The Daily Music Fix

Do you find yourself looking at Google News, or whatever news source you usually read, and keep seeing the name Joe Jackson?  Are you confused by this name?  Do you think, "What is the musician who wrote Steppin' Out doing in the news?"  Are you flummoxed and disappointed to find out that the Joe Jackson in question is actually the late Michael Jackson's father?
Well, I thought I'd come up with a simple an easy way to help you all distinguish between these two men.

First things first.  Neither of them is actually Joe Jackson.  The British born musician was born David Ian Jackson, while Michael Jackson's father was named Joseph Walter Jackson.  Let's just decide that we're going to refer to the latter as Joseph Jackson, since this whole thing falls apart if we refer to the former as "David Jackson".

Joe Jackson is a 5 time Grammy winning artist with 22 albums to his credit, crossing a diverse musical spectrum.
Joseph Jackson's contribution to the world of music is his 11 children, most of which are (or have been) performers of some kind.

Joe Jackson's career began in the 1980's, when he (along with Elvis Costello and Graham Parker) was crossing the musical bridge from Punk to New Wave.
Joseph Jackson began domineering and abusing his children at an early age, probably around the 1950's, working to sculpt them into show-biz stars.

Joe Jackson's public image has rarely been questioned.  He is an advocate for smoking, but otherwise remains a pretty decent human being.
Joseph Jackson is currently being scrutinized regarding his interview at the BET awards, which he attended after Michael's passing.  During the interview, Jackson took the opportunity to promote his record label, complained that Michael had never been recognized as the world's greatest superstar, and had some woman read a prepared statement about how he was the sole owner of Michael's estate.  He was a cold, unemotional, opportunist.

Joe Jackson wrote the great song, Look Sharp!, which I'm featuring here today.
According to some questionable news sourses, Joseph Jackson is planning on taking Michael's 3 children on a world tour as The Jackson Three.

( Look Sharp! - Joe Jackson )

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It pissed with rain up here in Portland yesterday.  It was decidedly un-July, with seriously grey cloudy skies and plenty of moisture.  Personally, I love those kinds of days.  My fruit trees and rosebushes can use the rain, and I was thankful for a respite from the sun and heat.  Heck, it was the first day in a while where I actually opted to wear pants!

For today's song, I wanted to feature something a little more current.  My tendency is generally toward older music, but when I realized that I hadn't featured a song from this year in over a month, I decided I needed to reach into my "new music" folder.  What came out was a track by a Miike Snow.  The name isn't the weird misspelling of the name of a singer/songwriter, but rather a trio of musicians that take their moniker from a reference to cult icon and Japanese film director Takashi Miike.  Not sure why they want to draw parallels to the director of Violent Cop (the most violent movie I've ever seen) and Ichi the Killer but they seem to limit the comparison to the name.  Back in May this trio released their debut album (imaginatively titled Miike Snow), and their single Animal was made available from various sources online.  Well count me among those sources online, cause this is a pretty sweet song.

( Animal - Miike Snow )

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A couple days ago, I had the pleasure of talking with my brother, Laurence.  Avid Fix-readers will remember Laurence from when he visited me here in Portland a year and a half ago, when he was covering the Portland Jazz Festival for All About Jazz: New York, the monthly jazz newspaper he edits and publishes in New York City.  Laurence is just the most knowledgeable person I've ever known when it comes to jazz --- quite possibly when it comes to music in general.
Since he lives on the east coast, and he's busy with his newspaper and his family, we haven't been able to stay in touch as much as we'd like --- it doesn't help that both of us have a tendency to get caught up in the immediacy of our present surroundings and fail to reach out to those people we rarely see.
In any case, I love him.  He's always been the coolest guy, and talking with him is always a breath of fresh air.  We talked about work, and family. He told me about his son, Nati, who's just now getting into baseball, and how that reminded him of our own dad (who was, despite being English, a huge Dodgers fan).  We talked about music and money.  Any our brother Nicolas, who seems to be recording his own music now under the psuedonym, Fellow Traveller.

Then I asked for his help.  You see, over the course of the last year, I've made Erika a handful of mix-CDs.  Unfortunately, with my two nasty hard drive crashes early this year, I'd lost the playlists for all those CDs, and I didn't want to make her a new disk without figuring out what tracks I'd already burned.  So, I'd been going her CDs, writing down titles so I don't accidentally double up.

Most of the songs were easy to identify, but this one track was giving me trouble.  It was a beautiful slow paced jazz number I'd put in the middle of her Christmas disc.  Though it was incredibly familiar to me, I wasn't able to identify the musicians involved.  The horn sounded awfully familiar -- could it be Freddie Hubbard?  And the sax, it's so tight and powerful...who is that?  The bassist didn't help me at all, and the drumming was solid, but so dynamic, always controlling the tempo.  I was flummoxed.

So, I asked Laurence.  I played him just a piece over the phone, and he was on it immediately.
"Well, that sure sounds like Wayne Shorter on sax.  Isn't that Gee Baby, Ain't I Good To You?"

( Gee Baby, Ain't I Good to You - Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers )

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I love my job.
At one point last night in the Tugboat, I had a large group of folks come in, clearly from out of town.  I welcomed them in, and invited them to come up to the bar so I could pour them a pint.  They caught me off-guard initially, since they all seemed to want to shake my hand.  Clearly a family unit of some sort (it seemed like a couple of parents in their 60's or so, and their two grown sons and their wives).  They asked my name, and introduced themselves.  I recognized the accent immediately --
"Where are you all from?" I asked.   "Ooh, we're from England." the older son responded.  "Well, I kinda figured.  But what part of England?"
He smiled and responded, "Oh I see.  We're from Manchester"
"No shit." I responded.  "My Dad was from Manchester!"
They smiled, and commented on how small a world it is. 
A few moments later, I mentioned that my mum was a "Manchester United" fan, they all let out a cheer.  It was glorious.

Today's song is another track from Europe...I think I'm on a roll here.  I haven't featured an American group since just after the 4th of July.  If I'd thought about it ahead of time, I'd have called it a theme week.  The band is called Saint Etienne, and they're an English pop group that gained popularity in the early 1990s overseas, but their sound never caught on over here (maybe because we were all caught up in Seattle's grunge scene at the time).  This song, Nothing Can Stop Us, is a fun playful number that's highly danceable and worth a listen.

( Nothing Can Stop Us - Saint Etienne )

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Some time ago I tapped into some new music sharing software that included an online chatting element.  Essentially, it shuttled users into chatrooms based on musical genres, and promoted users to discuss the genre.  Then,  when music unfamiliar to users arose in discussions, it offered a simple way to acquire the music in question.  The genres offered for discussion were remarkably specific.  I recall that there were something like 20 various chatrooms for Jazz alone, ranging from the expected like Jazz-Bebop, to outlandish stuff like Jazz-Improvised Instruments and Jazz-Circular Breathing,  You can imagine, I was like a kid in a candy shop.  I dropped into a number of rooms, testing the waters, asking for recommendations for on artists I might like.

At one point during my exploration, I noticed a room devoted to French Hip-Hop.  Because often I find that the lyrics of many English-language rappers is so heavily riddled by references and language which I don't identify with, I've long had a block on most American hip-hop, but I have to admit I've always been curious about Hip-Hop in other languages.  At some point in my past I heard a French rapper, and I recall being kinda reeled it.  I decided that I'd dip my head into this room, and see if I could glean anything from their conversation.

I found, of course, that the room was filled with people speaking French.  In order to understand the conversation better, I translated each comment via Bablefish, but it was clear to me that I would have to get really lucky to get anything useful out of their discussion.  Instead, I opted to throw my hat in the ring.  I wrote a query for French Hip Hop for an unhip American, and tried to translate it into French, hoping that the chatroom's inhabitants would take pity on me, and see my attempt at a joke as a sign of goodwill.
They didn't.  Likely a group of French teenagers, they ripped me a new one.  The French responses came fast and loose, and it was difficult to fully grasp the specific meaning of their responses, due to my rather limited translation options.  What I can say is that I was called a lot of names, some of them which sounded ruder than others.  I recall feeling kinda defeated by the whole experience, and then someone took pity on me and mentioned MC Solaar.

MC Solaar is the stage name for Claude M'Barali, a Senegalese born Frenchman, with was huge in France in the early 1990's.  He is still considered France's premeire MC, despite a dip in the quality of his later albums.  Today's track is Qui sème le vent récolte le tempo, the title track off Solaar's debut album.

( Qui sème le vent récolte le tempo - MC Solaar )

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I occasionally voice my dislike for television here.  It's become a sort of recurring theme for me.  However, when there's something on television that I enjoy, I like to make a point of bringing it up.  In this case, the show in question is Green Wing, a British import that originally aired over two seasons from 2004 to 2006 on BBC.  Thankfully, the first season of the show is available to watch for free on hulu.
The series is an interesting mix between an absurdist comedic medical series (sometimes it reminds me of the better dream sequences from Scrubs) and something akin to sketch comedies.  I once described it as "sketch comedy in a British hospital, where no one seems to do any actual medicine".  Much of the show is, in fact, improvised, with scenes often connected by only the most tangential threads.  Ultimately, the music ends up dominating these transitions, and its effective use in the show really makes the series stand apart from other British comedies I've seen.

Thankfully, the soundtrack to the series has finally been released on CD.  Composed by Jonathan Whitehead, under the psuedonym Trellis, the music from the show won an RTS Craft and Design Award for "Best Original Score"  and was also nominated for a BAFTA.  The music for the show is an excellent combination of trip-hop style electronics, use of samples, and strong jazzy live performances.  For your pleasure today, I'm featuring a track called No Tune, which often rolls over the shows closing credits (during which there's often some action occurring).

( No Tune - Trellis )

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Oh man.  Are we STILL talking about Michael Jackson, or can we move on now that his super creepy family has subjected his little girl to an awkward and strange pronouncement of her love in front of millions or people.  I think maybe it's time for most of us to move on.

Yesterday during dinner, Erika, Benjamin, and I entertained ourselves by trying to answer trivial pursuit questions.  I managed to stump both Ben and Erika with a question about a musician who had won the 2000 Cannes Film Acting award, and then retired from acting.  The answer to the question was none other than Icelandic vocalist, Björk.  Benjamin declared that he didn't really know very much about her, and asked for my impressions.  What better place to do that than here?

For me, Björk is an interesting performer.  Her musical style is very mercurial, and when she comes out with a new album, I never know what to expect.  I was never very familiar with Björk's early work, when she was recording with proto-punk Icelandic groups in her teens, and (though I've heard a few tracks) I've never invested much time in her work with The Sugarcubes.  Like most of us in the States, I first heard of Björk when I saw her video for Human Behavior, off her 1993 album, Debut.  I recall being struck by her unique voice and the atypical arrangements she brings. 
Years later, in college, I was introduced to Telegram, an entire album of remixes, mostly remixing tracks from her 1995 album, Post.  My favorite Björk track is among these -- a song called Isobel.

( Isobel - Bjork )

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