed with the bass player as well as Braxton himself. Many of the audience didn't know what they had gotten into, one heckler declaring "FUCK YOU" as he stumbled out. Braxton seemed unfazed.

Thursday and the main attraction of this "jazz" festival, Lauryn Hill, enters the stage. I had initially decided not to go, but persuaded myself that it was in my general interest to do so. Her band was actually surprisingly funky, and Ms. Hill herself was not as introvert as papers in Sweden had told me she would be. But she does not boast a body of song intriguing enough to sustain my interest for an hour and a half, which also confirms my belief that her Miseducation album sounds more like a classic than it actually IS, because the songs are simply not strong enough.

I have a bone to pick. The festival in Molde depends too much on non-jazz artist, mostly blues and related, to complete their program. No harm in that, but Kongsberg continues to break old and new ground with an almost entirely jazz profile, confirming my belief that Kongsberg has surpassed Molde as Norway's premier jazz festival.

Pondering whether to see Jamie Lidell tonight. Later