Well I never
Good Lord, it turns out I like Graceland - I wonder how that happened! I didn’t last time I tried, and yes, that was after Vampire Beak Hen were around.
That’s one reason I’m so hesitant to return to it. I like disliking it so much.
Played 5 times
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
La 5a Estación, “Me Dueles”
La Quinta Estación (for that, gentle anglophone, is how you pronounce it, means “fifth season”) is one of the most delightfully oddball Latin bands it’s been my pleasure to encounter over the past several months of listening to the Latin Pop radio station as much as to the Anglo Pop ones. The first song I heard by them was so much more hard-rock than anything I had heard on the station to date (with either a woman singing, no less!) that I had to run inside to a computer and look them up immediately.
And tonight when I looked up this song, which floored me the other day, I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was by the same group. It starts out like a standard mariachi song — when I heard it driving, I was all what the hell Latino Vibe doesn’t play música regional do they? — and there’s even a marimba break that sounds like a traditional Guatemalan fiesta, but then the guitars come in and hey! It’s 5a Estación!
Natalia Jiménez is the rare woman who sounds great singing both in a traditional Latin style and in a full-on rock style. Actually there’s no difference between them: like Freddie Mercury (or Adam Lambert), she’s working with sympathetic arrangers who mold their hard rock around her quasi-operatic pipes.
http://aceterrier.tumblr.com/ask
I’ve broken down.
Al Columbia, PIM & FRANCIE
If it were ten years ago, I’d have been the first in line to buy this the morning it was released. A whole book by Al Columbia? Are you shitting me? After all these years?…
Angelo, Landry, and Marilù in Cronique d’un été, directed by Edgar Morin & Jean Rouch.
Student, hall monitor, and principal in High School (1968), directed by Frederick Wiseman.
Anita O’Day and Mahalia Jackson in Jazz On A Summer’s Day (1960), directed by Bert Stern and Aram Avakian.
Friday Film Festival: Sixties Documentaries
I honestly don’t remember what impulse suggested that I download a bunch of old documentaries. I think I might have been looking at Wikipedia’s list of the films that have been selected for preservation in the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry. I guess I was still trying to get examples of as many wide-ranging genres as possible, before I started focusing deep on my immediate interests. But I’ve had these three films grouped together for a while now, and I really wanted to watch the first one, so here goes….
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(this post was reblogged from keithphipps)
You don’t learn that stuff; you just play it! You got three people that want to listen to a million chords and a million people that want to listen to three chords!
Guitarist Ernest Maclean speaking to the Louisiana music magazine OffBeat. A jazzman by training and by preference, Maclean became part of the New Orleans session musician powerhouse group known as The Clique. In the ’40s and ’50s, they backed Fats Domino, Little Richard and others. (via keithphipps)
It’s hard to find a more succinct manifesto for pop.
