Month: September 2008

Listen: “Menelik Wossenachew – Chereka”

Link: Egon’s NPR piece here.

We record collectors of the hip hop generation first discovered the music of Ethiopia’s Mulatu Astatke in the early 1990s, when dealers at the legendary Roosevelt Hotel Record Convention in Manhattan peddled copies of Mulatu of Ethiopia, released on the small Worthy imprint, for princely sums due to its then unknown drum break, rife for the sampler. Those of us entranced by the other worldly sounds of the Ethiopian qenet system fused with Western funk and jazz, searched in vain for other albums that sounded like this masterpiece until Francois Falcetto released Ehiopiques Vol. 4 , a compilation of the two supremely rare albums Astatke released on the Ethiopian Amha label.

Through Falcettos series, Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers movie (built around Astatke’s Amha recordings) and Astatke’s recent live appearances, many Westerners previously unfamiliar with the transfixing beauty of 70s Ethiopian fusion have opened their ears. But we’re still waiting for someone to compile releases from the small Kaifa label and Phillip’s Ethiopian subsidiary. We present a smattering of them here and hope that someone goes back and negotiates the release of these works.

Above – Menelik Wossenachew’s “Chereka,” written and arranged with Girma Beyene and released on Amha Records in the early 1970s.

Listen: “Auld Lang Syne.”

I can’t front. When it comes to Korean Christmas records, my man Cut Chemist has me beat. He returned from Seoul earlier this year with some insane Christmas Carol record that contained possibly the funkiest track I’ve ever heard on a Korean record (Though my man Jason up in Toronto has been hipping me to some that sound incredible in their own rights, I haven’t heard ‘em yet).

But I had to get up in the Christmas mix myself (I was getting tired of playing the James Brown Soulful Christmas album and David Axelrod’s Messiah around the folks’ place every December) so I bought the He 5’s Merry Christmas Psychedelic Sound for Xmas ‘07 rotation.

I do love the He 5’s later incarnation, the He 6. Their first three records under that name are amongst my favorite Korean “group sound” psychedelic albums, and their cover of the Rare Earth’s “Get Ready” is probably my favorite Korean track at this moment. But this record, seemingly their first (?) is quite the novelty: all Christmas songs (a la “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer”), done in an instrumental, garagey psychedelic fashion, just “acceptable” enough for the ears of aging hippies to play at your parent’s house on Christmas morning… But their cover of “Jingle Bells” morphs, about a minute and a half into the track, into a ten minute freak out cover of “In A Gadda Da Vida” and, after the drum break, wails into “Paint It Black.” The returns to “Jingle Bells” again. Yikes.

Then, immediately after, the He 5 play “Auld Lang Syne” for about two minutes before they, in the words of my boy Cut, “go at it like Billy Ball” and introduce their band. In broken English. With a drum break to boot. I once read a Korean website review the record and say: “Last track is influenced by black music like from James Brown etc.. very ‘black’ and funky.” Uh, yeah. It makes no sense but they’re really going for it. I like this one almost as much as Shin Jung Hyun’s cover of “Funky Broadway” on his (what else) In A Gadda Da Vida album.

Listen: “LaHorse.”

I shall not attempt to edit Mssr. Gainsbourg’s biography into a sentence or two, as that wouldn’t do the French genius justice. If you’re interested, there is a decent (and the only English language) bio by Sylvie Simmons you might want to check entitled A Fistful of Gitanes. Rather, I’ll start by saying that there was a time when Serge’s proto-rap classic “Requiem Pour Un Con” completely twisted my generations’ wig back. Some of us, myself included, heard it first by watching the Jean Gabin-venue Le Pacha, the late ’60s neo-noir that featured a mini music video of a pea-coated, chain-smoking Serge breathing his way through the song.

Well, in those pre-eBay days, we all thought that if we were ever able to get ahold of a copy of the picture sleeve 7-inch OST to Le Pacha, our Serge collections would be complete. We all already owned copies of Histoire De Melody Nelson, you know? How mistaken we were.

I’ll never forget the phone call from The Heliocentrics’ Malcolm Catto when he asked me if I’d ever heard of this promo-only 7-inch “La Horse.” Of course I hadn’t, and he went on to describe in vivid detail this track, composed by Serge and his long time arranging partner Jean-Claude Vannier that stood not only as one of Serge’s best instrumental releases, but also his rarest. The record was released by Serge’s publishing company, Hortensia, around the time of the release of the film, as a promotional-only item to be given to theater goers.

A few years and missteps later (including one in a Parisian flea market, when the Euro was worth about a dollar, when the going rate for the record was about 900 E), I finally scored a copy from a collector based in, of all places, Oxnard. This one hasn’t left my box in years, and I DJ it out constantly. The banjo break is a bit hokey, but whatever – the film, another Gabin feature, took place in the countryside, so I guess Serge was just shouting out the hicks. Who cares? It follows one incredible drum break, doesn’t it?

Oh, one last thing: that cover is a “paste on…”

Márconi Notaro
No Sub Reino Dos Metazoarios
Discos Rozenblit, Brasil 1973

With all of those who started shouting “private press only” after Shadow named an album after those American self-starters who took their recorded destiny into their own hands, consider this: as hard as it might have been to record, press and distribute your very own wax capsule in America in the early ’70s (and as rare, and good, many of them are), doing the same under Brasil’s military dictatorship was markedly more difficult. And releasing a psychedelic, fuzz and effects drenched opus with revolutionary musings disguised within double entendres? Next to impossible.

You’d want this one in your collection if it contained just one good track within its beautifully packaged gatefold cover. That this album screams perfection from start to finish just adds to its legendary status. The brainchild of poet Márconi Notaro, alongside his friends and compatriots Lula Cortes and Ze Ramalho (the men behind perhaps the most legendary of Brasil’s private-pressed albums, 1975’s awesome Paebiru), this album contains what can only be described as Brasilian ragas played with the Portuguese guitar and Lula’s own invention, the Tricordio; improvised passages so fluid you’d swear they were scored; psychedelic-funk jams about staying true to one’s origins; and, throughout, Notaro’s complex yet approachable poetry, sung by the poet himself.

The highlight of the album, if there is just one: Notaro’s improvised “Nao Tenho Imaginacao Pra Mudar De Mulher (I Don’t Have The Imagination to Change Wives),” a gorgeously melancholic piece that, when one sees it transcribed (gotta thank my lovely girlfriend for that), is nearly impossible to imagine as having flowed directly from the mind of one of the most underrated Brasilian poet/composers.

(Time-Lag Records, based in Portland, Maine, just reissued this album through Lula and Notaro’s daughter. Pick it up and support – if we’re lucky, perhaps they’ll reissue one of his impossibly rare books of poetry next).

Listen: “The Man Who Must Leave”.

Originally sung by the Pearl Sisters in 1968, this song roughly translates as “The Man Who Must Leave” and owes everything to the fierce guitarist featured on the intro and outro of his self-penned song. That would be the legendary Shin Jung Hyun, who is commonly referred to as the Godfather of Korean rock n’ roll, and is often compared to Elvis. But that really doesn’t do him justice. Sure, he might have been as popular as Elvis in South Korea. But to put Jung Hyun’s career arc in a context that the Westerner might understand, imagine if Elvis maintained the fire he first displayed on Sam Phillips’ recordings, then morphed into a Dick Dale style surf-guitarist before delving head long into psychedelia, with axe-shredding talents akin to Jimi Hendrix (ok, I’m stretching a bit there) and the song-writing ability of Brian Wilson (ok, I’m stretching again, but not by much). And imagine if he had found the time to write, arrange and produce dozens of protégés who would follow him down whatever crazy path he chose to take them. 

This album, like many that Jung Hyun produced, is not about the woman featured on the cover. It would seem like he had a deal with every Korean label that wished to record him: I’ll do whatever you want on the A-side if you give me the B-side to freak out a little something with my homies. Thus, Kim Sun and So Yoon Seok (who dominates the B-side of this album), get the royal treatment and they elevate what would have been a throwaway pop record into the realm of psychedelic goodness. 

More on Jung Hyun in later posts. There’s just too much to say about him to put it all into the review of one song. But we’ll put this out there now. Like many Korean records from the late 60s, this record has numerous pressings, all very difficult to differentiate. So be careful if you find a copy for less than you’d expect to pay, as it might be a third (or fifth?) generation reproduction.