Category: Photographs
Monty Stark – New Photos
Monty Stark’s only child, son Monty Jr. (those of you who have seen Hoagy Carmichael’s Music Shop will remember him as one of the children featured in the show’s educational skits) emailed us after his father’s passing and included a photograph of his father. The photo was touching: Monty in a candid moment, smiling and holding his young son somewhere in Boston, some forty years ago.
Since then, Monty Jr. sent us a few more of Monty and his pals, taken by his mother in the late 1960s and early 1970s. View the gallery:
Whitefield Brothers On Tour: Photos
Now-Again Japan Tour 2009 – Day Three and Four
I wrote about the end of record digging in Japan in my NPR column earlier this year. This trip didn’t change my assessment.
We dutifully made it through Tokyo’s multidude of shops, marveling how those closets could stay in business selling Tommy Roe and Roy Ayers albums for more than a couple bucks. Fillmore didn’t disappoint – it never does – but the days of finding a Marvin Whoremonger are long gone. Can’t front on unplayed copies of Indonesian psych treasures like Freedom of Rhapsodia’s first album though.
The best shops, as usual, were the Disc Union stores… the amount of records circulating through their doors is impressive.
I came close to buying the Tenorio Jr. and the Booker Pittman albums until I realized that, no matter how good they are, spending $1000 on bossa-jazz just ain’t happening in 2009.
Cut, for his part, did well at Disc Union’s Shibuya store, as the “rare-groove” manager offered him a stab at his personal collection.
It took a twenty four hour deliberation – and some tense negotiating – but Cut walked back to our hotel at the tail end of the typhoon with a copy of Billy Ball and The Upsetters “Sissy Walk.” Not bad!
The best digging of the trip? Digging for knives in the Tsukijji fish market at dawn:
Now THAT’s how we get down in Tokyo. Leave the records for the aging b-boys. Let’s take home some Japanese steel.
Now-Again Japan Tour 2009 – Day Two
There’s something to be said about running into random folks in a train station, in a country far away from your own, being recognized, and asked for an autograph on a flyer for the show you did the previous night. It doesn’t happen to me anywhere outside of Japan, but here, as commonplace as it is (sounds weird to write that), it’s pretty damn cool each and every time.
The Japanese rail system is no joke: the trains arrive and depart on time, hurtle around banked curves at speeds approaching 200 miles per hour, and are the most comfortable way to travel the country. As Cut and I discussed whether or not Tokyo would surpass our admittedly high expectations – and the surefire pratfalls to come – I broke out my computer and finished the licensing paperwork for my man Uchenna to bring to Nigeria on Tuesday to finalize the deals for a forthcoming comp. Cut slept, fitfullly it seemed. Japanese jetlag is the worst.
The Japanese countryside is bugged out. If not the Sanyo Solar Ark (or whatever the hell that Brazil-nut looking thing is a few hundred kilometers outside of Osaka), it’s a giant ferris wheel.
Arriving in Tokyo – on time of course – we met up with Take, long time friend and co-promoter of every Stones Throw show I’ve done in Japan. We went straight to soundcheck where a miffed Cut realized he would be set up in a booth. “Oh hell no. That’s not happening,” he fumed to the staff. “I haven’t DJed in a booth since, uh, 1993? I’m sorry. Get a stage.”
Tell you what – there was a stage set up in front of that booth (dangerously close to the sub woofers, but, you know, Cut’s choice of poison I suppose) in about twenty minutes.
The show? Well, let me say it was probably the best show I’ve been a part of in Tokyo. There were some contenders – the one I remember most vividly was the one with Madlib, Karriem Riggins and J.Rocc in 2007 – but this one was just damn. good. and. fun. There wasn’t one song that the crowd of 600 didn’t dig. Obscure Minoru Muraoka modal jazz madness? Oh, there was a section clapping away on beat as if it were a Dilla beat or something. Man. Why can’t it always be like this? And why can’t it be like this in L.A.?
Cut paid the price for that stage set up – those stacked loops of his got progressively more distorted. But the crowd didn’t care, as they stared at the opposing screens when they couldn’t catch what he was doing up close and personal. What a routine. I can’t explain in words just how exciting it is to see him build those beats from scratch. DJ Muro was equally as impressed. “Just… Incredible,” he said, often repeating what seems to be his favorite adjective.
After his set, as the staff broke down the remnants of the stage, about 250 people remained on as I had the best time DJing I’d had since Funky Sole ended its run at Star Shoes in 2007 and I gave up on DJing on a regular basis. It was nearing dawn by the time I walked out of the venue’s doors and made my way back to Shibuya. By the time I reached my room on the 30th floor, the sun had emerged, gradually dispelling the grey clouds that had crept out overnight.
