Unpiano | Music Blog

These two chiefs couldn’t have put together a more career shattering cover shot (my guess is that Donnie & Joe’s mum had something to do with this). Both teenage Emerson brothers in matching white pant-suits, giant collars and a goofy SEARS style backdrop looking like the older of the two is growing out of the back of the younger, like some Siamese twin in a time-warp. Despite their straight-to-the-dollar-bin look, this LP from ’79 is loaded with unexpectedly soulful, psychy pop hits. Heartstring-tugging ballads and trippy, stoney jams all glued together with bright reverb and Donnie’s barely-confident vocals.

Donnie & Joe Emerson – Give Me The Time
Donnie & Joe Emerson – Baby

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What else needs to be said? Fuck yeah there are foxy girls in Oakland, so many that Rodger Collins wrote this ripper in 1970 to make sure everybody knew it. Covered by Wilson Pickett and David Lee Roth (yeah, Diamond Dave), Collins had a handful of regional bay-area hits that landed him on tour with Ike & Tina and Elvis Presley. After a stint with Joe Tex, he converted to Islam taking the name Hajj Sabrie. He still lives in Oakland and continues to write & record as a session player under his given name.

Exuma was the stage name of Tony McKay, a Bahamas born musician who pieced together an uncommonly unique style of music from his influences; calypso, junkanoo, reggae, African and folk music as well as his fascination with obeah, Caribbean folk magic/religion similar to voodoo, which makes its way into a lot of his lyrical themes. Oddly enough, Exuma started out in the Greenwich Village folk scene in the 60′s, probably got bummed out by the eternally annoying Joan Baez (I would have) and dropped it to hammer together a 7-piece island mash-up. Reminds me of a lot of jamming African funk, but with a twist of mysticism and island smoothness (countering his rough, gospel-like howl), not to mention a few slower, heart-string-tugging soul ballads.

Exuma – Exuma, The Obeah Man
Exuma – Dambala

I could have posted any of 50 different Fela Kuti songs here, they all have a similar tempo, similar themes and a similar swing – and they all rip. Fela mixed African styled jazz & funk with an upbeat West African music style called highlife to pioneer a style of music he called afrobeat. He became hugely popular in Africa, not just for his music but for his social and political views, and his constant middle-finger to the endless succession of military-based dictatorships in his native Nigeria and throughout Africa. With his family, bandmates and others connected to his music, he formed a commune-style compound complete with a club and recording studio, which he declared independent from the state of Nigeria (Ouch! FUCK you Nigeria!). With the fame came the pussy, and Fela ended up with so many wives (I think around 100 total) he had to rotate them from year to year, so that he only “technically” had 12 wives at one time. Unfortunately, one of his many many wives gave him AIDS, which he suffered from secretly until he died from AIDS-related complications in 1997. As a former boss (and suspected wife-beater) once told me, “if you’re going to have 100 wives, you’d better know how to regulate”.

Fela Kuti & The Africa 70 – Who’re You

Somehow this post took a month to complete. I was sort of waiting around for more audio or video clips to surface, but it looks like it was a pretty tight show security wise. Either that, or everyone has finally realized how fucking annoying it is to have the person in front of you taking a video of the whole show. Well that’s the reason I didn’t take any photos anyways.. sometimes it’s better just to be there.

The show pretty much blew me away. He didn’t go on till near 1am and it was so casual it felt like I was in someone’s living room. The band blew through different genres, changing things up as they went along. They would start out with a jazz version of something like Stakes Is High, then flip it into the hip hop version but swap out different lyrics. It was fun just trying to catch up. I think the high point in the show may have been their cover of Radiohead’s ‘All I need’, which he started using a single drum sample played by hand as he sang. I have had no luck finding it, but hopefully it will be somewhere soon since they were videotaping the whole performance. I have to mention the band as well. Robert Glasper (of the Dilla tribute fame) and Chris Dave led a crew of amazing musicians including bass and trumpet. Sometimes when hip hop incorporates a band it can become hokey or else it starts to all sound the same (someone tell ?uestlove to change him drum sound once and a while). This time around however, everything sounded fresh a summer’s day, or in this case midnight on a cold April night. Chris Dave has this thing where he seeming fucks up and falls off rhythm but instead just keeps playing that way. Let me repeat that. He is so good that he can play off beat and still make it sounds good. Wow. Anyways, it was a little pricey at $60 and though I didn’t pay for it, I gladly would have. You know you’ll be getting show full of songs that you won’t hear again anytime soon. Equally amazing was Mos Def’s ability to take a calendar date and tell you whose birthday it is that day. He must have done twenty before he got stumped. Lastly and I guess most importantly, the thing that I took away from seeing the show was that everything is so lovely right now. When you hear music like that, nothing can phase you. Since I could only find one crappy clip of the Yoshi’s performance, I decided to find a bunch of clips of the trio that sort of summed up what the show was all about. You can also listen to the trio’s hour long Dilla tribute at the University of Michigan by going here.

Robert Glasper feat. Mos Def – Stakes Is High (live)

Video:
Mos Def – Live at Yoshi’s Oakland (video)
Mos Def, Chris Dave, & Robert Glasper – The Message (video)
Mos Def, Chris Dave, & Robert Glasper – Thieves In The Night (video)
Mos Def, Chris Dave, & Robert Glasper – Thelonius (video)
Chris Dave & Friends feat. Mos Def – “E=MC2″ (video)
Mos Def – Live at The After Party (video)

I first started getting into Brazilian music when a friend, who used to travel to Brazil for skateboarding (and to hunt down Volkswagon parts to sell to collectors), used to come back with piles of Os Mutantes, Caetano Veloso, Rita Lee and other Tropicalia records. Not long after, Aquarius Records in S.F. was pumping the U.S. reissues of those and the crazy history of this revolutionary 60′s movement started to circulate. I grabbed up as many Brazilian records from that era as I could, stumbling across this awesome jam after finding Brazil Classics Vol. 1, from David Byrne’s Luka Bop label, in a local dollar bin. Jorge Ben’s work covers a wide mix of styles. The album this originally came from, Africa Brazil, is my favorite by him (and of course, the hardest to find for less than 10 million dollars on fucking E-Bay).

Jorge Ben – Ponta De Lanca Africano (Umbabarauma)

Here’s a little slice of early 80′s minimal art-funk for the Spring. Just percussion jams and bass for the most part, with some NYC weirdo having at it with the mic. And yeah, Grandmaster Flash sampled “Cavern” for his classic “White Lines (Don’t Do It)”. I always loved Liquid Liquid’s repetitious grooves (probably the thing I liked most about Can), perfect for long drives, bike rides or breaking out of a long winter hibernation, hopping a train and heading to the club. That club being The Attic in S.F. tonight, where Jesse DJs the Tuff Town night with Jay Howell.

Liquid Liquid – Out
Liquid Liquid – Optimo
Liquid Liquid – Cavern