http://www.marcusmiller.com
https://www.myspace.com/marcusmillerband
Origine du Groupe : North America
Style : Jazz Fusion
Sortie : 2012
By John Fordham
From http://www.guardian.co.uk
This is bass-guitar star Marcus Miller's UK-tour repertoire of last month, plus a few bonuses, including the finely spun vocals of young New Yorker Gretchen Parlato and the rasping ones of Dr
John on two tracks. For jazz-funk fans, it's paradise – Miller's arrangements have the clamouring horn parts, snappy basslines, raw guitar fills and whipcrack backbeats of this style meshing like
a racing engine, and, of course, there are plenty of jawdropping bass solos. Creative obliqueness (of the kind Miller brought to Miles Davis's Tutu and Amandla albums in the 1980s) isn't always
apparent. The assertive foregrounding of the bass guitar doesn't exactly enhance the potentially mysterious Brazilian feature Setembro, with its vocals by Parlato and Ruben Blades, and
horn-punching groovers such as Cee Tee Eye veer to the formulaic. But the exhilaratingly funky Detroit, the lyrical (and Tutu/Amandla-related) Redemption, or the Headhunters-like Slippin' into
Darkness confirm Miller's mastery of his particular world. Solos from Lincoln Centre trumpeter Sean Jones and excellent regular saxophonist Alex Han spark fireworks, sly quotes from Dizzy
Gillespie and Bob Marley classics add spice, and there's a poetic solo-bass finale on I'll Be There.
Pour http://www.disquesdreyfus.com
Avec ce nouvel album studio, son premier depuis 5 ans, Marcus MILLER innove à nouveau. « Je sens qu’une page se tourne », dit Marcus Miller ; « Nos derniers héros disparaissent et nous entrons
dans une ère nouvelle, à la fois politique et culturelle. Mais la Musique n’est pas aussi révolutionnaire que les médias. Il est temps pour une Renaissance. »
Avec un casting incroyable de jeunes musiciens, et des invités comme Dr. John, Gretchen Parlato et Ruben Blades, Marcus Miller crée un nouveau chef d’œuvre moderne pour une nouvelle ère.
Huit nouvelles compositions originales ainsi que cinq standards : « Slippin’ Into Darkness » par War, « Tightrop » par Janelle Monae, « Setembro » par Ivan Lins, et un hommage virtuose à Michael
Jackson pour n’en nommer que quelques uns.
Tracklist :
01 – Detroit
02 – Redemption
03 – February
04 – Slippin’ Into Darkness
05 – Setembro (Brazilian Wedding Song) [feat. Gretchen Parlato & Ruben Blades]
06 – Jekyll & Hyde
07 – Interlude Nocturnal Mist
08 – Revelation
09 – Mr. Clean
10 – Goree (Go-ray)
11 – Cee-Tee-Eye
12 – Tightrope (feat. Dr. John)
13 – I’ll Be There
http://www.marcusmiller.com
https://www.myspace.com/marcusmillerband
Origine du Groupe : North America
Style : Jazz Fusion
Sortie : 2012
By John Fordham
From http://www.guardian.co.uk
This is bass-guitar star Marcus Miller's UK-tour repertoire of last month, plus a few bonuses, including the finely spun vocals of young New Yorker Gretchen Parlato and the rasping ones of Dr
John on two tracks. For jazz-funk fans, it's paradise – Miller's arrangements have the clamouring horn parts, snappy basslines, raw guitar fills and whipcrack backbeats of this style meshing like
a racing engine, and, of course, there are plenty of jawdropping bass solos. Creative obliqueness (of the kind Miller brought to Miles Davis's Tutu and Amandla albums in the 1980s) isn't always
apparent. The assertive foregrounding of the bass guitar doesn't exactly enhance the potentially mysterious Brazilian feature Setembro, with its vocals by Parlato and Ruben Blades, and
horn-punching groovers such as Cee Tee Eye veer to the formulaic. But the exhilaratingly funky Detroit, the lyrical (and Tutu/Amandla-related) Redemption, or the Headhunters-like Slippin' into
Darkness confirm Miller's mastery of his particular world. Solos from Lincoln Centre trumpeter Sean Jones and excellent regular saxophonist Alex Han spark fireworks, sly quotes from Dizzy
Gillespie and Bob Marley classics add spice, and there's a poetic solo-bass finale on I'll Be There.
Pour http://www.disquesdreyfus.com
Avec ce nouvel album studio, son premier depuis 5 ans, Marcus MILLER innove à nouveau. « Je sens qu’une page se tourne », dit Marcus Miller ; « Nos derniers héros disparaissent et nous entrons
dans une ère nouvelle, à la fois politique et culturelle. Mais la Musique n’est pas aussi révolutionnaire que les médias. Il est temps pour une Renaissance. »
Avec un casting incroyable de jeunes musiciens, et des invités comme Dr. John, Gretchen Parlato et Ruben Blades, Marcus Miller crée un nouveau chef d’œuvre moderne pour une nouvelle ère.
Huit nouvelles compositions originales ainsi que cinq standards : « Slippin’ Into Darkness » par War, « Tightrop » par Janelle Monae, « Setembro » par Ivan Lins, et un hommage virtuose à Michael
Jackson pour n’en nommer que quelques uns.
Tracklist :
01 – Detroit
02 – Redemption
03 – February
04 – Slippin’ Into Darkness
05 – Setembro (Brazilian Wedding Song) [feat. Gretchen Parlato & Ruben Blades]
06 – Jekyll & Hyde
07 – Interlude Nocturnal Mist
08 – Revelation
09 – Mr. Clean
10 – Goree (Go-ray)
11 – Cee-Tee-Eye
12 – Tightrope (feat. Dr. John)
13 – I’ll Be There
http://www.galacticfunk.com
Origine du Groupe : North America
Style : Funk Jazz , Jazz Fusion , Acid Jazz
Sortie : 1996
From Official Site :
It's incredible that GALACTIC has never made a carnival album yet, but now it’s here.
To make CARNIVALE ELECTRICOS, the members of GALACTIC (Ben Ellman, harps and horns; Robert Mercurio, bass; Stanton Moore, drums and percussion; Jeff Raines, guitar; Rich Vogel, keyboards) draw on
the skills, stamina, and funk they deploy in the all-night party of their annual Lundi Gras show that goes till sunrise and leads sleeplessly into Mardi Gras day.
GALACTIC was formed eighteen years ago in New Orleans, and they cut their teeth playing the biggest party in America: Mardi Gras, when the town shuts down entirely to celebrate. CARNIVALE
ELECTRICOS is beyond a party record. It’s a carnival record that evokes the electric atmosphere of a whole city – make that, whole cities – vibrating together all on the same day, from New
Orleans all down the hemisphere to the mighty megacarnivals of Brazil. Armed with a slew of carnival-ready guests from high-school students to 72-year-old AL “CARNIVAL TIME” JOHNSON (who remakes
his all-time hit), GALACTIC whisks the listener around the neighborhoods to feel the Mardi Gras moment in all its variety of flavors.
CARNIVALE ELECTRICOS begins on a spiritual note, the way Mardi Gras does in the black community of New Orleans. On that morning, the most exciting experience you can have is to be present when
the small groups of black men called Mardi Gras Indians perform their sacred street theater. Nobody embodies the spiritual side of Mardi Gras better than the Indians, whose tambourines and chants
provide the fundament of New Orleans carnival music. These “gangs,” as they call them, organize around and protect the figure of their chief. The album’s keynote singer, WAR CHIEF JUAN PARDO, is,
says Robert Mercurio, “one of the younger Chiefs out there, and he’s become one of the best voices of the new Chiefs. Pardo grew up listening to the singing of the older generation of Big Chiefs,
points out Ben Ellman, and “he’s got a little Monk [Boudreaux], a little Bo Dollis, he’s neither uptown nor downtown.”
On “Karate,” says Ellman, the band was aiming to “capture the power” of one of the fundamental musical experiences of Mardi Gras: “a marching band passing by you.” The 40-piece KIPP RENAISSANCE
HIGH SCHOOL MARCHING BAND’s director arranged up GALACTIC’s demo, then the band rehearsed it until they had it all memorized. The kids poured their hearts into a solid performance, and, says
Mercurio, “I think they were surprised” to hear how good they sounded on the playback.
Musical energy is everywhere at carnival time. “You hear the marching bands go by,” says Mercurio, moving us through a Mardi Gras day, “and then you hear a lot of hiphop.” There hasn’t been a
Mardi Gras for twenty years that hasn’t had a banging track by beatmaker / rapper MANNIE FRESH sounding wherever you go. “You can’t talk about New Orleans hiphop without talking about MANNIE
FRESH,” says Ellman. His beats have powered literally tens of millions of records, and he and GALACTIC have been talking for years about doing something together. On “Move Fast,” he’s together
with multiplatinum gravel-voiced rapper MYSTIKAL, who is, says Ellman, “somebody we’ve wanted to collaborate with forever. It was a coup for us.”
Out in the streets of New Orleans, you might well hear a funky kind of samba, reaching southward toward the other end of the hemispheric carnival zone. There has for the last twenty-five years
been a smoking Brazilian drum troupe in town: CASA SAMBA, formed at Mardi Gras in 1986. They’re old friends of GALACTIC’s from their early days at Frenchmen Street’s Café Brasil, and the two
groups joined forces for a new version of Carlinhos Brown’s “Magalenha,” previously a hit for Sérgio Mendes.
But the Brazilian influence on CARNIVALE ELECTRICOS goes beyond one song. “When we started this album, we all immersed ourselves in Brazilian music and let it get into our souls,” says Mercurio.
The group contributed three Brazilian-flavored instrumentals, including “JuLou,” which riffs on an old Brazilian tune, though the name refers to the brass-funk Krewe of Julu, the “walking krewe”
that Galactic members participate in on Mardi Gras morning. After creating the hard-driving track that became “O Côco da Galinha,” they decided it would be right for MOYSÉS MÁRQUEZ, from the São
Paulo underground samba scene, who collaborated with them and composed the lyric.
If you were GALACTIC and you were making a carnival album, wouldn’t you want to play “Carnival Time,” the irrepressibly happy 1960 perennial from the legendary Cosimo Matassa studio? Nobody in
New Orleans doesn’t know this song. The remake features a new performance in the unmistakable voice of the original singer, AL “CARNIVAL TIME” JOHNSON, who’s still active around town more than
fifty years after he first gained Mardi Gras immortality.
The closing instrumental, “Ash Wednesday Sunrise,” evokes the edginess of the post-party feeling. The group writes, “There is the tension you feel on that morning -- one of being worn out from
all of the festivities and one of elation that you made it through another year.”
But, as New Orleanians know, there’s always another carnival to look forward to, and GALACTIC will be there, playing till dawn and then going to breakfast before parading.
***
GALACTIC is a collaborative band with a unique format. It’s a stable quintet that plays together with high musicianship. They’ve been together so long they’re telepathic. But though the band
hasn’t had a lead singer for years, neither is it purely an instrumental group. GALACTIC is part of a diverse community of musicians, and in their own studio, with Mercurio and Ellman producing,
they have the luxury of experimenting. So on their albums, they do something that’s unusual in rock but not so controversial an idea in, say, hiphop: they create something that’s a little like a
revue, a virtual show featuring different vocalists (mostly from New Orleans) and instrumental soloists each taking their turn on stage in the GALACTIC sound universe.
Mostly the band creates new material in collaboration with its many guests, though they occasionally rework a classic. Despite the appearance of various platinum names on GALACTIC albums, they
especially like to work with artists who are still underground. If you listen to CARNIVALE ELECTRICOS together with the two previous studio albums (YA-KA-MAY and FROM THE CORNER TO THE BLOCK),
you’ll hear the most complete cross-section of what’s happening in contemporary New Orleans anywhere – all of it tight and radio-ready.
Despite the electronics and studio technology, GALACTIC’s albums are very much band records. Mercurio explained the GALACTIC process, which starts out with the beat: “The way we write music,” he
says, “we come up with a demo, or a basic track, and then we collectively decide how we’re gonna finish it.” The result is a hard-grooving sequence of tight beats across a range of styles that
glides from one surprise to the next.
What pulls all the diverse artists on CARNIVALE ELECTRICOS together into a coherent album is that one way or another, it’s all funk. GALACTIC is, always was, and always will be a funk band.
Whatever genre of music anyone in New Orleans is doing, from Mardi Gras Indians to rock bands to hardcore rappers, it’s all funk at the bottom, because funk is the common musical language, the
lingua franca of New Orleans music. Even zydeco can be funky -- and if you don’t believe it, check out “Voyage Ton Flag,” the album’s evocation of Cajun Mardi Gras, in which Mamou Playboy STEVE
RILEY meets up with a sampled Clifton Chenier inside the GALACTIC funk machine.
Theryl DeClouet - vocals
Erik Jekabson - trumpet
Robert Mercurio - bass, photography
Stanton Moore - drums
Mark Mullins - trombone
Jeff Raines - guitar
Eric Traub - tenor saxophone
Dan Prothero - programming, producer, engineer, editing, design, mixing
Raymond Pumilia - photography
Tracklist :
1. Go Go
2. Welcome To New Orleans
3. Something's Wrong With This Picture
4. Funky Bird
5. Stax
6. Church
7. On The One
8. Mystery Tube
9. Doo Rag
10. Percussion Interlude
11. Everybody Wants Some (Part 1)
12. Everybody Wants Some (Part 2)
13. Everybody Wants Some (Part 3)
14. Goodnight
http://www.galacticfunk.com
Origine du Groupe : North America
Style : Funk Jazz , Jazz Fusion , Acid Jazz
Sortie : 1996
From Official Site :
It's incredible that GALACTIC has never made a carnival album yet, but now it’s here.
To make CARNIVALE ELECTRICOS, the members of GALACTIC (Ben Ellman, harps and horns; Robert Mercurio, bass; Stanton Moore, drums and percussion; Jeff Raines, guitar; Rich Vogel, keyboards) draw on
the skills, stamina, and funk they deploy in the all-night party of their annual Lundi Gras show that goes till sunrise and leads sleeplessly into Mardi Gras day.
GALACTIC was formed eighteen years ago in New Orleans, and they cut their teeth playing the biggest party in America: Mardi Gras, when the town shuts down entirely to celebrate. CARNIVALE
ELECTRICOS is beyond a party record. It’s a carnival record that evokes the electric atmosphere of a whole city – make that, whole cities – vibrating together all on the same day, from New
Orleans all down the hemisphere to the mighty megacarnivals of Brazil. Armed with a slew of carnival-ready guests from high-school students to 72-year-old AL “CARNIVAL TIME” JOHNSON (who remakes
his all-time hit), GALACTIC whisks the listener around the neighborhoods to feel the Mardi Gras moment in all its variety of flavors.
CARNIVALE ELECTRICOS begins on a spiritual note, the way Mardi Gras does in the black community of New Orleans. On that morning, the most exciting experience you can have is to be present when
the small groups of black men called Mardi Gras Indians perform their sacred street theater. Nobody embodies the spiritual side of Mardi Gras better than the Indians, whose tambourines and chants
provide the fundament of New Orleans carnival music. These “gangs,” as they call them, organize around and protect the figure of their chief. The album’s keynote singer, WAR CHIEF JUAN PARDO, is,
says Robert Mercurio, “one of the younger Chiefs out there, and he’s become one of the best voices of the new Chiefs. Pardo grew up listening to the singing of the older generation of Big Chiefs,
points out Ben Ellman, and “he’s got a little Monk [Boudreaux], a little Bo Dollis, he’s neither uptown nor downtown.”
On “Karate,” says Ellman, the band was aiming to “capture the power” of one of the fundamental musical experiences of Mardi Gras: “a marching band passing by you.” The 40-piece KIPP RENAISSANCE
HIGH SCHOOL MARCHING BAND’s director arranged up GALACTIC’s demo, then the band rehearsed it until they had it all memorized. The kids poured their hearts into a solid performance, and, says
Mercurio, “I think they were surprised” to hear how good they sounded on the playback.
Musical energy is everywhere at carnival time. “You hear the marching bands go by,” says Mercurio, moving us through a Mardi Gras day, “and then you hear a lot of hiphop.” There hasn’t been a
Mardi Gras for twenty years that hasn’t had a banging track by beatmaker / rapper MANNIE FRESH sounding wherever you go. “You can’t talk about New Orleans hiphop without talking about MANNIE
FRESH,” says Ellman. His beats have powered literally tens of millions of records, and he and GALACTIC have been talking for years about doing something together. On “Move Fast,” he’s together
with multiplatinum gravel-voiced rapper MYSTIKAL, who is, says Ellman, “somebody we’ve wanted to collaborate with forever. It was a coup for us.”
Out in the streets of New Orleans, you might well hear a funky kind of samba, reaching southward toward the other end of the hemispheric carnival zone. There has for the last twenty-five years
been a smoking Brazilian drum troupe in town: CASA SAMBA, formed at Mardi Gras in 1986. They’re old friends of GALACTIC’s from their early days at Frenchmen Street’s Café Brasil, and the two
groups joined forces for a new version of Carlinhos Brown’s “Magalenha,” previously a hit for Sérgio Mendes.
But the Brazilian influence on CARNIVALE ELECTRICOS goes beyond one song. “When we started this album, we all immersed ourselves in Brazilian music and let it get into our souls,” says Mercurio.
The group contributed three Brazilian-flavored instrumentals, including “JuLou,” which riffs on an old Brazilian tune, though the name refers to the brass-funk Krewe of Julu, the “walking krewe”
that Galactic members participate in on Mardi Gras morning. After creating the hard-driving track that became “O Côco da Galinha,” they decided it would be right for MOYSÉS MÁRQUEZ, from the São
Paulo underground samba scene, who collaborated with them and composed the lyric.
If you were GALACTIC and you were making a carnival album, wouldn’t you want to play “Carnival Time,” the irrepressibly happy 1960 perennial from the legendary Cosimo Matassa studio? Nobody in
New Orleans doesn’t know this song. The remake features a new performance in the unmistakable voice of the original singer, AL “CARNIVAL TIME” JOHNSON, who’s still active around town more than
fifty years after he first gained Mardi Gras immortality.
The closing instrumental, “Ash Wednesday Sunrise,” evokes the edginess of the post-party feeling. The group writes, “There is the tension you feel on that morning -- one of being worn out from
all of the festivities and one of elation that you made it through another year.”
But, as New Orleanians know, there’s always another carnival to look forward to, and GALACTIC will be there, playing till dawn and then going to breakfast before parading.
***
GALACTIC is a collaborative band with a unique format. It’s a stable quintet that plays together with high musicianship. They’ve been together so long they’re telepathic. But though the band
hasn’t had a lead singer for years, neither is it purely an instrumental group. GALACTIC is part of a diverse community of musicians, and in their own studio, with Mercurio and Ellman producing,
they have the luxury of experimenting. So on their albums, they do something that’s unusual in rock but not so controversial an idea in, say, hiphop: they create something that’s a little like a
revue, a virtual show featuring different vocalists (mostly from New Orleans) and instrumental soloists each taking their turn on stage in the GALACTIC sound universe.
Mostly the band creates new material in collaboration with its many guests, though they occasionally rework a classic. Despite the appearance of various platinum names on GALACTIC albums, they
especially like to work with artists who are still underground. If you listen to CARNIVALE ELECTRICOS together with the two previous studio albums (YA-KA-MAY and FROM THE CORNER TO THE BLOCK),
you’ll hear the most complete cross-section of what’s happening in contemporary New Orleans anywhere – all of it tight and radio-ready.
Despite the electronics and studio technology, GALACTIC’s albums are very much band records. Mercurio explained the GALACTIC process, which starts out with the beat: “The way we write music,” he
says, “we come up with a demo, or a basic track, and then we collectively decide how we’re gonna finish it.” The result is a hard-grooving sequence of tight beats across a range of styles that
glides from one surprise to the next.
What pulls all the diverse artists on CARNIVALE ELECTRICOS together into a coherent album is that one way or another, it’s all funk. GALACTIC is, always was, and always will be a funk band.
Whatever genre of music anyone in New Orleans is doing, from Mardi Gras Indians to rock bands to hardcore rappers, it’s all funk at the bottom, because funk is the common musical language, the
lingua franca of New Orleans music. Even zydeco can be funky -- and if you don’t believe it, check out “Voyage Ton Flag,” the album’s evocation of Cajun Mardi Gras, in which Mamou Playboy STEVE
RILEY meets up with a sampled Clifton Chenier inside the GALACTIC funk machine.
Theryl DeClouet - vocals
Erik Jekabson - trumpet
Robert Mercurio - bass, photography
Stanton Moore - drums
Mark Mullins - trombone
Jeff Raines - guitar
Eric Traub - tenor saxophone
Dan Prothero - programming, producer, engineer, editing, design, mixing
Raymond Pumilia - photography
Tracklist :
1. Go Go
2. Welcome To New Orleans
3. Something's Wrong With This Picture
4. Funky Bird
5. Stax
6. Church
7. On The One
8. Mystery Tube
9. Doo Rag
10. Percussion Interlude
11. Everybody Wants Some (Part 1)
12. Everybody Wants Some (Part 2)
13. Everybody Wants Some (Part 3)
14. Goodnight
http://www.ilyasounds.com
http://www.myspace.com/ilya
Origine du Groupe : U.K
Style : Alternative Fusion , Jazz Blues Soul
Sortie : 2012
By Bill Stair from http://ilyasounds.blogspot.com
Fathoms Deep is the latest release from Bristol’s Ilya, a duo comprised of vocalist Joanna Swan and guitarist/multi-instrumentalist Nick Pullin. You may only know them from a song-snippet
featured in some perfume adverts, but they’ve spent the last few years assembling a body of work that represents one of the most fascinating discographies this decade has to offer.
Their 2004 debut They Died For Beauty was one of those embarrassments of riches that seemed to have arrived fully-formed from another, saner dimension where inventive, innovative, insane music
was the norm. Of course, it wasn’t really some kind of sui generis miracle; Joanna and Nick had been slogging away in the trenches for years. It wasn’t so much that their music attained
perfection in 2004, more that their sound at that point in time dovetailed with the zeitgeist and the aspirations of a slowly expiring music biz.
The cynical thing to do after that would have been to keep on churning out more of the same; there would probably have been more than a few satisfied customers. But that’s not the way Ilya work.
After the almost overpowering lushness of They Died For Beauty, they followed it up with the sublime Somerset - a record that retained the cinematic swoosh of their John Barry and Ennio Morricone
devotionals, but which introduced harsher, darker elements into the mix. The standout track “Winter in Vienna” began as richly as would be expected, but then slid into territory first staked out
by Holger Czukay’s shortwave dalliances and finally ended up dangerously close to something by This Heat, England’s finest exponents of post-prog, post-punk, quasi-kraut anti-commerciality. And
Ilya managed all this without losing sight of the epic post-rock universality they’d staked out with their first album.
But two albums in a row with some kind of coherent stylistic feel was clearly making things too easy for the punters, so their next step was to release the manicured howl of rage entitled Hootchi
Coochi. Attributed to Jo Swan, it was an Ilya album in all but name and, just to keep everyone off-balance, contained a bona-fide pop/R&B gem called “Play With Me”. The next logical step was
obviously to follow that up with the banjo and bouzouki weirdness of Carving Heads On Cherry Stones - a record so haunting and gossamer-like that it should probably only be available on
prescription. (Although its opening track “Prairie Dogs” is indisputably the best song to be written in cod-Esperanto since the Beatles’ Sun King.)
And so here we are with Fathoms Deep, their fourth (or fifth) album, and which is very much a return to roots - Ilya's Get Back, if you will.
Except Ilya was always a studio project - the brainchild of two people - and there never was a live band as such. But even so, the concept behind Fathoms Deep is still a back-to-basics one. The
idea was very neat: to assemble a core group of excellent musicians in one of Britain’s last remaining high-level studios, present them with the material there and then, and to record the results
immediately. It’s your basic 180 degree volte-face from their earlier, meticulously manicured albums; an escape from the endless tweaking of recording on computers and getting back to the way
people did it in the olden days. So how did it turn out?
Well, it turns out that - amidst recurrent themes of birds, water, seabirds and drowning - Ilya have produced a record that is, of course, entirely different from their previous albums but which
has very clear callbacks to all of them. In fact, when you look at their body of work as a whole, there is a remarkable consistency; dragging all their stuff into a playlist and hitting shuffle
doesn’t make Fathoms and Cherry Stones sound weird so much as it reveals the twisted sensibility at the heart of their seemingly sweet earlier albums. Ilya have always been about darkness and
sugar.
Of course, the one element that consistently holds their obsessive eclecticism together is the almost frighteningly transcendent voice of Joanna Swan; rarely has one person been able to channel
so many sounds and personalities in one set of pipes. Her one consistent attribute is that her voice gets better and better with each release. By now, seasoned Ilya listeners can expect that when
hypnotized by her ethereal angelic register, they will shortly be sucker-punched by a sudden switch to a gargantuan blues howl. But I must confess - the first time I heard the ending of “20
Fathoms Deep”, I felt afraid. Jim Morrison’s “Horse Latitudes” is a playground ditty compared to the kraken she unleashes on the coda.
Perhaps the most intriguing thing about Fathoms Deep is its insistence on using only piano and Hammond organ in the keys department. Ilya’s vast repository of influences combined with the
ubiquity of the Hammond in sixties music means that, for music nerds at least, a single song can be a juddering travelogue through multiple genres and epochs - because the Hammond can mean many
things. But ever since the Crazy World of Arthur Brown released “Fire” in 1968 - at that point, the heaviest record imaginable, and one which was made without recourse to the guitar - the Hammond
in rock has meant one thing above all else: prog.
So if Ilya have released an album that, while not exactly prog, certainly doesn’t shy away from it, does that mean they have gone off the deep-end once and for all? Or does it mean that they’ve
craftily noticed that, in the 21st Century, prog is more popular in Britain than at any time since 1976?
Neither. It simply means that they are, as always, following the dictates of their own muse. This is no more a prog album than it’s a John Barry soundtrack from the sixties; they’re just adding
ever more ingredients to the Ilya gumbo. No longer a mere embarrassment of riches, we are now into a full-fledged supernova of reference points.
For example: the ineffably gorgeous “On Vauxhall Bridge” (which may or may not be about suicide, but which certainly does deal with water and burial) is enough of a Cubano-style toe-tapper to
instantly evoke images of dapper old folks dancing close in the zócalo on a warm summer’s evening. Dan Moore’s piano is quite lovely, while the infectious “Quizás, Quizás, Quizás” rhythms - and
Joanna’s exuberant vocal - more than undercut the desperation of the lyric. And Nick’s closing splice of Marc Ribot and George Harrison works rather nicely as well.
“Lean Down” is another stand-out track, perhaps something of a stripped-down callback to They Died For Beauty. The intro alone is breathtaking, more or less a live performance from the core duo,
with Nick’s arpeggiated guitar backing up Joanna’s heartbreaking whispered vocal. Haunting, yes, but very, very pretty.
So naturally, we also have to have stuff like “Falcondale” in here as well. Right from the start of this one, Nick’s spider-web guitar lets you know you’re back in Cherry Stone territory - even
if he’s not actually playing a bouzouki, you feel like there’s one in there. And, like so many songs on Fathoms Deep, it’s built around circular triplet patterns, like so many hummingbirds
whirring around in your head. Or should that be falcons?
All this and a baritone sax that - dexterously combined with the low-end of the Hammond - shoves the song sharply into the strange world of Albert Marcoeur, until the organ takes over and kicks
us into the page-boy haircutted world of The Nice. But only for a little while, mind. Our next stop is in Stevie Smith/This Heat territory, as it seems that we are decidedly not waving and quite
probably drowning. Until the halfway mark, that is, when Joanna’s storm-petrel vocal comes skipping over the waves, a reverse siren that pulls us out of the endless deep. It seems that Ilya are
neither waving nor drowning but dancing round the maypole. And have somehow managed to condense “A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers” into less than six minutes.
Another standout track is “Little Lamb”, a sweet, frail, blue little thing that evokes the late, great Johnny Ace’s posthumous 1955 hit “Pledging My Love” - as used on the soundtrack of Abel
Ferrara’s midnight-black Bad Lieutenant, naturally. Joanna’s distant, glacial vocal is perfectly offset against Nick’s bizarro Ron Grainer guitar and a chord progression that occasionally shines
on like some kind of diamond. It may be the way that, for some reason, this song is now inextricably linked in my mind with Abel Ferrera but - given Ilya’s longstanding obsession with John Barry
- the only conclusion I can draw from this song is that James Bond is now a toothless Appalachian smackhead.
But that would be too easy wouldn’t it? The coda lurches abruptly to Jimmy Smith/Djangoworld, Joanna switches to her megafaunic voice, and the go-go girls start it up in their white plastic
boots. Bonkers, in the best possible sense of the word.
“All I Got” is perhaps the album’s most perfect song; it drifts into view amid Harold Buddy piano and backwards guitars, like some unjustly forgotten outtake from Side 2 of Before and After
Science. The lyrics once more deal with bitterness and regret, but the utter beauty of the music and vocal make it the sweetest of bitter pills. Quite perfect, in fact.
Joanna Swan, Vocals. Nick Pullin, Guitars. Dan Moore, Piano and Hammond. Andy Lowe, Basses. Matt Jones, Drums on tracks 1246&7 and Damon Reece on tracks 3,5,9&10. Ruth Hammond, Sax on
track 6.
Tracklist :
01. Port Erin Fair 04:25
02. Lean Down 04:15
03. On Vauxhall Bridge 05:43
04. Little Lamb 06:10
05. Hollow 05:00
06. Falcondale 05:53
07. I Fall 04:24
08. All I Got 05:50
09. In The Spring 05:22
10. 20 fathoms Deep 05:16
http://www.ilyasounds.com
http://www.myspace.com/ilya
Origine du Groupe : U.K
Style : Alternative Fusion , Jazz Blues Soul
Sortie : 2012
By Bill Stair from http://ilyasounds.blogspot.com
Fathoms Deep is the latest release from Bristol’s Ilya, a duo comprised of vocalist Joanna Swan and guitarist/multi-instrumentalist Nick Pullin. You may only know them from a song-snippet
featured in some perfume adverts, but they’ve spent the last few years assembling a body of work that represents one of the most fascinating discographies this decade has to offer.
Their 2004 debut They Died For Beauty was one of those embarrassments of riches that seemed to have arrived fully-formed from another, saner dimension where inventive, innovative, insane music
was the norm. Of course, it wasn’t really some kind of sui generis miracle; Joanna and Nick had been slogging away in the trenches for years. It wasn’t so much that their music attained
perfection in 2004, more that their sound at that point in time dovetailed with the zeitgeist and the aspirations of a slowly expiring music biz.
The cynical thing to do after that would have been to keep on churning out more of the same; there would probably have been more than a few satisfied customers. But that’s not the way Ilya work.
After the almost overpowering lushness of They Died For Beauty, they followed it up with the sublime Somerset - a record that retained the cinematic swoosh of their John Barry and Ennio Morricone
devotionals, but which introduced harsher, darker elements into the mix. The standout track “Winter in Vienna” began as richly as would be expected, but then slid into territory first staked out
by Holger Czukay’s shortwave dalliances and finally ended up dangerously close to something by This Heat, England’s finest exponents of post-prog, post-punk, quasi-kraut anti-commerciality. And
Ilya managed all this without losing sight of the epic post-rock universality they’d staked out with their first album.
But two albums in a row with some kind of coherent stylistic feel was clearly making things too easy for the punters, so their next step was to release the manicured howl of rage entitled Hootchi
Coochi. Attributed to Jo Swan, it was an Ilya album in all but name and, just to keep everyone off-balance, contained a bona-fide pop/R&B gem called “Play With Me”. The next logical step was
obviously to follow that up with the banjo and bouzouki weirdness of Carving Heads On Cherry Stones - a record so haunting and gossamer-like that it should probably only be available on
prescription. (Although its opening track “Prairie Dogs” is indisputably the best song to be written in cod-Esperanto since the Beatles’ Sun King.)
And so here we are with Fathoms Deep, their fourth (or fifth) album, and which is very much a return to roots - Ilya's Get Back, if you will.
Except Ilya was always a studio project - the brainchild of two people - and there never was a live band as such. But even so, the concept behind Fathoms Deep is still a back-to-basics one. The
idea was very neat: to assemble a core group of excellent musicians in one of Britain’s last remaining high-level studios, present them with the material there and then, and to record the results
immediately. It’s your basic 180 degree volte-face from their earlier, meticulously manicured albums; an escape from the endless tweaking of recording on computers and getting back to the way
people did it in the olden days. So how did it turn out?
Well, it turns out that - amidst recurrent themes of birds, water, seabirds and drowning - Ilya have produced a record that is, of course, entirely different from their previous albums but which
has very clear callbacks to all of them. In fact, when you look at their body of work as a whole, there is a remarkable consistency; dragging all their stuff into a playlist and hitting shuffle
doesn’t make Fathoms and Cherry Stones sound weird so much as it reveals the twisted sensibility at the heart of their seemingly sweet earlier albums. Ilya have always been about darkness and
sugar.
Of course, the one element that consistently holds their obsessive eclecticism together is the almost frighteningly transcendent voice of Joanna Swan; rarely has one person been able to channel
so many sounds and personalities in one set of pipes. Her one consistent attribute is that her voice gets better and better with each release. By now, seasoned Ilya listeners can expect that when
hypnotized by her ethereal angelic register, they will shortly be sucker-punched by a sudden switch to a gargantuan blues howl. But I must confess - the first time I heard the ending of “20
Fathoms Deep”, I felt afraid. Jim Morrison’s “Horse Latitudes” is a playground ditty compared to the kraken she unleashes on the coda.
Perhaps the most intriguing thing about Fathoms Deep is its insistence on using only piano and Hammond organ in the keys department. Ilya’s vast repository of influences combined with the
ubiquity of the Hammond in sixties music means that, for music nerds at least, a single song can be a juddering travelogue through multiple genres and epochs - because the Hammond can mean many
things. But ever since the Crazy World of Arthur Brown released “Fire” in 1968 - at that point, the heaviest record imaginable, and one which was made without recourse to the guitar - the Hammond
in rock has meant one thing above all else: prog.
So if Ilya have released an album that, while not exactly prog, certainly doesn’t shy away from it, does that mean they have gone off the deep-end once and for all? Or does it mean that they’ve
craftily noticed that, in the 21st Century, prog is more popular in Britain than at any time since 1976?
Neither. It simply means that they are, as always, following the dictates of their own muse. This is no more a prog album than it’s a John Barry soundtrack from the sixties; they’re just adding
ever more ingredients to the Ilya gumbo. No longer a mere embarrassment of riches, we are now into a full-fledged supernova of reference points.
For example: the ineffably gorgeous “On Vauxhall Bridge” (which may or may not be about suicide, but which certainly does deal with water and burial) is enough of a Cubano-style toe-tapper to
instantly evoke images of dapper old folks dancing close in the zócalo on a warm summer’s evening. Dan Moore’s piano is quite lovely, while the infectious “Quizás, Quizás, Quizás” rhythms - and
Joanna’s exuberant vocal - more than undercut the desperation of the lyric. And Nick’s closing splice of Marc Ribot and George Harrison works rather nicely as well.
“Lean Down” is another stand-out track, perhaps something of a stripped-down callback to They Died For Beauty. The intro alone is breathtaking, more or less a live performance from the core duo,
with Nick’s arpeggiated guitar backing up Joanna’s heartbreaking whispered vocal. Haunting, yes, but very, very pretty.
So naturally, we also have to have stuff like “Falcondale” in here as well. Right from the start of this one, Nick’s spider-web guitar lets you know you’re back in Cherry Stone territory - even
if he’s not actually playing a bouzouki, you feel like there’s one in there. And, like so many songs on Fathoms Deep, it’s built around circular triplet patterns, like so many hummingbirds
whirring around in your head. Or should that be falcons?
All this and a baritone sax that - dexterously combined with the low-end of the Hammond - shoves the song sharply into the strange world of Albert Marcoeur, until the organ takes over and kicks
us into the page-boy haircutted world of The Nice. But only for a little while, mind. Our next stop is in Stevie Smith/This Heat territory, as it seems that we are decidedly not waving and quite
probably drowning. Until the halfway mark, that is, when Joanna’s storm-petrel vocal comes skipping over the waves, a reverse siren that pulls us out of the endless deep. It seems that Ilya are
neither waving nor drowning but dancing round the maypole. And have somehow managed to condense “A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers” into less than six minutes.
Another standout track is “Little Lamb”, a sweet, frail, blue little thing that evokes the late, great Johnny Ace’s posthumous 1955 hit “Pledging My Love” - as used on the soundtrack of Abel
Ferrara’s midnight-black Bad Lieutenant, naturally. Joanna’s distant, glacial vocal is perfectly offset against Nick’s bizarro Ron Grainer guitar and a chord progression that occasionally shines
on like some kind of diamond. It may be the way that, for some reason, this song is now inextricably linked in my mind with Abel Ferrera but - given Ilya’s longstanding obsession with John Barry
- the only conclusion I can draw from this song is that James Bond is now a toothless Appalachian smackhead.
But that would be too easy wouldn’t it? The coda lurches abruptly to Jimmy Smith/Djangoworld, Joanna switches to her megafaunic voice, and the go-go girls start it up in their white plastic
boots. Bonkers, in the best possible sense of the word.
“All I Got” is perhaps the album’s most perfect song; it drifts into view amid Harold Buddy piano and backwards guitars, like some unjustly forgotten outtake from Side 2 of Before and After
Science. The lyrics once more deal with bitterness and regret, but the utter beauty of the music and vocal make it the sweetest of bitter pills. Quite perfect, in fact.
Joanna Swan, Vocals. Nick Pullin, Guitars. Dan Moore, Piano and Hammond. Andy Lowe, Basses. Matt Jones, Drums on tracks 1246&7 and Damon Reece on tracks 3,5,9&10. Ruth Hammond, Sax on
track 6.
Tracklist :
01. Port Erin Fair 04:25
02. Lean Down 04:15
03. On Vauxhall Bridge 05:43
04. Little Lamb 06:10
05. Hollow 05:00
06. Falcondale 05:53
07. I Fall 04:24
08. All I Got 05:50
09. In The Spring 05:22
10. 20 fathoms Deep 05:16
http://www.shakatak.com
Origine du Groupe : U.K
Style : Jazz Funk , Disco
Sortie : 1982
By Mike Stone (Notorious) from http://mikestonemusic.blogspot.com
The album cover may look sort of spooky & mysterious (Gives me the creeps, sometimes, but what a great-looking model), but as the saying goes, you can never judge a book by its cover. This
1982 Polydor/PolyGram release by Shakatak was one of the group's best R&B/Jazz recordings at that time.
Most of you may remember the songs, "Lose Myself", and "Lonely Afternoon", which features the sultry, sexy vocals of Tracie Ackerman (some thought it was Jill Saward singing on the track, but she
is with the group at this time of recording). They are the actual tracks on this album, so you can stop worrying about this album being another fabrication of "Night Birds" replacing the actual
song that was supposed to be there. In fact, "Night Birds & "Invitations" did come out the same year in 1982. That's primarily the reason why some Shakatak fans felt confused on what year
these two albums came out(?).
Tracklist :
1. Invitations
2. Lose Myself
3. Lonely Afternoon
4. Steppin' Out
5. Stranger
6. Usual Situation
7. Sol Fuego
8. In Shadows
9. Invitations (Remix) BONUS TRACK
http://www.shakatak.com
Origine du Groupe : U.K
Style : Jazz Funk , Disco
Sortie : 1982
By Mike Stone (Notorious) from http://mikestonemusic.blogspot.com
The album cover may look sort of spooky & mysterious (Gives me the creeps, sometimes, but what a great-looking model), but as the saying goes, you can never judge a book by its cover. This
1982 Polydor/PolyGram release by Shakatak was one of the group's best R&B/Jazz recordings at that time.
Most of you may remember the songs, "Lose Myself", and "Lonely Afternoon", which features the sultry, sexy vocals of Tracie Ackerman (some thought it was Jill Saward singing on the track, but she
is with the group at this time of recording). They are the actual tracks on this album, so you can stop worrying about this album being another fabrication of "Night Birds" replacing the actual
song that was supposed to be there. In fact, "Night Birds & "Invitations" did come out the same year in 1982. That's primarily the reason why some Shakatak fans felt confused on what year
these two albums came out(?).
Tracklist :
1. Invitations
2. Lose Myself
3. Lonely Afternoon
4. Steppin' Out
5. Stranger
6. Usual Situation
7. Sol Fuego
8. In Shadows
9. Invitations (Remix) BONUS TRACK
http://hazmatmodine.com
http://www.myspace.com/hazmatmodine
Origine du Groupe : North America
Style : Blues , Indie , Jazz Fusion
Sortie : 2011
By Robin Denselow from
http://www.guardian.co.uk
Hazmat Modine are a maverick New York band who are shifting from Americana to global influences with remarkable results. Founded by singer-songwriter, guitarist and impressive harmonica-player
Wade Shuman, they are distinctive both because of their range and their line-up: two harmonicas are matched against a three-piece brass section, guitar, steel guitar and percussion. The songs
here are often blues-based, but always different; the opening Mocking Bird starts like a slow work-song and builds into rousing, harmonica and brass-backed folk-blues, while Two Forty Seven is a
finger-clicking burst of brassy R&B, and the title track is an exercise in poetry and blues. The cover songs are equally original, and include a cheerful, spoken treatment of Irving Berlin's
Walking Stick and the harmonica-backed 70s soul of I've Been Lonely for So Long. But the collaborations are even better, with Kronos Quartet adding their strings to the cheerfully rhythmic blues
Dead Crow and Benin's Gangbé Brass Band bringing African jazz influences to Cotonou Stomp and the slinky Child of a Blind Man, where Natalie Merchant provides lead vocals. A brave and unexpected
record.
Tracklist :
01. Mocking bird
02. Child of a blind man
03. Two forty seven
04. Cicada
05. Buddy
06. In two years
07. I’ve been lonely for so long
08. The tide
09. Ebb tide
10. Walking stick
11. So glad
12. Cotonou stomp
13. Dead crow
http://hazmatmodine.com
http://www.myspace.com/hazmatmodine
Origine du Groupe : North America
Style : Blues , Indie , Jazz Fusion
Sortie : 2011
By Robin Denselow from
http://www.guardian.co.uk
Hazmat Modine are a maverick New York band who are shifting from Americana to global influences with remarkable results. Founded by singer-songwriter, guitarist and impressive harmonica-player
Wade Shuman, they are distinctive both because of their range and their line-up: two harmonicas are matched against a three-piece brass section, guitar, steel guitar and percussion. The songs
here are often blues-based, but always different; the opening Mocking Bird starts like a slow work-song and builds into rousing, harmonica and brass-backed folk-blues, while Two Forty Seven is a
finger-clicking burst of brassy R&B, and the title track is an exercise in poetry and blues. The cover songs are equally original, and include a cheerful, spoken treatment of Irving Berlin's
Walking Stick and the harmonica-backed 70s soul of I've Been Lonely for So Long. But the collaborations are even better, with Kronos Quartet adding their strings to the cheerfully rhythmic blues
Dead Crow and Benin's Gangbé Brass Band bringing African jazz influences to Cotonou Stomp and the slinky Child of a Blind Man, where Natalie Merchant provides lead vocals. A brave and unexpected
record.
Tracklist :
01. Mocking bird
02. Child of a blind man
03. Two forty seven
04. Cicada
05. Buddy
06. In two years
07. I’ve been lonely for so long
08. The tide
09. Ebb tide
10. Walking stick
11. So glad
12. Cotonou stomp
13. Dead crow
